Transcription (6 page)

Before his mother had died, James had maintained a clear, steady picture of his dad. The man was happy, hard-working, and kind. He worked a lot, but always had time for his wife and son. Ever since his mom had died, James didn’t know what to think about his dad. He seemed liked seven different people—one for each day of the week.
 

Thomas spotted his son, hiding behind the couch. He walked over and crouched in front of James.

“You need to make me a promise,” Thomas said.

James looked at him and didn’t say a word.

“You can never,
never
go in that office, do you hear me?” Thomas said.

James nodded twice.

“Good. It’s very dangerous.”

Thomas stood up and looked towards the door. He seemed unsure of what to do with himself.

“Why do
you
go in there?” James blurted out. The question had been on his lips for weeks, but he didn’t know how to ask it.

“Pardon?” his dad asked.

“Why do you stay in there all night writing? I know you’re not on a job, because you never talk to your editor anymore. What are you doing in there?”

“You’re too smart for your own good, Jimbo. I can’t talk about this, but you have to trust me. What I’m doing in there is very important, and it’s something only I can do.”

“Why?”

“I can’t talk about it. I’m going to write down everything. You can read it when you’re older.”

“It’s not fair, Dad,” James said. “Everyone else gets a mom and a dad. I don’t have either.”

Thomas dropped his head. James felt triumphant for a second. He’d meant to hurt his father, and he’d succeeded. When Thomas looked up at him again, James regretted it. The pain in his father’s eyes seemed to be double his own. Whatever his father was contending with, James had just made it worse.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“No. Don’t be sorry. I’m the one who’s sorry. None of this is your fault, and you don’t deserve it. I stuck my nose where it didn’t belong and you’re paying the price. I’m sorry.”

“Can you just tell me what’s going on?”

Thomas didn’t answer. He moved back to the door and looked out the small windows cut into the upper half.
 

James went back to his room.

The door of his father’s office was jarring to look at. His whole life, he couldn’t remember seeing it closed.

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James shook the memory from his head. He had been about to fall asleep again, and it was no time to sleep. He had things to do to get ready. If he could go back now, he would have so much to talk with his father about. Maybe if his father had someone to commiserate with, he wouldn’t have been so depressed. Maybe they could have found a way to share the load of the transcription. They might alternate nights, or swap every-other week so they could both lead a somewhat normal life.

It wouldn’t work, and James knew it.

The transcription ate a person up, like a motor draining a battery.

And Thomas wasn’t driven mad by the process, he was driven mad by the mistakes he had made. Early on, while still discovering the nature of his duties, Thomas had been careless, and his best friend Ron had died.

CHAPTER 6: PRISON

Diary of Thomas Hicks, 1977

W
HEN
I
FIRST
EXPLAINED
my theory to Jeremy, it took a lot of convincing before he agreed to help me out. Jeremy works as a freelance fact checker, and if you’re looking for a review of numbers, he’s your guy. He works part-time at the University, so he has access to some number crunching machines to run his simulations through. I wrote a story last year on large-scale hog farming, and Jeremy actually found a mistake in the farmer’s calculation of feed-to-meat ratios. He probably saved that farmer ten-thousand dollars, and all in the name of making sure that my article was correct.

This was a different kind of problem I brought to him though.

The conversation had to restart three or four times before he understood what I was getting at.

“I’m looking for a pattern in these dates.”

“What kind of pattern?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Then it won’t do you any good.”

“Pardon?”

“You’ve got four dates there,” he said. “I can find any number of patterns there, and I can also make a strong case that those dates are purely random. You don’t have a large enough sample to do yourself any good. You’ll need a hundred more dates. Then, I can find you a pattern.”

“But this has only happened four times, as far as I can tell.”

“Then you’ll have to wait,” he said. “Unless you can correlate some other variables.”

“Like what?”

“Do you have an idea of what
caused
the phenomenon on those dates?”

“No, that’s what I’m trying to investigate. But it’s really difficult to investigate if I can’t go watch it, and I can’t go watch it if I don’t know when it’s going to happen again.”

“It’s a little hard to speculate when I don’t even know what we’re talking about,” he said. “These dates are
years
apart. There could be any number of instigators.”

I paused at that. Jeremy was a man of logic, and he was never going to believe the theory bouncing around in my head. I barely believed it—that’s why I was investigating. But, I needed a confidant. Maybe a man of logic was exactly the person who could help me put this thing in the proper context. I decided to tell him what I knew.

“That’s nonsense,” he said.

“Right. I know. But, if it’s not, think of the possibilities.”

“For what?”

“For understanding the nature of man. For understanding the root of evil, and evil deeds. What if we find out that there’s something beyond free will that causes people to do evil? If we could find the source, then maybe we could help squelch the effect. Maybe we could decrease the amount of pain and suffering in the world.”

“Some people just have bad brain chemistry,” he said. “Other people were warped by the terrible cycle of circumstances in which they were raised. There’s no external force other than those that causes evil. Evil is not a thing, it’s just what we call antisocial behavior.”

“I know. Believe me, I know. But what if in some cases it’s not. Look at these men, and all the pain they’ve caused. Seventy-three murders—can you imagine how many ‘terrible cycles’ they were responsible for creating? Imagine the evil deeds they perpetrated as the effects spread out through the people they touched. Can you imagine how much pain and suffering came from their hands?”

Jeremy took a moment to process what I was saying. His response was slow and deliberate. “You’re right—they’ve caused terrible pain. You might be able to make a case that the criminal justice system had a hand in creating, or at least not recognizing, these monsters. That’s a far cry from your hypothesis.”

“But look,” I said. I had my folders with me. I fanned them out, letting him see all of the correspondence. “I’ve got letters from fifty inmates here. All of them were in contact with these four men before and after they stayed in that cell. They all describe the same changes.”

“Prisoners are locked in a tight, boring environment. Of course they would invent a mythology and spread it amongst themselves,” he said. But, as he was talking, he was looking through the letters. The dates of incarceration were very different—in four different clumps. Despite the time difference between the accounts, the language was very much the same. People used the words “inhabited,” “haunted,” and “possessed.” I even had a few letters from guards. They said the same things.

These four men, despite the fact that they were inmates, could pass for pretty normal guys. Then, at some point while staying in that cell, they became some of the most dangerous murderers the state has known. Reading the accounts of their crimes, one would think they were all committed by the same twisted mind. They all showed a reckless disdain for laws and human life. They seemed determined to cause mayhem and destroy happiness. And, they did it all with very little concern for their own well-being.
 

“The similarities are striking,” Jeremy said. “Did they just copy each other?”

“I’m sure it’s a possibility. My gut says no, though. Look at Al Hudson. He had the lowest body count, because he didn’t take any pains to hide his craziness. David Mitchell waited until he was paroled. On the outside, he was able to rack up quite a few more crimes before he was taken down again. If anything, he didn’t copy Al, he improved on him. It’s the same with Hopkins and Poole. But, even though they weren’t committing crimes right away, everyone seemed to see the change. With Mitchell, the parole board overlooked his recent change and judged him on his behavior before his hearing. One of the board members even said that Mitchell seemed disturbed, but that was probably due to stress in the face of his upcoming chance at parole. After that, they were much more careful about who they let out.”

I could tell that Jeremy was beginning to come over to my side. He still needed a bit more convincing.

“This is mostly observation. What’s your theory?”

“I try to remain objective until I’ve collected all the evidence, but if I had to go out on a limb…”

I paused. I don’t believe in ghosts, or possession. Sometimes it seems like the world is an easier place to navigate for the people who do. When they run across something they don’t understand, they can just wave their hands and blame it on God. Or, they can blame it on Satan. With people like me and Jeremy, it’s much harder to encounter something we truly don’t understand. My brain wants to classify everything, which doesn’t lead to the type of flexibility required to contain a phenomenon like evil.

“What if it’s a virus?” I ask. “Or, maybe it’s a fungus. There’s a fungus in South America that takes eight years to mature and produce spores. What if there’s something like that present in this cell, and when you inhale the spores, it makes you into a psychopath?”

“So we should be able to correlate against meteorological conditions,” he said. He was looking off towards the ceiling. I knew he was hooked.

“Perhaps,” I said. “Or maybe it’s some kind of magnetic field produced by the earth and somehow amplified by the local geography.”

“So we’re looking for low-frequency environmental conditions?”

“Maybe,” I said. Or demons, or leprechauns, or ghosts, but I don’t believe in those things.

Now that I’m in the cell, waiting to see what phenomenon will come, those dry conversations with Jeremy feel like they’re a million miles away. If I really had believed my own theory, would I have dared to come here tonight? Would I have risked my own sanity by staying in the cell that I theorized might be the spawn of evil?

I have one distinct advantage over The Big Four—I know what I’m up against. Ancient people were driven mad by the sight of an eclipse. Armed with the knowledge of celestial mechanics, modern viewers make sport of watching the moon pass in front of the sun. And, I have to admit, out in the real world it was difficult to fully believe my own theory. I needed to come here tonight, just to feel the place.
 

Looking across the aisle to the cell across the way, as the last light from the sun begins to fade, anything seems possible.
 

The sound from that cell is still there. I’m beginning to feel like I understand it a little more. To stick with the chalk analogy, as the sun goes down, it seems like the chalk is slowing. I’m hearing the subtle chatter of the piece of chalk scraping across the surface of the board. The sound isn’t entirely fluid. It stops and starts. It almost seems like there’s Morse code in there—little bursts of information encoded in that noise. If so, it seems like it’s not something I want to hear.

I’m humming to myself as I write. My subconscious brain wants to make enough noise to drown out the sound. I flip back through my notebook to see if I can find the reference. I knew it was there—on the night that Hopkins changed, his neighbors complained about the sound. They said he was singing to himself all night. Maybe that fact just got stuck in my brain, and that’s why I’m humming. I don’t think so. It seems more like I’m distracting myself so I won’t listen to the words.

I’m beginning to think I should yell for Fradeux. In a few hours, I could be back at home. My wife, Judith, and my beautiful boy, James, are back there, engrossed in our perfectly normal life. I should be there too. Any job that stands between me and the people I love should not be tolerated. At this moment, it seems like such an obvious truth. I can’t believe that I didn’t see it before.

I realize that the sun is gone. It’s below the horizon. I’ve got almost twelve hours until it comes up again, but Fradeux will be back to rescue me before then. I’m not sure I could make it twelve hours. I stop humming just to hear.

The sound is gone, but it comes back after a few seconds, like it was waiting for me to listen.

There are words there. It’s not just noise. I’m not sure how they know, but my ears are telling me that the origin of the sound is closer now, too. It’s coming from somewhere in the middle of the cell block. I should yell for Fradeux and see if he can hear the sound outside my cell. That would be cheating though. Nobody ever cracked a big story without the right amount of persistence and stamina. I’m not going to break at the first sign of adversity. Once I call Fradeux down here, I have the strong suspicion that he will end my experiment. He’s just looking for a reason to evacuate the cell once more and end his responsibility. The Superintendent of Prisons made it clear—the guards would not be held responsible for my well-being, but they would end the experiment at any time if they felt that I was in danger or causing a disruption.

Calling Fradeux away from his packing duties would certainly be a disruption.

It’s funny—the sound is made of words, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s the sound of someone speaking. I know this doesn’t make logical sense. There has to be a better way of describe it. Imagine a series of words, written on a page, and then communicated via sound, but not spoken. It’s like trying to describe what sad feels like, or how LSD changes your perception. There are no words which could describe the words. I
can
describe how they make me feel—disturbed, disquieted, uncomfortable, and unsettled come to mind.
Insane
also comes to mind.