by A. R. Braun
Bile streamed out of his mouth, the vomit traveling upward, splashing into his nostrils and his eyes. How they stung. He tried to blow the fetid puke out of his nose, tried to wipe it out of his eyes, to no avail. More gagging, more retching, more crying out.
He was afraid to look down there again.
Yet he’d be there soon enough. He could tell because the fire had spread to his chest now, singeing off the hairs there. He slapped and rubbed, slapped and rubbed.
This couldn’t be happening.
Then the realization hit home.
I’m going to Hell!
Van’s legs were twisted the wrong way. He’d hit the bottom with a thud. Yet the pain—as if someone had cut off his legs—was the least of his worries now. He didn’t fret about puking anymore, because . . . because . . .
He thrashed and flailed. The flames burnt off every hair on his body, seared his skin, and yet he lived! If he could walk, he’d hop up and down in agony. There was no hope. He slapped at his body, wearing it down like sandpaper with his palms, trying to get the heat off of him that wouldn’t come off.
Just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse . . .
His desk from Burzum waited for him, even here, the trash he’d helped to publish, gratuitous sex and violence. Van would work that job forever. Not like on Earth. There, he’d looked for a better job which, with this troubled economy, had been so difficult to find.
Instead of his co-workers, daemons entered the space, horns not only on their heads but also down their tails, up their backs, crowning their heads with spiky diadems, in their noses. Their red-black, scaly skin heaved up and down. Somehow they could breathe—Van still couldn’t—the long, black claws like knives, on their hands and on their feet.
They turned at once, spotting Van, who goggled at them while trembling and sweating. Inhuman bellows, guttural acknowledgements of his presence in their domain.
They grinned with razor teeth.
“No!” He screamed so vehemently it pierced his eardrums.
Then they descended on him. He convulsed on the floor of the fiery pit because they took his flesh, as much flesh as he’d taken in life, all those dives, all those broads, so young, so supple and so desperate. A thousand times he’d kicked himself, trying to work up the nerve to call his ex-wife, but he never had. As if he were having a seizure, he jerked and spasmed, unable to get up and run. The sound of his skin being removed from his body was like someone tearing paper grocery bags in two. A waterspout of his blood squirted out.
“Gahhhhh!”
Corks popping from a bottle of champagne as his eyes came free. How long could this go on, this torture?
Then he realized: forever.
Noooooo! Oh Lord, I’m sorry! I’ll do anything if you’ll let me out of here! Let me come back and serve you!
A chill . . .
Van blinked at the light assailing him. Isn’t it too late to be in the death tunnel? I already went to Hell. It was hard to think, his mind hazy.
Then he recognized it. It was the light over an operating table! He was back! He thanked God and promised himself he’d get back in church, to never be self-serving again.
Doctors and nurses leaned over him with furrowed brows. A voice as wonderful as a siren’s song:
“I think he’s going to make it.”
He’d had a heart attack on the job, that’s what the doctor told him. The building hadn’t fallen in after all. What a relief.
Van hit the pillow over and over but couldn’t get comfortable in the hospital bed. He pushed the button to raise the bed, and vertigo ensued. Van grabbed the phone and dialed. He knew what he had to do.
His ex-wife picked up.
“Sherry! Oh, thank God! I was afraid you’d changed your number.”
“Van?”
He sat up straight. “Yes, honey, it’s me.”
Silence strangled the line for too long. “You haven’t called me in five years.”
“I know. I apologize.”
“You what?” Her voice was high, like a high school girl’s.
He shifted on the bed because the cord stretched too much. “You heard me. Look, I know I’ve been a real prick, especially when we were married. All those times I yelled at you, trying to tell you what to do, never admitting you were right because I’m the man and you’re the woman.”
Sherry chuckled. “You can say that again.”
Van grinned. “That.”
Sherry let out forced giggles, though he could tell she was trying to hold them back.
Van said, “I just wanted you to know I was wrong not to please you every minute of every day. I should’ve treated you like a queen.”
Sherry harrumphed. “Is this a joke?”
Now he couldn’t help but chuckle. “Not at all; I mean it, sweetheart.”
“So what brought this change of heart on, huh? New alimony laws, what?”
Now she sounds like the old Sherry. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Sobbing from her end of the line filled his ears.
“Sherry, please don’t cry.”
“I told you! Didn’t I tell you? When Janny died, I explained that it wasn’t your fault, and it wasn’t God’s fault. Children go to heaven. But you wouldn’t listen. You stopped loving me and you stopped loving yourself. You crawled into that bottle! What was I supposed to do?”
He sighed through his nose. “I know, baby.”
“Van?”
Softly: “Yes?”
“Are you all right? What happened, did you drink yourself into the hospital? Or are you in rehab?”
Van flung his legs over the edge of the bed, the floor strangely not cold. “You didn’t hear about my heart attack?”
“No, I just got back from the cabin in Vermont. I needed to get away for a while, just be with nature, read and sleep.” She sighed hard. “How are you holding up?”
“Better than ever.”
Sherry sniffled. “Van . . . I . . . miss you.”
His breath caught in his throat. No one else lurked in the room, so he let the tears of joy come. He forced himself to say something so she wouldn’t hang up. “Do you believe in a higher power, hon?”
“Like the government?”
Van chuckled. “No, like God.”
“Well. No, not since I was little.”
“Me either, but see, I went to—”
The physician of perdition clomped into the room, the bottom of its tree-like legs sticking out of the end of the white coat, and shut the door behind him, not a human doctor.
“Van? Are you still there?”
He gaped at one of the scaly devils picking up his chart at the foot of the bed. The fallen angel wore a doctor’s coat and bore a stethoscope around his neck. He nodded over the chart, growling and grunting . . . and laughing.
“Prognosis is grim, I’m afraid,” the daemon gurgled.
It can’t be! I was back on Earth! I’d gotten a second chance! WHAT THE FUCK?
“Van!” Sherry said. “Are you still there?”
He gasped.
“What’s that growling? Are you listening to death metal?”
He dropped the receiver and it clunked on the floor. BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP. She’d hung up the phone.
“I’m not afraid you’ve had a blackout, Van Stoneworthy,” the daemon continued. “I’m not sad to say you’ll soon be back in your, ah, maze of torture, if you will.”
“But I was on Earth!” Van cried. “Isn’t The Lord the God of second chances?”
His nemesis laughed a growl-scream. “Only if you accepted him. In Gehenna—”
“In where?”
“Hades.”
Taciturn, Van just stared.
“Hell! In damnation, the quintessence of torment isn’t complete without allowing you to think you’ve escaped.
“And then sending you right back.”
The walls rushed in on him. Trembling wracked his body. The daemon stood st
atue still, grinning in expectation as the bed fell out from under him.
“No!”
Once again, he fell into the pit.
Van sat up with only the muscles in his back like Michael Myers, sucking in a voluble breath the way one does when one can’t believe what’s happening. Exhaling a hearty sigh of relief, he wiped off his brow and pulled off the silk sheets stuck to his sweat-slicked skin.
Goddamned Christ on a pogo stick! What a doozy of a nightmare!
Van was back in his apartment, the full moon a night-light in his window spotlighting his posters of the Boston Red Sox, Bud Light Lime beer and bikini girls. He struggled to catch his breath, drawing in deep gulps of air, the oxygen like nirvana.
Which was reality? So his office didn’t fall into the earth, and he’d never had that conversation with his wife. He perked up. Now if he could only call his ex and tell her that in real life.
But the dream hadn’t only given him the idea of what he should say to Sherry but the torments of hell.
He had to quit drinking too much, a total mind-fuck.
Rosalita snored beside him, her black, curly hair draped over the pillow like a doll’s in the hand of a child with a brush. And hadn’t she been a pistol? He remembered her dancing on the bar, making out with a blonde in the ladies’ bathroom until he broke in on them and gave her what she truly needed.
Gingerly, he crept out of bed and headed toward the bathroom, ignoring the empty, too-white squares on the now nicotine-stained wall. He’d taken down the family pictures of his ex-wife and daughter because he couldn’t bear to look at them anymore. He filled the glass he used to brush his teeth and gulped it down. Cool water, that’s the ticket. H2O never tasted so good. He drained a few more glasses of what was now the panacea. After what he’d been through. After where he’d been.
Van didn’t believe a second of it, of course. It was the booze.
Or was it?
Sighing, he trudged to the La-Z-Boy chair in the living room. Memories of his childhood rushed in on him whether he liked it or not, teenage years, actually, when he’d went through his heavy metal phase.
They sang of—oh, who am I kidding—they screamed and growled of seeing visions of Hell, some sort of perk of being in league with Satan. I thought that was all bullshit, a gimmick to sell CDs.
But what if it wasn’t?
Van rose and opened a drawer on his hutch, taking out a picture of his ex-wife. She’d grinned ear to ear then, her arm wrapped around him when they’d been so in love.
He sat down and lit a coffin nail, inhaling the poison.
They’d met in college, he a journalism major, she a budding poet. Sherry had cast him looks of longing as she’d giggled with her girlfriends, and he’d been shy. Van was forced to fight it, of course. His frat brothers wouldn’t have let him live it down. So he’d pushed forth, introducing himself and engaging in the game: small talk, flirting, being her friend. They’d lunched together. They’d talked about family and their dreams. He’d been invited to a poetry reading at a beatnik club. Oh, and didn’t she write the most poignant poems, about a heart lost, waiting to be found?
Van had awakened her heart with dinners, movies, concerts, even serenading her. He’d proposed at a Red Sox game, she’d tearfully accepted, they’d started their life.
He took out a picture of Janny, grinning though her baby teeth hadn’t come in yet, her red curls so long the mane covered her flat chest. Her thin-as-stick legs stuck out from the bottom of her dress, so precious. His heart remembered her then, how she’d sat in his lap, rapt with the bedtime story he’d read to her. She’d been the first to welcome him home from work. Sweet Janny, always in a good mood unless she’d scraped her knee, and who’d made it all better? Daddy had. His favorite memory: Janny hugging him around the waist and saying she loved him no matter how hard his day was.
Of course, this was before . . . before . . .
Before God took her from me.
He heaved a heavy sigh. Cancer. Seriously? She hadn’t even turned ten years old. Her pretty hair had fallen out, making his little girl look like a wan Vin Diesel.
Van shook his head and hissed. So what if the dream had been trying to tell him something? Could he ever forgive God? Did he even believe there was anyone up there? Penn and Teller proved it was bullshit, backing it up with historical facts and proving it a farce. And a thoughtful conversation with his ex-wife? How could their relationship ever be the same after losing their daughter?
Yup, just a nightmare caused by too much booze.
Rosalita’s voice from the bedroom: “Where are you, sweetcakes?” In her accent.
I loves me a feisty Latino woman.
“Come back to bed,” she called.
His groin getting the familiar sting, he put the framed photos away.
Stricken
“What the wicked dreads shall overtake him . . .”
—Proverbs 10:24
Night fell. A slight figure with racing thoughts rushed over to flick on all the lights. He had to hurry, before the fog of darkness destroyed. Arden Quinn had always been afraid of the dark. He drew the shades down to keep out the night.
A hack horror author with only one publication, Arden had been seeking work, and as soon as he found a new job, he planned on quitting. When he’d been a newbie writer, he hadn’t been able to get arrested for his short story submissions and contest entries until B&D Horror had voted the first piece he’d sent to them, “Invaders,” story of the month—his first publication. Of course, the magazine made it clear they awarded authors whose stories normally wouldn’t be published. Beginner’s luck, obviously. But he’d been paid twenty-five dollars.
That had been two years ago.
Arden had been woken in the middle of the night by what sounded like his window slamming shut. The night-light glowed by his bed, but it was never enough. The shadows of his dresser, his amp stack, and guitars were crouching demons playing tricks on his mind, seeming to inch toward him, waiting for the right time to strike. The branches of budding trees scratched his windowpanes like claws. He checked the window. It was closed, but not locked as he’d left it.
The scent of perfume and hard liquor wafted over to him.
His heart palpitated, dizziness spun the room around, he found it difficult to breathe.
Something evil was here.
From under the bed: “It’s Belinda,” a black metal voice hissed. “Remember me, the unmotivated layabout?
“You’ve got a spell coming to you.”
“A spell?” Arden asked, his voice trembling as much as his flesh. “You can’t hurt me! I’m a Christian Wiccan! I’ll cast a counter spell.”
“Your God is dead.”
Arden gasped.
“BYE-BYE.”
Arden’s eyes snapped open. He clutched his cold, sweat-slicked forehead. He couldn’t stop shaking.
He’d met Belinda Black, a black metal fanatic, through B&D. Being a heavy metal musician, Arden had found her on Whorrorspace.com and added her as a friend.
B&D’s goth-girl interviewer asked him if he was going to collaborate with Belinda on a story. He said he’d ask her, but when he had, she’d blown smoke up his ass. She’d also grown tired of heavy metal. Arden had been surprised to find out Belinda was a Satanist. He’d followed that path when a newbie, but after getting kicked out of the best critique group on the Internet, Critique Corner (he hadn’t been able to stop threatening other members), he’d told Satan to get his lard-ass out of his life and had shifted paths to Christian Wicca after seeing a website about the path.
Since Belinda had blown him off and said some nasty things about not helping the Indiana metal scene anymore, Arden had deleted her from his friends’ space, but not before calling her lazy because she wouldn’t follow through on collaborating with him.
Now he was dreaming about her. But it had been just a silly nightmare. He turned to the right to spot his alarm clock. It was 4:30 a.m. He tried to relax as his heart po
unded out a blast-beat.
The closet door stood open. He could’ve sworn he’d closed it earlier. He forced himself to look out the window and was rewarded with a view of the crescent moon. Can’t deny the Lordess; world without end, awoman. Arlen had made up his own term for “amen.” Goddess, give me strength.
Turning back to the closet, a dark shape stood between the clothes. Just looking at him. Waiting.
Arden rolled over, never taking his eyes off the figure. His hand shook as he reached out and flicked the switch. Goddess-saving light screamed forth from the lamp, illuminating his long leather jacket.
He heaved a sigh of relief, lay back down, turned off the lamp, and went back to sleep.
“I’m back!” Belinda croaked.
A woman’s hand came out from under the bed and two fingers pushed on his eyes. Arden’s heart skipped a beat. Youthful cackling ensued from underneath him.
“What’s the matter? Can’t you see me?”
He screamed.
Arden woke to a horrid pain, as if someone had shoved pins and needles into his eyeballs. His vision was a bit blurry, and he blamed it on being half-awake.
His two eight-year-old daughters crossed the door’s threshold.
“Daddy, Daddy, wake up!” they said. “We made you breakfast in bed.”
Laughing, he rubbed his eyes. He squinted through the weak vision, not awake enough to completely open them. Arden walked over and, feeling his way, unplugged the night-light.
The pain wouldn’t go away, as if someone had pushed on his eyes with her fingers.
Belinda, under the bed; maybe she . . . No, that was just a nightmare.
Arden thought if the pain didn’t stop, he’d go crazy. He walked back over to the bed and reclined. A tray crashed down over his chest and the scent of burnt toast wafted into his nostrils. Orange juice and milk sloshed onto his neck and chin.
“Oh my!” After he wiped his chin, he opened his eyes to find the distortion in his vision had not abated. He saw the top halves of his grinning daughters standing by the bed, but around them was darkness. A heart-shaped luminescence spotlighted them. The rest had gone black.