Riding the Lightning

 

Stephen Lochton Kincaid

 

 

  

           George Haslett watched the kid who was going to strap him into the electric chair out of the corner of his eye. There were four of them walking to the execution chamber: George, the kid on his left, an older guard on his right, and the team leader behind them. 

          The kid (who was in his late 20s, but had the kind of baby face that would get him carded at the liquor store until his fortieth birthday or so) was nervous, George could tell.  Hoo boy!  Skinny beanpole of a kid – just lookit his Adam’s apple bounce up and down like a pogo stick, he thought.  This made George chuckle. 

          “Somethin funny to you, George?” the team leader asked.

          “No sir.”  With George’s thick southern-fried drawl, this came out as Naw saw.  “Just lookin forward to gettin’ out of this place.”  George paused.  “Not that ch’all haven’t been accomodatin’ or anythin’.  Why, you’ve been downright hospitable.  I ‘preciate it.”

          The team leader was pretty good at keeping his face blank (had probably won some money at the poker table with that face, George reckoned), but George had caught a slight smirk at this.  Yeah, where you’re goin is real hospitable, that smirk said.  They’ll probably draw you up a nice warm bath of sulfur for you to soak in.  Maybe give you a relaxin massage with their pitchforks.

          George grinned.  He began whistling a snatch from an old song he had heard a long time ago, one of his favorites.

          “What’s that you’re whistlin, George?” the team leader asked.  He had led eleven men down the corridor they called the Highway to Hell, and none of them had ever been as calm and collected as George Haslett.  Haslett was downright chipper.  It was unnerving.

          “Hmm?  Oh nuthin, nuthin.”

          When word came down from the warden’s office over the radio, they escorted George into the execution chamber.

          “Well, that’s a yaller dog,” George said, referring to the chair bolted to the floor in the middle of the room.  His voice was equal parts wonder and equal parts disdain.  The wooden chair, built in 1927 by a master carpenter who had been incarcerated for grand larceny, had been painted a bright yellow color using line paint borrowed from the State Highway Department.  The result was a mongrel cross between something out of a schoolhouse and Frankenstein’s lab.

          “George, have a seat.  Chet, Bill, strap him in,” the team leader said.

          They sometimes had to help when a prisoner’s nerves gave way and his legs turned to jelly, but George sat obediently.  The nervous kid, Chet, pulled the leather straps over George’s chest and right arm, while the other guard worked on his ankles.  When Chet made to strap in his left arm, George, as quick as a rattlesnake in the sage brush, grabbed his wrist in a grip that was like a steel clamp.  George could feel the kid’s bones grinding under his hand.  George looked into the kid’s terrified eyes and uttered a single word, so low that only the two of them could hear it.

          To the outside observer, nothing much seemed to happen.  The two only stared at each other, if very intensely.  But inside George’s head, the swimming feeling began.  It was replaced by the distinctly nauseating feeling of being upside down.  Whoops-a-daisy!  George thought.  His vision doubled, trebled.  And then, for one brief moment, he was staring into the kid’s eyes and staring back into his own eyes at the same time – kid’s eyes, his eyes, kid’s eyes, his eyes – back and forth, like looking into two mirrors placed across from each other in a hallway, down into infinity.  A small tattoo on the inside of George’s left wrist disappeared and simultaneously reappeared (though hidden beneath the kid’s long-sleeved state corrections khaki shirt) on the inside of the kid’s left wrist.  (The lack of this tattoo on George Haslett’s wrist will later give the medical examiner some pause.  He has a checklist.  On this checklist is Inside Left Wrist: Tattoo.  He compares the bare wrist on the corpse with the photo taken when George Haslett was processed into the state corrections system.  In that photo, there is a small tattoo of a snake eating its own tail.  There is also a scar on the palm of the hand in the photo.  This exact same scar appears on the palm of the corpse, identical right down to the little hook at the bottom.  The ME has no doubts that the intake photo is of this man’s left wrist, except now the tattoo is inexplicably missing.  And not cut off or burned off, either – that skin is as smooth and clean as … well, not a baby’s bottom, but as smooth and clean as a murderer’s skin will ever be.  The coroner thinks about the dinner his wife will probably have waiting for him at home.  Then he thinks about a long day talking to the warden and maybe the state Attorney General to boot.  And what good would come of it?  None, he decides. They would only convince him it’s some kind of error or that he’s wrong, or both.  Finally, he sighs, shrugs, and signs his name on the death certificate).

          George (Chet now, got to remember that, he thought, although it would be impossible for him to think of himself as Chet for a long time … and what kind of stupid fucking name was Chet, anyway?  What was it short for?  Chetland?  Chetworth?  No time to find out now; there was a whole passel of memories to go through in here, but for now all he needed were the ones at the forefront of Chet’s last thoughts) looked at himself, his old self, for a moment.  The light in those cool gray eyes began to dim.  The head dipped and the hand gripping his wrist loosened (there would be a bruise encircling that wrist tomorrow, like a purple manacle, that would not fade to yellow for a week or two).  The kid had passed out and George was not surprised in the least.  The first time was … exhausting.  Exhausting and confusing.

          The team leader had taken a couple of steps toward them and George looked at him and shook his head.  Situation’s under control, boss.  Everything’s code 4 over here.  Old boy’s movin like he’s wadin through about three feet of molasses, George thought wryly.  Good thing it wasn’t no ‘mergency.

          The team leader gave him a knowing look.  Well, that George Haslett wasn’t half as tough as he let on, that look said.  He done fainted dead away like an old maid who found a turd in her sewing basket.  George dropped his head so no one could see him grin.

          Following the instructions that had been at the top of Chet’s mind, George finished strapping the left arm, then applied the sponge and electrode on his head.  By then the kid was starting to come around; his lips were moving soundlessly and his eyelids were fluttering.  George stepped back to the door with the other guard and waited while the team leader went to fetch the warden.

          While they waited, the curtain over the observation room window rolled open.  It was standing room only in there, George noted with more than a little satisfaction.  There were some crying faces, some angry faces, even a few eager faces, but most seemed almost painfully composed.  An old joke occurred to him, about a man sentenced to the electric chair and the priest who asks if he has any last requests.  Maybe somebody wants to hold his hand, he thought, looking at that crowd of strained faces.  Any volunteers?

          The warden came in next, a fat, pompous asshole if George ever saw one.  He pulled a pair of half-rim reading glasses from the inside pocket of his suit coat.  They looked ridiculously small on his jowly, florid face.

          “George Haslett,” he said, reading from a piece of paper that he produced with a prissy flourish out of the same pocket.  He had a self-righteous tone that grated on George’s nerves.  “You have been tried and convicted by a jury of your peers in the murders of sixteen men and women: Vicki Kurtz, Melanie Sherman, Daniel Abramowitz …”

          The kid was staring at the warden bewildered, his mouth agog.

“ … and Roger Whitaker.  For these crimes, you have been sentenced to death–“

          “No,” the kid said weakly, as low and plaintive as the mewing of a newborn kitten.  Comprehension had begun to dawn in his eyes.  Comprehension and fear.   

“–by electric chair.  By the power vested in me by the state of Alabama, it is my sworn duty as warden of this penitentiary to carry out this sentence.  Do you wish to make a final statement?”

        “I’m not him!  I’m not George Haslett!” he screamed.

        The warden heaved a big, impatient sigh and gestured at the execution team.  George and the other guard stepped forward.

        “Wait!  Listen to me!” the kid said as George and the other guard checked the straps and electrodes one last time.  The kid’s eyes rolled over to George accusingly.  “It’s him!  That’s George Haslett!”  The other guard looked at George and George shrugged, as if to say Where do they come up with this shit?

George tightened the cap on the kid’s head and that was when the kid started screaming.  Bucking and screaming, fit to wake the devil.  The other guard pulled a shroud over the kid’s head but instead of muffling the sound it only made the kid more frantic.      

        They left for the control room and waited for the warden to make his call to the governor’s office.  But that was just window dressing, George knew, a dog-and-pony show complete with flaming hoops and an obstacle course.  There was never going to be a stay of execution for that big bad boogeyman George Haslett, murderer of sixteen innocent men and women.  The Terror of the South the newspapers had dubbed him.  He could practically hear the guffaw from the other end of the line.  As if to prove this point, the warden walked into the control room less than two minutes later.

           There was a microphone in the death chamber that fed to speakers in the control room.  The kid was still screaming, and the warden had to turn down the volume so that he could be heard.

“Are we ready?” he asked the team leader.  When the team leader gave his assent, the warden leaned over the control panel, turned the failsafe key, and, without further thought or preamble, pushed the operate button.  The light over the words ELECTRIC CHAIR ENERGIZED (a phrase that seemed both utterly devoid of emotion and strangely profound) stenciled on the panel lit up.  Twenty-two hundred volts of electricity began to flow almost instantaneously from a step-up transformer outside the prison, through the wires in the ceiling over their heads, and into George Haslett’s old body.

          George watched with avid interest.  The kid’s screams shut off abruptly as his teeth clacked together.  The body stiffened, almost seeming to bulge against the restraints.  The hands clenched down on the armrests except for the pinkies on both hands, which rose up like the forelegs of a spider about to strike.  Steam began to snake up to the ceiling as the soft tissues raced to the boiling point.

          George felt an odd sense of something he couldn’t quite put his finger on … not regret, not precisely.  Nostalgia?  Maybe that was it.  That body had served him well.  It had been strong and resilient, sturdy.  This one was gawky.  Awkward.  That would change over time, of course.  The muscles would grow, the jawline would become more pronounced, the hair would darken.  Eventually the resemblance to George Haslett (and indeed to any of the succession of bodies he had occupied over the last 200 years) would be so strong that they could pass for brothers.  It was fascinating to George how the spirit bent the flesh to its will.

        When it was done, the team leader fetched the physician from the waiting room across the hall.  After a brief examination, the doctor announced the time of death.  The curtain over the observation room window closed with anticlimactic finality.

         As they filed out of the room, the warden shook their hands and clapped each of them on the back.  When the warden took George’s hand in his own (which was, George noted with more than a trace of disgust, meaty and quite damp, like gripping a pack of wet hot dogs), and told him “Good job, son,” in a hearty voice, George had a strong, almost overpowering vision of stabbing the man in the neck, just below one jowl.  There was no rage behind this vision, just a detached, almost clinical compulsion.

         Where did that urge come from George wondered, and not for the first time.  Was it simply boredom from having been on this crazy wheel for so long?  Or was it part of the price he had to pay to stay on it?  George had no idea, but in time he might find out.  Time was the great unraveller of mysteries, after all.  And time was something that George had in spades.

           They loaded George’s old body on a stretcher, covered it with a sheet, and wheeled it outside where an ambulance was waiting to cart it off to the state ME’s office.  In the hallway, George began whistling again.  The team leader gave him a strange look, but George didn’t pay him any mind.  It was the tune from one of his favorite songs, taught to him by a former slave.  A slave who had happened to be a shaman on another continent; a slave who had bargained his freedom to an old slaveowner for a secret.  The name of that song, which was now lost to George (a great many memories were now lost to George, drowned in the deep ocean of time, including his own name, his original name), was – quite aptly – “I Want to Die Like Lazarus.”  Sometimes, when he is on the verge of waking up, drifting along that thin interstice that divides sleep and consciousness, it almost comes back to him.  Then it floats away, just outside of his grasp. 

          They shut the ambulance doors and watched as it drove off.  Dark, without their flashers.    

         Watching the taillights recede into the darkness, George thought, Guess that makes number seventeen for old George Haslett, and then let out a bark of laughter.  Why, he just couldn’t help himself.

It just felt so good to be alive.

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     Stephen Lochton Kincaid grew up in the flatlands of Kansas.  After spending most of his life there, he now lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he draws upon the lowering gray skies and primeval forests for inspiration to write the stuff of nightmares.

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     Darren Blanch, Aussie creator of visions which tell you a tale long after first glimpses have teased your peepers. With early influence from America's Norman Rockwell to show life as life, Blanch has branched out mere art form to impact multi-dimensions of color and connotation. People as people, emotions speaking their greater glory. Visual illusions expanding the ways and means of any story.

Digital arts mastery provides what Darren wishes a reader or viewer to take away in how their own minds are moved. His evocative stylistics are an ongoing process which sync intrinsically to the expression of the nearby written or implied word he has been called upon to render.

View the vivid energy of IVSMA (Darren Blanch) works at: www.facebook.com/ivsma3Dart, YELLOW MAMA, Sympatico Studio - www.facebook.com/SympaticoStudio, DeviantArt - www.deviantart.com/ivsma and launching in 2019, as Art Director for suspense author / intrigue promoter Kate Pilarcik's line of books and publishing promotion - SeaHaven Intrigue Publishing-Promotion.