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Haunted Worlds

Page 17

by Jeffrey Thomas


  The monument was in the form of two vast human hands, gracefully slender and exquisite even as they loomed awesomely. The hands had been shaped in a cupping gesture, arcing away from each other fluidly. Though he was distant from them, and the tint of green moonlight might be tricking his eyes, he had the impression the hands were carved out of solid jade, polished and sleek.

  The monstrous, pitted green moon was aligned with the upturned palms of the hands in such a way that it seemed as though they had been designed to uphold it in the sky, cupping the ghastly sphere as if it were a diseased human heart, to be offered as a sacrifice to the cosmos.

  A mysterious sense of familiarity came over him as he stared at this towering idol. He was moved to tears and stood up more erect, away from the wooden door, trembling all over violently.

  Despite this, a movement in the tall, pale grass around his ankles drew his attention. Maybe it was the shifting green glow down there that had caught his eye. He looked down and saw a many-legged creature like a large crab or giant spider, impeded by the grass but struggling closer to his shoes.

  It was one of the disembodied hands. It had slipped through the threshold before he had been able to get the door of black wood closed and bolted.

  He wanted to cry out, but his lungs seized shut to trap the air, and before he could back away the hand pulled free of the encumbering grass and scampered onto his left foot.

  At this touch, even through the material of his shoe, he was jolted as if electrified rigid, his eyes bulging wide. This reaction transpired in but a fraction of a second. In that microsecond, looking down at his body and legs and feet, he appeared as a negative image of himself, but colored the same phosphorescent green as the hand that had touched him.

  And then he blinked out of existence.

  0. A Ring

  He snapped awake with a gasp in his heart and sat up in the seat of the parked car he had been slumped down in, covered with a soft orange blanket.

  Through the car’s windows he saw that the sun had come up, though it was still low enough in the sky to indicate the day was young. The sun was not monstrously engorged, so it seemed that it would have no trouble rising fully into the sky, as a sun should do.

  The car sat at the edge of a parking lot, distant from other vehicles that were grouped closer to a gas station and the adjacent service building of a highway rest stop. He didn’t recognize this place, however. Didn’t know the number of this highway. Didn’t know which state he was in.

  He didn’t know the make of the car he sat in. He realized he didn’t know his name.

  His disoriented gaze settled on the car’s glove box to his right. Would there be something inside that would tell him who he was and why he was here, sheltering in a parked car? He had an intuition that this would be so, and thus reached to it and popped the small compartment open.

  Resting atop a small stack of papers and the car’s owner’s manual was a package wrapped in a plastic shopping bag. He drew this out, into his lap, and opened the mouth of the crinkly white bag to see what it contained.

  Inside was an object sealed inside a quart-sized plastic freezer bag. He gazed down at the thing clearly visible within.

  A mysterious sense of familiarity came over him as he stared at the treasure, the memento, secreted inside the package. He was moved to tears, trembling all over violently.

  Inside the freezer bag—discolored with decay, even though the bag being supposedly airtight—was a severed human hand. It was slender, the hand of a woman, and it wore a ring—a gold Claddagh ring, with a diamond mounted in the central heart, which two graceful hands cupped as if to uphold it as an offering to the cosmos.

  Good Will toward Men

  1. The Five Stages of Drowning

  He didn’t know for how long he’d been drowning.

  The liquid he was suspended in wasn’t water, being of a more viscous nature and of a smoky gray tint throughout. Still, it was fluid enough that it had filled his lungs when he’d been thrown from the edge of the crater in which the liquid formed a wide, deep pool.

  Though his body was in truth only an illusion, a spiritual representation of the physical vessel his soul had occupied in life, when the Demons that he and the other Damned called the Torus had cast him into the gray pool he had experienced much of what was called the five stages of drowning.

  First Stage: Panic, as he thrashed his arms in a futile attempt to keep his head above the surface. However, in life he had never learned to swim. Even as he splashed frantically he recalled his older brother, an experienced swimmer, teasing him and calling him a baby for not even allowing their parents to support his body in the shallow end of his Aunt Marge’s swimming pool. He’d cried, all but hysterical, when his father had tried to carry him in. This panic stage lasted about forty-five seconds, if eternity could be said to be portioned out in the terrestrial sense.

  Second Stage: As his head sank below the surface, he held his breath in an attempt to prevent himself from ingesting fluid. Here was where a difference occurred between drowning in Hades and drowning in the earthly world. In life, he would have likely lost consciousness now due to lack of oxygen. However, in the afterlife his sham body only pantomimed the functions of a material body: he experienced hunger and thirst but didn’t require food or drink; his heart beat, but his body didn’t actually utilize the mock blood it drove through him; he seemed to breathe but didn’t need air to survive because he was immortal. And so, he was only too horribly conscious of the stages that followed.

  Third Stage: Despite his mind being aware, after about a minute and a half of trying to hold his breath his body persisted in its emulation of mechanical processes and went into respiratory arrest. His mouth gasped open and his lungs filled like sacks of sand. He sank lower in the gelatinous fluid until it grew darker around him. He finally hung in a shadowy oblivion between what lay above and what lay below. Below was ominous blackness. Above, if he tilted back his head, he saw the silhouetted curve of the crater’s rim and the ambient golden glow of the air, though the ceiling of the sky itself—an inverted sea of molten lava—was covered by a blanket of dense black clouds. Also silhouetted against the fiery air were several of the gigantic Torus beings, looming there like statues and seemingly gazing down into the pool, though they had no eyes, their heads darkly outlined as great zeroes.

  Fourth Stage: His spiritual body went through the motions of hypoxic convulsion, going rigid and jolting with spasms as if he were being electrocuted. A thick white foam rose up from between his lips, and he didn’t even have the breath to dislodge it by blowing it away. Unlike a drowning mortal, he did not suffer sodium deficit or potassium excess or fallen calcium levels, because he was no longer comprised of chemicals, but he could feel his imitation heart stutter to a halt and go still like a rock in his chest.

  Fifth Stage: Death. But he was already dead, so he dreamed.

  2. The Sea of Memory

  Though he never truly slept, sometimes in a sense there were nightmares. Unbidden, bad memories would push their way to the forefront of his mind, like scarred black whales breaking a calm surface to spout geysers of blood. However, if he relaxed his mind sufficiently that he achieved something like meditation, something like a self-imposed coma—internalizing his consciousness completely, forbidding it a peek at any window—he could distance himself from his surroundings and situation, so that for all intents and purposes he was away . (Dare he even say . . . free? )

  Because damnation was eternal and the passage of time so difficult to gauge—there was no day or night—he would never know for how long he had been in one of his away periods before being disturbed from it. For there were disturbances. The Damned did not share this pool of perpetual drowning with each other only. Every now and then he would be roused from his dreaming state by a vicious tug on his foot or hand, nose or ear. His eyes would snap open to see that a large eel-like creature had clamped onto him. Only one of an endless variety of infernal life-forms, this creature h
ad a long, segmented body like a human spine of black bone, its black head with its four white-glowing eyes composed of two matching halves resembling the heads of human infants, twins conjoined at the mouth, so that the lower jaw of each was the upper part of the other. Their shared mouth was full of needle teeth, and the eel would tear away a hunk of flesh or maybe even a few toes or fingers before it swished away again into the depths below, or to feast on another of the Damned.

  He could only be grateful that apparently just one of these animals haunted the pool, and not a whole school of them in an unending feeding frenzy. He could only be grateful that, given time, his mock flesh would regenerate, the perception of physical agony would recede. He had taught himself to be thankful for such things, as a coping mechanism.

  He was always grateful when he could return to his dreams.

  He dreamed of, or rather remembered, his childhood. The Sunday drives his father would take him and his mother and brother on, after church, with no destination in mind, stopping for ice cream or to play in some little park they’d never been aware of before. He remembered Christmas mornings, bleary from too little sleep but high on adrenalin, sitting cross-legged on the floor near a live (or rather, undead) tree almost lost under the cheap mortal magic of tinfoil icicles reflecting multicolored fairy lights, he and his brother admiring (sometimes jealously) each other’s presents as they tore the shimmering skins from them.

  He remembered his adulthood. He could clearly see his future wife’s breasts the first time she’d let him expose them, in his car in a parking lot outside a steak house where they’d just eaten; could almost feel their softness again, smell their warmth, taste their dark nipples, hear her little sigh.

  He vividly recalled being drunk at his wedding dinner, blissfully disoriented as he stared into the pink-lighted miniature fountain tinkling under their elevated wedding cake, thinking, “I’m a husband now.”

  . . . And vividly recalled thinking, “I’m a father now” as he watched his blood-slick son emerge from inside his mother, bluish as if born dead (and from his first breath, already on the lifelong path of death like all mortals) . . . the doctor rushing him to a table to suck out the meconium he had aspirated. Seeing his airborne son’s penis, he had told his wife, “It’s a boy!” The doctor had paused, swung around with his son aloft, and said, “Oh yeah, it’s a boy,” and then had continued to the table.

  . . . And dueling with his seven-year-old son with toy light sabers in a department store, falling to the floor mortally wounded and looking up to see a pair of parents watching his performance from the end of the aisle.

  . . . And walking into his son’s room (no, not this again! ) and seeing the fifteen-year-old hanging from his neck (oh no no no! ) with his toes just lightly touching the floor, as if he had been frozen in a graceful leap upward, a leap away, an arrow caught in flight, never finding its mark. A document left open on his computer, a confession of his shame. An account of his seduction at the edge of twelve and three subsequent years of abuse by their family’s priest, Father Gordon MacArthur, who was already on administrative leave as his diocese investigated him in regard to several other allegations. The rope choked off his son’s voice, his bulging tongue gagged him, but his document poured forth a gush of words. In the document that cast its blue light upon his hovering body, making of him a ghost bearing witness to its own testimony, the boy apologized to his parents. He couldn’t face them when they found out, couldn’t face his classmates should his name be released or leaked, couldn’t face this mortal realm of betrayal and grief any longer.

  . . . And walking up behind the man on the sidewalk, barking his name (Father MacArthur! ) because he wanted the priest to see him, to know him, and, when the man turned, shooting him with a .357 Python in the belly. Standing over him while the priest curled himself around the bullet like a fist. Listening to him whine and whimper and groooan before finally . . . finally . . . pointing the revolver again, this time at his head.

  . . . And then (this again . . . always this again ) lifting the gun’s muzzle to his own temple, while he heard people screaming across the street, while he sobbed out loud an apology to his wife, who was back at their home unaware, his son’s mother, whom he had failed because he hadn’t protected their child from a predator, because he (Damn him! God damn him! ) had insisted his family attend church every Sunday just as he had as a child, insisted they believe in its words, and in the messengers of its words, and the promises of eternal love and justice and reward, and he had pulled the trigger, and like a bullet through a skull, a bullet through some mysterious veil, he had fired his soul here .

  3. The Dubious Rescue

  A stern finger poked his shoulder to arouse him from his dreams.

  His mother? Was it already time to go to school again, the weekend gone so soon? He groaned inside.

  The finger poked him again, hard, in the side of his neck. “Mom!” he wanted to protest. How could she hurt him this way? It wasn’t like her. He opened his eyes, and at the same time the finger curled and hooked him with a pointed nail under the edge of his jaw, puncturing his skin. It ripped upward, tore free, leaving a deep gouge along his cheek.

  With his eyes open, he saw in front of him the void of grayness and remembered where he was with something so much more than a groan inside him. It was more like the howl of a man plummeting down a bottomless pit, forever and ever and ever.

  He also saw the shadowy form of another Damned man not too distant from him, like himself suspended in the thick solution. This man was thrashing his limbs as if drowning; had he only just been tossed into the pool by the Torus? But no . . . he was being towed upward on a taut black cable, as if being rescued. So why was he resisting? Then he realized that wasn’t a cable. It was a long, rigid pole of iron. He realized this even as a similar pole caught him in the left eye socket with its hooked end—which in his dream he had taken for a finger that had previously failed to snag his jaw—popping the jelly orb therein and taking hold of bone.

  Then he himself was being hoisted up toward the surface. He himself flapping his limbs like ineffectual wings. He would have sucked fluid into his lungs, in his attempt to scream at the pain, had they not already been filled to capacity.

  The shock had jolted his heart into beating again.

  As he was reeled in like a fish the outer air brightened above him . . . and as the fluid around him correspondingly appeared lighter, with his remaining eye he saw a half dozen other Damned—men, women, a girl of maybe twelve—being pulled up by hooks caught in their flesh or bone, too. He imagined other Damned behind him were also being drawn upward. A ring of the giant Torus were arranged around the circumference of the pool, effortlessly working their long metal pikes.

  Then he was breaking the surface, sputtering, trying to sob. Hand over huge, gnarled hand the Demon that had snared him pulled him toward shore. Identical to all the others, the Torus was twice the height of a human, its body hidden under layers of black leather robes imprinted with glowing white insignias that emitted wisps of vapor, its eyeless head a great circle of amber-colored flesh with the vague shadow of its O-shaped skull visible within.

  He was dragged away from the rim of the crater, and with a deft flick of its wrists the Torus unhooked its pike from him. He was left floundering, blood running from his eye socket and the gouge in his cheek. He rolled onto his side and began vomiting up the gray fluid that had filled his lungs for however long it had been. Beside him and all around the perimeter of the pool, other Damned were doing the same.

  The pain and the violent effort of his body to empty itself caused him to lose consciousness in a way he had never done while floating, as if in outer space, in the drowning pool—but just before he did so he saw there were other, smaller beings standing in a cluster off behind the ring of towering Demons. These beings were not dressed in black, but in robes of white.

  4. The Visitation

  He awoke as if from a night’s sleep in his mortal life—on his back
, atop a narrow bed (was this his childhood bed? ), dressed in dry clothing. He saw, though, that this was not his childhood bedroom. It was a tiny barren cell, three blank walls with the fourth wall, facing a corridor beyond, comprised of iron bars covered in three-inch spikes. A series of grooved tracks running along both the ceiling and floor accommodated each of the bars, so that the wall of bars could be cranked closer and closer to the cell’s occupant—this advance done either swiftly, or with excruciating anticipation over slow daily increments—inevitably pinning and crushing the prisoner against the pocked and bloodstained back wall. He knew this because he had been a prisoner of one such cell in the past, before being dragged to the pool of perpetual drowning.

  So had the Torus realized at last that he had learned to overcome his panic and physical discomfort in their deep well, and even achieve periods of tranquility? He had heard that the Demons liked to vary the torments in Hades, lest the Damned become too accustomed to any one of them. He experienced a more acute sense of despair than he had known for some time. Was his new punishment to take place in this crushing chamber, or was it only a temporary holding cell until he could be moved to another of Hades’ infinite regions, presided over by another of Hades’ infinite races of Demons?

  It wasn’t that his clothing had dried out, but that he had been dressed while unconscious in a brand new uniform of long-sleeved black top, loose black trousers, thin-soled black shoes like Kung Fu slippers. Gone was his old waterlogged uniform, threadbare and torn by bullets and blades, his old shoes with holes in the imitation matter that composed their soles (which didn’t heal up on their own, as did the holes in the imitation matter of his soul). He was at least thankful for these . . . gifts.

  He sat up on his cot, felt at his cheek where the groping pike had lacerated it. Smooth once more. He realized he was seeing with two eyes again. The only scar remaining, that always remained, was the conflated symbol branded on his forehead that announced his doubly damning sins: the sin of Murder, and the sin of Sacrilege for having killed a servant of the Creator.

 

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