This time the girl, (Byron was still calling her that in his mind. She had yet to become Janice Rosse) seemed nervous. As soon as the guard, a new one this time with a scar on his right cheek, sat her down and removed the handcuffs. She began to drum her fingers on the table between them, creating short, staccato beats that led to nothing. Byron waited a moment to speak.
“Are you ready to begin, Janice?” He finally asked, setting up the tape recorder.
“Oh.” she seemed a little surprised, wide blue eye blinking rapidly as they stared through him. “Yeah.”
“Is something bothering you?”
“No… well, yeah… It's just that I try not to think too much about what happened, and last week, after talking to you, it's sort of hard not to, you know?”
“I'm sorry. If you find these talks too distressing...”
“No, I want to tell someone. To a person that doesn't think I'm making it all up or I'm crazy. Somebody who wants to know what actually happened.”
“Well, that's what I'm here for. I do want to hear your side of things.” Byron said. He wasn't entirely convinced. In fact, he was pretty sure she was crazy, to put it in the vernacular, nuttier than a fruitcake, but he wasn't about to tell her that.
This is going to be quite the book. He thought to himself.
“Mind if I start the recorder?” he asked, putting his finger on the record button.
“No, go ahead. What do you want to ask me?” Janice had stopped tapping her fingers on the table, and now jiggling her knee in a way that was even more distracting.
“Well, you were telling me about your friends...”
“We've known each other forever, since before I can remember. We went to the same daycare, the same schools, we all graduated from Manhattan High School for Girls just before… before it all started. In fact, though we never talked about it, this trip was going to be our last hurrah as a group before our lives tossed us in different directions.Lacey was going on to college. We all knew that was coming. She wanted to be a scientist of some kind, something about physics, but cool… like the real Twilight Zone, Star Trek kind of stuff. If you could get her talking about it, and if you could get her to not use all the fancy math terms, it was really neat to hear about. She wanted to find out if there were really other dimensions, you know, like other worlds that were almost totally like ours, with little tiny differences.You know what I mean, right?Anyway, she was going to a college that none of us even had a prayer of getting
“It's alright. If you want to call it a day, that’s fine.” Byron assured seeing her state. It was in that moment, when Janice went from a calm, almost detached monotone to hitching sobs, that he stopped thinking of her as The Girl.Killer of friends or not, she was Janice to him now.She nodded rapidly, gulping in an attempt to choke back her tears.“Okay,” Byron shut off the tape recorder. “You never have to talk about anything you don't want to. I want you to know that.”She nodded again. After a moment she was able to get herself back to a state that was, if not controlled, at least it was rational.“I don't want to talk about any of it, but...”“But you want people to know your side of the story.”“Yes. Even though nobody will believe me.”“I wouldn't be so sure. I can tell, just from tal
“It's been a while,” Janice remarked as the guard brought her to the table. Byron noticed she wasn't tapping her fingers or jiggling her leg this time. Just looking straight at him, eyes expressionless, voice flat.“A couple of weeks,” he said, glancing up at the two-way observation window and smiled at the officers he assumed were watching.She nodded.“I want to ask you about the House today, if that's alright. You don't even have to talk about what happened there, not yet.”“Then what about it?”“Why did you go there, what drew you and your friends to it? You said earlier that it was a fitting last hurrah, but I want to understand why.”“Alright,” Janice said and began to tell her story.***“When we were kids, we lived for Halloween. We didn't care about the candy, spooky movies, the cider, or any of that stuff, we wer
“I think I'm about to get kicked out,” Byron humored, eyeing the guard who stood like all the guards before him, leaning against the wall.The guard nodded as he gazed at the clock on the wall. “Just about.”“I wasted the whole time again, didn't I?” Janice asked, her icy eyes cast downward.“No, not at all, all of this is important,” Byron assured realizing he meant every word.“But you're writing about the… about what happened to my friends, right?”“Yes, but people don't read this stuff just for the juicy details. Well, some do, but you can't do much about them.” He laughed a little and was surprised when Janice did as well.“Most people,” Byron continued, “Read the kind of books I write to get to know the people involved, to help them understand what happened. People are confused about how these things happen. They wan
That night Byron dreamed.In his dream, he sat at a long table covered in lit candles. Other than the flickering candlelight, the room was completely dark. From somewhere in the distance music played, an eerie, droning music that sounded like it was being played backward. Across from him, on the other side of the table, sat a skinny woman with dark hair pulled into pigtails. She was a bit younger than Byron and looked vaguely familiar.“I'd leave her alone.” The woman said, her voice taking on the strange, languid tone that dream speech sometimes had.“Who?” Byron inquired, his voice he noticed, was normal.The woman narrowed her eyes, “You know who.”“Janice,” Byron proclaimed as understanding suddenly dawned upon him. “And why should I leave Janice alone?”“Because you won't like what lies at the end of that road. Be it that of needles or that of pins
This is starting to feel like home, Byron thought as he sat across from Janice once more. The guard was even the same one that brought her in the first time they had spoken, creating a strange case of Deja vu.“The girl who told us about interactive theater was one of those artsy types, you know, short hair, glasses, probably plays ukulele? I think Julia knew her from a community art class she had taken, but I'm not sure.She had just gotten back from some show that was themed around cult brainwashing, and she praised it so heavily that we just had to go. Walking into that place was one of those moments where everything changes. We were hooked.This was exactly what we were looking for.We devoured these things; anything that allowed some degree of freedom and interaction became our weekend getaway. The best part was, we didn't have to wait until October for these things as the
Janice had expected prison to be a lot tougher. A million awful movies (and at least one television show) had shown her just how hard life in a woman's correctional facility could be, especially for a well-educated rich girl. She had expected constant abuse from the other inmates, and even wondered if she would survive the ordeal but to her surprise however, it was pretty easy.The others always looked at her with suspicion. One time, another prisoner had rushed at her with a stone she picked up from who knows where, but the guards had quickly subdued her, and stopped it from escalating to Hollywood levels.Janice felt almost like something was protecting her.“Or maybe you just watch too many movies,” she whispered to herself.She was lying on her mattress (hard, but not painfully uncomfortable), her hands folded under the pillow where her head rested.Tap.After dark, the prison was usually fairly qui
The next meeting was tense.Both Byron and Janice were nervous, stalling in every way they could think of, not wanting to get down to business but not willing to give up either. They made small talk for a while, and then Byron finally broke the spell by bringing out his tape recorder.Janice sighed, “I guess… since you're here...”“Yeah,” Byron said, forcing a smile. “Since I'm here...”They both laughed a little to fill the space.“You were telling me about the House,” Byron reminded, pushing the start button on the recorder.Janice nodded, “Right… so we drove up…”***“It looked like a normal house. A nice, modest two-story, hidden in the village of Ardsley. It wasn't falling apart, there were no broken windows, hell, the paint wasn't even peeling.”'You guys sure th