by Scott Hale
By the time the distorted memory had reached Gemma’s years in grade school, Trent and Camilla had reforged their love and formed an unlikely alliance. To them, Gemma had become a rallying point. They reveled in their disgust for their daughter. Though they continued to fight, there was one issue they could always agree on: it had been a mistake to bring Gemma home.
At the memories of adolescence, the black mass and the diamond went wild. Camilla had no opportunity to even realize that the events were permanently changing in her mind. She remembered the arguments between her and Trent, but whereas they had once concerned finances, his attitude, her wants, and their failing marriage, they became concerned with one constant aggravator.
Every time they fought, every time Camilla kicked Trent out, it was because of Gemma. In grade school, she had been a weird child with no friends, who was selfish and no better than her fat whore of a mother. In middle school, she was attention-starved and completely destructive. She failed tests on purpose and got into fights for no reason. She was disrespectful at home, and had to be taken to the hospital on multiple occasions due to self-harm.
Once exposed to the black mass, all the responsibility Camilla had once shouldered for Gemma’s behavior vanished. Everything she and Trent had done to provoke their daughter’s actions was no more. Gemma went from being a victim of a dysfunctional home to a vindictive brat born of bad genes, but a few incidences away from a prolonged stay at a boarding school.
As the black mass spread to the events of the last week, Camilla struggled to make sense of them. In the present, she loved her daughter, cherished her. But in the past, she hated her, despised her. Something was happening to Camilla, she knew it. The Keeper still had her in its clutches, and it was killing her. Killing her by killing her love for her daughter. It was turning Camilla into something she never wanted to be, causing her to think she had been the mother she never wanted Gemma to have. If only she could stop this. There had to be a way to break free.
But there wasn’t. As soon as Camilla realized what was happening to her, it had already happened. Every happy memory she had with or about Gemma was gone. Like a leaf shredded by insects, her mind and its memories had been torn apart. All she had left was what she had thought she had always been.
So when she opened her eyes and found herself still in front of the convent, she came to her feet and started towards it. For she had a confession to make. She hated her daughter. Hated her more than anything else in the world. And, by the grace of god, she was going to get rid of her.
TRENT
No matter where Trent went in the convent, he heard whispers. They were hymnal, horrible. A kind of caustic chant that carried itself on a soundwave of hellish peaks and doomed valleys. The alien words came from everywhere and everything. No matter how much distance he put between himself and a place, the sound was always the same. It was like the convent had a secret so dark, not even the walls could keep it.
Obsession overtook him. Like a demon on his back, it rode him through the convent, dangling a carrot of desperation over his head. From the chapter house to the refectory, the kitchen to the scriptorium, Trent cleared each room on the first floor and the halls that connected them. On the second floor, the chanting was unchanged, yet he scoured the level all the same. Going between the blood-soaked infirmary, the filthy lavatory, and the ash-covered calefactory did nothing but test the limits of his stomach, as well as his patience.
Returning to the first floor, Trent wandered, momentarily defeated, into the church itself. Despite being literally built in the middle of the convent, the church seemed to be anything but the center of anyone’s attention. It was a narrow, sparse space with no more than a few pews and a dusty tabernacle. The floor was a sharp stretch of upturned stone eager to put most knees to the test. In the way of adornments, there were none. There was no religious iconography or holy texts. No host to eat, nor wine to drink. The only niceties to the church’s name were the two stained glass windows, but the images depicted there were so grotesque, they were impossible to appreciate, let alone decipher.
“This must be where the masochists go to pray,” Trent quipped.
He slid into a pew and tried to get comfortable.
“A hardcore church for those who pray harder than the rest.” He laughed. “Christ Almighty, this is one funky ass dream.”
Dream. Nightmare. Over the course of however long he had been sleeping, the lines between the two often blurred. There were good moments—his time with Camilla at home, alone, and with Gemma, in her bedroom—and then not so good moments. There had been some clock? And he remembered Jasper screaming about something in the basement?
“Do feel good though, oddly enough.” He stretched out his legs. “No worries in the world.” Then he scanned the room again. “Must be where the really messed up go to get right with god. I’m sorry, god! But I do feel better being in your house. Purer, you know? After all that craziness, I’m happy to be here.”
Trent ran his tongue over his teeth. Staring at the ceiling, as though he were staring into heaven, he said, “Go easy on Camilla and Gemma. I put them through hell. The clock. Yeah, the Dread Clock. Was that all you? Can’t say I understood what it did, but it did make things better.” He sighed. “Thanks, god. We needed it.”
At this point, the chanting had become nothing more than background noise to him. But as he sat there, again scratching his face, an idea struck him. Putting his hand to his ear, he listened to his palm. The sound wasn’t just around him, it was coming from him, too.
“Holy shit.”
Aware of the dark words emerging from his flesh, he listened to his whole hand and arm, the top of his shoulders and the middle of his knees. He tried to stretch himself into other positions, but his aging bones kept threatening to break so he quickly stopped.
“What does this…?”
He stood up and stepped out of the pew. Giving the church a twice-over, he realized that the hymn wasn’t some auditory oddity or a bunch of gossipy ghosts who were talking loud enough for the living to hear. No, the nuns who lived here were still here. These words that he was hearing had to be coming from them. And the words were more than a hymn or a chant. They were a net. A snare of strange syllables that had been cast across the convent, not necessarily to ensnare, but to exsanguinate. To drain the lifeblood, whatever it may be, from any object, animate or inanimate.
“That’s why it’s in me,” Trent said, pacing the short length of the church. “I have to stop it. That’s why I’m here. The Dread Clock. Can’t quite remember. It was going to fix everything. Bet this is the last test. To cleanse me.”
On his way out of the church, Trent noticed something he hadn’t before. Wooden stairs, wedged inside the wall. At an almost vertical slope, they ran straight into the ceiling and stopped at the trapdoor there.
Trent shook his head and scampered up the steps, though perhaps ladder would have been a better way to describe them. At the top, he pushed back the trapdoor. On the other side was a cobwebbed dormitory with ten beds. Each one had been made with the utmost care. The only thing holding the beds back from perfection were the pillows. All ten of them were covered in vomit and black hairs.
He climbed into the dormitory. At once, he noticed a makeshift ladder hanging from a huge hole in the ceiling. Made out of clothes and undergarments, the ladder ran from the dormitory into what appeared to be the convent’s attic. Staring up into the hole—the wood boards were blown out, as though something had punched through the ceiling—he noticed candlelight, and shadows.
They’re up there, he thought, the dream skirting dangerously close to becoming a nightmare again. He mounted the ladder. Images flashed through his mind of his own attic in his own home, of a monster with a tail and pincers. At first, he had remembered the Dread Clock fondly, but now, not so much. He wanted purity, but all he seemed to get from the antique was putrefaction of his body and his soul.
Trent shook off the doubt. It hadn’t done him any good at
any other moment in his life, and after all, this was a dream. What else could he do until he woke but press forward? He climbed the ladder and, at the top, lifted himself into the smoky attic.
The Black Mass was happening at the back of the attic. Ten naked nuns, covered in boils and black fur, stood around an altar of candle wax. Upon the altar, a priest lay, his hands encased in stone, his feet bare and broken. Over his head, a paper mache death mask had been placed. There were a multitude of jars and bottles surrounding the priest. Filled with liquids of various color and thickness, Trent couldn’t tell if they had been harvested from the priest, or gifted to him from the nuns.
Now that he had discovered the source of the hymn, he could make out what the nuns were saying. Beating their chests, as though the words were a cancer to be dislodged from their breasts, they chanted in unison, “Y’llorov. Y’llorov. Maya y’llorovaya. Gorovash. Gorovash. St’ka gorovashaya. Halakos en carane. Nexgroda en nakt.”
To Trent’s uncultured ears, the words sounded slightly Russian, but even then, he couldn’t be sure.
The priest reared up and let out a scream. He struggled to lift his hands, but their stone fetters were too heavy. Turning his head, he caught Trent creeping behind the nuns and let out a garbled cry for help.
At that, the nuns, still chanting in robotic unison, slowly turned their heads. Trent stumbled back towards the ladder, but the nun with the stomach that sagged down to her knees held up her hand for him to stop.
Squinting her bloodshot eyes, she said, in a heavy accent, “English?”
Trent nodded. A woman screamed outside the convent, from where the garden would have been. He twisted his neck to see who it was, but there were no windows up here. It seemed strange to think about it, but the scream sounded familiar. It stirred something within him. He’d heard it before, and also, not long ago.
“What you want?” the fat nun asked. Her breasts were two fleshy stalactites that refused to stay still. “He brought you to see?”
“He?”
Trent cringed. More images were clawing their way through to this dreamy consciousness. The living room. Gemma. The feeling of weightlessness. And the weight of uselessness.
The fat nun pointed to the priest writhing on the candle wax altar.
“I don’t know who that is.” Trent’s mouth hung open as he remembered a story his wife had told him. “You. Do you know the Dread Clock? Is it doing this? My memory isn’t good.”
“He is dog.” The fat nun exchanged looks with her still-chanting sisters. “Y’llorov. Y’llorov. Maya y’llorovaya,” she started. And then: “What is this ‘Dread’ you speak?”
Trent, ignoring the screaming outside, went forward, saying, “Its name.”
Amused, the fat nun quickly corrected him. “Dread? No. The saint will not dread it.”
Will not? Trent looked past the nun, to the priest. “It takes the sin out of the world.”
At this, a second nun joined the conversation. She was younger. Her vagina had been sewn shut, and probably her anus, too. She looked bloated and sick, as though she had been soiling the inside of herself for days.
“Takes sin out?” the sewn nun asked. She laughed. “Sin is in the blood. Have to get rid of the blood.”
The fat nun added, “Have to get rid of bloodline. Dread Clock isn’t sponge. Dread Clock is scalpel. Going to make worlds better.”
“Worlds?” Trent said.
“Where you think you are?” The fat nun wrinkled her brow. “What you think you are?”
“Good man?” the sewn nun said with a laugh. “Not if you here.”
“—Gorovash. St’ka gorovashaya. Halakos en carane. Nexgroda en nakt.” The eight nuns continued on.
“The Black Hour,” Trent said, the words having just come to him.
A sinking feeling in his stomach told him this wasn’t a dream, that wherever he was, he wasn’t supposed to be here.
So he asked, “Do you know what it is? Where it comes from?”
The fat nun and the sewn nun exchanged looks with one another. Together, they both shrugged and said, “A better place. Come closer.” They nodded at the priest. “See, before he sees you.”
A spasm of pain shot through the priest. He arched his back until it started to crack.
“Y’llorov. Y’llorov. Maya y’llorovaya.”
Splotches of blood spat onto the death mask. The priest’s robes rippled with movement from the unseen beasts moving beneath them. His broken feet curved inward, bending beyond their limits.
“Gorovash. Gorovash. St’ka gorovashaya.”
The priest bucked. His arms shot forward. The stone encased around his hands expanded and then eroded, until disproportionately large and shaped like pincers.
“Halakos en carane.”
The robes tightened across the priest’s body, until they were wrapped so tightly around him, they were him. The fabric hardened into a carapace, and became as black as the wild shadows whipping across the walls.
“Nexgroda en nakt.”
With a jerk, the priest was torn off the altar and left to levitate there in the middle of the air. The death mask, soaked with blood and wax, melted and bubbled over his face. Out of his chest, a second pair of smaller arms, like a child’s, tore through his new, dark skin. They clawed at the invisible strings that seemed to hold him, as though begging for release.
“Nexgoroda en nakt,” the nuns repeated. Then: “Ueun ex nakt.”
The priest’s spine jutted out of his back. From his tailbone, the bone bore through his flesh and unwound around him. Until, twice his size, the tail stopped growing and, at its tip, the bones there ballooned into the black swell of a stinger.
“How intimately we know one another now,” a voice whispered into Trent’s ear.
He tore himself away from the scene. Behind him, the Dread Clock’s Keeper floated. Trent looked back to the altar, but the priest was gone.
“Strange how they all end up here.”
The Keeper’s pincers grabbed Trent’s sides and lifted him off the ground. “You’ve given me almost everything. But to have everything.” The Keeper brought its stinger to Trent’s sweaty forehead. “I must give you something in return.”
The Keeper’s stinger stabbed through Trent’s skull, and then the convent went dark. Somewhere between a coma and consciousness, his mind struggled to find something to hold on to. Blind and numb, he turned to his memories to try and make sense of what was happening to him.
They were all there, every event and incident, like a string of pearls, stretching from his birth to what might have just been his death. He returned to the memory of the convent, and the Keeper plunging its black stinger into his gray matter. He knew this creature, and by the memories that came before it, he obviously knew it well. How did he forget? Did it make him? Or did he make himself?
Trent traveled backward along the string of experiences. Some didn’t make sense—being a slave master in the South, a soldier in World War II—while others were so disgusting and disturbing, the pearl was almost unreadable. But four things were consistent amongst them all: the Black Hour, the Dread Clock, its Keeper, and his eventual repulsion to them all. Coming here, to this convent—it hadn’t been a dream, and it hadn’t been to get better. The Keeper had brought him here, and Camilla. And if he was remembering this right, Gemma—oh Christ, oh god, Gemma—she was here, too.
If he wasn’t dead, then maybe he was dying. And if he was dying, then like the dying, he had an overwhelming need to undo all the terrible choices he had made not only in the last few days, but the last thirteen years. Whether or not he actually could didn’t really matter. As long as he could understand why he’d made them and what had led him and his wife to this depraved limbo, then perhaps, if he got free, he could make the right choice for once and save Gemma, wherever she may be.
He hurried through the string of memories. Birthday party after birthday party. Late night dinners, and the occasional funnel cake and festival. A vacation here,
domestic violence there. It pained him to realize it, but the further back in time he went, the worse things were between him and Camilla. Nowadays, divorce was always a looming threat, but back then, five, ten years ago, they didn’t even mention it. Because of Gemma, divorce wasn’t an option. So instead, night after night, when their daughter went to bed, they pummeled each other into teary submission. Mostly with words, but they had both exchanged their fair share of blows. The only bright spot in these old memories was Gemma, but even then, because of them, she didn’t burn as brightly as she could have. If anything, that was their ultimate sin.
Trent picked up the pace. He knew where he was going, but curiosity kept distracting him. There, he thought. Thirteen years back. That putrid pearl of a night where he confessed everything to Camilla and gave her nothing but grief afterward. Candice was there, that bloated, post-pregnancy whale, and so was Gemma, so tiny and pure. And he even remembered the speech he had prepared for his wife. Camilla, I have to tell you something, it started. I deserve every ounce of hate you have for me, it ended.
But on this part of the strand, something was wrong. Not that he was an expert on memories. He wasn’t an expert on anything, except being an expert at nothing. But yes, there was something wrong. The trivial corridors of time that connected each pearl of importance were frayed. And this thirteen-year-old catalyst? It was corroded. There was something in that moment, a kind of black mass that was slowly filling the pearl, turning whatever second, minute, or hour it touched into a lie.
Trent’s first mistake was coming to this memory, thinking he could learn anything from it. Trent’s second mistake was trying to fix it. His mind reached out for the recollection. As it did, the string that held the memories snapped, spilling the infected moment and millions of others across his mindscape.
