Rick grabbed my shoulder, hard. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”
I shook free of him, reached down and threw the blanket back over the body. “We’re not going anywhere until this is finished.” I faced him. “This ends here, tonight.”
Just then, Rick noticed something in the darkness. His eyes slowly lifted, and I could tell from the look on his face that there was something above us. “Jesus—Jesus Christ,” he babbled. “Sweet Jesus Christ in Heaven.”
Following his stare, and then the flashlight beam to the low ceiling overhead, I saw the woman—the boy’s mother—floating in midair.
CHAPTER 34
I was either in shock or frightened to the point where I was incapable of running. Instead, I stood gawking, struggling to prevent my mind from splintering, and a moment later realized the woman was not floating after all.
She had been crucified to the ceiling.
I heard Rick vomit as I moved closer and gazed up at the carnage. The woman had been gutted, and her emaciated torso lay open and empty. Nails roughly the size of railway spikes had been driven through her hands and feet. Her eyelids had been sliced away, and her eyes were sunken and covered in gray mucus, forever forced to look down upon her maimed child. Her face was drawn and sallow, just as I remembered it.
You here about the plumbing?
“No,” I whispered, “and neither was he.”
In those few seconds it seemed all sanity deserted us. We were in Hell, and I was so terrified, so overcome with fear, I could barely prevent myself from completely breaking down. Emotion was raw now, and all the rules of life and death had changed. Lies and truth, fantasy and reality, good and evil—they had all become one.
“He’s here.” I took the flashlight back. “I can feel him.”
Rick wiped his mouth clean and gave a resolute nod.
I pushed past him and left the room. There were two small offices and a large metal staircase at the end of the hallway. We inspected the offices quickly. They were filled with broken furniture and garbage but nothing else, so I shone the light toward the staircase. Most of the steps were cluttered with debris. Two large windows at the head of the stairs were smeared with filth, but as more fireworks exploded, the colorful lights bled through the old panes and offered a glimpse of the top of the stairs.
In the flash of light, something on the landing moved.
“Fuck!” I backed away and nearly tripped. I swept the flashlight around but the beam wasn’t strong enough, and darkness again swallowed the top of the stairs.
“What? What is it?”
“There’s something up there,” I whispered. “I just saw it move.”
“More rats?”
I shook my head in the negative. “Too big.”
“There must still be homeless living in here then,” he said hopefully.
Rather than answering, I held my hand up for him to be quiet. We stood still a moment and waited for lapses between the fireworks to listen more carefully, but each time, all we heard was wind and ocean.
I climbed the first two stairs, distributing my weight carefully to make certain they could still safely accommodate us. Rick followed close behind. Once we’d covered three stairs, the flashlight was finally able to reveal the landing. I leaned against the railing and aimed the light, but from our vantage point all I could see beyond it was more darkness. We had no way of knowing if the second floor was safe to walk on, but something was up there, and one way or another, I was going after it.
We crept onto the landing and saw that the second floor was entirely gutted, an enormous open space with high ceilings. Again, the floor was cluttered and the same horrible smells pervaded the area, but the darkness here seemed different.
It was nearly alive.
I slowly swept the pool of light across the vast room.
“Who’s there?” Rick yelled suddenly. “Come out, we just want to talk to you.”
I glared at him but he didn’t notice, his eyes staring straight ahead. There was no answer, no sounds of movement.
“You’re sure you saw something?” he whispered.
As I slid the light along the wall closest to us, it illuminated a nearby open doorway. Shadows darted away, and this time I knew Rick had seen them too. “Positive.”
My heart and mind were racing so fast I wasn’t sure how much more I could endure. I wrestled with a tremor of fear, fought it off and stepped closer to the doorway. The light reflected off something within the room. Tiles. A wall covered in old filthy tiles.
“It’s a bathroom,” Rick said.
The sign buried in the cellar wall of Bernard’s house had been taken from a bathroom, a bathroom in this mill.
With my free hand, I reached behind me, pulled my 9mm free of its holster and glanced nervously at Rick. He dropped a hand to the grip of his knife but left it in the scabbard. His face and neck were slick with sweat.
Another round of fireworks burst across the sky, and on this floor, with all the windows and open space, it lighted the area far more intensely than it had below. I pictured countless people gathered on the public beach several miles down the coast, watching the displays and enjoying their Fourth of July. I pictured Donald pacing near his telephone. I pictured Toni dressed in dark clothes, standing at my gravesite with another man and grinning at me from behind black lace. I pictured Claudia in her dark and dirty cottage, straddled atop me, rocking slowly, hands pressed flat against my chest, pushing me deeper into the worn, stained mattress, her breasts full, wet and dripping sweat as I tell her, “I’m closing in on him.” And her shaking her head and whispering, “He’s closing in on you.” I pictured the families and loved ones of the victims crying and mourning, walking alongside caskets leaking blood. I pictured Bernard painting walls with the same blood, with body fluids and excrement, and from somewhere deep inside, heard the shrieks of the dead mingled with his laughter.
The fireworks faded to black, returned us to darkness.
We followed the shadows into the bathroom. The stench wafting from within was gut-wrenching, and as the flashlight crawled along ahead of us, we saw that the tiled walls were awash in a caked crimson so dark it was nearly black. I moved the beam around the room. The entire area was covered in blood. Even the floors were smeared with it. With the smell, in limited light and enclosed space, I imagined it was similar to being trapped within the bloody carcass of some enormous, brutally slain animal.
“Over there,” Rick said, his voice flat, void.
I swung the light in the direction he indicated.
A large industrial size sink ran nearly the full length of the back wall, above which had once been a mirror, though only shards and small sections of glass panels remained intact, fracturing our dark reflections back at us as if through some demented prism.
There was a line of urinals to our right, but only a few were still attached to the wall, the rest had fallen or been torn free and lay in pieces on the floor. On the opposite wall were the devastated remnants of stalls and toilets. Blood spatters were everywhere, like a painter had taken a very wide and wet brush and flicked it repeatedly about the room for hours, only to finish by taking up the paint bucket and dousing the area with whatever remained.
We inched closer to the sink. It had overflowed long before with what could only be a sickening combination of various body fluids and blood. Whatever the concoction had once been, it was now reduced to a dark gelatinous slop.
And within this demonic fluid lay a bevy of body parts protruding from the mess like dinosaurs stuck in tar pits. I moved the light along the sink, past a human head, to a portion where what appeared to be a torso floated on its side. Maggots writhed along the surface. Rick turned away and vomited again, and though my body wanted to join him, I was hit with violent dry heaves instead.
“Fucking slaughterhouse,” Rick gasped.
I holstered the 9mm, bent over, put my hands on my knees and took several deep breaths. The pool of light fell between us. On the fl
oor, facing the sink, an upside down cross was painted in blood. Other strange symbols had been drawn around it, along with a word that had been smudged and neither of us could make out.
“I can’t even tell how many are in there,” I managed a moment later.
Rick spat on the floor. “Have you ever—ever—felt anything like this before?”
I knew exactly what he meant. There was a pervasive sense of evil here, a tangible essence of it hanging in the air like dense fog, and it was so strong that I could feel it being absorbed into my pores, mixing with the moisture in my eyes, inhaled up and into my nose and clinging to the roof of my mouth. “No.”
“We’re leaving right-fucking-now.” He staggered away and headed for the door.
I followed, trying my best to keep the light aimed in front of him, but he was at a full run before I reached the main room, and once there, it took me a few seconds to locate him. Firing the flashlight in various directions and calling his name, I finally found him running through the room, stumbling through piles of garbage and debris as he went, the knife free of the scabbard and clutched in his hand, blade down.
A glow of various colors lit the sky and a greater portion of the room, which gave me my bearings. Instead of making for the staircase, Rick had become disoriented and was running the wrong way, deeper into the darkness. “Rick, no! Wrong way! Wrong way!”
He looked back over his shoulder, nearly fell, quickly regained his balance and spun around in an attempt to change directions. But as he did so a loud cracking sound echoed across the room, and with a frantic and helpless shout, he fell straight down and out of sight.
The floor had given way and swallowed him whole.
I ran toward the spot where I’d last seen him, doing my best to keep the light level and all the while fearful the floor might also give out on me at any moment. I arrived at the hole quickly, crouched next to it carefully and shined the light through. A large section of flooring had collapsed and now lay in a heap on the floor below, along with Rick, who was sprawled out and covered in filth, but conscious.
“Are you all right?” I called down. He didn’t answer, but moved groggily and shielded his eyes from the light. His arms and legs were moving, albeit slowly and with some effort, but it didn’t look like he had sustained any serious injuries. “Stay there,” I told him. “I’m coming down.”
I noticed his knife near the edge of the hole. He had apparently dropped it when he fell. I scooped it up with my free hand and aimed the light back in the direction of the staircase. But before I had taken a step I heard a strange squishing sound, and from behind me came a deep gurgling voice.
“Welcome to my Eden.”
CHAPTER 35
A stream of fireworks shot through the sky, firing sparks into the air and releasing shrill wails as they fell to the ground in slow spirals. A rapid-fire series of red and blue bursts followed. The finale had begun.
Against the rear wall of the mill, draped in shadow, a huddled figure watched me from the darkness. Its head was shiny—slick and wet—and it wasn’t until I stepped a bit closer that I realized it was covered in blood. His head was bald, like it had been completely shaved—the wig gone—but I recognized the face even before the eyes opened, two white orbs emerging from crimson. They looked at me as if I were some sort of anomaly, as if I were the one out of place in the universe. And maybe I was.
My emotions became too great, and even attempting to control them seemed inane. Laughing, crying and choking all at once, I was certain I had slipped off the precipice into complete madness, because that which stood before me was not possible, could not be possible, and yet, there it was. But with this awareness also came an odd clarity, a release and an acceptance of the inevitable—whatever it might be—and at the moment of this epiphany my fear tapered off, my tears stopped and I became surprisingly composed. I had come to this house of horrors to find the evil, to stop it or to die trying. And now, I had found it.
He cocked his head as if he had heard my thoughts. For a fleeting moment something in his eyes spoke to me, and I glimpsed who he had once been so very long ago.
“Bernard,” I said.
“Come closer, Alan.” His voice was a bit deeper than normal, and gurgled and reverberated like his lungs were full of fluid, or like he was gargling while attempting to speak.
I did as he asked, and the closer I got the wider and more intense the flashlight beam became. He was nude and covered in shining blood to his shoulders so thick and bright it looked almost like paint. The fireworks finale continued, one explosion on top of the next as colors rained through the mill and slinked across our faces and bodies. I followed one moving shaft of blue light to his lower extremities. He was crouched there in the dark like a suddenly discovered and cornered animal. Around his feet the floor was covered in a kind of jellylike mass of quivering flesh, blood and bone, a great deal of which was also on the wall behind him, as if violently thrown there. It looked to be gradually passing through the floor and wall to somewhere else, like little by little, it was being absorbed.
Not all spirits cross peacefully, Claudia had said. Some hang on.
He seemed to have a normal range of motion but moved groggily, and at a snail’s pace. He reached a blood-soaked hand to his face, wiped a space clear around his eyes then looked away to indicate brooding, contemplative thought. As he exhaled each breath through his nose, more blood ran free of his nostrils and joined the sheen already coating him. Eventually he began to breathe loudly through his mouth.
Movement to my left distracted me. The shadowy figures from our nightmare stood several feet away, barely visible in the dark corner and just beyond the reach of both my flashlight and the illumination of the now constant barrage of fireworks.
But I knew who they were. I had seen them before.
“And you know why they’re here,” Bernard gurgled.
“You’re not real,” I told him. “None of you are real.”
“Are your dreams real? Your nightmares?”
“You’re ghosts in my mind.”
“Close.” He exhaled through his mouth with a loud hiss that sounded like air escaping a pipe, and his bloody lips peeled back into a grin. He no longer had teeth, only slick pink gums. “There are no ghosts, Alan. Only memories…echoes…residue.”
“Why did you do this?”
The eyes shifted, and a black tongue slowly traced his lips. “It’s my nature.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You were my friend.”
“A friend, a relative,” he gurgled. “Someone you trust, someone you believe in. I have no unique characteristics; there are no giveaways. Don’t you realize that by now? I’m everywhere, Alan. I’m everyone. Anyone.” His mouth opened wide as a gush of dark blood spilled from his mouth and poured over his chin. “The inconsolable, the weak, the lonely and the lost, the faithless and the unclean. The damned. The lovely damned.”
The fireworks stopped, and both silence and darkness returned to the mill. Only my flashlight remained, along with the sounds of the nearby ocean. I tightened my grip on the scuba knife.
“You came here to kill me, is that it?” The wet white eyes dropped to my hands. “With your ridiculous toys?”
I stared at the monstrosity before me, my chest heaving.
“Well I have darker toys,” he said.
“Why are you tormenting us?”
Wet crimson fingers caressed his bloody chin. After a moment, those fingers reached out for me, the tips dripping. “Come together, Alan. I’ll show you the beauty of torment.” He grinned as I stepped a bit closer. “Did I mention your mother’s down here with us?”
“My mother’s nowhere near you.”
“Can you be sure of anything anymore? Ever again?”
I forced a swallow. “I’m sure of that.”
“You had such nightmares then,” he said, using my mother’s voice now. “When you were a little boy. Do you remember, sweetheart?”
* * *
> I’m afraid—so frightened I can barely breath. I’m crying violently, choking, and my entire body trembles. But then I realize my mother is there—so loving and patient, with the most beautiful deep brown eyes I have ever seen. She is holding me, sitting with me there on my bed, rocking me in her arms and whispering to me. She smells fresh and clean and warm, and I feel safe. “It’s OK,” she tells me. “Just bad dreams, little one, only bad dreams.” She gently wipes away my tears with her fingers, and the blur I had seen her through previously vanishes. “What were you dreaming about that frightened you so?”
“Something in the dark was chasing me,” I tell her. “I was running and it was behind me and it was growling and biting me, biting me on my feet and on my legs.”
She kisses my forehead. “There’s nothing in the dark but the dark.”
“There’s monsters in the dark,” I tell her.
“No such things as monsters, kiddo.”
Even though I know different, I also know she will never fully understand, so I focus on her face, and the perpetual sadness in her eyes. I am afraid and she is sad. These are our markings, burned into our flesh and mind and as much a part of us as spots to a leopard.
“Why are you always so sad?” I ask. “Is it because Daddy died?”
“I’m not always sad, my love.” She’s lying, but smiles and kisses me again. “Think you can try to go back to sleep now like a big boy?”
I look over her shoulder at the darkness from the hallway leaking in under the door…or maybe escaping beneath it. There is nothing to see, nothing hiding behind the curtains or beneath my bed. But we’re not alone. I can feel it. Inside me, I can feel it.
The Bleeding Season Page 35
