“Have you much guilt Miss Cotton?” Asked Boris Thomashefsky. “My people, we are raised on it. Fed it like mother’s milk. We do terrible things to each other, but we feel guilt, wallow in it, so that makes it acceptable.”
Nikki Cotton took a moment to mull the question over in her mind. Was she guilty? By her count she was more guilty than most. She had been born black to parents who were not only poor but also uneducated. They had made their livelihood scratching the Mississippi mud and hoping that something would grow in it. She never went to school, but she was still smarter than her brothers, and her parents, and that caused a considerable amount of conflict in the house, with Nikki on the losing end more often than she would like. She was guilty of hating her parents.
When she was fifteen her parents married her off to a preacher man almost twice her age, and she moved north to a little town called Refuge. Her husband was worse than her father, and she was forbidden to travel to see any of her kin. Even when she was with child, and then miscarried, she was left to suffer alone and frightened. Her husband’s idea of comfort was to bellow scripture at her until she could no longer bear it and collapsed sobbing in anguish.
That’s how she remembered him, bellowing scripture at the angry gray sky, the wind-driven rain whipping around him, two dozen of his flock kneeling before him. They were praying that the levee wouldn’t break, that the great river wouldn’t tear through its banks and whisk them away. They had been told to leave, but they had refused. They had their faith, and that would be enough to protect them. Lillian had slipped away when no one was looking. She was on the hill about a mile north when she heard a great crack and saw the steeple shudder and then sink out of view. She turned and ran further up the hill and never looked back. Was she responsible, was she guilty for all those deaths?
They put her in a survivor’s camp for single women someplace in Georgia. It was supposed to be a safe place, but it didn’t take long for the men who ran it to give in to their baser instincts. She had been cornered one night; three men had backed her into a storeroom. If it hadn’t been for Tessie, if that big, dumb cow of a woman hadn’t of wandered in and then whooped some serious behind … well she didn’t like to think about it. When they came to punish Tessie and her, she ran to the railroad and followed the tracks north, hopping trains when she could. She hadn’t set out to come to New York, it just turned out that way, and Red Hook was as good as place as any other she had ever seen. Better even, nobody ever asked about your past in Red Hook, because everyone had one. No one asked her about whether Tessie had lived or died. This was a blessing, because she didn’t know, and thinking about it made her feel terrible.
“Guilt Mr. Thomashefsky? I suppose I’ve had my fair share.” She replied. “Regrets too, but when it comes to taking care of things, I know what needs doing and when, if that is what you mean.”
He eyed her up and down. She was still a sliver of a girl, nineteen maybe twenty, light-skinned and soft-spoken. Attractive if you liked that sort of thing. He didn’t, he preferred his women short and a little plump, like his wife and mistress. There was a time when all men liked women with some meat on the bone, but times were changing, and he knew the younger men, men like his protégé Max, were drifting toward thinner, less voluptuous girls.
From his look Nikki knew what he was thinking. “I can handle myself sir.”
He nodded. “It’s not you I worry about.” He turned the handle on the door and ushered her into the room. “Nikki, I would like you to meet the Red Hook Theater Company.” It was cavernous, and from the mirrors on the walls and the polished hardwood floors Nikki could tell it had once been a dance studio. Windows at the far end let in a soft September breeze, setting the dozens of thin white curtains that hung from the bare rafters in motion, like gossamer ghosts in a strange ballet. The curtains created a semblance of privacy, dividing the room’s occupants from each other. They lay in beds, still like statues, some with their arms by their sides, others with arms outreached but still unmoving. At first, she thought they were dead, but she could see them breathing, slowly, deliberately, clinging to life as best they could.
She managed to open her mouth and leak a few words out, “What … what is wrong with them?”
The old man shook his head and spat something in a language she couldn’t understand. “I don’t know,” he said, “nobody knows.”
It took a few weeks, but Nikki learned that wasn’t exactly true. The nurses who came daily, and the doctor that came weekly, had a name for what had happened to the thirty-three men and woman that lay in the room. They called it Encephalitis lethargica or the sleepy sickness. It had first been diagnosed decades ago and had spread slowly. Estimates suggested that worldwide there were more than five million victims, now housed in various wards like this one. Contrary to her first impression they weren’t immobile, they did move, just incredibly slowly. More than once she had returned to her charges to discover one of them out of bed, or almost out of bed, standing there eerily like a mannequin. There was a suspicion that millions more had contracted the disease and then died before aid could be rendered, either through starvation or simply being unable to avoid the most minor of incidents. Not that it mattered. There was no cure, merely palliative care. Some suggested that the origin of the condition was psychic and that the ills of the modern world were too much for some minds and that events like the Great War drove some people to withdrawal from it. Others suggested an unknown bacterium or something called a virus, that the sleepy sickness could be transmitted like the influenza or chicken pox. There were wilder theories, one woman who claimed to be an adherent to a mystical order in Sussex England, wrote in her scandalous memoir that the epidemic was the result of a mystical accident, a summoning gone horribly wrong. Most called her mad, but when she was decapitated in a terrible automobile crash her critics went quiet, and she and her claims faded into obscurity.
Nikki didn’t care. She was happy to have the job. She wasn’t a qualified nurse, but she was smart and a quick study. Most of it was common sense. Keep the patients clean and dry. Keep them moving, even if they were in bed, they had to be rotated so they didn’t develop bed sores. They had to be fed twice a day, a thin gruel that didn’t have to be chewed. Keep them warm at night and cool during the day. Give them sun, but not too much.
There was of course one rule above all others: Never fall asleep. Towards this end Mr. Thomashefsky had delivered an urn of coffee twice a day, and staffing was done in staggered shifts of eight hours each, rather than entire crews changing every twelve hours. In this way two or three attendants were always fresh. At least that was the plan. Given the extra hours off, some of the girls picked up part-time positions meaning they were already tired when they came to work on the makeshift ward that sat above Thomashefsky’s stage.
With the entire troupe incapacitated, Nikki would have thought the theater would be empty, but Thomashefsky had taken to loaning out his stage to others in the community, but only during the day. Thus, in the early mornings the theater would fill up with actors and musicians, and even patrons who would come to see a show that wasn’t quite ready for Broadway or the road.
It was not common knowledge that the resident cast lay dormant inside the back rooms of the building. Mr. Thomashefsky and his assistant Max wanted to keep it that way. Visitors, family members only, were welcome, but had to use the performer’s entrance, where they were discretely whisked to a nearby door that concealed stairs to the upper level. They came and went at all hours. Some came to just sit and stare, others brought the daily papers or a book and read out loud. Some brought records and danced clumsily with their slow, stiff relations. It was sadly beautiful, both tragic and comedic, and somehow, they all knew it, and in their own ways acknowledged it.
Thomashefsky had ordered the room decorated with pieces from the prop room. There were masks on the walls, paintings made to look like windows offered up impossible vistas of deserts and tropical islands and teeming cities. In the four corners stood white marble busts that the sly manager had bought from an estate sale in London. The sculptor was a man of some fame and talent who had for reasons unknown been committed to an asylum and there had later hung himself. The marble busts were life-sized and though they bore different expressions each had the same classic countenance and were identified by names in Greek letters. Nikki couldn’t read Greek, but one of the nurses could, and she said that the statues were of the Oneiroi, the Dream Kings and were Hypnos, Morpheus, Icelus, and Phantasos. The four were, or so she was told, traditional patron gods of actors and playwrights. Nikki didn’t care what their names were, or what they represented. She thought they were creepy. Their eyes were too large, almost bulging, and too far apart. They seemed to follow her wherever she went. They were unnerving, even more than the still lives she tended to during the day.
After two months working nights, Nikki developed a system that allowed her to accomplish the routine tasks set to her in a rather efficient manner. Rather than working on a single patient at a time, she would work on them in small batches of four. Getting them all out of bed, feeding them, washing them, drying them, dressing them, and then setting them in chairs, while she changed their bed linens. It was a systematic way of dealing with things that seemed obvious to her, but anathema to everyone else, until they saw how it was done. Even then the nurses in charged huffed and then stalked out of the room leaving her alone. It wasn’t forbidden for her to be alone, but it was frowned upon. But even here in Red Hook, where goods form the Erie Canal were made ready for delivery to the entire world, and the streets were filled with the voices of hundreds of nations, a poor, black girl from the south still got the short end of the stick.
Nurses Carr and Nicholas would often leave her alone for extended periods of time. Sometimes they went downstairs to the alley, other times they crawled out the window onto the roof and sat on the green, metallic blister of a hatch that provided access from backstage to the roof. They smoked cigarettes or sipped from a metallic flask. Nikki knew there was a stash of moonshine in a storage closet just offstage. They left her alone particularly when there was a visitor, and regularly when Mr. Gorski came in. He was old, and heavy-set, and smelled like boiled cabbage. No one wanted to be in the room when he came in. Being alone made her feel bad, small, and even sad, but Nikki Cotton knew how to turn that to her advantage. When no one else was around she took to reading the books and papers and documents that had for one reason or another found their way into the makeshift ward.
It was newspapers she read first because they were most ephemeral, followed by books. She had loved the books that had been brought in. She had read the poetry of Yeats and Graves, adventures by Burroughs, mysteries by Christie, and tragedies by Fitzgerald, and of course, she had read the works of Langston Hughes who so captured the spirit of the age and made her look at New York, and the people who lived in it, with different eyes. The world was an amazing place, filled with a myriad of people, and only a few of them thought like her father or her husband. Somehow that made her feel better, not only about herself but the world too.
It was on Friday October 24th that the first hint of what was to come occurred. Dawn had just broken, and she was in the last hour of her shift, the older nurse was in the alleyway smoking, so she was alone when Mr. Gorski came in. He usually came on Mondays in the evening. He was a businessman of some sort and always dressed the part. It was his daughter Katerina he came to see, who had been twenty-two when she had been struck down, she was the youngest member of the troupe. He sat there that morning and just stared at her. For a while he held her hand, and then he kissed her on the cheek and left. Nikki didn’t think much of it.
That was until he returned Monday night, and again on Tuesday morning. He looked sad, tired, almost broken down. Nikki brought him a cup of coffee and he took it with trembling hands. There were tears welling up in his eyes. She asked if there was anything she could do for him, but he just shook his head.
“Thank you for the coffee.” He muttered. “The coffee at my office is always hot and sweet and mixed with cream, they call it a Franziskaner. I hate it. I like my coffee like this; warm, black and bitter. This is good. This is what men should drink.” He had an accent, it wasn’t German exactly, but it wasn’t Hungarian either, it was something in between that she couldn’t place, Polish maybe, or perhaps Prussian. He set the cup down and looked at his hands. “Soft. My hands have gone soft. I worked once you know, in the shipyards when I was a young man. I was poor, but I did things. Now I do nothing. Perhaps it was better to be poor. We shall see.” He put his hat on and wandered out without saying another word.
He was there again late on Wednesday morning. Nikki wasn’t even supposed to be there, but one of the nurses had sent word that she was sick, and Nikki was asked to cover for her, just for a couple of hours. Gorski had come in with the small crowd that had gathered to rehearse some play or another in the theater downstairs. He walked over to the side of his child’s bed and sat down. He hadn’t even taken off his coat. He was sitting there holding her hand and he was crying. Whatever he had been holding back had been finally let loose.
Nikki couldn’t watch him suffer. “Mr. Gorski? Is there anything I can do?”
Startled he stood up so fast that he nearly knocked the chair over. “No, no,” he muttered through his thick accent and tears. “There is nothing anyone can do.” He was walking frantically through the ward. “Everything is lost.” He stumbled along with Nikki in tow. “The house is gone, the bank is gone, and the money is gone. It’s only a matter of time before they come for me … ” He was frantic, almost spinning, like he was delirious.
“Mr. Gorski?” Nikki reached out but he pulled away.
He had spun himself into the corner. “The market has collapsed. They will take everything. I will have nothing. Not even money for food. Let alone to pay for Katerina’s care.” He reached into his coat and from it withdrew a wicked blade. It was at least six inches long and glinted in the morning sun. There were symbols etched into the metal along the edge and they seemed to Nikki something terrible.
“Where did you get that?”
The old man looked at the gleaming knife. “Katerina gave it to me the day before she fell ill. She said it came from London with these damn marble busts.” He looked at the hateful thing that sat staring at him from the corner. “Damn Thomashefsky he and his horrible theater have taken my daughter from me! After today I have nothing left, but my life. And Thomashefsky can have that too!”
And then the knife flashed in his hand and red ran cross the edge. The blade bit deep and fast and as he pulled it from his throat a great arc of crimson flew across the room. Blood splattered across Nikki’s eyes, across the floating curtains, across the walls and across the face of the bust that sat behind him.
Nikki opened her mouth to scream but before she could, her terror turned to morbid fascination. Gorski had fallen to the floor, and from his convulsing body blood was flowing freely, but it was not working its way downward across his shirt, but rather it flew across the air and into the suddenly open mouth of the marble bust. Like some grotesque vampire the stone carving was feeding on the vital fluid that streamed from Gorski’s neck.
The feeding was not the only eerie occurrence that caught Nikki’s eye, for with each gobbet of blood the eyes, those bulbous, unnerving orbs, began to glow with a terrible darkness that spread out and sucked the very essence of light from the room, turning into a gloom-filled twilight where blood-stained curtains swayed in unfelt breezes and the bodies of her statue-like patients were no longer immobile but rather had risen and now stood upright. Their faces were like those of the busts, mouths and eyes wide open, wider than they possibly could be, as if they were flesh and blood mimics of the queer stone carvings. Carvings that had once been pure white, but now were pulsing with sickly scarlet veins.
It was then that the other nurse burst into the room, whether she had been drawn by the commotion, or had simply entered at a most unfortunate time didn’t matter. “Miss Cotton!” She barked. “What have you done?” And then she surveyed the room and began to understand, but not enough. “The sleepers … how did you? They’re awake!”
They turned toward her in a fluid motion, as if some singular intelligence controlled their actions. They turned toward her and stepped forward, arms outstretched, hands grasping. They turned toward her and with eyes and mouths wide they spoke a single word that seemed to echo back and forth from inside their throats. It was a horrible thing to hear, these vacant-eyed revenants with their stretched open mouths intoning a single word over and over again without moving their lips. As they descended on the hapless nurse Nikki covered her ears for, she could not bear that impossible sound that moaned out from the horde. But she heard it anyway and shuddered as they fell upon the woman who stood at the other end of the room, the word “Awake” reverberating in her head, a word spoken by all in imitation of Nurse Carr’s voice.
Nurse Carr vanished beneath the wave of human monstrosities. Nikki watched with morbid anticipation as to what would happen next. There was a scream, something short and final, and then a kind of wet snap. Suspecting the worst Nikki gasped involuntarily but then saw the mindless horde part and this allowed her an obscured view of the woman.
With fear and trepidation in her voice Nikki called out “Nurse Carr?”
The silhouetted shape responded to the sound of Nikki’s voice. Not in recognition of its name, but rather as if an animal had been suddenly startled. She turned and joined the horde as they shuffled forward, their mouths stretched wide and a new word echoing from within. No longer was the word “Awake” drifting out of those hollow throated creatures, instead it was the word “Carr” the last word Nikki had spoken, and it echoed in what could only be described as a queer, lifeless imitation of her own voice.
The door was cut off by dozens of grasping hands and horrible hungry mouths that were slowly shambling toward her. In the corners the darkness emitting from the eyes of statues was growing. Left with no choice she threw open one of the many windows and through it climbed out onto the roof of the theater below. There was an access hatch that led down to the back stage. From there she could make the alleyway door and then the street. In the back of her mind there was the dim idea of getting help, but it was only an afterthought. Her primary goal was to simply escape, to run home beyond the reach of what appeared to be a most terrible infection.
She slammed the window behind her and then sprinted across the tarpaper to the metallic green blister that was her escape. The icy November wind cut through her thin cotton dress and set her shivering. She cast a glance over her shoulder expecting to see her pursuers coming after her, but the window was still closed. Through the glass she could see them turning, wandering back toward the door, toward the stairs, and beyond that the theater where the rehearsal was just starting.
She grabbed the lid of the hatch and tried to wrench it open, but it didn’t move more than a fraction of an inch. As she pulled, she could feel the metallic rod that locked the hatch in place. For all she knew it could have been a lock, or a simple bolt, the end result was the same, she was trapped on the roof. Or was she?
The hinges for the hatch were on the outside. She didn’t have a screwdriver, but there was plenty of debris on the roof: a can, a broken broom handle, shattered glass, and a box of rusty nails. She grabbed a nail and worked through the pins on the hinges, popping them out and then ripping open the hatch just enough so that she could squeeze through. She tore her skirt on the way down, and nearly lost her grip on one of the rungs, but she crawled down that tiny access tunnel and landed backstage, halfway between the exit and the door that led up to the ward, to terror.
She glanced at the door and caught glimpse of Nurse Nicholas passing through, she yelled her name, but the woman didn’t respond. Nikki ran after her calling her name again, but as she reached the door she saw the woman on the stairs, and the mindless, vacant eyed things bringing her down.
This time Nikki saw the whole thing. It wasn’t complicated at all, they just touched her and then there was a spark, like black lightning jumping between the infected and the victim. Nurse Nicholas seized for a moment, and then fell onto the stairs. She rose up in an instant, her own eyes vacant and her mouth growing slack and ever wider.
Nikki slammed the door shut, threw the lock and then lodged a chair under the handle. She knew it wouldn’t last, but it would buy her some time, a few minutes maybe, but that was enough. She was only steps from the exit, and she took them in seconds. Her hand fell on the doorknob, she turned it, but she never pushed it open.
She could hear the voices of the men and women in the theater. She heard them reciting their lines, and it was as if she was suddenly back in Mississippi listening to her husband and his flock pray against the rain, knowing that it would do nothing to save them as she snuck off up the hill to safety. She heard actors and the laughter from the crowd that had come to watch, and she knew that she couldn’t leave them behind. She couldn’t let people die again.
Next to the door was the small red box with the roof on it, and the word Sterling embossed on it. There were words in white too, directions. The operation was simple, deceptively simple. All she had to do was open the door and pull the handle down. Which she did. There was a short pause and a sudden pop of electricity and then the alarm was sounding, and people were yelling, and she could hear them running.
She smiled for a moment, but then she heard something else. Something heavy thudded against the door, the one that led upstairs, and she knew that the horde had reached the lower floor. She went to run again, to flee down the alleyway and out into the street. She wanted to go home and hide. Then she heard the other voices, those horrible voices calling the last word she had ever spoken, and she knew they would never stop, that she had to stop them here before they got out, before they were free, before they spread.
She turned away from the exit and ran for the other door, a thousand thoughts running through her mind. She was trying to come up with a plan. It didn’t take long, after all she had already used the threat of fire as a ruse to get everyone out, why not use the real thing to keep things contained.
She scoured the backstage for what she needed. A box of matches came from a desk drawer, and from the closet she grabbed three bottles of moonshine, which she carefully threw in a gunny sack. She glanced back at the door. Incredibly the chair was still holding.
In a flash she was up the ladder, the cloth bag over her shoulder. It was easier this time, climbing up in a controlled way rather than falling down. The rungs were cold in her hands, but the pin that held the hatch shut popped right out and she pushed the metal door up with one hand, letting it clatter to the side.
Retracing her steps across the roof, she barely noticed the cold, and slid open the window with ease. She lowered the bag inside and then climbed in after it. She made a minimum of noise but wasn’t sure if that mattered. The busts were still there, their eyes glowing black. Mr. Gorski was dead, his skin looked like a pile of dried leaves. At the other end of the room, she could see some of her former patients trying to get down the stairs, but they were still blocked in by the horde that was trapped on the stairs.
The curtains were now swaying in the cold breeze, and she moved amongst them dousing them with liquor from the first jar. She was quiet and fast as possible, and as she moved forward, she kept a careful eye on the monsters that were once human and tried not to listen to them. Then with the curtains prepared she took the second bottle of moonshine and threw it at the door where the mindless hungry things were trying to get out.
As it shattered, she cried out “Over Here!”
As expected, they turned and in their terrible shuffling way came after her, their voices calling out her own words.
Over here
Over here
Over here
They walked slow and steady, oblivious to the glass and liquor beneath their feet. They were coming for her, arms outstretched, fingers grasping mouths opened wide. She was all that mattered to them. And they cried out begging for her to join them.
Over here
Over here
Over here
She backed away toward the window, her eyes darting back and forth trying to count the monsters that were coming for her. They all had names, and once she had taken care of them, but now they were something else, something that couldn’t be let loose on the world. Once she was sure they were all in she took out the matches and lit the nearest piece of curtain on fire.
The flames danced up the alcohol-soaked cloth and caught the wind spreading around the room like a living thing. In moments the former dance studio was ablaze, towers of flame raced from the floor to the ceiling like some scene out of hell. It was inevitable really, and part of her plan, a flaming piece of cloth fell and hit the floor setting first the moonshine ablaze, and then the feet of the sleepers. Flames raced up their legs and caught on their nightgowns and pajamas.
They didn’t care. Step after step they came forward, driven by some hideous alien intelligence. In the roar of the inferno, she could still hear them calling, still hear them moaning. Their flesh burned and bubbled in the heat, and they didn’t care.
Over here
Over here
Over here
She had hoped that burning them would work, but she had suspected that it would be more complicated than that. Which is why she had held back on the third bottle of moonshine. The body of Mr. Gorski was still laying there, all the life sucked out of it at the base of the bust. She carefully went over and poured the illegal spirits over top of the marble head, letting it soak down the small column and run up against the spent shell of Mr. Gorski.
Then she lit another match and dropped it into the heap of clothes and dried skin. “I’ve always hated you,” she screamed at the formerly inanimate head as flames ran up its pulsing white and crimson flesh. At some point it had ceased to truly be stone. Maybe the fire acted as a purifying agent, revealing the truth hidden in the matrix, for beneath the flames the once classical image became something else, something twisted and inhuman, something plastic and fleshy. Something with huge eyes and a ravenous, churning mouth. Something that wasn’t of this world, but thankfully still could burn.
She ran for the window, but as she dove through something caught her leg. It was Katerina Gorski, and she was on fire. Her hair was burning, and her clothes were gone. The skin on her torso was black and ashy, her arms were on fire and the hand she grasped Nikki’s leg with was little more than smoldering bone and blackened muscle. Her mouth was still open, and from that deep, empty hollow place an imitation of Nikki’s voice echoed back, “I’ve always hated you.”
She kicked at the burning hand as her own shoe caught fire, and screamed as the flesh beneath it began to sear. She kicked again and again, screaming until her voice was hoarse and her throat raw. She kicked and kicked and screamed but the creature wouldn’t let her go. Terror gave way to fear, and despair. It blinded her.
It blinded her so much that she never saw the man running across the rooftop: The man, the fireman who with a single stroke from his axe severed the hand from the body and set her free. She fell to the roof and was scooped up by two powerful arms. She was lowered down the hatch into other hands that whisked her away. She was screaming the whole time, and the men who would letter testify said that it was the phrase “Let them burn!” that she kept repeating even after she was delivered into the arms of a waiting policeman.
He carried her away from the scene, and there were witnesses to his heroism as he patted her down with his bare hands, smothering the last of the remaining flames. When she realized what he was doing she yelled at him “Don’t! Stop!” But he grabbed the last bit of smoldering debris from her shoe and tossed it aside.
What happened next is open to some debate, but all witnesses agreed that Miss Nikki Cotton then grabbed the officer’s gun from his holster and pulled out of his grasp, pointing the gun at him. Some say he fell to the ground and shook a little, stunned by the sudden impact, others say he was fine. Both parties agree that he then reached out for her to take the gun away. Some say they heard him beg for his life—or at least start to: He only was able to say two words before she pulled the trigger sending a bullet into his brain.
They said she was mad, unfit for trial. They committed her to an asylum for the criminally insane. There she became little more than a frail shadow of herself, wandering the halls muttering those same two words over and over again. Thomashefsky came once to visit, but he could not get more than a few sentences from her.
She spoke in a whisper, “I couldn’t take the chance. I couldn’t let it out into the world. He could have chosen a thousand other words, but he didn’t, he didn’t, and I didn’t have time to waste. I’m so sorry. Tell his family I’m so sorry.”
The old man who in the fire had lost everything, held her no animosity toward the girl, but needed to understand what had happened. “What did he say Nikki? What did he say?”
“He said the same words I had said.” She looked up at him with soulful eyes. “He said the same words, but I don’t know if he used his voice or mine. I don’t know, I just don’t know!” And then she went back to wandering the halls, wondering whether she had saved the world, or killed an innocent man, and repeating the same phrase over and over again.
Don’t! Stop!
Don’t! Stop!
Don’t! Stop!