Inglehart's Monsters Pt. 1

The official reports weren’t exactly accurate as to what happened. The doctor and his experiments dove deeper into the pseudoscience based on the occult beliefs of Doctor Inglehart rather than the hard biology that I and the other students had expected. We were mostly pre-med students in our final years just before our entrances into the programs each of us had picked out. I had been the exception; I was a psychologist with a thesis in the work of criminal institutions and how they break people. The story we were fed was that we would be working with the patients Doctor Inglehart had been working with for years. This was the first time students had been allowed to go to his clinic which had been on the edge of scientific advancement and insight which all four of us were ready to be a part of, but then we saw what had been happening.

            Doctor Inglehart had been, at least up until I saw what he was doing, a great hero of mine. A survivor of the childhood atrocities of the Holocaust and an immigrant and refugee to the Americas when only a child, he had always been proud of his history and told everyone who would listen of what happened. How when only six he had seen the medical experiments which his Jewish ancestry had been seen by the Nazi scientists to be perfect for them, since as Inglehart had said, “We had been as close to humans as they could possibly believe.”

            When we all exited the bus which had picked us up, the first thing we saw was the isolation. The prison which Inglehart worked as a part of had made me sick when I first saw it. The panoptical set up gave me an intuition which, even as I think back to it now, makes me feel as if I have to turn over every object and look at each of the dark corners in my room for the cameras which was being used to make us feel uneasy.

            The octagonal ring of the first six floors gave rise to the grey obelisk which rose only twice as high as the ring. At the top of the obelisk was a glass tip which fed back into the, upon closer review, octagonal walls of the tower. Each level had glass looking out to the surroundings. At this point I almost threw up. Once I had the realization that someone maybe watching me at any time forced me to walk more upright and with a rigidity which my mother would be proud.

            Doctor Inglehart’s diminutive but powerful figure was there to welcome us at the door of the prison. Above him, the desert’s brightness reflected on the words “Sum ego factum est mors exterminatore mundorum”.

            I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

            The wolfish smile broke the saggy flesh of the small man, a hardy laugh and a surprisingly deep voice as he said, “Welcome to my home, my own world.”

            If at this point I know what stood before me, I would have left. Except that I had no idea. Instead of screaming and crying and fleeing like I wish I had now, I followed the man before me. The man who had spent his life trying to find out the inner most workings of a person, to see where evil was and to end it; this man looked to create a utopia of created and crafted human beings living outside of the realms of human evils to make us the God which had failed him and his family.

            All of the hallways that snaked through the facility ran behind the cells. We were given a tour of the facility from the side which we would be working on. The cells, as Doctor Inglehart explained, had the opening facing the tower. The prisoners had to look at the Tower all day within view of the few around them. A barbed fence on the other side of the cell kept the prisoners far enough away from the Tower, Inglehart had said, with the prisoners close enough to see what happened to those that misbehaved. To see the ramifications of socially misbehaving or doing things seen as evil from the outside world had lowered the prisoners’ rebellious nature in check.

            As we were walking through the hallway, I took a look into the small frame before me and saw a small figure huddled on the side of the cell, the side with the bars and door going into the courtyard. The cell was only eight feet wide by ten feet long with a roof of what would seem to be seven feet. Littered on the floor were torn paper and destroyed books. Each of the pieces of the paper had a chicken scratch all over them. What I could see of the man’s arms had scars up and down his forearms and as his head moved up I could barely make out his eyes.

            But I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and saw Doctor Inglehart standing there with a large smile. His deep, warm voice came out like it had been full of honey, “Come, we are almost to where you will be living and working.”

            I followed him with only a slight look back at the window as we made slow steps away from the prisoner and his cell.

****

The rooms we were to be staying in were warmer than the hallways had been. The colours all played and mixed together in a way which made me realize just how sleepy the trip had made me. The warmth of the desert from outside wafted its way through the open windows on the wall, revealing the ocean of sand on the outside of our home for some time. 

            The other students and I all made hasty introductions in our cramped living room with one another. Gary was the tall, lanky one. His large hands belied the grace within them and the skill with which had made him a promising surgery student. Lana was only a few inches shorter than my 6’1” frame. Her auburn hair shone and she had the warm smile of a paediatrician. Bart was the one built like a football player. He had been a promising running back until a major concussion made him give it up, but he was a master at physiology and the mental aspects of injuries. 

            I must admit, I seemed out of place. I had only been, as I said before, a student of criminal psychology stemming from my fascination with Ed Gein and Ted Bundy. I was writing my thesis on the institutions of justice and how to rehabilitate the prisoners and the proper prison build for control of those under lock and key. 

            We all dispersed as we looked at our sleeping quarters. The colours followed us into the sleeping quarters. I placed my few bags down, my few belongings which I felt my life would be tolerable complete with a laptop, a few books and a number of pens. I had left my phone back at home in San Jose, I didn’t think I would ever have a need for it while I was working. My warm, bare walls caused the sleep to tug at my eyes as I sat on the edge of my bed. I had a few hours until Inglehart had said he would be back, so I stretched out and went to sleep thinking of the man in his cell.  

****

The cool afternoon air woke me up before the knock at my door did. As I opened it I hastily put on a long sleeved shirt on. Bart’s wide, dark face welcomed me back to the land of the living.  “Inglehart’s here, we’re about to head out to his quarters for dinner.”

            The deep voice echoed in my room as I nodded understanding. Closing the door quickly, I went through all the papers I had brought with me and sources I would need for the paper. I found the pen I needed and walked out into the living room. Everyone had dressed up for the night except for Inglehart and me. I must have looked confused as Inglehart laughed.

            He was still in the same brown scrubs he had been in this morning. Lana had put on a short, iridescent blue dress. Bert had a button up shirt with khakis tightly spread over his broad frame. And Gary looked as if a Muppet put on a suit.  Seeing Inglehart in his scrubs made me comfortable as I nodded in agreement to the question that Inglehart posed to me.

            The warmth of the living quarters died quickly as we walked into the hallway of Inglehart’s prison. We followed him downstairs and toward what I thought was the direction of the Tower. I asked Bart if I was right or if I needed to fix my direction, but he needed warmly to my question.

            “It is. I know you study prison systems, but what you should do is look at the way the prison is set up. It’s almost like a spider’s web. We live on the outside, but we have our own strand going to the tower. The stairs,” he pointed behind us, “are hidden to make it seem like there isn’t a way out if a prisoner happens to breakout of their cell. So, it’s almost set up to make a person go insane if they aren’t meant to get out.”             I looked at him with a new admiration. His knowledge of the intricacies of the prison’s architecture was remarkable. I poked into why he knew that.

            He laughed, “My girlfriend’s professor helped design this prison. She does architecture and his last consulting job was on the type of prisons we set up now,” he looked at me as we were heading down to the near of the end of the hallway, “all of them are based on Doctor Inglehart’s design to create insanity of those guilty members of our society.”

            The hallway opened up to a large dining hall. Scarlet walls enclosed us as we stepped quietly into the room. A feeling of the far away castles in the Eastern European countries inhabited by our childish nightmares was rested in this room. In the centre of the room was a long brown and wooden table with five chairs around it.

            We all took our seats in the table. Each person was only an arm length away from the other as Inglehart took the seat at the head of the table. His small frame came only up to the middle of the seat. The quick arm movements from him brought out the food from the other room.

            The first guards we had seen all day came out. Large framed men carrying platters full of food placed the trays before us. The grey and brown uniformed men were in and out in only moments with our hearty, German feast placed before us.

            “Please, eat and I shall show you the fruits of my labour,” Inglehart’s deep voice echoed in the room. “Please.”

            The pork was sliced into thick pieces or stuffed into the casings of sausages. Sauerkraut was boiled with the meat left over from the pig. Potatoes and rye bread were left to round out our feast. As we finished the last bit of meat, a heavy, dark chocolate cake was brought out as a sleepy silence feel over us. Inglehart had been talking the entire night. Prisoners and their inhumanity, the want to look to see if we can find our human emotions, the way in which by using those that have become a stain upon the society, we may advance our understanding of what human beings are.

              As the sleepiness overcame us all I could make out of the blurriness I could see a grotesque coming closer to me. Before the black finally came, I felt hands.  

The Reality of the Situation Is... Pt. 5

9.

The news reports read like this:

            “Important city official has disappeared. Connected to the case is a ‘Kevin Elrich’, a private detective and freelance journalist. The latter had been hired by Ms. Catherine Connely, the city official and sister of Jessica Turnig. Mrs. Turnig was the recently murdered wife of the mayor. Mr. Elrich had been, according to recent reports been experiencing certain psychological oddities, including speaking to his cat. Shortly after the discovery of Ms. Connely’s body, a short two days after her sister was found murdered in their parents’ home, Mr. Elrich had altogether disappeared. Mr. Elrich was the last person to be seen with Ms. Connely and it is assumed that he is the prime murder suspect.0

            “Kevin Elrich had left and without a trace disappeared. The grisly scene of Catherine’s body being torn in the bottom of the tunnels running snake-like under the city had connected him to the murder case. The case remains unsolved as to how Kevin Elrich disappeared completely from the city without being seen by anyone who witnessed him entering into the tunnels with a violently crying Catherine Connely.”

On a personal note...

So, I -- the author of this -- admit this was nothing as good as I can write. Therefore, I have decided to end it now and pick it up at a time when I have to truly work on this. I came into writing this during an existential crisis and without realizing that I had only a week to work on it and it changed in my mind as I was writing. This will not be the end of Kevin and Sam, this will not be the end of this case, this will not be the end of this story. However, in November I will be writing short stories for post during the week, depending on the time I get to write, Monday and Thursday. Since I have felt like I let everyone down, December to January will be one saga which I have been truly working on for sometime that I've become completely obsessed with; and, since it is a much longer time, I'll feel better with this one.

I apologize for how poorly this one went, but I love Kevin Elrich and Sam the Cat, this won't be the end and I will rework this story. Enjoy and on Halloween, I will have a post for the marking of the only day people get to watch the movies which I love.

Cheers,

T.

The Reality of the Situation Is... Pt. 4

8.

If there is anything I must admit from this last day, is that I have lost all my dignity. I could not save anything I may have kept from being creepily standing in the back of a dead girls house to being verbally bitchslapped by my cat, so anything I have left is now gone.

            When I heard her voice, I screamed.

            Screamed like those women in the movies that are having babies, or those babies going to their first horror movie. I screamed.

            The next moments are all a blur of embarrassment and humiliation. As I screamed, I fell to the floor and played dead. From my vantage point on the ground, I saw Sam fly and attack someone’s face until a black bag was put on my face.

            I was being dragged like a dead body from my apartment. Hands gripped my limbs and pulled as if it was a perfectly normal thing to see a grown man pulled like a terrorist out of his home on a Thursday morning.

            The ride to wherever we were going took what seemed like forever. The metal floor of whatever I was pushed onto rattled and bruised my ribs as we went. My ribs screamed in pain as the floor played like a xylophone on my body.

            As the ride went longer and longer, I began to think of everything I was missing. Fish tacos on the peer and the beaches of a tropical island. As I thought more and more of the tacos, they grew arms and began carrying cocktails on the sand. Those bastards.

            I began to ruminate how I would end up killing those man-tacos as I was manhandled off the metal floor and down stairs. The pulling at my limbs felt as if they were about to be ripped off. Rough hands and smooth cement stairs began to batter at my roughed up body.

            The smell hit me first. I barely noticed that my hands were being held up by a hook as I smelled the rot of a thousand years of isolation. The mask was taken off my head and I barely recognized the others with their chilling blue eyes all lined up on the wall of the circular room for the thing.

            It was half way cemented into the ground. The amphibious body had elongated arms that were draped over its head. As I stared at it, the face peered through the arms. The large eyes stared at me, the pupil-less eyes, and puffy lips opened to reveal sharp teeth.

            I pulled at the meathook to get down as the grooves in the floor went from it to me. The cold air began to pull at my arms and the Woman’s hand cupped my cheek.

            “Please,” she said as she moved around to stand in front of me, “stop pulling and fighting.”

            Her voice cut straight into my muscles, I was paralyzed by the inhumanness in it.

            “You have the ability to die for something, it won’t be long.”

            I began to think of the Taco-men bastards and how I was about to die for them.

            Bullshit.

            I fought as hard as I could and it felt like it was done in slow motion, the only redeeming thing in my worthless life. I caught her small chin under my foot. She stumbled back and her mouth was full of blood as she screamed at me. That beautiful creature saved my life.

            I closed my eyes and turned as I heard the ripping and tearing from the centre of the room and felt the warm fuzz wrap around me. A small whispery voice came from it.

            “Think of somewhere. Anywhere.”

            So I did.

The Reality of the Situation Is... Pt. 3

6.

            “You can talk?” I looked at Sam in complete astonishment.

            “Don’t over think this, you’d have figured it out sooner or later.” Sam walked over to the desk.

            “But you don’t have any of the required anatomical stuff,” I must admit not my most poetic term, “to produce speech!”

            Sam jumped up to the desk; he circled around the desk’s top a couple of times and sat sphinx-like on the top of the desk. “Don’t over think it, some things just have to be accepted for the time being, trust me, I’m not the weirdest part of this whole thing.” He licked his paw and rubbed his face, “now how much do I have to tell you and how much do you know?”

            This is where I will take out the dialogue. I wish to retain some form of dignity, so I will tell you the general story which Sam put in front of me without him looking at me like the stupid meatsack with eyes he believed me to be. As it turns out, Sam is of royal blood. He was part of a long line of litters that reached all the way back to the cats that the Egyptian Pharaohs owned and worshipped. As he went on, he began to throw out terms that I could barely understand, but with the terms were so ambiguous that I couldn’t imagine: the Dark – some form of “otherworld” he would speak about with a horrible respect, the Ones – which must be a mistranslation since there was no closer word, and the Wall – something that separates us from these mad beasts which I assume can only try to eat my soul if I lose my ball on their lawn.

            He began speaking about how Jessica – the girl who had been killed, he seemed resolute about this and not a suicide since his brother, that other cat – had stuck her nose too far into the disappearances. I had heard of these, but nothing had been come out of the police looking into it. People would enter subways and mass transit systems, but they wouldn’t come out. Many people had used these systems to leave and she had looked into journalists that had been doing research, but then paid for the silence. That’s why Sam was here, he was to look after me not getting involved.

            “What makes me so special?” I asked, “I’m just a guy that looks for work.”

            “Well,” Sam said slowly, “you aren’t exactly the smartest person in the world. You don’t know when to stop. We had to make sure that you wouldn’t become involved with these disappearances. This is the only way we can rebuild the treaty.”

            “I don’t do anything that any other journalist and part time detective wouldn’t do!” I was hugely offended, my ethics and practices were under danger here.

            “Remember when you had a case that was looking for a lost dog and somehow got the Mayor impeached?” Sam looked at me accusingly.

            “How was I supposed to know he was part of a zoophilic ring?!”

            “That mayor was also that last person that was holding the Wall strong without the cost of what it is now. Since he has left,” Sam was becoming irate and raising his small voice to fill the room, “the Wall has become gapped and there could be danger of the unmentionables to be able to sneak through. That man that was following Jessica, the one that wanted to kill me, is one of them. You should be terribly afraid of him.”

            I looked and sneered at Sam, the small sphinx in my giant’s world, “why should I be?”

            “Remember Ghostbusters? He is Rick Moranis!”

7.

            “Alright, this is just getting absurd.” I swear to whatever is holy in this world, Sam had a look of total disbelief on his face.

            “You’ve spent the last three hours, talking to a cat about a magic world that has the sole want to enslave all of humanity,” Sam’s eyes became slits, “and me comparing someone to Rick Moranis is absurd?”

            Of everything that could possibly happen, I realized that Sam – a fucking cat – began to judge me. He thought I was stupid.

            “Look, I wouldn’t mind being told what any of this means. I’m being told my entire life can be killed by my taking part in this case. I don’t know whether I am going to become a sacrifice to some people that sound like from Lovecraft or become a cockroach!” I looked at Sam in the early morning light as he looked back at me, his feline face was highlighted by the rays of a rising Sun.

            “Unfortunately,” Sam tried to smile, “both of those things might become to pass. The Wall is currently being powered by blood sacrifice, but we have to figure out a way to get around that. Especially as the unmentionables are out, that lady though,” Sam shuddered, “is the dangerous one.”

            I thought about her otherworldly face, the cheek bones that weren’t right and the robotic way she spoke to me, how pristine she walked around.

            I looked at Sam and the hair rose on the back of my neck, “Why her? What does she have to do with it? Is she the Dark Incarnate or something?”

            “No, I’m the Zuul of Ghostbusters.”

The Reality of the Situation Is... Pt. 2

4.

The USB slid into the port well. My computer started to slowly register the new device that was hooked up. A small window popped up filled with document and image files. Colourful pixels filled the small window before I started to copy and sort the files to my laptop’s memory.

            The light cast over the small and desolate office I called home. I called out for Sam as I reached for my can of tuna. He wouldn’t come and I called out again. I breathed out and went back to the computer.

            Pictures began to cycle on the screen. Each picture on the USB drive had been copied and the document copies were spread out on the drive’s other folders. Each document was either a receipt or a journal article that had been coloured in a multitude of hues. I went back to the pictures.

            The passed girl was in each picture. A revolving door of people with the girl came into focus on my computer screen. As I cycled through the pictures again, there was another person that was common. A man in a hat and overcoat in the back of the pictures at first, but as the pictures went on with the dates on the file the man began to look more openly and maliciously at the girl.

            I couldn’t tell if he was a Photoshop or not. The man began to stare at the girl openly, and what appeared to be off-coloured eyes stared at her. The eyes weren’t normal; the almond eyes weren’t a normal colour. They were purple. I shrugged and breathed deeply, the damn contact lenses.

            I got up and unplugged the USB drive. I needed to see Jason.

5.

Jason had his large frame crafted by oceans of soda stuffed into the spinning captain’s chair. The mountains of flesh which greeted me were dimly lit by his four monitors. His face was curtained by black straight drapes around his face.

            “Alright, Kev,” Jason wheezed, “let me see what you’ve got.”

            I handed him the drive. The stubby fingers took the drive from my hand and inserted it smoothly into the computer. As he did so, a small breath was let out from his direction.

            “There’s a guy on these pictures. I want to see if any of the pictures have been tampered with and get print outs of the originals.” I sat back and watched Jason’s fingers fly over the keyboard. The pictures began to run through the program as the printers pushed out pictures and documents.

            Enough paper to republish War and Peace stood on the printer. Colours dashed along the paper were dim in the monitor.

            “All the pictures are printed out as they were before any tampering. If you want to see them now, they’re on the monitors,” Jason said as he turned to me. I grabbed the paper and went to the monitors. The girl was there, the revolving cast of people – the man. He was still there. Same coloured eyes.

            “The girl is sexy.”

            “What?” I broke my eye contact with the man and looked at Jason.

            “The girl, she’s hot. Are you following her?”

            I looked at him. “No, I’m investigating her death. She might be sexy now, but she may turn into Bloody Mary overnight, look out. Is this guy,” I pointed to the guy in the back, making sure my finger wasn’t touching the screen. Jason hated that, “real or a fake?”

            “The guy that has a total Akhenaten thing going on? If he’s fake he’s a cut out and not an implant into the picture.”

            “Go back to that first part? Akhenaten?” I looked at him quizzically.

            “Akhenaten, look, he’s a weird looking pharaoh from ancient Egypt.” He pulled up a picture of a statue of Akhenaten. They shared many similarities, a lack of shoulders, a long, elongated face, the almond eyes and what looked like a serpentine figure.

            “Well done, Jason. I’ll be back tomorrow or something, I got to look through this stuff,” I shuffled the papers, “see you, bud.”

            I got up and started to walk out, as Jason said, “Hey, I’ll send you some links of this guy. You may want to read some of the hilarious shit people say about him.”

            His voice died as I walked out. I was looking at the paper as I walking down the street back to my office. The receipts were colour coded to journalists, many of whom worked for large syndicates are in the list. Colours that listed as edits, changes and complete deletion, but payment for the article was listed with separate hues for each.

            I looked up and saw that I had arrived to my apartment and walked up to my office. I was looking at my papers to read as I opened up to a truly astonishing scene.

            Allow me to say this about myself: I don’t get scared very easily. In fact, I don’t normally get scared by anything that should probably scare me. Suspense movies, thrillers and horrors have all come and gone without my notice and I leave without caring about being scared. I say this so you may understand that when I saw the man from the picture, purple eyes and all, holding a knife to my cat’s throat, I screamed. I didn’t know what else to do.

            He looked at me and went out the opened window and I realized that I had continued to scream.

            Sam looked at me, feline eyes and all, and said, “Thank the gods you’re home.”