Curse: The end has only just begun

by Rich Hayden

  The footing was difficult, and given the limitations of crippled legs, he struggled to navigate the shipwrecked condition of the stone. As he carried on, Amil finally lost his balance and fell to the ground. Bereft of the assistance of his cane, he wallowed amongst this menagerie of brittle rock with only the sounds of his own weeping for company. Consumed by physical agony, and suffering a deeper pain within his mind, Amil rose again. He ventured forth, but still, he was without the slightest idea as to why, and, quite specifically, he was also without the will to do so. It was as though he was being dragged along the road and toward the only thing left in this decayed perversion of reality.

  A silhouette of a tremendous mansion loomed on the horizon and conquered Amil’s vision. The structure was so massive, it appeared to have no end, as it stretched from one side of the world to the other, and rose deep into the dark envelopment of the sky. Too far away to gain any details of this object, it looked to be nothing more than a swathe of emptiness, a black mass that lay over the land. Or was it simply a hole, a rip in the fabric of eternity into which every description of life is sucked away and devoured? This felt entirely possible, as the realm continued to be as lifeless and desolate as it had been out in the field.

  Not far from where he stood, a fountain rose from the exhausted road and finally offered Amil a landmark to help him set his bearings. It looked to have been built from granite, but even this magnificent stone lay weathered and scraped. Cracks wove their way around the robust creation, and water surely hadn’t sprung from the top in what had to have been centuries. There was, however, a collection of fluid that filled the fountain’s reservoir. It was of a midnight hue, and it supported a layer of filth that floated upon the surface like the dead sent adrift from an island swallowed up by the sea.

  As he staggered forward, Amil discovered that he was not alone. A woman, wrapped in a dress as black as the opaque skin of the mansion, sat beside the diseased pool and ran her fingers through the stagnant liquid. She had her back to him, the mane of her white hair obscuring her face. Fear forced him to slow his walk, but still, he drew near to the figure, even as he felt a great desire to flee from her. Amil knew that he could not run. He could not escape. After all, not even the finality of suicide could spare him from the memories that haunted him still.

  He stood on the other side of the spring, but the ominous woman made not a motion. She knew he was there, Amil was sure of that. As sure as he felt the exit wound in the back of his head, he knew she was fully aware of his presence. As his damaged legs were spent, he slunk to his knees and braced himself up on the bench that encircled the fountain. Momentarily halted by hesitation, but without much care for a life that he was certain was no longer his, he dipped his fingers into the water.

  The fluid was thick and it burned the flesh of his hand as it crawled up his fingers to the third knuckle. A powerful sensation of nausea filled his gut, and his mind felt like it was split in two by the most violent onslaught of a migraine headache. He cracked his head off the hard ground as he was forced from the bench by the pain that filled his skull. A temporary blindness swept over his sight, and with a feeling that he could not describe, Amil felt precisely the power of death. He was absorbed into its emptiness, only to be spat back out into this shattered rendition of existence. Tremors shook him and then ebbed away. After the shudders withdrew, and with this paradox of a sensation lifting from him, Amil again pulled himself to his feet. He rubbed his eyes and tried in vain to massage the spears out of his temples. The affliction he suffered bored deep within and wound its laces around his nerves, as if to pledge certainty to the lingering effects of the discomforts to come.

  “Wh...wh...where am I?” asked Amil to the still figure, with speech more labored than usual due to the bullet hole through the roof of his mouth.

  As she turned to him, her face was devoid of eyes. Her sockets were empty chasms that revealed only blackness. Her jaw line was sharp, and her cheekbones were set high. Her lips were full, although heavily cracked, and lines of age slept near the corners of her mouth. He retained no memory of the moment when she plucked his spirit from his body, but as she looked at him beyond the arch of her white locks, Amil knew that she was the one responsible for his current and hollow condition.

  “Please...just tell me...wh...where is...is this Hell?”

  “There is no Hell,” she calmly whispered. “And there is no Heaven, either.”

  “Then...wh...what is this place?”

  “This is just the next step.”

  “Are you...Death?” he questioned.

  “I was called Aphelianna, but that was a long time ago.”

  “But...you took me from the earth...didn’t...you? I don’t understand.”

  “Nor should you,” her response was whispered, but agitation coated her words.

  “Wh...what am I...supposed to do here,” he asked meekly, in irritation and fright.

  “Make your way to the mansion. There you will find your place.”

  “Is that...wh...where we all go...wh...when we die?” asked Amil.

  “Your concept of death is inaccurate, but it is indeed where most of those who have passed from the earth now dwell.”

  “Wh..what do you mean...most of us?”

  “Enough questions!” she snapped at him. “I have work to do.”

  Amil witnessed as her empty vision swept beyond his form and set itself upon the field outside the gate. He, too, looked toward that barren expanse, and what he saw filled his face with dread and forced him onto his knees in morbid appreciation for the magnitude of ruin that was displayed. He was the only soul upon the plain a short while ago, or so it seemed, but it returned to his vision utterly polluted with thousands, perhaps millions, of the dead.

  They stood tightly alongside one another in a lethargic mass that seemed to float somewhere between an abyssic sleep and a fragile daydream of torturous proportions. A common groan filled the air, and they inched closer with every twitch of their awkward movements. Many of them appeared quite old, but there was a great collection of young ones too. There were throngs of the disabled and the dismembered. There were infants, and soldiers still dressed in maimed battle gear. There were people bald and thinned from cancer, and there were those who carried the undeniable signs of drug addiction and disease. Some had common wounds, while the tales of battles lost to various maladies stitched themselves across the mass like a cruel puzzle. Among all the horror and torment, Amil viewed those who appeared healthy and somewhat vibrant, even under the dim glare of the sky. He shivered as it became stridently clear that the condition in which the body left the earth was one and the same with the composition of the spirit in this unlife.

  “Have...you brought them all here?” he wondered aloud, not really to Aphelianna.

  “Yes. While we were speaking.”

  Aphelianna then walked over to Amil and wrapped her fingers around the back of his neck. Her touch was colder than the most ferocious of winter winds. His skin cracked and twisted as it suffered the distressing effects of immediate frostbite. She lowered her face to his, and as her locks cascaded over his cheek like an avalanche, they rubbed his skin with the grace of a corroded file.

  “Forget what you know of time and leave me be, for more of your disgusting kind need my guidance,” she whispered into his ear. The vibrations that left her tongue were so sharp, it cost Amil the hearing on the left side of his head.

  Aphelianna was not like him. Not human. He came to realize that she was not of human beings either, and probably had little in common with anything in his understanding of the ethereal, as well. He sensed as a fierce disdain for human life bled from her, but still, he resisted her decree, and took not a step toward the mansion.

  “...wh...what...will...you do...with them?”

  “You may think that you have died, but believe me, you cannot fathom the horror of what it means to die in this place,” she warned. “Now go, through the orchard and to the mansion, but do not stray off the
path, lest the Spirit Ripper add you to his collection.”

  Being as though he had already died, Amil had felt no fear of the ordinary concept of death, or of death as he understood it. But as Aphelianna threatened a new demise, Amil was practically crippled with hesitation, and dreaded to learn what a spirit ripper truly was. He watched as she walked away from him and toward the gate, no doubt to harvest another soul from the bitten soil of the field. As difficult as it was to do much of anything, he turned his back to Aphelianna. His curiosity for her was smothered by the fear her presence commanded, and so, with only the trepidation for things to come by his side, Amil continued down the road toward the twisted orchard in the distance.

  Part 3. The crucifixion orchard

  Perhaps in another time, in another rendition of existence, this orchard was once beautiful, and swollen with fruit and all the colors of life. If such tranquility ever did indeed grace the orchard, all its favors seemed to have died off an eternity before. Ruin was all that remained. As Amil approached the entrance to the orchard, he looked to the trees and how they made a natural border around the grove. They were sewn together by unchecked growth, and the branches spread themselves out, naked and thin. They looked like talons that surely had their hollows flooded with poison, and, as they swayed in the air, they seemed primed to ensnare the weary. The crumbling road beneath his feet fully dissolved, leaving an assortment of narrow pathways that crawled on into the darkness. The trails were muddy, and caked with dank heaps of decomposition, as the breath of wind had conceivably not carried through the trees since the inception of eternity.

  As he gave himself to the orchard, Amil saw that every tree was black, and not one of the sickened branches held a single leaf. The trunks were rotted and split, as though they once bore entire hordes of abominations. Their roots rippled the ground as they popped up from the soil, starved to fragility by a lack of nutrients. Entwined with one another and sharing a common decay, they seemed to be minions of the Spirit Ripper.

  Amil trod carefully and tried not to make a sound. He attempted to peer through the lines of tress and into the shadows that they held, but the scenery was much too dark. As he walked in silence past each twisted tree, his faulty gaze swept from left to right in pursuit of something that he could not even describe. During his passage down the crowded rows, he was snagged time and again by skinny branches that hung low and extended their withered fingers out toward him. Their touch felt sinister, and, in one particular instance, their malevolent caress caused him to gasp. In was only a mild effusion of air, but his startled exhalation called down a calamity which murdered the quiet and filled the orchard with a din.

  Launched from the tops of every tree like an explosion, a murder of crows took to the sky. Their wings beat the air and their cries alerted the master of the grove to the intruder, and the location of his delicate trespass. At first, this frenzied flight obscured what little light there was to be found, but once they had dispersed into the sky, the land around Amil began to brighten. He had been unaware of them as they sat still, but once the birds had taken off, it was clear that their collective mass had been chiefly responsible for the near blackness that hung over the orchard. A new light descended from the sky, a pale and dim resonance. It illuminated a vile perversion of existence and the repulsive condition of the Spirit Ripper’s hobby.

  Nearly every tree within the interminable grove was decorated by human corpses. Most were women, fastened high off the ground to the prickly bark by all manner of restraint. Some were bound by wrappings of chain, others by wire and tattered cloth. There were those who were tethered by the twisted branches themselves, while smatterings of others were held in place by the knotted entwinement of their own hair. More yet were spiked into the wood with rusted nails, whose placement was as cruel as it was numerous. Some of the women were wrapped in rags and the frayed remnants of the clothing they were captured in, while many hung naked, vulnerable, and bearing the scars of the crows’ affections.

  Amil glanced around in a stunned absence of speech. He wished to be free of this vision, but his eyes remained wide with dread as they absorbed the despaired description of every sorrowed face. As in the fields, there were old women no younger than his grandmother, and there were girls on the boundary of their teenage years. With no fight left in him, Amil fell to his knees under the weight of the collective sadness that swirled among the trees. He grew unconcerned for the whereabouts of the Spirit Ripper. The realization that such an abominable place could actually exist robbed his mind of all thought beyond that of absolute disdain for the world he now knew.

  “He won’t hurt you, he only collects women,” a thin voice offered.

  Although the words were carried upon the same stale air that he sucked into his lungs, the sound of another human voice smashed into Amil with the force of a freight train. The soft utterance threw him backwards, and into mud that pooled near the stump of a forgotten tree. He scurried backwards like a trapped animal. He shook, as one does, while under the affliction of a great fever, although he knew better than to assume that his blood was still warm, or that it even moved through his veins.

  “...you’re alive?” he asked in disbelief as he stared up to the source of the words.

  “In a way, yes I am. We all are,” the woman plainly stated as she swept her eyes across the common fustigation of her sisters.

  She wore the signatures of middle age and of difficult years. Her frame was thin, and her drab blonde hair hung before her face as she spoke. It looked as though she were once dressed in heavy layers of a gray material, but all that remained were dry strips of ragged cloth. Amil could see no mortal wound on her form, and she didn’t appear to house any of the telltale signs of a virulent disease. In fact, she almost looked healthy.

  “Wh...what happened to...you?” asked Amil.

  “I didn’t make it inside, same as the others. I can’t imagine it matters. I doubt a fate any better than this would have awaited me had I made it through the orchard.”

  “How long...have...you been here?”

  “There’s no way to measure time here. The sun never arrives and it never sets. The seasons do not change and the wind doesn’t blow. I truly do not know.”

  “This can’t be...real,” he whispered.

  “No! Stop, stay away from me!” she frantically screamed, as Amil rose from the ground and advanced toward her. “Don’t come any closer. He’s watching. If he thinks that I’ve asked you for help, he’ll kill me.”

  “I...I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve seen what it means to die here. Please, just don’t come any closer. I would rather hang from this tree for eternity than be put to death here.”

  As he backed away, Amil shuddered. What could possibly be so wretched that in order to avoid it, one would voluntarily subject themselves to perpetuity as a crucified revenant? He was utterly vexed, and then he recalled her warning: the Spirit Ripper was watching.

  In the light offered by the vacancy of the crows, Amil witnessed a being as it darted between the trees like a sewing needle that disappears and then resurfaces in rapid succession. Whatever it was, it certainly was not of the earth. More surprising, it was also not the imposing beast that he had expected. As it drew closer to him and his frightened acquaintance, the creature slowed its zigzag advance, and Amil was able to discern the finer points of its curious features.

  Behind a tree it hid, hesitant, shy, almost. It was short in stature and weighed no more than one hundred pounds. The Spirit Ripper’s body had a complexion of soiled yellow. It was a hairless beast, and naked at that, although its strange anatomy bore confusion over which parts could be considered obscene. It stood upon two legs, which appeared to have duel sets of knee joints that allowed the appendages to bend in multiple directions. Tentacles sprouted from its thighs, and they felt around the ground and swam through the air, as though searching for something as the creature remained still. At its groin, where some description of genitals should have been hous
ed, nothing more than three narrow slits were found, which ran parallel to each other in a horizontal direction. The skin upon its chest seemed to be under the assault of some manner of wicked pestilence, as puckered lesions were scattered across the flesh. They were raised and reddened around the rims, with the residue of dried pus smeared over their mouths. But for as hideous as the chest was, the condition of the Spirit Ripper’s stomach was a far worse sight to comprehend.

  A cavity was crudely cut out of the beast’s mid-section, and this wound provided a view to the land which lay behind it. The skin around the carving was wet with some variety of blood, as if the hole had lost the ability to heal itself. If the Spirit Ripper did possess some manner of innards, they were absent from the injury. Nothing but the stagnant flavor of the air passed through the hollow. The tortured specifics of the creature’s torso should have garnered the most stares from Amil’s eyes, but it was the arms of the Spirit Ripper that drew the bulk of his attention.

  They were long, possibly ten feet in length, if not more. They wrapped themselves twice around the tree and were fixed tightly into the wood by means of the fingernails. Each hand held the normal distribution of five fingers, but countless jagged nails grew in all directions from the tips, the knuckles, and the bases alike. These chipped knives clacked off one another and added a poisoned medley of sound to the aether with every small movement of their master. As the coarse nails collided, the dull sounds produced reassured Amil with every ominous scrape that he could be filleted like the helpless piece of meat that he was.

  For as perversely complex as the body of this beast was, its head was unsettling in its simple construction. Bald, like the rest of the creature, its shape was common, but almost totally starved of features. It was without a mouth. The nose and ears were absent. There weren’t even any bumps or wrinkles upon the face. There was one massive eye placed at the direct center of the jaundiced sphere. It was horribly bloodshot, and the black ball at the center never seemed to tire as the Spirit Ripper constantly scanned his surroundings.