Prisoner 489 (Black Labyrinth Book 2) Read online

  “Damn,” Toggle said. “There may just be an elephant in there.”

  “What I’m trying to tell you,” Kettle said. “They were afraid his weight would tear through one of those cheap-ass cardboard and best-wish coffins. I think they’re right. It would have.”

  “But why the metal coffin?” Bernard said.

  “Let me tell you something else,” Kettle said. “That metal coffin, it’s wrapped in chains.”

  “What the fuck for?” Bernard said.

  “So what’s in it won’t get out. That old boy still has the plastic bag over his head. I mean, every prisoner on the big island is unique, it’s just this fellow was a little more unique than the rest.”

  “He have a name?” Bernard asked.

  “Not that anyone knows. We just called him number 489,” Kettle said.“How do you execute someone and not know who he is?” Bernard said.

  “Peculiar, huh?”

  §

  By the time they got the box to the gravesite they were covered in sweat, and when they tried to place it on the cloth straps that worked the device to lower the coffin, the crate tipped. It tore the contraption loose and dove into the hole with one end striking the ground so hard the crate burst open and the metal coffin was revealed.

  “Goddamn it,” Bernard said. It was the first time something had gone wrong when he was preparing a burial. He was overcome with a sense of being unprofessional.

  “It’s all right, pal,” Kettle said. “It’s not like anyone is looking. We’ll just shovel the hole filled. Who gives a shit if that motherfucker is standing on his head.”

  “We’ll do it right,” Bernard said.

  “There really are chains?” Wilson asked.

  They looked where he was pointing. Wrapped around the coffin they could see chains, padlocked chains.

  “Told you,” Kettle said.

  “But he’s dead,” Toggle said. “Even an odd one can get dead.”

  “I think they wanted to be sure,” said Kettle. “Let’s get him covered and we’ll have that drink. I’ll tell you what I know. Why the fuck not. I’d like to get it off my chest.”

  It took some work, but Wilson and Toggle were able to climb down in the grave and tug at the coffin until it lay flat. They pulled loose the pieces of the crate that weren’t under the coffin and passed them up, then climbed out.

  Toggle worked the front-end loader and filled the grave with loose earth. Then Bernard, Toggle and Wilson firmed the dirt down with shovels while Kettle leaned against the big tree.

  “I have the marker for it,” Toggle said, and he got it out of the front-end loader where it lay on the seat. It had the number 489 painted on it. He shoved it in the ground at the head of the grave.

  “All right,” Toggle said, “another one put away.”

  Kettle poured Scotch all around, except for Bernard, who didn’t drink liquor. He had some of the new coffee Kettle had brought instead.

  Kettle said, “The big boy. He didn’t eat.”

  They were seated in chairs in the downstairs community room, as it was called, though the community was the three of them, and now a guest, Kettle. They had the door and windows open and the night breeze was blowing in, turning a bit chill as it blew.

  “What do you mean he didn’t eat?” Bernard said.

  “He didn’t eat. Not a bite all the time he was there. Took them three years to throw the volts to him, and I’m not sure why it took that long, as they don’t have any laws or appeals over there. Not for the folks they bring in. And in his case, I’m not sure he was a folk.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Kettle,” Toggle said. “Everyone eats.”

  “Everyone human.”

  “Even adding in the weight of the crate and the coffin, there’s some serious meat inside that box,” Toggle said. “He was eating something.”

  “He didn’t eat for three years,” Kettle said, and took a long slug of his Scotch. “Let me tell you, I know. I was assigned to him sometimes. You know, guard duty, look in through the peephole now and then, make sure he hadn’t offed himself. I had to ask for them to let me out of the duty a time or two, it got to me so much. They let me off too. Everyone there that dealt with him understood. They had a special room just for him, and it had all manner of symbols on the wall. I don’t know what they were about, but it was like some kind of incantation.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Toggle said. “We don’t need some stupid ghost story.”

  “I want to hear,” Wilson said, leaning forward. One drink and he was already starting to act a bit buzzed.

  “I doubt it was just decoration,” Kettle said. “It was some kind of mumbo-jumbo going on there. It was there to keep him in that room. The walls were ten feet thick and the bars were as big around as my forearms, and there was a clear plastic shield in front of those bars, on the outside. There was an electric eye that was set off if he moved too close to the bars, and they gave off a shock of electricity, for what that was worth. You could go in there and stand in front of the plastic when you were on guard duty, but most of us used the peephole on the big metal door. That door was two feet thick and solid steel.”

  “So he could take that shock, he went too far?” Toggle said, “Enough bullshit.”

  “It didn’t hurt him,” Kettle said.

  “He took four serious jolts tonight, and a bag over his head,” Wilson said. “Haven’t you been paying attention? He could probably take a little shock like that.”

  “You tell him, kid,” Kettle said. “And he really didn’t eat. They tried to feed him daily for the first month, but he either left it or threw it against the wall. And he didn’t lose a goddamn pound. Not an ounce. They had him recorded as six foot seven, weighing four hundred pounds. He was broad in the shoulders as a beer truck and had legs and arms like trees. Big hands, catcher’s-mitt hands. He had a toilet in there, but he didn’t use it. He didn’t eat anything or drink anything, so there was no shit or piss. He just was. He sat on his bunk, sagged it, but didn’t move outside of that, except now and then to come to the bars and look at me when I came in, right through the electric barrier. It hummed around him like horseflies, but didn’t bother him at all. You could see the damn electricity, blue-white and sparking. Goddamn, that was some look he had when he was staring. His skin was gray, like damp sand, and his eyes were black and round like dry olives. Never smiled. Now and again he’d open his mouth and just let his jaw hang, but it wasn’t any kind of smile. He had big, fat teeth, all of them exactly alike. The size of sugar cubes and the color of dirty snow. And he had a tattoo right in the middle of his fat forehead. Blue and ugly, some kind of squiggles and such. You couldn’t call it decorative. Looked like this.”

  There was a notebook and pad on the table covered in coffee rings. Kettle took it, drew a design on it.

  “That looks like some kind of language,” Bernard said, turning it around to face him.

  “Very descriptive,” Toggle said. “But you lost me at he didn’t eat.”

  “He didn’t. Believe me. He just didn’t eat. I swear on my grave, he didn’t eat.”

  “You didn’t see him eat,” Toggle said.

  Kettle shook his head. “No. He didn’t eat.”

  “Why was he there?” Bernard asked.

  “They don’t tell us stuff like that, not us guards and boat men. Well, I’m the only one drives the boat. But there were rumors, you know.”

  “What kind of rumors,” Wilson asked.

  “He could fly and throw lightning bolts,” Toggle said. “Oh yeah, and he didn’t eat, but he could fart cannon balls.”

  “You don’t want to believe me, you don’t have to,” Kettle said.

  “I want to hear it,” Bernard said. “We all know that whoever is kept over there is not just a thief, a rapist, or a murderer. They have some kind of peculiarity about them.”

  “That’s what I keep hearing,” Toggle said. “But all I’ve seen are coffins and them slipping down into graves I dug, rotting li
ke any other dead thing.”

  “But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t peculiar,” Kettle said. “Governments put together this business, these two islands, for a special reason. They wanted to make sure they held them in a place where they couldn’t get out. And over there, I’ve seen some odd stuff, I tell you that.”

  “I think you like to hear yourself talk,” Toggle said.

  “I do at that,” Kettle said, “But that doesn’t mean what I’m talking isn’t true.”

  “Tell us about the rumors,” Wilson said.

  “They said they found him in a wall.”

  “A wall?” Bernard said.

  “Yeah, a wall. In some old synagogue in New York they were tearing down. Opened the wall, and there he was.”

  “Now the bullshit is deep,” Toggle said.

  “It’ll get deeper,” Kettle said. “And it may be bullshit. I’m telling you this part because it’s what I overheard. They found him in the wall, and he was just there, stiff as a giant tree. They thought he was a statue.”

  “Here we go, the set up for the big joke,” Toggle said. “Ends with, and he killed them all.”

  “Almost,” Kettle said. And the way he said it, even Toggle settled back in his chair. “You see, they had to get a dozen men just to lift him, and they carried him out and placed in a warehouse, and the next morning the warehouse had a hole just a little bigger than the statue, or body as it turned out. It was gone.”

  “He knocked a hole in the wall, huh,” Toggle said, but a lot of his sarcasm had dried up.

  “No. They saw tire tracks outside the warehouse. Someone had cut their way through the aluminum and stolen the body, hauled it away.”

  “Who and to what purpose?” Bernard asked.

  Kettle shook his head. “I don’t know. I mean there’s more to the rumor, but I don’t know the answer to that. But there is this. A few days later a couple of Jewish fellows turned up dead in an apartment in New Jersey, and there was a hole in the wall again, but this time it had been knocked open from the inside.”

  Even Toggle had grown quiet. Kettle poured them all another round, and even Bernard let him dash a bit in his coffee cup.

  Kettle sipped and then sat quietly for a moment. “Those two Jews, they had something to do with the old synagogue, I think. If I remember the story right, one was a rabbi. I don’t know all the truth, just the rumors. But they were messed up, those two. One had his head pulled completely off, like it was a cork in a bottle. The other, his arms were pulled off, and one of the men’s legs was missing.”

  “You can’t know that really happened,” Toggle said. There was nothing disdainful in his tone now, though, just curiosity.

  “I said as much. Rumor. But the body, because that’s what it was, was missing. Something had gone wrong there, and it had got up and walked away. After knocking part of the wall down. There were all manner of books lying about, they said. Most of them in ancient languages or some such shit. Again, this is just the stuff came down from the guards and the hired help, things they overheard, or got told in secrecy, which, of course means it got told to someone who told it to someone. It could be like the game of telephone, where you tell someone something and by the time you get to the end, it’s changed. They told me they finally cornered him, and he had that leg. He beat some homeless people to death with it, and had pulled some others apart with his bare hands. He killed two or three cops. Bullets didn’t stop him.”

  “Now you have gone wild,” Toggle said. “That’s insane. How can anyone believe that shit?”

  Kettle shrugged. “Believe what you want. I don’t know how they finally got him down, clamped him up and hauled him in, but they did. I believe all that, about the cops, all that stuff they say he did. Because I’ve seen him. Been near him. From what I know of him, what I saw, him not eating—and you don’t have to believe me on that. I don’t give a shit. But he didn’t eat. He didn’t crap. He didn’t piss. And he didn’t do much more than sit, and he was a solid weight all that time. There was something about him that was just plain scary. And tonight, you know what they did? They had to use a forklift with claws on it to take him from the cell, and he still hurt a couple of guards before they pinned him with that thing. The wall was fixed so it could be unbolted and pulled out. The lift had a wide shield and it had those tongs, and it got hold of him, and then it took a dozen men to put him in the chair when they got him there. And it wasn’t the usual chair. It was like a goddamn throne with thick clamps and wraps of chain. I saw all this through the plastic shield on the door. They always let me watch, and I always do. Like I told you. I want to know what kind of shit I’m putting in the hole. Well, they strapped him in, put a special-made cap on his head that made him look like Tom Terrific--”

  “Who?” Wilson said.

  “Forget it,” Bernard said.

  “And then,” Kettle said, “everyone jumped back and they threw him the juice. No formalities or last words, because he never spoke, ever. And they hit him with those volts and he smoked and cooked and let out with the first sound anyone had ever heard. It was like a giant wolf howl, but harder and meaner, maybe a scream inside a howl. I don’t know how to describe it, but it made my blood curdle, I’ll tell you that. They saw he wasn’t dead, and had in fact snapped one of the leg bonds, and they hit him again. This time the cap had flames coming out from under it, and they singed his head, and still he howled, and they hit him again and, as you said, again. I had forgotten that fourth shot. That time he went silent. They put a stethoscope to his chest, and he wasn’t breathing. But his hands were moving, and one of the wrist bonds was starting to break. They put a plastic bag over his head then, and he went still after a time, but I never saw any indication he was breathing inside that bag. They just assumed he had to be, but the bag didn’t suck in or nothing. He just finally wasn’t howling and was still, and it was done. They were going to hit him again, but decided it was over and crated him out and boxed him up and put him on the boat, and here we are.”

  “Damn,” Wilson said.

  “No doubt he could take some volts,” Toggle said. “That part I believe. I saw the lights. But all that other stuff.”

  “Believe what you want,” Kettle said. “Ain’t no skin off my dick. Look, I got to head back. Well, maybe one more drink. Anyone for one more?”

  Everyone but Bernard was for one more. They drank it down quick and Kettle got up and started out the door.

  “I got to go,” Kettle said. “I’ll leave you with the old boy tucked tight in the ground.”

  “I’ll walk down with you,” Bernard said.

  “Me too,” Wilson said.

  “Hell, why not,” Toggle said. “Not like I got anything else to do.”

  §

  When they were near the dock, Bernard found himself glancing out at Number 489’s grave. The moonlight lay on the white marker and made it shiny. The wind was very cool now, and to walk down to the dock he had slipped on a windbreaker, as had Wilson and Toggle. Kettle was in short sleeves and seemed just fine, as if he were impervious to the weather. They watched him climb on board and listened as he started up the boat and sent it out into the waters, which by that time had grown quite choppy. The boat heaved and lurched toward the big island, its lights going away from them fast. It seemed Kettle was anxious for the security of a prison filled with what were thought to be the world’s worst criminals, instead of on the little island with a freshly executed prisoner buried down deep in the ground inside a chained-up metal coffin.

  “Looks like it’s going to come a serious blow,” Toggle said, as they turned and walked back up the dock and onto shore.

  “Does at that,” Bernard said.

  “There hasn’t been a real storm on this island since I been here,” Wilson said. “Just some wind and rain.”

  “We’ve seen a few, haven’t we, Bernard?” Toggle said, and Bernard felt a strange sense of unusual camaraderie between them. Maybe it was the Scotch Toggle had consumed that made him f
riendly. Or perhaps it was the aftermath of Kettle’s story.

  “That’s right, we’ve had two good ones. No. Three.”

  “Yeah,” Toggle said. “Three. Three really good ones. We had one blew the roof off Island Keep, took them three months to get over here and fix it. Lot of stuff got rained on during the storm, and during the three months too. Messy.”

  “So we could have a good one?” Wilson said.

  “You can always have a good one,” Toggle said. “Shit, boy. You never know. But the way this wind is picking up, how cool it feels, I can tell you this, we’re in for something. Maybe I ought to bring the loader back to the shed.”

  “Probably should,” Bernard said.

  “All right then. I’m going to take a moment to have a smoke or a chew. One or the other. Wind doesn’t pick up too much, maybe both. I’ll be up.”

  Bernard and Wilson kept walking toward Island Keep. Toggle turned back to the cemetery and the loader.

  Wilson said, “He’s an odd man, isn’t he?”

  “No odder than I am.”

  “I can believe that,” Wilson said. “No offense.”

  “None taken. But like us, here you are.”

  “Yeah, I did something stupid, and here I am. But I can tell you this, my time is up, I’m off here. I always thought an island would be a treat. It isn’t. I get bored.”

  “Well, this little rock isn’t exactly Hawaii,” Bernard said.

  “True, but I think I’ve had it all up and done with islands of any kind. I didn’t know how much I hated water until I got here. You can leave, can’t you? You served your time.”

  “I can. I think about it. I probably won’t. I don’t know anything else. But I tell you, son, if you want to leave, you have the urge to leave, do so, and don’t come back. You come back here, pretty soon you’re like a bird with clipped wings. You remember flying, but you can’t do it anymore. Leave while you still got the wings for it.”

  “Don’t worry, I plan to,” Wilson said.

  When they got back to Island Keep, Wilson said, “I think I’ll go find a girlie magazine and jack off.”