The Galloway Encounter Page #2

• Short story
• Horror

								

	“Sugar?” She poured two cups. Beckett took his and sipped—gulped, really, for time’s sake.
	“Your husband, he fought in the war?” Beckett asked.
	“He was called up in ’45. We really didn’t think he had to go, not when the radio was saying we had taken back everything and fought the fights that really needed fighting. But Chuck couldn’t say no, not that he wanted to, but he couldn’t say no. No, he couldn’t say no, and so he was shipped off and made to jump out of a plane, so that’s what they told me in this letter. I’ll never see him again, poor Chuck.”
	Mrs. Webster picked up her knitting needles threaded with green yarn and set to work on some fabric of unknown purpose. She continued almost without pause:
	“Poor Chuck, the soldier, dearie, that’s what he wanted to be called. You should have seen him in his uniform that day, but he was lost in those fields or somewhere in those towns, wherever they place their dead, I don’t know.”
	Beckett finished his tea and set it back down. He pulled on his pants as to suggest he was about to get up, but Mrs. Webster continued. “…and I still don’t know why he had to go, what with his blood condition and all, but we couldn’t say no to the U.S. government. Chuck never could have done that. So there he went and then he was blown up.”
	Beckett’s head began to hurt, and the voice of Mrs. Webster droned with its agonizing fluctuations of repetitions and encirclings of a topic. All the while her needles clacked cliock clack clok with metronymic rhythms. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but do you have a bathroom?” He asked, his head was burning now, his forehead felt as if it were being squeezed like a lemon, the juices gushing out in beads soaking his eyebrows.
Her voice continued, unphased by the apparent deterioration of this mostly healthy man. Her needles kept on with their clack cliock clack clock as Beckett stumbled down the hallway. His vision seemed to blur like a drain beneath a pool of watercolor twirling images in circuitous orbits. Beckett’s muscles stiffened under pins of sharpened pricks. By the time he could reach the end of the hallway, his body was squeezed of all vitality. It took every ounce of his remaining strength to turn the knob and push it open. But he did not find himself in the bathroom. The last image Beckett saw, amidst every spiral and distortion of his senses was the decayed husk of a man in uniform atop a bed. Beckett closed his eyes and heard a faint clack clack approaching.
***
	Clack clack. Cliock clack clok. The sound grew louder, but Beckett could not think of anything else besides the horrible fire which burned his muscles and captured them in complete immobility. The chatter of needles awoke him more fully now, and a soft, animal-like groan signified that he was indeed conscious.
	“wh…what…” he could barely moan.
	“No need to worry, dearie, just relax.” The same silky voice of Mrs. Webster floated over the ramparts of his dim conscious and down into the flushed-out barracks of his mind. Beckett’s mind, or whatever remained which was singularly his, ordered his limbs outward but found itself immediately frustrated. Around every inch of his torso was a spool of yarn, interlaced and interconnected, knitted and knotted, tight and taut. His legs, too, were chained to his chair by the same fiber. Imagine Beckett’s anger, then, during his awakening to the undeniable fact that every resource of freedom is exhausted. His captor was unmoved by his deadened protests, still fixed on the latest loop of her work before moving down the row and beginning anew. Beckett flexed his arms to the extent he could, but he felt a new sensation now, one which conjured a new horror more dreaded than before. 
	Connected to his arm was a tube which ran down the chair and connected to a rectangular machine. On the front panel were a series of knobs, the purpose of which he could not make out for several reasons. He looked more closely at the tube and saw that it was red, a deep, dark red.
	“What the hell is this in my arm? Take it out! Take it out!” There was no struggle of any effect which could have broken Beckett’s bondage then.
	“It’s just a little blood. Don’t be such a puss about it.” Mrs. Webster went back to her needlework.
	“What the hell are you talking about? What did you do to me? Help! Help!!” Beckett screamed.
	“Let’s use our inside voices, okay? I only speak with people who use an appropriate volume. Now, that’s better.” Mrs. Webster looked at Beckett for a moment and then resumed her knitting.
	“Everyone needs it to live, and you have a supply I can’t get anywhere else. Doctor said I’ll need transfusions the rest of my life, and when Chuck came back from the war unable to provide for my treatment…well, there’s so much I needed from Chuck. I kept him alive as long as I could, but he was just so broken.” She poked the fabric where his ribs were. “You were an absolute catch, I must say!”
	Mrs. Webster wheeled over beside him, completely unafraid of her ensnared prey. Her fingers rapped spider-like on his cheek. “Tsk-tsk,” she said, “you were so silly to get stuck here. But I’ll make you a comfortable home, yes, won’t we?” She chuckled. Then she took a spoon holding some strange gelatinous, greyish, putrefying goop and pushed it down Beckett’s throat. The taste was abominable, but Beckett could hardly resist.
	“Why are you doing this?” He asked.
	“I can no longer go into town to get my blood, so I grow it locally.” She tapped the machine.
“You mean you steal blood! What the hell is wrong with you? Let me out of here! Help!” Beckett screamed again and again, his throat now growing stronger as the venom from the tea continued to wear off. Mrs. Webster put down her needles, visibly disappointed with Beckett’s lack of cooperation, and wrapped her latest piece of handiwork around his mouth. She cast it off with an elegant touch and tightened it.
	“I guess I’ll have to find some other way of keeping you alive.” Beckett launched another bout of muffled screams while Mrs. Webster took a tube from the other side of the machine and connected it to the IV on her arm. Mrs. Webster then rifled through another tub of yarn and picked out a spool, the material for a new fleece of greens and yellows, while the machine hummed behind the rhythmic clack cliock of her needles.
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