Bottom Feeders (Audiobook) Chapter 7
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Chapter seven, Jake Schuman wavered in position, shifting his weight from 1 ft to the next. When the strain became too much, the circumference of his belly hung over his belt in enormous rolls forming a wave of fat. His shirt rested as Kew tucked in but rotated to the left, forcing the line of buttons into a sharp downward curve toward his right hip. Roberts saw all of this from his angle behind his desk and resumed his paperwork. Reginald swept past Jake several times. He was a momentary apparition, carrying notarized documents and gone without a word. Jake was a dripping sponge, releasing sweat from every pore which shown a shiny gleam along his skin. You wanted to see me, sir, Jake asked Robert never answered and never looked up from his frantic scribbling on a stack of papers. His hand shook lurching in circular motions, moving a pen to finish his signature. I appreciate you waiting around until this late hour. Jake. I've made it my prerogative. Robert paused and raised his head to Jake for the first time mission. That's a better word. Whether you think it's a good thing, I guess time will prove I'm making it my task to rebuild you to oversee your every waking moment until you reach the summit of your potential. Robert said, refocusing his attention back to a mountain of pulp where he validated another document with his signature. I think I'll call it a day. Mr Deville. A voice said from behind Jake, thanks for all your help today, Reginald. I couldn't have done it without you. Robert said that is for sure night, sir. Good night. Robert said and looked at the security guard shaking like a leaf in front of his desk. At least I don't have to worry about having a yes man. Jake tried on an uncomfortable smile. It didn't fit and he gave it up back to you friend. I found the time today to print out our full plan of attack. Robert motioned the corner of his desk. He repeated his boss's motion before picking the paper up. That is your new Bible. Jake. I outlined everything you can eat the portion amount and meal times from now on. I want you to spend your lunch hour in the reclamation weight room. If you don't meet a 2% reduction every Friday afternoon, I'll reduce the portions. Instead, he gulped with Robert spotting the reaction. Think of this situation as a promotion if you will, I'm transferring you in here to become a part of my security team. As of now, your life is in my hands. Robert ignored Jake's terrified expression. Dismissed. Robert said, Jake walked out of the office leaving Robert to stare at an empty doorway until he shuffled across the room in aggravation and shut the door himself, the doorknob snapped and the mechanism clicked with a vibration. Moving through his hand on the other side of the room sat his desk, a desk lamp threw a meager amount of light, but the grains of the wood still seemed dse the grains veered back and forth in jagged curves and coming alive with a fiery illusion whooshing from one edge of the desktop to the other. Robert watched the orange flames with transfixed fascination. The air itself melted into an electric vitality that first burned his nostrils and then filled his lungs with a sickening acrid aroma. An unsavory poison flavor rose in his mouth. He swished his tongue against his cheeks and teeth like a broom, sweeping the cobwebs out of an attic. The taste remained as potent as ever. He lumbered back to his emblazoned desk in a fog. He placed his hands flat on his desk, then snatched them away. The flaming illusion made by the lamp was a strange reality. Warmth rose on his palms into a crescendo of agonizing pain. He withdrew his hands once more. What the **** he murmured. He plodded around the desk watching the light change and a shifting flame rose and dove with the angle of the light. A gust of fire as if ignited by the wood just underneath soared higher than the rest. The fire joined by another and then another until the center of the desk was ablaze. Robert's eyes gained another sight through his foggy, seeing the paper sat in the center of his desk were still there, but not there. He recognized their squared outline under the undulating flames that became a Python of Ardy. The urge to put his fingers atop the wooden pier, seized his senses. He was a man along for the ride. He liked the ride and there was lustful freedom stroking his insides. It was underneath his skin starting at his ankles. But it was soon on the move, darting up his legs with a slight twinge or tickle as it skimmed past his knees, he wanted to close his eyes, allow the seductive sensation to take over and couldn't, his eyes wouldn't budge from the desk and its fiery display. A sound descended the empty room. At first, the sound seemed to come from a speaker. The noise came in and out as if someone put a heavy wool blanket over a radio and removed it several times like a modern day smoke signal. Robert's concentration on the desk grew more critical. He moved to the front of the Tiger wood desk and sat behind it as a man might sit in a jet fighter seat for the first time looking at the dials controls, the flashing lights and making sense of none of it he guessed the clacking was more remote. A trick of acoustic, sweeping reverberations close in from farther away. His eyes were stinging from the lack of moisture but he believed it was the flames jumping from wood grain to wood grain. Robert redoubled an effort to shut his eyelids and couldn't eyes stuck open by industrial springs. He collected his thoughts, focusing them on a fine keenness, tears formed from his ducts when the clacking returned a sound once separated by space, refortified itself into a louder and bolder echo vibrating in everything around him. It was in the walls, the floor, even the light buzzed and then incorporated the clacking into its wiring. The phantom sound whirled around Robert in a vortex biting at his ears like claws. It drew closer and closer, spinning faster and faster. A ravenous tornado spun circling him and never relenting. He arched his back to the ceiling to watch the funnel rotating around him but nothing was there. His mouth dropped open and formed a horrifying oval teeth glimmering and his tongue scraped against the roof of his mouth. A stark recognition jolted him up right into his chair. The rattling sound was drifting from his open mouth. A terror rose in his throat before he spoke. The rattling emanating from within was lucid more precise than the rattling of chains. Chains he uttered alone in his office just below. Clinking chains were faint by growing strength. Robert sensed it coming and it terrified him for the first time in his life, he sat behind a burning desk lost in a spiraling wall of resonance and becoming a living antenna antenna. For what a dimmed chatter grew and mingled with chains, chains dragged across a surface. Robert opened his jaw further and the chatter amplified out, gliding on the air. A child's voice low and pathetic rose in a heaving whimper. The child emitted a sick breathless cry following every drag of the length of the chain. There was something else. Robert streamed to hear it. His eyes flew wide. There was scratching mommy. A voice cried into the wind. The soprano voice nearing a falsetto was pitiful and begging. Robert pictured the child scratching at the walls. His escape hindered by the metal restraints. He smelled urine and feces that lay next to the small boy. What's happening? Robert asked the metal change clinked and with it, a clawing more desperate mommy, mommy, mommy, the whale of the child was too brutal for Robert to endure. He wrenched his lips together like the gradual turning of a vice clamped his hand over his mouth to stop the torturous cries. The screaming went unnoticed with the sound muffled as the child was underwater no more. Although he no longer heard the boy in the room, he was alive and well in his head banging and bashing the walls of his brain. He didn't want it to go on. It couldn't, it's breaking my mind just when he felt torn apart from the inside, it stopped, the flames surrounded the front of the desk parted like a fluffy dissolving cloud. After the wavy haze dissipated, a rectangular drawer glimmered a brilliant tiger wood. Robert extended a hand trying to pull the drawer to him by the handle. His fingertips touched the desk drawer and the fiery haze broke up and fell away like a wilted dried plant and then disappeared. Robert stup by the episode, sat holding the handle and wondered if it ever happened. He yanked on the handle, the wood gave under his strength but it didn't open a metal envelope opener glittered under his desk lamp and Robert grabbed it marveling at how his mind was his own again, he loved the desk and didn't want to damage it, but he needed to know what was hiding in the drawer. Robert inserted the sharp edge of the opener between the top of the drawer and below the desk drawer encasement with a quick violent thrust, the metallic opener pried and snapped a concealed latch. It crackled and buckled under the pressure with the drawer sliding half free of its prison. Robert slid it the rest of the way revealing a book that was too easy. A description for what laid dormant for who knew how long a better description was a Bible with rich leather, a gold trimmed binder and thick pages. There was writing on the front of the large book's cover Joseph's diary. He touched the cover with his hands and expected it to jolt him with electricity. It didn't raising the former warden's journal. He placed it on his lap and opened the cover of the diary. It started with dreams. When I arrived at work that day, I was preparing myself for the fires needing put out life in the prison involved thousands of hours of boredom, followed by minutes of frantic terror. I learned to judge the prisoner's mental state with all the deep interest of a voyeur watching a runaway fire with its dangerous tendrils reaching out from its edges waiting for when the firefighter might look away or pop out for a smoke. And in that desperate fragile moment strike, the analogy of a firefighter was the best description through the years and the most misunderstood by my staff. Fire prevention as I have lectured so many times is the primary task. My staff has a bad habit of becoming lax with the prisoners and careless with the procedures. Prisoners need dominating, they need it the way a child doesn't know they crave discipline and calls out to their parents for punishment. Keeping an inmate inside the reclamation confines goes far beyond mending, a broken fence to keep the clientele from blowing into the wind. A more subtle hand is necessary and a softer touch is hard to find with most of my guards. There is a high percentage of the guards using brutal force against the prisoners as a first resort. Instead of the last, when I made it into my office, my staff descended upon me with a frightening fervor making the blood in my veins circulate faster from my apprehension. I tried to calm Roger Whitmer, the associate warden and the most subdued of my staff, there was something volatile in the air that day. It was thick with a congealing fear. We all breathed in through the lungs and stuck to the capillaries, decaying everything from the inside with every breath, the body was more contaminated. I focused my eyes on Roger for the first time and studied the tiny triangles that formed the edges of his mouth. Roger earned those lines through intelligent leadership and patient diplomacy. He is my most trusted ally here and I could not function without him. His expression sent me reeling and I wondered what transformed an always amiable fellow into the thoughtful wretch, shaking and quivering in his skin. That's when he started to babble. He explained how the entire prison dreamed in unison the night before I consider myself to be of average intelligence, but my pistons weren't firing in the right order. Just then. It was as if Roger was a talking dog that moments earlier broke out of a science lab. He needed to slow down and I instructed him to take a deep breath. He listened, followed my suggestion and began again. Roger sucked air in stuttering gasps, reminiscent of a child recovering from a tantrum. I watched his chest as it heaved. Spastic up and down, he closed his eyes, relaxed his posture and trained his dull gray eyes on me. What's wrong? Roger? I asked and for the first time this morning I wished I called in sick. Roger said that a rash of dreams spread through the facility. A bleak and murky change crept in and around us. I sat there turning his words over and over in my head and wondered what they meant. The idea was too alien, too abstract and far too frightening to accept at face value. Roger knew at once his declaration didn't hit home and tried another tactic. The inmates shared a vision the night before he explained, the dream was of fire and a dark man. I asked him if it stormed during the evening because I've understood thunderstorms caused mass disruptions in sleep. He assured me of no such weather. I was already working on my next theory. When he started again, he began pacing around my desk with me behind it like a trapped animal seeking the exit. After a moment, Roger got to the gist announcing to me that Anthony, a guard from the night shift shared the vision. Anthony entered squatted on the edge of a nearby chair and rubbed his eyes with nervous energy. When he started to speak, his frame was rigid, frozen in place against the chair's back. Soon, the simple act of talking seemed to thaw him. His body loosened as if he turned a pressure valve releasing inhibition. At the same time he admitted he was at fault. It seemed he fell asleep while on duty. The occurrence happened after midnight, sweat ran from his scalp down into one wild brow. The vision started in a farmhouse, a farmhouse in decay shutters hung sideways, tottering on a few precarious nails, aged paint pucker and crackled on the woods siding, leaving the facade of the structure resembling a sad clown with drying makeup. A screen door warped from endless summer sunshine swung in the breeze. The metal netting of the screen door escaped its frame and showed several snags across the front like the runs on a nylon stocking, a hand seized the door handle, pulling it out into the night hinges screeched with anger until he was inside staring down a hallway. Antique farming tools rested in a skittering pattern up and down the hall walls. His footfalls reverberated on the worn wood planks of the old farm home. As the intruder focused his sight to his shuffling feet and a butcher's knife, the blade glistened in the moonlight even as a dull red film stained the sharpened edge, a streak of blood jutted from the razor's edge and was the symbol of violence and mayhem glimmering metal swung causing a whooshing sound accompanying the hollow echo of his footsteps. The corridor vanished as a living room ballooned all around him. A fireplace nestled behind two armchairs projected glinting red embers of a dying fire. Flames licked and devoured the remaining timber, struggling to stay alive. An animalistic urge sprung from the and seemed to see from his pores. Although no sense of his rage was recognizable. A raw motion rose to the surface and became noticeable in his locomotion. He moved like a man whose errand was of the utmost importance as if it was necessary, brutal or not, except for the shadows from a waning fire. The living room was empty. The intruder loved the chase allowing the movement to linger if possible, prolonging it until the sensation filled his stomach and chest and finished in his heart. His pursuit turned from a primal comatose into a convulsing fury when he found the living room empty, reborn by his visceral anticipation. The intruder prodded up a staircase, leaning his free hand on the rickety railing. It dipped somewhat from his weight. He plotted with care on each wooden step like a mine sweeper. Testing every inch of a path that lay ahead creeks explode as maturing nails, holding the step planks down, moaned and awakened from their peaceful slumber. When the intruder reached the head of the stairs, his fury was already retreating into a meager simmer. His plans however remained the same. A fist gripped the handle of his knife, turning it around in the moon's rays and gauging its heft with every deliberate motion slower than the next the intruders, impatience won out over his skulking expectation. He entered the small bedroom and at once noticed the sports heroes pinned to every free space on the wall. The bed was empty and still made up from that morning. The deserted scene affected him. His heart fluttered, not unlike the stories. People relayed to him of mourning a significant loss. He missed his chance to deal with the boy and there was no way to avoid the detail. He moved to the next room which was the master and walked on the floorboards with caution, waiting for their squeaky emanation. There was none, two forms, one large and a four much tinier lay next to each other in an oversized slay bed extending upward and bent towards the wall. The view of the vulnerable couple renewed his urges and ignited his warm muscles to scuttle forward. The intruder straddled the smallest form like a thoughtful young lover might pressing his groin against her belly. He understood the urgency of acting fast but relished the danger in procrastination and thrilled in the situation's lunacy. The woman began to stir which meant a death sentence to her man lying next to her. The intruder slapped a palm over her mouth hard enough to cause excess skin to puff and fold over his grip. Eyelids flew open and blew irises searched into the darkness for an explanation. A muffled murmur screamed through the intruder's hand. He shook, lifted the knife skyward and pushed the steel into her companions neck just below his Adam's apple. He drove the blade deep enough that the tip became buried in the mattress. While the hilt sunk into the victim's fleshy skin, choking gurgles filled the room and blood poured from the wounds like a butchered pig. The woman's eyes began to figure out the fate of her companion. Tears filled her eyes. The intruder removed the knife and watched the man grapple with his mortal wound. He turned to the woman as her mate was already drifting into the quiet calm. The intruder wanted so much to release his hold over her mouth and let her screams fill the night air, burning his ears, sharpening his wits. She was the appetizer and not the main course. The little girl down the hall was the prize and the reason for the visit and the potential fulfillment of the urge. He held the mother tight against the bed, aware of her sweat beginning to saturate the sheets. The smell of her sweat flung him into a swoon as cavernous as he had ever experienced and still he fought to pull it back. She wasn't the one and the charade needed to end before he went too far. The intruder snatched his hand away from the mother's mouth as if it became an oven burning and replaced the hand with his mouth. Her eyes went round with a delicate touch. He assured and projected serenity. He slid the knife under her chin and skimmed it back away, tearing at the soft skin of her neck. The intruder pressed harder, his mouth against hers. He tasted the blood expelled from her throat to her lips. He wanted to savor her last breath and he did in an instant, he was off the mother and stumbling down the hall, still lost in an enchanted moment where her dwindling energy intermingled with his enormous appetite. The best lay ahead and his feet no longer touched the floor. He floated toward the little girl's bedroom. Anthony stopped speaking. The story was far from over. I guessed the direction the story was going and being honest, I didn't want to hear the rest. Anthony leaned back in the grips of some inner turmoil as if the simple act of retelling the dream robbed all the energy from him. The spent guard leveled his eyes to me and I saw for the first time his cages in describing the vision, I asked him if he saw the prowler raiding the farmhouse during the dream. Anthony was sure I could not have misunderstood but I did. It seemed he carried a sad expression but I didn't detect dishearten in his tone determined to be as transparent as possible. Anthony let me know he wasn't watching the intruder during these acts. He was the intruder seeing the world through his eyes. Anthony was a slave to the killer's urges, dark preoccupations and a sick hierarchy of fantasies. Anthony explained how he tried many times without success to shift his eyes away from the murders. I gathered he would never be the same. And the little girl's finality was a horror beyond anything he would have thought possible burning in his brain was the child's last moment along with damn near all the inmates in reclamation at the start of Anthony's confession. My first impulse told me to reprimand him for falling asleep on the job. But after I suppose he received more punishment than I could ever deliver, he walked to the door trembling as I muttered, how I wished I knew who the farmhouse intruder was. Anthony frozen place turned back to me and said two words before leaving the office. Damon tonen the name shot shivers down my spine and not because I knew his name. The truth is I didn't, nor was I familiar with Damon's crimes. I didn't believe the entire facility could share in a collective dream like some strange story from a twilight zone episode. I thought it was a case of playing hysteria mania was far more frequent than most wanted to accept. I thought the vision was nothing more than a campfire tale skipping through the facility to pass the time. Tall tales are an essential part of the fabric of prison life. Nobody hints at this in books or movies. And as far as I could tell, James Cagney never ran a sewing circle, dishing gossip to other inmates before he screamed top of the world. Ma the fact however remained these boys in here spin a yarn a mile long and say it with a straight face while doing it. The nonsense sometimes swallowed up my guards and it distressed me. I guess that's how hysteria works. Like a contagion. My first order of business was to investigate. If a prisoner named Damon Tonen existed, then throw away the premise of a malevolent creature. Once and for all, I didn't expect to come across the notorious man in my records. And if I hadn't, the facility could go back to their normal daily life. That wasn't the case and normalcy would become a precious commodity. It seemed like before I put forth any effort toward finding Damon Tonen. There, he was in a file picture and all staring at me with gloom behind his eyes. I refused to fall for believing in a supernatural boogey man. I read the details of his conviction the way I often do when I must deal with a behavioral incident, but my heart skipped a beat. I wanted to toss the file away and pretend I never found him. He was a death row prisoner convicted of murdering a family in a small southern Ohio town, a farming community. Damon Tonen slaughtered Betty and Eddie Williams while they lay helpless in bed. He cut both throats. Soon after Damon ventured into their daughter's room, the girl's name was Cheryl Williams. Damon took his time with her assaulting her through the night and into the morning hours, Damon drained her blood and continued a sexual assault. After her death, the descriptions were well beyond horrific and worse still. The story was true. I was about to close the file when another sentence captured my attention. The record stated a son survived the ordeal. Reginald Williams spent a night at a friend's house and avoided the savagery his family received. I couldn't imagine what it was like to be the boy. Now an orphan. My heart went out to him and for the loss he was enduring. My stomach twisted into knots. As I traveled to the highest level of reclamation, it was there. The death row inmates awaited the spark from a chair and the sweet escape from their horrible acts. Roger along with two guards ambled every inch of the steel monstrosity with me. My lone thought was protecting him from the awful details of Damon's misdeeds for the sake of his daughters, Tracy and Miranda Roger was a dear friend of mine and I didn't want the tragedy to touch his family. I stopped him halfway to Damon Renson and begged him away to his credit. Roger protested the way any self respecting associate Wharton might do. He relented to my overriding authority and waited while I journeyed onward. As we parted ways, I observed him in a weakness, a vulnerability somehow eluding my usual mental perceptions. The job didn't agree with Roger's personality. He accepted his position out of friendship, our friendship. I felt sad, deflated and cut off as I walked away toward Damon, I listened to the loud clap of my footfalls on the metal walkway and regretted sending Roger off. When we reached Damon's cell, one guard found the keyhole with his key and the other grasped the cell door, heaved it out and open. The wind whipped next to my face as the door swung outward, displacing air before I laid eyes on the prisoner. A guard ordered Damon to his feet in a gruff voice, demanding obedience. I entered the cell with Damon raising his head. I recalled his eyes from his photo the way they appeared to hold the secrets of death standing a few feet from him. I saw death emanating from the rest of him as if a fatal virus started in the eyes and spread throughout his structure and into the core within. I wanted to project power and dominance. Yet when I fixed my eyes upon him, I realized my artifice wouldn't hold up for too long. Damon's eyes contain something else. I didn't understand my mind trapped in a thick and arresting bog caused me to spin my wheels with every thought. The mood persisted until Damon tonen spoke to me. His tone wasn't what I expected if I expected anything at all. His voice was melodic, soothing and hypnotic. The voice dug into my brain and calmed my soul, my brain wave sputtered. Then an image so brutal and so primal came into my mind. The picture was of a snake lulling a mouse with its black dead eyes, its long cylindrical heads swaying as if the breeze alone was holding its frame erect. The mouse iced over, shivering in a mass of furry trepidation. My train of thought derailed and I reasserted myself through forceful confidence, a learned trait I discovered on the job some years back. And now I slipped the confidence on like a glove. I took the offensive with Damon and asked if he remembered Cheryl Williams. No reaction, deciding on a less subtle course. My hand glided a manila folder from under my arm and let its contents scatter across the floor. Damon soaked in the picture of Cheryl's mutilated body. And I watched it all reaching down. I plucked the violist specimen from the evidential file between my fingers and handed it to Damon. I guessed he would not take it, but he did. He repositioned it in his hands and I waited and waited. I watched his plastic expression for minutes. Damon viewed the nasty little scene in the photo observing every nuance. I needed to see his face falter in front of me. I wanted to witness the thin yellow vines of guilt strangling his heart and tugging at his countenance. He said he remembered Cheryl's smell. I looked at his face and it never twisted from regret. No walls went up a barrier, kept his emotions from spilling out into his prison cell. I knew he had no defense against his feelings because they didn't exist. My mind shaped a moment of clarity. There was nothing more than just death in his pupils inside lived wisdom. I can't explain how I knew a thing like that or how it was even possible. But there, it was right in front of me. My shell melted and I articulated all my fears and all my outrage for humanity in a single razor sharp question. Who are you? I asked and heard the shudder in my voice. He spoke almost too quiet to hear. I'm the devil.