"The Doom Statues" - Chapter 33

Alone in their cabin for the first quiet night in what seems like weeks, Jeremy and Emily are sprawled across the spacious bed, atop the blankets but lying in different directions. Though she had spent a good hour thumbing through this book on mixed media techniques, which she’d found cast casually aside in the back classroom days ago — the room Tom Drucker recently claimed as his primary studio — she is now scrolling through various social media sites, attempting to get caught up and remain in the loop, which is an urge that has come and gone in the month she’s been away. Mostly it’s something she doesn’t even think about anymore, which is itself amazing to fathom. Other times, she does think about reconnecting to that world, but then forcibly throws a net over the social butterfly within, making a conscious effort to remain distant. On a couple of occasions, however, such as tonight, the urge has proven impossible to resist. Even so, Emily considers that this is a perfect and healthy balance, overall, probably healthier than her endless socializing had ever been, all those years back home.

“You know what we really need,” she says to Jeremy, glancing up from her phone now, and over at him, “I wish we had a couch. You know? This is a huge ass cabin, and it’s kind of bare, don’t you think? I would totally love to be curled up on a couch right now.”

“Hmm. Yeah,” he chuckles, meeting her gaze from his position, nearer to the warm yellow glow of the bedside lamp, which they’ve turned on in favor of those blinding overheads, “except the next thing is, if you’ve got a couch, you’re gonna want a TV after that. It’s inevitable.”

He is only now flipping through that book the librarian had lent him, having initially forgotten about it in all that excitement concerning Jen. It was well after dark and they were sitting here twiddling their thumbs, Emily with her book, when she asked him whatever happened with his mission into town. He snapped his fingers and thanked her for reminding him, as he strolled down to his car to retrieve it. Only seriously glancing at it for the first time upon returning to this light of the cabin, he and Emily both agreed that the black and white photo looked familiar, on the back of this flimsy, self-published book, but that they couldn’t place it. Some skinny youth with a light, natural looking near pompadour, either blonde or possibly light orange, with a number of piercings up both ears. But the name, Nicholas Hoskins, meant nothing to them.

“Maybe we spotted him in passing somewhere in Stokely,” Jeremy theorized, “Hilldreth was right, according to the copyrights this book is…thirty-two years old. So he would look quite a bit older now.”

“Yeah, either that or he just sort of reminds us of someone we know. Or somebody famous,” Emily says.

These considerations are obliterated as soon as he begins reading anyway. Jeremy had certainly not expected a book as engrossing as this one, which he hasn’t been able to set aside in nearly two hours now.

The book is divided into two wildly disparate sections. This structural choppiness, which Jeremy thinks is characteristic to self-published works such as these, in many ways makes the entire thing a little more disturbing. The writing quality is mostly just workmanlike prose, nothing too fancy, although there’s something about the way that a person can write about grisly subject matter in such a matter-of-fact tone which will make it more demented, and that certainly applies here.

With plenty of authentic seeming documentation to back it up, its first half details the day to day existence at the Stokely School For Girls, which was an apparently successful operation for roughly twenty years, up until this William Allensworth was appointed headmaster in the late 1930s. And the pictures provided do make a compelling case that this is the figure Emily and the others claim to have seen, although Jeremy wouldn’t necessarily discount that one or more of them may have already heard about this case somewhere, if even just in passing, and were subconsciously influenced by it. Or for that matter, whatever local prankster jackass who is fucking with them, he too is surely familiar with this dark period in the site’s history, which may very well have been the most famous incident an obscure town like Stokely has ever known. Possibly second to that fire, which occurred some twenty-five or so years later, but whatever the case, both went down right here.

So this Allensworth, which Jeremy could have probably guessed before even cracking the spine on this puppy, is alleged to have begun molesting most if not all of the girls here at this boarding school for troubled teens and even pre-teens. That’s ghastly enough, to be sure, though sadly all too predictable. Yet it’s where the narrative goes from here which has him scooping his jaw off the floor.

“Holy fuck…,” he murmurs aloud at one point.

“What?” Emily questions, glancing up from her phone with a troubled expression.

Jeremy recounts what he has learned thus far, including this recent, most disturbing passage. The girls, trapped here with Allensworth and just a skeleton crew of other adults — who, it’s made clear, must have known what was going on, though doing nothing to curtail it — began referring to him as The Ruiner. This term sounds somewhat hokey and outdated now, yet Jeremy can picture it very in keeping with the parlance of those distant times. So distant it’s almost come back around full circle to sounding all the more ominous, as a result.

After years of abuse from The Ruiner, one night in late November, while much of the staff was away for a Thanksgiving holiday, a gaggle of nearly a dozen girls cornered Allensworth in the main house’s kitchen. They forced him into the walk-in cooler, held him down, and poured a number of poisonous household chemicals, chief among these antifreeze, into his mouth. Then left him in there to die, shoving enough tables, boxes, and other kitchen equipment in front of the door to trap him inside.

Except he didn’t die, not right away. Some three days later he could still be heard groaning in there. Here the tale gets a little muddled, or at least doesn’t seem to make sense, in that Jeremy can’t picture how the school remained in operation, even during the Thanksgiving lull, without what adults remained on hand discovering the kitchen in disarray, and Allensworth nowhere in sight, not to mention his groans in the cooler. Then again, if aware of his misdeeds, they may have considered this his just desserts, and turned a blind eye, a deaf ear to these developments.

Whatever the case, after a few days of this, the girls could take no more. Armed with knives, they removed their cooler blockade, then set about stabbing the living hell out of Allensworth right there where he lay. Then, for whatever reason, most likely thinking this might help them avoid detection, dragged his body clear out to the pond, leaving him to rot at last in the thin strip of land between that water and the forest, maybe fifty feet beyond the barn. Then sat calmly in their cabins where, late Sunday afternoon, less than a full day after stabbing him to death, the body was found, and the sheriff arrived on the scene. Some were sitting on their beds, combing their hair, and just nodded with total dispassion as the law stormed in and took them away. However, once all the facts came to light, this incident was swept under the rug as much as was possible, with a charge of aggravated manslaughter, slaps on the wrist. The girls were whisked away to disparate locations, many if not all of them changing their names, and none suffered any consequences whatsoever.

Well, it served that bastard right, Jeremy concludes. Yet he’s only halfway through the book when that detailed chronicle ends, and can’t imagine what’s possibly left to say. Here the book abruptly shifts into ghost story, albeit one presented as nonfiction, with plenty of its own supporting documentation. There’s just one page of separation, in large, bold faced italic, proclaiming Part II: The Ruiner and His Continued Presence before the author launches into this section. Here, while moving in strict chronological order, he begins to skip through the years, the decades, outlining various noteworthy sightings of this figure. Most occur around that pond, and if not that then on this property itself, although a couple of witnesses have seen him elsewhere, for example “walking along Stokely Farm Road, and at least one reputable incident near the gravity hill on Goldrich County Line Road.”

The descriptions are admittedly rattling Jeremy beyond whatever skepticism he might have once felt, even as it applied to his girlfriend. Some have reported spotting him knocking on their windows, smiling and waving at them in the middle of the night. Hoskins briefly entertains the notion, too, that this explains the lack of development in the region, in that whatever residents were around had mostly been spooked out of their homes by this phenomenon, and word got around fast to steer clear. Though always clad in trench coat and top hat, he is sometimes illuminated in that sickly glowing green color, sometimes not, though that peculiar staticky sounding voice is usually heard in either instance, at least by those who were outdoors when spotting him. The author makes passing reference to the Howard fire, and speculating about any role the paranormal and/or a “bad aura” might have had in that disaster, though this episode is only given a few paragraphs.

Though Jeremy is typically a heavy sleeper, and can seldom if ever remember his dreams, when he and Emily do manage to drop off for the night, at some point well past 1 a.m., he is visited by a curious one which does stick in his head come morning. In this dream, his skull is filled by a mob of swarming, buzzing bees. There is nothing else in his head except for these bees. Yet the skull itself is made out of some thin, brittle material, like a candy shell, or — more accurately, perhaps — the hardened chocolate or butterscotch syrup on a dipped cone, like they used to sell at his parents’ ice cream stand.

Up near the top of his skull, there’s a small hole, which the occasional clever bee manages to find and escape through. With each one that passes, the hole becomes incrementally larger, and Jeremy knows it’s just a matter of time before they are all gone. He also understands now what Denise was talking about, as far there being levels of consciousness in a dream, because when he awakens, it will seem to him peculiar that he still has an awareness here, like observing himself from the outside, for example being able to see the top of his own head.

Whatever it means, the escaping bees are bad news. Even though when they first exit the skull, for whatever reason, their little feet are sticky, and they can do nothing but walk along the surface of his head, for a moment or two. When they finally do manage to fly off, without exception every single one of them, flies straight for this nearby wooden shed, lands against its front exterior wall, and remains there.

He can’t say what possible meaning this might have, and it wouldn’t seem influenced in the slightest by any current events, or anything he’s read. Yet Denise’s own apparently prophetic dream, coupled with some of these bizarre sightings, has given him the unshakable impression that this might prove important, too.

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