The Key to Everything (10 page)

-13-

Jabez: Entrance

The rain stopped after a few hours. Leaving the poncho over him helped Jabez feel more hidden and secure, although the fingers crawling up the back of his spine persisted. Though whoever planted the explosives that destroyed his convoy might not have found his trail, he couldn’t shake the creeping dread that something was indeed coming for him.

He needed to move. He began to mentally prepare himself for the pain and checked his remaining ammunition and supplies. He funneled the rainwater that pooled on top of his poncho into his canteen and took a small drink. He drew the cold liquid down into his throat and felt every inch of its chill slide down his esophagus to his belly. 

Using the butt of his rifle, he pushed himself to his feet. The first step wasn’t as bad as he expected. He moved forward on his good leg and quickly pushed off with the bad. The true test would come when he cleared the table and couldn’t lean on it for support anymore. The door looked like it was only three or four steps away, so he figured to try for it quickly.

Taking a deep breath, he steadied his nerve and stepped forward. Letting go of the table, he hopped on his good leg, almost falling immediately. The weight of the pack threw off his center of balance. About to go down, he lunged for the doorknob. If it was unlocked, it would have turned in his grip and he wouldn’t have been able to hold himself up. Fortunately, it remained motionless in his hand.

Fashioning a splint out of a few broken pieces of the building would take longer than he wanted. The white clouds were outlined as the sky grew dark again. He braced his back on the door and took another pain pill. He swallowed it dry and allowed his head to slump forward onto his chest. 

Sticking out from underneath the tip of his boot was a bright light. Gritting his teeth, he slid the leg to the side to get a better look. What he could see sticking up from the mud at first glance appeared to be a coin reflecting the little sunlight that broke through. It was rounded at the edge and had the rubbed-down remains of an engraving on its face. Bending over to get it would be next to impossible now that his leg was braced, so he let it be and reached for the long piece of wood he wanted to use as his crutch.

The squirrel appeared silently. Jabez didn’t notice it at first. A shadow slipped over the bricks on the ground in front of him, prodding him to look over. It sat on the chair, sniffing at the air and looking right at him again. Its claws made a scraping sound against the wood as it hopped up onto the table. 

Jabez reached for his rifle, took aim and then thought better of the situation. Gunfire would only call attention to his location if there were someone nearby. He needed something to throw instead. As he leaned down, his good leg lost traction on the slippery ground. Trying to support his weight by pushing his rifle in between the bricks at his feet, his back slid slowly down the door until he landed in the mud. 

The squirrel watched with an unchanging yet interested expression. Jabez grabbed at some loose gravel and threw it at the small animal. While most of the pebbles missed their intended target, the oddly observant rodent’s tiny hand reached out and caught the only one that came close and immediately threw it back, hitting Jabez between the eyes.

They both remained still for a time, eyes locked in a strange embrace. In all his years being a soldier, Jabez had learned quite well how to judge his enemy by their eyes. He could tell a vicious killer from a scared little boy costuming himself in a tough guy’s uniform with one glance. But these…these were eyes he had never seen before. These were the first eyes that had shown him what death actually looked like.

As if the animal sensed his fear, he watched its snout form a hellish shape resembling a twisted smile. Exposing sharp teeth too long for its head, it issued an uncharacteristically deep growl from its small body. Jabez blinked, and the squirrel’s head twisted to the right at an impossible angle that should have broken every bone in its neck. Its mouth stretched open wider still, tearing and ripping at the edges of the dark black lips. 

Jabez screamed and pushed against the door, straining hard with every muscle he could access. Looking around for an escape route in the debris, he realized that even though he sat in a virtually wide-open space, he was completely trapped. He couldn’t make it to the side of the wall with his leg in this condition. Scrambling for purchase, his hand knocked the rifle. The squirrel flew off the table, grabbed the gun, and threw it backward over its shoulder, as if it weighed no more than an acorn. 

With its head still bent over at that obscene angle, it made a noise like a child’s laughter, sending chills through Jabez’s entire body. He kicked at the squirrel with his good leg and missed. He screamed, tearing at the inside of his throat, and kicked again. This time he connected with the creature, sending it tumbling away in a hideous mass of fur and spit. 

Digging at the ground to find anything solid, his fingers scraped across something hard and sharp. He squeezed it, piercing the skin of his palm with the cold wet metal. He quickly glanced down to see if it could be used as some sort of weapon. It was an old and rusted brass key, oddly shaped, with a strange engraving. He knew the wall was broken, but if he could get himself on the other side of the door, it might give him the break he needed to create some defenses from whatever this thing was. 

His blood dripped down from the sharp edges of the key’s teeth breaking through his skin. A deep, unnatural laughter carried in the wind, from over the rubble and just beyond his line of sight. Jabez felt every vertebra rattle in his spine. He lifted the key up over his head just as the squirrel scrambled back over the loose bricks and mounds of snow. The key was slippery with blood and melting snow. He gripped it tightly and tried to slide it home into the lock without taking his eyes from his small attacker.

Rocks and jagged chunks of broken bricks hit him and the wood of the door behind him. As the squirrel ran, it picked up whatever it could and threw it at him with a fierce accuracy. A sharp stone hit his neck, causing him to choke for a moment, and he almost dropped the key. Another rock, this one quite heavy, smashed into his stomach, almost doubling him over in pain.

It was getting closer. Each impact struck with more force than the last. Welts rose and skin tore. Ribs cracked. The laughter grew deeper and louder. The ground shook. Glass in the window began to crack and split. Only a few more feet and it would be on top of him, tearing him to pieces. 

The key slid home, and the doorknob turned. 

Jabez shoved the door open and kicked out at the terror racing toward him. He missed his target but was able to pull himself across the doorway. Scrambling through, he watched the horrible black mouth filled with terrible sharp teeth launching through the air . 

The door slammed shut.

Silence. 

White. 

Everything was a pristine, warm white. 

A soft feather bed with a hand-quilted white comforter against the wall. In the center of the room, a writing desk. A blank stack of paper with seven white sharpened pencils rest on top. On the wall across from him, an ornately sculpted white frame enveloping nothing but black space. 

Completely illuminated, Jabez looked around the small room for a window or some other light source. Other than the dark void surrounded by the gilded frame, he saw nothing but the empty, painful white. So brilliant he squinted against the glare. Then he noticed the real problem. There was no door.

-14-

Jabez: The Room

The second hand on his watch stopped working during the team’s ambush, so there was no way to gauge the passing of time. He spent a while tracing his hands over the walls, looking for some hidden seal or sign of a trap door. Trying to find anything that might grant him a way out. 

Even standing on the bed, the ceiling was too high to reach. He thought about sliding the desk over and putting it on top of the bed, but even that wouldn’t lift him enough. Hopping down to the floor, he took one of the pencils off the stack of empty pages and started drumming the eraser on his knuckles. It was something he always did in school when he was a kid. It calmed his nerves during a test or when he actually built up the nerve to talk to one of the cute girls in his class. 

He measured the length of the room by counting his steps. He wore size 12 boots and, stepping heel to toe, counted off ten feet from wall to wall. The room felt a lot bigger than ten by ten, and the echoes reverberating around him took a noticeably long time to come back to his ears. In this imaginary or dream room, why should the laws of physics apply?

Dragging the eraser against the wall across from the bed, his peripheral vision saw the desk moving away from him. He turned and walked back to the center of the room, coming to the surprising revelation that he no longer felt any pain in his leg. The brace he had made was gone, and he wasn’t limping anymore. His uniform was gone as well. The soft white pants were drawstring-tied at the waist, and the loose-fitting shirt hung down to just above his knees with long, flowing sleeves. Between the crazy, fucked-up squirrel and this place, he was starting to think there was a misprint on the label of his pain pills. 

Things were a bit too ass-up right now to get any real sleep, but that bed was starting to look pretty damn good. He fought against the urge to lie down and threw his pencil as hard as he could. It hit lead point first, leaving a dark grey crumble that stood out from the white background, then fell to the ground and settled perfectly into the corner where the floor met the wall.

Jabez took both hands and fiercely rubbed his fingers through his hair. With his eyes closed he started walking. Five, six, then seven steps forward. Ten, eleven, up to fifteen steps before he opened his eyes. The wall was immediately in front of his nose, but the pencil and the grey crumble it made on the surface were gone. He scanned the floor, and it was nowhere. He ran over to the bed and dropped to his knees, sure that it had rolled across the floor and ended up beneath the bed. 

He reached out his hand, searching under the bed, but found nothing but empty white space. He got up to his feet and turned around. Leaning all of his weight on the back of the chair, he all but fell over when he counted the seven perfectly sharpened pencils resting in a row on top of the stack of blank paper.

* * *

He didn’t know how long he slept. When his eyes opened, he hoped to find himself back home in bed with his dog Tikvah sleeping at his feet. No such luck. The achingly empty whiteness still held him prisoner. Someone was holding him here. Someone made this place. He didn’t know who, and he really didn’t care. He just wanted out. 

There seemed to be a flicker of movement from the framed blackness. A circular ripple spreading outward in this pond of dark. He approached it cautiously, not wanting to fall victim to a trap. He came at it from the side, pressing his back against the wall and inching quietly  toward the frame. Trying to get his fingernails between it and the wall, he thought he might be able to pry it loose. 

A familiar low rumble filled the room. The sound was coming from the framed dark void next to him. When he stood in front of it, the slow, curving ripple continued to flow across the black surface in a pattern he recognized. He couldn’t quite place it, but he was sure he’d seen it somewhere before. 

The rippling grew in intensity and swelled into deeper tones. The surface heaved outward as the sound of waves breaking far off in the distance rolled closer and closer. The blackness forced its way outward from the frame and stretched, like an arm reaching for the center of the room. Thin, pointing shapes grew and morphed into the semblance of a hand. The almost-fingers tightened into a fist and slammed down on the top of the desk. The wood creaked and groaned. The almost-hand picked up one of the pencils and scratched something on the first blank page. Jabez was struck still as stone and could not move to read the words. His body didn’t even shake, he was so filled with terror. The almost-fingers gently put down the pencil and reached for Jabez. He wanted to back away and run, but where could he go? Finding its way to him, the almost-hand lovingly took him by the shoulder. He was pulled to the chair and made to sit. The almost-hand walked up to his chin almost-finger by almost-finger and tilted his head down to look at the page. He recognized the words at the time, though they didn’t register in his shattered mind. The almost-hand disappeared back into the now-silent, still void, and the room held its breath.

The chair falling backward moved in slow motion. White rushed in on Jabez from everywhere, and he let it take him away. Before he faded completely, the message written to him on the page flashed across the inside of his eyelids.

“You turn the key.”

-15-

Jabez: Writing

I didn’t notice it before. It’s warm in here. I still can’t stop shivering. Shaking so bad all over, I can hear my body humming. My teeth are clenched so tight the muscles in my jaw are killing me. I can’t feel my toes. No matter how hard I stomp my foot, I get nothing. 

Last night, or whatever it was, I passed out on top of the bed. I woke up with the covers neatly tucked in over me. I couldn’t kick my legs free I was wrapped in so tight. Awesome. 

I don’t think I moved while I was unconscious. At least the covers didn’t look like it anyway. It took me a minute to remember where I am.