[Writing Prompt] You are the sole survivor a famous serial killer as a college student. Years later, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer you finally pluck up the courage to visit him in prison and ask one question that’s been plaguing you for decades: “why didn’t you kill me?”
Sole Survivor
Prison smells strange.
The odors that waft through a prison run the gamut of distastefulness, from cheap food to the fetor of shit and piss, the consuming stench of waterlogged towels, or, from time to time, the acrid, iron taint of spilled blood.
But, behind all that, persistent through all that, is another odor – a kind of sweet, almost cloying scent of industrial cleaning fluid mixed with the accumulated reek of a thousand thousand air fresheners.
Sing Sing Correctional Facility was no different. When Laramie walked through its well guarded entrance he was accosted by the unexpected odor. The stench filled his mouth. It activated his salivary glands and touched deep within his nostrils. It was distasteful. But then again, so was the whole enterprise.
It had taken Laramie forty-two years to build up the courage for this visit and now, as he subjected himself to a thorough search, wrote his full name and address in the sergeant log, and clipped a dilapidated visitor’s badge on the front pocket of his button down shirt, Laramie began to wonder if he hadn’t made a terrible mistake.
The sergeant pointed down a long hallway, all pale, flesh colored tile and groaty old pipes lined with insulating asbestos fibers. “End of the hall on the right. Just have a seat in there and an officer will come in shortly.”
The sergeant spoke with abject disinterest. He was watching a basketball game on his cell phone.
Laramie cleared his throat and spoke. Every word hurt, so he tried to be brief. “Is it safe?”
The sergeant didn’t hear, or didn’t care to hear, and just kept watching the game. Laramie looked down at his feet, a vestigial gesture born a long time ago in response to the actions of the very man he was coming to visit. Without another word, Laramie started down the tiled hallway.
In 1981 Laramie was 20 years old and vivacious. He was going to be a theater actor, the best in America, and, if he had his way, the best in the world. He had trained from a young age, made it into Yale drama, and was beloved in his class there. The future seemed to Laramie as a golden path, pre-stretched before him, clear as a crystal day, upon which he need only stride confidently to succeed.
John Thomas Gethers had just arrived in New Haven from Rhode Island, where he was responsible for the killing of at least fourteen young men and women. Laramie would not find this out until five years later when Gethers turned himself in – frustrated at a national man-hunt that was making no progress whatsoever in discovering his true identity.
Gethers was indiscriminate in his targets. He had few of the psychological markers generally found in serial killers. There was no modus operandi which defined a pattern in his killing, nor did he take tokens with him from his victims. All that could be said of Gethers was that he was an accomplished and frequent murderer who only ever let one victim get away.
Laramie was walking back from a performance one evening when he had the displeasure of “meeting” John Thomas Gethers. The meeting was brief – the honk of a horn, a rolled down window, a bearded man’s face, and then blackness as Laramie fell unconscious. He would find out later that Gethers enjoyed using a tranquilizer gun, a little compressed air pistol that shot a dart filled with sedative, the kind used by animal control on rabid dogs.
Laramie woke up in a motel room, his arms and legs bound, his mouth gagged and duct taped over. The room was poorly lit and Laramie was standing against the wall, duct taped to it, like a fly caught in a spider’s web. His vision was blurry at first, and he struggled to see in the darkened room. There were two beds, an old TV, and a single low voltage lamp on the night table. The bathroom door was closed, and in the slight gap between the bottom of the door and the carpeted floor, Laramie could see a line of light and the periodic movement of shadows. Someone whistled to themselves behind the thin wood.
People often talk about flight or fight as if the choice is binary. But for some people, there is a third option – disappear. You don’t know which of these options you will take until you find yourself in that situation – adrenaline coursing through your veins like battery acid, death’s hot breath on your neck. Just know that whichever option you choose, should you survive your ordeal, your choice will define you from then on.
Laramie disappeared. He fell internally into an open pit of the mind. His neck slumped forward until all he saw were his feet, bound together and still. There was no room, no whistling man, no foreboding shadows. Only Laramie’s feet. From that moment on Laramie could have been vivisected, carved into pieces, and he would not have felt at thing.
Only, he was not. Gethers did nothing. Laramie stood in the room for a long time. Eventually a police officer cut him loose from the wall.
Laramie was never the same after that. The spark that drove him through life was snuffed out. John Thomas Gethers had spared Laramie’s body, but he had killed Laramie’s spirit.
And now, at last, Laramie was going to find out why. His lungs ached from the inoperable tumor slowly devouring them, and each breath raked across his throat like desert sands in a wind storm. Still, Laramie put one foot in front of another, watching them carefully, as if they were someone else’s feet, until at last he was in the interview room, sitting on a red plastic chair, waiting for his tormentor to arrive.
Gethers entered the room with a limp, his beard a mess of curly white threads, the hair on top of his head almost entirely gone, bald liver spots revealed on the skin of his crown. His orange prison uniform was too big for his hollow frame, and it hung off him like cloth draped over a skeleton. His eyes bore the appearance of perpetual confusion.
An officer guided Gethers to his chair on the other side of the plexiglass and helped Gethers take a seat. Then, with a sad look at Laramie, the officer walked back toward the far entrance and gave them their privacy.
Gethers and Laramie sat there in silence, looking at each other through the thick plexiglass for some time, neither saying a word. Laramie had wondered what emotions this meeting might foment in him, but so far he was surprised to find he felt nothing at all. At last, he spoke.
“Mr. Gethers?”
Gethers blinked.
The seal broken, the words came. “Mr. Gethers, my name is Laramie Mathews. In 1981 you abducted me in New Haven and brought me to a motel room. You bound and gagged me, but then you let me go.”
Gethers looked Laramie in the eyes and blinked again. He licked his lips just a little, as if he was preparing to speak, but then said nothing.
Laramie shook his head. “I’m here…” why was he here, speaking to this old man, “…why didn’t you kill me? Why did you let me go?”
As a curtain lifts and reveals a well lit and manicured set, so did the haze momentarily rise on John Thomas Gethers’ hapless eyes. There, for just a moment, was the man himself – whatever was left of him in the rotten mass of his degenerate brain. Suddenly the eyes thinned with recognition and Gethers’ head lifted slightly backward on his neck, his chin rising, so that he looked at Laramie down the length of his long nose.
Then Gethers began to chuckle. The sound rose in volume until it was a full bodied, hacking laugh that morphed seamlessly into wet coughing. The coughs wracked Gethers’ thin frame, and he coughed with such intensity that it seemed he might die, right there behind the plexiglass.
Laramie watched, dumbfounded.
Finally, Gethers settled down, got his breath again and, calmly, assuredly, looked Laramie in the eyes. His voice was lazy, bored.
“I had a stomach ache.”
Then, all at once, the recognition faded – the monster that was Gethers descended back into a swamp of poisoned neurons and misfiring synapses and all that remained was a vapid old man, the living face of confusion.
The old man looked at Laramie as if seeing him for the first time. “Are you my grandson?” the old man asked.
But Laramie did not answer. He did not even hear. Laramie wasn’t there anymore. He had disappeared, just as he had all those years ago, staring down at his feet.
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