The Revenge Room

by Robb White

Urban legends. Every town has one or two that the local teenagers recite to one another for a spooky laugh, then dismiss with contempt as they age, but not before passing it down to the next generation. Like the game of “Telephone,” the versions change over time, sometimes acquiring a whole new cast of characters as victims or monsters. That’s how it was in Northtown by the time my friend Jerry McGonnell and I came along as thirteen-year-olds attending the Northtown public schools and working out how to survive the gauntlet of bullies we faced every day in the hallways and playgrounds.

Our town had one about a jilted bride, whose wedding day was trashed by the band her parents hired to play at the reception. When her marriage collapsed soon after, she went insane, blamed them, and hunted them down one by one, although it took almost her lifetime to get them all.

Depending on whom you asked, the order and manner of the deaths of the slaughtered band members changed along with the places and times where she exacted her vicious revenges, which included drugging and flogging with steel-tipped whips, exsanguination by knife, and other kinds of grisly demise so awful the news reports resorted to euphemisms instead of providing accurate details.

The one detail that changed least was the final revenge on the band’s sole survivor, the flamboyant lead singer. She lured him back to Northtown, sliced his throat, and hid his body in an underground room the town’s scandalmongers would come to call the “Revenge Room.” The room’s location changed over time from one part of town to the next. What didn’t change much was the description of the room itself. It was small, made of cement walls and floor, completely dark, and empty—except for the partially decomposed body of the band’s lead singer, who was quietly rotting away down there underground.

The version Jerry and I heard most often was the one that put the Revenge Room on our street, a boulevard that followed the Northtown River on the east side of town, where the houses were in worse shape the closer you got to the river. The room was actually supposed to be a cement bunker of World War Two vintage built by an immigrant who’d fled Italy when Mussolini took over. He prospered with a grocery store and then a bar catering to factory workers. The story went that he was terrified the fascists of Italy and Germany would take over the world, and he wanted to keep his family safe and had the bunker bult entirely by family and friends, other Italian immigrants who had come over and done the manual labor of Northtown, including building the entire sewerage system with picks and shovels. It sounded believable, but no one ever located the bunker.

As kids, we prowled the riverbanks in summers, fishing and skipping stones and building forts out of cattails. Some kid made a tire swing from a birch tree branch extending over the water, and we used that to leap into the river where the water was deep. We observed the taboo not to eat the fish we caught, however, and often tossed them into the undergrowth for the raccoons.

Here I must digress to talk about my friend Jerry. He was like me, one of the typical working-class kids whose fathers worked the docks or the railroads and drank too much beer on weekends, smoked too many unfiltered cigarettes, and pretty much let their kids unsupervised—unless they got into trouble at school or with the law.

The similarity ended there. Jerry was a genius, a very socially awkward genius with a pronounced stutter. Kids bullied him mercilessly. Jerry never fought back. When I asked him why, he offered a cliché: “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” I didn’t know what he meant, but he always talked about “the crazy bride’s revenge” as a thing worth admiring. When we were about fourteen and prowling the banks of the river, doing nothing much on hot summer days, I told him that story was a “myth.” It was a big word I’d picked up from television.

Jerry stopped midway in flicking a stone into the water, looked at me with a grin, and said: “It doesn’t have to be.”

I’ll never forget it. Going into high school, we drifted apart. I made new friends; he became more of a loner than he was in middle school. Kids didn’t bully him as much—except for the jocks who prowled the hallways like hyenas looking for a limp.  His stutter worsened under the pressures of puberty and a deteriorating home life. Some of the kids who tormented him back then were classmates, others went to different schools. On one of my last visits to his house, he showed me a journal with their names and addresses, some with personal details about which sports they played and where they went. Jerry kept track of them all. His obsession bothered me. When I saw my name in there, I asked him why. He mumbled something about “p-possibly n-needing m-my help someday.”

By the time we’d prepared to graduate high school, I hadn’t spoken to him more than a dozen times other than in passing. On one occasion at a mandatory pep rally, we wound up side by side in the bleachers. We both hated the forced enthusiasm and celebration of the alpha males among us. He turned to me while we sat surrounded by our cheering and stomping classmates and said in my ear so that I could hear: “I-I-I va-va–I’ve f-finished it! It t-took me three years to b-b-build it.”

The stuttering was a stab into my conscience. I was ashamed of being seen with him. We both knew it. “Finished what?”

The rest was drowned out by the noise and clapping for one nitwit coach after the other, by far the worst teachers in the school.

He shook his head, grinned, but didn’t answer.

Jerry’s family was too poor to send him to college. His IQ and scores on the SAT and ACT exams saved him from minimum-wage jobs in our rust-belt town, economically devastated by the factories pulling up stakes and heading for China. He garnered a full scholarship to Case Western and became an engineer, going to work for a bridge-designing firm in Syracuse. That was the last contact I had with him. That is, until an email from him hit my inbox at work forty years later.

Jerry was back home in his parents’ old house on his deathbed under hospice care, dying of stage-four throat cancer.

When he asked me to visit him at home, I had to think for a second who he was. I was ashamed at the memories that flooded back, mainly because I had ignored a friend and gone my separate way. I was a first mate on a Great Lakes freighter just like my father, only he went to work in engine rooms as an oiler, whereas I aimed for the forward section of the bow, from deckhand through wheelsman to, finally, pilot house as a third mate working my way up to first. The depressed steel industry guaranteed I’d never become captain of my own vessel. Two years before I retired, I was bumped down to second mate, then third, as layoffs in the shipping industry became widespread. By the time I left the Charles M. Pierce, third mates were working the cables on the docks like ordinary seamen.

A hospice nurse let me in and told me to wait a few minutes until they had him “tidied up,” whatever that meant. He was moved from the upstairs bedroom to the living room when he became too ill to negotiate steps.

He was lying in one of those fancy hospital beds with a swing table for meals and buttons for raising and lowering. He looked sallow, eyes bigger than normal from the sunken skin around them. I would not have recognized him if I’d passed him in the street. The plastic mask over his mouth and the tube connected to an oxygen tank beside the bed hissed every time he drew breath. He couldn’t speak more than five or six words at a time before he had to suck air.

“I’ve been a chain-smoker since Puff-Puff college,” he told me. He shrugged his shoulders, as though silently accepting the fate accorded to one with that deadly habit. “First the lungs. Then it metastasized. I don’t Puff-Puff have long to go, they tell me.”

“You don’t stutter now,” I blurted, stupidly ignoring the oxygen apparatus he was chained to. I recalled the cruelty with which his classmates mocked him like a foul wake of babbled syllables and laughter trailing in his wake all day long.

“I spent a fortune on speech therapy Puff-Puff as soon as I had the job.”

I fumbled around for a way to ask if he were in much pain.

“Very little, except at night,” he said. “The morphine.”

Besides the mask over his mouth, I couldn’t miss the twin drip bags near the head of the bed or the tubes attached to his wrists.

Making small talk, trying to avoid the unpleasant subject of his cancer, the elephant in the room, I told him about my sailing days aboard the Pierce.

“I have a favor to ask you, Jack,” he said after the intake of air. “It’s important.”

The flashback of my name scribbled in his journal hit me like a fist. I knew whatever he was going to say had something to do with that journal.

“You’ve been away from Northtown Puff-Puff for years,” he said. “You wouldn’t know much about them.”

“Them?”

“Missing… person… cases.” Talking at length was becoming difficult and more painful for him. I wanted to look away. He jerked the mask off for a violent cough, and I was forced to witness the terrible effects of cancer. His face leeched of color, his eyes bugged as he strained against the agonizing grip of the disease wracking his body. The dim light of the room deepened every crack and fissure in the skin of his face. He looked bad enough with the tubes and jaundiced skin as he struggled to get air into his lungs. The coughing jag transformed his face into something cadaverous, wizened, reptilian.

“Kleenex,” he gasped.

I handed him tissues to wipe the tears from his eyes, now red and veiny from the coughing fit. But his mind was clear; he insisted I understand that. 

“I need you to read this first.” He gestured to some xeroxes on the side table surrounded by vials and bottles.

At a glance, I could tell the top pages were a printout from the internet of an historical account of the Tower of London.

I looked up, my eyes questioning him, but his head sunk back into the pillow, and his eyes squeezed shut against the pain.

I returned to the reading matter, canting my head toward the light leaking through the venetian blinds to see better. The pages detailed one basement room in the tower that abutted the River Thames—a gory account of prisoners thrown into a brick room without windows or light. But the earthen floor was susceptible to the shifting of tidal waters when the room became partially flooded, and then, as the ebb tide moved out, hordes of rats displaced by the flooding of the riverbanks entered the room en masse. Hundreds of those rats invaded the blacked-out room at once, squealing and scuttling, biting the prisoners in a frenzy. They could only be kicked or slapped away for so long. When the prisoner fell into an exhausted sleep, the rats returned with a vengeance to bite chunks of flesh from the prisoner’s arms, legs, and face. He’d awaken to sheer horror in the dark. The blood would excite more rats to attack. Initially, some prisoners were released after their time of punishment was up.

In time, however, no prisoner was released, and new prisoners were tossed into that hellhole of rotting corpses. The article ended with a description of the excavation of that room in modern times when the bones of hundreds of corpses were discovered piled on top of one another.

When I finished reading, I looked up and saw something in Jerry’s gaunt face that would trouble and haunt me. We have no word in English for it, but wickedness, fear, and pity would have to be combined in it.

“The crazy bride’s room,” he said, puffing hard on the tube. “I found it. It was no myth.”

The living room was overheated, yet I felt a shiver up my spine when he told me what he had done in those lonely high school years. There was no bunker built by an Italian immigrant along the Northtown River, but there was a cement-block building built near the Conneaut Creek on the east side of town where the effluent from factories since the early 1950s was so contaminated with dangerous pollutants the creek garnered a permanent place on the government’s Superfund list. Signs warned people not to eat any fish caught there, and swimming was banned. Rashes and infections weren’t the worst of it for those who lived along its banks. Eco-warriors had come in one time and planted signs of upside-down smiley faces in yards to mark houses where residents had died of rare forms of cancer. We rarely strayed there from our usual boyhood haunts because every family had a member who died of a weird cancer.

“It was Puff-Puff no bigger than a prison cell,” Jerry said. “Completely shrouded in grapevine and prickers. Puff-Puff. An old pump station for one… of the chemical factories.”

It took him time to get that out between wheezes and coughs.

“You don’t know… what darkness is,” he said when he’d recovered. “I spent a night in there to see… what it would be like. It’s so black Puff-Puff that you literally cannot see your finger… an inch from your nose.”

The gasping and wheezing after that long description cost him. He strained against the pillow. His eyes watered. I thought: It must feel like a rat clawing its way up his esophagus.

“Why did you do that?”

“I think… you know.”

“The journal,” I replied. “Those names, the bullies.”

It took long minutes to piece the rest of his story together as he struggled to use as few words as possible. He never ceased looking for them. He had even hired a private investigator while working in New York. He learned everything about them, down to their second cousins. That little notebook he showed me was bigger than a family Bible by the time he put his plan into motion.

My stomach lurched. I had a premonition of the horror of what was to come. I waited for him to gather more air into his lungs.

“The pump station is so isolated and hidden Puff-Puff a person wandering around out there Puff-Puff near the creek wouldn’t see it… unless you walked right up to it.”

He spent a summer cleaning it out. He even painted the valves and cleaned rust from the overhead intake and outtake pipes. The door to the station had been knocked loose by vandals decades ago, and taggers had covered the walls inside with graffiti. He covered the names and obscene depictions with paint and made the place look as though the company had recently abandoned it.

I could see it as he struggled to verbalize it. His arms and legs were covered with scabs from scratches. He had to clear a path to it from the creek. Lucky for him, his parents were too busy drinking and fighting to notice. When teachers asked him at school, he told them he was helping his father clear a back lot. He grimaced telling his own lie. His yard was a neglected postage-stamp-sized lawn.

“The rats,” I said, pointing to the article he had me read.

“Yes… the rats.” He gathered his words to explain before the strain overwhelmed him; it was a sheer act of will I witnessed, courage even, despite the horror I knew was coming from his withered lungs.

Jerry was blessed with a spatial sense and a head for math. Being an engineer was inevitable. Even as a boy, he knew how to construct a method for allowing night-foraging rodents to access the pump station. Nothing like fish guts to bring them running. At the end of that portion of his narrative, he managed a weak smile that flickered across his lips. “It was like hitting Puff-Puff a swill bucket with a stick.”

For me. it was like listening to someone reading one of the original Grimms’ Brothers fairy tales without the soft snow of the Disney version covering the horrible parts.

“The trick was—was…”

His coughing spell brought the hospice nurse in. She must have been drawn by his wracking spasms to the doorway. She shooed me out. Jerry pleaded with me to come back. He handed me a folded piece of paper. I told him I’d stop by again that evening if he was up to having visitors.

At home, I opened the paper. It was a professional schematic of the pump station interior and exterior adjacent to the Conneaut Creek. He had worked out the exact mileage from State Road and Route 11. I paced in my room, tried to think of something else, and decided to go.

Wearing hunting boots and carrying my trail flashlight, I grabbed my derringer loaded with snake-shot ammo from the closet and headed to my car. I followed the drawing’s directions and parked off State Road in the empty lot of the abandoned Reactive Metals Company parking lot. They once handled titanium to build Lockheed’s top-secret spy planes in the sixties and seventies.

It couldn’t have been easier to find if he’d drawn red arrows to it. Even the path he’d cleared was still evident despite the dockweed and phragmites fronds growing up from the creek bed partially obscuring it. The door he’d replaced the broken one with looked genuine, but the door latch was missing. Instead, the whole building was wrapped in a heavy-duty chain fastened with a big steel padlock.

Part of me was relieved. I didn’t like the idea of opening the door, aiming my flashlight beam on a roiling mass of cat-sized Norwegian rats with their red eyes gnawing on femurs.

Back home, I debated long and hard about returning to Jerry’s for the ugly denouement to his story of revenge. But I had to go. I’d be abandoning him twice, and I couldn’t live with that knowledge.

A different nurse greeted me at the door.

“He’s sleeping now,” she said. “But he’s expecting you, so please wait in here.”

She led me to a kitchen nook and served me coffee. I’d never sat there before, although I’d come to his house many times. How strange I had to wait half-a-century to realize my former friend was embarrassed by his parents’ behavior.

He was awake and sitting up when she showed me into the living room.

“How are you feeling?”

“The dope,” he said. “It knocks me out. Puff-Puff. I want to be awake for as long as I can. I’ll be sleeping Puff-Puff a long time pretty soon.”

That was it for the small talk.

“Benny Jackson was the first. Remember him?”

I did: a short, black-haired, muscular boy who became an all-city linebacker in high school.

“He made my life… a living hell.”

Jerry followed him to Jefferson-on-the-Lake one summer after we graduated. He didn’t remember all those rabbit punches Benny had given Jerry or sticking his head in the toilet in the boys’ lavatory. He’d threatened me as well in the hallways for doing little more than looking at him.

Jerry bought him a couple beers “for auld lang syne.” Benny didn’t want to associate in public with Jerry but accepted the tribute as his due, having been the alpha male.

I asked Jerry: “He wasn’t the brightest tool in the shed, I remember, but how did you get him to go into the pump station?”

It was “easy,” Jerry replied. He took out a couple of gold and silver coins. He told Benny he’d found the coins on the floor of the pump station. He said they were probably hidden inside the pipes overhead, but he needed help to get at them.

Jerry cleared his throat when he saw the look on my face. I feared another protracted coughing jag was coming up, but his willpower alone controlled it. We both knew there wasn’t much time left.

Jerry added a tidbit to the Northtown myth of the crazy bride. He told him the plant manager embezzled company money and converted it to gold and silver before the plant closed down for good. He died before he could collect them. He told Ben he had to work the next night, but “was free the night after.”

“He took the bait,” I said, not needing to look at Jerry’s expression for confirmation.

He drew Benny a map on a bar napkin. He didn’t know what time Benny would show up, so he had to be out there at dawn in the brush waiting for him.

Jerry was half-eaten alive by mosquitoes by the time Benny showed up at sunset carrying a backpack of tools and a folding ladder. Jerry used his engineering brain to rig the door to lock behind Benny. His real skill was in designing a system of conduits from the creek bed to bring in the rats at a signal and close off their retreat so that they had only one way to go: right into the pump station, all driven by the rotting smell of dead carp and sheepshead Jerry had filleted before the door and smeared in the openings.

Jerry told me that in August, the temperature inside that concrete-block station rose to a hundred-fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. Even if Benny took bottled water, he’d be dehydrated in a week.

“That’s how long you gave it before you checked on him?”

“I didn’t need… to open… the door,” Jerry wheezed.

He planted a microphone inside to pick up every word Benny uttered and hid a voice-activated recorder outside in a tree stump.

I did look into Jerry’s face then. “He must have cursed you until his own lungs gave out.”

“Often… loudly and often. Puff-Puff. Unoriginally, too. Then curses… became prayers.”

Jerry listened to Benny begging and bargaining with God. To no avail. Around day five or six, Jerry said, the wheedling and begging ceased, followed by long moments of silence—except for the screams when the rats found him.

“When you did go inside…?” I wanted him to finish. He had gone this far; he had to confess it all.

“When I went inside Puff-Puff he was dead. Bloated… the smell… was terrible.”

Some rats remained to partake in the feast. They ignored the release valve that would have let them out at one time and back to the creek. I think I shivered then, as though the temperature in the room had dropped to freezing.

“You didn’t worry he’d show the map to someone? Mention you?”

“A risk… willing to assume. Hated him. Hated all… of them.”

Cancer and hatred had consumed him. He tried to smile and gasped out a trite saying about “a good blaze lasting a long time if you stoke the embers.”

He stared at me and his eyes glittered. The only sound in the room for long seconds was the oxygen machinery and the terrible wheeze of his tortured lungs.  

 “I was away sailing the Great Lakes most of the time,” I said. “I never heard of him going missing. I didn’t get much news from home on the ore boats back then. I didn’t even have a cell phone. Just the last two, and only because I—we went to the same high school.”

I did know that the families of the missing men from our high school posted and slathered every telephone pole in town every time one went missing. They held vigils in public, had church memorials. The Cleveland Plain Dealer sent a reporter to Northtown. He must have lived in anguish, worried the FBI would investigate all the missing men from one small rust-belt town. But it never happened. Not even a task force of local law enforcement. My old friend was the Grim Reaper harvesting them one by one, hustling them through their own greed.

“Who… who—”

I couldn’t get it out. I was between a sob and a choking sensation.

“Who was next? Puff-Puff. Scotty Riesbord. Harder… to convince.”

He had scrimped and saved for a year to afford what he showed me when he asked me to reach under his pillow. I brought out a gold kilo bar.  A Fortuna, the goddess’s image profiled on one side. On the other was the PAMP Suisse Versican logo. Five troy ounces of point-nine-nine-nine-nine pure.

Riesbord was no Benny in IQ points. On the other hand, he didn’t stay up nights splitting the atom. Jerry needed the gold bar to convince him the ductwork in the pump station was packed with gold bars. He was lured the same way with a bigger prize. The next day Jerry waited in his homemade “duck blind” in the cattails.

“What about… Benny’s corpse?”

“Buried in… swamp muck.”

The bones would have been gnawed and scattered by now. Coyotes run around there now that the chemical plants aren’t dumping their poisonous residue into the groundwater. I had a grisly image in my head of Jerry, heaving and sweating away as he dragged a bloated body by the heels out of that pump station. He also knew a disturbing smell would linger inside the pump station, so he bleached and disinfected the place. Jerry vomited, he admitted, because a decomposing body left a taint that penetrated into his clothes and wouldn’t come out with washing. He solved that problem by a fire pit, consuming shoes, pants, and shirts.

“After Riesbord? I’m guessing either Curt Housel or Jamie Reason.”

“Correct.” He giggled, coughed, and spat up blood that dribbled down his chin. The idea of a “twofer” pleased him as a morbid joke in the final stages of his life.

Both boys hung out long after high school. I recalled them both, neither fondly. They were in each other’s wedding. Jamie twice because of his divorce. They went fishing in Canada together, hunted quail and duck in North Carolina in the autumn. When they went missing together, people thought something bad had happened on some mysterious trip they took that they never told anyone about.

“Blood… brothers,” he said when he was able to speak.

“Why do you say that, Jerry?”

It took a long time to get the story out. Twice I had to leave the room and return when the hospice nurse ejected me for treatment. He began at the end. Scotty Riesbord whimpered his way into oblivion. A hundred hours of mainly silence, according to Jerry, before he succumbed. He’d been dead longer than Benny when Jerry finally opened the door. The stench sent him vomiting into the weeds until nothing but yellow bile came up—and then he dry-heaved for long minutes. The two friends, now grown men, had fought and scrapped inside their cement coffin like wild animals. They blamed each other for falling for Jerry’s ruse after they realized they weren’t getting out.

Jerry’s eyes glistened with the recollection. They knew why. They hated each other more than him by the time it was over. They didn’t play mental games with the truth about how they had tormented him. In fact, they each brought up little cruelties and threw them at each other as the main causes of their fate.

“Where did they… where did you—?”

“Bury them? Next to Benny… Scotty.”

Jerry had originally planned to take me there to tell me all this, but time and the disease interceded. If he knew he could make it there and back, I was certain he’d have shown me exactly. The horror of the scene was imprinted in my mind; in his, it was burned by the rage of his revenge. He could have been blindfolded and found that place on his deathbed, that graveyard of bullies.

“Mother of God,” I whispered. “I’m not a priest. I can’t absolve you.”

The pupils of his eyes were large—too large.

I recalled my altar-boy Latin: Dies Irae. Day of Wrath, Judgment Day.

His head lay back on the pillow. For a horrible moment, I thought he had just died. Then his right hand feebly slapped at the remote to lower his bed.

I looked at my dying old friend. Why had he called me for this? It wasn’t to unburden himself from the yoke of guilt.

He died that afternoon. The hospice nurse told me when I called that evening to check on him. She said he died peacefully in his sleep when she came to bring him his pain medicine.

I have nightmares, always the same. I’m trapped in that stinking, sweatbox of a pump station. I hear the scuttling feet of rats pouring in from the creek bed. So many attack me in the blackness that their spiky tails stick together, and they make a terrible sound as they try to free themselves, biting and snapping everywhere. I wake screaming, slapping at my chest and arms where the rats have gouged out my flesh with their spiky razor-sharp teeth. Sometimes, Jerry is crouched in the opposite corner, hugging his knees and rocking. He’s safe from the rats. The seething noise of their crazed running back and forth almost drowns him out.

He brought me there to brag, not to confess. In my mind, I hear his cracked voice repeating the same scalding phrase until I squeeze my eyes shut to drown out his voice: “See what I did, Jack? See what I did?”