by Jeff Strand
"Yeah," he said. "I'm back." He took a long, deep breath, and then exhaled slowly, blissfully. "Not what you tried to do to me, is it?" he asked Gina.
Gina didn't answer.
"Do the same to us," the bruised ghost told her. "Put us back in our bodies. We'll all walk out of here and go our separate ways."
"I..."
"We won't come back for you. Everybody gets to live happily ever after. Do you really think we'd stick around? We'd head straight for the border. You'll never see us again."
"I can't. His was the only body buried on the property."
Shit. Adeline wished Gina hadn't told him the truth. They could've come up with something else and kept the ghosts at bay a while longer.
"I guess it's back to Plan A, then. Everybody dies."
Fletcher let out a giggle. Coming from a small child, he would've sounded giddy. Coming from a very large adult, he sounded psychotic. He ran toward the stairs.
"Where the fuck are you going?" the bruised ghost demanded.
"I'm getting out of here!"
"Goddamned traitor!"
Fletcher gave him the finger and hurried up the stairs.
Adeline couldn't do anything for Boyd right now. But if Fletcher was flesh and blood, maybe she could stop him. The best scenario would be one in which he opened the front door and perished in a hail of police gunfire. Adeline would not try to prevent him from leaving. However, since nobody actually seemed to completely understand how any of this stuff worked, she needed to make sure Fletcher did not pose a threat if it turned out that he was still trapped in the house with the rest of them.
She didn't want to bring Paige and Naomi upstairs into possible danger, but she also couldn't leave them down here with two ghosts. She tugged on their hands. "Let's go!" she said, running up the stairs after the psychopath.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Boyd's teeth floated in the air around his head, bloody roots forming words he couldn't read. His blood was boiling; he could feel it, hear it, and see the steam coming through his pores. Somehow he was simultaneously falling endlessly and dangling from a giant rusty meat hook.
His intestines spewed out of his belly. They didn't stop. Nobody had this many intestines, but they just kept pouring out and pouring out and pouring out and pouring out...
Finally the last length of bowel came out, taking his spinal column with it. Boyd folded in half. The rest of his bones disappeared (they didn't break through the skin like Maddox's did, they just disappeared, as if they'd never grown inside of him) and he collapsed into a pile of muck.
The muck sprouted squid-like tentacles. Or were they like the tentacles of an octopus? Boyd wasn't sure. He also wasn't sure why he cared about which mollusk the tentacles resembled, considering that the process of sprouting them was so unbearably painful that he shouldn't have been able to think of anything else. He would have shrieked, but piles of muck didn't shriek, even as tentacles sprouted from them.
Then he was back to normal.
Then he had screaming mouths all over his body.
Then the screaming mouths began to vomit up a putrid yellow-brown substance with beaks and feathers in it. The substance burned like gasoline set aflame. Or maybe it just burned like fire. Boyd wasn't sure.
When they were finished vomiting, the mouths popped out on stalks, twisted around, and began to devour Boyd's body. Each mouth had glistening fangs and they had no problem ripping out a generous hunk of meat with each bite, so the process of turning him into a skeleton was completed with relative haste.
Being a skeleton hurt like fuck.
Boyd was glad he didn't have to see himself as a skeleton, but then a giant shimmering lake appeared in the air before him (sideways) so he could see his reflection in an image fifty feet high. No, sixty feet high. No, seventy feet high. No, a million feet high.
His flesh grew back. Boyd didn't know why that would hurt so fucking much, but it did.
He had all of his flesh again, but it wasn't in the right places. At least half of it was on his head, which now flopped backwards from the weight. He couldn't breathe. Maybe he was about to die.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. No way would this place let him die. He was insane for even thinking such a thing for the fifth of a second that he'd thought it. No death for him! Oh, no! Boyd Gardner was going to get the full Hell experience, even if it wasn't really Hell. Did that mean there wasn't a Hell, or did it mean there was a Hell and he just wasn't there?
He supposed it didn't matter.
No. It mattered a lot.
Did it?
No. It didn't matter at all. He was where he was. Hell, not Hell, all that really mattered was that his body hurt so much that he was surprised he could even think.
The flesh that was making his head too heavy for his neck to hold began to squirm around to the rest of his body like tiny little skin worms.
When his flesh was back to being in the right spot, his jaw exploded again. It was no less horrific the second time. Or was this the third? It was difficult to keep track.
Why was he here again?
There had to be a reason.
Punishment for a life lived poorly?
That didn't seem right. He'd tried to be a good person. He'd never cheated on his wife and always made time for his daughters and was kind to animals and...
Wait, did it count as being kind to animals if he wasn't a vegan? He ate meat. He ate a lot of meat. Was he in Hell because of all those hamburgers?
He vowed to never eat another burger.
Didn't work. He was still in Hell.
He vowed to never drink another glass of milk.
Didn't work. He was still in Hell.
Was he out of Hell now, or was he still in Hell buried up to his neck with scorpions crawling all over his face? He thought it was the latter.
Boyd...
Who was that?
Boyd...
It sounded like him.
It is you.
Oh, good.
You crossed over.
I knew that.
You have to save your family.
Bring me back and I will.
No.
Then fuck you.
You have a job to do.
Like what?
Find the men who are terrorizing your family. They're still here. Find them and kill them.
Kill them? Isn't that the kind of thing that sends people to Hell in the first place?
Find them. Kill them. You can do it if you regain your sanity.
Regain my sanity? I thought my sanity was doing pretty well, all things considered. Oh, look, my hand is a snake.
Find them. Kill them.
Ooooh, watch it slither. I hope I'm not poisonous.
Find them. Kill—
Kill them, I've got it. Can I wait for my skin to stop peeling off like a banana or is sand already running through the hourglass? Have you ever seen what the back of your skin looks like? Not pretty. I wish I didn't know but it's too late now.
Find them. Kill them.
Enough with the mantra. I've got it! Find 'em and kill 'em. At some point you just have to assume that your message has been received instead of repeating it a zillion times. People don't like redundancy.
Who am I doing this for again?
Yeah, yeah, wife and daughters, I know that part, but I'm foggy on the specifics. Adeline, right? She's one of them. Page? Paige? Paige, yes, and she's the older daughter. Naomi. Is Naomi the wife or the younger daughter? I sure hope I get this right. I can't even imagine how awkward it's going to be for everyone if I get this wrong.
Adeline, wife. Paige, older daughter. Naomi, younger daughter. Gordon, dead pet tarantula. That's all of them. I know my family. Ha! Whoever said I was insane can suck it.
Adeline. Paige. Naomi.
Boyd instantly realized why he was here. He'd sacrificed himself, or at least put himself at very serious risk of sacrificing himself, so he could stop the home invaders.
He s
creamed in agony. The pain was a lot worse now than it had been when he'd lost his mind, but he'd fight through it.
He had to focus.
Right now he was on a raft made out of severed arms in the middle of a dark red ocean. There were a thousand shark fins circling the raft. But none of this was real. Or, if it was real, it was a flexible reality.
Maybe it was like lucid dreaming. Not that he'd ever had a lucid dream, but he'd read about them. If he could control his environment, he could find the men. And he'd have the element of surprise; they wouldn't be expecting him to have joined them in Hell.
His throat split open.
It wasn't real.
Or at least it wasn't permanent.
He ignored the blood as it gushed out, more blood than a hundred bodies could hold, blood with images of withered faces.
The blood stopped. Froze like a waterfall in the middle of winter. Boyd's neck was frozen to it. More skin tore off his neck as he yanked away, as if his neck was a tongue stuck to a frosty metal pole.
The blood waterfall fell into the ocean.
The severed arms began wiggling underneath him.
One of the sharks rose above the surface. Its skin was covered with knots and scars, and its eyes were eerily human.
The shark didn't matter. If it bit him in half, it wouldn't matter. Boyd would move right on to the next horror.
Lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming.
Where did he want to be?
He was back in school. Standing at the chalkboard. He'd pissed his pants and all of the other kids were pointing and laughing.
No, they were pointing and laughing because he had no penis.
No, they were pointing and laughing because his crotch was spurting blood.
Had he thought about school?
He wasn't sure.
Boyd did have a recurring dream about school embarrassment, but that was about high school, and the math problems currently on the chalkboard were 5+2 and 7-3.
He ignored his classmates and finished writing on the board. He stepped back and looked at what he'd written: My family is dead.
"I'm sorry, Boyd," said Ms. Quincy, his second-grade teacher, who was not wearing a shirt. Her sagging breasts leaked spoiled milk that fell to the floor in clumps. "That answer is incorrect."
The other kids laughed at his stupidity.
Boyd wanted to shout at them, tell them to shut the fuck up, tell them that he was a human being who deserved some dignity, but they weren't real kids, they didn't matter, and it was good that his answer was wrong.
It was the best wrong answer he'd ever given.
Now he was in a bedroom. Not his own bedroom. The room was unfamiliar except for one detail, a detail he'd never forget. A poster of a white kitten. He was in Louise's room. His first girlfriend. Her little brother had drawn a mustache and devil horns on the kitten with magic marker, and Louise's father had beat the shit out of him, right in front of Boyd, even though Boyd had only been over there a couple of times and Louise's father shouldn't have been comfortable enough around him to beat his nine-year-old son with a guest in his home.
Louise had left the defaced poster hanging in her room. Boyd thought it was kind of funny. He was sixteen now. He knew that because he'd dated her at sixteen and didn't have a birthday before they broke up. And he knew what had just happened, because Louise was putting her bra back on.
He'd told his friends he'd lost his virginity. He hadn't. Unless it counted if you finished before you even took your jeans off. He'd been so humiliated that he started crying, which obviously made his humiliation a thousand times worse. Louise hadn't offered any consolation, no "it's okay," not even an offer to get him a tissue to clean himself up. She'd been angry. She'd planned an amazing evening for them and he screwed it all up. She'd threatened to tell everybody about his shame, though ultimately she'd only shared it with her best friend, which Boyd knew because Cecilia started grinning whenever she saw him.
If he was in Hell, yeah, this was an appropriate memory to revisit.
"I have a beautiful wife now," Boyd told Louise. "And we've had lots of great sex. Incredible sex. Not quite as much anymore now that we have kids, but I can last as long as I need to."
"What are you talking about?" asked Louise.
Her father walked into the room. "What the hell is going on in here?" he demanded.
This was a false memory. Boyd had managed to sneak out of the house in his wet sticky pants without her parents noticing. He knew it hadn't happened, and he knew it wasn't really happening now. Still, he was ashamed. Mortified.
Louise would tell everyone.
Everybody would know.
His friends would know.
His parents would know.
He couldn't live here anymore.
No. Stop it. This paralyzing shame was fiction. Louise wasn't really here. And even if she was, it didn't matter, she was in his distant past, he was married to Adeline now, he had two beautiful daughters, and an embarrassing experience with teenage sexuality was no longer relevant to his life.
He was so humiliated that he wanted to kill himself.
He was no longer in Louise's room. He was in Paige's room.
She'd stolen a bottle of Adeline's sleeping pills.
This was real. This had happened.
Paige hadn't taken any of them. She'd set them out in a straight line on her desk. When Boyd caught her sitting there with tears flowing down her face she swore she hadn't actually swallowed any of the pills. She just wanted to look at them.
Paige picked up a pill and put it in her mouth.
This part wasn't real.
She took another.
Also not real.
He couldn't stand here and watch his daughter commit suicide. His mind couldn't handle it even if he knew it was illusion. He wasn't that strong.
"Don't do it, honey," he told her.
Paige swept her arm over the desk, knocking all of the pills to the floor. Then she picked up a box cutter (they didn't own a box cutter, not even after the move), extended the blade, and placed it to her wrist.
"Please don't."
She slashed her left wrist. She did it wrong, you were supposed to go up the arm instead of across the wrist, but blood spurted from the wound and Paige clamped her other hand over it, as if realizing the horror of what she'd done.
"I'm sorry, Dad," she said. "I didn't mean to."
Boyd wanted to help her. He couldn't move.
She switched the box cutter to the arm that was slick with blood, and slashed the other wrist. She let the box cutter fall to the floor as she held up both of her arms. Blood flowed, pouring into her hair and onto her nightgown.
The color faded from her face.
Finally the blood stopped.
Paige reached down, picked up the box cutter, and slashed her wrists again.
New blood spurted.
I can't be here anymore. I can't do this. I don't care if I'm supposed to find those men. I can't stand here and watch my daughter kill herself over and over. Please, Gina, make this end. It was a mistake. It was a terrible mistake. Please, please, please, I'm begging you, bring me back.
Gina did not answer.
He didn't want his family to die for real, but how could he be expected to handle this? It was too much to ask. It wasn't fair.
Paige picked up a pair of scissors. She jabbed them into the gash on her wrist, pushing them in so far that the blade emerged from the other side.
"Why can't I die?" she asked. "I'm ugly and hideous and everybody hates me and I just want to die!"
"I don't want to be here," said Boyd.
Paige stabbed the scissors into her neck.
"I don't want to be here. I don't want to be here. I don't want to be here."
"I don't want to be here, either," Paige said, not removing the scissors from her neck. "It's not about you."
She was right.
She was absolutely right.
He could handle this.
<
br /> Those three assholes had figured out how this place worked. Why couldn't he? He was stronger than them. He had more to live for. He had everything to live for.
Showing Paige trying to kill herself didn't work. It just reminded Boyd of what he had to live for. Nice try, Hell.
Paige yanked the scissors out of her neck. She opened the blades and stuck her lower lip between them.
Do it. It wasn't real.
Paige cackled with laughter as she sliced off her lip. She held her hand under her mouth for a moment then flicked some blood at Boyd.
It wasn't real.
Now everything was burning. He was in a pool of fire. Burning souls screamed all around him. A huge man, three hundred feet tall, stood at the edge of the pool. Red skin. Horns. Pitchfork.
It wasn't real.
Boyd was falling through the sky. His parachute hadn't opened. His heart felt like it was going to explode from panic.
It wasn't real.
Boyd was covered with leeches. They were all over his body, in his hair, on his eyes, in his mouth, in his stomach.
It wasn't real.
It was a sick joke.
Boyd was in a movie theater. Up on the screen, the image being projected was him, lying on the basement floor. He looked dead.
Maddox sat in the front row, transfixed by the movie.
The dismembered ghost, not dismembered and not a ghost, sat next to him, equally rapt by what he was watching on the screen.
Was this real?
It felt real.
Boyd was going to interrupt their movie.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Fletcher grabbed the doorknob. He cried out and Adeline saw him twitch as if being electrocuted, but he didn't let go, even when smoke billowed from his burning hand.
"Wait in the hallway," said Adeline, as Paige and Naomi hurried past her.
Fletcher turned to look at her. His teeth were clenched together in pain and Adeline would've enjoyed seeing his eyeballs explode in their sockets. Instead, he finally let go of the doorknob. Strips of blackened flesh dangled from his hand.
"I wasn't supposed to be trapped in here," he said, sounding so forlorn that somebody hearing him out of context might have felt genuinely sorry for him.
