by A. L. Mengel
“Yes.” The man remained focused on the book.
“Sir?”
“You were.”
“Were what?”
He looked up and looked at Douglas. “Following someone. I sent him for you.”
“You sent him for me?”
The man shook his head and returned to his work. “He first appeared to you in a dream, am I correct? And then he saw you on the street above? Yes?”
Douglas nodded.
“I have someone coming for you, Mr. Douglas. Please have some patience. Things don’t move as hurriedly down here. Just have a seat at one of the dining tables and we will be with you shortly.”
“Okay.”
Douglas sat down and looked around the room. Yes, just like he thought, it was a dining hall of sorts. Long, rectangular wooden tables with plan wooden chairs and benches, and a crest shield hanging on the wall.
*~*~*
Too much was happening, too fast and too soon.
As Darius boarded the giant 777 at Frankfurt airport he felt tired. No, in fact he felt exhausted. His muscles and bones ached. There were bags under his eyes, and every step that he took down the expansive blue carpeted jet way seemed to take every effort that he possibly could. All he wanted to do was collapse in his First-Class seat, and fall fast asleep for the nine hour flight to New York.
Handing his ticket to the smiling young flight attendant whose gleaming teeth seemed to reflect the setting sun back in his face, he noticed something. He noticed his hand. It wasn’t on purpose. The spots jumped out at him in the sunlight. His hand was covered in light brown age spots, and the skin was more wrinkled than it had been when he arrived just two nights prior.
He was aging faster than he had thought he would.
He let out a sigh, and stepped inside the cabin of the plane and sought out his seat. After stowing his bags, he plopped down in his seat and declined a pre-departure beverage. He was simply too exhausted. He very quickly settled into his seat, grabbed the complimentary pillow and blanket from the seat pocket in front of him (behind the copy of the free in-flight magazine) and promptly fell into a deep sleep.
*~*~*
Ned opened the door to the East viewing room with a slight click of the brass handle. He turned around and faced the wall to the left of the door and raised the lights. “There he is.” He gestured over to a closed silver coffin at the opposite end of the room. The scent of the flowers surrounding the casket was overpowering.
Delia walked into the room in silence. She stopped after taking a few steps and looked up at Ned. “Thank you. May I?”
“Just a moment.” Ned shuffled over towards the casket and unlocked the lid with a click. He propped it open, and there was Stephen, lying deep in light blue satin.
She stood at the edge, next to the kneeler, and looked down on the body. Ned stood behind her looking on. She looked up at him after a few moments, as if reading his mind.
“Oh, he was acquainted with a mutual friend of mine.”
“I see. And can you explain a little more about The Inspiriti?”
“We are an organization that prevents deaths like this one here.”
“I see,” Ned said, straightening some small, wooden folding chairs which were placed in neat rows facing the coffin. “And are you affiliated with a government organization of some kind?”
She sat on one of the folding chairs in the front row, and looked on at the casket. “No, no…nothing like that.”
Ned looked over at her again, as he continued straightening chairs. “The church?”
“Not the church, no, not them either.”
Ned paused.
He walked over to where Delia was sitting, knelt down in front of her, and looked her in the eyes. “Then who then? Who do you work for?”
She looked up at him with wide eyes. “I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry for wasting your time, Mr. McCracken.”
She got up and walked out of the viewing room as fast as she could, despite her age, and Ned simply stood, standing next to the casket as he watched her leave. He knew that family and friends would be coming out of the woodwork and wanting to see the body, but this women was the most peculiar.
She never gave him her name, which he thought was quite odd, but then he was far too busy to even ask for it. He cursed himself for being so lazy with protocol, but, at this point, it was too late. He had heard the front door slam and she was gone.
As he closed the coffin lid and locked it, he started entertaining thoughts of a conspiracy.
And he hoped that he had made the right decision in letting the woman view the body.
*~*~*
There was a light rain falling in the courtyard outside Promenade One in Coral Gables the afternoon that Darius visited his psychiatrist.
“Dogs,” Darius said, rubbing the hair that grew below his chin, his face in a scowl of frowning lines cascading down from his mouth, and he drew the smoking cigarette to his lips, drawing in deeply, the burning tip burning brighter as the smoke entered his lungs.
“Why do you smoke?” Claire asked, sitting back further into the large brown leather chair, pausing for a moment to jot a note down on the yellow legal pad that was resting on her lap.
Darius blew out the smoke. “I am dying anyway. I am dying, and I am dying quickly.”
“How can you be so sure?” she asked. He turned to face her. “Look at my face!” he said, his eyes growing wide, accentuating the liver spots and developing lines. He returned to the window. “There go the dogs,” he said. “There they are…I have been coming here for several weeks now, and I see them every day. So many dogs.” He drew on his cigarette again. Claire rose from her chair, setting her legal pad down on a large glass coffee table.
“Show me,” she said, coming to the window.
And there they were. Dogs running below in a courtyard of concrete and bricks. The dogs darted through a maze of concrete planters filled with colorful flowers. “Oh, they are always there,” she said, brushing it off, making to return to her chair.
But Darius stopped her, grabbing her arm. “They are always there?’
“Yes,” she said. “There is a woman who walks dogs by the corner. She owns a small pet grooming shop on 10th and Ponce, and she is out there every day with a whole gaggle of dogs. Does it mean something?”
Darius paused for a moment, and searched for an ashtray to extinguish his smoked cigarette butt. Claire held up a small smoked glass one, and he put it out. “I have seen those dogs every time that I have walked in here,” he said. “Every time that I have sat in here, spilling my guts to you. I would stand here, just as I did today, and watch the dogs dart across the courtyard.”
“Yes?”
“But then today, I stopped and remembered.”
Claire set the ashtray down quickly and quietly, grabbing her legal pad, sensing that Darius was finally remembering something. “Go on,” she said, sitting earnestly in her chair, legs crossed, ready to take notes.
And, once Darius started to tell Claire what he could remember, the thunder clapped outside, and the skies opened up, and it started to rain. It came down in buckets and sheets, and there was very little to see each time that Darius would return to the window. Each time that he returned to the window, he lit another cigarette, and when he ran out of matches, hours later, Claire searched through her designer purse for a book of matches or a lighter to keep Darius there speaking as his story was too interesting to let him go.
“I didn’t really understand myself for a long time,” Darius said, exhaling and sitting down in a small chair that was near the window. “I hardly remember being mortal, and here I am, and I find myself mortal again. But the dogs reminded me of the dogs that I grew up with, the ones that were running through my house as a child.”
“But you were not really a child, were you?”
“No I was not. I was already a man.” Darius leaned over and peered at Claire’s notes. “Didn’t we cover this a few minutes ago, dearie?
”
Claire smiled and let out a small, nervous laugh. “Yes, yes we did. I just wanted to clarify.”
“When I look back, I see how much of a child I was. But I was a man. A young, and very naïve man.”
Darius closed his eyes and remembered a morning so long ago. He remembered waking up in the morning to the sounds of a fire crackling in the main room, the rich smell of smoke coming through signaling that his mother was preparing breakfast. He remembers getting out of bed slowly and lazily, drawing his arms up over his head to yawn and stretch, and then hearing a knock on the door.
And the door wasn’t immediately answered.
He tiptoed to his door, keeping quiet as he did not know what was happening, and he stopped and shuddered as the impatient knocking turned to three deep thuds against the door. He cracked the door just a hair, just enough so he could cover his eyes from the light of his bedroom and see out into the hallway and peek, open just enough so he could run and hide back under safety of the covers if someone were to come towards his room.
There were three thuds again, and the cracking sound of wood splintering as whoever was calling entered.
Darius leapt backwards, stunned at the intrusion. He stood still and silent, hardly containing each breath, listening intently to the front room.
And then there were muffled voices. There was no struggle, only voices that were muffled, low, and not raised at all.
But he got back in his bed.
He crawled under the covers, drawing them up over him like a cocoon, and waited silently. He never heard a struggle, but he heard footsteps on the wooden floor heading towards his bedroom. His breathing became shallow, harder to contain, but he managed to stay silent, holding himself still as a stone statue waiting for this moment to pass.
And then his door opened with a small, drawn out creaking. He dared not move.
The footsteps were slow and heavy on the floor of his room, and they came to rest next to his bed. Darius laid still as the covers were pulled from him, drying his sweat and bringing the slight chill of the room air, lying face down into the pillow, not even moving as his cotton pants were pulled down roughly, down past his knees, leaving him naked and exposed.
He heard the intruders clothes drop to the floor, and he didn’t resist when he felt the heat of a muscular body hovering above his back.
Oh Tramos. Oh my demon.
“How old were you when that first happened?” Claire asked, making herself a cup of tea. She returned from the other side of the room with a bottled beer for Darius. He took it from her gratefully, took a long swig, swallowed, and cleared his throat. “Twenty-three,” he said, reaching for another cigarette.
“Did you ever see who this intruder was?”
“Not once. He always assaulted me while I was in a dream-like state. In a period where I could not tell what had been reality and what was a dream. He had this power over me – this power that made me feel like a small, scared child again. When I heard the footsteps, I would always freeze and turn back into a little boy. There was nothing I could do.”
“But you would just lie there?”
“Yes, I was powerless.”
Claire set her tea down on the table, letting it steep for a few minutes longer.
“But I don’t understand,” she said. “You were being attacked. Weren’t you in pain?”
“Initially, yes. The pain was so exquisite. It was so dominating. But that was part of his power. At first I thought that someone in town was taking advantage of my youth and virility, but eventually, I started to see what was happening.”
“How could you think that? That it was a human?”
“I didn’t know what to think at first. I felt like I was swimming in a drug. In a sea full of bodies. Walking through a field of skulls.”
“And he sent you these visions?”
Darius stopped drinking his beer for a moment. He thought back to the sea of souls. The altar. The ashes.
Ashes.
That was the answer.
He had to get to Antoine’s ashes.
“And what was that, Darius?”
“He wasn’t human.”
Claire dropped her tea and it spilled on the floor. Darius finished his beer, chucking the bottle in the wastebasket across the room, hearing it clank against several other bottles that he had drank in the hours previous. Claire began to clean up the mess of her tea. “Okay,” she said. “At what point did you discover this?”
Darius returned to the sofa from where he had been standing by the window and sat down on an expansive brown leather sofa. He folded his arms. “He came into my bedroom time and time again. The first time was the first time of many…”
“And you weren’t injured?”
“No I was not. He took me to realms of euphoria that I never had known before.”
And then Darius sat, deep down in the sinking sofa cushions, slinking down deeper and lower until his head was below the back of the couch. His long blond hair was mussed from running his hands through it many times, and from many times, while he was talking to Claire, from when he had opened the window and felt the soft, warm falling rain with his hands, and letting the water drip from his hands down onto his head.
And then he closed his eyes, and he saw Tramos.
He saw the demon who he had seen so many times before, he saw who he met with so many times when he was a young man in his mortal life, and the saw the same Tramos who took him and ushered him into a life of damnation, and the same Tramos who became his quick adversary.
The assault replayed over and over in his mind, even as he heard the door close and the demon left.
The attacks continued for days and weeks and months; the demon would always come in the early hours of the morning, shortly after Darius awoke; and the demon would assault him, commanding his thoughts, drowning him in the sea of souls, and then leave.
And then, one evening, late at night after Darius had been returning home, through the forest, he spotted his assailant face to face – when he least expected it.
“Darius,” he called.
Darius stopped in his tracks. He was standing on a path of stone and sand, framed by pine trees, and there was no moon.
And there stood Tramos. He recognized the sullen face, the long, golden hair. “Darius, do you know why I come to you each day? Do you know why I force you to revisit that day? When you shed your darkness?”
Tramos smiled. Darius remembered the day that Antoine died.
He remembered carrying his ashes. He watched Antoine get dragged to the altar and burned.
Darius looked into the woods, straining to see, but seeing no one. “I know why you did that. You didn’t help me shed my darkness. You dragged me deeper into it.”
Tramos laughed. “But don’t you see? The only way out, Darius, is farther in.”
*~*~*
There are those that believe in destiny.
They believe in a supreme being, whether it be the Christian God or another entity. One that directs our lives and plans out our future. Then there are those like Antoine Nagevesh, who live and create their own destinies…
…Antoine lived in his early years on a farm in Badulla, Sri Lanka and lost his father as a young man. He did not remember much from that day, only that he came home as the sun was painting the sky rust-colored, and he trudged up the gravel path that led to the small cottage in the middle of the coffee fields that was his family’s modest home.
He kicked at the stones with his feet, dragging them in the sand, and covered his brown leather sandals with dirt. Tiny clouds of dust to rose from the path, and he walked that way each day; just as he did when coming in from the fields every day previously as far back as he could remember.
Something seemed different, though, as he approached the house. His tall frame allowed him to see in the small, square hallow windows that were carved in the clay walls; they were at a height where most people would have to stand up on their toes to see inside. But for Antoine, t
he windows were at eye-level, and he was able to see the silhouettes of several people inside in the shadows.
He stopped kicking at the gravel for a moment to listen. All he could hear were muffled voices. He covered his eyes with his hand to block the sun, and peered inside, staying carefully distant from the window to keep his presence unknown.
He still could not tell who was inside, but he recognized the voice of his mother. She was crying, he could tell. She was sobbing. “What is this saying?!” she cried. “I cannot believe this! I cannot…”
The door opened with a creak, and the outdoor light and dust crept in, and the sobbing woman stopped, and looked up. In the doorway stood her son, a tall dark silhouette, the sun beaming in rays behind him, surrounding him in a yellow aura.
There was another, much older woman with graying hair, sitting at a small wooden table in the center of the room. She looked over at the door as well. “Antoine! Come over here boy!”
His mother cried, running to the door. She hugged her son, crying into his arms. Antoine had a look of question on his face, a look of concern, as he reached around and comforted his distraught mother.
“What is it?” Antoine finally asked.
“Look in the stables,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes, regaining her composure.
The grey haired woman at the table arose slowly from where she was sitting, and reached her hand out. “I will show you,” she said. “It is a sight that only you will be able to stomach.”
Antoine released his mother. She sat in a small wooden chair that was next to the table, and stared straight ahead, her hair mussed and her eyes red with tears.
“Come with me young boy,” the grey haired woman barked, taking Antoine’s hand. “Come back with me to the stables and you can see your father.”
They left his mother sitting in despair in the front room of the cottage. Antoine had to see what happened to his father, and as they walked through the green fields to the stables, he wondered who this woman was.
“Who are you?” he finally asked, calling up ahead to the woman who was amazingly quick for a woman of her age. “How do you know my mother?”
