Soulscape

BLACK MOON COUNTY CORRECTIONAL FACILITY


1-Strapped securely to the gurney, Alec waited patiently for them to find a suitable vein in which to insert the catheter. The ceiling bulged and swelled above him, pressing down closer and closer. Alec knew it was simply a reaction of the barbiturate they had administered, so he paid it little mind except to become fascinated by it all. He didn't fear the death they were struggling to administer.

Their fingertips pinched and prodded the inside of his right forearm and wrist, and for the fifth time inserted the needle tip. A faint smile twisted his lips as he barely felt the sharp prick. He didn't look at them, but he could feel the medical workers' eyes flit across his face like insect tentacles. He could feel their tension and anxiety at their inability to find a useful vein. He ignored them as they withdrew the needle again and moved to the other arm and began prodding the tender flesh.

"Why the hell is he smiling like that?" One of the technicians muttered irritably with unease. "It's friggin creepy."

The other shook his head as his face pinched. "Ignore him." he said quietly,
then swore softly as another insertion failed to take.

Alec closed his eyes as gracefully as a baby falling asleep in its mother's arms and imagined the strange little man who had come to see him two days ago. Who, at this very moment, was in Alec's room back at the Asylum praying for Alec's soul. He thought of Dr. Frank Harlan and wondered if the man was watching this botched attempt to take his patient's life. But no, Harlan wasn't here. He was at the Asylum as well. Alec could feel the man's guilt like a telepathic wave, and he liked the sensations it gave him- like a million tiny fingertips massaging the surface of his skin.

The catheter was finally in place, a wide strip of tape securing it. In a moment, one of the medical technicians would begin the Saline drip. Alec's eyes opened and settled on a plain, circular clock mounted high on the wall and began to subconsciously count the minutes.

Why, exactly, was Dr. Frank Harlan suffering guilt? Oh yes, because of the
woman. Dr. Kim Delaney. Alec's smile broadened. She had been so trusting of him to insist they be left alone, despite Harlan's objections. But she'd talked Harlan down and gotten her own way. Killing her hadn't even been a challenge, hardly fun at all. But there was more to his guilt than just the death of Dr. Delaney; Frank Harlan felt he had failed Alec as his doctor.

Alec stared at the clock; almost five minutes ticked by since the Saline had been turned on. About ten minutes to go.

He thought about his mother. It had been nearly twenty-five years since he
last saw her, but her face was as clear as a bell in his mind. The wretched whore who had brought him to the Asylum. Sent him to hell while breath still swelled his five year old lungs. She'd become afraid of him, though she'd never admitted such things aloud. But he'd detected it too clearly in her eyes. She knew he wasn't right and wished to hide him from the world. She would be the first.

His eyes followed the second hand. The technicians were beyond his vision, but he could still feel them in the room. Another few minutes and they would turn on the Sodium Thiopental, followed by the Pancuronium Bromide and Potassium Chloride. Approximately five minutes after the poisonous solution entered his bloodstream- Alec would be dead.

He waited, welcoming. He could smell death hovering just outside the carnal realm, and that old Reaper had a sulfuric stench that stung the nostrils. Alec squinted and could almost see death's face- it was little more than a skull mottled with tendrils of rotted skin. It smiled darkly at him, but Alec just smiled back; the fool, the joke was on him. Because back at the Asylum, away from the death chamber, the priest was praying for Alec's soul.

The poison flowed into his bloodstream with a fierce burning sensation and  the muscles in Alec's stomach churned and convulsed. His throat constricted and worked desperately to draw in air. But his struggles for survival were merely instinct; he wanted to die. For in death, a great freedom awaited him. Freedom and vengeance.





BLACK MOON ASYLUM


2-Frank Harlan sat in his dark office and waited for the call to come in. He couldn't get Delaney's face out of his mind. She had insisted he let her speak to Alec alone, but it was still his fault she was dead. He knew Alec better than anyone, and he knew what the patient was. Backing down should have never been an option for him. He'd left her vulnerable. She hadn't known what she was getting into, because he hadn't properly informed her.

Alec was evil. Pure evil, in the flesh.

When Amanda Strom first brought the young child to him, Frank had looked in the boy's eyes and seen the darkness pulsating inside him. It had been like looking into a black hole, through a window to hell. And that was surely true, for Alec possessed a black soul. Something Frank Harlan had heard about but had never truly believed until he met Alec.

Children born evil

Bad seed.

Demon

spawn.

Whatever Alec was- he was better off dead.

Frank left his chair and went to the window. Black Moon County had been appropriately named, for there always seemed to be a dark haze over the moon, even when it was in full. And many nights it was like a piercingly black shadow-ball in the sky, darker than even the night itself. It was strange and neither Frank- nor anyone- had an explanation for it. Everyone had simply written it off as one of those phenomenons. But the eerie echoing whispers of the voodoo drums that drifted down from the foothills in the twilight hours made Frank wonder if it wasn't dark spirits that shadowed the moon. Voodoo was weaved through Black Moon County as surely as a piece of string in a woven rug.

The train of thought led back to the strange man down in Alec's room. He had
visited Alec at the prison two nights ago, but Frank hadn't see him before that night. Frank knew his kind, though they rarely came down out of the foothills. The man  was a voodoo priest, and Alec had requested him as his spiritual advisor. None of it set well with Harlan, he didn't like their practiced religion. He found it dark and malevolent. But legally, he couldn't refuse a patient a religious counselor of choice.

Frank Harlan tried to will the phone to ring; what the hell was taking so long?
The call should have come in twenty minutes ago. He tried not to think of what might have went wrong. Didn't even want to entertain the possibility that Alec had somehow escaped the-

The phone rang, loud and shrill. Frank stared at it through the third ring without moving. He'd wanted it to come, wanted to be done with all this once and for all. But now that the ringing filled the dark office, he wondered at the news that waited to flow through the receiver. He considered not answering, but even before  the notion became a conscious thought he was scooping the receiver off the cradle.

"Harlan?"

Harlan cleared his throat. "Uh, yes."

"It's Warden McNeil." the voice informed with an uncharacteristic quietness. "It's over, Frank." Nothing else was said, and Frank was left with a hollow dial tone humming in his ear.

Alec Strom was dead; the evil snuffed out.

Frank sank down in his chair and leaned his head back, closing his eyes. A measure of relief coursed through him, but not like he'd expected. He realized, though, that it would take time to relax after such an ordeal. By morning, perhaps.

He left his office and went down to the room Alec had nearly grown up in. The door was closed and he had no idea whether or not the priest was still inside. Frank found it difficult to picture the voodoo priest on his knees, praying for such a dark soul as Alec Strom's in the standard Christian way. But he supposed the priest had his own ritual for resigning a soul to death. Could anything but Hell be waiting for Alec, though? Even at the end, with that single thought in mind, Frank had  chosen the least painful method of capital punishment for his patient. He could've opted for the electric chair, or the gas chamber.

But Frank Harlan had had no desire  to inflict pain or torture, he knew Alec's soul would reside for the rest of eternity in that dark, sulfurous pit where pain and anguish developed an all new meaning- where Hell itself became a reality. Frank Harlan wished only to be rid of the shadow of evil that had been hovering over Black Moon Asylum for the past twenty-five years. And now he was.

He had no clue as to the cause of the delay at the prison, and he didn't wish to know. He only prayed it hadn't caused his patient undo misery. In a strange way he didn't quite understand, Alec had become like a son to him; a disturbed and dangerous child for which there was no help- yet one you longed to help anyway.

Frank twisted the doorknob and eased the door open. He recoiled physically at
the sudden chill that stretched out to touch his face like fingers of ice. A strange pungent odor invaded his nostrils, and he discovered its source in the small candles arranged on the floor around a weird pattern that resembled a Veve; a large cross with a skull at the top and a swirled X near the bottom, the letter B at the tip of the left cross beam and a backwards S at the tip of the right. This particular symbol, drawn in the center of the floor with what appeared to be black candle wax, was the symbol for Baron Samadi, the lord of the graveyard and death.

The candle flames cast flickering shadows up the walls which were covered with more eerie symbols and designs; Hexagrams and Thaumaturgic Triangles being the most widely used. Frank was no stranger to the occultic symbols and their uses in the black art. The heart of Black Moon County pulsed black and evil.

"Sweet Jesus." Frank breathed. The candles flickered fiercely as if a sudden gust of wind had swept over their tips, then calmed. Frank stared at the tiny fires atop the melting wax sticks; what in the name of God was going on? He frowned as his eyes narrowed. "Jesus." He murmured aloud. The flames jumped and swayed briefly.

A swelling fear gripped him. Frank stepped deeper into the room and turned in a slow circle, studying the walls. What the hell had the voodoo priest been trying to accomplish? The strange cold inside the room reached through the surface of Frank's skin and down to his bones. He could feel it trying to press into his mind like some sort of supernatural force-

"Oh, God." He shuddered as he suddenly understood the purpose of the symbols, the candles, and the Veve. "No." He lunged towards the door, but an unseen hand slammed it shut. Frank turned slowly. He could feel the invisible force all around him, pulsing, alive. "Alec?" he whispered uncertainly.

The candle flames flickered softly and he watched their wisps of smoke being pulled to the ceiling. Frank raised his eyes slowly and felt a painful tightness squeeze his chest. The candle smoke gathered and swirled like gray mist in the center of the ceiling. As Frank Harlan watched with mounting horror, the mist shifted and swelled.

A face he wasn't certain he was truly seeing formed in the grayness. A face he knew too well. The voodoo priest had used his dark, unholy magic to catch Alec's soul as it left his body- and turned this room into its haven.

Frank watched the face in the candle smoke shape-shift, dissipate, then reform. And now . . Alec wanted out.

"Leave me be." A violent tremor shook him as the face of his most feared patient shifted contours and became something hellish, an image from a darker realm.

Frank's scalp prickled and he felt his very soul harrow. He opened his mouth to scream but the only sound he heard was a hollow whirling like wind spinning through a tunnel as the smoky mist poured down his throat. His mouth stretched wide, Frank sucked in the evil that had embodied his patient, unable to exhale.

Frank's knees buckled and he hit the floor hard, his back arched at an unnatural angle. His arms shot out to the sides in a semblance of a crucifixion and the most unholy laughter erupted like vomit from deep inside him.



3-The figure moved through the darkened halls of the Asylum.

Silence filled the structure like a mausoleum and truly the souls that resided here were deceased, though air still sucked into their lungs and their bodies moved about in the manner of the living. But he knew otherwise. Black Moon Asylum was the house of the walking dead.

He went to the office of Frank Harlan and moved through the darkness of the room as efficiently as if bright fluorescent light glared down from the ceiling. He needed no guidance, for the strange light of the black moon was his guide now. He'd been to a place where darkness could be felt, touched like thick tar. And he'd breathed that darkness into his shadowed soul.

In the bottom drawer of the metal file cabinet he found what he was looking for. As silent as stone, he opened the file marked Strom/Alec and read the entries marked down in Harlan's handwriting. Certain words were repeated throughout the file.

Unnatural

behavior. Detached.

Evil.

He read the psychiatrist's last entry, dated the day of Dr. Delaney's death. Harlan had noted his own personal grief and anguish at being unable to help the patient, wondering if he himself had somehow been to blame for Delaney's death because of his ineffectiveness to treat Alec Strom. He stared at the last line of Harlan's final entry: 'I regret that my efforts have been futile. Had he been treated under another's care, perhaps . .'

The silent figure sensed the presence of an emotion he wasn't accustomed to; pity. He closed the file and tucked it under his arm then turned towards the door.

A strangled cry burst forth as the lights were suddenly flicked on. His free arm swung across his eyes as he felt the retina's begin to burn.

"Dr. Harlan." A surprised voice clamored. "I didn't realize you were in-"

"Turn off the damn lights." he hissed coldly.

"W-wha-"

The file squeezed tightly into his armpit, he lunged across the room and swept his palm down over the switch, casting the office back into heavy darkness. His face lost in the deep shadows, he smiled darkly. "You're . ." he shook his head once. "I forget your name."

The man in the doorway looked at him uncertainly. "Weslow, sir." he said slowly. "Chuck Weslow."

"Ah, yes. Weslow." He looked the younger man over slowly. He remember Weslow now. He was what some might call an apprentice. But he had a cool indifference towards the patients, as if he secretly despised them for their problems. But Alec Strom he had despised most of all- because Alec had frightened him. How thrilled he must be now that the patient was dead. How thrilled, indeed.

"Dr. Harlan…are you all right?" There was a submission that resonated from his voice when speaking to the senior psychiatrist. But then, after all, Harlan could make him or break him.

"Fine." He assured the young man. "Never better. Just taking a moment to relax after tonight's incident."

Weslow visibly relaxed as some of his arrogance seeped back into his voice. "Strom give them any problems?" he wondered around the butt of a Marlboro he'd produced out of his shirt pocket.

"None." he murmured lightly, squinting at the sudden bright flick of Weslow's lighter. "Took his poison like a good little killer."

Weslow snorted and blew smoke out the side of his mouth. "Shoulda gave him the chair." he muttered. "Lethal Injection was too humane for a monster like that. At least that initial 2500 volts woulda prepared him for the fires of Hell." He snorted again and leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. "Good Lord, what's this world coming to when people start worrying about torturing a killer while they're snuffing out his worthless life?"

"You and me." He reached out and squeezed Weslow's shoulder. "We're going to get along just fine."

Weslow grinned around his cigarette. A grin that quickly twisted into a grimace as Harlan's hand slid around his throat and squeezed just enough to let the man know he wasn't fooling.

"Dr. Harlan?" he choked. "What the hell?"

Harlan winked. "Precisely." He yanked the younger man forward and pressed his fingertips hard against the crook of Weslow's jaw, forcing his mouth open. "So you're fond of Ole Sparky, are you?" he murmured down the stale smoked depths of Chuck Weslow's throat. "Maybe I'll introduce you. After we have a little nasty fun, of course. In say…Nebraska, where Sparky lets you set on his lap when you take innocent lives without a shred of remorse."

Weslow's eyes bulged. "No." The protest was little more than a gurgling in his constricted throat.

"Oh . . yeah." Harlan's grip tightened and he forced his mouth down hard on Weslow's and closed his eyes as a noise like a distant whirlwind echoed faintly through the office.



4-Frank Harlan opened his eyes. He was standing in the center of his office in pitch black darkness; what the hell had happened? He blinked then squinted and noticed someone turning away from the open doorway. He thought he recognized the profile.

Harlan stepped forward. "Chuck?" Then he noticed something else; a file tucked under the younger man's arm. "Weslow, where are you going with that file?"

The man ignored him as if he hadn't heard the doctor speak. Harlan frowned as he realized something was different about the aspiring young psychiatrist. His walk, that's what was different. Weslow had a swaggering, arrogant gate that had always secretly annoyed Frank. But the man walking away from his office strode forward with confidence. And Harlan knew that walk as well.

"Alec?" he breathed.

Weslow paused then turned slowly. "Ah, shucks. You found me out, Doc."

Frank stared at the man; why had Alec let him go?

As if reading his thoughts, Weslow met his eyes steadily. "You did me right, Doc. For that, you live." He shook his head once. "But don't try to stop me, and don't get in my way."

Harlan watched him turn away. "Alec." he called. Weslow stopped but didn't turn. "I'm sorry . . that I couldn't help you."

"I am what I am, Doc. You didn't make me. You saw what I was and still you tried. And even a dark soul like Alec Strom knows the value of a friend." He shifted his head a fraction to the right. "You were my friend . . weren't you, Doc?"

"I was." Frank Harlan didn't attempt to keep him from leaving. He didn't call
the authorities. What could he have told the police anyway? He stood at his office window and watched the man walk onto the Asylum's front lawn where he paused, turning his face up to the dark sky and the black moon and breathe deeply of the night air. The evil had escaped, after all. But it was leaving Black Moon County, and that's all that concerned Frank Harlan. Though deep inside he experienced an odd sense of loss. Alec had been in his care since the boy was five. And at some point during the twenty-five years since, he'd developed a love for the child, though one he had- until this moment- refused to admit.

But the darkness inside Alec was, nevertheless, undeniable. And he pitied the poor souls who met up with it out there in Nebraska or along the way. And Chuck Weslow, when he shook hands with Ole Sparky.



NEBRASKA STATE PENETENTARY


5-Chuck Weslow came to with a suddenness that rattled his pulse.

A myriad of blurred faces swam before him. He stared at them until the haze dissipated and the faces were in focus. "Shelly?" he whispered uncertainly.

A frown pinched his brow as he stared at his wife through a large pane of glass. Behind her, strangers were settling into chairs. "Why, Chuck?" she mouthed silently through the glass.

Chuck went to reach out to her- and that's when he realized he couldn't move. He looked down at the thick leather straps securing his arms and legs. Something- an electrode, he thought- was attached to his leg. As he raised his eyes slowly back to his wife's damp face, hands were forcing him back against the heavy oak chair and a metal cap was pressed down over his shaven scalp.

"Oh God- no!" The protest was ignored as a band was placed over his eyes and his wife's face was eternally replaced by darkness. He knew the purpose of the band- it was to keep his eyes from bursting when the 2,500 volts boiled his brain.

A hand squeezed his shoulder with sudden familiarity. "How ya holdin' up, Chuck?" A voice murmured with dark amusement. "Comfey? Damn sweet reward, don't ya think, for those monsters who rape and murder little children?" The hand loosened then patted his shoulder like an old friend. "Told ya I'd introduce you to Ole Sparky- and Alec Strom never goes back on his word."

Terror coiled around Chuck Weslow and stabbed through him in the form of a 2,500 volt of electricity. His body convulsed and strained outward against the thick straps as smoke poured out from under the metal skull cap and beneath the face mask, and the scent of his own burning flesh invaded his nostrils.

The last sound he heard before the second surge of electricity stilled his erratic heart, was the bones of his fingers snapping as the deadly currents sought an escape.