by John Everson
“No,” I said finally, minutes later. “There is no God, but Transcendence is definitely from heaven.”
“You said sometimes souls here do die…or at least they fade away,” she said. “If they are not going to a heaven, where do they go?”
I stroked her cheek, and when my fingers pulled away, her skin was slick with blood. Hers, or mine, I wasn’t sure. But it had begun. When we touched, our hearts bled. The pain was soon to follow. And the flensing. I shivered.
“Perhaps they are recycled and reborn again to life,” I said. “That’s what the Buddhists would have you believe.”
“What do you believe?”
“I believe there is a time and a place for everything. And when yours is done, you should let it be done and stop holding on to past and memory. I think that those who disappear have finally stopped holding on to nothing.”
“Letting go,” she sighed.
I nodded.
“The shopkeeper told me to buy the Transcendence in small doses, because it is as vile when it corrupts as it is exquisite when it is fresh. Should I run downstairs and get some more, for both of us? He also said it gives you an awesome buzz if you have more than a shot or two.”
I laughed and said sure, I’d have more, if she was buying. Then I opened my wallet and gave her a slip of currency so that she could actually afford to buy some. Even in death, we continue to live by the false principle of valueless paper equaling valuable goods.
She slipped out the door and down the stairs, and I leaned back on the couch and felt my heart pound. What was I doing? Just days before I had scouted her out as a worthy meal, someone whose fear and flesh I could feed off of, for a while at least, until she either faded or flew. Now I was almost playing house with her, and surely about to indulge in the ultimate act of sacrifice—love kissing lust in a bloody twine of razor wire and delirium.
From outside the small room, a scream broke high above the din of traffic, and then another. Fear gripped my heart. I ran to the window, and saw the body lying just outside, in the middle of the street.
It was her.
I dashed out the door and into the night to save her. Once on the street, I saw her tormentor was still there, taunting her with unknown words, and thrashing her back and face with the lash of a long leather whip. Its end was threaded in wicked barbed hooks, and my love’s face was already all but torn away after what I supposed was only a handful of blows. The white of one of her eyes looked doubly large, as he’d ripped the eyelid off with his hooks.
But it was the sickle in his left hand that had truly done her in. He’d swiped a clean, deadly sweep right across the line of her knees, and the street was heavy with the pools and splatter of her blood. Her legs lay separate from the rest of her; they looked like gore-tipped prosthethics amid the crumpled newspapers and trash of the gutter.
“Serves you right ma,” the man laughed. “You should have known better! This is all your fault!”
He brought the cruel whip down on her again, this time it caught in the flesh of her side, and he yanked it back to open a three-inch rip in her white skin.
“You fucking bastard,” I screamed, and drew back a fist to deck him.
“Exactly,” he said with his last breath. When my fist made contact, it hit him so hard that he lifted from the ground and stumbled across the pavement to land in a motionless heap a few feet away. I hit him so hard that two of his teeth were left embedded in the flesh of my fingers. I flicked the teeth from the wound and knelt at her side.
She tried to speak as I leaned down to kiss the bloody mess of her mouth.
“Shhh,” I said. “Save your strength.”
“It was Jonas,” she said. Her voice gurgled with a gargle of blood. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I looked to where he had fallen, but there was nobody there. Had I punched him clear to oblivion?
“I’m sorry,” she hissed, between pants of pain.
“Don’t be. Consider this a payment to balance a nice afternoon.”
“What…will…happen to me?” she said. Already her jaw and cheeks were swelling thick, and I could barely understand her. “Will I…die? But I’m already…”
“Shh,” I said again. “You’ll heal. We can get us some more Transcendence in a few days and you’ll be right as rain again. Only…”
She screamed then, as the pain overcame her, and I looked hard at her, covered in her deathblood, the street slick with her stubbornness. At her legs, so lifeless and strange, as they lay disconnected from her body. A trail of tears bled through the ragged red gore of her flayed cheeks.
“…Only, maybe it’s time for you,” I concluded.
She grunted, a questioning sound.
“You’re fighting hard to stay here, in death. You have never learned when to let it all go,” I said. “You’ve told me how you stayed in a loveless marriage for 30 years. Of how you stayed in a thankless job that you hated, bullied by a sadistic boss for equally as long. You’ve cried over and over again of how you tried to bring your children closer, only to have them move farther away. Maybe it’s time for you to stop trying, to stop being so dogged.”
“But, I want to be with you,” she gurgled, dark blood spilling from the side of her lips. “I…I love you.”
“And you’ll pay for that for the rest of eternity if you stay here,” I said. Now I was crying, and red tears bled and ran down my face to fall and mix with the ruin of her soul. I kissed her, and the sensation was electric, amazing. When I pulled back, I could feel the skin of my face degrading, the pain spread like a sizzle of acid across my mouth and nose.
“Look at me,” I said, and she struggled to open her right eyelid fully. Her left was gone, but the skin around it had puffed and swelled. “Do you want to watch me decay every time you kiss me? Do you want to scream every time we make love? I don’t want that for you.”
She was crying harder now, and I knew it wasn’t from the pain. “Jonas’ father raped him, and he blames me,” she whimpered.
“Do you really want to wait around for April, to see what venom she’s held for you all these years?”
The blood seemed to have slowed its torrent from the stumps of her legs, and I knew what that meant. Soon, her ethereal body would begin to pull itself back together. She would heal, and in a couple days, be good as new, so that someone else could scalp her or rape her or beat her.
That’s what happened here. That’s what happens when you put the most stubborn, self-centered, maniacal souls together for eternity. Oh, there was beauty, sure. But the horror lurked so close. Too close.
“The secret of life, and death, is letting go,” I whispered, and with a finger, pressed her right eyelid closed. “Whatever happened to Jonas, it wasn’t your fault. Stop hanging on to the past. Open your arms, open your heart to whatever will come. Accept oblivion.”
She struggled a little, pressing to open her eye against my finger, but I held it closed, and with my other hand stilled her mouth.
“Don’t be afraid,” I whispered. She jerked as if in a seizure beneath me, but I held her firmly and in a moment, her breathing slowed. In another, it stopped.
Her face just…relaxed. Her whole body settled against the ground; you could feel the tenseness, the energy, the stubbornness that rooted her here, dissipate. When I took my hands from her, the skin of her face was already healed. The soft, tight lines of her cheekbones, and that thin, proud patrician nose were, again, perfect. She was beautiful in death after death. Stunning, actually.
And fading.
One moment, and the beauty of her quiet face wrenched at my heart, which screamed for me to call to her, to rouse her, to bring her back.
And the next, she was just…gone. All of her. Blood, legs, body—it was as if she had never been. Was the sky above us just a little brighter as she passed?
I cried so hard that soon my blood pooled in the street as much as hers had. I don’t know if I did the right thing to send her to…wherever she went.
A new life? Annihilation?
And what kind of coward was I, to push her away, when I had always been afraid to let go myself? Why else was I still here, living in an empty room, eating the pain of others, too afraid to live. All I did in death was hide.
Something clicked then, with that cold self-realization. After a century of denial, I decided to take my own advice and follow her. Still crying and shaking with the horrible, ever-tragic pain of love, I lay down in the street amid my bloody tears and closed my eyes.
A hypocrite no more, I took a deep breath and released it slowly, forever. Finally, letting go.
— | — | —
THE CHAR-LEE
1. A SACRIFICE AT DAWN
There’s no time like the early morning, just after dawn has slid its fingers under the sheets of night, but before the heat of the midsummer sun has really taken hold.
I was enjoying that perfect time, the dew still glinting diamond prisms off the grass on the side of the road, the birds still swooping the swaying emerald fields ahead, looking for the worm that hadn’t already fallen to breakfast for some earlier riser.
I ignored the gagging, grunting, animal sounds in the back seat and watched the road ahead. It demanded attention. There was more grass than pavement to it anymore, and at times, the broken asphalt seemed to disappear altogether. No tires had seen this pavement in many years.
We’d already been on the road an hour or more, creeping through the backside of the country towards the caverns of the hills. It was shaping to be a hot one. You could taste the threat of sizzle on the air, as well as the thick, cottony honey of clover. The white cones of it rose above the rough tufts of grass like the spume of the ocean, rolling up and over the gulley to froth onto the road. I breathed it in and sighed, savoring. It was going to be a good day, I thought.
Then I swerved to avoid a huge pit in the road, and lost the back tire in the hole. The car shuddered as if it been hit by a missile.
“Shit,” Rick swore in the back seat, and in a moment, that’s exactly what I smelled. That sweet morning air was suffused with the odor of sewer, and I looked over my shoulder to see Rick’s white hair dotted with crimson.
He gave me a lopsided grin and shrugged, holding up a gore-streaked bowie.
“Knife slipped.”
“Great,” I said, catching a glimpse of the girl’s glistening entrails that instantly ruined the peace of my morning before turning back to watch the road. “Where are we going to find us another sacrifice just standing there waiting to be picked up?”
I looked at him in the rear view mirror as he licked the blood from the razor-sharp edge of the knife and shrugged again. “Someone’ll turn up.”
“You’re disgusting,” I said.
“Just drive.”
We’d found our first “someone”—now dead on the back seat—on the side of the road a couple days before, just outside of Hillside. She’d been walking along, duffel on her back, long chestnut hair blowing in the breeze. When she heard the engine, she’d turned to stare at us in surprise, then put out a thumb and jumped up and down just a little bit. She had on a yellow tank top, and it bobbed with her in a soft swishing rhythm that I quite enjoyed.
“Thought hitching was illegal,” I said idly to Rick, who was riding shotgun.
“Lotta things was illegal,” he nodded, looking away. “Was… Pull over.”
I stopped the car just beyond where she stood, and watched as she jogged over. She was young, maybe 20. Her skin was brown as tobacco with no apparent lines, and I guessed she’d been a farm worker, outside under the sun all the time, before she’d taken to the road. In a place like Hillside, where the center of town held nothing but a granary, a small general store and a bar, you didn’t get brown by lying out in the sun. You worked for it, or you starved.
“Hi,” she said, when she leaned into the window on Rick’s side, her face flushed and dotted with freckles just a shade darker than her tan. “I’m Jackie. Mind giving me a lift?”
“Depends where you’re going,” I said. Rick didn’t say a thing, just looked her up and down with obvious intent.
“Anywhere that’s not here,” she said.
I nodded at the back seat.
“There’s room.”
Rick cocked his head to watch her as she opened the back door, and then turned to me, eyes glinting with fire and violence.
“She’ll do.”
Turned out, Jackie had been a farm girl, I’d pegged that right. She tossed her duffel in the seat ahead of her, slid herself across the worn vinyl and began to regale us with her life story before the door had fully slammed behind her. She’d milked and picked and tilled and loved a boy from down the acres before he’d taken up with a widow 10 years his senior on a bigger spread and damned if that didn’t set Jackie to the road once and for all to seek something just a little bigger than the hard grey earth of the back forty and eventual marriage to some other local mudfucker who could offer her a house of hens as well as cows.
We’d only been driving an hour when she asked to stop to take a whiz in the scrub at the side of the road. When she got back in the car, Rick was in the backseat waiting for her.
“I thought we should get to know each other a little better,” he explained.
She smiled, and put a long hand on the white stubble of his cheek.
“That’s sweet,” she said. “Did you know, you look just like one of those old movie guys? You know, the ones that were always in the action adventure flicks.”
“Did you know,” Rick asked, “that you talk a lot?”
She laughed, which really was a poor choice on her part, because that’s when Rick grabbed her by the hair, yanked her backwards and stuck his Bowie into her open mouth to slice off her tongue.
It didn’t really cut down on the noise level much for awhile. Though I couldn’t make out any words, I knew exactly what the high-pitched wails emanating from the back of the car meant.
Tongues bleed a lot, by the way. Every now and then, I felt a warm wet drop sponge down the back of my neck as I drove. She didn’t settle easily.
“You really fucked up the seats,” I said later, using an old shirt to try to sponge up the mess.
The girl was gagged and tied and lying on the side of the road by the car’s back tires. I’d had enough of her whimpering and had stopped the car to get out and take a breather. The sun was going down, and we were still in the middle of god-fuckin’-nowhere. The grey line of asphalt, broken by waist-high stands of grass and Queen Anne’s Lace, stretched out ahead as far as the eye could see. We’d only passed two towns in the past four hours, and both had been empty, doors flapping like lost laundry in the wind. I’d found a dusty bottle of whiskey in the broken down shop of one, and gotten Jackie to suck down half of it. I figured it would kill the pain and the germs at the same time.
“Had enough for one day?” I asked.
Rick nodded and moved to the trunk to get his gear. I followed, pulling out a beaten grey sleeping bag and a one-man pup tent.
We set up camp just off the road. I scouted around and found enough twigs and dead branches from a few small bushes to get a fire going for a couple hours, at least. There were still some cans of beans in the car, and I didn’t fancy eating them cold.
“I’ll take the girl for the night,” Rick announced, after polishing off a can on his own.
“Suit yourself,” I said. “But I’m guessing if she used to be a screamer, she ain’t anymore.”
He cuffed me in the shoulder and dragged the girl by one arm into his tent. She was beyond resistance by then. I stayed up a little longer, and looked out at the stars coming up over the prairie. Life’s in the journey, not the destination, they say. And this journey was one fuckin’ strange one.
Behind me, the whimpering started up afresh, and I smiled as I thought of the first time I’d met Rick.
2. A SACRIFICE AT DUSK
I was walking down by the Old Plank River after dark. A stupid thing to do, really,
but I had won my share of the county’s testosterone matches, and wasn’t worried about the neighborhood. There weren’t more than a few hundred left in Shawnee, and I’d bested my share of the musclebound. The moon was on the horizon, casting a low spotlight across the cattails on the shore, and the crickets creaked a racket like thunder on thorazine. High-pitched and loud.
But not as loud as the shriek I heard suddenly from a few yards away.
I didn’t run to the rescue. Nobody’s ever accused me of chivalry. But I was curious. I crouched lower to the ground and slipped through the brush towards the noise. The night had quieted with the force of the scream, and I stepped carefully, not wanting to crack a branch or lose my footing in a gopher hole.
When the waist-high grass disappeared, and I reached a stand of willow trees, I saw where the scream had come from.
White as a scraped oyster and laid out on the loam was a dying girl. She was pale but painted in fire, liquid pain drenching her in a shower of mortality. Her own. Her flesh wept with the tears of a thousand fickle knife-kisses, while between her naked legs a man thrust his own deceptive spear. He laughed with a welcoming grin as my face slipped free of the weeds.
“Welcome to paradise, my friend,” he said, never slowing his rhythm. Blood coursed down her ribs in spurts with his orgasm.
“She doesn’t have much gas left,” he announced. Then he groaned before pulling free and gestured with equanimity at her body.
“But she’s all yours if you want a piece.”
He stood, gore dripping down the hair of his chest like perspiration.
“I guarantee you, she’s worth the price of admission…which, in this case, was her life. And I already punched her ticket.”
He stepped back from the shuddering girl while his manhood mocked me with its nodding, knowing gaze there beneath the sardonic moon. I didn’t buy its tears as those of pity.
The girl locked eyes with me, a brief glint of hope in her tortured gaze. But I could see it was too late for her. In minutes she would be gone, regardless. I loosened my belt buckle, and nodded at the stranger grinning beside her.
