Now is the Time of Monsters, page 2
The mere visit was an experience in itself, and Cassie was enamored with everything about it. From the weight of those heavy old doors with their tainted brass handles polished to a sheen by endless touches, to that cool, stale air laced with the scent of wisdom. Her senses were awakened by it the very moment she stepped inside.
And then, of course, there were the books.
So many books.
In the pages of those lovely tomes of hard-toiled creation, she found more than just words printed on paper. She found portals to a realm of infinite possibilities. And just like the building itself, Cassie’s love of books stemmed from so much more than that. She adored everything about them. From the way they looked (bright and colorful modern covers or staunch classic cloth-bounds) to the way they felt in her hand (sturdy and real and worthy). Cassie especially loved the way they smelled, new or old: that alcohol scent of fresh ink or the faint hint of vanilla as the lignin slowly breaks down as the books age.
She pored over reference books. Magazines. Even this new and slightly daunting way of reading periodicals in a format called microfiche. Demanding only a fraction of the library’s storage space, they were now able to carry a much greater wealth of options. For the first time ever, Cassie was able to view several newspapers from New York through the reels of film on which they were forever preserved. With their pages cast big upon a light box, she twisted and turned the machine’s little knob to shift from one page to the next. More than once she turned just a shade too far to the right and the pages whizzed by in a dizzying flurry.
This she didn’t care for, and after a few attempts to embrace this newfangled technology (over which her husband would no doubt marvel) she went back to her beloved books.
On the third day she found what she was looking for in a barely touched reference copy used by psychiatrists and psychologists called the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short). Identified in 1952, scelerophobia was a disorder defined as an intense and irrational—
see, irrational!
—fear of being stalked and harmed by an intruder.
There was nothing in the DSM to explain a rational fear, however, let alone one caused by intense psychic visions.
So, with no sane comparison to help her understand why this fear was eating her up inside, Cassie suffered in silence.
She refused to even confide in her husband.
After all, how could she when doing so would be tantamount to sabotaging his dream career?
) (
It hadn’t yet been three years since Bill had taken his shiny new job with International Business Machines. A growing technology firm with an office in San José, they were, amongst other things, helping NASA achieve its presidential goals in space exploration. A year prior to Bill being recruited, IBM had built a system capable of tracking the Mercury astronauts’ orbital flights. Then in November 1967, just fourteen months after Bill had joined, his work became a part of history when the government launched its Saturn V rocket.
Amazing for Bill; bittersweet for Cassie.
When he was first offered the job, it felt like kismet. After all, the Apollo program operated from NASA’s facilities on the east coast of Florida…now known as the Kennedy Space Center. It had been President Kennedy’s dream that Americans would not only be the first to walk on the moon, but would do so before the end of the decade. To honor this dream, Lyndon B. Johnson dedicated this new space facility to his predecessor just one week after the president’s horrifying and very public assassination.
Now, it’s worth noting that Bill and Cassandra Kennedy could boast no connection to the iconic Kennedy family other than the coincidence of having the same surname. But when Bill was recruited to work at the space center that also shared their name, it felt like a sign. Overt confirmation that the Universe had conspired to gift the young couple with an opportunity impossible to decline.
And in many ways, it had.
But it made no sense for IBM to fly her husband from northern California all the way across the country to south Florida for just a day or two. So, not only was Bill immediately away from his new wife, but usually for a week at a time.
Sometimes more.
Not easy for any beautiful young wife and mother, let alone one with Cassie’s history.
Little did she know how quickly these periods of separation were about to escalate. If she had—and this Cassie would never have admitted to her husband—she might have reconsidered their entire union. For instead of the fortuitous kismet it first seemed, it was now starting to feel like some kind of cosmic karma for Cassie’s own past wrongdoings.
In this life…or another.
Bill had only been four months into his new job when everything changed. It was a date neither would forget. Nor would most Americans:
Friday, January 27th, 1967.
The date of the Apollo I launchpad fire.
After that tragic day, Bill’s trips away from Cassie became even more frequent and lasted even longer. Which only served to fuel her fears even further. In turn, this brought on feelings of guilt and selfishness for being afraid of what most adults would dismiss as a fear of the ‘boogeyman.’
But Cassie knew the truth.
She knew from experience that out here in the real world monsters like the boogeyman were far from fictional. Because terrible things really did happen. Awful things. Mortifying things.
And they most often happened to good, normal people.
You only had to look at what happened to those unsuspecting astronauts. Cassie couldn’t even imagine it, those poor men being locked inside that metal cylinder right there on the launchpad as the flames grew and the heat seared and the toxic smoke choked the breath from their lungs. Yet she found herself drawn to doing exactly that: imagining it. Until it became a heavy ball in her gut, churning and tumbling and making her want to throw up.
It was little surprise that Bill returned from that trip a changed man. Always so eager to put his education and natural talents toward something more than just theory—to dedicate them to something that was real, something with meaning—Bill’s entire demeanor had changed. He’d left their Twin Peaks home in mid-January brimming with anticipation and promise, only to return in early February as little more than a shell of his former self.
He didn’t sleep. He hardly ate. And he’d begun drinking just that little bit more. Not enough to be a real concern at first, but certainly more than Cassie could faithfully call ‘social.’
Most striking was the fact that her husband barely engaged anymore with their beautiful, sassy and curiously clever five-year-old, Isabella. It was clear the girl felt this loss as surely as her mother, perhaps more, though she couldn’t quite explain why her little heart was hurting. Many was the time Cassie found herself rocking Isabella to sleep in her arms, tears drying on her daughter’s soft cheeks until the gentle gurgles of sleep issued from her lips.
It was this more than anything that made it painfully clear to Cassie that even when Bill wasn’t away, he wasn’t here either.
Not really here.
A shell masquerading as the man she’d married just six years before, his withdrawal only worsened when the conclusion of the official and very public Thompson investigation was announced. This board of experts revealed that the combustion within the Apollo I craft was caused by a simple mistake in the choice of wire coating which, though fire-retardant, was too easily damaged. This is what caused the spark which became the fire that billowed inside the sealed capsule’s oxygen-rich environment until it devoured everything that could fuel it.
The astronauts included.
As a result, NASA’s entire Apollo program had come under scrutiny, only adding to Bill’s worry and placing untenable amounts of duress on their marriage.
Over the months that followed, Cassie had tried to get Bill to talk about what happened. If he would only open up to her, she believed firmly that her husband might finally feel empowered enough to exorcize that terrible demon called Guilt.
Eventually, Bill did finally talk to her. Which is when Cassie learned another thing she would never forget about that day.
With a half-drained tumbler of whiskey in his hand and a soulless stare in his eyes, Bill told her with almost sangfroid poise that since she was so keen for him to open up to her, “Then how ‘bout we try this one on for size…”
He then recounted in the most graphic detail how everyone on site had listened to the screams of those astronauts over the control room’s comms link as all three men were essentially cremated alive.
Far from diminishing the weight of his emotional burden, Bill’s admission seemed to only send him deeper into withdrawal. Soon he was in a place so dark that the young wife could not allow herself or their Isabella to follow.
It was this point when Cassie began to realize that the Florida launch center had been cursed the moment President Johnson renamed it. As bright and shiny as the world of the Kennedys seemed to most, all Cassie saw was how everything that touched that family somehow rotted and fell from the vine.
All you had to do was look at the facts.
In August of ’63, the First Lady’s pregnancy failed to go full-term and poor little Patrick died after less than two days on earth. Barely three months later, as Jaqueline continued to mourn this fresh and devastating loss, her husband was gunned down as he sat beside her in the back of a convertible Lincoln Continental limousine. Pieces of his brain had embedded in the nap of the First Lady’s pretty pink jacket as she scrabbled to either get away, or salvage a lump of the president’s brain which had skimmed across the trunk lid. Maybe both. And now, just a few short years later, public opinion had turned on Kennedy’s pipedream to send Man to the moon. With social issues such as a burgeoning homeless population, mixed public opinions toward our returning Vietnam vets, and civil rights tensions at an all-time high, the people were demanding not only change, but a shift in priorities. The whole Apollo program—once the blonde-haired, blue-eyed prom king of America’s future—had become the awkward, red-headed stepchild.
And these were just some of the tragedies yet to come. Still, as if it were no longer satisfied with devouring the iconic Kennedys alone, now the curse had begun to eat away at Bill and Cassie’s life, too. For all intents and purposes, the man she called her husband ceased to exist after the Apollo launchpad tragedy. Consumed by the flames of failure, her sweet, loving Bill had been taken that day, as surely as those poor astronauts had been.
Now all but alone with Isabella, the once carefree five-year-old she affectionately called ‘Bella Luna,’ Cassandra spent most of her nights listening for the telltale sounds of an intruder she knew would one day come. Darting from one side of the room to the other, her eyes searched for signs of movement, or shadows she couldn’t explain, while her daughter slept unawares in the next room. Only after Cassie would succumb to the thin and restless sleep she so vehemently resisted would her mind be permitted to escape this grainy, stress-induced reality in which she constantly resided.
But the realm of her dreams offered scant refuge.
In them, Cassie was barraged with grotesque and confusing images. Often, she saw herself in third-person, weakened and bloodied on the floor as a man in coveralls and military boots towered over her. Perhaps more frightening than anything was the fact that she was unable to see his face. Having a burlap sack pulled tight over his head, there were no eye holes for him to see; no nose or mouth holes for him to breathe.
No facial features whatsoever.
Just a blank burlap sack.
And in those dreams that blankness was as empty as the man’s soul itself.
) (
FRIDAY MORNING / JULY 18
“That’s terrifying, Cass.”
Her friend—who was sometimes Trish, sometimes Patty, but always Patricia—grimaced through a plume of smoke as she tapped her cigarette against the brown glass ashtray. She took another slurp of coffee as Cassie cradled her own mug between both palms, savoring the warmth of the sturdy ceramic. Summer rains were threatening, and a morning mist had settled over the city. Its cold and damp seemed to infiltrate her very home to nip at her delicate fingers.
“It is.”
Cassie tried to think of something more to add that would better convey the terror she felt every time this lurid dream assaulted her unconscious mind. But nothing seemed to match its darkness. Its violence.
Its intimidation.
Besides, although she and Patty had been friends for going on two years, Cassie still found herself unable to share with her that this recurring scene was borne of a fear which had shadowed her since childhood. One that, in recent months, was only getting worse.
Patricia Brewster visibly shuddered. “And you never see this guy’s face?”
Cassie shook her head as she raised her mug to her lips.
“What about the location—is it here?” Patty gestured broadly about the third-floor walk-up. “In your own house?”
Cassie swallowed. Shrugged.
“I really don’t know. I don’t see that much of my surroundings in the vision—” She cut herself short, bristling at this particular label as if it bestowed the power to manifest the horror into reality. “I mean the dream. You know?”
Patricia took in the apartment slowly and shuddered. An overly dramatic shivering sound put an exclamation point on how well and truly creeped out she was by the whole thing.
“Really, Patty. It’s okay. It’s only a dream.”
“Yeah, but is it?” Patricia lowered her empty cup and snuffed her cigarette, exhaling an impressive final billow that caught the circulation of the ceiling fan and swirled in loops until it dissolved. “I mean, c’mon, Cass. Do you really think it’s just a dream?”
Cassie stared into her friend’s eyes, a gaze as soft as it was sincere. She said nothing as her kitchen wall clock quietly ticked away the seconds, each one a thunderbolt in the electrical storm brewing in her mind.
) (
“You know, I have to admit, I kinda missed you and Bella the last few weeks,” Patty said while pouring herself a second cup from the percolator. “When you stopped coming to the café, and then stopped calling, I thought maybe you’d already flown the coop or something. Pooped the scoop. Busted outta this popsicle stand. And without telling your best friend, no less.” She lit another of her Virginia Slims. “I was getting a little pissed, if I’m honest.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I guess the move’s been just a little more than I could take. And you know me by now. If I have nothing positive to contribute, I just retreat into my little turtle shell. And take Isabella with me.”
Patty took a long drag, nodding. “Speaking of nothing positive, have you heard from Bill?”
“He’s still at Kennedy. So, no arguments or screaming for over a month. Which has to be a record.”
Silence. A light pop like crinkling paper from the tip of Patty’s cigarette which glowed bright. “You did the right thing.”
Patricia could have been speaking about any number of recent decisions, but Cassie knew she meant her separation, and of course this place—her Haight-Ashbury rental. A third floor walk-up at the bottom of the Lyon Street descent, hauling groceries was a drag. But being catty-corner to the park, mere steps away, meant everything. Especially to Isabella, who simply adored taking walks there and running around the playground.
“Twin Peaks just isn’t the place for you. At least for right now. I mean—” Patty pulled aside the curtain over the kitchenette’s slim French door and the morning’s soft diffused light filtered in from the small balcony “—just look. Even with the fog rolling in, you’re so close to the Panhandle you can still see all that beautiful, delicious green. I mean, just look. It’s life-affirming!”
The Panhandle to which Patty was referring was the long but unusually thin park abutting the eastern boundary of the much larger and far more famous Golden Gate Park. Being just one block deep but eight blocks long, on the map the park appeared to be the handle to the much larger pan of its better-known counterpart.
“Life-affirming? Sure is,” Cassie said. “Hell, I get to see half-naked hippies getting stoned and shagging like rabbits. And from the comfort of my own living room, no less.”
Patty’s eyes lit up. “Wow, can you?”
“God, you’re so easy.” Cassie laughed. “No! Ewww!”
Cracking open the French door just enough to blow the smoke through, Patty took another drag. It swirled in the breeze and blended with the fog.
“Sister, I’m a whole lotta things. And ‘easy’ is one title I’m actually proud to admit that I’ve earned. There’s nothing wrong with us gals getting some, too. I mean, guys get to do it. So, why not us?”
Cassie chuckled.
“Right on, babe.” She held out her mug and clinked it against Patty’s. “Here’s to my sister from another mister.” With a wink she added, “And here’s to being easy.”
) (
Before leaving for work Patty offered to come back and stay that night. She knew Cassie wouldn’t accept the offer, but she felt she had to at least put it out there.
Living alone for Patty was no longer a big deal. In fact, she had come to relish it over the years. But this whole solo thing was going to be a new experience for her friend. Being several years Patricia’s junior, it was Cassie’s first time living on her own.
With any separation there’s always an element of emotional turmoil. When it’s a marriage or cohabitation, you also suffer the added stress of having to find a new place to live coupled with the gut-wrenching task of packing up and moving. Little else in life is more humbling than seeing your life compartmentalized into neat little cardboard boxes. Of course, as Cassie also had Isabella to think of, finding a place was even more difficult than had she been on her own. Which is why Patty couldn’t have been more thrilled when Cassie revealed that she’d found this third floor walk-up. Sure, three floors of rickety old steps were a bitch, especially with bags of groceries in tow. But the price was right, and it was adjacent to the park and, frankly, was as cute as a button. Being on Lyon Street also meant it was just a few minutes’ walk up the hill to the heart of Haight-Ashbury, with Patty’s café being just another few blocks more. So the potential risk of seclusion and loneliness were less of a worry than if Cassie had moved to another part of the city altogether.
