by Scott Hale
“You have one hour to eat the homunculus,” Mr. Haemo had told him. “If you can’t eat it, then swallow as much blood as you can. One hour, and you’re back to being you. After that, it’ll be up to your charming personality and your… ghoulish… good looks.”
There had been people outside when they first arrived in Brooksville, but not anymore. Impersonating Emvola gave him the kind of wide berth from others you couldn’t get short of being a cruise liner or a comet. He knew why, too. Those memories were fresh. They still had a temperature and smell to them. They were hot, and they smelled of sweat and rust. Emvola and the others, while the homunculus had been asleep, had snuck out of Brooksville Manor to terrorize the Corrupted living here. Not to send a warning or “balance the scales,” but because traveling with the homunculus had forced them to be civil. Six women, eight men, and five children were slaughtered, raped, and impregnated by the time they were able to scratch that “itch.”
“If the Maggot is down there, don’t go near it,” Mr. Haemo had told him. “Don’t go into the hole you saw in her memories. You won’t come out. And I won’t come save you.”
The ghoul didn’t want this. He didn’t want Emvola’s memories, or the ones he’d fashioned when he took on the fashion of others from his flesh projects. And what about his own memories? What good were they to him anymore when the ones he kept them for were an afterlife away? His wife was Ava; his daughters were Zoey and Faye. And he was… He couldn’t remember his name, anymore. He remembered being a banker, or a manager of a bank. He remembered Zoey was a C-section, and Faye came out so tangled up in her umbilical cord she might as well have been playing cat’s cradle with it. He remembered meeting Ava. They met their freshman year of college in the library. She’d ended up getting pregnant six months later. She had cussed him and his “no good, deadeye dick” out for two hours before laughing herself to tears. They were married for ten years before a Lillian put a bullet in her head.
“But if you can do this,” Mr. Haemo had said, “then I’ll teach you the secret histories of the body. It’s the best fresh start you’re going to get in this rancid world.”
But if he found the perfect life and possessed it, would he forget everything else? Just having Emvola’s corpse of consciousness lying beside his was spiritually and mentally nauseating. It made him want to vomit out both and be done with the experience. Yet, if he allowed everything to be scratched and scoured from his synapses, would it be worth it? What had he been doing this whole time? A family man convinces himself everything he does or will do will be for the sake of his family. But he has no family; just people he’s orphaned and invaded.
“You’ll have to hibernate, eventually,” Mr. Haemo had said, waving him off. “But you might just get to live just shy of forever. A new life and young wife every hundred years or so? You scallywag.”
The ghoul doesn’t want to live forever, but he doesn’t want to die. He is a ghoul, not a human—not even a Corrupted—but he knows he’s foolish to think he’s all that different from them. He just wants meaning. God was his meaning once. And maybe God still can be. But until then, his curse can be a gift. He could carry on a life nearing its end; bring happiness to those who aren’t ready for their loved ones to go. No one has to see him die. He could be the stalwart protector standing on the precipice of time; rotted, ragged, ravaged; a skin cloak like Mr. Haemo’s fastened around his neck; waiting for that preternatural pat on the back. And then, yes, then, and only then, can he let go and see Ava, Zoey, and Faye again. Finally, he’ll be able to look them in their beautiful eyes and tell them why he had been spared when they had not been.
Brooksville Manor creeps on him in the way most repulsive things do. He doesn’t see it until he can’t help but see it everywhere he looks. That is the boon of repulsive things. They do not belong, but the world compensates around them, so that they do. It is the only way to explain why they should exist at all.
The three-story, low-income housing complex used to tower over the Tri-County river, but ten years before God awoke, it collapsed upon itself. Whether the collapse was the result of an accident or malicious intentions, it was never substantiated; but Brooksville Manor was never rebuilt, and its debris had never been fished out of the river. They were simply left to drift into the distant sea.
Brooksville Manor was nothing. The only reason the ghoul knew to call it that was because he remembered it had been here once. Brooksville Manor was a blown-out piece of hill, like a bombed bunker, that had been walled off by row after row of barbed wire, broken glass, metal shards, and stacks of cars that burned infinitely with the same cold, black flames from Exuviae. There were bodies, too; hundreds of them, strung up in the air by silken threads connected to nothing but the wrinkles in the sky. Each of them had their eyes gouged and their bodies split, from their asses to their mouths.
Fifty feet out, the ghoul stops. He straightens the ram mask and slips into Emvola’s thoughts. He doesn’t know how important this homunculus is, but clearly it didn’t need much of a guard while Emvola and the other Night Terrors had been away. Brooksville Manor looks how a cataclysm might when preparing for the apocalypse. But there had to be a way in. And if there was, he already knew it.
Emvola’s memories drift like motes of dust across his mind. He reaches out to them. Lenticular imagery flash before his eyes. He sees a stack of cars braced by a vertical white van. Black flames immolate the mechanical pyre. Everything burns. Nothing melts. Emvola steps through the cold fire unscathed, and goes through the van, out onto the cars, to the second layer of this transplanted hell.
The ghoul goes around the outskirts of the Manor. He spies the vertical white van. Squeezing the handle of the halberd, he adjusts the ram mask and gets as close as he dares to the black flames. Here, unlike elsewhere, they’re not cold. They’re not anything.
He takes a deep breath and reaches out. The black tongues caress his hand. Expecting pain, he feels pain; and then, realizing it’s nothing, he feels nothing. This part of the fire is an illusion.
Climbing into the van, the ghoul snatches another memory from Emvola’s molting life. After the cars come the metal shards and the broken glass. Protruding from the earth and tightly packed, it’s impossible to step off the cars without impaling your foot or scrambling them into boney confetti. Yet, Emvola does just that. She drops from the cars and into the second layer. She steps from shard to shard, and each time, they disappear beneath her feet, as if they weren’t there at all.
The ghoul replays the memory over and over. When he’s comfortable enough to do anything but call it quits, he lowers himself from the wall of burning cars and plants one foot in the exact location Emvola had yesterday. The shards give to his weight. He can’t even feel them beneath him.
Reaching the end of Emvola’s memory loop and the beginning of the barbed wired third layer, the ghoul stops. The barbed wire walls are just that—walls of barbed wire—and stand at least ten feet tall. They are memorials to massacre. Their brutal, sharp points are bloodied knots upon which flesh, feathers, scales, and tissues are fixed.
Sensing movement across the wall, the ghoul looks to his left. There, he spies a lamb caught between the dense, cutting layers. Its fur drips pink with pigheaded pride. It does not whine as it works itself to the bone to get to the center. It is indifferent.
More movement. Spastic vibrations. The ghoul glances to his right. Farther down, an elderly Corrupted couple are caught in the barbed wire. Their emaciated bodies, soaked with blood, glow radiantly against the cool, uncaring steel. At first, the ghoul thinks they are trying to escape the wall’s clutches, but then sees they are merely trying to get farther in. They sound like they are praying. Epiphanies in evisceration.
Emvola’s memory glides over his consciousness, teasing him to take it. He does, and recoils as what he finds there. She doesn’t pass through the barbed wire as if it were an illusion or secret passage like he thought she might. Instead, she holds out her hands; and from one of the s
uspended corpses above, a silk rope drops from between its mutilated pelvis. She grips the rope, and the corpse reels her up, over the wall, where she drops and descends into the hollow of Brooksville Manor.
The ghoul goes back to the lamb. One little leg, sheered to steel, sticks out of the wall, dripping blood from its toes like a paintbrush.
The ghoul wonders about the elderly. They didn’t get much farther from when he last saw them. They’re dead in each other’s arms, except one appears to be holding the other back, as if they meant to be the first one through.
Sighing, shaking, the ghoul glances over his shoulder. He’s come this far. He can’t even say how far he’s come. But he’d like to know where he was going for once. So, he holds out his hands.
He counts ten corpses closest to him. One turns slowly towards him, its silken noose glittering around its mushy, bruised neck. A faint, green mist oozes out of its empty sockets and slacked jaw. It considers him intensely in a way only the blind could. Then, from its dry, yawning perineum, a silk rope unravels.
The ghoul steps back. The rope hits the top of the barbed wire wall and slides down it. He fixes the halberd underneath his arm, presses it against his body.
The hanging corpse gives the rope a tug.
The ghoul grabs the rope, holds it above his head.
The corpse begins to reel him in slowly, effortlessly.
The ghoul tucks in his legs to avoid having them catch on the wall, but the corpse is pulling him at an impossible angle, adjusting his trajectory, despite not moving from where he hangs.
Ten feet up, the ghoul clears the wall. The corpse lowers the rope. When he’s close enough to drop from it, he does. The ghoul falls four feet and hits the ground. The halberd slips out from underneath his arm. He scrambles to his feet, but the weapon is out of reach. It bounces along before falling into the Manor’s hollow.
The rope rises past the ghoul’s face. He looks up to see the corpse stuffing it back into the hole between its legs. The green mist rolls in reverse back into his eye sockets and mouth, and for now, it is dead again.
The ghoul approaches the hollow. He doesn’t know what to expect, because Emvola’s reconstructed mind has gone dormant. The stitching between his and hers is fraying. He can only remember what she remembered for him—fragments of fossils from a shape he doesn’t have the imagination to imagine.
“I’m almost out of time,” he says to himself, going to the lip of the hollow.
The last of Brooksville Manor is subterranean. Inside the hollow of the blown-out hill is a partially destroyed cement staircase. It plunges narrowly into the glistening dark beyond.
The ghoul puts one foot on the top of the stairs and stops. His stomach turns. He turns. He wants to run away, but he can’t remember the way. Beyond the corpse’s rope, the rest is a blur of nervous hesitations and anxious second guesses.
No different than anywhere else, at any other time, he thinks to himself.
And thinking that, he descends.
3
In the hazy depths of Brooksville Manor, the ghoul and the homunculus he’s come to consume are not alone.
As he moves down the crumbling stairs, he hears two voices below. One from the homunculus of Emvola’s memories. The other belongs to a woman with a strong speech impediment.
“Ou… y’ave et?” the woman struggles to say.
The ghoul leaps over four weak steps and catches himself against the wall. The cement and old pipe dig into his bones. He takes off the ram skull and holds it at his side, to see more clearly.
“Yes,” the homunculus says.
Their voices echo around the ghoul. It’s too dark to see where the homunculus and this woman are, but he’s certain they are near. He smells fire—real fire—and sees the glow of it just beyond where the stairs appear to stop.
“When will you use it?” the homunculus asks.
The ghoul creeps to the bottom of the stairs. He sees the halberd a few feet away, sidesteps towards it, and scoops it up. Donning the ram’s skull, he drifts in the dark towards the fiery glow—and the two figures huddled around it.
“N’yver. They w-will.”
“You have the Blood. What else do you need for your Communion?”
“The Body.”
The ghoul is dripping in sweat. The dark is sweltering. The shapes become more defined by the fire with every step he takes. He probes Emvola’s mind, but there is no reaction, no response.
“How will you find the child?”
“They w-will ‘ring him t’ me. They w-would give me all their c’ildren if they could. I will find him.”
He has seconds at best before this phantom mind becomes a phantom limb. What does he need to know? What will the homunculus ask him? Was there a passphrase? Was he, she, them even supposed to come back—
“Someone’s there,” the woman says. Her speech impediment is gone. “Someone’s in the dark.”
The homunculus clears his throat. The ball of fire he and the woman are beside lifts into the air, touches the earthen ceiling, and then explodes into hundreds of tinier, yet equally bright orbs. They rush across the ceiling in every direction, until the entire hollow is no longer completely dark, but instead, dimly lit with cloudy bulbs, like a Podunk bar on Christmas Eve.
The homunculus and the woman, once Lillian, now the White Worm, stand before him. Behind them, the massive, abscessed, maggot-wreathed hole from Emvola’s memory gapes. Between them, an old, dirty, metal hospital bed sits lopsided; butcher’s knives lay across it.
The White Worm looks no different than she did before. Her tunic and pants bear no stains or rips from the barrier above, as if she passed through it perfectly, or somehow avoided it entirely. The only thing different about her is the box in her hands. It’s constructed from a deep red wood; and the locks and hinges fixed to it are milky white. She holds this box so tightly that the flesh in her fingers and hands bunches up from the tension.
The homunculus cocks its head, concerned. Sexless, genderless, and without armor or weapons, the creature shouldn’t scare the ghoul as much as it does, but it does. It’s not the cracked marble eyes, or the bird-like features of its mouth. It’s not its slightly elongated arms, or its fingers that come to a point. It’s the complete and total control of itself and the environment around it. The surety in the way it carries itself. It is the way in which it resembles a flesh fiend in its purest, most undiluted form. It is the embodiment of violence and depravity, without any of the telltale signs. It is unpredictable.
“Emvola,” the homunculus says, sounding slightly relieved. “You’re alive.”
The White Worm disagrees. She unlocks the wooden box and opens it. Inside, sitting upon a cushion, is a silver, red-gemmed necklace covered in what appear to be worm-like adornments. She mumbles, “Guess you were good for something, Ruth,” and closes it.
The ghoul shuts his eyes. He invades Emvola’s mind with his own, but finds himself creating memories for her. Some slip through before he realizes, and now he can’t tell what’s real and what’s not.
“She’s not alive,” the White Worm says. “She and the others rushed off to Filipa’s house to kill some voyeurs. That’s not Emvola.”
The homunculus nods. It turns to the White Worm, bows, and says, “What will you call yourself?”
The White Worm taps her lips in contemplation and then: “Mother Abbess Priscilla.”
“And after that?”
Mother Abbess Priscilla laughs, gives the homunculus a weak shove, and walks into the hole. The maggots close around her, and when they disperse, she is gone.
The ghoul’s heart is beating so hard he’s certain the homunculus can hear it. He finds himself drifting towards his flesh closet, desperate to put on another suit. He stays his hand. He can do this. He’s so close. He’s seen enough of Emvola. He doesn’t need her to be her. The details differ, but most courses are always the same.
“What the hell was the point of watching her if she was going to come back
here, anyway?” the ghoul shouts, ramming the halberd’s end into the ground. That sounded like Emvola.
“She was supposed to come back with you,” the homunculus says. “Callie had orders to escort her back. Where is Callie?”
The ghoul stiffens. Tears fall from his eyes. Callie. The love he never loved and yet the love for which he would now kill himself.
The homunculus approaches. “I am sorry.” It holds out its hands for him to take. “I am sorry for all of your deaths. You should not have come back.”
The ghoul says through his teeth, “She died… because of you.”
“She died because of you. I asked you not to kill, and you were killed because of it.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? I’m standing right here before…”
The homunculus reaches the ghoul and takes the ram mask by its sides and lifts it off his head.
By the time the mask is gone, so is this grotesque glamour. Emvola’s flesh melts into his own and finds its place upon a rack in his mind.
“That is better,” the homunculus says. “It is nice to see the truth in a world of lies.”
The ghoul imagines stabbing the homunculus with the halberd. But he can’t bring himself to do it. Not yet.
“You are a ghoul.” The homunculus lays the ram skull at his feet. “You impersonated Emvola to reach this place. That is very clever. Was it to meet the White Worm?”
The ghoul shakes his head.
“Was it to see heaven?”
The ghoul is confused.
“Heaven.” The homunculus points to the maggot hole behind him. “Well, it was a way into heaven. The Vermillion God is gone, and so the way to It is shut for now. Yet, people and things are drawn to this place. I am sure you have seen them caught in the barricades outside. What is a place that once was heaven and is no more if not hell? It is important they do not reach this place until the maggots have finished cleaning the wound.”
