The Gallows

The Gallows

By: Michael Farwig


Back and forth and back and forth, it sways ever so lightly, just enough to hypnotize anyone watching it. And who could take their eyes off such a spectacle? The pendulum that swayed perpetually from side to side, ticking, beating out the last seconds of a human life. Tick, tock, tick, tock, it counts with the footsteps. The air is sliced on its upward path, the thing moving like a scythe through the sky, up towards the heavens, and then it descends backward guillotining the atmosphere again. One-step forward, shuffle, another. This is the way of things.
Henry watches it with his eyes moving in the same pendulum motion, following its exact course through the air. A morbid interest in a morbid object. But who wouldn’t be curious in the device that is going to take their life? Who could avert their eyes from the noose in which they are about to be hanged?
I wish I had had more sex, Henry thinks to himself. The wind continues its slow breeze. Just enough to make the noose sway. Just enough to set the maddening pace of tick – tock – tick – tock.
He takes another step. On both sides of Henry the guards step with him. They stay perfectly in line as if they had rehearsed this event many times before. Their faces were blank and expressionless. Just doing the duty they had been given for the day.
The chains constrict his movements. With each step, there is that awkwardness that the manacles provide. Henry has adjusted to it and is now accustomed to their oppressiveness. His actions are graceful inside his tethers. Something that only someone who has spent a long time in them can accomplish.
I wish I had had more hamburgers. More beer. Henry’s thoughts are directed to all the things he missed in life. The experiences that cannot be relived. Maybe that’s what the meaning of life is. The things you will miss in death.
Another step and his pace is agonizingly slow. Just get it over with god damnit. He is not afraid to die anymore, he has long since past that fear, but for some reason the slow drawing out of his death is what pains him. It is as if the noose is already around his throat and with each step, it tightens a little further, with each breath, a little less air gets through, none of the lightning pace of the snap of the neck, but the slow painful suffocation and affixation.
Another step, another second passed. The cells begin to spin around. Vertigo over takes Henry as he steps forward once more. His knees seem to buckle yet he takes another step instead. Losing all sense of control and stability he takes another step. His mind drifts outside his body. He thinks of the crime, not wanting to.
You killed them. For what? How much did you get out of that? What is the price of a noose these days? More than the forty dollars you got from that woman and her kid I’m sure. An incessant voice speaks in his mind. He had learned to block it out long ago but now in his final hour it breaks through the sound barrier he had erected.
The mugging was supposed to go simply and painlessly. Woman goes up to the A.T.M., withdraws her money, Henry bullies her into giving it to him. He hadn’t seen the kid, and hadn’t known she would try to fight. Hadn’t known she had only withdrawn the forty dollars.
That is how one ends up in prison, the lack of knowledge. There was no true desire to do evil, no hatred for humanity, but two people had ended up dead because of missing forethought. How unkind the world can be, how cruel Murphy’s Law is.
He approached the threshold to the courtyard. The two doors were already opened, waiting like the jaws of an abomination to swallow him whole. The light breeze that drove the noose in its swinging moments could be felt calmly on the faces of Henry and his captors.
He looked up for the last time at the faces he would never see again, or maybe see them forever he thought. No, he was not spiritual; still the thought of Hell had of course crossed the mind of a killer. The faces of the people in the cells were black, as if burnt off by the ever-raging inferno itself. Again the feeling of vertigo onsets Henry. Again, he feels like he will lose his balance in the next step and fall to his knees. His foot connects with solid earth; his knees do not buckle. He takes another step.
Four walls surround the courtyard. Towers occupy the corners and barbed wire perches atop them. Parapets jut out as well, and there are extra guards on duty today. They walk back and forth like hungry vultures ready to feast upon the condemned man.
Back and forth, like the swinging of a pendulum, like the ticking of a clock; sands are falling through that crevice, through the crease, of the hourglass of life. If only it would fall from its ledge and shatter on the floor, scattering the sands of time in hapless mayhem. The disorderly chaos of destiny is sweeping through the hall with the breeze conjuring from outside the walls.
Henry takes the final step, crossing the threshold from inside to the hell that awaits him outside. The light breeze increases tenfold and nearly knocks him to his knees. The noose inconceivably maintains that slow steady pace of tick – tock – tick – tock.
A maddening churn rages in his mind. A cyclone, a tempest, unmatched in any previous fervor batters his senses and his psyche and he begins to lose control of everything. The sands of time slip through his fingers and the clock that should be suddenly and irrevocably speeding toward his doom now slowed its pace further.
He takes another step.
He feels as if he is sinking slowly into the earth, as if with every step he is slowly submerging into quicksand. The mud and gravel beneath his feet begins to slip and slide and slosh underneath his strained feet.
The muscles in his body ache for the release of his soul; holding it in has become to strenuous and far too painful. With each step a shooting pain runs from his foot through his leg and into his heart.
It was gruesome; the boy’s body outlined in chalk seemingly holding the hand of the mother. The blood splatters on the wall mixed in with the hair and indescribable texture of brain made one officer throw up.
“STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!” he screams relentlessly into the maddening wind. The guards at his side walk on unflinchingly. He hadn’t really said anything.
He takes another step.
The stairs of the gallows are now right before him. He only has a few more steps to take until the world that has been a torment to him for so long is all over and behind him. It is the single ray of light that keeps his pace steady; that in a few moments eternal darkness will be his salvation and redemption.
He ascends the stairs, the guards moving at both sides in succinct unison with him, and the pace slows. Not only his steps slow but the whole world around him is abruptly changing into the creeping rate of death; all except the wind.
Even the noose, which is no directly in front of Henry has slowed its swinging into a rhythmic pattern. It still counts out the beats: tick-tock-tick-tock.
In a last ditch effort to end it all he tries in vain to break from not his physical tethers but the ethereal constraints that bind him to his slow pace. He tries to force his muscles to rush towards the rope and throw it around his neck. He tries to throw himself forward and break this spell and his own neck in one fell swoop.
Instead… he takes another step.
The drum roll precession plays as he comes closer and closer and with each strike of the wooden stick on empty hollow drum a cackle is called forth in his ears. Demons are laughing insanely at him.
The rope is fitted around his neck and everything is finally picking up speed. The floodgates are open and the water is rushing through. He’s grateful.
The priest presiding over the ordeal plays his part. “Any last words?”
Henry doesn’t wait to respond… he takes another step, the last step, the one that hurtles him over the edge and finally the snap of his neck subsides the howling wind. The noose still sways, it’s now just a weighted pendulum. Tick-tock-tick-tock.

The End