Worlds of Hurt

by Brian Hodge

  Bruce had then fed him a couple of tranquilizers before firing up the car, and he hadn’t objected. Time to think, in slow motion, drifting along with his thoughts as with the currents of a river coursing through the heart of winter.

  Up one street, it seemed to him that he was just collateral damage, the random casualty of misfortune that could’ve happened to anybody, in a situation he hadn’t even understood until less than twenty-four hours ago. Down another street, perspective shifted completely, with little room for chance. Fourteen years ago, he’d gotten into the wrong car on the wrong night, at the wrong time of year, and ever since, all roads had led him to now.

  Maybe there was destiny in this, coiled and waiting to manifest. Bruce would be nothing more than its unwitting usher, and pain its ticket.

  Or maybe the meaning was still a lump of clay in his bound hands.

  Another bend in the river and he thought of Manon, how the usual directness of her gaze had softened yesterday morning while she had drawn back the curtain on worlds he’d never expected to find, much less find him. That final secret that few must have been so privileged, or so cursed, to have known…what a shame it was that he’d learned it only now, with no time left to do anything about it.

  * * *

  Whatever you know It to be, by whatever name, she had told him less than a turn of the Earth ago, one thing is true: It has always ruled first and foremost through fear. Fear first, above all things, and after that, a pretense to love.

  Of course fear works best. When has it ever not?

  You may love me, and you may even have reason to, to begin with, or think you do…but if we’re very far apart and you never see me, doesn’t that love have a risk of waning? Isn’t it natural that you would find someone else to love, someone closer than me, that you could see and touch and feel right with? It is, and you would…or you would if I hadn’t made sure to terrify you with what would happen if you ever turned your back on me, and if I dangled before you the promise of my return, but never told you when.

  If I do that, then I’ve locked you to me for as long as you live, and your life will naturally contain enough shadows and uncertainty in which you think you see me moving. Your fear of my rage and my rejection has seen to that.

  * * *

  And when he felt himself tremble, the unknown unfurling ahead of him like a thorn-lined path, he tried to replenish his strength by drawing from the wells of others’ words. Remembering Dickens first…Sydney Carton at the end of A Tale of Two Cities, a wastrel taking the place of a look-alike friend who’d been bound for the guillotine: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

  Ah well. There were days when even one out of two didn’t seem so bad.

  * * *

  For a very long time after I came back from the burning, I continued to believe that what had happened to me was a punishment. That I had been chastised by the God I’d always believed in before, and had sought to serve, for serving Him badly, out of the arrogance that led me to exalt myself so I might hope to receive the same glory Jeanne had before her fall from man’s good graces. I still believed that I might earn forgiveness and have my punishment lifted.

  I’d been naïve and arrogant before, but now I was just naïve and blind. I didn’t yet realize that I was serving Him now more than I ever had in my earlier life.

  * * *

  But after a bit more thought, Dylan Thomas seemed even better in these hours before dawn, and he clawed it word and verse from out of the past…a poem he’d committed to memory after encountering it in college, for no other reason than the best one: It had resonated with him. And even if, after a time, he had allowed it to lie dormant, at least he’d never let it disappear.

  And death shall have no dominion.

  Dead men naked they shall be one

  With the man in the wind and the west moon;

  When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

  They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

  Though they go mad they shall be sane,

  Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

  Though lovers be lost love shall not;

  And death shall have no dominion.

  * * *

  One spring near the end of that century, I decided to return to the village where they’d burned me. In all the decades since, I had given the place a very wide berth. At first it was nothing more than part of my strategy for survival. Someone there might recognize me, and history could repeat itself again. Later, it was just habit, and the threat of my own worst memories, that kept me away.

  But now it had been almost seventy years. No one could remember me. It was not likely that any of them from that time would still be alive, or if they were, they would have only been small children when I’d been there last. It would be safe. I had been feeling a need to see this place again, because it was such a pivotal place in what I was, and by now I’d come to the conclusion that I would never be anything else.

  * * *

  Because he didn’t know where they were going, he couldn’t say if Bruce’s route was direct, or if he was deliberately detouring to cruise past one church and then another, and another after that. In one, it appeared that an all-night prayer vigil was going on, the windows warmly lit and glowing orange from within. At another, the sign out front seemed to concede current events:

  PRAY FOR OUR LOST.

  PRAY FOR US ALL.

  * * *

  That winter, you see, in a town in the south, I’d finally encountered another scourge on the land and people…a hairy man who, I now think, had tried to suppress his hungers until they’d consumed his sanity long enough for him to rampage like the beast they all took him for. Have you ever seen blood on snow, a lot of it? It’s a terrible sight, two kinds of purity in such stark contrast.

  I was married then, to a good man who had no idea what I was, and my husband and our neighbors and I, we all huddled in our church that winter and begged for deliverance from the scourge—or they begged while I pretended. And this worked, in their eyes, but only because it moved on, I think. I just know it wasn’t taken down by the hunters that went out after it.

  I’d heard tales of such beings before, since I was a girl, but this was the first time I’d seen the truth of them. I had to wonder if there was some distant connection between us…especially after the morning I was gathering firewood and came almost nose-to-nose with him outside our home. He didn’t attack, but only looked at me as if catching a scent of something that stopped him…something that he may even have recognized.

  * * *

  And death shall have no dominion.

  Under the windings of the sea

  They lying long shall not die windily;

  Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

  Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

  Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

  And the unicorn evils run them through;

  Split all ends up they shan’t crack;

  And death shall have no dominion.

  * * *

  When it was warm enough to travel, I answered that inner call to the place in the north where I’d died.

  It had changed little over the lifetime in between. A newer, larger church…that was the main thing I noticed. No cathedral by any means, but still, a beautiful place of gray stone and obvious devotion. The sight of it helped dissipate whatever anger I may still have harbored toward the town. However cruelly I may have been treated in this place, none of them here now were responsible for it.

  Then I went inside.

  Even today, for someone like you, who hasn’t known anything other than a world saturated with photography, it can still stop you in your tracks to come across a picture of yourself when you aren’t expecting it.

  Can you imagine how much more staggering an experience it was to realize I was looking at my own likeness in stained glass
?

  * * *

  Now that they’d crossed north over the Monongahela, Bruce seemed to be driving with more purpose, a greater sense of direction—not that he’d been lost before, just that it felt as though they may finally have been approaching the end of the line—and the rest of the poem began to slip away.

  As they rolled northeast up Liberty, the windows treated Andrei to the old familiar sights of the Strip District, with its polyglot of ethnic markets. Even though she’d set up shop elsewhere, Janika had credited it with being her inspiration; he’d always thought she’d done it proud. A block over, to his left, was the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company. For as long as he’d lived under her roof, they’d never shopped anywhere else for cheese, and he ached to see it one last time, its vintage storefront painted red as marinara…but he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t beg, not even for something as small as this.

  After a few more minutes it didn’t matter any longer, all that behind them now, especially after a few more turns he’d never taken in his life, because they would only have led to places he had no reason to go. The city had begun to show a less friendly face, or the friendly face had slipped to show a face that had always lain underneath, pocked with warehouses and other reminders of the city’s glory days as a titan of industry, abandoned and long since left to crumble.

  He groped again for Dylan Thomas, to take him the rest of the way.

  * * *

  Today you think of stained glass as just another kind of art, as beautiful as it is delicate, but it served another function then: telling the Gospels and other important stories to a people that, most of them, could not read. They read glass then the way you read books today.

  This one was divided into four sections of glass and lead, from top to bottom: my supposed existence as a witch, with the devil whispering in my ear…my burning…a priest presiding over the flattened pyre, nothing but smoke now…and, finally, my head, like a screaming hag, rising under the moon as I pushed myself up from the black ashes.

  They might not have been responsible here for what their grandparents had done. But every day they still remembered, and I walked out of their church with a new understanding.

  * * *

  And death shall have no dominion.

  No more may gulls cry at their ears

  Or waves break loud on the seashores;

  Where —

  Where blew…

  Umm…

  It was the best he could do, all he could remember now, maybe ever again. But that was okay, enough for one lifetime, anyway.

  It had done all he could ever have asked of it, and if he was lucky, a little more.

  * * *

  You ask me why God makes monsters…?

  Who better to inhabit the darkness that superstitious people already feared?

  Who better to poison the spirit of the forests that had given them other gods along with their meat and berries?

  Who better than us to drive them straight into Its waiting arms?

  * * *

  And at last they were here, parked so close that, as he looked out and up through the passenger window, it loomed overhead and eclipsed the night sky.

  Perhaps a mile away, give or take, stood a ponderous brick sanctuary that had been decommissioned years earlier, then given renewed life as a brewpub called The Church, creatively enough, gleaming vats standing in place of a priest and pulpit and altar.

  This place hadn’t been nearly so lucky, left to rot much further back in time, and if the sun were up he could see it in all its neglect, its bricks smudged and blackened by the soot of the old foundry furnaces, and webbed an unhealthy gray with ivy that had adapted, learning to thrive on top of lingering poisons.

  In the front seat, Bruce tinkered with something out of view.

  “I know I gave you those tranks, but you still don’t seem very shook up,” he said. “What, you think because you made what you figure is the right choice that I’ll bless you for it? That I’ll say it was just a test and all’s forgiven?”

  “There’s nothing to forgive, and even if there was, it wouldn’t be by you.” Andrei found that he could still snort out a derisive laugh. “Now you’re just boring me.”

  “Think so? That’ll change.”

  Bruce told him to lean forward. A moment later, Andrei saw a syringe, Bruce yanking his jacket down his left side and jabbing the needle through his shirt and into the meat of his shoulder—skewered, okay, but not a badly given shot under the circumstances. More followed, many more, and his upper arm began to go numb. When he seemed satisfied with the left, Bruce turned to the right.

  When he was finished with the shots, he stepped from the car and opened the rear door, used a pair of heavy shears to cut through the cuffs around Andrei’s ankles. Bruce took him by the collar and pulled him from the car, guiding him toward one of the church’s side entrances, where a broken door hung crooked over a corridor so black it seemed to seethe.

  “Some of the locals saw me coming back here the other day,” he said. “I don’t know for sure what they saw, even…but one of them called me ‘Father.’”

  XVI

  Inside, the church was no more and no less than what he’d expected, dank and vandalized, an immense vault guarding decades of chill and the smell of mold. Twin rows of columns ran the length of the sanctuary, front to back, one of few surviving remnants of past grandeur. Somewhere in the dark, water dripped with the plinking echoes of a cave, and surely, even now, something still called this place home.

  I can’t do this, the thought growing louder in his head with every step closer to the empty space where the altar would’ve stood, their shoes muffled on wood gone soft with age and damp, how did I ever think I could, but in spite of the weakness in his knees, and that he couldn’t even feel Bruce’s grip around his upper arm, pride was what really kept him going.

  That, and his rediscovered mantra:

  And death shall have no dominion.

  Down, then, facedown in a trapezoid of moonlight crosshatched with the surviving tracery of the window through which it shone…a knee in the base of his spine and more shots, pinpricks up and down his thighs, until they began to deaden like his arms. When Bruce finally rolled him onto his back and sheared through the cuffs binding his wrists, he realized he was beyond giving in to the temptations of fight and flight. He tried—Bruce even seemed to want him to, if only to prove the point—and his limbs merely flopped. He was as defenseless as an upended turtle.

  For a few moments Bruce was gone, then back again, kneeling a few feet away and unrolling a wrapped bundle that clinked and clanked and clunked.

  “You don’t need to do this,” Andrei said. Was it begging to relay a simple fact? No. No, that wasn’t begging at all. “Why not just make it quick…send me back that much sooner. That’s all they expect of you, isn’t it?”

  “Need is such a subjective term,” Bruce said. “Old habits die hard. You should know better by now. I don’t leave bodies. I create spectacles.”

  He pushed a wad of cloth into Andrei’s mouth.

  “Something to bite on,” he said. “It won’t totally soak up any screams, so feel free, if you need to. It won’t bother me, and outside…it’ll probably just sound like wind.”

  And death shall have no dominion…

  Bruce clapped a helmet onto his head, an absurd and bewildering move that seemed to have no purpose…until he switched on the electric spelunker’s lamp mounted onto the front, throwing a shaft of piercing white light wherever he looked.

  And please, shall death have no dominion…

  He began to arrange his tools, blades and chisels and mallets.

  “You probably want to shut your eyes now.”

  As soon as he did, Andrei tried to imagine eighty-seven faces, a good start, the eighty-seven who wouldn’t have to endure anything like this. You can do it, they encouraged him. Nothing lasts forever.

  He heard the shears again, a familiar sound by now—not cuffs this time, b
ut his clothing, and the air seeped in around his skin, November’s coldest breath.

  You can handle it. Nothing lasts forever except our gratitude.

  You’re the surrogate father of thousands to come, and they will remember you, if only in their dreams, and some of them will certainly fight, following where you had no time to lead…

  And death shall have no dominion.

  Something else clinked, as shiny and delicate a sound as the dripping water.

  Bruce got down to serious business then, and the deeper he worked, the worse he made his presence felt.

  * * *

  When Andrei opened his eyes again in some far distant future, maybe one of countless possible futures, he wondered if it really was true that the more fortunate dead went to heavens created by their own beliefs. A comforting thought now that he had come through the worst.

  What else could explain the sound that had coaxed his eyelids up once more—the approaching footsteps that were so much lighter than the heavy creaking tread of his killer? What else could explain the presence of someone who looked just like Manon…a figure of wisdom and incalculable age, perhaps, wearing a beloved face as she came forward to welcome him and share the answers to all those mysteries that had dogged him throughout the years.