The Hallow Nightmare

The Henry family moved out of their upper class home in Houston to a cheaper one miles south because their dog had been hit by a car. Patriarch Leland heard his oldest daughter’s cries that he was finally happy until the day that he died when referencing the family pet. Several months later in their new home which was supposed to be a fresh start, his youngest daughter would wake up in a hospital screaming the same thing about them. We were finally happy.

In late November 1963 Winifred Henry was the lone survivor in a massacre worse than the small unowned town would ever recover from. After a night that took the lives of her parents, two older sisters, and two younger brothers, hers was the only body that could be identified. Winnie, as she was known lovingly by, was on her way to the morgue with the rest of them when she gasped for life. What was seen as a miracle to some was the ending of one nightmare and the beginning of a new for the poor girl.

As should be expected by someone in her position, the young lady was inconsolable when she was conscious. Each time she had to be reminded that her entire family was gone. When she asked about the ashes of the siblings her mother lost during and after childbirth kept in porcelain dolls, she found hope. Those dolls her father had made to console his wife were not recovered. Given the condition of the bodies it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility the dolls had been destroyed as well. She didn’t believe it.

Winnie convinced herself that the remnants found of her parents and siblings were not them. They took the dolls and escaped. Leaving her behind was no accident. She was the only one smart enough to know and tell the truth. The Henry family had been happy the days before the house fire. There was no point in investigating an arsonist, let alone a murder the way the police were talking about. The doctors wanted to humor her. Perhaps it was best for the girl’s recovery if her family was out there in the world walking around. They would treat her psychosis the best they saw fit in the meantime and report anything she said.

“River Hallow?” Sheriff Lydia Sanders extended her hand and introduced herself.

I closed the notes I had made about the case on the ride over. Sheriff Sanders was an older woman, but only evidenced by the silver of her hair blending with the blond. If you stared at her long enough you would see the creases by her mouth and eyes beginning to come in. I knew her personality when we spoke on the phone several days ago, but it was typical of someone in her position. Woman Sheriff in a Texan small town with a situation on her hands unimaginable outside of a nightmare. She stood with her soldiers back and chin up.

“Nice to meet you, sheriff. This is my partner, Troy Phinehouse.” I motioned to my left.

“Thank you for coming in. We could use all the help we can get.”

“Likewise.” Troy nodded in acknowledgment, unaccepting of her handshake greeting.

“He’s not a people person.” I brushed off an explanation so she wouldn’t feel too offended.

“Don’t give folks around here the option then. They’ll take it personally.”

“Understood.”

“I do the talking. He’ll do the observing.”

I placed my hand on his arm when Sherriff Sanders turned to lead us on. His face immediately cut to mine out of worry that something was wrong. I shook my head and gave a smile of reassurance. Though he was the observer in our partnership, he served as my security guard first and foremost.

“We’re very short on staff, so I went ahead and had everyone meet in the back room.”

“Who am I meeting?”

“Our deputies, our secretary, and someone they sent from Fort Worth. I think she’s in mortuary.”

“She wasn’t on our list.” Troy said of the last person.

“I wasn’t aware the Army got involved with this.” I frowned, flipping through my pages.

“No, she just lives there. She’s kind of freelance.”

“Has her background been verified?” He went on.

“I promise you she wouldn’t be here if she couldn’t be trusted.”

That didn’t settle Troy’s doubt, nor my upset stomach. Reading my mind he said, “I agree. Call him.”

I stopped Sheriff Sanders and motioned her back to the front office. I opened the sliding glass window and leaned through to grab the phone. Punching in a few numbers, I reached my office in Virginia.

“Bill, is Norma busy this week?” I asked my assistant based back home. He assured me that she was not and, in fact, left another note promising herself to me if I needed outside assistance. “Send her my way. We have a mortician and no analyst.”

“Guess it’s good to have friends in your place of work.” Sheriff Sanders said to me when I hung up the phone and rejoined her going down the hall. “What does Norma analyze?”

“Forensics, but she got her start in makeup chemistry.” I stepped ahead, not acknowledging that Norma and I were in different places of work.

“Alright, but you’re telling the one we’ve already got.”

“That’s why it’s good to have someone who isn’t a people-person with you.”

I opened the door and was met with the very small group of people welcoming me with a banner and a table of breakfast baked goods. As though my arrival were a New Year’s party, a few of them pulled the string holiday poppers exploding with confetti and glitter all over the brown carpet floor. Troy’s arm immediately went across my front and he brandished his gun.

“It’s okay!” I eased him. “My apologies, he has a reflex with loud noises.”

A murmur of awkward apologies rippled through them.

“This is Special Investigator River Hallow from Virginia and her partner Troy Phinehouse. Introduce yourselves on your own time.” Sheriff Sanders patted me on the shoulder and went over to grab a muffin.

“Who set this up?” I asked, staying near the front of the room. The workers looked among themselves before a mousy-faced brunette timidly raised her hand.

“I always set something up for a new workers in the office.”

“Is that in the budget?” Troy asked.

“It was pre-approved.” She rubbed her hands together.

“Are you the forensics expert here?” He questioned further. A dark haired woman near the back with a plastic cup looked up.

“No, I’m Eva. I’m the secretary.” She pointed at the woman on the other side of the room. “Diana is-“

“We’re bringing in someone external. Your services won’t be necessary.” Troy cut the indignant looking professional.

Diana looked at Sheriff Sanders who shrugged her shoulders. She scoffed and walked out. The others in the room turned cold. Two of the men, the deputies, tossed their coffee in the trash and followed her.

“Oh-! No, don’t go!” Eva pleaded. Sheriff Sanders walked back up to us.

“Know what I said about not giving folks the option to give you a handshake?”

“None of them did.” Troy noted, but I caught the meaning he wouldn’t.

“We should have done that privately to not bruise her ego.” I explained it to him.

“An ego is not a bone or an organ, she shall be fine.” His face remained steady. His eyes darted around the room taking inventory of everything in there. I asked Sanders to give us a moment so I could handle it.

“Troy?”

His eyelids twitched in an imitation of a flutter looking at me. I smiled, touching the side of his face. “You know what hurts the emotions can hurt the brain.”

Realization and memory washed over his face. I was glad that he was looking at me so that Sanders couldn’t see when a light in the digital orbs acting as his eyes circled to process this information. They returned to normal and his features returned appearing more human than synthetic parts.

“Does the Diana suffer a depression?” His linguistics stuttered when he tried to talk too quickly. He was still facing me, but asking Sanders.

“Um, not that I’m aware?”

I could tell in her face that she didn’t take that possibly seriously. The American Dream ideals of the fifties in the previous decade had not been open to mental illness.

“I shall run a mental test with those working alongside us to determine the balance of the chemicals in their brain.”

“Are you one of those medicinal doctors?” Sanders asked. I chuckled, shaking my head at the idea of Troy getting high.

“He has a line of logic for this decision.”

“You’re in Texas, Mr. Phinehouse. My deputies are strong and tough men.”

“So was Agent Paul.” Troy said aloud in something that shocked me. He never talked about his former agent. I thought he’d deleted the memory.

Gathering what that alluded to, Sheriff Sanders eased off Troy’s perceived neurotic personality. “They would probably rather you fire them than be accused of not being strong enough to do their job.”

“Anyone can have an unbalanced brain.” Troy looked from the ceiling to the Sheriff. “What else are we here for?”

Having made his point quite clear, Sanders was the last one to leave the meeting room still packed full of breakfast food and drink. I was proud of him for making progress on understanding that words could hurt humans and for reminding Sanders that those who weren’t mentally stable ended up in her jail cells. He and I would not have been asked to come in if the Whickett family experienced a nice family picnic. Someone killed a young girl’s entire family and left her alive. Troy was there to outline the rationale while I handled the superstitious belief that it might have not been of this earth. Which, as I had found often, was merely a cause of mental distress.

Troy and I both knew how powerful a human brain could be. As a lab creation designed to be human without one, he was fascinated by it. The importance of its development before the age of nine, the ease of losing it in old age. How one wrong tap near the right brow, or a broken nose going too far, could mess up the entire body. People could lose fingers and limbs and still manage to survive, but not anything going slightly off in the head.

I don’t know what his emotional capability is as synthetic human meant to not be able to, but when I had even the slightest migraine he flew into something strongly akin to fear and panic. The first time he was around when I started my period he had me in the car halfway to a hospital thinking that I was dying. Upsetting to his creator’s intentions, Troy wasn’t all-knowing. His former owner Agent Paul wasn’t a woman so Troy didn’t know the extent of what it was like to be a person with the female reproductive system. He was a previously owned address and phone number book with Paul’s history while I was giving him mine now as well.

we decided to go unpack at the Railway Inn. It was the only place to stay otherwise I would have asked him to book anywhere else. It was a two story house with a saloon on the open main floor and five bedrooms upstairs. If Troy were not in his humanoid disguise we would have stood out less as outsiders.

There were gruff, midday drunk alcohols snickering when they saw Troy dressed up in something other than jeans a fist sized belt buckle. The woman running the bar dressed the part of a saloon girl with her chest overspilling in a tight red and black corset and her hair in long outdated curls I hoped would never come back. She didn’t have the ethical morals of an old Madam in charge of the brothel by the way she looked at me with disdain at our dissimilar surnames. A part of me was glad. If she’d had any knowledge of the Phinehouse name, Troy’s cover would be blown.

From our single bed room on the second floor we had a perfect line of sight to the bombed Henry House. A plume of smoke still spiraled up to the sky and fire crews all the way from Dallas remained on scene. The explosion had gone off in the witching hours following the Kennedy assassination and with every emergency service in Texas focused on it, no one was around to help the ten person volunteer firefighters. The Henry family couldn’t have been saved any faster, but evidence might had been recovered. Like the rest of the country, Troy and I were still mourning the killing of a President combined with slightly different reasons.

Dr. Phinehouse had created his synthetic humans with the express intent of helping the military. Once they were approved as secret weapons and given identification to conceal their robotic truth, the White House naturally commissioned one for the First Family. Dr. Phinehouse had named it Botnik after hearing how Kennedy referred to the puppies from the Soviet leader. It was the only one he named personally while the agents they were assigned to chose their own. Likewise, Troy’s name given by Agent Paul was Trophimus. The synthetics were implanted with a chip to imprint on the first person to use its facial recognition software, so they were created to bond. Phinehouse realized that human beings had a tendency to do this when it was personally named.

A little over a week ago on November 22nd, the Kennedy’s tour through Dallas went on without Botnik. The synth was experiencing a common glitch and was in Fort Worth for repairs. He was left dismantled in an unused room of the White House as far as Troy and I knew. While the rest of Phinehouse’s synthetics were recalled in to get refurbished to fix that glitch, nearly a thousand in total, Troy was already considered discontinued. Once a synthetic’s assigned person had died they were meant to be sent back to the laboratory to be broken down for parts. I had gotten Troy by sheer luck before he went on the transportation truck out.

Keeping the truth of his creation secret was always dire so the powers that be wouldn’t take him away. Even now, in our hotel room with the blinds drawn, he was hesitant to remove the disguise. I hadn’t seen him without it since I’d had his autonomy chip increased to give him the maximum amount of free will. Back home in our apartment I understood that he wouldn’t want to because he had become quite the metropolitan. To have his own chosen clothes allowed him to more comfortably settle into a human persona. The disguise gave him an identity no one would contest. He had been re-imprinted to me with Dr. Phinehouse’s help, but the change in his free will allowed him to choose me the way that I had him.

There was nothing in the world that could convince me that, despite being artificially created, he didn’t want. When he chose what to wear because it was aesthetically pleasing with my outfit, or the way he sat and stared at the television watching Mister Peepers from the decade before instead of I Love Lucy. He had a personality. He had thoughts and ideas for discussions. He was no more cold hearted from his wiring than a bad seed.

When we dealt with cases where children were harmed, their age factored into how he processed our investigation. He knew when religious fanaticism steered adults into making abusive choices. Even if we weren’t romantically attached, he was perfect for investigating this case. We had the survivor’s medical file and he was scanning over every single detail from her last hospitalization several months before. Right off the fact that the Henry family had taken young Winnie to a doctor we knew we were dealing with something a little more complicated than James Fifield’s followers and The Freedom Story.

“Penny for your thoughts?” I asked. He had been studying the medical file long enough for me to have thought he might be stuck.

“We’ve interviewed children in hospitals with circumstances just like Winifred Henry’s.” He acknowledged. “Thirty-six hours of quite intense treatment for a child and she was discharged by the next morning.”

“You do agree that this was an external attack, then?” I leaned back on the headboard.

“She was found in the barn as though she were planted there.”

“You didn’t get to see the body before they took her to county.”

“Shall I phone Sanders for the number to request an appointment?” He offered, making his way to pick up the phone.

“No, ask Norma to do it.” I began biting my nail while looking over the autopsy reports for the rest of the Henry family.

“Mrs. Sampson won’t be here for awhile if she’s traveling from J. Edgar.”

“I don’t see our survivor waking up before Norma arrives. If she does, can you imagine the mental state she’ll be in? Poor girl.”

“I can gather how it would be troubling.”

He set Winnie’s file down on top of the chest of drawers. He took a seat at the corner of the bed, minding the papers I’d had scattered around. I shoved them aside so he could come up beside me.

“Widow Stevenson was inconsolable. I hear her children went to stay with family.” He said of his former partner’s family.

“Agent Paul’s death was traumatic for the entire Bureau. You as well.” I encouraged him further without drawing attention to it.

“I liken it to when I read a book about a baby with colic. I understand the struggle of the mother, but I don’t understand the helplessness of knowing a loved one is suffering.”

“You do.” I amended. “It’s why we do what we do.”

“The human experience is a series of understanding something.” He decided. I rested my head on his stiff shoulder. He contorted his hand to place it on my face, having learned that it was comforting.

He and I looked at the grizzly details together with his processing light blinking intermittently. When the night grew darker his eyes emitted a dim light for the both of us to continue reading, but I decided it was time to sleep before it gave me nightmares. He made a sound of discontent when I shoved the files and papers he wasn’t going over onto the floor. He kept the light of his eyes low enough to be a night light rather than a reading lamp. Sleep for him was a once-a-month visit to the recharge station at Dr. Phinehouse’s lab. When we traveled out of state like this he’d have it done sooner in order to remain as sufficient as possible.

No sooner had I closed my eyes it seemed when the phone blared its loud ringing. Troy pulled himself out of rest mode, a setting which allowed him time to think while the rest of his body slowed down. He was gearing back up calmly since we weren’t in any danger and answered the phone before he believed it would wake me up. Hearing Secretary Eva’s voice on the other line, I got up with a loud enough groan that I hoped whoever else was on the line could hear it. Troy took the details of where we needed to meet and what was going on while I changed shirts and socks and put my shoes on.

“At the scene, a heart-shaped locket was found. It was welded shut before the fire.” Troy explained the gist of the conversation.

“Might be just a lock of hair.” I pondered.

“Of the miscarried children?”

I grimaced. “Hopefully a secret lover.”

“That doesn’t sound sanitary, or emotionally comforting.” He paused choosing a hat to face me. “I do not wish to carry around a piece of your hair, for reference.”

“Noted.” I allowed myself to give him a kiss on the cheek to have one last moment of joy before embarking on the true first step in what was to b the most harrowing case I’d ever been on.

“Okay.” I sighed, looking at the door. “Let’s go.”