by Scott Hale
Coming out of the basement, from the doorway Dario initially met Jam at, they passed the apartment with the picture of the black Jesus who held blood drop-shaped faces in one hand, and maggots in the other. Seeing it again, Dario bit his lip so hard he took a chunk out of it. The writing had been on the walls. He just hadn’t yet learned the cryptic language of the cult.
He went up the stairwell as if he were going to the gallows. In his mind, he replayed his past and present crime of inaction. He couldn’t remember the names or the faces of the children he’d led to Darnell’s fists. And try as he might, he already felt Michael leaving him, like a sickness his body had decided it needed to be rid of. It was easier that way, to remember the remains than the thing to which they belonged. The more ambiguity, the hazier the recollections became.
He told his clients it wasn’t healthy to bury the guilt, the hurt, but there he was again, as he had been before, shovel in hand and a grave before him. All the old corpses were there, just as fresh they’d been the day he threw them in. Some, like Darnell, had clawed their way out, but he was still strong enough to put them back. The problem was the memory of Michael, and the event that had been his marriage. They wouldn’t budge. His mind was clinging to them. They refused to be cast like old stones into a well, to be forgotten until they were new again.
Then it came to him, from where he least it expected it.
Ruth Ashcroft, reaching the third floor, turned and asked, “What have you learned from hell?”
The immediate answer that came to mind was nothing, but that wasn’t true. At the risk of sounding like a suicidal teenager, hell had been his mentor his entire life. By its hammers and fires he had been molded and shaped. For years he had convinced himself that he wasn’t like a lot of the other social workers he met, but he was. For eight hours a day, he absorbed the agonies of others and used it as glue to seal the wounds in ways alcohol and pills hadn’t been able to. He was still cynical, and he was still naïve, and he wasn’t very popular, not with his wife or daughter or his so-called friends, because in all his helping years, the only person he was trying to do right by was himself, and he had been doing it in every wrong way.
Social work was the shell in which he hid. It had never been about the client, and because he told himself it was, it had never been about him, either. He had been spinning wheels, choking on the fumes. He usually made one grand show of things—hitting Ruth with the chair—and when it failed, as it inevitably did, he caved-in to what he figured was fate.
But not this time. Not anymore. He didn’t have enough fingers on his hands to count those he’d damned. Dario had a duty to protect, a duty to warn; a duty to do something other than let Michael’s tortured cries for his momma ring out through his head. The boy deserved better. They all did. And if Dario lost it all trying to get it for them, then he would lose it all.
He would trust in god now, like his grandmother had always told him to. The real god, the true god; not the Maggot that infested the Manor’s bowels, or the beasts Ruth warned of in the Membrane. If he had learned anything, it was that, through hell, he could finally find heaven.
Ruth led Dario into the third-floor hallway, where, once again, the floor was tiled and the walls wallpapered, and the chandeliers were transformed back into their gentler selves. Whispers fell in on them from every direction, as the curious undoubtedly tracked them behind their apartment doors and through their peepholes. He noted surprise in their voices, as if they couldn’t believe he was alive.
The chandelier that had gone out earlier flickered back on above 310. Dario wondered if Michael’s mother and siblings had just moved in there, and if they were reaping the spoils of their slaughter. It made him sick to his stomach, so into his shell of social work he retreated and acknowledged with monkish indifference the decision they’d made. A colony run by a monster did make of those who lived there monsters. Through therapy, he had connected with and even cared for criminals, whether they were murderers or sex offenders. At least when it came to the tenants of Brooksville Manor, he knew it wasn’t ghosts that haunted their skulls, but a demon possessing their bodies.
Ruth pushed open the door to her apartment. It was unlocked. Dario imagined it always was. The fruity rot of the old man, Herbert North, greeted them like the help. Ruth picked up the chair that Dario had used to try and beat her brains in, and Dario went and stood beside the table and his work bag next to it.
For a moment, his mind swam in the high-tide of déjà vu. He had been here before, not long before, but to say that everything was the same would ask of Dario to be that same scared, cowardly kid he had always been and just recently shed. His eye was swollen shut; his left arm was broken; his right shoulder was a bloody emblem of idiocy; he was dehydrated badly; and there, in his mind’s eye, the death of MichaelIndomitable looped, one cleaver cut at a time. It would be there forever. It shouldn’t be archived. He didn’t want it to be.
Dario cleared his throat, killed his thoughts, murdered his feelings, and with the cleanest of affections, said, “Hello, I’m Dario Onai from the Brooksville Community Health Center. You must be Ruth Ashcroft?”
Ruth nodded, apparently pleased that this was about to play out exactly as she wanted it to. “I am,” she said, in a proud English accent. “Thank you for coming to see me. I imagine it must have been hell getting here at this hour.”
He swallowed his revulsion. “Yes.”
She laid the hammer on the table in between them. It was a dare, a part of her violent dance. She’d spent so long in this depraved kingdom she seemed to relish opportunities such as these, where her rule could be challenged, and those that dared challenge her could be put down with ease.
“You may have heard this before,” Dario said, “but anything you tell me is confidential.”
“Unless I intend on harming myself, someone else, or if I know a child is being harmed.”
“Yes—” Momma, Momma, Michael cried out in Dario’s head, “—that’s correct.”
Ruth twisted a long strand of hair around her finger. “Where should I begin?”
“With the thing that has been bothering you the most,” Dario said—his swollen eye, broken elbow, and mauled shoulder singing in seething harmony. “Start with… where all this started.”
“I was born 1878.” She paused, as if waiting for his shock.
He gave her no response. After everything, she would have to do better than that.
“I was born in 1878 in a small village in England. My mother’s name was Amelia Ashcroft, and my brother’s name… Why aren’t you writing this all down?”
Dario swallowed blood, leaned over, took out her folder from his bag, and started documenting what she’d told him.
Frustrated, she carried on. “My brother’s name was Edmund Ashcroft.”
Edmund Ashcroft. E.A.973. Dario’s pen skipped across the page. Nine-hundred-and-seventy-three. What the hell did that mean?
“He and I have different fathers. I cannot remember their names, but they were abusive, to us and my mother. She killed them, my mother. Stabbed one, kicked the other down the stairs.”
“Was she arrested?”
“No, the Ashcroft family was once a powerful family, and it had many ties. Unbeknownst to my mother, the last surviving member of the Ashcroft family other than ourselves was keeping a close eye on us, keeping us the best that he could out of harm’s way. His name was Amon Ashcroft, and he was my great uncle.
“He wrote to my mother one day. They had once been close, almost inseparable, when she was a little girl, but then he disappeared. She had thought he was dead. In his letter, he begged her to return to the family estate, to allow him to make right everything that had gone wrong. Reluctantly, my mother agreed, and we then set out for the countryside.
“There was something very wrong with the land near the Ashcroft estate. Villages were abandoned, and a strange pestilence was rooted there. It took the form of vermillion-colored veins.”
Dario whisp
ered, “Like those coming out of E.A.973’s eyes?”
“The very same, actually. But all will be explained in due time.” Ruth exhaled slowly, smiled. “There was something wrong with the Ashcroft estate as well. The pestilence hadn’t spread there, but originated from that ruin. I said that the rest of the family had died out, and this is true. While my grandmother and grandfather, uncles and aunt had died due to natural causes, those that came before them perished for a more sinister cause. Sacrifice.”
Dario felt himself drifting into her orbit, the same as the poor and the destitute drifted into Brooksville Manor’s. He reached across the table, grabbing the bottle of water that was still there, and chugged it. She wanted him to fall under her spell. He couldn’t let that happen.
“The Ashcroft family, for as long as anyone could remember, had found fame and fortune in the forging of an unholy alliance with a creature that lived far below the estate, where, like here, the barrier between our world and the Membrane was weak. The price they paid for Its services was bodies. Children of the Ashcroft line had to be sacrificed to Its insatiable hunger. And they were. The women of the family were bred like cattle, so that those who had been given a pardon from the ceremony could live, while others, such as newborns with deformities, or children with little potential, could take their places.”
If Ruth Ashcroft had told him this earlier, when they had first met and she still went by Oblita Vesper, he would have immediately diagnosed her as psychotic, schizophrenic, or as having some other delusional disorder, possibly brought on by a medical condition. But he’d seen what lurked in the basement, what lurked beyond the walls of this reality, and he believed her completely. She had planned this perfectly. But why? Why did she give a shit about what he thought?
He engaged her to show that he listening: “Did Amon know?”
“Yes, that is why he called us back. The creature needed a new pawn, my mother. However, Amon had other plans. He had discovered a weapon in those years he was away, a weapon that could possibly destroy the monster. He thought my mother could get closer than It would allow him. He was a cowardly man, and my mother was the bravest woman I’ve ever known. When the creature’s minions stole my brother and I, she went into the bowels of the house and destroyed the creature. Or at least, she believed she had.
“When my mother returned from her ordeal, Amon was changed. The vermillion veins had consumed him. He became an agent of the creature, a harbinger. Or perhaps it was only a copy of Amon created by the beast. I never knew. The house released my brother and me, and with my mother, we were infected with the vermillion pestilence.
“My mother, brother, and I were recruited into the creature’s cause. We went with Amon from the estate to a neighboring village, Cairn, and there we set about spreading the pestilence, the influence, if you will, of the creature further. We did fairly well, until an investigator arrived to stop us.
“His name was Herbert North.”
Dario clenched his jaw. “The old man in your bathtub?”
“The very same.”
“But that was so long ago.”
“Yes, it was,” Ruth said, dreamily, “but we had attempted to convert him to the cause. In doing so, he was given an extended life, like me and my brother and mother, and Amon. He overcame the vermillion hunger, though, and killed my brother and my mother. We killed many people in Cairn, and I burned down the village before Amon and I slipped away. I thought the killing would make my grief go away, but it did not.”
Dario lurched forward; the pen twisted up in his hand before dropping onto the table. He closed his eye. In the noisy darkness of his lids, he saw the veins and amorphous shapes, and other things his optometrist told him not to worry about, and yet he did now more than ever, because what if they hadn’t always been there?
He had lost a lot of blood from where Ruth had taken a chunk out of his shoulder, and his body’s reserves were running on fumes. Feeling a pressure on that same shoulder, he opened his eye to find her wrapping a bandage around it. In front of him was a bag of ice. He had only closed his eye for a second, but it may as well have been an eternity.
“You are a tough man,” Ruth said, putting the finishing touches on the wrap. She picked up the bag of ice and pressed it to his swollen eye. “Hold it.”
Spitting, cringing, he managed to get his arm high enough to hold the ice there.
“There is something I have to tell you about the creature our family swore allegiance to. I can tell that you are a religious man. In the basement, I saw you mouthing prayers.”
Had he been? Dario drove the bag of ice harder against the throbbing swell of flesh.
“The creature wasn’t just some creature. The orifice in which you saw the Maggot belonged to It.”
“You said—” he coughed, “—the creature your family served was… in Europe.”
“It is. It is very large and Its domain occupies an even larger space inside the Membrane. It is no creature, though. It is much more than that, Dario Onai. It is God.”
He lowered the bag of ice, cheek twitching.
“Not a god, but the God.”
It took everything Dario had not to debate with her, but he managed to manage his words. He was a social worker. She was a client. It was not his place to challenge her, not yet.
“The Vermillion God, that is Its name. It had been lying dormant a very long time, until the Ashcroft family caused It to stir and gave It a reason to take an interest in our world. They did not know it was God, but Amon did, and so when Amon and I left Cairn, we left as missionaries, to bring the true God to those who had unknowingly placed their beliefs in false idols.
“For years we crossed the continents, breaking down the barrier between the Membrane and this world.”
“How does one… do that?”
“Religion reigns supreme in a world unshackled by science and technology. Amon and I tapped into the supernatural and gave rise to ‘monsters.’ We planted carnivorous trees, coaxed forth ghosts and phantasms. We unleashed beasts from the Membrane that the people had only read of in books, or heard of in tall tales. We gave life to every urban legend and horror story humans had ever told. In the deserts, we resurrected ghouls. In the mountains, we unleashed wendigos. We supplemented the rituals of Witches, and encouraged the efforts of spellweavers. But most importantly, we spread It where we went. The vermillion veins are Its veins—tangible proof of Its existence. In the soil we planted the veins, and in the minds of others, we planted Its word.”
Dario was starting to get his bearings again. “You brought monsters into the world. Are monsters not evil?”
“Are they?” Ruth asked him such a way that she seemed to really want to know. “Are they any different than any other species in an ecosystem? Do you think they think highly of us?”
“Good point,” he mumbled. “Releasing these monsters… it broke down the barrier between the natural and supernatural world?”
Cheerfully, she said, “It did. God is easier to accept when those supposedly ‘godless’ things—” she laughed, lost in a memory, “—are allowed to run free.”
“And you planted these vermillion veins…”
“To increase God’s influence. To show It how far It could go.”
“Did the people believe in what you were saying?”
“Some, but not all of them. This was the early 1900s. People were stubborn, and stupid, and devoted to the god which had a monopoly on the afterlife.”
“How do you know It’s God?”
“I’ve seen It. Have you seen your god?”
Dario didn’t respond.
“My God has a body and a will, and Its power can be felt and seen at all times. I do not need faith to know that which I can see with my eyes and hear with my ears.”
Dario changed the subject: “You and Amon went your separate ways.”
Ruth nodded, played with the hammer on the table. “We made our way to the United States and did what needed to be done. We visited a plantati
on in the South—Carpenter Plantation. It was owned and run by a man named Abel, and he was one of the most powerful families in the South at the time. Amon wanted to use Carpenter Plantation as a portal by which vermillion veins could be harvested and propagated.
“It did not go well.” Ruth picked up the hammer and squeezed its handle tightly. “Abel became obsessed with me. He tried to rape me, and when I told Amon he said I should have let it happen, I snapped. Amon and I beat each other to a bloody pulp that night. The next morning, Amon was gone, and I was left alone there. Abel had already started construction on the plantation to turn it into something else; a prison, I think, to keep me there forever.
“He thought I was a child, and because Amon had abandoned me, I did not know what to do. I had no one, and my only purpose in life was derived from his. But in my wanderings of the Membrane, I had discovered something, and with my hatred, I was given a purpose.”
Dario’s hand hurt badly from trying to keep up with everything Ruth was telling him. At first, he had been jotting it down for the sake of appeasing her, but now, he was invested, hanging on her every word as if they were the ledge from which he dangled about the claws of Death. If he escaped Brooksville Manor tonight, he would have to have something, anything, to explain what’d happened here.
“Alone, in a new country, with someone who didn’t respect you, and no family? That must have been so hard for you,” he said.
Ruth shook her head, and then admitted: “Yes, yes. But I knew what I had to do. There was a Witch. Her name was Pain, and pain was her game.” She snorted. “I summoned her to Carpenter Plantation, told her to go to town torturing the family, especially Abel. Before I left, I filled him with vermillion veins, to make sure he had a long and terrible life under Pain’s watch.”
“Revenge is important to you,” Dario said.
“Isn’t it to you?”
Dario could still hear Darnell laying into the children in the sewers, one wet, heavy punch at a time. He thought about the drunk driver who had killed his mother while she was crossing the street. He thought about his father, who he’d bumped into at the grocery store once, and who didn’t offer any apology for abandoning him and his mom before Dario was born. He thought about the boy who had groped his daughter in gym class, and how, despite all his fury, he had said nothing at all to the boy’s father, because the boy’s father was larger and meaner, and head of the PTA.
