INSIDE A HAUNTED MIND
By
K. PATRICK MALONE
INSIDE A HAUNTED MIND
All Rights Reserved Copyright2006
By K. Patrick Malone
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~Dedication~
Dedicated to the loving memory of my mother, who, from my earliest memories instilled in me, as her legacy, the reflective conscience of a thinking man, and, in the end, comforted me with the knowledge that love never dies. I love you. KPM
~Thank You~
To “My English” for struggling so tirelessly and so valiantly to keep me from degenerating into a caveman while I did this, to Trisha Moore for her insight and experience in rescuing “Inside A Haunted Mind” from the no-talent hands of hack editors who tried to turn it into “Little House on the Prairie,” and last, but certainly not least, to Maggie Stapperfenne for embodying the courageous spirit of independent publishing in letting this voice be heard when so many sought to silence it. You are a remarkable woman, Maggie, and my muse. I’ll never forget you as long as I live. Thank you. KPM
*****
PREFACE
A Journal Found
By way of introduction, I feel I should explain how the enclosed text came into my possession. I’ve also included a few additional notes which explain what was necessary to bring it to completion. First, I am an accountant by trade and training, but I’ve been a junk hound for most of my adult life having spent years rummaging through flea markets, garage sales and junk shops as a means of release from the tedium of the numbers I’ve dealt with for more than twenty-five years. What I look for mostly are pieces of antique jewelry, china, pottery and glass, small items that can be easily placed in the house or resold on eBay. It was during one of these events that I came across the enclosed document. The following are the particulars.
I was on a weekend treasure hunt in northeastern Pennsylvania in the fall of 2004 to attend a “Giant Flea Market,” not looking for anything in particular, but nevertheless hopeful of coming across the ever elusive “flea market find.” By midday, I had found a Carltonware pot, an early Christian Dior brooch and a Mdina Maltese paperweight from 1934 (hallmarked and dated on the bottom). The Mdina paperweight was in a box lot, which I rarely have any interest in, but it was clear that no one recognized the value of it, so I bought the whole thing knowing the paperweight alone was worth no less than fifty or seventy-five dollars. The box itself was approximately two feet long, two feet deep, one and a half feet wide and had the name of an egg company printed on the sides. The other items in the box included a few tattered men's garments, some dishes and other commonplace household odds and ends, but since I was only interested in the paperweight, I didn’t pay much attention to the other items until I got home later that afternoon and unpacked the box.
When I went through the remainder of its contents, I discovered the manuscript at the bottom of the box tied with twine and wrapped in a dusty regional New York State newspaper dated June 2002. The pages it contained were handwritten in blue and black ink. Not quite as big as an average telephone book nor as heavy, it was bound by what appeared to be the remains of a three-hole binder notebook of the kind typically used by college students a decade or so ago, but with the binding clasps removed from the inside.
Ordinarily, I have no interest in documents and this one was certainly not old, but for the sake of thoroughness, I unwrapped the parcel and thumbed through the contents thinking I might come across some rare stamps or postcards. One really never knows what one may find, even in the most unlikely of places. What I found, however, were not old postcards or stamps, but what appeared, at first glance, to be a journal…but not just any journal. I was riveted from the very first words on the opening page, and took it out on my front porch to read the entire document. I became so consumed by what it contained that it wasn’t until I had finished the entire volume well on into the night (or more accurately, close to the next morning), that I realized I was drenched in my own sweat, my hands having given in to a slight tremble by what just simply could not be real. I didn’t sleep at all that night and had only uneasy sleep for several nights after.
It was during one of those nights of uneasy sleep that I finally realized what I had to do. I had to go public with it. The following text is the result. But before continuing, there are a few things the reader should understand. First, for the sake of my respect for humanity and avoidance of any legal trouble, my conscience has required me to change the names and places named in the original document along with some minor details regarding a number of specific events in order to maintain the privacy of those involved, both dead and alive. Above all considerations, it’s important that their memories as well as their families are protected. The last thing I would want to result by doing what I have done here would be for droves of reporters, paranormal investigators or wannabe ghouls to converge on the parties involved or their loved ones. It has always been a standard of my life that my conscience take precedence over the lure of dollars so not even America’s Mysteries, the Sci-Fi Channel, or Oprah Winfrey herself, could ever make me divulge the true details.
Secondly, I’ve had to restructure the text to make it readable to the average person in areas of dialogue formatting, paragraphing, spelling, etc. I did this with the indispensable aid of a professional editor to whom I will forever be indebted for his help in bringing the text to life. In its original form, each smaller notebook contained in the larger manuscript seemed to have been written as one long “stream of consciousness” type of work over a short period of time and was evident throughout that, at the time of its writing, the writer did not intend the thoughts, ideas and events contained therein to be made available for public consumption. Thus, the reformatting, as well as the other editorial actions were absolutely necessary to bring the manuscript to its current state.
The original text also contained numerous scratch outs, illegible words (giving the impression that they were written in a state of extreme haste) and, in places, was marred to a blur by numerous large water stains. As such, certain substitutions were required to maintain both the flow of the dialogue and the continuity of the story, but please be advised that these substitutions were made only where absolutely necessary to the completion of the project, with careful attention and every effort made to retain the integrity of the original. I have also divided the text into chapters with titles that seemed appropriate to the content. Then, to further highlight the complexity of emotions portrayed in the original text, I have added selected quotations culled from both contemporary and historical sources to these chapter headings (as well as the opening and closing pages) as they would be reflected from the my point of view, rather than that of the participants themselves. In the end, I can only say that I have already drawn my own conclusions about the content of the journal. Now it is up to the individual reader to decide for themselves but, upon my advice, hopefully not at night and especially not alone.
Daniel Vincent Carruthers, C.P.A.
Montclair, New Jersey
May 2005
***
BOOK ONE
THE PRECIPICE
All day, staring at the ceiling
Making friends with shadows on my walls
All night, hearing voices telling
That I should get some sleep
Because tomorrow may be good for something
Hold on,
Feeling like I’m heading for a. . . breakdown
And I don’t know why
But Im’ not crazy, I’m just a little unwell
I know, right now you can’t tell
But stay awhile and maybe then you’ll see
A different side of me
I’m not crazy, I’m just a little impaired
I know, right now you don’t care
But soon enough, you’re gonna think of me
And how I used to be . . . me.
Unwell-Rob Thomas
***
CHAPTER 1
Unwell
“ . . .then black despair. The shadow of a starless night was thrown over the world in which I moved alone.”
-Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Early 19th Century Romantic Poet &
husband of Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein,” from
The Revolt of Islam-Dedication (st.6)
***
January 2002
God, I’m so afraid! I can hardly breathe. I don’t know what to do anymore or where to turn for help, or even if there can be any help for me. Could there be anyone out there who knows fear the way I do? Are they still alive? If they are, they’ll know the hell I’ve lived in these past months, every day, every second and at this very moment as I struggle to hold my pen straight to keep it from shaking out of control, someone to know what it’s like to live with the kind of relentless panic that makes me want to run and hide, knowing full well there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. But that would be incredibly selfish, wouldn’t it? Inhuman, really. My conscience would never let me wish this even on my worst enemy. Martin is the closet thing I have to someone who might understand, but I’ve kept so much from him to try and protect him. Then what little he does know, he doesn’t remember. I guess that’s for the best. It’s all just like one long nightmare for him, fading day by day as he gets better, and poor Jenny, the brief glimpse of it that she saw almost sent her over the edge. I could never burden her life any further with this. She’s done so much for Martin already. It would be unconscionable, beyond unforgivable.
I’ve been cursed by so many things, not the least being an unfailing ability to hold everything tightly inside myself. It’s served me well lately, though. Up ‘til now, I’ve managed to protect those around me that I hold so close, even at the cost of my own sanity. I’m sweating so hard right now. It’s running down the back of my neck, dripping down my forehead, running into my eyes, stinging them, mixing with my own shameful tears as they run down my face, droplets of myself splashing the page as I try to get this all down, or are they tears? I just don’t know anymore. I don’t know who I am, or even if I am. I’m so cold, chills of an invisible current from somewhere beyond myself running over my flesh making the hair stand up on my arms, and my nerves . . .twitching through my brain as this unholy current works its way down through every inch of my being making the nerve endings snap like tiny light bulbs bursting from a sudden surge of high voltage electricity. It’s like this all the time and has been for so long that I have to keep my bowels on constant guard, afraid they’ll get away from me like a small child in the night, terrified of the unknown thing in the bottom of the closet, or the monster under the bed that may not stay there . . .but I’m not a child. I’m an adult, and for me, the thing won’t go away when the sun comes up. It’ll be waiting for me, waiting until I’m dead, and possibly even beyond.
I’ve been such a fool, taken so much for granted. I just want to be normal again, or as normal as I ever was. I watch people on the street, soccer moms, businessmen, teenagers, little old ladies with blue hair, and find myself wishing more than anything that I was one of them…any of them…anyone but myself. I’m jealous of what they don’t know. In their everyday lives they have the luxury of ordinary kinds of fear, car wrecks, plane crashes…disease. They routinely think that the worst they have to fear is death, but that’s not true. There’s more. I know…much more. God! I feel so abandoned…so alone, clinging to my gun…just in case.
I used to think that grief was the worst of all human emotions, back in the days when I thought it would swallow me whole. I know better now. At least my father is safe and at peace, but for me, having managed to come this far, I realize I was so very deadly wrong. Fear is the cruelest feeling in the human vocabulary of emotions. It’s the cancer of the mind, of the soul, black cells multiplying by the thousands inside me every day, gnawing away at what’s left of whatever made me feel like I was a man. I can feel them again now, thick black clots breaking off inside me, dissolving in my blood, running through my veins, seeping from my pores, choking me with that awful smell, the smell of my own fear.
From the first time I saw that house, I should’ve known. Some primal instinct inside tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen. Maybe somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew all the time it would come to a showdown between us. It was going to be either it or me, and as I sit here wallowing in my own sweat, it looks like it, or my gun, will win. I’m so tired of living with an unknown that takes such delight in having shown its ugliness to me, wanting me to know it as if we were lovers discovering each other’s bodies for the first time, making me feel dirty and…violated as if it were raping my sanity and my humanity. I think I must feel fear as only the rarest of human beings can. I pity them…and myself for having discovered an evil more base than any human being should ever have to face…and letting it beat me, making me a prisoner in my own mind, alone with the knowledge of things that transcend the human soul and the monstrous acts committed by men who create them.
It knows I’m writing about it. The hair on the back of my neck just stood up. It’s here again, toying with me. I can’t stop my teeth from clattering no matter how tight I clench my jaw. I’m not sure what to do right now. Oddly enough, when I know it’s here, I still try to convince myself that it’s not real, that somehow I’ve found myself in some cosmic ‘reality TV’ episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, but in the darkest spaces of everything that still makes me human, I know I’m not. This is no movie. It’s all too horribly real. There’ll no safe haven when the lights come up. For me, there’ll only be the cold reality of mind-bending, body-numbing fear; fear for my immortal soul. I have to stop here, close my eyes and wait until it goes away—if it goes away. It tends to come and go these days. I don’t think it has what it wants yet, or I wouldn’t be here to write this.
***
It’s gone away again…for now, but it’s left me drifting back to the idea of the soul. Since this all began, I’ve realized that most people go through their daily lives completely unaware. They never consider things such as the human soul, theirs or anyone else’s for that matter. Even the most devout have only the most abstract concepts of it, as if it were a wisp of air, ethereal and fleeting. I don’t think I particularly blame them. I’ve come to believe that their fanciful ideas are simply a result of the limitations of our mortal selves, our bodily beings, but at least that’s something, and they’re safe. I’m not. After all, not everyone has had the privilege of crossing the barriers between life and death, heaven and hell, the way I have. Lucky me!
Others don’t believe in the human soul at all. Having had my own faith run through the meat grinder by the randomness of life on earth, I used to be one of those, but I’m a true believer now. I know it exists. I live every day in fear for my soul and the souls of those I love because I know now what souls can become. I’ve seen them, heard their voices. I’ve felt their touch on my skin, but it’s even worse than that…much worse, because not all of them are harmless or good. Casper, the friendly ghost, yeah right! I’d laugh if I weren’t so afraid I’d cry again and I can’t afford to break down right now. But make no mistake there are those that are here for no other reason than to hurt us. Malignant and rotted, they thrive on the evil they create as they seek to consume the souls of others and make them suffer. They delight in the suffering of others because it sustains them. My skin crawls even to write about it. Then when I feel it near me and can smell its breath as I have for months now, constantly hammering at my senses, I have to doubt every sound, every movement, every thought and perception. It’s even forced me to doubt my own sanity because it’s easier to think that I’ve gone stark raving mad than to believe what I know to be true, that evil exists right beside us every day, surrounding us, waiting patiently in the cold, dark recesses of the human soul. Even more than that, what happens when evil bound in human form is released from the body? What then? God help me, I know the answer now. I need another drink. I still have to exist, at least for now, even if I’m reduced to clinging to the barest, most elemental animal instinct in nature to sustain me, the will to survive.
***
I’m calmer now and have some sensibility about me. With a clear head, I still can’t help but try to think it through, get my head around it all as best as I can. No matter what I do, I keep coming back to the same thing—the fear. Fear has got to be the evil soul’s strongest weapon, the way it can use it against you, driving you beyond all rationality. Then when you’ve become consumed by it body and soul, you realize, as I did at first, that there are really only two options of escape for someone in its grip…like I am right now. Suicide or true drooling, howling insanity.
Once you’ve come that far and your mind and spirit are bent so far out of shape from your ordinary reality that you don’t even recognize yourself, it becomes clear how someone living under the pressure of such an unrelenting fear can be forced to choose between the two. I’ve had time to reflect on the suffocating feeling of a trapped animal it creates, understanding it like no one else. I guess that’s why I’m writing this, grasping wildly in the dark for a third option that may offer some hope for my survival, even if only for a little while. It’s my pressure valve opening in one last desperate bid to keep myself from the other two.
I need to put this down, what I’ve felt, seen, what I’ve done and why…or lose my mind. It’s my only focus, my only concentration. Whether it’s ever read by anyone else is unimportant. I just want to keep from putting my gun in my mouth or having the state take me away in a straightjacket. I’m not sure which would be worse, but I don’t know how much longer I can stand this. The way I feel right now, I know it can’t be long, maybe only weeks, possibly only days. Then I worry about what would happen to Martin. The thought of him alone and at its mercy terrifies me, even more than it does for myself. I just know one thing. I will not give up his soul…or mine . . . not without a fight. If I have to die, I’ll die fighting in a way that’ll deprive it of its final victory over me. If it goes that way, I just pray that it’ll be in a state of grace. I have to believe that even if I have to do us both, God’ll understand that we died a good death and finally embrace me in a blanket of light, because I’ve learned in these last few months that there are worse things than death. I’ve seen the face of it and know its true nature. Worst of all, I know it’s here and it’s coming for me again, for both of us, coming back to get whatever it is that it wants, so time is not on my side. I’m having another panic attack. I have to put my head down for a while. I’ll come back to this when I wake up, assuming I do wake up.
***
Morning is here and I guess I managed to sleep for a while. It’s hard to tell sometimes. I may have just been lying there in a narcotic- and alcohol-induced trance, afraid to let go. I can’t really tell, but I can see the light of the winter sun through the window, feel its warmth on my face, so I guess I’m must still be alive. It doesn’t seem to show itself in the morning, small miracles I guess. Sleep for me these days is like a double-edged sword. I’m afraid to go to sleep thinking I may not ever wake up again, then I’m afraid of waking up to find that nothing has changed, but let me get back to where I left off in the best way I know how.
I’m going to have to take this one step at a time. My mind has been so fractured from months of struggling with a knowledge that no human should ever be forced to comprehend that the focus a thorough, methodical approach would afford is all I can think of to get it down before it’s too late. I suppose I should start with who I am, how I got to this place and how I became its prisoner. Maybe if I put it all down and go over it again in writing, I’ll find something I’ve missed, something I failed to do when I tried to destroy it, but then…can one ever really destroy evil?
Maybe I’ll see something in my life to this point that has made me the target I’ve become. No matter what the end result, it’ll help me to collect myself, even if only temporarily, and allow me to breathe for a while, to relive what good memories I have, brief moments of love and freedom, pride and accomplishment, “Putting my effects in order,” so to speak. It can help remind me of times before the darkness overcame my life and my mind making me break into cold sweats when there’s a creak in the floorboards thinking that it’s coming for me, tremble when there’s a noise in the house thinking that it’s beside me, and shake uncontrollably when the wind is at the windows thinking I can hear it call my name.
Evil is the most insidious creature imaginable because it can live forever. It has all the patience it needs to lie in wait until it’s ready to strike, and it always strikes when its prey is at its weakest and most vulnerable to its tricks. It seems only now, in hindsight, that the traumas and tragedies of everyday life that I always took for granted as the worst that could happen to me seem so insignificant. Unfortunately, it’s only now that I’ve felt the breath of the foulest, most godless evil imaginable on the back of my neck that I realize it but, of course, now it’s too late.
***
My name is Terrence Arthur Chagford and I’m the Chief of Police of Jennisburg, New York, a quiet, unassuming little burg. Just another one of those small upstate towns of under a thousand people named after its founder back in seventeen hundred and something, famous for nothing more than its maple syrup, apples, peaches and cows. I was born here forty-one years ago to very loving parents. My mother, God love her, is a psychiatric nurse at the hospital about ten miles over in the nearest large town of Henriston, just about to retire, and not a moment too soon if you ask me.
My father was a State Police officer, a good man and a great cop, not one of those miscreants with a gun and a badge who get off on bullying people under color of law just because they can. He always said that those kinds of cops were only trying to make up for their own personal deficiencies and the job was the only thing that made them feel that they had any power. The whole big gun-little dick sort of theory. It was always, “To Protect and Serve,” with Arthur Chagford, and do it with respect and a sense of dignity that let people know they were in good hands. He was a decent man who respected people and was respected by them for it. I remember him teaching me that from my earliest memories when we’d go fishing together on the river or hiking in the mountains. Even just walking down a street in town with him, people would stop to put their hands out for him to shake, smiling the kind of smile that can’t be faked, no matter how hard one might try, genuine, real, warm. I can see it so clearly in my mind now. They would take his hand in theirs to shake it then put their other hand over top of his so that they were holding his hand in both of theirs. People just don’t do that unless they think you’re special. Their eyes would always shine as they looked into his, honest and unafraid, open and accepting. I always got the feeling that they felt he’d done them a good turn or had protected them in some way that they’d never forget.
That was my Dad. I loved him very much. I guess I probably shouldn’t use the past tense here because I still do, and I miss him terribly, even after all these years. Especially now. As I sit here I can’t help but wonder what kind of man I might’ve become had he not been killed leaving me the half formed human being that I am. Would this even be happening to me? “Focus, Terry, Focus.” I have to keep saying that to myself. I can feel it welling up inside me again, the panic, the anxiety. I can’t let it get to me here or I’ll never finish this. If I do, it’ll paralyze me. I can’t let that happen, not now that I’ve finally found the balls to do it. I’ve got to beat it down and move on.
***
I was just a regular kid of the times, not particularly special in any obvious way. I ate peanut butter and jelly or bologna and cheese sandwiches on Wonder bread out of my Batman lunch box, watched Wonderama and Soupy Sales on a black and white TV. You know, that kind of kid, just bigger than most my age, a little chubby and kind of clumsy. It wasn’t until high school that I seem to have surprised everyone, including myself, and became…not so ordinary anymore. It’s what put me on the path I’ve stumbled down ever since. I call it “my metamorphosis.” It seemed like, almost overnight, I wasn’t chubby anymore or clumsy, or shy and backward. I also seemed to have found my voice and, to my utter amazement, people started to listen, my teachers, my friends, my parents. That was when my grades began to soar and what would later become my athletic gifts started becoming apparent. I remember when the track and field coach came to my house to speak to my parents about joining the team. He told them that my regular gym teacher had asked him to come and watch me in class to see if he thought he could develop my potential. I remember thinking to myself, What potential?
The whole thing mystified me so I just did what they told me, pleased for the attention. Looking back now, I can’t shake the idea that it left me with an insatiable hunger for accomplishment, craving approval at every turn, while at the same time setting me up for the feelings of failure that would follow my life with an all too alarming consistency. I ended up graduating high school with the second highest grades in my class. “Bringing up the rear,” I call it. I still got both academic and athletic scholarships, though, and decided on the State University at Albany. I guess I could have gone anywhere. I had plenty of offers, but I wanted to stay as close to my mother as I could, for both our sakes. It was a bad time then. It would have been for anyone who’d lost someone they loved so suddenly and so senselessly.
The unimaginable had found its way to our door in the form of two uniformed State Troopers. My father had been killed in a high speed car chase, and my mother needed me, so I wanted…needed to stay close to home. We needed each other, really. I don’t think either of us ever really recovered from it. People don’t recover from things like that. It just lives inside you in a little box, opening up every now and again to remind you that it’ll hurt you until the day you die. Time seemed to have stood still so long for me then, like my head was encased in concrete. Months went by before I realized I was still alive and that it was real, not just a bad dream. I have my mother to thank for bringing me out of it…by force, her hands pushing me out of the front door when the day came for me to leave, pulling me by my arm to the bus that would take me to Albany.
“I don’t want to go. Please, Ma, I’m not ready yet…don’t make me go!” I begged, sobbing like a child half my age. “I’m afraid!”
“You have to do this, Terry. You’re all I have now and he wants so much for you to make something of yourself. It’s his dream for you. Do it for me…and for him. He loves you so much, Terry. Get on that bus!” she cried as pushed me up the steps. It wasn’t until I looked out of the window as the bus was pulling away that it dawned on me. She wasn’t able to speak of him in the past tense yet…
***
I must have drifted off somewhere for a while. I don’t remember writing that last bit. But that’s just the way it happened. I’m soaking wet now, all down the front of my shirt. I have to change into dry clothes and throw some cold water on my face if I’m going to continue. I don’t even know what time it is. Time just seems to shift under my feet, like an undertow in a storm, eroding reality into something I no longer recognize. Maybe I took one pill too many. All I know is that it’s still light out, I need to get a grip on myself and keep anyone else from knowing what’s been going on. Martin should be coming down soon anyway. I can’t let him see me this way.
***
Martin has gone to bed early. He does almost every night. He’s still on the mend, so by 9:00 P.M. he’s worn out by the day’s struggles. It was a quiet day in town, and even quieter yet since I got home—alarmingly quiet. It sounds like what I imagine a tightly wound rubber band must sound like right before it snaps in your face. I’m going to try and get as much done as I can tonight because no one knows better than I do the potential for unexpected events that tomorrow may bring. My head is still clear. I can thank the cold weather for that, nothing like a bracingly cold wind to pull you out of a haze, substance induced or otherwise. I guess I’ll pick up with my years at school. That seems to be the time when I was closest to reaching my goals, but even then, it all came crashing down around my head. Anyway…once I’d come out of the shock my father’s death, the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best that I could to make him proud of me. I chose Criminal Justice as my major in his honor. Although, looking back now, maybe it was more to see if I could be him, replacing his loss with myself.
***
My first year away was a hard road to acceptance, alternately rocky and pocked with deep trenches of blackness that forced me to take to my bed every few weeks, staying there with the lights off until it passed. After that, I decided that the only way I would survive would be to channel all my grief, anger and loneliness into school work and sports. I got that idea from a book I read on coping with grief. Sometimes I think that book saved my life, though for what it was saved, I’m still at loss to understand.
I kept as much of it from my mother as I could. She had her own grief to deal with. I felt guilty enough having to leave her alone, so the idea of making her cope with my grief on top of her own was unthinkable. Funny, sometimes, how one’s love for others can block out whatever else they may be feeling. I guess that was the first time I felt like a ‘protector.’ It made me feel good. I found strength in it that helped me make it through, probably seeming to the outside world like an ‘All American’ success story, while on the inside being nothing more than a hollow, pointless, directionless, empty shell of not quite a man.
I did have my rewards during those years, though. As it turned out, my channeling exercises led me to being chosen for the 1980 Summer Olympic team for the pole vault and broad jump. My mother was so proud when she read it in then newspaper. I could hardly understand her through her tears when she called to tell me about the article. I didn’t even know the final decisions had been made, but more importantly, it was the last time I heard or saw her cry. To me, that was my real accomplishment. It’s not that she didn’t cry when I wasn’t around. I’m sure she did, and often. It’s just that it made me feel that I’d given her at least one reason not to cry.
***
I’m drifting again, losing time, like I’m not really here but somehow hovering above my own life, watching it but completely powerless to change it. It’s strange how the past can come back to you and seem so vividly alive when the present seems so hopeless and the future seems non-existent. I saw the same thing happen to Grace when we had our “little talk.” Now I know how she felt. I can empathize with the wisdom of her age, but I’ll get to that later. If I can get that far. For now, I’d better move on, back to the Olympics.
***
It was 1980 and the world was in a particularly tense state of self-induced political distress. The Cold War was still arctic, even though the threat of nuclear war had taken a back seat. Mexican stand-offs, posturing and boycotts were the current trend so participation by the United States and fifty other countries from the Moscow Olympiad ended up being withdrawn because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Do I have the best fucking luck in the world or what? You really gotta laugh sometimes because I was having an increasingly rare good spell then. I even had the nerve to dare and think I could win, but fate apparently had other ideas. I did eventually end up going to Los Angeles with the team in1984, but by then I was older, not in as good a shape and suffering one of the blackest spells I’d had up to that point. I managed to rally for a little while right before the events, but the coach and I both knew it was too late.
Ironically, I came back home to a hero’s welcome for my two bronze medals. Go figure, third place. Like I said, it’s the story of my sad fucking life to ‘bring up the rear.’ No Wheaties box covers for me. Endorsements went to superstars and I was only…well…an ‘also ran’ or a ‘has been’ or a changeling of something in-between the two, and in events nobody really cared about anyway. After that I decided that I wouldn’t try again. Sports achievements were a useless accomplishment. So many things felt useless to me after that. I just said, “Fuck it!” and gave up. The black spells, although less frequent from then on, became longer in duration. But when they did come, they were more like ‘black holes’ than ‘black spells.’ They got so bad sometimes that I couldn’t really tell if they would ever end, much less when. The only positive thing I can say about that time was that, by then, I’d at least learned how to hide them from almost everyone, except my mother. We didn’t talk about it for along time, but I know she knew. Mothers always do—particularly mine.
With my Los Angeles ‘triumph’ behind me, I managed to summon up the last shred of what my mother, in trying to dissuade me, called my “… youthful idealism and enthusiasm.” But, stubborn as I’ve been all my life, I held fast and fierce to the feeling that I could still make myself useful in some way. It seemed like it was all I had left to keep me breathing. I figured that if I made some real impact on other people’s lives, it might make me a worthwhile human being instead of the walking, breathing carcass I’d become. If I couldn’t be happy for myself, I had to at least offer myself up and do the best I could for others, thinking that maybe their lives might fare a little better through me so that the dwindling core of goodness I still felt inside wouldn’t be completely wasted. I’d hoped I might find some salvation in that, by being a “protector” again.
My father never wanted me to be a Trooper like he was. He wanted better for me as any parent would, so I tried to get into the FBI. The upshot of that was—that’s right, you guessed it—they didn’t want me. Who knows, maybe my psychological exam gave them a glimpse of what was to come. Whatever it was, the “other” federal police didn’t seem to have a problem with it, so there I was, an ‘also ran’ yet again. You’ve really got to laugh at it all. I’m nothing if not consistent. Nevertheless, the ATF gave me confidence again, and a purpose, and a reason to live. Little did I or anyone else at the time know, but in those next few years, my “quiet” agency was just about to heat up to white hot and, not least of all, for me, nothing would ever be the same again because of it.
***
David Koresh and his Branch Davidians had created a compound of allegedly ‘dangerous subversives’ in a place called Waco, Texas. It was said that they had an arsenal of weapons in a compound there and were hurting children. The shameful fiasco that later became euphemistically known as “The Waco Incident” was approaching its deadly and disastrous conclusion while the rest of the south was ablaze with flames from the burning of black churches being set by one or more racist lunatics on a rampage of hate. True to form, I wasn’t assigned to that primary Waco project, thank God, but pulled what was thought to be at the time, a lower priority assignment, investigating the burning of the churches.
I still don’t understand the logic there. Sketchy allegations of guns and white parents supposedly hurting their children justified the government burning and killing them all, but the random burning out of decent, hardworking, churchgoing people on a routine basis by a lunatic fringe hardly made a ripple, left to back page news and tail end stories. It’s a funny thing about “threats” in a multi-media world, either real or imagined. They can become so subjective and prime for being worked out of all reality by “spin doctors” who spend their lives turning truth into lies and lies into truth to the point where no one can tell the difference anymore. I guess, in some minds, the life of a little white child is still more valuable that a little black one, so no one ever really heard about the little black one. Did they? Gotta love it don’tcha? Jeeze, I just got a such bitter taste in my mouth. I’m gonna get a drink to wash it out before it gets too comfortable there.
Anyway…my team and I traveled throughout the South for months, always seeming to be one step behind the arsonist. My men were good men, but the frustration we were all feeling kept building until it had us all at the boiling point. Then one night, while we were staying in a tiny town in southwestern Tennessee not far from Memphis, they struck right under our noses. Less than five miles away from where we had stopped for the night, another church was torched. For the first time, we were on the spot and leapt on it with all we had. That night, and the crushing baggage I’d carry away from it, would change my life forever…again.
As we approached the site, the dark night sky was already glowing with the surreal light of the white clapboard church, simple and small, being devoured by flames like a legion of demons spewing forth from hell, dancing gaily at their newfound freedom. But even worse than the sight of it were the sounds. When I got out of the car, all I could hear were voices, shouting, screaming to us that there were people still in there. God, it still hurts me so badly I can’t breathe. Each time I think of it my heart bleeds out into a river of sorrow, flowing from a half-healed wound of guilt and loss, torn it open daily so that it can continue to live inside me.
There was a young woman named Cordelia Weston, a victim of domestic abuse, and her eight-year-old daughter, Angelica, still in the burning building. They’d been left homeless and were living there in a few unused rooms upstairs in exchange for maintenance work. They were trapped upstairs in the back when the fire was set underneath them. Just as my men and I approached the action, I could see the woman being carried out by one of the few local firefighters who’d arrived not long before we did. They’d found her after she’d managed to make her way as far as the stairs. Blinded by smoke and covered with soot, she was screaming and crying with the kind of unrestrained abandon that could only mean one thing—her child was still in there. As long as I live, I will never…never forget the pleading sound of her voice, her anguished, shrill cries. “My baby! My baby! Somebody, please save my baby!” she screamed, smoke streaming from her singed hair and blackened nightgown as she fought her rescuer to get back into the blazing building.
That poor woman. It seems that when the fire broke out, the little girl ran and hid out of…fear. Without even giving myself a second to think, I did the one thing I had been so rigorously trained not to do, but what I knew my father would have done. I ran in. I could hear my men shouting to me from behind as they followed with our equipment, but I was too fast. Fueled with an eruption of energy I didn’t know I still had, I flew through the door. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I heard the little girl’s voice crying with a terror she should’ve never had to know. “Mama! Mama!” Using muscles I’d forgotten I had for ten years, I shot up the stairs, taking them three at a time until I was more than halfway up. The last thing I remember was getting the briefest glimpse of her frightened little face illuminated by the flames that had imprisoned her as she hid in the back of the linen closet, seeing the helpless panic in her eyes as she saw me. I reached out my hand out to her. Just as I opened my mouth to call to her, “I’m coming, baby,” I felt the burning rafter come crashing down on me, catching me between my neck and shoulder, the stairs giving way beneath my feet and that horrible dreamlike feeling of falling further and further into darkness with the certain knowledge that I’d failed her, failed us both.
When I woke up in the hospital, the little girl was dead. As I laid there with my broken right collarbone, right hand and forearm, broken left ankle and foot, fractured right knee and scattered spots of second and third degree burns all over my upper body and legs, with a concussion thrown in for good measure, I wished I had died there with her. But it wouldn’t be that easy for me. I was doomed to live the rest of my life with the big L on my forehead . . . branded forever . . . Loser!
I’ll always believe in my heart that her death was my fault. I can’t get away from it. I should have done more, run faster, been…better. That poor little girl. Her death has burned a cavernous, bottomless pit in my soul that will last until the day I die. I relive it at least once every day, usually at night when I’m alone and can hear the echoes of her tiny voice crying out, over and over, “Mama, Mama.” I couldn’t sleep in the days that followed, dreaming that I could still see the terror in her eyes, beckoning me to save her, pleading. That makes two now. My father’s death was the first. He did what he thought was best to feed us, keep a roof over our heads and live like a man of honor the only way he knew how, and he died because of it. I wanted so much to be like him. Now there was Angelica. Her death was my own personal failure, an everlasting mark of inadequacy on my conscience. My shirt is wet again. My head hurts…and my eyes, but I’ve got to get past this tonight.
Cordelia Weston came to the hospital a few days after the funeral. She was a thin, frail looking woman of no more than thirty-five with smooth cocoa skin, spotted in places by scorch marks left by the spitting sparks. She wore a black turban to cover the places where the fire had burned her hair to the scalp. Her face was a portrait of blinding grief and pointless, endless loss. A portrait that I knew all too well. My mother wore it for years after my father was killed. I still wear it myself when no one is around. She brought me flowers and a school picture of Angelica, a pretty, bright eyed, smiling little girl with dark skin, pigtails and brightly colored barrettes. As I looked at it, I knew that her senseless loss, the waste of her human goodness, had broken my spirit in ways that the rafter could never have broken my body.
“I want to…thank you…for trying to save…my baby,” she said haltingly with a light southern accent, taking my hand as she fought back tears through eyes nearly swollen shut from days of them, “…and tell you…how very sorry I am that you got hurt so badly tryin’. You’re a very brave man, Mr. Chagford. I will never forget you.” The unselfishness of her words and the kindness in her voice shattered whatever was left of my already brittle composure. This woman who had lost the most precious gift life had to give her had the presence of mind and generosity of heart to come see me, even though I’d failed. I didn’t know what I could say to her that would give her any peace.
“I will hold her smile in my heart until the day I die, Mrs. Weston. I promise,” I said, my throat sore and swollen from the smoke and the heat, my voice little more than a groaning whisper. I can still feel the soft pressure of her hand on mine, her warm tears on my skin as she held me to her. I had to be sedated after she left, but I’ve kept that promise to this day…unflinchingly, unfailingly everyday. That was when I first started drinking. It offered me only the slightest relief from the pain, but it allowed me to sleep some. When you’re desperate, you have to take what you can get.
The pill-taking thing has been more gradual, in cases of extreme pain. I’ve only begun taking them regularly in the last few months, on and off mostly, but more and more since the first time it came after me. I’m sure it loves when I’m in pain and I’ve got more than enough to feed its hunger. Maybe that’s why it’s waited for me. I know it’s not a new evil. It’s been around for a while, at least a hundred years, but it could be older. It had to come from somewhere before this…had to learn its tricks somewhere.
***
An analyst told me once that my drinking and taking pills “isn’t the answer,” but when I asked him what the answer was, what do you think he said? “I don’t have any answers,” while charging me a hundred dollars an hour for his sage advice, the thieving son of a bitch. I could’ve got that damn advice from Oprah on TV…for free. “Then don’t mother fucking tell me my way isn’t the answer unless you have anything better to offer to replace it. I’m in pain, you fucking asshole, so if you don’t have any goddamn answers what the hell do I need you for? Booze and pills are cheaper…and at least they do the job without taking Caribbean vacations on my hard-earned money, jerk off! ” is what I told him in return, kicking the chair over as I stomped out his priggish, over-decorated office, slamming the door behind me.
I’m going to put my head in my hands and sob now for a while. The wound is open again and it’s…killing me. I need a pill and a drink too. I’ll pick up where I left off when I can, when I’m feeling better, maybe later on tonight. What little sleep I’ve been getting lately hasn’t been serving me well, hardly at all really. I can’t put my head down or I’ll lose track again. I can’t afford to lose any time just in case it comes back tonight. I’ve started to think that it’s trying to wear me down to the point that when I do sleep, it’ll be unshakable so that it can go after Martin and I won’t be there to protect him. The hourglass never stops running for me and I’ve got to keep an ever watchful eye out for signs. It’s the only plan I have.
***
I’m better now. I’ve taken my pills and had a good, long drink. I stood out in the cold for a while without my coat. It revived me some, so I guess I’d better get on with this before my head gets too heavy and my eyes get too clouded to write.
***
I was in the hospital for a few weeks before they released me to my own devices, such as they were, with my disability and pension still intact, even though what I did broke the rules. There I was, thirty-five years old and out of a job. They said my injuries were too severe to expect a full duty recovery because I’d never be able to run as fast, lift as much or move as quickly as the job required. They were right I couldn’t, not without enormous effort and grimacing discomfort. But by then I’d lost my heart for it anyway, and the thought of being chained to a desk like a wounded animal in a cage, alone with my misery, was out of the question.
I must confess here, I’ve always wished we’d caught the rotten son of a bitch responsible for that fire. Watching him fry for it would’ve at least given me some sense of justice. I think that was the first time in my life I’d ever truly had a taste of hate, the thick bile of festering injustice welling up from my guts into my throat, ready to spew itself out at those who turn their heads away from it. They did recover an unidentified male body in the ruins, burned beyond identification. I’ll never know if it was the arsonist or just another poor soul seeking shelter unobserved for the night. Marginal lives can be that way. I’ve learned that, having become one of them myself, and “…seeking out the poorer quarters where the ragged people go…” The worst part is that I’ll never get my chance to spit on his grave, or even have the satisfaction of knowing that he’s really dead. The way my luck runs, the dead man they found probably was just another lonely soul with no where else to go, like me, and the real murderer is still out there somewhere having a beer and laughing at me.After a few more weeks of climbing the walls in some dump of a motel in Memphis, letting it all weigh on me, I looked over my resources, found that I enough money to feel as secure as I needed to be and decided to do the one truly selfish thing I think I’ve ever done in my life. I couldn’t go home and face those I loved and respected looking at me, judging me, only to find me lacking or worse yet, pitying me like a three legged dog with an ear torn off, so I ran away from it all…from my guilt…from my pain. It wasn’t until later that I realized that there’d still be my own judgments to face when I looked at myself in the mirror and found myself lacking, seeing everyday for myself what a three legged dog that I was.
When I got to Europe I decided to try and drink it all away. It worried my mother half to death. That’s something I’ll always regret, but at the time, I was just too blinded by self-pity and vacancy of purpose to care anymore. I went to London first and drank their strong beer until it drained from my body of its own accord. I was a dirty, unshaven, ale-soaked wretch by the time I got to Paris a few months later, which is still little more than one big blur. I’m not really sure when or how I left Paris. All I know is that I landed in Spain where the booze was so cheap I could drown myself in it and almost did, literally. I was in a hospital there in Seville for a while. It seems I hadn’t eaten in days and was floating in alcohol when I collapsed on the floor of some dive bar on the fringe of the city weighing twenty pounds lighter than when I had left home. …running scared, laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters where the ragged people go, looking for the places only they would know… I remember the words from the old Simon and Garfunkel song played in my head as I went down, signaling me, as it has for years, that there was another black hole looming beyond the horizon, waiting to pull me in head first.
When I woke up a few days later, after having been sufficiently medicated, I got a message from the States. The doctor in Seville had contacted the U.S. Embassy in Madrid. They, in turn, contacted my mother through channels in New York City. She’d called the hospital and left word for me to contact her immediately.
When I was released a week later, my conscience got the better of me. I called her and was carefully and calmly informed in her most professionally practiced voice that she’d spoken to the Police Chief in Jennisburg, who just happened to be a buddy of my father’s. They’d agreed that it would be best if I came home immediately to take a recently vacated officer’s position. It seems that one of my old buddies from high school was leaving the force and moving to Florida to raise his family near his in-laws and they needed someone to fill the spot. It was agreed beforehand that, although my injuries may have disqualified me from federal duty, I would still be perfectly qualified for a small town job and it was hinted that I might move up quickly because of my experience and my father’s connections. As much as she tried to contain it, the tone of her voice was one I’d heard only one other time before, after that knock on the door eighteen years earlier. Overwhelmed by guilt for having worried her so badly and leaving her alone again, I agreed to come home and take the job. By then guilt was like a Siamese twin attached to my side at all times, reminding me constantly that it had its needs too. That’s how I got here, who I was and who I am.