Through the In Between, Hell Awaits

by Robert Essig

  “I want to show you my world,” said Baz.

  Audrey whimpered and cried and wondered where Austin was. This couldn’t be him, could it? He had to be there somewhere. He had to get there just in time to save her. Right?

  With a hand bearing sharp talons, Baz grabbed Audrey. The world began to change at his touch, and she could see something within the hotel that wasn’t there at all—another plain of existence—yet she could still see the hotel room, filling her vision with a maddening double exposure. Somehow Austin was sleeping peacefully in bed, clutching the covers close the way he had been when she woke from her nightmare. Baz grabbed her with his other hand and the world she knew vanished completely, replaced with a world that was foreign to her. It happened that quickly.

  Baz let go of her, but the new world remained.

  “This is my world,” said Baz.

  Audrey was lost for words; hell, lost for thought. She stood in a world of darkness shrouded with a sea of sepia toned clouds that cast a color over the land as if the sun were made of copper. The landscape was almost desert-like with a sprinkling of rocks accenting sporadic trees and shrubbery. She scanned the land and couldn’t help but wonder if she was dreaming. She’d never thought so consciously before in her dreams, and that did nothing to comfort her.

  In the distance something moved. Something twitched. Baz noticed Audrey’s gaze and followed it. He chuckled as he watched a plethora of expressions climb and fall from her face.

  The breath was taken from her lungs, as Audrey realized what she was watching. There was a cage made of peculiar wood containing several people who seemed to be alerted by her and Baz’s presence. They crawled over one another, arms reaching through the prison-like bars of the cage. They were so caked in dried and fresh blood that it looked as if they were wearing dark skin-tight glistening suits and masks. They were naked and clawing at one another to feed their hope for salvation. And then the sounds of their collective agony hit Audrey’s ears and she wanted to scream and cry as if doing so would take it all away and return her to the comforts of Austin’s suite.

  “Just up the road is one of the crossroads,” said Baz. “That’s where the mature demons go before entering Hell. It takes one hell of a vicious demon to make it here now that we aren’t protecting them. I like to leave them some kind of a treat for the trip to Hell.” Baz pointed to the cage. “Any one of them will be lucky if they are taken through the realms, for Hell has much more to offer them than the eternity of suffering they will endure here in the In Between.”

  Since her arrival to this land of torture, Audrey hadn’t noticed how much she was shaking. Her body was in a state of tremors that mimicked a mild seizure. She clenched her jaw tight so as not to allow her teeth to chatter. It was all so real, yet so impossible, so nightmarish. A part of her insisted on convincing her eggshell mind that she would wake up next to Austin, but she knew better.

  Baz grabbed her arm with a grip so tight it felt as if every finger was pure muscle. A fraction of a squeeze would snap her bones. “Come with me,” he said, and they walked toward the crossroads.

  23

  Acronos was enthralled as he wrapped his mutated arms around Ned’s squirming, frightened body. How this murderous man didn’t want his becoming, Acronos couldn’t understand.

  “Hold his head still,” said Dagana as she held a pitcher of soupy brains over Ned’s sweaty, flailing head.

  Acronos unwrapped his arms from around Ned’s and grabbed the man’s head holding it still. With his arms loose again, Ned tried to grab the pitcher from Dagana’s hands, but she pulled it back before he could do so.

  “Break his fucking arms!” she demanded.

  “No! Don’t break my arms.”

  “Do it!” said Dagana.

  Acronos let go of the man’s head and grabbed his arms by the wrists. He didn’t put much thought into what he was doing. It all felt so damn good. Pulling Ned’s arms behind his back, Acronos then planted his foot between the man’s shoulder blades and yanked.

  Dagana was pleased with Acronos when he stumbled backward with a dismembered arm in each hand. Ned screamed so loud it was a wonder he didn’t pass out from sheer exhaustion. The torn patches of red gory sinew where his arms had been gushed blood like macabre fountains to either side of him as his body fell, smacking his face on the floor, yet he remained conscious and screaming bloody murder.

  “Grab him!” said Dagana. “We can still use him. A mortal of any state can be used in the In Between.”

  Blood flowed through Acronos’ veins like fire. He was having way too much fun. He threw the arms on the floor and grabbed Ned’s blood-sticky torso, straitening it and holding his head as still as he could considering all the blood that was making every surface of his body slippery.

  Dagana wore a crazed look on her face as she poured the blended brain down Ned’s throat with one hand while holding his jaw open with the other. He had a gag reflex, but she held his mouth closed and forced him to swallow the thick gray matter. Once he’d had enough, she decided to go the easy route and snapped his neck. It was amazing he hadn’t died sooner, perhaps a sign that he would be a strong and worthy minion.

  With the snapping of the neck his soul was sent to the In Between where Dagana willed herself to witness his becoming. Acronos wanted to see the poor bastard go through what he’d gone through, but he was so excited that he couldn’t manage to attain the meditative state he needed to transport himself there.

  “God-damn-it!”

  Acronos closed his eyes and envisioned the In Between, what he could remember of the place anyhow. He’d only seen it during his becoming, and he wasn’t even sure merely thinking about it was the way to will himself there in the first place. Dagana went from one realm to the next like a fish swims through water.

  Eyes closed tight, teeth clenched enough to bite into his gums, he closed off all thought with the exception of the land Dagana called the In Between. He focused his thoughts and willed himself through the realms, away from Earth and onto the next world.

  It’s not working! It’s not working!

  Damn it to HELL!

  Acronos opened his eyes, defeated, but it wasn’t the bloodied insides of a cabin that he saw. He was indeed standing in the gritty sand of an unfamiliar territory just outside of the forbidden zone he had seen hours ago. Beside him was Dagana staring at something lying on the ground, glistening and writhing within the dirt like the aftermath of a lion attack, only the thing at her feet hardly resembled anything at all.

  “He didn’t make it?” asked Acronos.

  “Oh yes,” said Dagana, “he made it.”

  Even in his monstrous state—limbs three times the size of a human’s, head swollen and mutilated—Acronos looked at the thing on the ground with confusion. He felt as if he were supporting a weighty Halloween costume or prosthetics and still a measly, sweating human beneath. Apparently, he was still getting used to his new skin.

  As for the thing on the ground that used to be Ned, it writhed and wriggled like an oversized maggot, or a slimy chrysalis.

  “It needs to gain its footing. The arms didn’t make it through, but the transformation adapts to when comes through. If you spend enough time here, you will see a lot of things that arrived here in bizarre forms. It’s the eating of the brain that allowed your cognizance and his, too. At least that’s what I think. It may be more ritual than anything else.”

  “Is it a he or an it?”

  “Both. But mostly an it I suppose, now.”

  The form on the ground shifted and sat up, if one could imagine a huge maggot suddenly pivoting its body like a human and crooking into an L shape. The gruesome, sickly head became clearer. The eyes were thick and jellied within large wells on a face speckled with coarse hairs jutting out of boils and pustules. The lips were like something out of a plastic surgery disaster story with large vertical fissures dotted with grains of sand and some clear fluid that dripped to the ground.

  Dagana kneeled dow
n before her latest creation. “Can you hear me?”

  The thing looked at her with those eerie jellied cataracts, each dotted with a solitary dilated ink spot. There was no real way to tell if he understood her. Then the Ned-thing opened his absurd mouth and spoke words that rang hollow and deep like a vocalized church bell.

  “Yesssss. I. Do.”

  “Good,” Dagana responded as she stood again.

  “What good is he?” asked Acronos.

  “Obviously his return to Earth would render him an armless wonder and he’ll be of no help at all, but the In Between equips its beings in one way or the other. We just have to wait and see what it does for Ned. Perhaps wings like a disfigured butterfly.”

  “Or an airborne maggot.”

  It was quite clear that Ned had indeed become some type of flying monster too dazed to properly evolve into his full potential.

  “What. Is. Happening?” said the Ned-thing.

  Dagana surveyed the area nervously. “I hope this doesn’t take long. Although the sentinels would just think he’s another abstraction that made it through the realms, he’s going to have to stay in the forbidden zone until he can defend himself.

  Acronos didn’t know what to do. He stood there staring at the Ned-thing in amazement. It wriggle on the ground, its eyes so jellied over that it more resembled something wild than the mutated human forms of Dagana and Acronos.

  Dagana knelt beside the Ned-thing. “I’m going to bring him back to Earth. There he can take the proper time to mature. We can’t stay here. I can sense something bad. Perhaps one of the sentinels.”

  Dagana grabbed the slimy, dirt encrusted Ned-thing and before Acronos knew it they had vanished through the realms.

  “Bitch!” said Acronos. “She left me again.”

  It would be difficult for him to pass through the realms. He was having a hell of a time with that aspect of his becoming and right now he decided that if Dagana was going to keep leaving him behind like this then he was going to roam the In Between by himself until he damn well felt like going back to Earth.

  What could be so bad about the In Between anyway? He felt he was equipped to defend himself. If she thought that fat maggot could one day defend itself then surely Acronos could do so.

  As it turned out, there were a lot of things about the In Between that were wretched and evil, as Acronos would discover in due time. He would soon wonder if he was indeed equipped to fend for himself if forced to do so.

  24

  Austin woke with a horrible stench in his nostrils that acted like smelling salts shooting his eyes open into something he never could have dreamed up.

  Blood and piss and shit. Something that smelled of fetid meat.

  Rubbing sleep from his eyes, Austin shifted his body upward with his back to the headboard to better assess what was going on. Where’s Audrey? he thought, and then he saw where the horrible odors came from, and who produced them.

  Baz sat on the plush white couch licking his fingernails of the blood and grime that had become caught beneath them. The couch was more red than white and if it weren’t for the uniform Austin wouldn’t have known that the thing Baz was digging his hand into like a moviegoer on a bag a popcorn was the housekeeper. Her body was ripped in half, as Austin noticed when he took better assessment of the room. Her legs were strewn haphazardly over the mini bar.

  For a moment, Austin was lost for words. Waking into a nightmare with such horrible implications sent ice shards through his veins prickling his senses into submission. He had to remain as calm as possible as not to give Baz the upper hand, not that he didn’t already have the upper hand.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” asked Austin, voice calm and even. “Where’s Audrey?”

  Austin feared the worst. Audrey could have easily met the same end as the housekeeper. Some of the gore could easily belong to her. And what was Baz doing here? Austin couldn’t make heads or tails of anything.

  “She’s around.” Baz made an obnoxious slurping sound. His gray mouth was slathered in dark blood like a child’s face after a chocolate pudding cup. “She’s a carrot, if you will, that I am going to dangle in front of you so you don’t get off track. I think last night you got very far off track. While you were fucking your lovely girlfriend’s brains out my dear Dagana was getting further away from me.”

  “What? Where is she?”

  “Your sweet little tart or Dagana?”

  “Audrey!” Annoyance was peeking through the calm veneer. “I have no fucking idea where Dagana is.”

  Baz reached his arm deep within the housekeeper’s abdomen, wincing as he searched for a succulent morsel. He retrieved a bit of organ meat and popped it in his mouth before responding. “So she goes by the name Audrey, does she? You needn’t worry about her. Not until you find me Dagana, and I know you can. I still smell her on you, and I imagine the parasite that was feeding on you would be attracted to your scent were you to get too close. That’s the way they are. Dagana can manipulate them to do her bidding, but once they get a taste of human flesh, they want more. That may be the way you find her; hell, I don’t know. Thing is, you better find her or Audrey will be raped for an eternity by the passers-by in my world.”

  “You sick bastard.”

  “Yes,” Baz nodded, “I am indeed a sick bastard. Proud of it, too.”

  Baz stood and walked off, literally, but just before he melted through the realms to the In Between he said, “Bring me Dagana and I’ll retrieve your Audrey for you. You’d better get out of here before someone notices the housekeeper is gone. We don’t need your ass landing in jail, now do we?”

  Austin hadn’t noticed how quick his heartbeat accelerated until Baz left him in the depraved room with the housekeeper’s mutilated body. How was he going to explain this one? That eager desk clerk Paul would be looking for him and he figured it would be best that he wasn’t seen leaving the building. When the law finally caught up to him he would have to claim that he hadn’t spent the night there, that he had loaned the room out to an old friend. But that was something he would have to consider at a later date, if he even made it to a later date. Things were looking grim and he was absolutely sure he had no fucking idea how to find Dagana, and he knew damn well the consequence of not finding her.

  There was always a back door, so Austin packed his bag (after two mini bottles of vodka, of course) and fled like a stealthy villain.

  He took the stairs at the back of the hotel that were there mostly in case of a fire and only occasionally used by people who despised or feared elevators. He went down into the parking garage and left through a pedestrian gate that opened from the inside and remained locked from the outside. Paul was none the wiser, though it would only be a matter of time before the body was discovered and Austin was a wanted man. If he managed to get himself locked in the pokey, Baz would kill him for sure.

  Outside, Austin stopped for a moment and tilted his head upward to gander at what was supposed to be his inheritance. He’d taken the Wheeler hotel chain for granted all these years, using their rooms, city after city, without so much as giving his appreciation to the managers who were forced to adhere to his father’s request that he be able to squat there at his will. They must have secretly hated him because of that, particularly when the place was booked up solid and they were losing money on an empty room for his sake. He’d been a perfect shit at times in his demands, not that he was a snooty asshole by nature, but because it was something he felt he deserved. It wasn’t the way his father wanted it, that he now realized as he looked up at the bold letters on the top of the building that displayed his surname.

  And now it was all ruined. His morbid curiosity had finally gotten the better of him. A better man would have reported the murder in the alley and moved on, even if they decided anonymity was the best bet. But not Austin. Nope. He had to go and investigate because there was something strange about the scene, and what did it get him? It got him involved in murder with a target on his head.
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  Austin sighed, bowed his head, and walked away from his father’s hotel. He’d felt a lot of things over the years, an emotional roller coaster as wild as a mystical peyote trip, but this one took the cake. When the news leaked out that he’d been involved with a murder he would have to live the life of a fugitive and relocate to another country. Perhaps Ecuador. He had friends there. Or perhaps Spain. And he would never be allowed to bunk at a Wheeler hotel again.

  The streets were especially lonely and desolate considering current events. It was early, but the slime never truly left the gutter. Bums crashed in the corners beneath old holey tarps or on the covered porches of abandoned buildings. The punks and wanna-be-punk rich kids smoked cigarette butts from ashtrays and drank the remnants of coffee from cups people set on top of overflowing garbage receptacles. Austin felt like one such receptacle, his life’s junk filling him up until this final horror that had the potential of taking that garbage to the dump. Visions of the housekeeper’s mutilated body rose to the top of the garbage heap his mind had become, threatening madness and self-loathing. But there was Audrey to think of. Her capture was on his shoulders, and if he didn’t do everything he could to save her from Baz, he would have to live with her blood on his hands.

  But Austin felt he was being hard on himself. He tried to convince her to go her own way, and that he was trouble, and she wouldn’t listen. He wasn’t a bad man, and the garbage heap in his mind wasn’t a mass of soiled dreams and terrible acts. He’d done so much good and helped so many people all over the world, but times like this brought out the worst in him. And that brought on the urge to drink.

  Austin had already bit the heady scruff of hair on the dog, but he could use another, and the only places that served liquor at six in the morning were on the wrong side of the tracks.

  He knew just where to go.

  The place was mostly deserted save that for two old buzzards in painter garb who were tying one on to begin their day of inhaling fumes as they mindlessly applied paint to wall. Clearly they’d been doing this ritual for some time, which was apparent by their seamless and natural banter with the bartender.