The Tripping Dead

© Mason Kuldinow

Okay, now that you live here, I guess you should know; when my big sister was in high school, she knew a group of kids who were all killed in the woods. I'm telling you the truth. Ask anybody out here and they'll tell you the same. In nineteen eighty-six, three boys and a girl—who all happened to be tripping on hallucinogenic mushrooms—fell into the most hapless situation possible. What happened to them tore this whole town apart in so many ways. And to top it off, the killer (having already been deemed criminally insane for the murder of his mother) couldn't be held responsible. He was later sent back to the asylum, from where he had escaped on that terrible night.

Being as how they were on such a heavy trip, we could not imagine the horror those kids must have felt, when Jackie Barnes, clad in a white hospital jumpsuit, came to bash in their heads. However, the police said at least two of the victims didn't fight back, which led many to believe (a somewhat comforting notion) those kids never knew what the hell was happening.

Anyone who remained here afterward eventually visited the site at some point, to pay their respects... and to listen for reported ghostly voices in the woods. The site became somewhat legendary, attracting people from all across Quebec, who would often leave things like flowers, food, love notes, guitar strings, and drugs: offerings for the departed. But as you might expect, the activities spurred the provincial cops to begin regular patrols of the area, to set up barriers, and arrest curiosity seekers for trespassing. After all it was private land. Not that anyone cared about the land itself. They feared for the safety of the teenagers who used it as a romping ground. And though lots of kids got busted for going there, the chances became slim after the provincial planners made many changes in police priority; or maybe they just got tired of doing it.

I go there sometimes, however only in the day. And I look for the strange things that many people swear to have witnessed. Reports of ghost sightings, and the sounds of crazy laughter still come in on a regular basis. But what I hear is that sick son of a bitch, Jackie Barnes, crying like a big baby, and yelling Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! in a demented voice, just like you'd expect from a lunatic.

For some reason, it seems like everyone in town must come to grips with it—the crime like a deep scar—even those who have no memory of the actual incident. So it's important for you to know if you really want to live here. For me, the worst part came about a year and a half ago, when the unthinkable occurred.... I remember dropping the local paper at my feet when I read the miniscule headline—Mental Hospital to Set Jackie Barnes free!

In fact... he was already living somewhere among us!

In town, there wasn't really a big fracas, like one would expect after such an announcement. The families of the tripping dead had all packed up and left a generation ago. So there wasn't anyone around to be completely outraged. The mental health centre had paid enormous amounts of money to persuade their departure, which made it all very convenient, leading some people to believe the directors had planned it that way.

What? Yes, the tripping dead... that's what we started calling them. Who knows where the name came from; probably one of the stoner kids who used to hang around those woods, begging to fall victim to a copycat crime.

You've been to the local diner— right? Well, with a psychotic among us, it served as the sole outlet for all our concerns. When we discussed our feelings, my friends seemed (at best) vaguely interested, or willing to get involved.

“Why would they let such a fiend among us?” Stef Metawin asked. She was a waitress at the diner, and my long lost crush, who had ignored me my whole life.

“That place is a damn joke,” Greg Steiber commented. He was the local drunk, who also did work on people's lawns. “They never explained how in the hell that fucker got out the first time.”

“He escaped,” I said, reciting the town's common knowledge.

“They never said how though,” Tom Grainer interjected. He was a provincial officer when the killings occurred. “We did an investigation. And there wasn't any reason why he should have escaped. Back then, people started wondering if somebody in the asylum had allowed him to get out. Now, after twenty years, they've done it again.”

“Why wouldn't they warn us about this?” Bebe (the florist) wanted to know. “I mean before hand, so we could at least have some time to object.”

“There was a hearing two weeks ago,” Phan, the local barber, said. “It is not like a parole hearing. The doctors decide that he is okay, and they don't have to consult anybody.”

No one in the local diner knew where Jackie went. For all anyone knew, they could have dropped him off at a bus stop, or checked him into the bed and breakfast down the street. The likely, responsible thing, we thought, would have been to send him far away. But then later on, we all resolved that maybe it was safer to let him stay nearby, where everyone knew well enough to leave him alone.

A few days later, Bebe and Greg, acting as concerned citizens, went to speak with the directors of the centre. They were told that the location of Jackie was confidential. It would take a magistrate order to get that information.

And so we had to leave it at that.

Weeks went by and the town reluctantly accepted that he may or may not have been living among us. People in the US were more concerned than the people in Canada, or so it would seem. But for the townspeople, it became a dead issue—to be no longer discussed openly.

To justify their move, the mental hospital sent a series of reports to everyone in the county, describing the medicinal therapy, and the progress Jackie had undergone before his release. During a five year period, he had made a complete turn around, though it was by no means a very sudden change. They claimed that for all those years, due to effectual treatment, he had gradually become a normal person, showing no cause for his doctors to expect any form of relapse. Having been prosecuted and found innocent, by reason of mental disorder, the Crown could do nothing about it. They did their best to prove that he was cognizant when he murdered the four kids. Only the truth prevailed. In all cases, he couldn't be held responsible. And when I thought about it, I couldn't really disagree. The man was suffering from psychotic depersonalization syndrome, a theoretical ailment, which comes when the defensive animus overwhelms the entire persona of the individual, or something like that. During the fifteen year malaise, the real Jackie Barnes lay bundled inside, only able to watch the actions of the ‘shadow self', like a driver with no control over the vehicle.

Along with the report, they also disclosed Jackie's location. He was living in a halfway house, out near Sainte-Michel-du-Lac, where no one lived close to him.

When the story went national, more ghoulish tourists (from as far as Montreal and Ottawa) eventually got wind of it, and began visiting the death woods. It became a nightmare scene. Our diner received visitors like never before. And we couldn't do anything about it. They all wanted to know how to get to the site of the murders, to listen for ghostly voices. Some even went camping there, which baffled everyone to ask—what could make a tragedy that enticing? I mean, even knowing full well that Jackie Barnes was free, they seemed to risk everything, just for a thrill.

You might say that the shit hit the fan when Jackie realized what was going on. The halfway house therapists couldn't contain him. He began talking about the murders, telling the stories by firelight, where people came to listen, to literally freak themselves out. They all wanted to experience the grim history. And Jackie showed them the way.

To their credit however, no one really believed it was him. They would have expected a madman with bugged out eyes, slobbering ugly talk, and donning a hospital gown; while this man was none of those things. And Jackie didn't care of course. From what I heard, he seemed very glad his looks didn't inspire people to believe he was a former psychotic killer.

Gabe and I attended one of the gatherings to hear what was being said. We immediately knew who it was when he showed up. A campfire amphitheater had been set up, with rows of logs, to accommodate a few dozen spectators. Jackie called himself a historian, an epithet which made Gabe and I laugh, though we had to admit: he didn't look like a dangerous person. He seemed very charming. Everyone there, none of whom we had ever seen before, assumed that he was just a local man, who loved telling stories. The tourism brought lots of money to the town. So it seemed to be the perfect situation for Jackie, and he never wanted it to end.

Jackie sat, wearing a polo sweater, nice slacks, and a pair of leather hiking boots. The ladies looked upon him like he was an eligible bachelor, the pretty women gazing with smitten eyes, and full lips, like he was everything they could ever want in a man. After the storytelling, as Gabe and I walked back to town, he asked me, “Why didn't you say anything?”

I replied, “I thought you were going to do that.”  

“I can't believe they were so nice to him,” Gabe said. “Anyway, when I thought about doing something, it occurred to me that none of them would believe me. Jackie told them who he was; and they assumed he was playing a character.”

“These tourists are an oddball bunch,” I said.

“Yes, who else would come to that place, except for a bunch of crazies?”

“What are we supposed to do now?”

Gabe looked at me with a countenance of defeat. “We can only accept it, and move on.” And then he walked away from me.

All those tourists eventually got tired of coming. However, Jackie kept showing up every weekend, even if no one else did. Of course, no one from the halfway house, or the mental centre, knew anything about it. As far as they were concerned, if he didn't break any laws, they had no reason to intervene. At the diner, whenever I tried to bring up the subject, they began to look at me strangely; no one would talk about it. The situation became—I had to let the issue die, if I wanted to keep any friends there.

Then one morning during breakfast, Jackie showed up, and I almost choked on a bacon strip. What surprised me more than anything else was that no one cared. When he sat down at one of the counter stools, Stef poured him a cup of coffee without batting an eye. Apparently it wasn't the first time he'd been there! The townspeople didn't seem at all concerned about his crimes. They were more interested in hearing about the depersonalization syndrome he had overcome. With the belief that he had gotten better, no one thought for a moment that he could relapse.

We started to trust him. Even when things went wrong, there was no suspicion. Like the time when a girl went missing. He helped on the search to find her. And find her we did. So from that day on, Jackie became a respected member of our town.

Everything would have been fine, if not for the resurgence of local kids tripping their asses off, and using the death woods as their chosen turf. One particularly hardy gang of scofflaws even called themselves The Tripping Dead . No one could have thought of a more roguish and gothic title, for a group who worshipped the deaths of four kids, who were only out to have some fun, and celebrate their togetherness.

The cops did everything they could to suppress the gang of outlaw youths. However, those particular drug addicts were pretty good at avoiding the law. Even after the mental hospital shut down, it only served to exacerbate their nefarious activities, providing those assholes with more places to run wild. Thankfully, the facility was immediately razed. Otherwise it would have undoubtedly become their most sacred ground.

At times I became very angry at those kids. They seemed to spit in the face of everyone in town. Like the night when six of them ran into the diner, smelling like Molson Golden, and demanded that Jackie come out and have a drink with them. I felt like doing something, though I didn't know what it should be. So I just sat in shock like everyone else. I could see how they enjoyed it, and how they fed on our disapproval.

As they dragged more and more members into their crew, all the parents in town became quite beleaguered, even to the point of them wanting to move away, in fear of their kids joining those idiots.

Jackie could sense all the stress it was bringing. And when I spoke with him about it, he seemed willing to do whatever he could.

“What if you gave them a good scare?” I suggested.

Jackie looked at me with kind eyes, quickly turning over to suspicion. “Why in the world would I do that? What happened that night will forever be etched in my memory. I still can't sleep for more than five hours at a stretch. That's on a good night. Did you realize that?”

“Would chasing them induce a relapse?” I immediately felt bad about asking it, although I didn't know why it would be an indelicate question. Everyone knew by then that Jackie would never hurt anyone. And after seeing him spend all that time talking about his crimes to a bunch of strangers, I didn't understand why it would be an issue.

“Did I ever tell you why I killed my mother?”

I felt trapped, a little bit scared; to my knowledge, he had never spoken to anyone about it.

“You don't have to tell me.”

“No, I want to,” he said. “My mother was an abusive woman. That's the main reason why I was found innocent. She used to leave me alone for days at a time, I think, maybe even longer. You hear stories about kids being left alone, and surviving, some young as six years old, and some younger. I was one of those kids. Before it happened, she tried to drown me in the bathtub. Luckily I was strong enough to resist her. The doctors told me with her every attempt at murdering me I retreated farther and farther into myself. When the shadow animus took over, the only thing it knew was survival, and how the main threat was my mother. And so I watched from inside as the defensive archetype destroyed her. The court might have let me off altogether, if it weren't for the fact that I was so screwed up. Getting committed by the Crown was the best thing for me. I mean thank God I didn't go free. Twenty years is what it took to bring back my complete self.

“When the four teenagers got killed, I had not received any real treatment. They still didn't know what the hell was wrong. Then after spending two years in a padded cell, I finally won another insanity verdict. That's how I ended up at the same hospital again.

“People wanted to lynch me for what I did. I heard that some Americans even threatened to come up here and do it themselves. It could still happen! By grace of God, you people allowed me to remain. And I'm not stupid enough to assume that the same thing is waiting in another town. It isn't. Did you know that I'm not allowed to enter the United States?”

I replied, “I did hear that at some point.”

“Not that that is a big loss to me. My mommy never took me there. Right now I'm kind of glad. If I had any ideas about going, it would probably be the death of me.”

“I understand,” I said. “Drug use is creeping into our way of life. And you can't help me.”

“You make it sound like I don't have any interest in doing what's right. Haven't you been listening? If I do what you're asking, who knows what could happen. People here might change their minds and run me out. The courts might even use it against me, and have me retried or remanded back to another mental health centre. The Tripping Dead aren't hurting anybody... so we should just leave them alone.”

A week after our talk, on a blustery autumn night, I felt a disturbance in the air. When I woke up the next morning, I knew something bad had occurred. The whole town was swarming with provincial cops. It appeared that what we thought could never happen again ... happened! Bebe filled me in on it—five teenagers were murdered. Turned out it was the same exact thing over again. The police did not hesitate to point the finger at Jackie. He immediately got arrested and thrown into confinement. During questioning, he claimed to have no memory of the attack. However, when he was informed of the evidence against him—bloody clothes, footprints, and a survivor who described him before dying—he did not hesitate to confess. “I must have done it,” he admitted.

The halfway house directors said he was home the whole time. But that hardly mattered. Our more conservative Canada was tired of hearing from psychologists who made false promises of being able to cure... what has no cure. The Crown prosecutor took the reigns right away. Before a trial could even be considered, they were already denouncing and repudiating the defense witnesses.

At the diner, Stef asked me, “Where were you when the murders happened?”

I was utterly surprised by the question. “I was home,” I answered.

“Well, I don't think Jackie had anything to do with it.” She seemed very sure of herself. “Why would his therapists lie about his location during the murders?”

I said, “Maybe they don't like the idea of being proven wrong. It wouldn't be the first time. Think about how many mistakes those bastards made.”

Stef said, “I heard you guys talking. Are you telling me he had the state of mind to do something like this? It's absurd! I know people. Jackie isn't the kind who could do something like that.”

I had to laugh. “Now look who's sounding absurd. He's done it before Stef. The police have no choice this time.”

Stef wasn't getting what she wanted from me. And I knew what it was all about. Jackie had it in mind to pick someone from the herd, while Stef had hopes, and reason, to think it would be her. Personally I thought she was being ridiculous. The situation reminded me of all those women in the US, who marry men who are on death row. Pretty stupid I always thought. It was a worthless human condition—when fruit falls from the tree you are standing under, you long for something else... or maybe you just long to piss off everyone around you. Stef was definitely the type—she had plenty of good reasons to be with me; and yet the first psycho who came along won her heart. She couldn't accept Jackie's guilt, which definitely made her defense team witness material. I could picture her in court, accusing whoever she could think of. Maybe even me!

Then after a few months, the police determined that the killer left saliva containing DNA, which didn't match any of the victims, or Jackie, casting doubt on their original supposition, that he was the killer.

And so from there, the town had a mystery to overcome.

I completely understood why Jackie would never get out again. He started cracking up while he sat in jail, reverting to his old ailment, which didn't let up even after the charges against him were dropped. The stress of it proved to be too much. He could no longer deal with the cruel world outside.

It was a famous ending for a famous crime. I pictured Jackie's depersonalization syndrome becoming worse than ever. So maybe this time, he'll have his brain pumped with anti-psychotic drugs, or perhaps shocked into a state of mental mush.

No more campfire stories for him.

Stef seemed willing to wait, never letting up on her Free Jackie campaign. Only she will certainly wait in vain. The whole thing makes me sick. In spite of all the local guys who are available (including myself), she would rather pine over her long lost mass murderer. I have to wonder; maybe it's a call back to the primal mind; the desire to live like a cave woman, while giving in to a beastly attraction. But if you asked her why she loves him, she would undoubtedly say that she can identify with his plight of isolation, and cite the injustice of imprisoning the wrongly accused.

But personally... I think she simply desires a man who is unavailable.

Yes, I feel like I have women like her pegged neatly. One day I'll come back with a beautiful Vancouver girl, and I'll relish the look of hurt and jealousy, when Stef gets to see us together, sharing a table, ignoring her as she waits on us.

Oh, did I mention I was leaving?

With winter coming, bound to turn this whole place into an icebox, I don't feel any remorse. And with all of the odd specters trailing around in my wake, fishing for samples of my spit or anything else they can muster, I owe it to myself to find a new place, one where you don't have to be a mass killer to retain the attention of women like Stef.

As for The Tripping Dead, well, they lived up to their name. Before I leave tonight, or tomorrow morning, I plan on seeing how they are. It isn't likely to do me any good. But it's just one of those things you simply have to do. You understand. Danger is only a small part of the whole issue, like when love is involved; you never let anything get in your way. That's how I feel about those cops who patrol the death woods.

They're just petty obstacles!

They gather names like litter. Mine is already on their list. What they want is the DNA profile of every guy in town. Luckily, I'm not the only one who had refused to give them a sample. Otherwise they might follow me all over God's green Canada.

I can still feel them out there, the provincial tools, shining their lights all over the cold woods, and trying to make it seem like they can unravel the mystery. What fools! Shadows of this mystery never come out when the lights are shining.

Anyway, it was nice talking to you. Right now, I have to get my shit together, so I can leave without incident. I really hope you enjoy living here. As you can see, I've had it with this place...

Listen... can you hear that?

Laughter often rings out of the forest on nights like this.

It sounds like music to my ears.

_____________________

Mason Kuldinow is the author of the soon to be released novel (May 2010) Emissaries of archeote, the story of an ancient apocalyptic prophecy coming ot life in the present, published by Lachesis Publishing/LBF Books.  His debut novel is a fine crafted epic centered around those who find themselves in a battle to thwart the intentions of the evil emissries sent from their dying hell, a place of desperation and forgotten souls... a place called Archeote. Visit his website HERE