Whenever the sun set on the small town I grew up in, the streets would empty and a silence would take the night, you could almost hear the stillness of the leaves and flowers outside. The place wasn’t rural and out of touch with the world like some of those towns are, but it sure as hell was no city. Nighttime In those big places seems to usher in a new, maybe a little bit depraved, day but here the town seemed to rest with its inhabitants.
Maybe I took it for granted. I mean, you look at any paper, any movie, book, etc. and see that all the action in life happens in those bustling streets so far away. I’m not that naive anymore, though, now I know that all of the “action” I heard about were things that no one should desire. I knew that when it came to my town, when the silence that once pierced the night dissipated for a few hours and, in time, so did the peaceful life I miss.
It was like any other night at first, thick and humid air flooded the streets, gray clouds stretched across the sky and obscured the moon and stars. Most importantly, though, it was silent. I laid in bed unable to sleep, thinking of crowded bars and better towns than this one. I could hear my heartbeat in the silence when I focused on it. Then a sound drifted in from my open window, it sounded like a moan at first, maybe a deer that got hit by a semi, but then it came again–clear like glass as it tore through the night.
“Heeeeeeelllllllpppp meeeee.”
It was a man’s voice, his words were drawn out and laborious like a dying breath. I sprung out of bed, clenched the windowsill, and peered through the mesh screen. Nothing. The streets were as dead as they had always looked.
“Pleeeeeasee.”
Like delayed Christmas lights, I watched the porch lamps turn on at all of the neighbors’ houses, meanwhile the pleading groans drifted down the street.
Within a half an hour, nearly the entire town was crowded around a house 4 blocks down from mine. Fire trucks, ambulances, and squad cars doused us with flickering colored lights as a cop screamed, “Everybody get back! Move! Go back to your homes! Everything is under control!”
I asked people at the back what was going on, but none of them seemed to know. I pushed my way through the crowd of people, my heart racing as I tried to fight off a curious smirk. I didn’t need to fight it off for long though. The closer I got to the front, I could see people crying and trembling like they were having seizures. Others were puking, pulling out their hair, pacing around aimlessly. I could see men closing their eyes and grimacing as they squeezed their hysteric wives to their chests. That was enough to put me in my place.
I should have left then, but you know how these things go. I had come this far, I needed to see what happened, I needed to know what was making everybody catatonic.
Nothing ahead looked too out of the ordinary, just a run of the mill house. I could see that the roof was angled and there was a nice lawn out front, the lights were on behind the windows and the front door was wide open but other than that it was normal.
“P-pleassse…”
I could hardly hear it this time through the slew of frenzied people. It came from the house—from the outside of the house. As I moved closer I could make out the walls, layered wood panels painted a subtle shade of blue, again it looked pretty normal at first. And then I saw him, surrounded by paramedics, cops, firemen. A good share of them were scratching their heads or crying at the sight.
My knees shook and I stumbled about just trying to stand. I blinked rapidly to push away the tears and the bottom of my throat started to swell. My mind blanked, I couldn’t feel anything, I couldn’t process the emotions that my body was responding to.
I didn’t recognize the man, but then again I doubt anyone could have. His body was fused into the wall of the house, looking almost like a sadistic woodcarving. His face was contorted and stretched about wildly, slowly being pulled into the wall. Agony. That’s the only word I can find to even remotely describe his deformed face. His skin blended into the wooden panels like a gradient and his body was slowly flattened out as it moved away from his crushed torso. No arms, no legs, no fingers, nothing; but I could almost notice thin ridges surfacing where the limbs above his elbows and knees once were.
My spine rolled like a cat coughing up a hairball, I felt the stinging rise of vomit fill my throat, and I threw up all over my pants and shoes.
“We’re gonna get you out of there, don’t you worry!” a policeman shouted, but he only seemed to be trying to reassure himself.
First responders rushed in and out of the house. In their commotion I could hear that there was nothing of the man on the other side of the wall—just flat, unbroken, uncracked drywall.
I could hear his wheezing breaths, it sounded like a man with punctured lungs trying to breathe through a straw. I clasped my hands over my ears and hunched over, but I could still hear it in my mind.
“P-pleaaaasse…” His mouth hardly moved, “j-just kill me.”
“Kill meeeeee. P-pleaaase kiiill mee.”
That voice, it was so airy, so drawn—much more than before. He was pulled flatter against the house by now, and his skin was almost completely wrapped in the wooden panels.
“Y-you…youuu”
There were no fingers for him to point, he couldn’t even move his eyes. The first responders darted their heads around between him and each other, trying to figure out what he wanted.
“Pleaaa…. G-g-uuuuunn.”
He kept repeating that for the rest of the night. Within a few hours everyone seemed to realize what we had known all along: there was no helping him. All we could do was stand there, like we were before, staring dumb and wide-eyed as he was ever so slowly being pulled and stretched into the wall. The firefighters, the paramedics, the police, and eventually everyone else that had crowded around him slowly shuffled away and crawled back to their homes, leaving him alone there begging and pleading to be put out of his misery. Maybe someone should have done it, but nobody had the stomach to pull the trigger.
When I got home I noticed that my parents were still asleep, as was my sister. They must’ve been the only few who slept that night. I could still hear him faintly cry out, begging for a gun to free him, but even closing my window couldn’t stop those groans and pleading cries from throbbing against the walls of my skull.
By morning, the wall that once emblazoned the grotesque and distorted shape of a man looked like any other wall. Flat against the house with the same wood panels, the same shade of light blue, without even a crack in the paint to show he was once there. A few onlookers gathered randomly throughout the day, their hands stuffed in their pockets and standing far apart from each other as they stared in silence.
It’s been at least two or three months now but, still, nobody talks about what happened, not so much as a whisper. That night marked a change in our town, a change in the people who used to smile and wave as they pushed strollers and walked their dogs in the sun. The day feels no different than the night nowadays. I miss when kids used to play on the lawns and ride their bikes down the street, when families used to hang out and hold the occasional block party, and when the mailman wasn’t the only familiar face outside.
I’m sure that they all chock up what happened to some bizarre and fucked up dream since, by morning, there was no evidence that the man was ever there, but I know what I saw. I still see that horrible face every time I close my eyes, and even if I blast music into my ear canals I can’t drown out those agonizing groans. I can’t even fucking sleep anymore without downing enough alcohol from my parents liquor cabinet or stealing sleeping pills from my mom. Sometimes I think about his face, how it was so disfigured that he couldn’t even shed a tear, and when I cry into my pillow in the dead of night I like to think that I’m crying for him.