They say that if you practice law long enough, eventually you’ll find the case that’ll break you. Well, I’ve only been in practice for a few years, but I already found mine. The type of case that places not only your mind and body in peril, but your soul itself, if you believe in such a thing.
It all started about a week ago, when I was assigned the representation of one Turner Done, an elementary school custodian accused of slaughtering three people here in rural Pennsylvania. I’m going to stick with ‘people,’ for purposes of this account, though my subsequent investigation calls that designation into question.
What I’ll say for now is that the ‘victims’ are no longer in their graves and leave it at that.
“They were…corrupted,” is how Turner himself plainly described it. “I had to…eliminate them, they were taking over the whole damn town.” That’s what he’d said the first time I visited him, at the tiny county jail, where murderers get mixed in with drunken brawlers, spousal abusers, and small-time drug dealers before they are processed through the State and sent their separate ways. I was assigned the case in my role as local public defender.
Said another way: Turner couldn’t afford a private lawyer, so he was assigned to me. Knowing what I know now, I do believe he assaulted three individuals, though I do not believe he had the necessary ‘mens rea’ to commit the crime. Plus, murder requires, you know, actually killing someone.
Turner told me that he’d served as night janitor at G________________ elementary since graduating from a local high school in the mid- ’90’s. He described himself as a loner, someone who preferred working in the shadows.
He described the night of the ‘massacre’ as follows: he was working the night shift, when he decided to hoof it to a local 24-hour convenience store to buy a pack of smokes and a cup of coffee. This was a normal routine for Turner, or at least had been since he’d lost his car in his divorce. “Not to my wife,” he had explained. “To my divorce lawyer. Only way I could afford her!”
Turner said he had planned to walk to a store outside town limits on this particular night. “I already knew then that plenty of people weren’t acting right,” he explained. “Something foul was in the air. Even the children were acting different when I worked the day shift. It’s like they weren’t even kids anymore…”
He said he locked up the school at around 3AM and cut through the town’s church graveyard on the way out of town. Something that he said he didn’t find creepy because he’d done it so often and because he was used to being alone at night given his line of work. Like a vampire, he said he preferred the night. When he reached the entrance of the graveyard, he heard a loud, shrieking sound. At first he thought it was a coyote, or some other type of nocturnal creature, but he could soon make out a woman’s voice screaming:
“I’ve changed my mind! I’ve changed my mind! Oh God, let me go!” Turner said he next heard another voice, a deep male one that seemed almost inhuman. “You offered to spill the blood,” the voice said. “To walk forever with your daughter. There’s no going back now.” At least, that’s what my case notes say. Not that I believed Turner’s story when he first told me all this.
Turner claimed he then rushed toward the voices, where he found three locals crouching over a thirty-ish woman, a local teacher. The aggressors were the town’s mail carrier, the middle school’s bus driver, and a Catholic priest. I know, it sounds like the buildup to a joke, right?
Turner said it seemed the priest was in charge, as he held a long, sharp Kaiser blade in his hand. One of them had already slit her throat, and were allowing the blood to drip into a chalice-like cup held up by the bus driver, a local named Pam Harper.
“To Eden,” the mailcarrier said. “The return to Eden,” the priest countered.
They apparently took turns drinking from the chalice, and the priest chided the bus driver: “Make sure you save some for the Master. You know we must tithe.” Holding the whimpering woman down, they began to bite at her bare skin, drawing blood and sucking it up as though they were leaches.
“It was disturbing as hell,” Turner said, fidgeting in his seat something fierce. “My God, it was evil. Evil in its purest form.” And I don’t need my notes to recall that much. I can still remember Turner’s disgusted face as he said it, the way his fingers gently traced the jail library books that were set out before him on the rickety wooden table.
“So I did what any rational person would do,” Turner said. “I pulled out the little handgun I kept with me, should anyone sneak into the school at night, and I blasted them suckers.”
“Literally suckers,” I said, but Turner wasn’t amused.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never dealt with the occult before,” he said, grimly serious. “Practicing out here in the sticks?”
“Oh, the odd ritualistic murder or two,” I said. “But literal vampires? No, that would be a first.”
“These weren’t vampires,” Turner said. “At least I don’t think. Not yet, anyway. More like vampire’s helpers.”
I asked Turner how, if this was all true, the woman who had been sliced open had communicated an entirely different story. “You are aware that Stephanie Daniels told the police she was performing a prayer for her deceased daughter when you came out of nowhere, guns a-blazing.”
“Yes,” Turner had said. “Of course I know what she said, and I know how it looks. But something must have… changed in her by the time I flagged down the county sheriff. Whoever, or whatever else was waiting out there, must have speeded up her transformation.” He claimed it wouldn’t be the first time; that his tiny town had been slowly converted into a town of monsters. Vampires, or something vampire-like, to be precise.
He described chronic absenteeism at school and work, abrupt personality changes, strange disappearances and reappearances, missing bodies, desecrated graves. I asked him why he didn’t inform law enforcement before the night of the so-called massacre, and he insisted that the local police were among the first to be “converted” and at any rate, he didn’t think any other law enforcement would believe the conspiracies of some middle-aged janitor. Said that half the time he had a hard time believing it himself.
“Unless you’re trying to plead insanity,” I had told him, “your story isn’t going to go over very well with a jury of your peers.” It was, unbelievably, the craziest story I had ever heard, in a long career of crazy stories. Totally and utterly unhinged.
“Go there,” he insisted. “Go to the town yourself and see, if you really think I’m a nut.” Then his eyes grew wide with fear. “But if you do, counselor, then by God, bring along a posse, some fresh garlic, and some mighty sharp wooden stakes. Your laws will mean nothing out there.”
The next day I went to G_____________________ alone, sans posse, garlic, or stakes. Us public defenders don’t exactly have the budget for posses. Besides, I had been practicing long enough to give little credit to paranoid delusions. Sometimes people just break. It isn’t really their fault, but it’s not necessarily my job to believe them, just to help them as best I can with the limited tools at my disposal. That’s how I saw it, anyway, back then.
The first odd thing I noticed, as drove up a gravel street toward the center of town, was how quiet it was. Describing something as ‘eerily quiet’ seems like a cliche, and I suppose it is, but that’s the best way I can describe what I witnessed. A dead zone. A broken promise of a place.
The first thing I did was stop at the local police station. It was an old building, apparently one that used to be the public library, based on the fading letters that adorned its white brick exterior.
There was no receptionist, so I shouted “hello,” as I stood in the worn out, ’70’s shag-carpeted lobby. An officer appeared a minute later, wearing dark sunglasses indoors. His skin was an icky greenish shade. I assumed he was jaundiced from liver failure, the cops in the sticks know how to party with the best of ‘em.
“You’re not from around here,” the officer said, though it was more of a statement than a question. “Are you, son.” His voice was slimy-sounding, oozy. I explained the situation, and I soon had his full attention. Though perhaps for the wrong reasons.
“Are you alone?” he had asked, his eyes constantly darting around the room.
“I’m with some others,” I lied.
“I can show you around the town, help you make the right connections,” the officer said. “But it will have to be tonight.” He forced a brackish smile. “Paperwork,” he explained. I noticed that the notepad poking out of his uniform was stained the blackish red of dried blood.
“I’ll come back later,” I lied. “Around sundown?”
The officer asked me to wait a moment before I left, but by then I was already backpedaling out of the station. Unnerved, bordering on utterly creeped out. As I exited, I swore I heard whispering from the hallway behind him.
“He knows,” was what the whispering sounded like. “He knows.”
By then I felt more than a bit…jittery…if not outright fearful, but I decided to carry on with my investigation. It’s not that I’m particularly brave, just that I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my job. I don’t have the energy to get into it now, but needless to say public defenders deal with all kinds. I say this because I’m sure you now doubt the veracity of this tale, as I originally doubted Turner Done’s. But maybe this world is a bit weirder than we’re given to believe.
Despite my unease, I decided to visit Stephanie Daniels. The woman who apparently came back from the dead, or at the very least recovered from a slit throat in record timing.
She lived, or perhaps now it was un-lived in an old Victorian off Main Street. I parked outside the house, noticing how all its windows appeared to be sealed off, boarded up. Heavy black curtains. Like the kind that, yes, a vampire might use to keep out the sun. I noticed a similar effect in some of the other local houses. As though G______________________ were an Alaskan town besieged by 24-hour daylight, rather than just another rural community in good ‘ol Pennsyltucky.
I sat in front of the house for a while, stalling. I felt some strange malevolence in the town generally, but something felt more specifically off about this house. I tried to check my emails, hoping to buy some time, but I had no reception. A not uncommon issue where we live, and having nothing to do with the supernatural or occult. Or so I assume.
I had the distinct feeling of being watched, though the streets were quiet. No children jumping rope, no old men tending to their lawns with desperate precision, not even any cars around, save the ones scattered about, parked like lumpy glacier rocks. I got out of my old Ford F150 and made my way outside. The sun was still bright and high in the sky, and I felt embarrassed that I took comfort in that fact.
I climbed up a few porch steps, which were as soft as butter, and inched my way to the front door. I knocked three times and then rang the doorbell for good measure. Then I waited, and waited, but nobody answered. In the driveway was a freshly polished green Suburu. I walked around the back of the house to find a clothesline stuffed with bed sheets and clothes stained a blackish red.
I tried the front door again with no answer, and with a morbid sensation of fear gripping me, made my back to my truck. A few moments later I was turning onto Main Street when another truck crashed into the passenger’s side of my vehicle at full impact.
No airbag went off, because my truck was too old for such safety measures. A true classic. And if you’ve ever heard the saying ‘they don’t make ‘em like they used to,’ then that might very well be true. The newer truck that had crashed into me crinkled in on itself like a sardine can, whereas my Ford screeched a loud clang and was simply brought to rest in a slow-motion puff of unleashed hood steam.
“Shit,” I said, wiping some blood from my brow. My head had struck the steering wheel but I felt generally okay, aside from a bloody nose. It didn’t feel broken, just slightly mangled. A dripper rather than a gusher.
As I made my way to check on the other driver, I noticed it was a priest. Or at the very least, someone wearing the priest garb.
“I’m so sorry,” the priest said, in what was indeed an inhuman sounding voice. “I simply wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t even see you there.”
“Are you okay?” I asked. I noticed that his head looked positively bashed in, and yet he was not bleeding. His skin looked dry and drained. His right eye was all but detached and yet he acted as though he had suffered a paper cut.
“I am perfectly fine, my son,” the priest said. “But we better call the police.”
“More like an ambulance,” I said. “Stay still and don’t move.” I didn’t want him to make anything worse.
The priest kept playing with something in his seat. When I leaned over, I saw what it was: He was attempting to reattach his right arm, which had been severed in the accident. Only there was no blood at all.
“You’re…not bleeding,” I said. As much to myself as him.
“Why, of course I am,” the priest said. “Bleeding all over. Why, you must have suffered a concussion. Now hold on while I call the police. I think you need medical assistance!”
But by then I already saw a police cruiser rushing toward us. I looked to the bloodless priest, then to the jaundice-eyed face of the officer I had just spoken with, and then I gathered my briefcase tight to my body and bolted away.
“He knows!” hissed the priest in that inhuman voice. “Get after him Bill; by Christ he knows!”
And now, though I wish to continue my story, my head is throbbing and I can’t possibly get any more words typed out. I am so sorry to leave you in media res, but I need to take a nap before I can go on.
I will check back soon to continue with what happened next. I promise, and assuming I’m still all here. I’m just so weak from all that transpired, and my body must rest for now…