by Rob Bliss
“He unraveled the whip, stretched back his arm, and cracked the leather lash above my head. I yelped and jumped where I sat.
“‘You listen to your older brother, like it was in the olden days. Don’t make me bride-burn you for disobeying,’ he said. ‘Either you get used to putting out for the customer by fucking me, or I cut you to shreds with the cat o’ tiger tails, sis,’ he said, and I saw the end of the whip split into nine whips made of flesh striped orange and black.
“I couldn’t stay huddled in the corner, waiting to be killed. I got my feet under me, pulled the fur over my head and raced, stooping low under the cracking lash over my head, and tackled him to the ground. He only laughed and pawed me.
“He pinned his body on top of mine as the fire crackled and billowed out smoke. I thought the room had caught fire, that he would want to leave before we both choked to death, but all he could think of was to rape me.
“I punched my fists against his face, kicked my legs hoping they would connect with any part of his body. Tucked my elbows in and kept my face low to the ground, hoping to breathe purer air. I twisted the bear fur tighter around my body. His face arched over the back of my neck and he kissed me. I screamed and panicked and slammed back an elbow. It was a more powerful blow than I had expected. (I realize now that the bear cloak must’ve given me increased strength.) I pushed him off and stood. I kicked him in the face with my bare feet, wishing I had the weird shoes back. Blood poured from his nose, his teeth loose and bloody as he smiled. I glanced at the wall where a window dissolved into view, with vines circling it. Hadn’t noticed it before; it just grew there. Sometimes a door is a window, I thought. I was prepared to dive through it and fall a thousand feet to the ground if it meant getting away from the smoke and the rapist.
“I ran. But not too far before my left leg was pulled out from under me, chin hitting the floor. I looked and saw the length of the whip coiled around my leg, the striped flesh ends sticking to my skin like suckers, trying to burrow in. He pinned me to the floor again, grabbed the handle of the whip and corkscrewed it into me, saying he had to rape me to teach me how to be a good bitch. I screamed and tried to fight him off, but the pain shooting through my entire body was too much. I beat my fists against his head, which slowed him down and pushed him low enough down my body that I was able to raise my legs, get my feet pressed against his chest, and push. He flew across the room and landed in the fireplace.
“While he burned, I ran—still with the coat on, still with the whip inside me—and dove through the window.
“Then I woke up on this floor.”
Gord and I were in awe at Elizabeth’s story. She wept quietly for a few moments and spat bile onto the floor. A thick silence held in the soft room for a long time. Eventually, I nodded to Gord to tell his story, hoping it would distract Elizabeth from her hellish memories.
“Well,” Gord began, “I went back in time too. Right back into Gorman’s tailor shop, the trail of vines leading through that curtain of black beads covering his back shop, where all the clothes were kept. You were there,” he said to me, “with your wedding uniform on, plus the pants. I was still naked, and Gorman was pulling out a jacket and vest from a wardrobe he had, which was never there before. I was as happy as hell getting dressed up because I thought I was still the groom. I knew that. And you were still the best man. So, Gorman was holding up the vest for me to put my arms through, checking how it fit me. Did the same with the jacket, and later gave me the pants and shoes to try on. Things were a little different this time for a few small reasons and one big reason. Instead of making a small slip of the tongue for Gorman to get pissed off about and then spread the word around to Venus and the rest of the family, I started bragging.
“Chris, the whole time you were just standing there in your suit, smiling and nodding at everything I said, saying nothing, not even moving. You looked like a bobble-head doll. I went on and on about how the family was this big cabal, some ancient tribe of people who worshipped some bear god named Ursa. And they all had weird magical powers.
“Gorman kept dressing me, not flinching at anything I said. I was kind of insulting them all, saying how they were incestuous inbreeders, the woman all had tails and they ruled the men. They were killers of outsiders and of their own kind, mass murderers. They had this guy, Paco, basically working for them, having his drug tunnel on their land, with tons of shipments which led into Canada, where there were more family. Tons of coke and pot and whatever else coming and going between the two countries and no one outside the family knew about it. No one knew about the true family, about how much they controlled in this region and around the world. I spilled everything.
“By this point, I’m dressed. Gorman smiles at me. Says, ‘There’s just one more part of your uniform, sir.’ He brings out these gloves, which latched themselves onto my hands. I’m looking at them, can’t feel my fingers inside them, and they’re heavy, making my arms tired just holding them up.
“I ask him what they are, and Gorman says that they’re to prevent me from every touching my bride. That I won’t be able to feed myself, bathe myself, or even scratch my dick. Everything will have to be done for me by my wife, Venus. She will control every aspect of my existence; I’ll be a baby in her hands.
“He said it was punishment for revealing family secrets.
“I get pissed off and tell him to take them off. He taps each one with his long, bony fingers and they start to get hot. Feels like there are a thousand needles piercing my hands—except my thumbs.”
He wiggled his thumbs hanging down from the steel mold of the gloves.
“I screamed for him to take them off, they’re burning my hands. He laughs and says he can’t do that—orders from Venus and the family. I say I’ll see what she has to say about that. The gloves burn hotter, dropping me to my knees. I try to pull one off with my feet, but the shoes are no good and the gloves are on solid.
“I staggered up to my feet to take a swipe at Gorman with the glove, but he easily ducks it. I scream at you, Chris, to help me, but you’re just standing there, smiling and nodding, watching. I throw another punch at Gorman and he ducks out of the way. My arms feel like they’re weighted with lead as they burn, I can’t lift them. I’m just standing and screaming.
“Gorman then puts a flat hand on my chest and his palm burns me. Smoke rises up, smelling like burning flesh and hair. He chuckles as he moves his hand across my chest and stomach, scorching my melted skin, re-melting it, branding the designs of the jacket and vest onto my skin. The clothing burns off me completely, rising off my shoulders and ribs as black smoke. I can’t lift my arms to push Gorman’s hand away.
“I look down at the pants and shoes I still have on, see the vines again, watch them move into the wardrobe behind Gorman.
“He says, ‘If you want the burning to stop, you must choke off the air supply.’
“Then he grabs both of my hands and delicately turns them to face me. The claws widen and clamp around my neck. I start to choke and wheeze until my air is too cut off for me to make a sound. Then Gorman brings that full-length mirror he has over to me, and I see myself again. My face is turning purple. My good eye bulges out like a cartoon, and my other eye re-emerges from its hollow socket and grows. Both of my eyes are completely red, and my face is fucking blue, almost black. I’m thinking: I’m gonna die, I’m gonna kill myself and I can’t stop my hands. The gloves are in control. And Gorman’s got a shit-eating grin getting bigger on his face.
“Then I remember where the vines led. I ram like a bull into Gorman, knock the prick down, and dive through the doorway of beads.
“And then I woke up on this floor.”
He held up his hands, still encased in steel gloves, skin melted into designs and symbols. Skin color normal, eyes normal, both the same size.
“Do they still hurt?” I asked.
“No. No pain at all. And my chest feels fine, better than usual, in fact. It’s kinda like having a really cool bo
dy tattoo. Guess they call it ‘branding.’ Don’t know what the hell it says, but I kinda like it.” He swallowed and shook his head to disperse the memories. “Fucking weird shit in this goddamn house.”
“And it only gets weirder!” echoed a voice far above us.
We jumped and got to our feet, then moved across the floor to get a better vantage point of the top of the bear’s head. Poppy sat astride it, gazing down at us through the blue glasses sealed to his face.
He applauded slowly. “Well done you three. You are survivors. Few make it this far. Those who don’t, of course, become ghosts of themselves. But the house isn’t done with you yet.”
The great bear head opened its jaws and roared, the growl like the sound of a jet turbine engine—the wax coating its face and head shattering like glass, candles tumbling to the ground. They lit patches of fire on the floor bear fur, and the flames quickly grew and climbed every piece of fur-covered furniture and up the walls.
When the bear head roared, Poppy was thrown off, did a somersault backwards through the air as he fell, and landed straddling a bear that had risen from the floor. Or, I should say, a beast in the rough shape of a bear, covered by bear fur—no eyes or features that were not covered in fur. It could’ve been a sofa that had become bear-shaped. Poppy rode the beast as it slowly lumbered around the trees of fire toward us, shuddering light reflecting in his blue lenses as he laughed and threatened, “The house always wins!”
We scrambled in three directions, trying to stay away from both the bear and the fires. Poppy and his mount charged toward Elizabeth. She unraveled her whip, cocked back her arm, and snapped the flesh ends, but they went wide. She didn’t have enough time to snap the whip again, having to rush away from the bear’s charge.
I raced up behind the beast from one side as Gord raced to the other flank. I swiped the samurai sword at its hind leg, but the fur and flesh were too thick. The blade glanced off. Gord rammed a glove into the bear’s leg on his side, but his fist bounced off, momentum throwing him back toward a patch of flame.
Elizabeth leapt through a tower of flame toward me, the white cloak wrapped around her, whip trailing behind. She fell into my arms. I saw Poppy’s bear turn and race for us through the flames. I grabbed Elizabeth’s arm and pulled her across the room, weaving between fires, trying to see Gord as smoke stung our eyes.
I looked behind us. The bear’s snout sniffed the air, couldn’t exactly smell us amongst the smoke and fire, flames clinging to patches of its fur, feathers of fire seeming to rise off of Poppy’s head. Elizabeth began to spool her whip as we raced for the bar. We dove over it, sped over along its length as the bear caught our smells and crashed through fur and the wooden bar beneath, roaring louder than the roar of the flames.
Elizabeth saw Gord race from between fires toward us. The bear was coming. I jumped onto the bar and raced toward the beast as it smashed its shoulders down the narrow gap between the bar and the wall. As I leapt off the top of the bar to tackle Poppy, Elizabeth reared back the whip and struck. The flesh ends glued themselves to the bear’s face, began burrowing through its fur, drilling holes of blindness where its eyes would’ve been had it been a real bear. The beast reared and threw Poppy and myself off its back.
The sword slipped from my grasp, so I locked both arms around Poppy’s throat as we wrestled amongst fires. He rammed his fists into my face and stomach, brought a knee up against my nose. My body flung back, and I lay on the floor a few feet from a patch of burning fur. Gord jumped over my prone body and swung a steel glove into Poppy’s mouth. Teeth and blood flew off with the punch, but the man still stood. And laughed a bloody smile.
“I like your vest,” Poppy said to Gord. “I got one too.”
He rammed a driving fist into Gord’s stomach, doubling him over. I struggled to my feet and caught the next blow meant for Gord on the side of my head. My ear rang and the rush of flame around me sounded like water.
Another fist came my way, but Poppy’s feet slipped out from under him. Gord had hooked his wrists around Poppy’s legs and pulled. I dropped my knees onto Poppy’s shoulders, pinning him, hammering my fists into his face as hard as I could, trying to smash his glasses. But they weren’t glass. They were a part of his face, lenses as hard as bone.
He laughed, dripping red teeth at me and said, “You punch like a girl!”
Then he screamed in pain, my fist raised but not swung down. I looked behind me. Gord had punched a glove into Poppy’s shin, snapping the bone, the man’s foot wrenched sideways.
I looked over Gord’s head to see Elizabeth running towards us, trailing the whip, the bear lurching blindly behind her, its black hole eyes spewing flames while its claws swiped at smoke.
Part of me hoped that the bear was Venus in shape-shifting disguise. But with ‘L.O.V.E.’ and a doctor’s bag of other inks and poisons in her veins, it was unlikely.
I pulled Gord off Poppy and we stumbled through a wall of flames. My kimono had been burning the whole time, and I never noticed. The vest and jacket and pants protected me from the fire’s burn. Still, the upper part of the kimono burned and wrapped my upper torso in a cocoon of flames. A wall of flames blinded me, so I couldn’t see as Elizabeth dropped out of the fire, slipped her cloak off in mid-air, and slapped it down over me. The flames snapped off in an instant. Elizabeth pulled the bear fur off me and the last wispy hairs of soot puffed up across my face. My kimono was vapor.
I choked and coughed, fighting for air, as Elizabeth looped an arm under mine to help pull me away from the encroaching fires around us. I kicked myself to standing and made sure the white fur was around Elizabeth.
We saw Poppy hobbling and half-crawling away from us, slipping through screaming flames, trying to avoid the thrashing and rearing bear. But he yelled from the pain in his leg and coughed with smoke, and the blind bear followed the sounds.
Both bear and rider had wound their way around and through towers of flame to the center of the room. Elizabeth and I looked up to see the piece of fur-covered ceiling where the chains holding the bear’s head had burned through to the wood and the wood began to crack. Plaster and fire fell, and the bear’s head roared a pillar of fire as it dropped.
Poppy and the bear were smashed into the floor beneath the bear’s head. Flames swarmed the beast’s stretched jaw and head and its howl soon died beneath the tidal roar of fire.
Elizabeth and I wrapped an arm around each other as we shuffled around the spreading patches of inferno, trying to find an oasis of air.
Gord appeared through a gap in the fire, the sound of his voice drowned by the roiling heated air, waving us toward him. We stepped over a low wall of flames, the hem of Elizabeth’s cloak snuffling them into smoke, to meet Gord by the wall.
Fire had burned through the thick fur to expose a door which was also being eaten by a blue frame of fire. One at a time, the three of us tucked our respective vests or bear cloaks over our heads as we burst through the door.
We raced away from the Swamp Hotel, smoke rising off our backs. We fell to sit on dew-wet grass as we sucked the cool night air into our lungs and watched tongues of flame rise high through windows and doorways, brick and board burning and crumbling, wood exploding, the roof caving in and shooting up pillars of sparks.
The sign had the words ‘Swamp Hotel’ carved into it but had been painted over with ‘Roadhouse.’ Both eras were erased by fire. The signboard dropped and burst into smoke and smoldering coal on the burning porch.
We stared for what seemed like hours at the bonfire that was once the House of the Dead, heat thrown back to warm us, to bring smiles to our faces that the dead were finally dead.
And we were sill alive.
Dawn was rising.
— | — | —
PART 4
— | — | —
Chapter 29
Before the light of the burned and sunken house waned to darkness, we searched where we sat and saw Poppy’s jacked-up pickup truck parked beside a stand o
f trees. Keys under the floorboard mat. A shotgun and a hunting rifle on the gunrack across the back window, a .357 Magnum under the seat, boxes of ammo for all weapons in the glove compartment and under the seats. Gord laughed, remembering his old pickup truck. We got in and I drove since Gord’s hands were still encased in the gloves. Elizabeth sat between us, her bullwhip left behind on the grass. It wasn’t a souvenir she wanted to keep. My sword lay across her whip, also abandoned.
We pulled out of the driveway as the final sticks of the house burned, coals smoldering, the marsh gas returning to replace the scent of thick wood smoke. I kept under the speed limit, in no rush since I wasn’t sure where we were going, following Gord’s directions as we headed down the unlit night road.
So I asked, “Where’re we going? Where can we go?”
He sighed and leaned his head against his side window. “The hell out of Dodge, I figure. We could try for the airport. Even if there are family members working there, hopefully either they’ll all be at the wedding or there will be enough non-family members to act as a buffer and allow us on a plane.”
I glanced down at his hands. “I don’t know if they’ll let you on with those gloves. Definitely set off the metal detectors.”
He chuckled, held the gloves up to inspect them. “Wrap some bandages around them. Say they’re protective coverings—new technology. If the airport doesn’t work out, we can try for the border. Get you and Elizabeth back home through Canada. Fuck the family. If we have to battle them the whole way across the continent, so be it. But we should head to my place first. I think we should all get some half-decent clothes on.”
I drove down the black highway for a little while before Elizabeth changed our plans. Worry in her eyes as she looked at Gord. “Mom and dad and Kevin…we gotta save them.”
Gord tapped a glove against his knee and chewed his lip as he thought, mumbled a swear word under his breath.
