Protocol

By Keith S. Hampton

Beneath a night sky roiling in dark shades of purple, black, and blue with strands of red, yellow, and happier hues, sprinkled with pinpoints of stars that beamed and pulsated urgently, he awoke abruptly. He felt dizzy. He looked up, but one of the harder gusts of wind blew over his face and something – a small airborne creature, perhaps – suddenly slapped itself onto his whole head. In terror, he brushed it back into the wind, then, as best he could, he looked down upon his body.

He saw he wore a dirty blue shirt and blue jeans, both smudged with brown and black splotches. He turned his hands toward his eyes and saw they were blackened with dirt, and his bare feet were no better. His right hip was painful, and his whole body ached. He strained to focus on the landscape, and turned himself on his elbow for a fuller view.

He saw he was on a strange street, somewhere, in a city, it seemed. He was in an alleyway. The sidewalk appeared at first glance lightly yellowed and outlined in black and dark gray, curbed around the streets, including around the sharp angles of so many of the buildings. In the distance, he could barely make out the amber strands of the walkways, ellipses, rectangular trails, circles, outstretched into the horizon.

There were no cars or trucks or vehicles of any kind. The buildings, gigantic and drenched in a drab charcoal, rose so high into the sky, he could not see whether they stopped ascending. A sickening odor hung in the air. He strained to focus on the intersecting street.

If it were a city, it gave off the expected sounds of traffic and movement and lights. Yet the traffic sounded oddly muted, and horns honked with a peculiar electronic buzz. Lights on or near the various sidewalks glared as if they were angry surveillance devices, glowing more brightly as people passed them by. The white lights seemed especially menacing, aggressively beaming themselves in laser-like fashion at the heels of passers-by. But it was the movement of the people that so clearly informed him that he was in a city different from any he had ever known.

The people moved in waves of groups, almost militarily, in how they maneuvered away from him. Individual walkers who did not see him appeared ordinary, indifferent. But the odd behavior of small crowds of people told him he was something especially recognizable in some unfathomable way. He made brief eye contact with some of the ambulators, but each of them without exception reflected a sinister look. The inhabitants of the city plainly regarded him with extreme specificity and hatred, as one might loath a cockroach who was pretending to be a human being.

He found a shadow in a rounded corner, and rolled himself up into it. The buildings knifed the sky in Gothic spires reaching deep into the astral dome, flanked everywhere by huge flying buttresses and, just below them, strange elliptical portals dotting the cityscape. A soft florescent blue within the portals and other windows seemed to beckon him, but he quickly looked away in fear and directed his gaze elsewhere.

His pulse quickened and he opened his eyes fully. Raising himself, he quickly began walking amongst the inhabitants upon one of the available sidewalks, as the moonless night descended like a black cloud, consuming the last faint light of the sun, invading and enveloping the whole sky.

He walked slowly enough to ensure people passed him by. He adopted their razor-perfect posture to blend in, and observed their pace. He could hear the heels of shoes click upon the pavement, which glowed an eerie saffron incandescence, as he focused his attention downward.

Yet the people were not walking, but floating just above the sidewalk. In horror, he watched gliding past him the backs of legs, their movements smooth like skiers: legs in pants, legs in hose, legs naked and bleeding, insect-like legs, legs horrifically sheared, metal legs, blurred legs, and lower portions he knew would be impossible to describe. As they moved along the butternut paths, he saw intermittent explosions of purple and orange radiating from their movements, the odd lights receding from him until they appeared like the stars and planets in the night sky. He threw himself into pockets of shadows created by the looming architecture, darting from one such dark hole to another as he moved along the alien landscape.

He struggled to remember how he had come to be there. Only fleeting, dream-like images, nonsensical and jumbled, appeared in his memory –a shotgun, a woman and child, a vague sense of evil – flashes permeated with dread. He walked on, into the sulfurous night air, following a narrow path into the darkness.

The suddenness of their appearance startled him. They wore suits so dark he could not make them out, even in the soft ambiance of the city lights. Their faces were a ghastly white, and the lower halves of their bodies seemed to disappear in the shadows.

What he could see most clearly were their eyes and teeth. The whites of their eyes were almost blinding, each eye dotted with a tiny iris. They were the eyes of spiders.

Both were grinning with full sets of long teeth jutting out of their mouths, and he could barely make out the lightening-quick movements from their backs, as they shifted about in an apparent effort to hide their muscularity. They spoke in garbled sentences, and he could only make out, “come here, come here, come here” as they moved airily toward him. They were a blend of human and creature, or one mimicking the other, an obscene mock of humanly appearance.

In terror and disgust, he stepped back, hurling himself into a Roman-arched doorway. But there was no door. He fell into the dark entryway, tumbling violently down the long drop of steep stair-steps from the street, as the spider-creatures galloped behind. He fell prone onto the floor and saw instantly two perfectly laced military boots, starkly presented.

He looked up. “Wanna be spider meat?”

A stock man in green fatigues towered over him. The man reached out to him beyond his hand and almost to his elbow. He was a soldier. He pulled him up and, together, they ran. The soldier half-dragged him, running madly through the cavernous underground, past what appeared to be submarine-shaped cars that would appear and disappear, blinking into and out of existence, occasionally disgorging people from its door, who would then scatter fearfully in the manner of fleeing insects.

The man in fatigues ran hard, pulling his companion along with him like an escaping puppeteer dragging his marionette. At last, they came to a small house, its interior decorated with cowboy and military memorabilia. He rested in the lower bunk, while the military man retrieved a chair from the kitchenette and sat down across from the army-style bunk bed. The two ate.

“I am … Louis,” he said, absent-mindedly.

“I am Ranahan. But people call me Sarge.”

He gave Louis a reassuring look. “I’m here to help,” he said like a Marine on a mission of

peace.

“You need some sleep and a bath. You’re safe here.”

Soon, Louis relaxed and drifted into sleep, free from the phantasms of his experience.

***

When he awoke, Louis was bathed in a lemony light, an overcast dominated by a dimly lit orange globe vainly seeking to penetrate the hazy sky like a sun. Sarge was with him, standing almost at attention. He had a rifle strapped to his back, and carried a shotgun easily in his hand. He peered through a crack in the blinds, then back at Louis.

“Who are these devils?” asked Louis.

“They are devils,” said Sarge, huskily. “And they pursue you in so many forms.”

“But why?”

“Don’t you remember? We killed two of them when they tried to kill your wife and daughter.”

Louis recalled, with sudden illumination. His wife’s own parents had been possessed of these evil beings, and they conspired to kill both her and their young daughter. He remembered how they had inhabited the elderly couple in grotesque mimicry of their true selves, and whispered delightedly about their murderous plans, smacking their lips wickedly at the thought of eating them all. One night, they at last attacked, but Sarge had appeared and repelled them with shotgun blasts to their sternums. They exploded on impact, and the devilish parasites inside were exposed and limp and dying behind the shattered bone of their victims.

“They’re here,” breathed Sarge. “We attack,” he announced, handing an oddly oversized handgun to Louis.

Outside, phantasms, shooting out from the sky and from the ground, in all manner of strange menacing shapes, appeared. Some dipped down against Louis with vicious effort, successive waves of gory assailants, descending rapidly upon them only to be repelled by Sarge. Louis had emptied his gun, and fallen. Eventually, the entities fled, and Sarge carried Louis back into the bunkhouse.

Louis did not climb into his bunk bed, but fell onto the slab floor, breathing exhaustedly, his consciousness never falling fully within the gravity of sleep. He lay in the twilight between his conscious mind and its perilous underworld. His body strained for rest, but his mind still struggled to make sense of his present circumstance.

After a time he could not measure, he opened his eyes in the near perfect darkness of Sarge’s cabin. He could hear a commotion in the back room, and soon heard Sarge’s cry, which seemed like a death-cry, both defiant and submissive. Louis lifted himself weakly. He felt a hand on his arm, and saw the ghastly spider eyes and the feel of so many appendages powerfully wrapping themselves around his body until he at last surrendered, drifting into an engulfing white light.

His eyes were shut, yet the light penetrated beyond his lids, growing in brightness and intensity. The soft slap of skin over eyes did little to prevent the harsh brilliance. He blinked.

He saw he was in a room floored with ugly linoleum, with walls that matched the drabness with the absence of color. A color, meshed in a redundant, stale pattern on the floor appeared as a sort of pale reptilian green. He was restrained in a bed.

He winced at the light from the ceiling, which appeared ordinary, yet struck him as vaguely malevolent. He made out shapes that became two people, a woman and an elderly man, staring at him.

“Hello, Louis,” said the woman with a friendly tone. She waited a moment, then said with concern, 

“Louis, how are you?”

He squinted hard and saw her smiling at him. He shifted his sight to the small old man dressed in medical garb, who was looking at him in a decidedly unpleasant manner. He stood near the door, his mood clearly dark.

“What do you think of this room?” she asked.

“Not much,” said Louis. “The green looks like vomit.”

She laughed softly. “That’s good. I think it looks like that, too, never liked it.”

She and the elderly doctor left, after having quizzed him with the sorts of questions any patient might expect from physicians. He dutifully opened a notebook and, from time to time, jotted notes of some sort. But they returned again and again, Dr. Spectar and Dr. Conroy, over the course of so many weeks that the exchanges became routine and the whole of his circumstance was filled with ordinariness, both dull and, in a way, sublime, free from the horrors of the city.

One morning, near the tropical green of the sprawling yard, Louis said to Dr. Spectar, “I’m feeling much better, the strange world so far behind me.” She smiled broadly. “That’s great, Louis, that’s really great, you’ve come along wonderfully.”

Louis strode forward, and, looking at his feet, asked, “But what happened to Sarge? What

happened to Ranahan?”

Her broad smile recoiled to a disappointed expression, and she glanced intensely and

knowingly at him. “Let’s find out.”

They entered a different entryway from the outside back into his room, into a larger facility filled with desks and offices framed by rectangular doorways and populated with uniformed officers, white-coated doctors, and smartly dressed assistants. Dr. Conroy occupied one office, made obvious by its more central location. Louis glanced about in search of Ranahan.

“Doctor Conroy, Louis wants to know what happened to Sarge,” she said somewhat coldly.

Conroy looked up with a surprised expression which settled into a grim countenance. “Have a seat,” he gestured. Then to himself, he muttered, “Protocol,” as he opened his notebook.

“Louis, what do you remember about Sarge? Try and think back.” Louis briefly closed his eyes, and said, “I remember him, but, like, in angles, sort of.”

Spectar’s eyes lit up. “Do you remember the night of the killing?”

Louis did remember seeing the presence of Sarge. He recalled him, but from an odd perspective, as if he was hovering above the scene. More clearly, he could see Sarge, his bulging biceps and the shotgun he held, the fatigues. “I see Sarge, shooting them.”

Louis hesitated, and then said, “He killed my mother-in-law and father-in-law.” Louis spoke slowly, lost in self-reflection.

Spectar glanced at Conroy. “He’s making a remarkable recovery, don’t you agree?”

“I note the progress,” said Conroy dismissively. He was carrying his notebook in an unusually careful manner, almost as if he were carrying an infant. He held it up, stared at it, and then relaxed his arms. He prepared to write something, and then decided against it.

“Do you know what Sarge was thinking, Louis?” she asked, but Conroy quickly admonished

Louis not to answer. “I think you need to rest, you’ve done quite a lot today.”

Spectar and Conroy walked away and down the hall, leaving Louis to wonder why they were

in such animated discussion about Conroy’s notebook.

As the weeks progressed, Louis replayed the scene in his mind again and again: Sarge with the shotgun, the shots fired in the kitchen of a small suburban home, the man and woman collapsing, and the screams. The screams, he noted, continued after the couple collapsed in death, which made no sense. He began to focus his attention on the screams. At first, they sounded almost like the squealing cries of animals. But as he strained to remember more, the pitch lowered and he could make out that they were human voices.

Conroy was with him, patiently listening to Louis describe his more detailed memories. From a slim vantage point, Louis could see the upper portion of his notepad and read: “Protocol.” “If they are human voices, perhaps they are saying something,” offered Conroy

disinterestedly.

“Yes,” said Louis, his eyes widening in unspeakable horror. The voices, he now knew, were his wife and child, and his wife was shouting, “Louis! Louis! My God!” His young daughter was wailing hysterically. As he looked down upon Sarge, he traced his body and saw that his arms led to himself. In the distorted reflection of a microwave oven, he glimpsed himself, deranged, and dressed in military clothing, camouflage markings smeared under his eyes, the shotgun in his hand. Louis began to cry heavily and painfully.

Conroy was stone-faced. As Louis convulsed in despair, Conroy involved himself in the notebook, then rose slowly, forcing himself off his chair, and left.

Soon, he reappeared with Spectar. She had an air of hopefulness.

“Louis, I understand you’ve made quite a breakthrough.” She was now comfortably holding Conroy’s notebook in one hand, and Louis’ hand in another.

Louis was still sobbing and did not speak.

“Now, Louis, I need for you to answer some questions for me right now, it’s quite important, can you do that for me?”

Louis could only stare down.

“That’s not helpful,” said Dr. Spectar more sternly. “Do you understand you murdered your wife’s parents?”

Louis nodded, and Dr. Spectar brightened considerably and made a quick mark in the notepad. “Now, 

Louis, this is very important – do you know where you are?”

“In a mental hospital,” he said, dully.

“Well, yes, in a manner of speaking,” she said impatiently. “Do you know what sort of mental hospital?” She rested the notebook against her bosom and waited for his reply with vigilance.

“No,” he said, after an effort.

“Let me help you. You’re in a prison hospital. Tell me, why, Louis, why would you be in a prison hospital?” Her tone grew more demanding, and the tempo of her speech quickened.

After some hesitation, Louis said, “Because I killed them?”

“Yes, excellent,” she said approvingly, forcefully making a mark in the notebook.

Conroy protested. “He doesn’t even recall his trial –”

“Not necessary that he does,” she snapped.

“Louis, do you know what happens to a person who murders?”

The mood between the doctors was tense. Eventually, Louis responded slowly as his own words told him his new nightmare: “They can be put to death.”

“That’s right! That’s right!” Spectar was triumphant, scribbling hard in the notepad. “And

you are now scheduled for execution tomorrow!” Conroy turned away.

“I’ll inform the warden immediately of his restoration,” she said, walking past the glum Conroy.

“This is a hospital –” began Conroy, but Spectar quickly shot back, “It’s a death chamber now. Protocol is satisfied.”

“Isn’t his madness torture enough?” shouted Conroy.

“But he has been restored, doctor,” she replied from down the hall. “He understands. He understands, now.”

She held in her hand Protocol, the checklist for the execution of the insane. It forbade killing a prisoner while in the throes of his insanity – a distasteful spectacle. But if the insane prisoner could know, as any sane man in any way, his impending doom and its general social purpose, the prospect of public embarrassment was avoided, and the execution could then promptly commence, virtually unnoticed. Protocol was the exalted instrument for humane restoration and for civilized execution. The last check marked in Protocol meant the condemned finally understood enough to be killed.

With Spectar’s announcement, the death needle had been prepared. It was large and filled with a bright red liquid. Once injected, the prisoner would appear to fall asleep, but in actuality, he would merely be paralyzed. The drug would slither through his body, scorching every vein and ultimately accumulating in his heart, which would eventually implode quietly inside the body. The prisoner would experience it all and remain fully conscious over his last hour of life, unable to escape his silent internal immolation. To spectators, he would merely appear to be napping. But he would know his execution, alone, in darkness and with cruel intimacy.

For the first hour, Louis’ mood was flat. But he soon began to experience the dread of death swelling within him over the hours, as this deepest fear finally and fully engulfed him. By the time the dawn came, Louis was seeing green ghoulish creatures writhe up from the floor tiles, the bright white light was blaring at him, the walls were detailing with high-pitched giggles new tortures he would endure.

When the doctors returned, they were spider-creatures again. He could not make out the look of frustration on Spectar’s face, which was now a hideous pale white, dotted with two small, cold eyes, blending easily into the blinding overhead light. Conroy appeared to be marking on a baby he held, now mutilating it with a knife.

They left, and Spectar walked down the hallway slowly and in disappointment. Conroy slumped as well. Protocol would begin anew.

Louis found himself amidst a sea of thick dark green grass, nearly the height of any ordinary man. He spied giant trees in distant clearings, clustered in islands. The sun hung low in dawn or dusk, while two moons rose together. The smaller moon brightly reflected both a subtle malevolence and some vague hope, while the other seemed grayer and older, as they hung with intensity in the half-lit sky.

As the grass blew back and forth to the rhythm of the wind, he saw strange hairy creatures racing at him out of the trees against the lemon sky. He ran madly through the teal blades towards a yellow meadow, the snorting and snarling of beasts growing louder as they tore through the massive field of leaves. In time, Sarge would appear and rescue him, and he once more would flee one universe filled with demons and hungry, devouring things, only to arrive at another, emerging, from time to time, to his restoration, permanently ensnared in the inescapable web of Protocol.

Keith S. Hampton