Curse: The end has only just begun

by Rich Hayden

  “Alright, go on,” whispered Amil.

  No response came, and soon it was quite clear that Amil’s exhausted companion had passed out.

  “Hey! Wake up, wake the fuck up!” Amil commanded as he grabbed a handful of the strings and jerked them violently.

  “Why? Why do you hurt me?” the musician meekly asked.

  “Please, tell me what to do next,” Amil begged.

  “Okay, yes. Very well. Forgive me, I strain to remember most things these days. Now where was I? The door, of course. Take that door, you will find yourself in another hall, much the same as the last. All you must do to locate the proper door here, is to listen to my bells. In the very instant that you can no longer hear my children scream, you will know which door to take.”

  For the first time, the carillon player lifted his dry eyes to Amil. Among the call of high-pitched bells, he straightened one of the bony fingers that hung from a hand beset with pins, and pointed it sharply at the deceased human before him.

  “Now,” the musician began. “You must run. It will be immediately clear as to why. Never hesitate, not for a second, even though it is all you will want to do. Ignore all your emotions, and run.”

  “What am I running from?”

  “That is for you to discover, but as I said before, you must never stop. If you pause for one moment, your key will be lost, and Aphelianna’s influence over you will be lifted. A Waste’s fate you will have. If you can refuse your inner voice, and you manage to reach the last door left to take, simply use your key again and you will find my friend.”

  “Who is he?” Amil asked, with a fresh slick of sweat on his face.

  “He’s an artist of sorts, although his masterpiece has long since been broken. He will help you, he...he will help.”

  A mild offering of drool collected inside the mouth of the feckless god, and, as he faded from consciousness, a band of the heavy saliva fell from his cracked lips. His eyes closed, and into a restless sleep he fell, as the mourning cry of the bells continued to sound. As the musician hung still among that framework of iron and stitching of sinew, Amil was witness to a vision of absolute agony and unrelenting pain. It was a sentence that no being, divine or common, should ever be made to serve.

  Much like the young couple that he had met in the auditorium, Amil simply turned and walked away. Once he had cleared the boundary of the arena, the familiar landscape of the courtyard resumed. The rain persisted as he traversed the undulation of the sleepy hills, but among the rather pleasant environment of artistic sculpture and tended coves, he barely minded the cold licks of the rain. It didn’t take long before a door was spotted, but, off in the far distance, was another. He remembered the words of his weary friend, and continued further into the unknown.

  As he stepped past a door that stood strident and connected to nothing that human senses could detect, Amil cast not a thought to its impossible nature. Rather, he simply wondered where it went. Even if he never found Isadora, it was certain that he would fail to see what lay on the other side of every door encountered. Could that door hold the secrets of the fabled Eternal City, or would it greedily take a turn of his key, and then coldly place him on the opposite side of its threshold? Maybe it held a treasure so splendid he would be made to forsake his quest to spare Ali from the Spirit Ripper. It was a notion he was pained to entertain, but it was plausible all the same. For nothing seemed beyond the reach of cruel possibility within Aphelianna’s house. Amil’s mind was stalked by the reality that Isadora herself was waiting on the other side of the door. Perhaps the carillon player was seeking to send him astray, and he was voluntarily passing by his one chance to meet the only being that could save Ali. These were thoughts that would only serve to undo him, and, so, with a refocused determination, he put his faith in the words of the musician, and kept walking.

  Amil walked, the rain fell, and doors arrived. In sets of twos, threes, and bunches, they were all put behind him. He started to think that he may never find a lone door, but all at once, the rain remained nestled in the clouds and the sky cleared to allow fresh rays of light to illuminate the way forward. One door, removed from the sight of all the others, had been placed on a hill. Its outline sparkled with a slick of rain that reflected the new light of an eternal day.

  Amil set his hand on the knob and grew thankful that a use of his key would be spared. But before he flung the door open and stepped within its shadowy embrace, he scanned the world about him. He strained his eyes to the limit of their function, and diligently searched for another door. Close to half an hour was spent with his sweaty palm upon that rounded piece of glass before he was content to give it a full turn. Once convinced that he had, indeed, found the correct path, he drew a deep breath, and opened the door.

  As promised, a dismal and poorly lit hallway greeted him with the compassionate kiss of a sledgehammer’s blow. The hall itself supported a low ceiling, and was no more than five feet wide. The pathway was lined with doors on one side of the stretch for as far as the eye could see. To his left ran an unending stream of repetition, and to his right, a perfect reprise. Amil turned to his right, as instructed, and set about the daunting task of finding the 3947th passage.

  “One...two...three...” he muttered, as he pressed his fingers to each door that he passed.

  Once he arrived at the 100th door, Amil tore a small scrap of material from his pant leg and stuffed it into the one back pocket that he still had. He repeated this action, with some measure of ease, nine more times, and then paused to count his ribbons.

  To his relief, he had ten strips of fabric and their sum equaled one thousand. As he kept his legs firmly planted, Amil looked down the hall and realized that if he were to lose count, all hope would be lost. Each door didn’t merely resemble its mates. They were exact replicas. He tried to chase from his mind the thoughts of what may lurk behind or what he might come to face, as he knew that such distractions would only cause him to lose count. Once had given a moment to these terrifying realities, and then another to set them down for the time being, he carefully slipped the scraps back into his pocket and set off in the pursuit of another thousand doors.

  One...two...three, as he went.

  Although his skin held the gleam of a nervous sweat, Amil felt good about his progress, and didn’t stop for rest once he had cleared the 3000 mark. With a mild joy, he tapped his fingers as he went along, with the knowledge that the first leg of his strange saunter was almost complete. Then he heard something, the unmistakable voice of a door as it swings upon the rusted body of a hinge long dried.

  “3178, 3178, 3178,” he repeated, over and over to himself, as his heart thundered in his chest.

  He heard footsteps, and in a motion that he felt damned in doing, he turned around. A hooded figure, some distance away, stood as still as Amil. He continued to utter the clumsy number under his breath, watching in fright as the being slowly began to advance toward him. It appeared vulnerable, and every bit as apprehensive as he, but this fact did little to ease his tensions, for any amount of disturbance would certainly dash his chance at finding the proper door.

  “Stay away from me!” he shouted, frantically.

  The figure stopped, and then shouted something back in a language that Amil was unable to pin down. A sliver of light washed over the stranger and revealed the being as a young woman. Ringlets of scarlet hair danced from the hood she wore, and her green eyes became enraged as she continued to harshly chide Amil. In a desperate move, he pressed his index finger to his lips and then pointed at the doors. She seemed to decode his message, as she stopped her rant, but resumed her march toward him.

  As she drew closer, Amil noticed that she, too, was tapping her fingers against the dull wood of the doors. She was counting, too, and he had nearly broken her concentration. He silently acknowledged his outburst as an act worth cussing out, and then turned away from the girl. He caught a glimpse of her eyes as he removed his attention from her, and gave a thought as to where she came fr
om and to where she was headed. He started to wonder if she had a key, as well, or if this fiery woman was simply looking for a safe place to rest. He thought of how long she might have been lost inside Aphelianna’s house, or, for that matter, inside the very hallway that they shared.

  As difficult as it was to do, he reminded himself of his number and resumed his walk down the passage. The hard footsteps behind him and the clack of her long nails were unnerving, but Amil did his best to ignore her and the elaborate monsters that his imagination fashioned from the sounds at his back.

  Sweat dripped from his fingers as he poked them against the peeled paint of the wood, and his hair had been slicked to his face from the outpouring of perspiration. His nerves were rubbed raw and his dead heart felt poised to rupture with every violent beat. He could barely contain the fears that tore at him, the possibilities of what truly lingered behind. His eyes began to cloud and his brain was losing its capacity for simple math. As he smacked his fist off door 3947, he spun around to again greet his pursuer.

  Salty water was tossed off his head and his eyes were wild and red. His limbs shook and his chest heaved with the power of an earthly fault line. His teeth chattered together and his fists balled into weapons so tight that his nails dug fresh wounds into his palms, but the beasts his mind had conjured up were not to be found. The angered girl with striking features had not morphed into some amalgamation of feverish scourge or a hell-flung servant of wickedness. In fact, she was not there at all.

  She must have wandered off some time ago. In his terror, Amil had simply failed to notice. He stood with his palms to the door for a moment, and allowed the sweat to fall from his body. He devoured the stale air of the hall and calmed his tremors to the best of his ability. Amil allowed his head to softly collide with the outside of the barrier he had so doggedly sought, and gave in to his suffering. His face became twisted by pain, the marks of a man defeated stretched across his look. He permitted the sounds of his distress to fill the hallway, and, with only the faculty of blurry sight, he slid his key into the door’s slot and pushed onward.

  On the other side, absolutely nothing had fallen under the axe of change. This hall was as dark and lined with as many doors as the last. It owned the same stale stink, and a low ceiling of cracked plaster. As he cast his eyes fore and aft within the long hall, Amil realized that the carillon player had never extended him the courtesy of a direction in which to go. He felt the first ticks of a panic attack grip his being at this remembrance, but, as he started to shake, the weeping of the bells could be heard.

  He had placed so much concentration on counting that in the last hall, his ears had failed to absorb a single note of the carillon’s song. But in here, he heard it all too clearly, and with a perfection that called a fresh offering of water into his eyes. The sounding of the bells came slowly, like a dirge, and their anguished vibrations could be sensed for far longer than Amil felt equipped to handle. But he acutely listened. He was without choice, if he were to ever locate the proper path.

  In the chimes, Amil heard the ghostly voices of deceased beings as they had been grotesquely recycled into a cacophony of grief. He was made to listen to the cries of the carillon master’s family, and suffered along with their eternal plight. He walked among the tolling sounds of genocide, and distinctly heard the mournful sobbing that only children can produce. Their cries were impossible to ignore, so much so that he knew the cursed musician did more than relay the annihilation of his family. He was forced to forever relive it. Trapped within the battered bronze of the bells were the razed souls of those once alive, left only to weep for their own extinction.

  As he stepped softly in time with the bells, Amil began to notice that the further he trod, the meeker the call of the instruments. He kept his ears tuned to the fade of each knell, and with a few hundred doors set behind him, the strikes came with greater irregularity. As the song slowly crawled toward its death, its cries were hushed into a whisper so faint it caused Amil to question the reliability of his senses. He mistook the dull ring that occupied the inner spaces of his ears for that of a sound produced from one of the shyer bells as their voices became entwined with the thin air. But for all the tricks that his mind dealt him, there was always that deep groan of cast bronze that reassured him that the long walk was not yet at an end.

  It became a truly maddening task, a torturous exercise that was ludicrous in its simplicity. All he had to do was to listen and wait. But this felt like an order much too tall to fill, as just when he thought it was over, another toll would sound. After each quiet note, he would stand in silence and stillness with a growing impatience, as the duration between each lick widened from minutes to nearly an hour. But still, Amil waited and he walked. He marched on and began to wish for the fate of Sisyphus, as the ancient Greek’s punishment would seem a reward of reprieve from this hopeless stroll.

  Lesser men, and those not beset with a terrible stubbornness, would have given up. Most would have exited the hall after an hour or two had elapsed without the wretched accompaniment of one of those bells, but not Amil. He remained, and waited in a racked state of lethargic insanity for the sound that he knew would come. And every time it did, a piece of his spirit was wrung out, left to die upon the air with the dissipation of each phantom call.

  But then it happened, when he had no more left to give and all that was required to hold him upright was nearly gone, the absence of sound that he sought finally arrived. It was a silence colder than death, as all things associated with noise shut their mouths and fled from the hallway. Amil could hear not a sound, the rustling of his clothes, his knuckles as they cracked, nor the voice of one single bell. Only nothingness remained, and it hugged him tightly.

  He swayed before the door that he knew was his with his mouth agape and an exhausted look stretched across his face. His eyes wandered between cloudy and glazed, and every muscle in his body felt like it was constructed out of a crude concoction of gravel and slush. He formed his fingers around the knob and slid his key into place. That’s when Amil remembered his next command. Run.

  RUN! RUN! RUN! RUN?

  If there was one act that Amil felt wholly incapable of performing, it was the act of running. He was sapped of all strength and stripped of any chance to reach the next door by way of the miserable task that he had sluggishly bested. As saliva collected inside his lower lip, he acknowledged the death of hope, but grieved not a moment for its passing. He pressed his foot up against the door, and flung it wide.

  A second had been dissected and split into one billion equal fragments. The paltry sum of one of these nano-ticks was all the time that was necessary for Amil to realize that he indeed must make great haste.

  He stood upon the first rickety plank of a narrow bridge, formed from rotted wood and dried rope. It swayed in a tired unease, and the center owned a sickly dip, like that of a distended stomach. At one end, it was supported by the threshold of the door at Amil’s back, and at the other was his destination and only means of escape. As the bridge hung thousands of feet above a mighty chasm, a world of fire and utter desolation fell to pieces around its moribund form.

  It was stridently clear that Amil had arrived in time to witness the violent apocalypse of a foreign land. The mountains around him exploded and rained rock down upon the burning forest below. Birds dropped from the acidic sky like winged anvils, and the clouds pissed icicles that sliced at the ropes of the bridge as they fell. The river under him swelled and raged. It frothed with sticky black waves, and rose rapidly toward the decayed span.

  In a full sprint, he could barely hear as the boards cracked and fell away under the assault of his gait, for the discordant song of destruction was so loud and omnipresent. He kept his focus upon that far-off door, and shielded his head from the falling debris and rocky shrapnel. Fresh expanses were opened in the floor of the bridge as the stone that shot from the sky removed entire chunks of the wooden surface. He jumped the gaps, which bred like savages beset with a wild nymph
omania, and tried his best to maintain his balance as the bridge trembled and shed strands of the rope that sewed it together. Lightning joined in the race, and as its fingers touched the wood, they ignited the brittle structure and pressured Amil to quicken his pace.

  He descended toward the center, and as he approached the sag and the rapid increase of the river below, his will was bolstered by the fact that he had nearly reached the middle. But once his nervous feet scuttled over the lowest point of the bridge, he was poisonously treated to the true misery that the fury around him had thus far obscured.

  The water lapped at the undersides of the boards, and Amil’s skin was made wet as the waves crashed around him and peppered him with their spit. In the embrace of the river were those he once knew. Hundreds of people, everyone he had ever come in contact with, now struggled to keep themselves above the rise of the water. He heard their screams, and winced as their gurgles choked out any empty air that remained.

  Amil squeezed his eyes shut tight and kept on running. As he started to ascend the second half of the withered span, his calves began to burn. An inferno of guilt was aroused within him as he ignored the many pleas for help. He knew it was all an illusion, a trick to enslave him. But as he clearly heard the voices of those he used to know so well it tore at Amil not to give them a moment’s recognition. He listened to the frantic voice of his grandmother, and then he absorbed the silence of her demise. All of those who shaped every memory, pleasant or painful, that he once had, drowned below the bridge. As he fled, he tried to convince himself that those below would not become Wastes. He reasoned that some of them still walked the earth. But he never succeeded in accepting this notion wholly, and, in a testament to his selfishness, he continued to stomp over his fellow man and the outstretched arms of the forsaken.

  The god who was strapped into that disgusting instrument had once warned Amil that he would want to stop, that it was all that he would want to do, and the afflicted musician was cruelly correct. As Ali’s voice came through the din, she begged him to save her. He had prepared himself for this torturous moment, but it made the disregarding of her voice no easier. He told himself that this was all in a greater effort to save Ali, but as water filled her mouth and muffled her screams, Amil nearly cracked. He wanted to cast himself into the water. At least then he could embrace her. He could feel the touch of her skin once more, and look into her eyes. They could exchange their vows of love, and, though it would be the end, they would drown together, and sink hand in hand into the nevermore.