Through the In Between, Hell Awaits

by Robert Essig

  Constantly scrutinizing his surroundings, Austin moved on. The quad was quite large with numerous roads that led there from the many realms of the In Between, because the In Between does not exist in the same way as Earth, or even Hell for that matter (both of which have uncanny resemblances, though are both quite the polar opposite). The crossroads was like the heart, each of the roads like arteries that flowed into the many other realms where Satan had originally sent the newborns of his ilk to be watched over by the sentinels in safety while they grew into adult demons. There was to be a sentinel at the border from each realm to the crossroads where they would protect the young demons from the many predators that roams the In Between. In those days the crossroads wasn’t a public sanctuary of torture and rape, but a place for those who were ready to cross into Hell.

  In the old days even Austin would have been somewhat protected. Roving beasts and humanoids were more reluctant to attack a wanderer in those days than they are now.

  Austin felt as though he was getting closer. He began to recognize the surrounding a bit, and thus he thought calling out her name wasn’t a bad idea.

  “Audrey,” he said in a tone that was not much above casual conversation. He was still wary of attracting the wrong attention, and that’s just what happened.

  “Hey stud,” said some grizzly looking bastard with a hobo issued beard crusted in dried puke, blood and who knew what else. The guy was stick thin and hunched forward over a piece of wooden fence, shimmying his body left and right, which must have been ripping his flesh to bits with the slivers.

  Austin tried to ignore the old creep. There was something startling in his eyes, a gleam that was out of place for someone in this twisted predicament.

  “C’mon, man! Just one fuck. Please!”

  Austin stopped. He couldn’t believe what the old dingle berry was saying. He turned, because he had passed the weird old man, and then he realized what was so odd about him. He was indeed hunched over the piece of wood fence, rubbing the weathered wood across his flesh in a manner that was to the eyes as nails on a chalkboard was to ears, but he wasn’t strapped there or bolted there in a way that would prevent him from walking away. He was there on his own accord, a sick fiend that thrived on the abuse a passerby was willing to inflict upon him.

  Austin stared into his black eyes and wanted to scream. Even here, there was always one real sick fucker. The kind of person that would rape children and eat their brains. Austin squinted his eyes as a though occurred to him, crazy as it were. Is that Albert Fish?

  If he had a gun he would have blown the bastard away, and really, that would be too good for him. Instead, Austin turned and continued his walk. The old coot yelled to him that no one wanted to fuck him, that he was lonely and everyone wanted to fuck the screamers and criers.

  “I can scream and cry!” he yelled. “I can scream and cry!”

  A bit further up the quad, Austin called for Audrey, louder than before. He continued to look behind him and to the left and right. He’d already planned to dash into the bushes were he to see someone coming. He was prepared for fisticuffs if it came to that, but he would prefer to find Audrey without incident.

  And then he did.

  And he couldn’t believe what he saw.

  34

  The roads of the In Between were perpetually close to any location desired on Earth, though the majority of the inhabitants either don’t know how to, can’t, or don’t want to cross the realms.

  Dagana made it a way of life jumping the realms the way a hobo jumps the rails, and it was her capacity for realm hopping that kept her safe from the claws of her enemies. Of her former tribe, Baz was the only one who would jump the realms. The others were wary of Earth and afraid of the consequences and the rumors, much like the Black Pit. Back when Baz and Dagana were emotionally connected to one another they would steal away from the others and slip through the realms to Earth where they would manipulate their appearance and pretend to live as humans did. They loved each other that way. Kissed. Hugged. They made love the human way that they couldn’t do in their native land where love was but a four-letter word that began with “r” and ended in “-ape.” It was those very rendezvous’ to Earth that instilled in them the human emotion of love.

  She tried to dismiss those thoughts. They made her weak. She would have done just about anything for him in those days, and she thought he felt the same way about her. Until she mentioned her dreams of domination and confessed to him that she had been considering a new way of life. Freedom from the bindings of Satan and the job of protecting the child demons. They had already become lenient regarding their duties, but Dagana had grandiose visions of transforming the In Between into her own land—a land that would eventually rival that of Hell itself.

  And she still had big dreams. Dreams so massive in scale that she had no qualms about offing the only thing she ever loved. Not that it mattered. She and Baz had fallen from the blissful high their love had produced, drowning them in a heady abyss of hurt and anger. Had she not killed him, he would have surely done the same to her. Hiding something like love from their tribe and fearing the retribution were they to be discovered were hard to live with.

  Dagana slipped through the realms into West Hollywood where she took on the appearance of a drug hag and decided to call herself Trina. It was easy to find a meal when she looked like a horse’s ass. There were always beggars and hangers-on who seemed to gravitate to pock-marked junkie whores, and they tasted just as good as a socialite. Humans are all the same inside.

  She was familiar with West Hollywood, having used the area as a hunting ground for human delicacies often and any time she was traveling the West Coast. It was easy to associate with deadbeats and even easier to lure them to their death. They were like sheep, and they would do anything she asked of them just so long as she promised drugs or sex. And the best thing of all was that they were rarely missed, thus it was quite easy for her to cover her tracks.

  She went to a seedy apartment she knew about and struck a conversation with the losers loitering outside. She claimed that she was a prostitute from Vegas looking for some action. Everyone liked the idea of pimping, and one of the rail-thin junkies grinned something awful and invited her into his pad where she promptly snorted several lines of cheap dope that stung her nasal passage like powdered glass. Drugs hardly had an effect on her, but she did them as not to arouse suspicion. Not taking drugs with people such as these would attract unwanted attention.

  The apartment was typical for these types of sewer rats: walls splattered with filth, an odor like dirty clothes, sweat and cigarettes lingering in the air, black carpets, and grimy drug people who were a species all their own.

  It was easy for Dagana to associate with such tripe. They weren’t very different from the humanoids and demons of the In Between, after all. She was used to far worse. The gutter slime she currently mingled with didn’t announce their latest rape the way most demons did. They didn’t boast about killing and pillaging either. They were merely Earthly criminals who robbed, stole, and pimped, hiding in the slums, only extracting themselves at night when in need of a fix.

  After talking to several of the junkies hanging around, Dagana (under the name Trina) knew whom she wanted to kill and eat and whom she wanted to assist her and Chops. (Chops waited for her in the In between, savage enough to care for himself.)

  Thing about junkies is that they love to brag. If they scored a really good bag of dope they couldn’t help but tell everyone they knew about it until they smoked some here and snorted some there and found themselves back to stealing or sucking for another fix. They also liked to brag about their criminality. It was like bragging about scars to them. The more you’ve been arrested the better, and even better if you committed a felony. Gary Nicholson seemed to be the baddest motherfucker in the house, and he liked to talk about it. He’d killed someone several years ago and beat the rap due to some kind of technicality. He was a wife beater, chronic alcoholic, a constant
fighter, and he was missing more than one tooth that made his smile sinister in combination with his handlebar moustache, bald head, and the large rings in his lips and eyebrows.

  Yeah, he’ll do.

  Dagana asked the burly man if he had a place they could go and get high. He said he did and she told him she wanted to bring her friend, a lowly bastard who was all but passed out in the corner, loaded up on horse and dead to the world. Gary didn’t understand why she wanted to bring the extra weight, but he was more than ready to dope it up with “Trina” and fuck her brains out.

  If only he knew.

  They left. Gary had a place a few blocks away. Tucked into a modest yard, it was an old dilapidated house that was so dimly lit by a rarity of light bulbs that it felt as if they were walking into a dark alley. The place smelled much like the former apartment, but there was no one there, which was what Dagana had hoped for.

  As soon as the door was closed, Dagana punched the heroin zombie in the face and laid him out. She was happy to see a gleeful expression wash over Gary’s face.

  As it turned out, Gary had killed more people than the one murder he had gone to trial for.

  “Hot damn!” whooped Gary. “Knocked his ass right out. You’re one tough broad.” Gary grunted then kicked the man lying on the floor of his house. The guy was out cold and looked dead, his breathing so shallow that he seemed not to move.

  As with Chops, Dagana decided to transform Gary without a proper invitation or warning. She figured that might have been her mistake with Rich. She tried to mold him from his human state into something monstrous and powerful and too much of his humanity made it through, not to mention the fact that he wasn’t quite the badass he claimed to be. He was just lost, and that didn’t translate well in the realms of the In Between. Things became twisted and turned inside out there, and turning him inside out had done little to transform him in into a machine of destruction, which was what Dagana desired.

  “I want you to cut him,” said Dagana.

  Gary’s face only faltered slightly as if her request was only a bit off kilter, and then he grinned wider and produced a pocket knife from his grime encrusted pocket. It was a switchblade. He pressed the button and the gleaming blade popped out. Without further command, he knelt down before the skinny freak and cut an X on his forehead. The poor bastard didn’t even move.

  “You’re going to have to do better than that, honey,” said Dagana, still under the guise of a junkie.

  She stood over Gary, preparing for his becoming, unbeknownst to him as he contemplated which type of cut would satisfy her desires.

  Madness swept over Gary as it had the other times he’d killed. He slid the knife across the man’s throat severing arteries that sprayed blood into his face with what would prove to be the final pumps of the junkie’s heart. Dagana changed from the human façade of Trina into her comfortable sentinel skin. She locked her fingers around Gary’s neck and thrust his face into the arterial flow of the ruined neck. He protested, but her strength was beyond his and he could no longer remove his face from the blood geyser than he could fight her off.

  Dagana had once believed that ritual was the only way to create an obedient minion, but she was beginning to realize that obedience was more prevalent in the human mind gone mad. The lone wolf psychopath was thrown to the In Between and turned inside out and backward into something ready and willing to serve for the mere pleasure of the kill, Chops being a prime example of such an obedient and willing servant.

  Gary screamed and pleaded as blood was drawn into his nose and mouth, and that’s when Dagana’s other hand grasped the back of his cranium and squeezed until his skull cracked. Her fingers dipped into the soft of his brain, at which precise moment she drew him through the realms to the In between just as his soul was preparing to evacuate his dying body.

  Gary’s becoming was agonizing, which was apparent by the rising of his screams to a crescendo. And then, as if his throat had been obliterated, his screams became a wet nothing. The becoming was instantaneous much as Dagana’s passage from Earth to the In Between. What lay upon the sun-bleached sands was something foul that only vaguely resembled a human. Gary’s new form wasn’t quite as abstract as Chops, but he was . . . something else altogether.

  It shifted. The body had two legs and arms and a torso and even a head, but that was where the similarities to a human, or even a demon, ended. The face was thin and skinless yet not quite a skeleton, but more or less, rough and dark red like dried marrow. It was bone turned inside out. The eye sockets drooped in great ovals filled with not eyes of a human form, but with small faces, each with its own set of eyes staring out like miniature navigators. The chest was lined with something akin to scales or matted oatmeal, the color of a deep red rose and intermittently speckled with small spiky protrusions. The appendages were much like the torso, though the hands and feet were similar to the dried flesh of the face, tipped with crude bone-like claws.

  The monstrosity looked around with the tiny faces in its drooping sockets, shaking off the daze that permeated it after the brutal transformation from man to monster. It stood shakily, and then gained its footing, looking down at its magnificent body. It was impossible to tell what it was thinking due to the lack of expression on its dense, bony face, but Dagana was impressed by the physique and magnificence of the transformation. In many ways, it was hideous (the face and hands, for instance), however as a whole it was something of beauty in a realm where everything seemed to have become wretched abstractions of what was once whole on Earth. This thing before her was unlike both Chops and Acronos, and hopefully twice as savage.

  “Do you remember anything?” she asked.

  After thoroughly inspecting his hands, the Gary-thing faced Dagana with its queer eyes and nodded as if it either couldn’t remember how to talk, or just plain out couldn’t.

  “Your name was Gary. Do you remember that?”

  It nodded again.

  It was sleek, even with its coarse sinewy face, and Dagana felt something within that she thought she would never feel again, something slight that was left over from the time so many years ago when she was human. Gary’s becoming was so streamlined and seamless that he looked like something intricately sculpted of marble, even in his monstrous state.

  Dagana couldn’t become soft in the wake of her attraction to this horrendous beauty. She had to be tough, rigid, forthright, just as she had been with Acronos. Sure, this being’s predecessor was a louse, but that didn’t mean she would be lenient as he gained his footing in this new and cruel world.

  “On your feet,” she said like a true Nazi. “There’s no rest for the wicked. Are you wicked?”

  That last part came out with far too much desire and yearning. This wreck of a man-turn-monstrosity intrigued her, particularly after his becoming. It was so damn difficult not to want him, to tantalize herself with his wretched brilliance.

  He was going to have to prove himself to her, and fast. If his physique alone could elicit such teenage dreams, he was going to have to be one bad motherfucker for Dagana to allow him to be a part of her minions.

  35

  Audrey was in a state only the most heinous of murderers could have been comfortable with. She wasn’t dead — no, death may have been a blessing in comparison to the debauchery that had been unleashed upon her.

  Austin drew a breath in awe and held it there as he witnessed something of a horrible miracle. She should be dead. No one could have sustained the beatings and rape that left her a bruised and battered bag of flesh and bones. On Earth, she would have died long ago from the sheer loss of blood.

  Austin knelt beside her, vowing to destroy any monstrosity that happened upon them. Austin was so filled with rage and anger for what the inhuman slime of this realm had done to Audrey that he was beside himself.

  They had broken the large pole she had been suspended upon, the fall alone probably enough to kill her, but that wasn’t what happened her, was it? After she was toppled, they did un
mentionable things to her, leaving her body bloodied and so weak she could do nothing more than lie there on the cusp of a death that would never steal over her.

  “Audrey,” said Austin, cradling the back of her head in his arms. He almost said something lame like ‘are you all right?’ though he knew damn well she wasn’t all right. May never be after this.

  She made an attempt at opening her swollen eyes. They were merely slits in fat folds of puffy purple flesh, and when she realized who was holding her, they opened wider, causing pain that made her wince.

  “You came back for me,” she slurred. Her voice was a delicate piece of tissue paper in a mouth of broken teeth and sores.

  “Yes. I’m going to get you out of here.”

  “I . . . I can’t move. I’ve been beaten, over and over, and . . . ”

  Tears rolled down her face mingling with blood and snot. Austin cradled her head and told her not to think about what had happened. He promised that everything would be all right and that they would get back to the real world. Audrey said little. She would make an attempt to speak and then her voice would go out on her or she would well up with tears.

  It wasn’t safe, sitting there in a field of torture, and Austin was in no mood to fight. He was no fool, and knew he would have no chance were the beasts that had it in them to do this to Audrey to cross his path. Though if one did, he would put out a good fight. His blind fury may even give him some kind of advantage.

  His wounds itched. In fact, they screamed at him, continuing to ooze down his body, sticking his clothes to his skin, but he couldn’t be bothered. Austin stood, gripping Audrey’s hands, but she was in far too much pain to stand herself up, so he grabbed her in an embrace and hefted her over his shoulder as gently as he could. It seemed almost primitive, but it was the best way for him to carry her and get the hell out of there before something bad—worse—happened.