by Brian Harmon
Claire shook her head. A little blush was creeping into her cheeks. “Not on him,” she said. “On you.”
“On me?”
Claire giggled. “It was so silly. I don’t even know why. You were already dating Gail back then. You sat next to her all the time. I didn’t really get over it until I actually started talking to Harvey in one of my classes.” She smiled at him. “I guess when I fell for him, I got over you.”
Wayne smiled back at her. “Well that’s good news for Harvey, isn’t it?”
She giggled again. Her cheeks were flushed red. “I never told him that. I never had the courage.”
“You should. He’d find it funny.”
“You think so?”
Wayne nodded. “Yeah.” He remembered Harvey telling him that he’d caught her looking at him, and he felt a little embarrassed. He’d assumed at the time that Harvey was merely being jealous. “I think he would.”
Suddenly, Claire seemed different to him. He wondered what might have happened if he hadn’t met Gail. Would Claire have worked up the courage to flirt with him? She was pretty. Would he have wound up with her instead of Gail? Would his life have been that drastically different?
The conversation went on. They sat and talked while time ticked by.
Ahead of him, in the present, the eighth seal came into view and he opened it. As he did so, a soft breeze pushed past him and he froze. Suddenly, he remembered something else that the Sentinel Queen said. She told him that she did not know how many of these seals were still intact. She said that the things in the forest were desperate to get out and that they would be trying to break them open.
He had forgotten about this, and now he wondered if he’d reached the last intact seal. After all, if the Sentinel Queen was telling the truth, these seals had been standing for many thousands of years. Perhaps longer.
He remembered the things in the Wood, the things that he had seen swarming the foundation of Gilbert House as he looked out into the darkness, things that looked like living corpses. If he’d already set foot in the Wood, then the precautions the Sentinel Queen told him about could very well be useless. After all, if he ignored the things in the tunnel, they could not harm him, but if he ignored the things in the Wood, he was sure that they would simply dismember him that much more quickly.
It was too late now. It was too late from the moment the Sentinel Queen closed the first seal. He had nowhere to go but forward. For better or worse, he was stuck with whatever awaited him.
He closed the eighth seal behind him and continued on into the darkness.
Chapter 10
He didn’t know how it happened. He honestly didn’t know. He was just sitting there, talking to her. He and Claire had moved on to different topics. They were talking about Branson when it happened. Branson. He could not remember how they’d gotten on the subject, but he was telling her about the last time he’d gone, about his father renting them a tube to play with out on one of the lakes. There was no prelude to it, nothing at all really. It just happened.
He never intended to do what he did. It never even crossed his mind until after he’d done it. One minute he was talking to Clair, to his own best friend’s girlfriend, and the next he was on top of her, tearing off her shorts.
He had sex with her. He did it right there on her parents’ couch in her living room, right in front of the bay window, betraying the two people who were closest to him for no reason at all.
She kissed me first! he would often tell himself. She started it! But it was a lie and he could not lie to himself, no matter how hard he tried.
She had kissed him first. In the middle of their conversation she leaned over and began kissing him, but he did not stop her. He kissed her back, and a moment later he put his hand on her breast, and soon after she was under him, her shirt and bra shoved up and her shorts and panties yanked down. He saw her breasts and the pretty red tuft of hair between her thighs and in a hazy moment when self control did not exist for him, he enjoyed her as he had enjoyed Gail so many times, thrusting himself into her as she lay there with her mouth half-open in a constant moan of ecstasy. For the rest of his life he would remember that orgasm, how he released himself into her without even a condom to protect them from the consequences. Even Gail had never let him do that.
When the moment passed, he looked down at her, realizing what he had done. He was mortified. He was ashamed. He was destroyed.
“Wow,” she said to him as he pulled away from her. “You’re bigger than Harvey.”
Wayne felt a fire starting in his guts. What had he done?
Claire seemed to realize that he was upset. She sat up and readjusted her bra. She pulled her shirt down, but she did not bother pulling up her shorts. “Are you okay?”
He shook his head as he pulled his pants back up.
“I won’t tell Harvey, if that’s what you’re worried about. Gail either.”
Somehow that made it worse. He could almost feel himself slipping into hell. He’d done a horrible thing, the worst thing he could imagine doing to anyone.
“I promise I won’t,” she insisted.
And she wouldn’t. As far as he knew, neither Harvey nor Gail ever found out about what they did that day. But Wayne knew. Wayne knew and it tore him apart inside.
“I should go,” Wayne said, standing up.
Gail stood up and pulled up her shorts. “Wait. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that, should I?”
“You shouldn’t have,” Wayne agreed as he walked toward the door.
“Wait.” She took him by the hand and made him turn to face her. “You’re not going to tell Harvey, are you?”
Wayne shook his head. “I wouldn’t know how.”
“Can we still go out for pizza tonight?”
“Sure.” Although Wayne was already wishing he never had to see Claire again.
“You can come back sometime,” she told him as he walked out the door. “I don’t mind.”
Wayne said nothing. He walked to his truck, climbed in and drove away. He’d done a terrible thing. He loved Gail. He loved her so much…and yet he’d done the most despicable thing a man could do to a woman.
He spent the rest of that day in what Gail would have called a “black mood,” sulking around, torturing himself, loathing himself. That evening, he would go with them all to Pizza Hut and he would eat a little bit of pizza. He claimed he was ill, that he must have eaten something that disagreed with him, and as far as he knew, only Claire had any idea otherwise. He never looked at her. He never saw the look in her eyes, but he did not have to. He could hear the way she talked. There was no remorse in her voice. There was no regret there. She talked and she laughed and she had a good time, as if she hadn’t done anything wrong, as if she hadn’t cheated on the man she claimed to love.
He never told Harvey what he did with his girlfriend. He never told Gail either. A few days later, he broke up with her, sent her crying hysterically into her house. She never knew why. He couldn’t bear to tell her that he’d cheated on her. He did not want her to know. But he could not live a lie, and so he let her go. As far as she ever knew, he had simply stopped loving her, but that was the farthest thing from the truth. It was because he loved her so much that he did what he did, because she deserved better than him. She deserved someone who would be true to her, and she deserved to live the rest of her life believing that no one had ever done her wrong the way he had.
For the next three years, he burned his bridges and cut his ties to that life he lived before his infidelity. He isolated himself not just from Gail and Harvey, but also from all the things that could connect him to them. Sam, Mark, Brent and Will were those things. He tried to live his life as though it had never happened, tried to start new, to forget that he ever went to Claire’s house that day. And after all that time, after isolating himself from not just his old friends but from the entire world, he might have actually forgotten that horrible thing he’d done…if Laura Swiff had not come into his life.
; He hated Laura. He hated her for being a slut. He hated her for targeting him. He hated her for being the kind of person that Claire had been, because before that week was over, he had learned to hate Claire as well. Claire just went right on living her life, even married the man she’d cheated on. It did not bother her that she’d been unfaithful. She had even invited Wayne back for more.
He’d often wondered how many times she’d done that to Harvey. How many other men must she have opened her legs for in order to walk away that day as if she’d done nothing wrong? How did she not hate herself the way he hated himself?
He was a terrible person. He was a no-good, lying, cheating bastard and he deserved the life he chose for himself, locked up in some small room all the time, pretending he did not mind that his arms were always empty and his heart was always broken. It was more than he deserved, really. The fact that he was allowed to breathe at all was almost a grave injustice.
He knew he was being hard on himself. There was no way to know how much of the population slept around. Other people did not lose sleep over it. But he wasn’t other people. He had never once even considered sleeping with anyone other than Gail. He loved her with all his heart, and the guilt he felt was excruciating. The point of the matter was that, by betraying the trust of someone so important to him, he wasn’t sure he could even trust himself.
Wayne continued on through the darkness, loathing himself and his life, hoping that somehow his pain would soon end.
Chapter 11
When he saw the ninth seal, Wayne realized that his earlier fear had been incorrect. At least one more was still intact. Like all the rest of the things he perceived in this tunnel, the breeze he felt when he opened the eighth seal had been nothing more than a phantom gust without an origin.
But he felt no real relief that the seal was still there or even that he’d passed another one. He felt on the brink of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. How many miles had he already walked? How many obstacles had he now overcome? How much anguish had he relived? It seemed like so long ago that he walked out of his apartment and set off on what he thought would amount to a brief and quiet walk. He had physically traveled a tremendous distance, even crossing into another world. Furthermore, he had also run through a lifetime of raw emotion.
He wondered if it was the road that had made him take that painful trip back down memory lane or if he had done it on his own, apparently deciding that he was long overdue for some emotional torture.
Perhaps it was neither he nor the road. Perhaps it was the Sentinel Queen, digging around in his mind like a horny teenager through a newly discovered stash of pornography. Maybe she was sitting in her empty city at this very moment, peering into him, looking for the things he kept buried the deepest, the sweetest fruit for the ultimate voyeur. She had already been in his head, after all, speaking to him from within his own brain because she had no mouth with which to speak. He could keep no secrets from someone with powers such as hers, and there was nothing to stop her from seeking them out. She was free to dredge up any memory she wished and torture him with it for as long as she pleased.
But then again, perhaps it was not like that at all. Perhaps she had done him a favor. Perhaps it was a good thing that he’d relived those awful memories. Though his self-loathing had been newly awakened, enveloping him in a black cloud of emotional despair, he realized that his fear had significantly subsided. Between the long walk and the agonizing tumble into his painful past, he had finally managed to clear his head a little. The result was that he suddenly found himself far more capable of handling this tunnel and the tricks it threw at him.
As he walked down the still-curving tunnel, things moved in the darkness ahead of and behind him, even over him, but he ignored them. Things whispered and spoke and even shouted, but he did not listen to them. Things touched him, from a gentle and eerily seductive caress to a sudden jab, but he barely felt them.
For a long time, he walked, ducking the occasional dangling root, but otherwise without distraction. He was no longer afraid of the things he perceived in this darkness.
The entire curve of the tunnel, stretching between the seventh and ninth seals, made a perfect, gentle arc that was about a mile in length and turned a full ninety degrees. Though he had no way of knowing it, by the time the tenth seal came into sight, he was no longer traveling west, but south.
But it was not the south of any compass he’d ever seen. He no longer shared the same latitudes and longitudes with the world in which he grew up. If he could travel straight up through the roof of this tunnel until he broke free of the dirt and rock, he would find not moonlight and stars shining down on a blue and green earth, but an eternal blackness swimming over a dark forest.
Up ahead, the tenth seal appeared and he passed through it with no more difficulty than he’d passed through the other nine.
Only four were left. It would not be long now.
Chapter 12
The road was full of tricks. It spoke to him. It called his name. It danced just beyond his vision. It slithered and scurried and hissed and whispered. It even touched him.
But this was new.
Wayne followed the beam of his flashlight, his eyes fixed firmly forward, his body trembling lightly, his heart pounding. With every ounce of will he could muster, he focused his eyes and ears forward, on nothing but the withdrawing darkness, trying not to notice the man who walked beside him.
He was an old man, with thick, white hair and a kindly face. He was bundled in a long, strange-looking coat with wide sleeves and a hood hanging at his back. It was a dark color, not quite black but almost. Brown, he thought, or maybe dark gray. It was difficult to tell by flashlight.
When Wayne first saw the old man, he was simply standing there in the darkness, waiting for him. As he had done with everything else down here, Wayne ignored him, hoping he would just go away. But as he passed, the old man began to walk beside him as though they were old friends. For several minutes now, he’d kept pace, occasionally turning his head and looking at him, but not speaking.
Wayne kept praying that the old man would not speak, but finally he did, and it was hard not to turn and meet those kind, blue eyes.
“You’re very good at this,” the old man said. “Very impressive. Eyes straight, attention focused. You know, not many people would be capable of the self-control you’re demonstrating right now. Most would’ve died here, as a matter of fact.”
Wayne said nothing.
“Amazing. Your faith in the old woman, the one your friend calls the ‘Sentinel Queen,’ is astounding. Especially considering you don’t know anything about her or her kind. Don’t you have any doubts? For that matter, don’t you doubt any of those people you came here with? You don’t know them. They’re strangers.”
Wayne kept his mouth closed. It was true that he did not know Albert or Brandy or Nicole. He did not even know what the Sentinel Queen was, but he did have faith in them, and this man, or whatever he was, was not going to rock that faith. Like it or not, he was in a situation where he needed them, and if they were all out to get him, then there was already nothing he could do about it.
Although he did not look at the old man, Wayne thought that he was smiling.
“But I can say anything I want right now, and you won’t budge, will you? Because I may be real and I may not be, but as long as you look straight ahead and ignore what I say, I can’t hurt you.” He leaned toward him and actually whispered in his ear, “Unless I am real.”
Wayne almost shuddered at this. The old man’s breath was warm in his ear.
“If I am real, then I could slide a hunting knife in your kidney and you’d be helpless to stop me.”
Wayne kept walking. He did not look. He did not speak. He refused to even run.
“But I’m not here to kill you, Wayne. I’m not here to hurt you. I’m not here to slow you down or put you on the wrong path. I’m here because the last two seals are broken, and you can’t survive past the twelfth
seal without my help.” He reached out and took Wayne by the arm. He actually turned him and forced him to look into his face. “I am real, Wayne. As real as you. I bleed, I eat, I thirst. And you don’t have time to determine for yourself whether to believe me or not.”
Wayne stared at the old man. He’d been grabbed. Nothing else in this tunnel had been capable of physically altering his course. That went against the rules. It was impossible to ignore.
“Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?” The old man’s eyes were pale blue, gleaming like jewels in his soft face. He was stern, as solid as the stone sentinels in the Temple of the Blind, but he appeared desperate. “Do you know what the Wood is? The few people who have ever seen it with their own eyes and returned to tell about it call it the place where the already damned are damned again. The things that walk in that forest aren’t alive, Wayne. They’re not dead either. I’m not talking about vampires or zombies or any of that Hollywood bullshit. I’m talking about things caught so far between life and death that they no longer possess a concept of either. They exist in a physical and psychological hell that you can not possibly imagine, one that can never end because death, real death, is a myth to them. It doesn’t exist. Hurl something alive into that world and it’ll draw them like moths to a porch light. Even the fading embers of a passed life, the smallest insect squashed a week ago, dropped into their world, would send them into a desperate frenzy, like sharks to blood. If they find something even recently alive, they’ll tear it apart, piece by piece, searching for whatever it is that reminds them of distant memories of the lives they once had, of places where they didn’t suffer.”
“Who are you?” Wayne asked, too rattled by the old man’s words to even pretend to ignore him any longer.
“Who I am doesn’t matter, Wayne. Listen to me and listen very carefully. That woman, your ‘Sentinel Queen,’ lied to you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on, we can’t linger here.”
