by Scott Hale
Dario turned around. There was E.A.973, stroking the vermillion veins growing out of his eye sockets. And there was Oblita… no, Ruth Ashcroft, smiling and nodding and pleased with herself. Past her was a gurney with restraints hanging off it. And farther back still, framed in orbs of nightmarish green light, the wall gave way to a scaled orifice inside which something white stirred.
Ruth asked him, “Can you guess what my favorite thing about humans is?”
Dario didn’t respond. The orifice trembled with life. The white thing creeping inside it moved towards the exit of that weeping portal.
“How easy it is to make them believe something is a god.”
“That’s… not… god,” Dario said, backing away, towards Ruth and E.A.973.
“No, it is not,” Ruth whispered, as if she didn’t want the tenants above to hear. “But when it is grown, it shall do godly things.”
Doors slammed open behind Dario. He turned around and in came Jam, the man he’d seen coming up from the basement earlier, with someone slung over his shoulder. His pristine, white tank top had a single stripe of a blood and vomit sludge mixture running down the front of it. The person over his shoulder was flailing, screaming high, pathetic, pre-pubescent pleas for help.
E.A.973 grabbed Dario by the back of his shirt, but he had no intention of intervening. He wanted to. He told himself he should. But then there they were again—Darnell, Mark, and Brad—taking center stage for the longest-running play his mind had ever known. They had another kid this time, a little boy, and his blood was on all their knuckles. Dario did nothing then.
And he did nothing now, not even as Jam walked past him, and he saw who was slung over the man’s shoulders.
Michael. It was Michael, the ten-year-old from the stairs who looked older than he was, and who asked if Dario liked to play video games. MichaelIndomitable. The kid who was so hard he could have sunk the Titanic. Now he was bawling his eyes out, kicking his legs up and down, bashing Jam’s chest to no avail.
“Help! Help! Help!” He outstretched his hands and clawed at the air, for Dario. “Help me!”
Dario jerked away from E.A.973’s grasp. He made it two steps before the creature had a fistful of his hair. It yanked him backwards, kicked his legs out from under him, so that his knees slammed into the cement ground.
“They’re going to kill me!” Michael cried. “They’re going to—”
Jam spun Michael’s body around and threw him onto the gurney. The boy exploded upwards, trying to get free, but with the restraints, Jam was faster. Arm by arm, foot by foot, the man, silent but for his heavy breathing, tied Michael down. He had done it so quickly, so effortlessly, that this couldn’t have been the first time.
Michael heaved and twisted on the gurney. The brake-lock wheels that kept it in place kept coming off the ground, but never enough to tip it over.
“Momma!” he cried to the tenants watching the scene from above. “Momma, please! Momma!”
Jam walked up to E.A.973, not acknowledging Dario at all.
“What the fuck are you doing? He’s a kid!” Dario tried to throw himself at Jam, but E.A.973 had grabbed a fresh batch of hair. To Ruth, he yelled, “Don’t do this!”
Jam cupped his hands together and held them outwards.
E.A.973 removed the butcher knife from its belt, made a symbol in the air with it, as if blessing the man, and then placed the weapon across Jam’s palms.
“Momma. Momma. Momma.” Michael went on, his voice hoarse, his mouth full of spit.
Above, the tenants shuffled and whispered amongst themselves. There was clapping, too; praise.
“Your mother has five other children, Michael,” Ruth said, never taking her eyes off Dario. “If you weren’t a mistake, then why are you here?”
“Momma. Momma. Momma.”
Jam took the butcher knife with both his hands, turned, and slowly started walking towards the gurney.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Dario said.
He groaned as E.A.973 lifted him by his hair to his feet and then held him there, its boney arm once again pressed to his neck.
“Momma. Momma.”
More clapping from the onlookers. Somewhere in the nosebleeds, the sound of a door shutting. Michael’s mother, maybe, no longer able to witness what she’d wrought.
“Don’t do this,” Dario said.
Jam stopped at the end of the gurney and turned to Ruth Ashcroft.
“Momma. Momma.”
Dario closed his eyes—there was Darnell, waiting for him; always waiting for him—and then he opened them.
“Momma.”
Jam took one hand off the butcher knife and used it to grip the side of the gurney.
“Momma.”
He raised the butcher knife above his head.
“Momma.”
And drove it into Michael’s leg.
The ten-year-old let out a blood-curdling scream.
Faster and faster, Jam hacked Michael’s leg, chopping through meat and bone, until the cleaver clinked against the metal surface of the gurney.
“Mom… M—”
Blood poured off the gurney, splashed against the ground.
Dario mumbled a weak, “Stop it,” but there was no stopping it now. This was ritual. This was routine.
Jam crossed in front of the gurney, to the other side of Michael. He sliced into Michael’s left leg. With each cut he made, he dragged the butcher knife out of the wound, so that it caught on stray muscles and tendons. Once again, after a few seconds, the cleaver hit the top of the gurney, and so it was time for Jam to move on.
Michael had stopped speaking. Dario hoped that he was dead.
Jam went to Michael’s left arm, lifted it, and started chopping through the bicep. The boy was skinny. His bones like a dead tree branch. With the final swing, his arm came away raggedly from its spewing stump. Jam dropped the severed appendage beside the boy’s head, and then walked behind him, to the other side of the gurney.
“Stop,” Dario said, to anyone who might be listening. “Stop.”
The front of Jam was completely doused in blood. His hands were slick. He could barely hold the butcher knife. He grabbed Michael’s right arm, paused for a moment, and looked at Dario.
“Don’t,” Dario said, feeling the faintest hope. “You don’t have to—”
Jam jerked Michael’s arm, bringing the boy’s blood-gushing torso closer to him. In one strike, he separated his right arm from his body and dropped it on his chest.
“Momma.”
Shocked, Dario’s swollen eye almost opened in surprise. How the hell? How the fuck? He couldn’t still be alive.
Jam went to the top of the gurney and took Michael by the hair. He reared his arm back and aimed it for the boy’s glistening neck.
Dario closed his eye to escape what was to come, but the sounds found him all the same. The sudden, thick chords of nauseating noise: the wet splash of gore; the hollow echoes of blood drizzling on steel. He could hear bones being uprooted from their soil. Michael continued to beg for his momma, even though he couldn’t.
This was hell. He was in hell, and Dario knew exactly what he had done to deserve this. When he was thirteen, a twenty-year-old from his building, Darnell, hung out with the two high schoolers, Mark and Brad, he dealt drugs to. One day, on Dario’s way home from school, he caught Brad giving Darnell a blow job by the dumpster near the back door to the building’s basement. When Dario tried to sneak away, he ran into Mark, who had a condom wrapper in one hand and a woman’s purse in the other. Both of them owed Darnell money. Sex was the only payment outside of cash the drug dealer had been willing to accept.
Dario opened his eyes. Jam was finished. Michael’s arms, legs, and head had been cut from his body. The blood pouring off the gurney was slowing down to a steady trickle. Jam, looking weak, looking as if he finally realized what he had done, started towards E.A.973.
After they caught Dario, Darnell, Mark, and Brad didn’t lay a hand on him. Darnel
l knew Dario—they’d both lived in the building for as long as the other could remember—and knew how much his grandmother meant to him. Darnell called him a faggot and had Mark spit what was left of him in Dario’s face. They weren’t going to hurt him. They were going to give him a choice.
Jam stopped beside Dario. His eyes were cold, empty. The tenants above were beginning to disperse. The show was over. What was done was done, and with it done, Jam gave E.A.973 back its butcher knife.
Randomly, Darnell and his gang would jump Dario, be it before school, after school, or somewhere in the community on the weekends. They reminded him he was a faggot, a coward, and useless. They threatened to beat his grandmother, rape his mother. But if he chose someone else to take the beating, then they would be spared. He could’ve chosen himself, of course, but he never did. Instead, he chose kids at school, the ones who picked on him, the ones he hated. It seemed fair. It wasn’t at all.
E.A.973 finally let go of Dario and pushed him away. Ruth Ashcroft closed in on him, her trusty hammer poised to strike, and said, “We are almost finished here.”
Jam’s arms dropped to his side defeatedly. E.A.973 pulled back its arm and swung the butcher knife into Jam’s head, cracking open his skull. It dragged the blade out slowly, the same way Jam had done to Michael, and went at him again and again, sending pieces of flesh and bone fragments across the basement, until Jam collapsed, dead.
E.A.973 knelt down beside the corpse and started hacking it to pieces. Not just the limbs, but fingers and toes; the creature cut off every feature of Jam’s pain-wracked, death-paralyzed face. And with a handful of nose, eyeballs, lips, ears, and a tongue, it threw them onto the gurney.
Darnell’s punishment went on for months. Dario would choose a kid from his school, and Darnell, Mark, and Brad would stalk them. Dario would have to follow. They never raped anyone he chose, and he only chose boys, because he was afraid they would. Instead, they stole whatever belongings they had and, in the sewer tunnels that let out into the local creeks of Brooksville, beat the kids into unconsciousness. Dario saw it all from the shadows. Every awful thing he let happen to others, because he couldn’t face having it happen to himself. He was helpless, and made others helpless with his helplessness.
With Jam in a pile of stinking, steaming bits, E.A.973 scooped up the remains into its arms, and what it couldn’t carry, the vermillion veins curled around and held, like tentacles. In one trip, it hauled all of what had been a man to the gurney and deposited the two-hundred-pounds of gore, burying Michael beneath it, as if he wasn’t even there.
Ruth Ashcroft said, “Thank you, Edmund,” to E.A.973 and left Dario’s side for the gurney.
By the third month of Darnell’s punishment, Dario was having such bad anxiety that his mother took him to a therapist. His grades had begun to drop, as well. There were rumors at school he was somehow connected to the bullies who were beating up the kids across Brooksville. Mark and Brad had started to stare at him in ways that turned his stomach, and Darnell kept making him drink the swill at the bottom of his beer bottles. It tasted differently every time.
Ruth undid the brakes on the gurney, stood up, and started pushing it towards the large orifice. The wheels let out a piercing screech, despite the blood that oiled them. The closer she drew to the orifice, the more excited the white thing inside it became.
Dario often thought of killing Darnell, Mark, and Brad. One day, he stole a butcher knife from his mother’s kitchen and put it in his backpack. He had convinced himself it was the right thing to do, and no one would miss people like them.
Ruth slowed the gurney to a stop inches away from the orifice. With a grunt, she lifted her end up. The pile of Michael’s and Jam’s remains came together in a foul avalanche of gore and slid down the gurney, off it, and into the disgusting hole in which the white thing thrived.
For once, Dario had gone out looking for Darnell, Mark, and Brad. He checked the building and all the places where Darnell was known to deal drugs. He checked the clothing stores and gas stations where Mark and Brad were often seen. But he couldn’t find them, nor could he find anyone who had any idea of where they had gone.
Once the last of the limbs finished rolling off the gurney, Ruth quickly dropped it and backed away from the orifice.
All of the tenants were gone, now. It was just Dario, E.A.973, and Ruth.
“See,” E.A.973 told Dario.
A day later, Dario discovered Darnell had been busted for drug dealing. Mark and Brad had ratted him out, after having been caught by the police with heroin on them.
Mark and Brad did some time, and Dario never saw them again; at least, never face-to-face. Years later, Facebook suggested Dario friend them, on account of having grown up in the same neighborhood and having gone to the same school.
Dario did run into Darnell once. It had been at baseball game in Bitter Springs. He had been wearing a nice suit, and spent most of the game yelling at his girlfriend, whose name he kept mixing up with someone else’s. When Dario, who had been desperately trying to avoid him the entire time, ended up running into him in the parking lot, Darnell looked at him as if he had never seen him before in his entire life.
Darnell, Mark, and Brad had never been punished for what they had done.
And Dario, who had never told anyone about his involvement in the beatings, hadn’t either.
The white thing inside the orifice was larger than Dario realized. Distance had disguised its length and throbbing girth. It crawled forward, its upper half going first, its lower half following close behind. It navigated the insides of the massive orifice that checked the basement with a fierce intensity, the same way a leashed dog would drag its owner towards a cornered animal.
When it reached the edge of the orifice, the creature reared back, and Dario saw in full its grotesque glory. It was the length and width of a pick-up truck, with two brown chevrons and two black pincers as its defining facial feature. There were smaller, darker markings that ran up and down both sides of the beast; the markings and the coloration came together in a deep black patch at the thing’s tail-end. At first, Dario thought it was a worm, but it wasn’t a worm at all.
It was a maggot.
The Maggot jammed its face into the gory remains and began gulping down the skin and organs. When it came to liquids, the overgrown grub absorbed them directly through its piss-colored outer-layer. Like a chameleon, it took on the color of carnage, and then the blood receded into the thing’s starving depths.
“What do you think?” Ruth asked.
Dario didn’t respond.
E.A.973 turned away and walked off into the shadows.
“You must have a lot of questions,” she persisted.
Dario didn’t. He really didn’t. Over the course of two hours, everything he had ever known or thought he knew about the world and the people who inhabited it had been destroyed, and then desecrated. In the back of his mind, he knew he had a date to keep, but his dates had no need to keep him now. When a social worker didn’t take care of themselves, or took too much of others and their problems in, they often suffered burn-out. Dario was beyond that now. Ruth had scorched his reason, his sanity; she had incinerated his soul.
The Maggot, having finished its meal, glanced up from the orifice and into the basement. Though it could not express any emotions, Dario recognized that absent look. The creature was hungry. It wanted another meal.
But as it lurched forward to claim the fresh meat before it, the orifice faded into non-existence. Like a hologram giving out to electrical failure, the wretched window went fuzzy, out of focus. And then, as if it had never been there at all, it was gone, replaced by a bland, water-stained cement wall.
It didn’t stop there. The grand, slanted ceiling had vanished as well. The operating theater closed down in a matter of seconds, and whereas before Dario couldn’t see the top of the basement, he could now nearly touch it if he stood on the tips of his toes.
Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that
the basement had shrunk, too, in width and length. There were more washers and dryers, and a clothesline with drying clothes hanging from it. More piping, too, and the catchy chorus of a pop song coming in from underneath the metal door that led into the place.
Dario gasped and gave everything he had to keep from fainting. The Maggot was gone. The Membrane was gone. He had seen what Ruth Ashcroft had wanted him to see, and he had heard what she had wanted him to hear. It was over.
Ruth pocketed the hammer into her jeans. She shrugged, smiled, and said with her arms outstretched, “Well, are you ready?”
The question drove tears out of Dario’s eyes. “What?”
“To get started.”
He closed his eye, shook his head.
“I’m ready to talk now.”
He shook his head harder.
“Isn’t that why you came here? To get to know me? To help me?”
Dario swallowed hard; his jaw was quivering so badly it made his teeth hurt.
“Let’s give the session another go.”
Dario opened his eye, and saw from the way she flirted with the head of the hammer he had no choice in the matter. “Why?” he said with a rasp.
“Why do you do what you do at all? Can’t everyone change if given a chance?”
“I don’t… have a choice… in this,” Dario said.
“You do, and you did,” Ruth said, extending her hand to him. “You chose to do nothing. Doing a little more nothing isn’t going to kill you. It’s the opposite you have to worry about.”
Hand-in-hand, Ruth led Dario through Brooksville Manor like a mother would an overwhelmed child their first time at the mall. As it had in the basement, the Membrane had vanished, leaving no trace of its otherworldly presence or the putrescent, bio-organic material of which it was comprised. Everything was exactly as it had been a few hours ago, except it all carried a different meaning, a different tone. He was losing his mind—that much he could be certain of—but the place seemed changed, or at least, revealed. It had the atmosphere of a building locked-up for the evening; too quiet, too stagnant; where anything could lurk around any corner; and the things that had been hidden in the light gave themselves over to the trusted embrace of the dark.
