by Bruce Blake
“Shit.”
I rubbed my chin, hesitated a second, then took a step in without asking my mother’s opinion. Three more steps and the black enveloped me. I looked back over my shoulder; the light coming in the cave mouth appeared orange looking at it from a detached world of night. My mother stood silhouetted against it.
“Are you coming?”
“No. I don’t like the caves.”
Comforting.
I walked farther into the cave, moving slowly to avoid walking into anything. Each step brought deeper darkness. The temperature dropped. If I could see, I’m sure my breath would have been a cloud of white mist drifting ahead of me.
After a few more paces, the darkness began to wane. The change was almost imperceptible at first, but a definite difference. As I went deeper, the black lifted further. I made out the wall to my left, discerned the terrain of the floor passing beneath my feet, but the illumination didn’t come from ahead; five feet further on, the night returned to impenetrability. Looking up, I saw no sign of light overhead. Hell, no sign of a ceiling.
I glanced right and the figure cloaked in light walking beside me startled me. The woman’s long, dark hair visible within the luminosity made me think my mother might have lied about being an angel, but when the woman faced me and I saw her youth, noticed the stud below her lower lip, I knew who’d joined me.
“Piper? Where did you...?”
Her skin glowed with a dim yellow incandescence like a fish that lives in the deepest part of the ocean. I’d seen Poe perform a similar feat a couple of times, though her reasons were about enchantment, not illumination, and as I watched, the glow brightened. I diverted my eyes back to the path ahead, worried I’d be mesmerized.
“Where did you come from?”
“Around.”
I practically heard her shrug with her answer. Not a satisfactory answer—her sudden appearance smacked of Hellish manipulation—but what’s a man to do? If her presence aided me, I shouldn’t look a gift angel in the mouth. Maybe some of the forces of good still chose to marshal on my side.
Sure.
“Well, it’s nice to see you.” I glanced down the rocky corridor ahead. “It’s nice to see.”
“Thanks,” she replied and her fingers brushed my arm.
Her touch was what I might have expected it to be like if someone dragged a baby electric eel across my flesh—jolting, but not powerful enough to be painful or unpleasant. The tingle it created vibrated down to the tips of my fingers, up into my shoulder, then her touch disappeared.
We walked on, her glow brightening, allowing us to see farther ahead. My arm felt numb once the sensation of her caress waned and I considered amending my path to brush against her again but kept myself in check. Somewhere, my son was in serious danger—I didn’t have time to dally. If not in this cave, then one of the others. Hell was an undeniably big place, but I had to believe something guided me, brought me to this particular corner of it on purpose. If I didn’t hold on to that, nothing remained but despair.
And the angel at my side.
The tunnel widened until it became a roughly square room. It was empty except for a pile of straw in one corner. The three walls were bare and solid: no doorways, no windows, no cracks or fissures. We stepped into the room and Piper’s iridescence increased to full-blown light, forcing away the darkness, leaving no shadows behind.
This is it?
I’d expected more from Hell, especially given my other experiences. Where hid the gargoyles? The tortured souls reliving their worst nightmares? Where was the nudity, debauchery, depravity and degradation?
Disappointing.
“What’s going on here?”
I caught myself turning toward Piper as I asked the question but caught myself at the last second. Poe’s glow had left the people at the hospital completely enchanted and unable to function of their own accord. Didn’t need that to happen.
“What do you mean?”
Her voice changed, became the angelic choir I’d heard out of the mouths of other angels in the past: Poe, Michael, Raphael. Hers held a different tone, discordant, as though the mezzo soprano couldn’t carry a tune.
“I mean: why is there nothing here?”
I stepped into the room, ran my fingers along the wall. It turned out to be cool, hard stone—exactly how it looked.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
I took a chance and glanced her direction. She was pointing at the patch of blood-soaked shirt clinging to my chest.
“Hell-beast got me again. Can you do something about it?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
I half-expected her to tell me we needed to find a handful of wolf’s bane and a pinch of witch hazel.
“Whether you ask nicely or not.”
She smiled coyly and tilted her head. Flirting while standing in a cave in Hell and not knowing where my son was made me uncomfortable, but you got to take it where you can get it. I diverted my gaze.
“Please?”
She put her hand on the wound, her touch immediately sending that tingling sensation through my chest, down my arm, racing to my brain. I felt warmth in my wound, imagined my skin knitting itself back together like some cheesy special effect out of a bad sci-fi flick. Visions of Piper unclothed replaced the thought as her touch lingered. I took a shuddering breath and stepped away before I embarrassed myself. When Piper took her hand away, some of the blood on my shirt stayed on her skin like she’d brushed her palm against a red ink pad used for rubber stamps.
“Good?”
I sighed. “Oh yeah. Never better.”
She reached for me again but I stepped back.
“Maybe we better save that for later.”
She shrugged.
“Perhaps this empty cave is here for us.”
She whispered the words and, despite the space between us, it sounded as though she perched on my shoulder and spoke them directly into my ear. I felt her breath on my neck; it raised goose bumps on my arms. Difficult as it was, I took up my examination of the wall again, studiously looking for any deformity to show the cave was more than it appeared. Mostly I did it to distract myself from her.
“We have to...I need...”
My brain didn’t seem to know what it wanted my mouth to say, so random words tumbled off my lips, the way I imagined my son would fumble for the right thing to say asking a girl on a date.
Trevor.
The thought of him brought reality back, focused my thoughts. I faced the doorway, purposely turning my head toward the wall and my back to Piper. Her hand touched my shoulder.
This time, the shock was immense but wholly pleasurable. My body stiffened and my feet ceased moving me toward the door; I imagined the glow emanating from Piper flowing into me. One finger of her free hand touched my chin, swiveled my head toward her. I tried to close my eyes but they weren’t going along with the plan.
Piper’s luminosity became almost blinding but, even in its brightness, I saw her clearly. Dark hair, sapphire eyes; the stud below her bottom lip; the milky curve of her chin.
Below that she was naked.
My eyes probably widened like a surprised child. My mouth must have fallen open like an old man in search of misplaced dentures. I became indistinct in my own mind as it filled with nothing but her: the beauty of her face, the smoothness of her skin, the warmth of her proximity. She stepped forward and pressed her body against mine. I felt her breasts against my chest and gasped.
The pressure of her against me forced me back and I let it. A moment later, I was supine on the heap of straw, the smell of hay the only thing I recognized outside of Piper’s overwhelming presence. Her lips found mine, her energy flowed into me, and I felt like there was no me anymore, just us—two beings becoming one, our bodies merging, our essences. I lost myself and didn’t care if anyone ever found me.
Somehow, in a dark cave of Hell, I found Heaven.
Bruce Blake-All Who Wander Ar
e Lost
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The shack was gone, and the two boys. The knife, the blood, the feelings of anger, surprise, exhilaration, shame and despair: all gone.
Instead, Poe stood outside on a hot and sticky night, the kind of night that brings a sheen of sweat to your skin, leaves you feeling damp all the time. A night in high summer somewhere in a southern state.
Poe looked down at the railroad tracks beneath her feet and needed no more clues than the metal rails and the adhesive humidity to know where she was, and when—a place and time she didn’t want to be.
No. Please not this.
Her lips moved to speak the words but they sounded only inside her head. Crickets hidden in scraggy bushes growing a few feet from the edge of the tracks chirruped, speaking to each other in their monotone rasps. Their night songs disguised the sound of a man snoring, a homeless man she knew she’d find sleeping on the tracks half-a-dozen yards from where she stood.
Soon, she’d hear the train.
When this really happened—in the real world instead of in the re-lived world of Hell—it was the second time they’d sent her out. The first time, she’d come back empty-handed and been returned to the shack to be raped over and over, to kill those boys and herself again and again until convinced to perform the work.
The rail shivered under Poe’s foot and she wondered what would happen if she remained on the tracks, didn’t move before the train came, bearing down on her with the cold light of its cyclopean eye. She thought it, but her feet paid her no mind as she joined the crickets in the rough shrubs.
A minute later, the light appeared down the track; with it came the dull rumble of the train. The first time—the real time—she considered simply running over to the man and shaking him awake, but the shock of living her death over and over kept her from it. This time, she knew not to waste thought on it, it would make no difference to the outcome.
The train approached, sounded its horn at a crossing, the blast startling Poe like it had so many years before. The ground shook with its approach as the light shone down the track, illuminating the man lying half-on the tracks. The train’s horn blasted again as it sped by the nearest road.
Get up! Get up!
The futility of her lips moving along with the words in her head brought a lump to Poe’s throat. Things were about to end for the man, but it would get worse for her.
The distance between train and man shrank. Poe looked from one to the other. A few seconds, no more. The man stirred, a movement Poe didn’t notice when this happened for real. He propped himself on an elbow, looked up at the train rushing toward him.
Poe’s heart leaped into her throat as she clearly saw the man’s face: dazed-looking with sleep at first, then slack with fear, his jaw dropping open comically. His feet pushed against the ground, searching for purchase to move out of the train’s path, but they found none as the dry dirt gave way under his churning shoes.
That didn’t happen. He didn’t know.
The train hit him and flung him off the tracks, spinning him three hundred-sixty degrees on the vertical plane like a huge, awkward Frisbee. He landed in the brush ten feet from Poe as the locomotive and its cargo rushed past without noticing the life it ended.
Poe allowed her feet to carry her to the man. The impact had split his head open, dislodged its contents. She began to cry, like her first time here. Then the man sat up.
Not the man, precisely, but his soul. Poe knew it to be the case this time, but it shocked her the first time as she’d thought the man had survived. He looked younger, cleaner, and shimmered a little in the dark of the night.
“What...?” The man looked around him until his eyes settled on Poe.
“It’s okay,” she said, words choked with enough emotion he couldn’t have believed them.
The man’s expression was the same as when he saw the train: wide-eyed, gaping mouth. He scrambled away and his soul stretched like an elastic band caught on a twig. It detached and he jumped to his feet, stared down at the broken body he’d inhabited for decades, its limbs now twisted into unfathomable shapes, its head split open like a coconut with all the milk spilled out.
“What did you do to me?”
“No, I--”
The man took off, stumbling through the tangled shrubs, heading for the easier going of the railroad tracks. His foot slipped in his own blood, but he kept his feet, made it to the tracks, and ran.
Poe sighed. As bad as it was watching him die again, this part would be worse.
She darted out of the brush and onto the tracks behind him, boots clopping on the wooden ties as a black overcoat flapped against her thighs. The man stole a look back over his shoulder at her closing ground, and the sight of her gave him speed, but she was too quick. A moment later, she grabbed him by the shoulders and rode him to the ground.
They scraped along the tracks, the man groaning with the impact, but he twisted himself under her to end up on his back. He punched her in the throat, pushed her away, raked her cheeks with his nails.
Reliving the event, Poe fought the rage building inside her. It wasn’t anger at the man or his attempts to be free of her, she’d have done the same thing if she suspected what awaited. This anger was at Aaron Baxter and his cousin, at what they’d done to her and what they made her do, at the time she’d spent in Hell. She raged at going through it all again, of repeating this, and at having lost Icarus’ trust and his son.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, her lips said wordlessly as her fists flailed, hammering the surprised soul’s face, pummeling him into unconsciousness, then she hit him some more.
Sometime later, Poe found herself kneeling in the corner of a room. She hadn’t noticed the train tracks and the man’s battered soul disappear from around her. Shoulders sagging, hands lying loosely in her lap, she stared at her fingers, at the chipped nails and the black buttons on her overcoat. She didn’t look up, didn’t want to. She couldn’t imagine being anywhere that would make her feel better.
She gazed into her lap until she heard the grunt made by a woman’s throat. It held no threat or anger but sounded more like the struggle of a pained beast.
Poe raised her head and saw a woman lying on a bed, propped on her elbows, her swollen belly preventing her from sitting up further. Another woman crouched at the end of the bed, the sleeves of her blouse rolled up, a towel draped over her shoulder.
Poe stood, pulled the hood dangling at her back up over her head, held her breath and watched.
†‡†
I plucked straw out of the hair at the back of my head and let it fall to the ground as we made our way to the next cave opening. The fourth. We’d exited the first cave onto the empty ledge and I felt something was missing, but my foggy brain refused to nail it down. I dazedly surveyed the area like a man retracing his steps trying to figure out where he’d left his keys but soon gave up in favor of searching the caves.
After finding our torrid lovemaking in the first, the second and third caves had proven disappointingly empty. If endorphins hadn’t been racing through my body like a pack of greyhounds after a mechanical rabbit, I’d have been getting stressed by our lack of success.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anything here,” Piper said.
The first words either of us had spoken since emerging from each other’s bodies. It left me feeling a little disappointed the reverence had been broken. The spell was broken, the pleasure done. Back to business.
“Where to, then?”
She shrugged, of course, and I remembered why we were there.
“I have to find Trevor. Do you know where he is?”
“No. I haven’t been able to locate him since your guardian angel lost him.”
She practically spat the words ‘guardian angel’. Right then, I didn’t care what she thought of Poe. I’d have to deal with her later.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
I thought about asking her
what good she was, but my anger would have been misplaced. Piper didn’t get my son into this mess; that distinction fell squarely on Poe’s shoulders. Piper wanted to help. She deserved my gratitude, not my ire. Given the circumstances, controlling my emotions was proving difficult.
“Damn it.” I looked up the next set of stairs. “You have no ideas?”
“Sorry.”
“Then let’s try up there.”
My mind full with the smolderings of anger and the residue of desire, I took the stairs two at a time—for the first few at least, until I ran out of steam. I heard Piper’s footsteps padding up the steps behind me, her breathing easy, not labored the way the climb made mine. At the next landing, I paused, bent at the waist to catch my breath. She stood beside me, watching with a sly smile.
“It’s the altitude,” I gasped. “The air’s thinner.”
“Down here in Hell.”
I straightened and shrugged giving her a taste of her own medicine, then directed my attention toward the caves.
“Any idea which one?” I asked.
She shrugged and strolled past me appraising the nearest caves. After a few paces, she pivoted on her heel to face me, hair swinging around her head in a dark cloud, eyes sparkling. Any misplaced anger I’d been tempted to direct her way disappeared at the sight of her beauty, and I struggled to put the memories of the cave out of my head and focus on the task at hand.
“We’ve got to look somewhere,” I said.
“How about this one?”
“Yeah, we should--”
I looked beyond her shoulder and saw a figure standing at the foot of the stairs leading to the next level of caves. Seeing another person cleared the cobwebs from my head. Although too far away to see their face, I sensed a familiarity. I stepped past Piper and squinted at the figure, my shoulder brushing the angel’s, but I barely noticed the accompanying tingle. A couple more steps, a little more squinting.
A black frock clothed the figure but with some white around his or her head and upper chest. I recognized the costume: a nun.
“Mother?”
I realized two things at once: she wasn’t dressed that way last time I saw her, and she’d been the unidentified missing thing when Piper and I emerged from our rocky love nest. The angel’s touch and affection somehow affected me by erasing my mother’s presence from my mind until now.
