But he knew it wasn’t true because, unlike with a nightmare, he didn’t want to wake up. His eyes opened with hesitancy beneath the protests of his mind, which was wrapped in fear, synapses firing off random, disjointed sensory perceptions of his surroundings: a screeching owl, a howling wind, burning palms and the eerie laughter of a child in the distance.
He was on a wet shore, lying among some reeds next to a black lake beneath a gray sky tinged with red. The place seemed to be a real, physical space and yet not, as if it were half-alive and half-dead, but fully wicked.
He saw the man with the lantern instantly, standing a good five feet offshore, the water up to his shins. He was wearing a black trench coat and black pants, black gloves and a black top hat that was partially crushed. His face and head were wrapped in black rags, with no discernable eye slits, nor a hole for a mouth.
With his left arm extended slightly out to one side, he held a square lantern, maybe sixteen inches tall, with a brass frame and lid, his gloved fingers wrapped tightly around a silver handle that allowed the lantern to dangle below it and swing, ever so gently, in the warm wind.
Kyle waited for his fear to morph into terror, but it didn’t. His mind seemed to be keeping busy matching the non-matches around him. Why were his eyes telling him the lantern was swinging only gently when his ears were telling him there was a howling wind? Why couldn’t he feel that wind on himself, but see it moving the lantern and some blood-red leaves on the ground? Why did his chest and the cheek he had rested in the soil feel wet while his back felt hot? And why wasn’t this… thing… looking around for that damned laughing child, like Kyle was?
Damned.
The word stuck in his mind a little too long, like lint on the turntable of an old record player, jamming the needle of his consciousness.
This place was damned. That’s right. He was in hell, wasn’t he? So it only made sense that what stood before him was a demon, and that the laughing child was here for a reason too. A child in hell? He wasn’t prepared for that, and the thought of it was too much, so he pushed it away.
Kyle forced himself to push up from the soil but collapsed again, letting out a small grunt.
“Rest.” The voice was deep and soothing. Like everything else in this place, The Lantern Man’s voice did not match his image.
Kyle tried to reply, but his mouth wasn’t cooperating. In fact, half of his face was numb from the wet soil. His eyes were growing heavy again, but he fought off the urge to go back to sleep. This was not a place you wanted to be asleep in, at least not if you wanted to ever wake up again.
“Don’t worry. I will protect you.”
Kyle was wary. How could this thing, which looked so ominous, be offering to protect him? The words bounced between the two of them briefly and then echoed off into the cloudless sky.
With great effort Kyle managed to speak, his jaw popping at the hinges. “What is this… ?”
The Lantern Man stood motionless for a moment and then turned his head away. “Questions. It’s always the same with the questions.”
“What are you talking—”
“You know where you are. You know what this place is. You just don’t want to admit it.”
Kyle felt his insides give way to his emotions. He didn’t want to believe any of this was happening or that any of it was real, but the reality of what had up to this point been a fictitious place—a “maybe” kinda place on his best Sunday—was creeping up on him.
So much so that even though there was no Satan running around with a pitchfork and no land of burning fire and unbearable heat, there was no doubt in Kyle’s mind that both were real and both would be coming along soon enough. But, for now, for some reason, he was stuck here.
“You aren’t stuck. You’ve arrived, and you’re now being prepared.”
“Prepared?”
“Yes. This is The Lake of Loneliness,” The Lantern Man said with a nod as he waved his free hand across the shoreline. “This is where you’re meant to sit, for as long as it takes, before your mind snaps.”
“Snaps?” Kyle managed the word in the barest of whispers.
“Yes… from loneliness. A uniquely human trait, meant to make you seek your Maker and the company that He promises.”
Kyle noticed the wind was gone and in its place now was the distant whistle of a train. The Lantern Man stepped forwards, the lake water rippling outwards in rings from his shins as he did so.
“Often, it’s in your loneliest of moments that you turn to the Maker—for comfort, for company, for healing—because you were never meant to be isolated.”
“But not here?”
“Here there is no Maker and the channel by which you seek him has been shut down.”
Kyle tried to push himself up from the soil again, this time succeeding and managing to sit. Mud was all over his shirt, caked beneath his neck and along one ear. It smelled of burning wood.
“So… what then?”
“You will be left lonely, with that channel closed, until loneliness, when taken to the extreme, does what it always does: it will drive you insane.”
Kyle thought about it for a moment. “All the better, I guess. At least then I won’t be able to understand what’s happening anymore.”
The Lantern Man let out a soft, condescending laugh. “Ah. If only it worked that way.”
“Oh?”
“Hell is in your mind, Kyle. Fingers can be cut off and cauterized. The creatures that live here can yank out your living intestines and spoon feed them to you, making you chew twenty times with each bite before swallowing; they can poke out your eyes and roll them across the floor… and none of it would come close to the agony and suffering that can be unleashed in the mind.”
Within Kyle a series of various panics swam about like a school of fish, scattering into the currents and under the rocks of his soul. He forced himself to stay focused. The Lantern Man didn’t move and then, once again, off in the distance, came the sound of that laughing child.
“Why are you telling me all this?” Kyle finally managed.
“I’m a Middler,” The Lantern Man replied.
“A what?”
“A Middler. I’m worthy of neither there nor here. So I stay, forever suspended, between the two.”
“And you just happened to find me?” Kyle asked with suspicion.
“No. Your gray friend asked me to help. I owed him one, from long ago, so I obliged.”
Hope jumped in Kyle. “The Gray Man? He’s still trying to help me! Thank God.”
Instantly, as the words spilled from his mouth, the ground rumbled and the child’s laughing stopped. The Lantern Man shook his head and put his index finger to where his mouth should’ve been and then looked around, first to the right, then to the left.
He turned back to Kyle. “We have to leave. Now.”
But it was already too late. Behind him, rising from beneath the surface of the water and dripping in streaks of black sludge, was a little girl. The sludge pooled off and fell from her, revealing her blond hair, which was streaked with blood, and the same red marble eyes that Kyle had seen before on the other demons he’d encountered.
The Lantern Man spun towards the shore as the little girl simply hovered there, her feet just over the water.
That’s when Kyle noticed that she had no cheeks. In their place were bloody, gaping holes.
“I have the worst peanut allergies,” she said with a sick smile, all her side teeth and most of her jawbone visible through the holes. “My cheeks swell so horribly that, well, one day I decided to just tear them out.”
Kyle’s fear erupted as she advanced towards him and giggled. That laugh. It was the laugh he’d been hearing since he’d awoken here.
She stopped suddenly, and in a helpless little girl voice full of insecurity and fear, she asked, “Do you think I’m still pretty?”
Then she smiled and came rushing towards him, her teeth bared and gnashing.
BRIGHT SUNLIGHT BROKE throu
gh the worn shades, defining the darker corners of the living room with more purpose. Papers and boxes were stacked around the room in no particular order, a pile of Hustler magazines on the coffee table and a Publishers Clearing House letter lying next to a half-eaten tuna sandwich from two days before.
The Bread Man sat and watched Good Morning America with the TV remote in one hand and a Schlitz Malt Liquor in the other, a weak smile on his face as he remembered his parents; his mother had always loved this show, and this was his father’s favorite beer.
Time flies.
He wished he hadn’t had to kill them, but, well, it was hard to tolerate people you grew to loathe. If only his father hadn’t beaten her so much, all the damn time, like a dog. Open handed at first, if he wasn’t too drunk, but then with his fists eventually. There was the one time, on New Year’s Eve, that he had hit her so hard that the blood from her mouth had scattershot, as if from a wet paint brush, across the cold white plastic of the refrigerator door.
The only thing more infuriating than that was that she’d tolerated it, actually cleaned it up, even, her own blood, off the fridge.
The Bread Man sighed. This always happened. He got fresh meat and then he got sad. He’d called off sick from work this morning, another part of the ritual, to get past the blues and on with the plan. But he was having a hard time of it.
Robin Roberts was interviewing Liam Neeson about his latest movie. Next up after the commercial break was going to be a new dish from Emeril Lagasse and a feature piece on a woman saved from a robbery by a boy in Chicago.
Dear Old Mom. He should’ve just let her die. All women were better off dead. They just were. The world was just too mean to them.
And even when you tried to help them? They didn’t appreciate it. Like this boy on TV and the dumb-ass woman in Chicago with her Gucci bag. As a thank you? She’d bought him a brand new Razor scooter.
A hundred dollar thank you for saving her fucking life?
The Bread Man burped. “Stupid bitch.” His beer can was half-empty already. He should pace himself, but he took another swig anyway.
His mom had threatened to turn him into the police when he’d finally done it; when he’d caved his father’s head in with a twenty-five pound dumbbell from their makeshift gym in the garage.
The Bread Man had just been trying to get his workout in, so he could relieve the stress of his first year of junior college. Then he’d heard her scream, again, but by then he was used to it, and, well, he just wanted to finish his reps and get the pretty girl in his PoliSci class off his mind.
But this time was different. She started calling out his name, frantically, terrified. “Troy! Troy! Troy!” Over and over again. And that’s when he knew this beating was different, because his mother had never called to him for help before when his father was giving her a good thumping. Never. Not once. She always wanted to keep him at a distance from Dear Old Dad when he was in one of his moods. But not that day. That day she’d evidently seen her own end at long last. After a sea of cuts and bruises and broken bones, he was finally going to do her in.
So The Bread Man ran into the house with the dumbbell in his hand because, if the truth be told, he’d been waiting for this moment a long time. Finally, permission to act. To be a good son. To be his momma’s hero.
He was amazed to discover how soft the skull actually was. His biology classes always made it seem like such a sturdy case for the human brain. Perhaps it was a combination of the weight and his rage, but his father’s head popped like a melon and chunks of meat were everywhere by the time The Bread Man calmed down, which had been sometime after the fifth or sixth swing.
His mother had stopped screaming the moment he’d started, but by the time he was done she was moaning horribly, as if she’d trapped the screams inside herself and they were writhing around now, up and down between her throat and stomach, banging against her vocal cords.
He crinkled his beer can in his hand. He needed to stop thinking about this shit.
The Bread Man blinked and then took another sip of beer. Memories sucked.
Robin Roberts had been smiling on the TV screen on that day too, right over his mother’s shoulder, excited to be interviewing Britney Spears. It was 2001. Britney looked an awful lot like the girl in his PoliSci class. Pretty. Very pretty. And naughty. Yeah.
He’d attacked his father all the way to the living room floor, damn near into the corner of the room, and now he was motionless, his blood pooling around The Bread Man’s knees.
When his mother finally spoke it was barely a whisper.
“Troy! What have you done?” she asked in her meek, pathetic womanly way.
He should have expected as much, but still, as he sat in this same living room now, years later, looking back and taking a deep breath, The Bread Man was willing to admit to himself that it had really hurt when she’d said it. For some silly reason, it still hurt.
He wanted to say, That’s it? I save your miserable fucking life and it’s “What have you done?” But instead, all he managed was a feeble, exhausted “What?”
“Oh my God, Troy. Heaven help us. What have you done?” She actually had the nerve to say it a second time.
He wanted to say, God don’t give a shit about you or me, you dumb bitch. I gave up on God a long time ago. When you bought me earmuffs one day so I couldn’t hear as easily when he would beat you after bedtime. Or rape you. But instead he had been confused. “Mom?”
The Bread Man was never much of a talker. Words were like coins, too easily spent. Still, the one’s she spoke next finished him off.
She looked at him terrified, terrified of him, and said, “We have to call the police, Troy.”
Wetness filled his eyes, just for a second, and then he turned on her instantly.
Surprisingly, she’d put up a bigger fight than his father. Of course she had. She’d seen it coming.
Still, he broke her left hand at the wrist with the dumbbell as she tried to defend her face, the bone snapping white and sharp through her skin. She managed one quick scream before he smashed in her teeth and busted her jaw clean sideways.
Worst of all were her eyes. The way she’d looked at him. With more horror than she’d ever looked at his miserable father.
How was that possible?
The Bread Man blinked back to his living room, noticing the dust motes circling in the rays of sunlight that fell through those damned shades, still stained with a few drops of her blood, all these years later. He’d cleaned them both up real good. Packaged them up in suitcases, piece by piece, and driven them up to a remote spot in the hills, miles from any turnoffs, where he’d dumped them over a steep cliff, down into a ravine that had no service roads or hiking trails. It was good to finally be rid of all the drama, at long last. The coyotes or bobcats would sniff them out and spread their bones. Simple enough.
His best defense then was the same as it was now: he didn’t really care if he got caught.
He sold his parents car and told what few neighbors that cared to ask that they’d moved to Arizona. Their families had both given up on them long ago, his father the product of Missouri half-breeds and his mother an unloved stepchild from Nebraska.
He finished the beer.
No one really cares about you anyway. They might call a few times, but when you don’t answer, they explain you out of their lives and move on.
The Bread Man looked at the television. GMA was ending and Kelly and some guest host were walking on to the set of Live!
The sadness clawed at him from all sides as he remembered the gory cleanup at the house—all that red water and smelly bleach. It had taken a while to get over it, and he vaguely remembered weeks, even months of crying. But then, before long, The Other appeared and told him there was a way to make it better. An easy way.
Two weeks later he had the girl from his PoliSci class.
He had played with her for over a month before he sent her down the ravine to join his dear parents. Just another du
mb bitch. Like his mother.
Same eyes. Same horror.
The same look his latest catch, out there now in the garage, chained up and waiting, would have soon. He hadn’t even touched her and already she was starting with the pleading for her life stuff and, of course, the begging for her mother routine.
They all did. For some reason, they always begged for their mothers.
As if a mother can ever protect you from anything. Ever.
Dumb bitches. All the same. Weak. One generation to the next—all love and sensitivity, all caring and concern. Just big flesh bags of empathy.
He rolled his head back over his shoulders and rocked it back and forth, trying to loosen the tension knotted at the base of his neck. Reminding himself that she was out there, waiting, then telling himself that there was no rush.
He would fuck that empathy right out of her, soon enough.
Then?
Then he would bleed it out of her.
CHAPTER 5
THEIR DESCENT WAS SWIFT and sudden. Too many crows, Napoleon guessed, for even The Gray Man to hold this altitude. Up to this point, Napoleon had been so consumed by the lava wall that he’d not taken the proper time to study what was below them. He vaguely recalled an orange haze of some kind, broken in places by misty clouds that seemed tinged with ash. The air was heavy, as if full of combustible gasses, but breathing it was harder now, as each breath he took was stifled more and more with crows’ feathers.
The hardest part was keeping his head moving. The pecking crows were working vigorously to get at his eyes. He felt warm blood running down his cheeks and neck, but he couldn’t defend himself: his arms were being held in The Gray Man’s iron grip. Napoleon knew he was a harder package to carry, jerking back and forth and kicking the way he was, but he also knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the crows were out to kill him, and that if he didn’t do something to defend himself he’d never make it to wherever they might land.
Then it dawned on him: wasn’t hell a great lake of fire? He’d read that when he was younger, during the catechism classes his grandmother had made him take. The priest teaching the class had been determined to hammer home the seriousness of the consequences for those who turned away from God, “Especially for those who do so after proclaiming their allegiance to Him, as you do when you complete these lessons,” he said. He was a nice enough man with a soft, usually cheery voice, but he’d stunned twelve-year-old Napoleon that day by turning so serious, so grave all of a sudden. As if he was preparing them all for war.
A Million to One: (The Millionth Trilogy Book 2) Page 4
