Read Part 5
Arlington Eagan knew fear. He knew it intimately, every rough edge and jagged claw of it. Introduced in early childhood by events perpetrated by his father against his mother that he was too young to recall, they had grown close over the years. He had some memories of abuses at the hands of his father and neglect from his mother, but as most children do, he later ascribed the resulting emotions to hellish forces intent on his destruction, in an unconscious attempt to preserve the memory of loving parents. Such are children.
As a young boy, he tried to get the upper hand in the relationship, using logic and wisdom from elder teachers and bible school scholars. He sought knowledge of the unexplained and occult, the demonic and just plain mean in an attempt to hold his fear at bay through understanding. He learned a great deal, but it didn’t make him less afraid.
In the process, he gained a little knowledge of many worrisome things and found that a little information can be far worse than none at all, as his active imagination filled in the gaps and explained what could not be explained. And so he retreated to blanket forts lit up by night lights and a rubber doorstop under the closet door at night. He invented countless recipes for avoiding death by a demonic hand. If he brushed his teeth and then took a vitamin, checked the closet door and then said his prayers, he could sleep through the night without the darkness invading his dreams. Miss one part of the formula and he would wake in the night, screaming and alone, calling for parents who were too inebriated to respond, until his tears dried into river stains and he fell back asleep.
By adolescence, Eagan had given up quivering and quaking in response to his fears in favor of active flight, achieved initially through drugs but later through immersion in over a dozen different religious experiences. Some of them patented. Fear would not abate. It was a battle he was doomed to lose. In time, he learned to accept what fear held in store for him with a sort of despondent surrender. When he didn’t die before he was 25, he was shocked.
By that time, both of his parents had met their end, which was no surprise to anyone who knew them. Some who did were surprised that they had a son, having never seen Eagan until one of the funerals. Ill equipped to keep up his parent’s affairs, he lost the house and moved from place to place in the city until he secured the job at the cardboard box company and moved into the apartment on North Willis street.
It wasn’t long before his old fears made their way out of the dark and into his social life. He was unable to relate to most of the people he worked with and couldn’t even speak to a woman. He retreated into his apartment, decorated in a Spartan fashion to avoid shadows and other places where dark things could hide, and tried to live a simple life apart from the many, many things that he found fearful.
And it worked very well until a routine trip to the doctor, the same old man who had been treating him for over 20 years, revealed his condition. It appeared that all those years of fear and trepidation had taken a toll on his heart. He was told to walk and so he bought a fitbit and used it to track his movements to work and back. To increase his step count, he used the stairwell in his apartment building. He thought it was working, until he saw the spikes on his computer chart during times when he thought he was asleep.
The idea that his body might be doing things unbeknownst to him was terrifying. He’d studied enough about the occult to know that a person can be overcome by a demonic force and used for evil purposes. Being asleep made it easier. The more he thought about it, the more he imagined the evil that such an entity could do with his body.
And so he bought the camera to find out exactly what his sleeping self was doing. Watching the video nearly overwhelmed him with horror. Of course, he knew the name Paula Kelly. He’d seen both the television news and the local newspaper. Knowing that he had written that name down filled him with a cold dread and he couldn’t help but wonder if he had played a role in her murder.
But that wasn’t the part of the video that threatened to send him over the edge. In fact, seeing the candle and the parchment probably saved him from running screaming out of his apartment and into the morning traffic. No, what terrified him the most was the idea that he had walked down into the basement in the dark without a light. The idea of him in his pajamas walking down those narrow stairs and into the dark, alone with whatever terrors awaited him there, made him wrap his arms around himself tightly as he shook and wept.
Seeing the name on the parchment and having a bona fide reason to call the police saved him from going over the edge.
He knew he couldn’t go home. The idea that he might fall asleep and go back down those stairs consumed him. And so now, he was alone in a cell, in the dark, afraid to fall asleep. He thought about moving, which seemed like a necessity, but that would take time. He didn’t want to risk spending a single night there. He resolved to tell the police that he had killed Paula Kelly. They would be forced to keep him in jail until they realized he didn’t do it. By then, he would have had time to think up some solution. But it would surely involve moving.
And so his mind went around and around the problem as he lie on the narrow bunk until he finally fell asleep, though he didn’t know it.
He was packing things up in his apartment, ready to move, to start a new life in a safer place, without a creepy basement. He was happy, but tired from the effort of putting what little he owned into cardboard boxes, some of which he had actually made himself, he was proud to note. He sat down on his simple IKEA couch and laid back his head and fell asleep.
As he watched his eyelids fall, he screamed out inside, warning himself not to fall asleep, not to give in to the...but it was too late. He watched himself leave his apartment and walk to the end of the hallway. As he reached the doors to the stairwell, he passed the kid from 407, Boyle was his name, he thought. He worked down at the motor factory and came in late each night.
Inside, Eagan was screaming to Boyle to save him, trying to get his limp arms to reach out and grab him as he passed. Outside, Eagan just nodded to him. Boyle returned the greeting and moved on down the hallway. Eagan proceeded down the stairs.
With each flight down, his fear increased. He could feel his heart beating through his chest and by the time he got to the first floor, it was physically painful, a sledgehammer against the inside of his sternum. He moved down the hall toward the basement door, screaming wildly on the inside, but silent as death on the outside. He made it to the door and stopped. As if in slow motion, he reached out for the doorknob and turned it.
* * *
“He’s right down here,” said the officer in charge of the small block of cells housed in the local precinct house. Gilbert had read Smith on his nameplate but couldn’t remember his first name. Rarely were prisoners kept locally, as most were processed and shipped downtown to a much newer and larger facility. “He begged us to keep him in custody.”
Parme gave Gilbert a knowing look.
“Did we get a swab for DNA testing?” Gilbert asked.
“Yep, and prints. If he’s your guy, we should know it shortly.”
Officer Smith opened the last door. At the sound of its opening, a smallish man squatting in the center of the cell spun his head around to face them. His clothing had been ripped up and there were bloody scratches covering his face and torso. His eyes were wide and bloodshot. Spittle ran down his thin chin.
Upon seeing the officers enter, he screamed and rushed the cell door, throwing himself up against the bars hard enough to rattle the cage.
“Please!” he screamed. “Please! You have to wake me up!”
He stood their, pressed against the bars, clawing at the air in an attempt to reach the officers on the other side of the bars, his mouth a frothy mess, blood dripping from his scratches.
Parme looked at Gilbert. “Well, I’ll be damned. Maybe he is crazy.”
Read Part 7.
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