The Fey Gargoyles
Terry stepped out of his bus at the first security check point, out of three, that lead into the Fey Memorial Institute for the Violent Minds. The building ahead of him housed some of the most violent and mentally deranged individuals on the east coast. How Terry wound up on this assignment, he wasn’t quite sure but upon seeing the building from afar for the first time, he cursed the stars that crossed themselves to bring him before this forlorn and intimidating sight.
“Christ almighty,” he whispered as he handed over his identification to the officer at the gate.
The officer took his time going over the cards and papers that granted Terry permission to enter, looking again and again at Terry as if at any second he could attack. He wasn’t taking any chances.
“Ok. I need you to stand back sir,” the officer said.
“Yeah, ok,” Terry acceded as he put a reluctant distance between himself and his only means of escape.
The officer boarded the bus, carrying a very large gun, the sight of which sent a wave of goosebumps up and down the rollercoaster of Terry’s spine. Why would someone need a firearm that grizzly? He didn’t pursue this line of thought any further.
As the officer was searching the bus he turned his attention to his destination in the distance. The building itself sent the message that it was pregnant with a bitter child. It was tall and block shaped, made of a stone that looked like it had once been white but for whatever reason had turned a sickly yellow color, a color that was oddly matched by the trees that surrounded the grounds. The trees, mostly oak and maple, were tall, probably second growth that flourished well in the rich soil found in the middle part of Virginia. The size wasn’t particularly noteworthy but Terry did notice that every tree in view seemed, no, was, leaning away from the building up on the horizon. It’s as if the entire forest, with a single hive mind, recognized that the further it was from the Institute the better. Each tree doubled back and warped in on itself in an apparent effort to put itself at the greatest possible distance.
The officer came out of the bus briskly.
“You’re all set,” he said in a clear baritone. “The next check point up ahead will repeat this process so I suggest keeping you identification handy.”
“Got it,” Terry responded.
“Glad you’re finally here. Means we all might get out of here ok,” the officer called to Terry’s back as he climbed back into his bus and started the engine.
“Wish I could say the same,” he muttered as he shifted the bus into gear and rolled through the open gate, which closed behind him sharply.
The Fey Institute for Violent Minds was named for the rich philanthropist Gavin Christopher Fey whose family had inherited great wealth after World War 2. No one is quite sure where the family acquired the wealth, some people say they found Nazi gold in the aftermath of the liberation of Paris, others say they betrayed partners in a bank heist in the early 60s and were never caught, no one really knows but everyone is of the opinion that the money was ill gotten. The reason for this was not due to anything Gavin Christopher Fey had done, but his brother, John.
From the time they were little people had always known that Gavin was going to make something of his life while John… he was different. As a young boy John had complained of vivid hallucinations. In the beginning they were benign, he would imagine that fairies were flying around him as he played outside, that friendly hippos were in his friend’s swimming pool, and other fancies of that nature. Soon, however, the young boy’s mind seemingly turned on him. On more than one occasion he would say that people were bleeding from their eyes, people that no one else could see. These people, he said, followed him around wherever he went, telling him to hurt people or they’d hurt him. He called these people the Gargoyles.
His parents were alarmed by their son’s visions and gave him the best psychiatric attention that money could buy, but unfortunately, at the time psychiatry and psychology were both in their infancy. They sent him to early masters of psychoanalysis, students of Freud and of Freud’s student Jung. After many painstaking hours with the child, drawing from him every detail they could about “The Gargoyles” they could determine very little.
All they knew was that these visions called John their father and that they would not grant him a moment’s respite unless he placated them. These indulgences varied from pushing down a school friend as they walked by all the way to cutting the head off of his class’ pet rabbit with a knife he snuck in from home.
The Feys resorted to a new technique called electrotherapy that was supposed to work wonders on the minds of mentally disturbed patients. An electrode on either side of the subject’s temples and a bite plate in their mouth, a high voltage electric shock would be sent through the patient’s brain, supposedly correcting whatever electrical imbalance was causing the initial problem.
This seemed to work for young John. As a result of the treatment these phantoms receded and only reappeared to him sporadically as dull visions, as one would view a figure through a thick fog. Their voices would only be whispers then, enough for him to ignore. For a while.
John grew up to have a semi-normal life. He attended a new school, far from the one in which he had been enrolled before and was normal. Quiet, but normal for all intents and purposes. Whenever the shadows of the Gargoyles began to come into focus his parents sent him in for another round of electroshock. As he got older, drugs replaced the electricity in keeping John’s mind from turning on him.
He was accepted to Virginia Tech, where he met his wife, Karen, who bore four sons for him. Quadruplets, in fact. Life was chugging along at a decent clip for John Fey.
The second check point was approaching so Terry slowed his bus down to a crawl. The bus itself was a converted school bus, which is why Terry was assigned to this particular job. He had been a driver for the Center Valley School district for twenty years. This, in fact, was the resurrection of a bus that he had once driven while working for the school district. Old number eleven. The memories that he had of that bus. Driving kindergarteners on their first day, their eyes wide with apprehension at finally going to big people’s school. Watching them grow and develop into intelligent little squirts or troublemakers. Even the troublemakers were a fond memory for Terry. They’d sit in the back and laugh loudly at each other’s jokes, often jokes about farts, and rarely cause any real trouble.
The bus had changed quite a bit since he last saw it. The seats were still the same but that was about the extent of the similarities. The happy yellow of the outside had been replaced with a steel grey and the name of the institute had been painted on the side, warning anyone who might be driving on the same roads as the bus to keep a safe distance. The windows had been replaced by steel meshwork that barely allowed sunlight to pass through the now inoperable windows. The glass itself had been replaced with a stronger, bulletproof facsimile of what had originally been there. The seats themselves, while being the originals, now were adorned with iron alloy rings. It would be these rings that the prisoners would be shackled to for the duration of their ride with Terry, a ride he hoped would be over quickly.
Urban sprawl had brought the suburbs of the nearby Jackson City within a few miles of the Institute, and the people living in those suburbs were not comfortable with the idea of living so close to the East Coasts’ most violent lunatics, so they pressured the state legislature to move the inmates and the Fey Institute further away, up into the Blue Ridge Mountains that one could see far away on the horizon.
That’s why Terry was here.
The move had started earlier in the month. They transported the “less dangerous” inmates first with the lower level security employees and doctors accompanying them to the new location. This was to ensure that the route to the new site and the site itself could handle the easy customers before the heavy hitters were brought in as well.
All signs pointed to “they could”.
So now, Terry, a former school bus driver has been called out of retirement seven years after the fact due to a lack of drivers to drive the remaining seventeen inmates to the mountains. The seventeen most dangerous psychopaths on the East Coast.
Terry was overjoyed.
He brought the bus to a stop in front of the second check point, turned off the engine and got out of his bus. This time he was greeted by double the amount of guards, six to be exact, and they all had guns double the size of the first one he had seen. The sinking feeling Terry experienced was interrupted by the guard barking at him.
“Identification please,” the very large man demanded
“Yes,” Terry answered nearly inaudibly as he handed it over.
As the one massive guard looked over his papers another came and engaged Terry’s attention.
“It is at this point that I will brief you as to your protocol once you get inside the third check point, do you understand?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“The inmates are in the yard as we speak, the doctors have advised that most of them be allowed to exercise before the transportation as a way of keeping them calm. They will be moving about semi freely when you enter. You are not to get out of you vehicle. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They will be lined up and shackled together in groups of four. These groups are designed to keep them calm as well as inhibiting any chance that they should escape should something happen. These groups are not to be tampered with, do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“As the inmates load the bus you are not to speak to them, make eye contact with them, or in any way draw their attention to you. Do you understand?
“Yes, sir.”
“Their accompanying doctors and enforcers will handle everything. You only need focus on the driving. Any questions?”
“Actually yes,” Terry squeaked.
“Yes?” the guard interrogated, he clearly had not expected a question from Terry.
“You said that they’ll be locked together in groups of four?”
“Affirmative.”
“There are seventeen passengers, aren’t there?”
The guard paused before finally smiling. His smile was like a mouthful of knives.
“They didn’t tell you,” he nearly giggled.
“Tell me what?” asked Terry, the fear of the answer bubbling up in his chest like heartburn.
“There will be one inmate being transported in full body restraints. His name is Lockard, you might know him as the Chesapeake Bay Cannibal,” the guard explained as he watched the color drain from Terry’s already pale face.
“He’s… in there?” he stammered out.
“Not for long,” smiled the knife toothed guard. “Soon he’s going to be in there.”
He pointed to the bus.
There was a long silence where Terry felt as though he was going to fall over. Noticing this, the other guards informed him that they had a bathroom in their guard house and encouraged him to use it prior to entering the complex.
The inmates, they explained, could sense fear.
Terry stumbled into the bathroom. He had managed to make it out of sight of the guards before he started to shake like John Fey when he used to receive his electroshock. A full body tremor that he just couldn’t stop no matter how he tried. Terry splashed water on his face and held onto the sink for stability. He looked at himself in the mirror and pondered the implications of moving the Chesapeake Bay Cannibal in his bus.
The Bay Cannibal was famous for the dozen or so murdered he left behind him on a trail of destruction that took police a full year to reach the end of. He was famous for eating the entire left side of his victims while leaving the right in pristine condition, even cleaning them before he dumped them in public places under cover of night. When asked why he did such things, the Cannibal would only laugh and respond:
“If you’re going to eat someone you might as well start with their heart.”
No one ever got the chance to ask John Fey why he did what he did. They simply found him hanging from his second floor balcony by the neck from what, upon closer inspection, the police found to be the intestines of his wife, who’s mangled and disfigured corpse was found in the bath tub.
The body was so disfigured that the police had to resort to DNA testing to make sure that the mash of bones and organ meat that they found in the Fey’s blood spattered bathroom was in fact the Missus of the house. The fact that the jaw bone of the victim couldn’t be found, and has yet to be recovered, made dental record useless.
The DNA tests found some interesting results. The body did in fact belong to Karen Fey, that was not the interesting part. The discovery of note to investigators was that the DNA of Mrs. Fey was remarkably similar to that of Mr. Fey. So similar that investigators were forced to face the fact that John Fey had married and fathered quadruplets with his half sister.
The four children, who were reportedly present for their mother’s murder and father’s suicide, were broken up and asked about what they had seen and heard. All four recounted the preceding with remarkable detail and horror. The boys relayed to the police that throughout the ordeal their father referred to their mother as “Lil Sis”.
When Gavin Christopher Fey was told that his brother had apparently succumbed to his mental condition and killed himself after murdering his wife, he announced his plan for the Institute that Terry was now walking back to his bus in order to enter.
The bus lurched forward once again, this time with much more hesitation. It might have been Terry’s subconscious pleading with him not to go any further or it might have been the bus that had served Terry so well so long ago trying to get him to flee with it. The point is moot. It growled ahead down the dilapidated road to the final gate which was about fifty yards in front of him.
At seven o’clock this morning I was eating my wife’s omelet, Terry thought. Amazed at how far away he seemed those few short hours go, he lifted up a small prayer to a God that he wasn’t even sure really existed. A prayer that he might tomorrow wake up at home, just like this morning, and choke down another rancid concoction of his wife’s creation. He was happy in this life. Didn’t ask for much. Now all he wanted was to be able to continue existing, that bare minimum that so many are content with.
The gate was now close enough that he began to slow the old number eleven bus down. The partition itself was a massive creation that looked as if it had survived the dinosaurs. This is not a comment on the door’s structural stability so much as an appraisal of its fortitude. It was constructed of heavy iron arranged in geometrical shapes that were either ornamental or somehow engineered that way for reinforcement, Terry didn’t know which, made the door hard to look at for long. It was topped with snaggled looking razor wire that ran also along the perimeter of the reinforced concrete wall. It might have been his imagination or a trick of the light, but Terry thought he spied dried blood mixed in with the sea of barbs.
Directly below the razor wire but above the opening read the words “A Place of Hope.”
The irony escaped no one.
Terry slowed to a crawl before the gates but the guard began to shout at him not to cease his forward motion. Terry was more than willing to comply. He hit the gas as the massive metal doors uttered a diabolic screech and began to open. Light from the other side burst forth from between the doors like water from a crumbling dam. The light was the same yellow color of the walls and trees around them. Everything had the jaundice yellow pal about it in this place and this did not escape Terry’s ever quickening notice.
Two guards from the outside trotted along side the bus carrying guns that looked as though they could pierce the concrete walls if need be. These men looked not at Terry or the bus but at what lie before them: A large open yard populated by roughly twenty five people.
Terry knew that at least seventeen of these people would be riding on his bus in a matter of minutes. He also knew that at least seventeen of these people would kill him for no reason whatsoever.
He gripped the steering wheel a little tighter.
At the bus’ approach the assumed non-inmates began organizing the assumed inmates into the groups that they would be traveling in. Groups of four that were scientifically derived to make the inmates calm, stable. At least in so far as these men could be.
Terry, in his morbid curiosity and all consuming fear of the unknown, looked out at the men that were now being coaxed into two parallel lines of eight, only twenty or so feet away from the bus.
They came in a variety of sizes, but were almost uniformly colored: pale. These men looked as though they weren’t allowed outside often. Terry supposed it was because they were too rough or unstable or whatever to be out with the normal populace of the Institute. Or, as normal as such a populace can be…
Doctors and guards began traveling down the rows, shackling the men together. For the most part the inmates regarded these actions as if they weren’t even happening. There were four, however, who cackled with intense fervor when the chains were fastened to their wrists and ankles. Terry couldn’t help but look at them. He didn’t look long, he knew he wasn’t supposed to in the first place, but he did look long enough to notice that each of them had what looked like black eyes. The skin under their eyes was redish purple, not as if they had been struck, but as though they themselves had driven their own fingers into the area under their eyelids that all the blood vessels there had broken under the skin. Giving their eyes the illusion that they were bleeding.
He also noticed one of them was look right at him.
The guards began to move the lines. When the first guard arrived at the doors of the bus, he knocked the butt of his gun on the glass, signifying that it was time for Terry to open the doors. He complied reluctantly.
The inmates were guided into the bus by the doctors while one guard stood at the door and another obscured Terry from the view of his new passengers. They loaded on in relative silence. Some of them mumbled incoherently, but nothing too unnerving until the laughing foursome boarded. The one that had caught Terry staring glowered at him as he passed, though Terry couldn’t see it because of the guard, but he caught the tail end of the glance in his rearview mirror.
Won’t be using that much during this trip, Terry thought.
The four were escorted to their seats, like all the others that had boarded already, but right as the doctors finished locking them down, the one of them, still looking in the mirror at Terry, called out:
“Gonna meet Great Grandma soon, driver man!”
The doctors responded by telling him to be silent and the guards responded by taking the safety off their weapons. The inmate merely smiled and looked away. It looked as though he was trying to look into the woods, but Terry was too shaken to be sure.
Great Grandma? What the hell could that mean? Terry feverishly thought over this terrifyingly abrupt statement for a minute. His thinking however was interrupted by the arrival of his final passenger.
The Chesapeake Bay Cannibal was wheeled out of the front doors of the institute in what looked like a dolly used for lifting freight converted for transporting dangerous men. His massive arms were strapped by his sides and his feet were in massive metal boots that were welded to the dolly. A series of leather straps crossed his massive chest that was slowly rising and falling with his breath. Lastly a mask covered the nightmare’s face a face that Terry had the feeling he had seen before, though probably just from the news. The mask had grates that allowed air to pass through but were not large enough to allow anything else.
Terry knew he shouldn’t be staring at the man wheeling towards him but the fear commanded him too. Terry could remember the horrible wave of fear that had gripped the entire state during this man’s rampage. People were terrified to go anywhere, even in broad daylight lest they should find one of his victims or worse, be chosen as one themselves. Terry, personally, boarded all of his windows and bought a shotgun during this terrible episode in the state’s history.
The guards, upon seeing his approach lowered their guns a little.
He was brought up the steps of the bus slowly and carefully, so as to not jostle him. The slightest disturbance, one of the doctors explained to Terry, could wake him up. He was heavily sedated but had an inhuman ability to snap out of drug induced malaises. Terry recalled the bumpy road leading out of the complex with a certain amount of anxiety.
They brought the cannibal to the back of the bus and strapped him to what had once been the back emergency exit, still on the dolly. The doctors and guards apparently weren’t taking any chances in waking this sleeping terror. When the doctors had him secured they quickly scuttled off the bus, shutting the protective cage that separated Terry and the guards from their wretched cargo as they went. The guards told Terry to start his engine and go.
“Are you going to stand the whole time?” Terry asked.
One remained silent the other repeated the command.
“It might be dangerous to stand like that though, I might have to stop short for something, you could get hurt,” Terry babbled. He was not in love with the idea of the guards being hurt in any way.
“Start your engine and let’s get the fuck going,” the guard growled.
He didn’t need to say it again.
The bus rolled briskly but carefully out of the gate and toward the first security point. As he approached the guards waived him through. He got the hint: this bus stops for nothing.
He picked up speed and repeated the process of not stopping at the final security point. He was now alone with two guards and a bus full of lunatics. The numbers weren’t in his favor. He wasn’t the only one who knew that they were now on their own. The man that had been staring at Terry began to cough, loudly and clearly on purpose. The guards instantly commanded him to be silent but he continued right on coughing loudly and insincerely.
The guard that had snapped at Terry pulled out his keys and unlocked the safety cage in order to go and sort out the matter himself. Now that they were away from the doctors, the guards could do whatever they liked. Unbeknownst to the guard that as he unlocked the door, the coughing man had handed a small piece of bone to the man beside him. The bone was a small pick that had been whittled from the jaw bone of Karen Fey, the four men’s mother.
As the guard opened the door, the chains were unlocked. The guard making his way quickly to where they were seated saw this, but too late. The coughing man stood up and screamed in a soul piercing voice:
“GREAT GRANDMOTHER!”
Terry looked back at the disturbance, terrified not only that a prisoner was free but that the screaming would awaken the Cannibal.
Which it did.
His eyes popped open instantly and he began to struggle against his restraints. The guard was taken by surprise by the sudden motion and turned to fire not at the coughing man but at the Cannibal. Before he could pull the trigger however, he was thrown from his feet as the bus turned angrily and sharply to the left.
After looking at the altercation Terry realized he wasn’t watching the road. He turned his attention back just in time to see a woman standing in the middle of the road. She was gaunt and pale. Her clothes were old and on her chest there was what looked like a Star of David in yellow felt. The same yellow as the Institute. Her eyes were red as if they were a window into the Fury of hell itself and from around her neck hung a noose.
Terry screamed at the sight and swerved to miss the woman. He had lost control of old number eleven and knew it. He was sure he was going to die, one way or the other. The bus capsized, sending the two guards into the roof of the bus with a sickening double thud. When gravity brought them back to a motionless state they were already dead.
Old number eleven screeched to a halt on its left side, scrapping the new paint off and revealing the yellow underneath. Glass showered down all around Terry who was knocked monetarily unconscious. When he came to he was aware of two things, the overwhelming and omnipresent pain in his body and the creeping fear of the others in the bus.
He exhaled heavily, no ribs broken at least. He freed himself from the seat belt that had saved his life and crawled out of the shattered windshield in front of him. He was out. He tried to stand. Pain exploded through his left side as he fell back down. He looked at his leg. The bone was sticking through the skin.
“Help,” he called lamely.
He looked around. No one was there. Not even the woman he had seen only moments before. There was no trace of the woman’s existence. Anywhere.
He started to drag himself away from the toppled bus, he couldn’t see into its darkened interior but he knew what was in there and he wanted to be as far away from it as possible.
Suddenly the top vent of the bus shot off. Out of it stepped four figures, each of them cackling manically. They stood and spoke for a moment and then started running full steam ahead into the forest, each in different directions. They hadn’t noticed him.
Terry continued to drag himself listening to their insane cackling grow further away. Sirens became audible in the distance. Help was coming. Thank God, help was coming.
He let himself down onto the gravel road to rest and wait for the approaching emergency vehicles. Then the creeping sensation that he was not alone came over him. He opened his eyes and propped himself up on one shoulder to look around. The cackling had grown very faint, but he could only hear three distinct voices.
A rustle behind him made his heart leap, as the coughing man emerged from the forest.
“You were staring at me, boy” he hissed. “Don’t you know that ain’t polite?”
“Please… no,” Terry whimpered.
“No? You don’t know that ain’t polite?”
“I didn’t…”
“Don’t interrupt me, boy.”
The coughing man put his face right down next to Terry’s.
“Do I have to teach you a lesson?”
Terry didn’t know what to do. The man’s hideous eyes drilled into him and every second that passed was another second less until it was all over for Terry, driver of the old number eleven bus.
A sound echoed out of the bus so savagely that even the coughing man turned startled.
“You leave him alone, Fey” rumbled a deep voice from within the busted carcass.
“None of your business,” The coughing man replied
“No,” replied the voice as the speaker forced his way out of the bus and into the light. It was the Chesapeake Cannibal and he was carrying one of the guard’s guns.
“But it certainly is Mr. Firebarker here’s business,” he said
A pause. The tension between the two men was unbearable for Terry who lay on the ground bleeding between them. Finally:
“If you say so,” said the coughing man.
“I say so,” drawled the Cannibal.
The coughing man retreated back into the woods quickly; the sirens were almost upon them. As he was just becoming totally obscured by the deep foliage he turned back and with a sneer said:
“Make sure to work on those manners driver man, other people in this world ain’t as kind as I am.”
He vanished, crashing through the underbrush.
Terry looked back at the Cannibal who was walking towards him very slowly, deliberately. Ever step he took he claimed the ground he walked on as his own. No one else would ever own that ground again as he stalked closer to Terry.
“You’re lucky I’m around little man,” he said. “That fucker would have killed you slowly and painfully. But I… I ain’t gonna do that to ya.”
He lifted his gun. Terry closed his eyes and said goodbye to all he ever knew.
Then he heard the gun fall at his feet.
“You kill me now, little man.” Said the Cannibal. “You owe me.”
“What?” Terry could barely get the word out.
“I ain’t goin back to all that captivity shit. You kill me now, before them pigs get here.”
It did, in fact sound like the cops were almost within view. Another few seconds and they would be there.
“Why don’t you… like those…” Terry stuttered, bewildered.
“Escape? With them? Naw man, them fuckers… is crazy.”
Not understanding why, Terry lifted the gun and pointed it at the Cannibal’s head.
“You sure?” Terry asked.
“Yep.”
The shot rang out just as the police arrived. The Chesapeake Cannibal fell to the road in a mass, a hole between his eyes and blood running down his scarred face. A police officer ran over to Terry.
“Jesus, nice shot,” he said.
“Yeah,” Terry replied lamely.
“Any more try to escape?” he asked.
“Wha…?”
“Escape! Did any more of them try to get out?”
“Uh… yeah. Four of them.”
“Did you get any of them? With the gun?”
“No,”
“Shit. Where’d they go?”
Terry pointed vaguely in the four directions the men ran. Search parties were dispatched in each direction. Terry was loaded into an ambulance and taken from the scene. As they were wheeling him away, Terry didn’t take his eyes off the old number eleven bus and the body of Simon Lockard, better known as the Chesapeake Bay Cannibal, who, unknown to Terry, had ridden that bus to his first day of kindergarten twenty five years earlier.
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