The Dead Circle (5 page)

Kevin’s excitement doesn’t wear off quickly, he doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of watching this, but he eventually starts to feel a nagging sense that there is something creepy happening. Under all of the titillation there is an unsettling
wrongness
about this whole situation.

The group is also growing exponentially fast. Ten people became a hundred in a matter of minutes. Twenty minutes after that, there are over a thousand naked people walking in the circle. And now it seems to be doubling every few minutes.

The ‘dance’ hasn’t stopped. In fact, the sheer mass of people seems to have intensified the strange spasmodic motions. Arms and legs twitch and flail in random directions. Within an hour, the cluster of bodies which began with a single woman has now grown to include more than five thousand people.

Each of them walks around and around the lot in a huge counter-clockwise circle.  They don’t fall into step with each other, but they all move at the same consistent and deliberate pace. The order is only interrupted by the randomly snapping muscle spasms that violently contort their bodies.

Step…step…step…SNAP... stepSNAP …step…step…

As more and more ‘dancers’ join the horde, they fill in to form a complete circle. They create an enormous revolving wheel of writhing flesh.

Several hundred onlookers have joined Kevin and his new mechanic friend. On their faces shine the whole range of human emotions—excitement, glee, terror, revulsion, despair. Each witness is having their own experience of the event. Some are shouting into their phones or talking rapidly to each other. Others focus on taking pictures. A large number of them just stand in sober silence. As the minutes pass, more people start to crowd around the edges. Many theories on what is happening are posited, but there seems to be no definitive answer.
Is it some sort of a protest? An illness? Mass hysteria?

A small group of people kneel in a circle holding hands and rocking back and forth. A woman in a corduroy dress leads a prayer. Tears streak down her face as she speaks in a half-murmur, half-moan.

“Lord may you grant us the strength and wisdom to understand what we are witnessing. Give us the grace to comprehend this dark event, this horrible display of wickedness. Jesus, what are you trying to tell us? If this be the end of days, let us be worthy and may you take us to sweet heaven and away from this fetid mortal coil.”

The police arrived twenty minutes after Shirley began her walk. They unsuccessfully tried to talk to the naked ‘dancers,’ eventually trying to arrest one of them for public indecency. They were forced to tackle and handcuff the naked man, but they could not get him to talk. The baffled cops could not get him to do anything except wordlessly strain against them, trying to get back into the circle. Eventually, there were too many naked people to contain. The authorities settled on cordoning off the area with police barriers and just watching. Within an hour, their sawhorses had been overrun by thousands more naked bodies. They had no choice but to keep falling back and bewilderedly ask for instructions over the radio.

The media gets there shortly after the police. Knowing they will get incredible images, they immediately take out their cameras and take gigabytes of photos and videos. Several scuffles break out as photographers jockey for the perfect position. They each dream of taking the one iconic photo they hope to sell to Time magazine for more money than they make in a year. When not trying to interview the nude people, reporters phone their political contacts to try and find out who organized the event. Few of them think to talk to their science editors. The television correspondents call for satellite trucks so they can set up live shots.

Kevin, who remained standing at the outskirts of the circle as it formed, has forgotten all about the fact that he should have been home by now. He should have already received annoyed, then frantic, messages from his mother or Ted asking where he was. But his phone remains silent.

Without really being aware of it, Kevin has fallen into a state of dulled shock. Lulled by the overwhelming strangeness, by the hypnotic circular motion of the bodies, he stands frozen for almost twenty minutes. He remains in his trance-like state until it is brutally punctured by the image of a large tattooed man punching his arm out and slamming an old woman on the side of her face. The force of the impact is shocking. Her head violently snaps to the right. Her grey hair flings across her forehead as if she is at a heavy metal concert. Even in the chaos of bodies, Kevin hears a loud crack on impact. He thinks she must be nearly eighty—small, wrinkled and frail. Her skin sags on her frame like she is melting. Kevin has never seen an old person naked before and he is surprised by what happens to a body, and boobs, when time and gravity do their work. The pit of his stomach drops out like it did when his real father once took him to Six Flags and they rode his first ‘adult’ roller coaster. He expects her to crumple to the ground, thinking there’s no way she would be able to withstand the impact. But neither the tattooed man nor the old woman react to the violence, despite the fact that the woman is now bleeding profusely from her eye and the man’s wrist is hanging limply at an impossible angle.

Kevin is stunned. Much like sex, violence in reality is completely different from violence in the movies. His older brother Derek had shown him ‘House of 1000 Corpses’ one night when their Mom and Ted were away. It was super gross and secretly gave him horrible nightmares, but seeing this casual act of brutality and
injury
in real life is so different. It shocks him to his core. He hears a buzzing in his ears and his vision starts to get darker. With the world starting to swim in front of his eyes, he drops to his knees and leans forward trying to get the blood to go back into his head. He will come to regret this decision.

Trying to clear his mind of the image, he forces himself to read every word on a littered candy wrapper. He takes a few deep breaths. The banality of the unpronounceable ingredients helps calm his mind and after a long moment, the buzzing in his ears slowly starts to fade. His hearing slowly returns to normal and everything seems loud all of a sudden. Still on his hands and knees, Kevin looks back up and realizes that from the ground, he can see a different perspective of the circle. He takes in wave after wave of bare feet, now almost black from walking in the grime and…
could
that be blood?
The endless motion is dizzying. He feels a tingling sensation as if all the legs blurring together were bristles on a toothbrush rubbing across the back of his neck.

Through the chaos of the feet, Kevin’s attention is called to something different, smaller. Something that used to be a toddler. It is fighting to stay upright in the mass of motion. Kevin gasps. Like the rest of the horde, the child’s eyes are white and expressionless, but are no less the eyes of a child who is loved and cared for by somebody.

It’s a wonder that the small chubby legs have been able to stay upright as long as they have, though it does not stay up much longer. Kevin watches as a spasming foot kicks out and trips the child. The small body stumbles and falls face-down onto the dirty pavement. No one stops to assist. Nobody avoids stepping on it. Nobody even seems to notice. The thousands of feet just continue their journeys around and around the circle.

Kevin covers his face with his hands and puts his forehead directly onto the dirty concrete causing the wrapper to stick to his sweaty forehead. He almost looks like he is praying. And in a way, he is. He’s praying that he will not envision what is happening deep in that circle. He’s desperately trying not to picture that child being ground into the pavement. But of course that is impossible.

Perhaps it is a mercy for Kevin when it starts to rain.

*

When the rain begins, the last sliver of sun has dropped below the skyline and darkness has fallen over the city. Dozens of police and TV news lights surrounding the perimeter now illuminate the circle. The powerful lights throw large shadows of the ‘dance’ up onto the office buildings surrounding the lot. The shadows change fluidly like animation. Sometimes they display abstract shapes created by clumps of torsos and limbs and sometimes they isolate the silhouette of a single body. Projected two stories high, the images swirl with a primitive motion like a post-modern cave painting come to life. Like blood spatter on a wall, it is accidental art created by horror.

Local TV reporters have set up live shots for the evening news, but still fail to make sense of what is happening. In each news van, segment producers are desperately trying to figure out how much to show on television. The nudity is part of the story, but they don’t want to spend the next six months being yelled at or fined by the FCC.

“Fuck! What the hell am I supposed to do here?” one producer shouts at an equally baffled reporter.

“Isn’t there some sort of policy? Or guidelines?”

The producer rolls his eyes. “Oh sure, just let me check the mass naked hysteria chapter in my editorial handbook!”

Over their heads, the NBC 4 helicopter hovers five hundred feet above, broadcasting the bizarre footage. Crazy Kenny is getting an earful from the station producer who is shouting into his headset.

“Don’t zoom in! Pull back asshole. We’re live! If I see one more set of dick and balls or big floppy tits on my monitor, we’ll all get our asses fired!”

Crazy Kenny in The Chopper, whose regular beat is reporting the Traffic on The Tens, is struggling mightily. This is not his night. He’s a one-man operation. He flies the helicopter, he does the reporting, and he runs the high-definition video camera mounted to the bottom of the cockpit. He is perfectly capable of doing each job by itself, but even after three years, he has never gotten comfortable doing all of them at once.

Now, Kenny is failing to describe what he is seeing. And his failure is being broadcast live on TV. He has a vocabulary for traffic: ‘It’s jammed up like my Aunt Rose after Thanksgiving dinner!’, ‘It’s as clear as my dating calendar!’, ‘It’s a parking lot out there Jim, if I was you, I’d just stay home and watch NBC 4!’ He has a vocabulary for the various problems that might occur on the roads of Detroit: accidents, weather, construction, a police chase. But he has no vocabulary for what he is seeing tonight
.

What the hell do I call them?
Protesters? Crazy people? Freaking zombies?
In one ear of his headset, frustrated anchors back at NBC are talking to him live on the air. In his other ear, his producer is screaming instructions that only he can hear. The cacophony makes it impossible for him to concentrate. And to make things worse, it is beginning to rain.

Kenny hates bad weather. The jerk-offs at NBC kept refusing to pay to repair the weather stripping on the helicopter, so every time it rained, he would get cold and wet. Not enough water gets through to damage any of the equipment—because they care about the equipment—but it is always enough to be insanely annoying and give him a perpetual cold.

“Yeah, once again Doug, I can’t tell you what the purpose of this… event… is. If it’s a protest of some sort, they’re being pretty vague about what they’re trying to say.” Kenny shouts into his head-set. Collin, the pompous head anchor, is continuing to ask him the same questions over and over despite the fact that he doesn’t have any answers. Kenny can tell he is making him look like an asshole on purpose.

“I can tell you that they don’t seem to be bothered by the-”

A drop of rain hits the bridge of Kenny’s nose. There is a cartoonish look of surprise on his face before his expression goes completely blank. He takes his hands off the controls and the self-leveler kicks in. Kenny removes his headset, dropping it to his side with a clang. Voices in both ears of the headset simultaneously ask him why he stopped talking, but Crazy Kenny in The Chopper is no longer listening. He doesn’t complete his report or even finish his sentence.

Instead, he begins to take off his shirt.

The rain starts to fall onto the crowd below. The first precipitation comes down in a few random drops, plopping down every few feet. But quickly, the drops build to a pounding, driving rain that crashes over the people below in thick sheets. Within five minutes, the horde is joined by the onlookers, cops, reporters and what remains of a boy who loved floor hockey.

Nobody looks up at the helicopter to see the cockpit door open and a slightly pudgy balding man calmly roll out and begin to plummet to the ground. None of the people notice that even during his rapid descent, he continues to remove his pants. He gets one foot out before he hits the pavement below and promptly explodes from the impact.

Chapter 3

A unique set of circumstances has to take place for a library to be abandoned before construction is even completed and even more unlikely occurrences have to be set in motion for it to remain untouched for more than eighty years. Chris and Sarah jokingly decided that it was fate that led to their ownership of the little library that never was.

Ten years into the twentieth century, Henry Ford debuted his assembly line and started selling Model Ts as fast as he could build them. The automobile industry exploded and Detroit was soon flush with cash and expanding as fast as it could build itself. The industrious city constructed the Michigan Central Station in 1914, a majestic public library in 1921, and the city’s first skyscraper, the Penobscot, in 1928, rapidly turning Detroit into one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the world.

The year after the Penobscot tower was completed the city began building a downtown branch of the Detroit Public Library system. It wasn’t going to rival the size and scale of the main location on Woodward Ave, in fact it wasn’t going to be much larger than a small church, but it was going to be beautiful. European marble and South American Mahogany would create elegant paneling and shelves. The main feature was to be a large open room, two stories tall, with bookshelves covering the walls of two separate levels: the main floor and an oval-shaped balcony. A marble staircase was to have connected the two floors with the card catalogue and librarian desk in the center of the lower level. The library was to have been reached from a marble staircase leading up from the street in a miniature nod to the New York Public Library steps in Manhattan.