by Tim Waggoner
The thought that she might end up like Edgar, as a sort of Flying Dutchman of the Nightway, endlessly on the run from the Cabal while trying to figure out what they wanted her to do, sounded like a kind of Purgatory to her, if not actual damnation. She’d prefer to avoid that fate if she could.
“We’re here,” Edgar said.
Chapter Eleven
Lori peered through the windshield. At first she saw only a glow of blue-white light spread against the darkness, but then she began to make out shapes – lots of them. She thought they might be trees, but they were too uniform in size to be organic. As the van drew closer, she saw what she was looking at were wooden poles about eight feet in height, with a crosspiece on top to form a large letter T, topped with a fluorescent light. There were dozens of poles, spread out alongside the road and continuing back into the darkness, making it impossible to guess how many there might be. There were objects on the Ts, and these objects had heads, arms, and legs. She realized then that she wasn’t looking at Ts – she was looking at crosses, all of which had people affixed to them.
“Fuck me,” she said softly.
Edgar said nothing. He pulled the van to the side of the road and turned off the engine and the headlights. Everything went dark for a moment, but then individual fluorescent lights came on above the crosses, bulbs attached to lengths of metal that rose from behind the wooden structures and curved downward to hang above them, illuminating the people on the crosses in pools of blue white. The people were naked and represented a mix of ages, races, and body types. Men and women were equally present. The people were bound to the crosses by tight coils of barbed wire around their wrists and ankles, but as painful as that looked, it was nothing compared to the other condition they all shared. Their abdomens had been slit open from sternum to crotch, and their internal organs were now external ones. Viscera spilled forth from body cavities and hung down past the victims’ feet, entrails making soft, glistening piles on the ground beneath them. The lower halves of their bodies were streaked with blood, and the ground around the base of the crosses was soaked with the red stuff. But as horrifying a sight as the mass crucifixion was, far worse was the fact that each one of these men, women, and children were still alive. Pain-filled eyes blinked as tears flowed freely, mouths opened and closed silently as if their owners were trying to speak but could not. Bodies writhed in agony, some of their exertions so violent it was clear they were trying to shake themselves free. But all they did was cause the barbed wire to dig deeper into their flesh, fresh blood flowing from those new wounds. Lori didn’t understand how anyone could survive like this for any length of time. They should all be dead. But they weren’t, and she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised. This was the Nightway, after all.
She experienced an urge to tell Edgar to start the van, pull back onto the road, and drive away from this awful place as fast as he could. She almost did it, too. But she thought of her family and friends, of what the Cabal might be doing to them at this very moment, and she said nothing. They both sat there for a moment, gazing at the nightmarish tableau. Then Edgar got out of the van, and a couple seconds later, Lori did the same, keeping the blanket wrapped around her more for the security of it than any sense of modesty. Self-consciousness about her own nakedness seemed almost obscene among so many unclothed and violated bodies.
Edgar came around to the passenger side of the van, opened the door, and leaned inside. He opened the glove box, retrieved an object, then stepped back and closed the door. Lori saw that he held what looked like a gun in his right hand. At least it was shaped like a gun, but it was white and made of a number of smaller pieces that had been put together.
Those are bones, she thought. Small ones, like you’d find in a foot or hand.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“That’s just in case,” Edgar said.
“Good idea.”
The two of them walked around to the other side of the van and surveyed the scene before them.
“Goddamn,” he said. “And I thought void crawlers stank.”
Lori was too busy gagging to respond. The air was filled with the coppery tang of blood, so strong she could taste it. When she’d been a child, she’d bit the tip of her tongue while talking to a friend in her parents’ kitchen. She tried to recall which friend it had been. Aashrita? Maybe. It hadn’t hurt all that much, but it bled like mad, and her mouth quickly filled with blood. Terrified, she’d tried to cry out for help, but all she succeeded in doing was spraying blood all over (Aashrita) her friend, who immediately started screaming.
The smell here was bad, but equally horrifying to Lori was the low buzzing thrum that hung heavy in the air. Flies covered the victims’ exposed organs, crawling across them, traveling back and forth between the crosses, searching for just the right place to lay their eggs. She glanced at Edgar. He gazed upon the bodies nearest the edge of the road, swaying slightly, as if in time to music only he could hear. The man had said he hated bugs, but that was before he became a host to a legion of them. Perhaps because of his little hard-shelled friends, the flies’ droning sounded quite different to him than it did to her.
She caught movement out of the corner of her eyes, and her first thought was a cloud of flies had abandoned one of the corpses and was coming toward them. She raised her hands, intending to fend off the insects, but when she turned in that direction, she saw no mass of flies streaking toward them. Instead, she saw a figure – a person, or something shaped very much like a person – walking with sandaled feet across the blood-soaked ground. There was something about the way the figure moved, a subtle grace that Lori thought of as feminine, although it was difficult to gauge gender given the way he or she was dressed – a loose-fitting brown robe cinched at the right shoulder like a toga, leaving the left arm free, and beneath this a plain white shirt with long wide-cuffed sleeves. The figure wore a head covering that looked something like an unadorned bishop’s miter, made of simple white cloth, with thin strips hanging down on either side. The outfit looked like something that might’ve been worn around the time of the Roman Empire, but the cloth looked relatively new, and it was clean. Not a spot of blood on it. The person’s face was covered by a white cloth mask, which had no openings for eyes, nose, or mouth. Lori found the effect eerie, especially once she noticed the figure’s hands were covered by white gloves, its feet by white socks. What if there was no person beneath the cloth? What if there was simply nothing?
The figure stopped when it was within five feet of them. It had kept its arm at its sides the whole way, and it made no move to raise them now.
“Welcome. I am the Haruspex, and this—” the figure gestured toward the crosses and the people bound to them, “—is the Garden of Anguish. Have you come seeking knowledge?”
Edgar said nothing. He’d warned Lori that he was going to drop her off and leave, and yet here he was, standing next to her. It was clear, however, that he didn’t intend to take the lead in dealing with the Haruspex.
“Yes,” Lori answered, throat so dry she could barely get the word out.
“This is good. If you had stopped for any other reason, I would have been forced to kill you both and use you as fertilizer for my crop. Rules, you know.”
The Haruspex’s voice was calm, soothing, genderless, and devoid of all emotion save for a mild pleasantness. Lori watched the area of the mask over where the Haruspex’s mouth should be, but she saw no sign of lips moving.
“What’s a Haruspex?” Lori asked. “I’m not familiar with the term.”
The cloth-faced creature regarded her for a moment with whatever senses it possessed.
“It’s a Roman word. A Haruspex was a priest who divined knowledge by examining the entrails of sacrificed animals. Although in my case, I don’t do the interpreting. That you do yourself. My Garden is like a buffet in that sense. I supply the meat – you serve yourself.”
A breath
y sss-sss-sss came from the Haruspex, and it took Lori a moment to realize the creature was laughing, or at least doing its version of it.
“Exactly how does this work?” Lori asked.
“The process is simple,” the Haruspex said. “Just start walking among the crosses until one of the bodies speaks to you, both literally and figuratively. Everyone has someone waiting for them in the Garden. Someone special.”
Edgar winced at this, and she understood why he didn’t want to accompany her into the Garden. He feared confronting whoever was waiting for him within. She felt the same, but if she was to have any hope of finding some way to restore her life to normal, she had no choice but to enter the Garden and face whatever she found there.
“What do I do after I go in?” she asked.
“It all depends on which of my beautiful flowers stops you,” the Haruspex said. “Since the earliest days of your species, if one wished to gain insight into that which was hidden, one needed to peer inside the greatest mystery of all – a living body. What makes its heart beat, its lungs breathe, its blood flow…. What makes it love, makes it hate, makes it afraid? Where is the soul, and once it is located, what secrets might it share with us? Can it tell us what is happening now, far away from our sight? Can it show us that which is to come, and how to ensure those events come to pass – or how to prevent them from occurring? Can it show us the past, shadows of memory we can barely recall, nightmares we lived but fear to revisit?”
These last words hit Lori like a hammer blow. She wanted to remember what had happened to Aashrita and why, but she was also deeply terrified of discovering the truth.
“All of these things can be learned in my Garden. All you have to do is be brave – or foolish – enough to enter.”
The Haruspex had no visible mouth, but Lori heard the smile in its voice as it spoke this final sentence.
So far, Edgar had listened without saying anything, but now he asked, “And what is the price for this knowledge?”
“Price?” the Haruspex said. Lori heard the smile in its voice again. “What makes you think there’s a price?”
“Because there’s always one on the Nightway,” Edgar said.
Lori looked at the man’s prosthetic legs and thought of the price he’d had to pay for the beetles’ help in escaping the Vermilion Tower.
“Of course, you are correct,” the Haruspex admitted. “The price for knowledge gained here is a simple one. You must help me tend to the Garden.”
“What sort of ‘help’ would I have to do?” Lori asked.
“That will be revealed when all your questions have been answered,” the Haruspex said.
“That’s bullshit,” Edgar said. He turned to Lori. “You know that, right?”
“Maybe,” she said. “But what choice do I have? I need to know.”
“No, you don’t. You can come with me. You can run.”
It was a tempting offer. She had no way of knowing what would happen to her inside the Garden, or even if she’d survive the ordeal. And she had no idea what sort of price she’d have to pay for the knowledge she sought. Knowledge that she needed, even if she didn’t want it.
She thought of Aashrita’s headstone, rain running down its face, over her name and her birth and death dates.
“I have to,” she said.
Edgar looked at her for a long moment before nodding.
“Then it is settled,” the Haruspex said. “I have already prepared the auguries for you. All part of the service.”
Lori had thought both of the Haruspex’s hands had been empty, but now she saw the being clutched a long, wicked-looking knife in its right hand, the blade covered with old, dried blood, as if it had never been cleaned. Had the blade been there before? Had it just appeared? Really, what did it matter? It was there now.
She held the blanket tight around her as she began walking between the rows of crosses. The cloth did little to keep her warm, but she didn’t know if that was due to the temperature here or if it was caused by her fear. Either way, she wished she had a sweater. A warm jacket would be nice, too. Most of all, she wished she had some fucking shoes. The ground here was gritty and sandy, as she’d experienced elsewhere in this realm, and it hurt to walk on with bare feet. But that wasn’t the main reason she wanted shoes. It was so the flesh of her feet wouldn’t come into contact with any of the blood that had been spilled here, of which there was a copious amount. It made the sand clump together in a manner that reminded Lori of what litter did when cats peed in their box. The thought was so ridiculous she almost laughed, but she stopped herself. She feared if she started laughing now, she would never be able to quit.
The blood-stink was worse this close to the bodies. No, not bodies. People. They weren’t dead yet, although they probably wished they were. She knew she would if she were in their place. There were other odors here, too. A smell like raw chicken, which she assumed came from the victims’ exposed organs. The musky scent of shit and the ammonia smell of piss, both the result of crucified bodies expelling whatever waste remained within them. Another reason to wish she had shoes. The Garden wasn’t silent. People moaned and whispered, drew in slow, painful breaths, mumbled prayers to whatever gods might exist to put them out of their misery. But if there were any such gods, it seemed they weren’t listening.
The crosses were arranged in neat rows regularly spaced from one another. It felt like she was walking through some nightmarish version of a cornfield, except the stalks held more than just ears – they had entire bodies on them. She felt laughter threatening again, and this time she bit her lip hard, hoping the pain would help her hold it back. She tasted blood, and she thought once more about that time she was a child and had bit her tongue.
“That was really gross.”
The voice was so soft, Lori almost didn’t hear it. She stopped and turned in the direction she thought the voice had originated from. A girl’s voice, she thought.
There, two crosses to her right, hung a brown-skinned girl, nine, maybe ten years old. Like all the others in the Garden, she was bound to her cross with barbed wire, and her flat tummy had been sliced open, her innards splayed onto the ground at her feet. Flies crawled over her organs, infested her open body cavity, buzzed around her head, landed on her face, scuttled across the soft flesh there…. Despite her condition, the girl’s eyes were wide open and alert, and she watched Lori with intense interest.
Lori experienced no shock of recognition upon seeing the girl, but she did feel a sort of tickle at the back of her mind, along with a tightening in her gut.
You don’t want to do this, she thought. It was true. She didn’t. But she walked over to the girl and stood before her anyway.
“Do you know me?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” the girl said. Her voice was weak, but this close Lori could hear her well enough. The girl leaned her head to the right, then the left. Lori had the sense she was trying to draw her attention to something, but she didn’t—
Her gaze focused on the girl’s inner forearms, first right, then left. They were sliced open from wrist to elbow, the cuts deep. Unlike her abdominal wound, which bled freely, the blood around these cuts was old and crusted.
Lori’s head swam and her vision blurred. She took several steps back from the girl, her movements awkward, clumsy. She felt numb, disconnected from her body, and she thought she was going to faint. She fought to hold on to consciousness, and while for several seconds the outcome was in doubt, she managed to remain aware and on her feet. When her vision cleared, she saw the girl was now a young woman, probably in her late teens. Lori recognized this version of her, just as she’d recognized the previous one, but this time she was able to give her a name.
“Aashrita,” she said.
The young woman gave her a weak smile. “Yes,” she breathed.
Was this the real Aashrita, somehow brought back from the dea
d, or was it something that only looked like her? Lori hoped the latter but feared the former was the truth. She felt memories beginning to crowd at the threshold of her mind, screaming to be allowed in. This was why she had come here, why she’d gone to Aashrita’s grave in the first place – to get answers. All she had to do was allow the memories to come. But she couldn’t. It wasn’t a matter of choice, a mere exercise of willpower. She simply could not allow the memories in, knew if she did, they would destroy her. The mental struggle was too much, and pain erupted in her skull as a migraine flared to sudden life. It hurt so much that tears streamed from her eyes, and her vision narrowed to pinpoints. She had to get out of here – now.
She turned to flee, the blanket falling away from her naked body as she did. But she only managed a few hobbling steps on her bad knee before something flew over her head, came down around her bare waist, and started pulling her backward. She fought it, gritted her teeth, put all of her strength into moving forward. She reached down to take hold of whatever it was that had wrapped around her and felt something soft, spongy, and wet. She looked down in revulsion and saw that her hands were slick with blood. A cord of some kind pressed tight against her flesh, bumpy and pinkish-pale. It was a length of intestine, she realized. Aashrita’s.
Lori continued to move forward. Another loop of intestine wrapped around her left wrist, and yet another encircled her right. Still she fought, although her movements were almost completely restricted now. The intestines were slick, though, so if she could manage to wriggle free….
A last loop came down over her head and pulled tight around her throat, immediately cutting off her air. She tried to reach for the portion of intestine choking her, hoping to loosen it so she could draw in a breath. But her arms were held away from her body, and regardless of how hard she struggled, she couldn’t budge them. She was restrained in four places now – waist, wrists, and neck – and the intestine, flexing like a giant constrictor, lifted her off her feet.
