-1-

 

I had not seen Aubrey Debrunner since I was a kid, and for me, being a kid was a long time ago. When I finally saw him again after four decades, I couldn’t help being repulsed by the memory of his missing eyes—those empty sockets and flaccid lids—and my abhorrence when I saw what he had placed inside those gaping holes, or my terror when he whispered “Now I can see you,” as he had done once before so long ago.

 

-2-

 

Aubrey and I grew up in Kitchissippi, a town in Canada’s Ottawa Valley. While we lived on the same street, it’s not like I really wanted him around. As a kid, he was tolerated, much like the ass-end of winter in February, or clouds of black flies in June.

Some of us were military brats whose fathers worked at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa and some of us were “civvies,” but we all lived together in the same small town and attended the same public school.

Kitchissippi no longer exists. A lot of bad shit went down there in the seventies, and by 1981 it was a ghost town. I’m sure there’s a good story in the bitter decline of what I will always think of as my boyhood home, but that’s not my story to tell.

I want to tell you about Aubrey.

 

-3-

 

Aubrey was the kid we all ragged on. Make no mistake, my friends and I were losers. We were kids who were singled out for minor differences in a typically homogeneous Canadian town that remained, right up to the end, almost exclusively the domain of white Protestants and Catholics. There was the fat kid, the kid who had seizures and the kid whose parents were raging, street-fighting drunks. There was the kid whose divorced mom dated too many different guys, the kid whose motorcycle-riding dad was turned into a red smear on Highway 7 and the kid whose little sister died in a fire. And then there was me, the one with red hair, nerdy glasses and a wild imagination that made him blurt out weird shit at the most inappropriate times.

We were all about the same age and attended all the same classes for years. We called ourselves the Group of Seven. We had stolen the name for our gang from a bunch of Canadian artists who painted landscapes so bleak you wanted to cry or kill yourself for just looking at them. Aubrey wasn’t one of the Seven.

He may have had certain advantages, but he was a coddled only child who couldn’t do anything risky. He couldn’t swim in the Petawawa River, or slide down the steep sandy hill near Boyd’s Pond on sheets of cardboard, or skate on a frozen creek in winter, or even help the rest of us build tree forts in summer, the latter being arguably the grandest of traditions among Kitchissippi children. He was susceptible to colds and infections that either kept him out of school or required that he fire down handfuls of antibiotics like the rest of us gobbled up Maltesers. Among the other kids, the Group of Seven were near the bottom of the social ladder, and Aubrey was a rung below us.

And then there was that damned name his parents had burdened him with. Aubrey. Holy whistling Jesus, could it get any worse than that?

Aubrey’s family had a really nice house on the west side of Kitchissippi, nicer than anything the rest of us knew living in rented apartments or PMQs, and I recall him saying both his father and mother were artists who worked all over the Ottawa Valley, including at the National Gallery and the Museum of Man. That got a lot of weird looks from the other eleven- and twelve-year-old kids who heard this, kids whose dads were mechanics or worked on loading docks, whose mothers were housewives.

His parents were a different breed, and they treated Aubrey differently. That made him seem different to the rest of us. Hell, they might as well have painted a target on his back.

Aubrey was pale and slim and ripe for being shit on, yet he kept hanging around, no matter how much grief we gave him. I guess you had to give him points for that.

I remember Aubrey showing up to school one day with big sunglasses. He had a note allowing him to wear them in class. That was in September of 1976, and we were all starting the sixth grade. Aubrey looked like an albino Roy Orbison in those shades. After a few weeks of creeping along the halls with his eyes hidden behind tinted plastic lenses, Aubrey began leaving school early. It was said that he was getting headaches all the time, bad headaches.

The few times Aubrey showed up at school in October were unsettling. He was horribly pale; his veins showed through his skin as if someone had drawn on him with a blue marker. It was just before Halloween when we realized Aubrey was losing his hair, and he looked so wretched that our Group of Seven felt bad making him the target of our teasing or the butt of our jokes.

Somebody, it may have been Mark, asked Aubrey what was going on with him and Aubrey said he was getting chemotherapy and radiation, which instantly filled us with dread since we knew—thanks to the movies—that radiation either melted you like a death ray or mutated you into a giant monster.

Horrific stories started making the rounds, stories about Aubrey losing his eyes. It was said he had cancer, that he had tumors on both of his optic nerves and that the doctors would soon have to surgically remove them, along with his perfectly healthy eyes.

That remains one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever heard.

When I was young, kids weren’t as sophisticated as they are today. Our knowledge base and playing fields were narrower. We didn’t have cable TV or the Internet, smart phones or Xboxes. We didn’t have the entire world at our fingertips. What we had was reruns, the public library and endless woods; the truths and the lies our parents told us to enlighten and protect us; the utter bullshit our older siblings fed us just to screw with our heads; and the grapevine of communal childhood information that was part mythology and part hearsay, all of it distorted by the lenses of wonder, inexperience, fantasy and fear.

We weren’t exposed to everything the world had to offer back then. We had no idea how apocalyptically messed up some people were, and for that I have always been grateful. There’s a lot of good in the world and a lot of ugliness. I was spared most of the ugliness, and I spent my childhood simply being a kid.

And that’s why I thought the stories about Aubrey had to be true.

I’ve always enjoyed writing, and I had a knack for making stuff up even at that age. Long before I ever put pen to paper, I began telling poorly crafted stories that were completely uninhibited flights of fancy, but cancerous tumors of the optic nerves? No kid I knew could have imagined something like that back then. It was too ghastly to be anything but real.

When you were a military brat you got used to kids disappearing. Fathers got transferred and sometimes families had to pull up stakes on short notice. You got used to packing and moving, saying goodbye to old friends and making new ones. I have friends now that have spent their entire lives in the same town, and to me that seems strange.

A week before my family left Kitchissippi, Aubrey disappeared. And I welcomed both events.

It was in the spring of 1977, and my dad had been posted to Chilliwack, out in BC. The upside was I was leaving Kitchissippi. The downside was that I had to say goodbye to my friends. But that was just as well as my friends were disappearing in the worst way imaginable. They were being murdered. And I think it was Aubrey who was killing them.

After Keith and Lorne died, Aubrey’s parents left town. One day they were there and the next they were gone, but not before they had their own son committed to an asylum, the Leander Meade Convalescent Home and Sanatorium, Renfrew County's notorious mental hospital north of Kitchissippi.

That aging facility, constructed at the same time as Canada’s Parliament buildings, using the same Ottawa Valley sandstone, was troubled from the start. Once a wellspring of terrifying stories whispered among the children of Kitchissippi, Miramichi and Petawawa, the vacant hospital is now a shuttered Gothic curiosity, its sculpted towers and arched windows slowly being swallowed by the dark outgrowth of Algonquin Provincial Park.

After one too many scandals involving inexplicable operational expenditures, rumors of sexual abuse and purported accidental deaths—not to mention acquisition of the notorious and unflattering sobriquet La Maison Sombre—the institution was shuttered a few years after Aubrey’s arrival.

Where Aubrey went once the asylum was shut down, or what he had endured while he was there, no one knew. During the turmoil of the hospital’s dénouement in the winter of 1979, a brief, bleak note on his release was inscribed in a register of patients. It read simply that he was “turned out.”

 

-4-

 

Like many people my age, I recently began using Facebook to recall and share memories of the past, reconnect with old friends from high school and college through pages set up to commemorate a specific time and place, or to host groups for military brats. When I received an invitation to join a group called Remembering Kitchissippi, I was surprised that anyone wanted to recall that town, and amazed that anyone found me.

I had been living in northern Alberta the last few years, in Fort McMurray. I never stayed in one place very long. From British Columbia to Newfoundland there are thousands of men who share my name, John MacDonald. It’s a name than comes with a certain amount of anonymity. And while I do make a very public living writing, I publish everything under a pseudonym. Yet someone had connected this John MacDonald, me, with a place two thousand miles away and forty years gone, knowing that the full-bearded, ponytailed man living now was the fresh-faced boy who lived then.

The creator of the Facebook group used an alias: Perseus Jones.

I had read a lot of Greek mythology as a kid, and for a moment the ancient tales of Perseus seemed to have some significance, but it eluded me and I let the thought go.

Access to the page was granted quickly, and I soon saw some familiar names. Kent was out in BC. Eddie was in Halifax. Mark was in Montreal. Darren was in Toronto. All that remained of the Group of Seven. We chatted on Facebook for months and played with schedules until we realized we could all meet during the first week of August. We choose Miramichi as ground zero; it was the closest town to the now empty houses, deserted businesses and overgrown lots of Kitchissippi.

 

-5-

 

When we finally got together in the restaurant of the Best Western, it was surreal. I could see the boys in the faces of the men around the table, people I had not seen in forty years. We all had greying or thinning hair, too many wrinkles, and for some of us, too many extra pounds.

We shot the shit for a while, tossing each other the highlights of our lives, getting to know who was married, who had kids, who had a nice house or a job worth bragging about. We had all been close as kids, but too much time had passed. We had moved too far apart. I didn’t care much about the full lives being shared with me, but I did care about what I thought of as the real reason we were here.

“Time to fess up,” I said. “Which one of you is Perseus Jones?”

Blank stares all around.

“It’s not me, so it had to be one of you.”

“It isn’t me,” Darren said. He had been chubby as a kid and still carried a lot of extra weight. His round, ruddy face was the most youthful at the table. He had five little girls and a wife who was still slim and gorgeous. Go figure the odds on that one.

“Me either,” Eddie said as he sipped a Canada Dry club soda and muffled a belch with a fist. His parents were drunks who had trashed their own home a dozen times over in fantastic brawls, and now he was a high school counselor. Seeing the club soda in his hand, I wondered if he had inherited the family genes.

“Sure as fuck wasn’t me,” Mark said. He had been a small kid with a sweet face, and rumor had it that his mom had been an easy lay—a lush, a tramp, a harlot. All the old epithets came back to me as I looked at Mark. Now he was all sinew and callous, one of those wiry guys that can be so dangerous in a fight. He taught advanced self-defense classes. When we had met he smiled and shook my hand, squeezing hard, and I had noticed a raw hostility in his eyes that saddened me. He’d been a nice kid. Now he looked like a bastard.

Kent just shrugged. His once glossy black hair was now grey, but he had the same big jug-handle ears and friendly grin. He restored old cars. If that sounds like he was a grease monkey messing around in his garage on Saturday afternoons, let me clarify things: he sold his cars to collectors like Jay Leno.

I was biting back the urge to say it was me, just for the hell of it, when our waitress came to the table. She was probably all of twenty years old, and for a moment as I looked at her, I felt my age like a great weight on my bones.

She set a folded card on the table, gestured to a faux-antique clock on one wall and said, “I was told to give this to you at 10:00 p.m.”

I opened the card.

Inside, there were two small photos that looked as if they had been cut from an old grade-school yearbook and glued in place. The photos showed the smiling faces of the two members of our Group of Seven who were no longer with us, Keith and Lorne. Written on the card in a childish scrawl was a message:

Meet me at the Playhouse, at midnight.

The Maitland Playhouse had been Kitchissippi’s only movie theater. It had been boarded up in 1979 after being overrun by rats that had proved damned near invincible.

The message was signed Perseus Jones.

I passed the card to Kent. He read it and passed it on. No one said a thing as the card circled the table.

When it came back to me, Kent pointed at the card. “Anyone notice the word midnight?”

“Somebody scratched out the letter i,” Eddie said. “Both of them.”

“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Mark said.

“Aubrey,” Darren whispered.

I sat back from the table, remembering what happened the last time we had all been together.

People in Kitchissippi said the trouble with Aubrey started when he killed a cat. I believe it started a few weeks before that, when Aubrey lost his eyes.

 

-6-

 

Aubrey had left school for good at the end of November in 1976. He underwent surgery at a hospital down in Ottawa two weeks later, and had his recovery over the winter break.

I believe Kent and I are the only two people Aubrey reached out to after his surgery. It was Aubrey’s mother who had invited us to drop by on the day after New Year’s Day. I can only imagine how excruciating the lead-up to those phone calls could have been for Aubrey, with Mrs. Debrunner asking her son if he would like to invite any friends over, and Aubrey trying to come up with the names of one or two kids who might actually show up, not blow him off and use the request as fuel for more cruel taunts, all the while lost in a darkness that was newfound and forevermore.

In the end, Kent and I agreed to visit Aubrey, but not because of pressure from our parents. My mom and dad didn’t know the Debrunner family, but they were sympathetic to their grim situation as the parents whose poor little boy had “lost his eyes,” as if they had fallen out of a hole in his pocket. No, we ultimately decided to see him out of morbid curiosity because we were kids.

At the urging of the others, Kent and I went to Aubrey’s house on Sunday, the day after the Group of Seven attended a New Year’s Day matinee at the Maitland. It was a typical double bill of older flicks, which in this case were The Devil’s Rain and Race with the Devil. I don’t think Pete Maitland ever showed a first-run feature in his theater. He was too cheap for that. The stupid bastard turned down a chance to screen Star Wars and make a mint at his concession stand.

It was between a chapter of a pretty decent Republic serial called The Purple Monster Strikes and the first feature when I mentioned that Aubrey's mom had called to ask if I would could come over and visit him. Instead of ragging on Aubrey as a loser, we sat silently watching the spastic antics of a cartoon bag of popcorn that exhorted us with disturbing desperation to visit the snack bar, until Kent spoke up and said his mother had received the same call.

Eddie, Mark, Darren, Keith and Lorne insisted we had to go. We had to find out exactly what had happened to Aubrey and then report back.

So we went.

 

-7-

 

 “Do you think this is a good idea, Johnny?”

I tried to focus on Kent’s question and not let irritation distract me. I hadn’t been called Johnny since I left Kitchissippi, and I wasn’t too keen on hearing the name again.

“Sure, why not?” That was bullshit. I was scared, but I was also compelled to go back to my old hometown and find out exactly who was screwing with us.

We were heading down Highway 13 in the minivan Darren had driven up from Toronto. Eddie was driving now; he was the only one of us who hadn’t had any drinks with dinner.

It was a warm night and the windows were rolled down, the air heavy with the humidity that was the scourge of Ottawa Valley summer. Darren’s satellite radio was tuned to an oldies station, the volume turned low. Bachman Turner Overdrive whispered to me from the past, telling me that I ain't seen nothing yet. As we turned off the old highway onto Laplante Road I heard the unmistakable call of a loon out on the flat black expanse of Lake Kewasowock. Miramichi was behind us. The ruins of Kitchissippi lay ahead.

“Sounds like some practical joke,” Mark said. He was half-cut on Canadian Club whiskey and looked meaner than ever.

A moth hit the windshield with a soft thud and left a palm-sized greenish smear on the glass. Darren jumped. He looked scared, and I wondered why he had come along.

“Jesus fuck,” Eddie whispered, turning on the wipers. “I forgot how big the bugs were out here.”

We drove on without speaking. The minivan turned onto Laurier Street, and then we were in the dark and haunted belly of Kitchissippi.

“We’re back in the Kitch’,” Mark said. “And ain’t it a bitch.”

Eddie took a left, and another left and then we pulled up in front of the Maitland Playhouse.

As kids we’d all had some grand times in that old movie house. The movies had been my only escape from this town until my family moved away. Seeing that it had become a boarded-up, graffiti-tagged ruin broke my heart.

“What a mess,” Darren said.

“What a drag,” I said.

Kent nodded. “I know, eh?”

There were sheets of plywood across the entrance. The glass was broken out of the ticket booth, and more plywood sealed the booth off from the rest of the building. Someone had used chalk to draw a crude pair of eyeglasses on one sheet, head-high. Centered in each of the chalk lenses was a knothole. Written over the knotholes, in an oddly-canted hand, was a challenge:

Are you brave enough to look inside?

Or will you run away and hide?

Still drunk, Mark nearly fell out of the minivan, read the words on the wall and said, “Fuck that shit.” He unzipped his fly and began pissing on the side of the ticket booth.

Eddie stepped past him and stood close to the plywood wall. He peered through the knotholes and then screamed in pain as someone rammed the long steel tines of a two-pronged hayfork through his eyes and out the back of his skull.

 

-8-

 

I rang the Debrunner’s doorbell on that chilly day in January. Kent was taller than I so he reached up and used the brass door knocker.

“Before we got here, I was hoping this would be kind of weird,” he said. “Now I hope it’s not.”

Aubrey’s mom opened the front door, and for a moment I thought she was getting ready for a role in a play as her face was powdered almost white, her lipstick was such a dark red it was almost black and her eyelashes looked like the legs of June bugs. It took me a moment to realize that, aside from eyes that appeared red and tired from crying, this was probably how she looked every day.

Aubrey’s dad stood behind her like a supporting player in a bad sitcom. He was wearing a sweater-vest, and he had a pencil-thin mustache on his upper lip. He didn’t say a word.

“Oh come in, come in,” Aubrey’s mom said, letting out a forced laugh. Her hair was as white-blonde as Aubrey’s, piled high on her head like ice cream on a Dairy Queen cone. She was holding a can of Glade air freshener.

The furniture in the living room was covered in protective plastic and everything was perfect, as if from a magazine. What little I could see of the kitchen was spotless, not a pot or dish or drinking glass in sight. The house didn’t look like anyone really lived there. It looked preserved.

Kent and I took off our gloves, coats, toques and snow boots, and then padded up a flight of stairs with Mrs. Debrunner saying, “Knock on the first door, yes, that one right there.”

We knocked on the door, and a voice from inside told us to come in.

It was a gray day, the lights were off and the blinds were drawn over the only window, leaving the room almost dark. I could see a shape sitting on what I assumed was the bed.

There was a smell in the bedroom that was both sweet and awful. Mrs. Debrunner’s air freshener and something else.

“Hi, Aubrey,” I said.

“Hi!” he replied, excited that we were there. His enthusiasm made me feel terrible because I couldn’t wait to leave.

“Can I turn on a light?” Kent asked.

“What?” Aubrey sounded genuinely confused, and then he let out a morbid, jaded chuckle that frightened me. It was a sound no child should ever make. “Yeah, go ahead. You know dads, always turning off lights and turning down the heat and telling you to put on—”

“A sweater,” Kent and I said at the same time. All three of us laughed.

I was thinking that things were going to be okay after all. Until the light came on and I saw that slender, pale boy stand and take a step toward us, his eyelids as flat as the blanket on his empty bed.

“I’m really glad you guys are here,” Aubrey said.

Kent pointed, and I saw that Aubrey was wearing one gray sock and one green sock.

“No problem,” I said.

Aubrey came closer and Kent and I stepped to either side, as if the cancer that took Aubrey’s eyes was somehow contagious. He closed his bedroom door and then turned back, walking across the room with one hand outstretched until he reached his bed, where he sat down again.

“So, how’s it hanging?”

Kent winced dramatically when I said this, and I felt like an arsehole, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Aubrey shrugged. “Okay, I guess, at least that’s what my doctor says. It hurt, at first.” He touched one of his lax eyelids, making a wet sound like parting lips. I nearly bolted from the room, wailing in revulsion when I glimpsed an empty red hollow beneath that eyelid. “But now I’m just bored.”

Kent and I stood by the door in silence, breathing in that faint, horrible smell. He confirmed later that we were thinking the same things. We couldn’t talk about TV, or movies, or comic books, or about anything we’ve seen. When you’re twelve years old, those restrictions don’t leave a whole hell of a lot else to talk about.

I looked around the room, desperately trying to think of something to say, and that’s when I noticed the jar atop a dresser near me. It was made of heavy glass that had a slight blue hue and was sealed with a glass stopper. There was liquid inside. Floating in the liquid were what appeared to be two rotten pieces of meat the size of dice.

Kent had noticed the jar too, and I heard him whisper, “What is that?”

Aubrey perked up at this, his pallor and collapsed eyelids making him look like a corpse.

“You’ve seen the apothecary jar, and my eyes,” he said. “My optic nerves were removed and my eyes were precancerous, so it all had to go, but I kept hoping that maybe I could get them to work again. That’s why I asked the doctor if I could keep them.” He shook his head. “After I got home from the hospital I put my eyes back in, and they didn’t work. But I found something that did.”

Aubrey got down on his knees and groped blindly under his bed until he found what he was looking for: a shoebox. He kneeled and set the box in front of him so we could see it. He lifted the lid and Kent retched.

I felt like I was going to vomit and fought it down. Inside the box was a dead cat, a young tabby with a broken neck. It was the source of the horrible sweet-putrid smell in Aubrey’s room.

The cat’s eyes had been removed from its head and now lay between the creature’s paws, the sclera as white as ivory and the emerald green iris now as cloudy as jade.

Aubrey took one eye out of the box and then the other, lifting his eyelids and gently placing the cat’s eyes in his own sockets.

Those green eyes gleamed.

And then they moved.

Aubrey smiled and said, “Now I can see you.”

Kent and I screamed. We ran out of Aubrey’s room and down the stairs, pushing past Mr. Debrunner, with his pencil mustache and shroud of silence, and Mrs. Debrunner, who was grinning like an imbecile and spraying air freshener. We pulled on our boots and ran out into the cold, carrying our coats and gloves.

Following us down the frozen street like a gust of winter wind at our backs was Aubrey’s voice as he cried out in heartbreak and rage, “Come back!”

 

-9-

 

Eddie hit the ground like a steer brained by a butcher’s mallet, the heels of his shoes hammering the sidewalk as blood poured out of his eye sockets.

Mark went berserk. He ran full-tilt into the plywood wall and smashed through. He grinned at us, apparently unaware he was bleeding from cuts on his nose and chin.

Darren followed. His fear-bleached face was as pale as a winter moon.

Kent and I entered the dark theater lobby cautiously, seeing Mark, and then Darren, turn down a hall that lead to the bathrooms.

The lights came on, painfully bright, and I heard Kent gasp as if a bucket of cold water had been splashed in his face.

In the center of the lobby, hanging from a rope around its neck like a condemned man, was a pig. Its eyes were missing.

I stepped over the hayfork lying on the dusty lobby carpet. The blood-slick steel tines jutting upward like horns had been bent close so they would fit through the knotholes in the plywood wall.

Kent saw the hayfork and said, “Oh Je—”

Mark and Darren cried out, their voices muffled and far away.

 

-10-

 

Two of my friends were murdered in the winter of 1977. Keith was found by the side of Donaldson Road on January 30th, his body twisted as if it had been tossed away like so much trash. Lorne was found on the 12th of February near the densely wooded area known as Borthwick Stand.

The Group of Seven was no more.

The Miramichi Ledger said Keith and Lorne had wounds that indicated, “the presence of scavengers.”

They had bled to death and parts of their bodies had been chewed away. Their eyes were missing.

Written in the snow in their own blood were the words LET’S BE FRIENDS.

Rumors ran rampant among the citizens of Kitchissippi. Adults suggested it was a serial killer or a psychotic sex pervert, and teenagers said it was the Unicorn Man, a local legend used to scare little kids.

My friends and I were convinced it was Aubrey because he was taken away a few weeks later.

That spring my family learned my dad had been posted to Chilliwack. We eventually packed everything we owned into boxes and moved out of Kitchissippi on April 12^th, and for that I was grateful.

The week before I left town, a white station wagon pulled up in front of Aubrey’s house, and that skinny, blind, lonely boy had been dragged into the street by two men in crisp white shirts and pants. He was crying aloud that he wanted to stay with his mother and father, that he wanted to stay in his own home, that he didn’t want to go to a hospital.

Aubrey was bound in a straitjacket, looking like something out of an old movie. His pale blond hair was sticking up in tufts, spit flying from his mouth as he raved at everyone watching. And most horrible of all his eyes were open, the lids raised over their empty sockets.

The last thing Aubrey said, the last thing he swore before he was locked in the station wagon and sent away, was, “I’m coming back!”

There was so much I didn't see back then, which is ironic.

I didn’t see Aubrey kill my friends. I didn't even see him kill the cat in the shoebox. It could have been road kill for all I knew. But I believed he took those lives, believed it with all my heart.

I believed that losing his eyes left Aubrey standing on the edge of sanity, and losing his friends, having Kent and me turn away from him when he showed us his stolen cat's eyes in a desperate attempt to be normal again, pushed him over the edge. That’s why I was so relieved when my family moved as far away from Kitchissippi as we could get.

 

-11-

 

Kent and I ran down the hall, passing the doors to the bathrooms and pausing at the head of the stairs leading down to the basement.

We heard another cry of pain and continued down the stairs, part of me wondering who had turned the power back on since there were lights on everywhere, and part of me wanting to simply cut and run.

At the bottom of the stairs was a hallway as long as the theater's lot and many closed doors.

A door at the far end of the hall creaked open a few inches. I went down the hall and through the open doorway, Kent following in my wake.

Inside the room, Mark and Darren were lying side by side on the floor. Both men were dead. Their throats had been crudely torn open and their eye sockets were red holes. Their blood on my hands was still warm.

Written on the wall in broad strokes of blood was LET’S BE FRIENDS!

Movement at the other end of the room caught my eye.

It was the shape of a man, little more than a silhouette against a wash of fluorescent light. He was tall and lean, his thinning hair long and unkempt. He held something over his open mouth, like a debauched Roman being fed peeled grapes. It was a human eye hanging by a string of tissue. He dropped it into his mouth and began to chew.

He sidestepped gracefully as Kent ran at him, spitting obscenities. The moment Kent was on the other side of the door it was slammed shut, and I heard him scream.

 

-12-

 

For a long time after leaving Kitchissippi, I had a recurring dream. I was in the dark and somebody, a kid perhaps, whispered, “I always liked you the best.” I would reach out and turn on my bedside lamp and realize I was still in total darkness. Blind. And then someone would set the limp, furry body of a dead cat in my hands. Sometimes I woke up screaming.

Now I heard that same whisper, only it was not a boy’s voice but a man’s. It was Aubrey. He was on the other side of the door he had closed and he was whispering, “I always liked you the best.”

I went to the door and opened it, hearing the thump of Aubrey’s feet as he ran up another flight of stairs. Kent’s body was lying dead inside, his ravaged throat and empty eye sockets dripping blood.

Aubrey was at the top of the stairs, a decrepit, deranged version of the boy I had known so long ago. He stood with arms outstretched, a beatific smile on his face, watching me through the dead pig’s eyes.

“Now I can see you. Again,” he said with a grotesque wink before stepping through another door and slamming it shut.

I went up the stairs slowly, listening for recognizable sounds. The theater was silent. I opened the door and stepped onto old wooden flooring that creaked underfoot. Above me was a vast expanse of white cut by red slashes. I was on the theater’s stage, behind the screen.

I stepped out in front of the screen into a blinding glare that came from a small aperture in the wall at the back of the theater. Aubrey had put a light in the projection booth bright enough to illuminate the screen.

From one end of the screen to the other were words slashed in red.

As I read the words, my mind made connections between disparate elements far too late.

When I was young I enjoyed reading from Greek mythology because those stories were the most graphic tales kids could get their hands on. Bloodcurdling violence, incest, matricide, patricide, castration, torture, bestiality—the Greek myths offered up all of that and more, and librarians shared those stories with a smile.

As I read the message towering over me now I remembered that Perseus had stolen a single shared eye from the Graeae, sisters to the Gorgons, as the first part of his great adventure. Without that eye there would be no slaying Medusa, no saving Andromeda.

It all began with stolen sight.

Long slashes of red on the tall white screen formed a message.

When my grim task is complete, I will pluck these eyes from my own head, for I shall never see a thing more beauteous than what I hath wrought instead.

It did not take me long to realize who the passage was intended for, but the knowledge came too late.

Aubrey’s hands were already encircling my head from behind, his eager fingers digging at my face with a maniac’s relentless strength, tearing away my eyelids and uprooting my eyeballs as I shrieked into the approaching darkness.

As I touched my eye sockets and felt my own hot blood wash over my trembling fingers, I heard the sounds of Aubrey eating my eyes and saying, "Let's play hide and seek, you and me. If you stay hidden you get to live. If I catch you I will eat the rest of your soft parts."

I ran, my hands held out before me, my palms slapping against old wood, my fingers grazing crumbling plaster. I could hear Aubrey following, hooting with pleasure like a demented child.

At some point I turned a corner and could no longer hear him at all.

Ultimately, I made my way out of the theater and through the streets of downtown Kitchissippi, falling and crawling and pushing myself back to my feet again and again.

I stumbled sightless through the cold and dark until I reached the highway where a tow truck driver nearly ran me down. He brought me to the emergency room at Miramichi Regional Hospital but not before calling the police.

Aubrey was never found, but the bodies of my friends were quickly discovered.

Smeared, bloody hand prints on walls and doors throughout the theater made it appear that the murders had been committed by a man who blinded himself afterward and found his way out of the building by touch, leaving behind his confession writ large on the theater screen.

It was the perfect setup.

 

-13-

 

I have a very comfortable room in this facility. The Laurentian Park Institution is a minimum security prison, but I like to think of it as a secure infirmary. LPI is on a beautiful tract of land, or so the guards and attendants tell me. From the barred window of my third-story room, across a wide expanse of fields and fences, one can see the deep green shadows that mark the border of Algonquin Provincial Park and, as I've been told, the abandoned remains of the old Renfrew County mental hospital.

Everyone I talk to doubts my story, attendants, doctors, police and prosecutors. They all seem to be patronizing me. I’ve been told it’s a curious coincidence that two kids were killed in Kitchissippi back in the seventies, and that those killings stopped when my family moved away. It’s been suggested that of the five men who went back to Kitchissippi that August night, I was the most unstable. I had no family, I worked alone and I never stayed in one place very long.

The police told me the RCMP were now investigating the incident at the Maitland Playhouse because they had unsolved murder cases going back forty years in which victims across Canada had been killed in many different ways, but the dead all had one thing in common: their eyes had been gouged out.

I’m beginning to realize I’m the only one who believes Aubrey was ever in Kitchissippi the night my friends died.

When I stand at my window with summer’s warmth or winter’s chill on my face, I can almost feel the weight and the hardness of the distant stone walls and steel doors that once incarcerated Aubrey.

I know Aubrey is mocking me, capering with glee in the still silence. I can hear him in the distance, as clearly as I can hear the pigeons cooing on the sill of my window as they strut and swagger outside the bars just beyond my reach.

Someday soon I will lay my hands on one of the pigeons and take the pompous little thing's eyes.

Then I will leave this place, crossing fields and fences and entering the ruins of the Leander Meade Convalescent Home and Sanatorium, where Aubrey and I will meet again.

 

 

 

 

John McCallum Swain wrote his first story in the sixth grade. While other children were writing about kittens and summer vacations, he wrote of the annihilation of humanity by invading aliens.

Since then, Swain has progressed from longhand to typewriters to laptops, and he continues to write tales ranging from graphic horror to alternate history while exploring new territory creating original screenplays for the transatlantic partnership Grab a Half Productions.

He has previously published novels and short stories under the name Jack X McCallum.