by Bruce Blake
They reached all the way to the sky, maybe beyond, those trees. He thought if he climbed one, it would take him the rest of his life to reach the top, but when he did, he would find himself in Heaven.
Heaven.
The word sounded in his head like the peal of a bell. His eyes flickered tree to tree surveying the brown bark, the green needles on the branches, moss on the trunks.
Beautiful.
Maybe this was Heaven and the trees led closer to God. The idea felt good to Trevor, but the concept seemed wrong.
The wind blew again, this time bringing a chill to his skin, raising goose flesh on his arms and making the hairs on the back of his neck stand upright. He shivered. The wind died but the chill remained and he realized without knowing why: this isn’t Heaven.
As the thought entered his mind, the trees changed. The brown bark shriveled and peeled; velvety moss turned to slime; green needles lost their pigment, became the gray of ash. If another breeze blew, it would surely separate them from the gnarled branches.
All Trevor’s muscles went stiff with realization, awareness.
This is Hell.
Memory flooded back in as if the pipe in his head channeling them past conscious thought had burst. He remembered Poe, the demon, the landscape of Hell. He remembered the strange room, the tapestry.
He remembered the boy.
Trevor pivoted slowly on one foot, like a basketball player in slow motion. He saw Poe at his side, a look of fear on her face. He saw his father standing outside the bars, his back to them. Beyond Icarus stood two more figures.
His eyes met the boy’s gaze and the boy smiled.
Bruce Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost
Chapter Thirty-One
When I turned away from Poe, I didn’t know what to expect. For months, I’d thought of her as my guardian angel, always on the look-out for me, a being who’d put my best interests before all else.
How things change.
In retrospect, I saw her failings: the times I’d needed her and she wasn’t there, the times she’d showed up to help and it led to more trouble, the Carrions who appeared whenever she did. And now I knew why.
Because she’s one of them.
So when I pivoted to see what she stared at behind me, I expected it to be a trick, a way for her to escape with my son and lead me on a further merry chase through Hell. I didn’t expect what was actually behind me.
Azrael was clothed as usual: black on black. His appearance made me think of an old-time gunslinger, someone about whom Zane Grey might have written in his old Western novels. As much as I loathed Azrael for everything he stood for and everything he’d done—from killing my mother to abducting my son—I’m sorry to say I also felt an unwanted tickle of pride somewhere down deep, though not deep enough to hide it completely. The man was not a man but an archangel and my father.
How many people can say that?
What’s your father do for a living?
Mine? Oh, he’s an archangel. The angel of death, to be precise.
Didn’t Heaven banish him?
Shut the fuck up.
A boy stood beside Azrael. I recognized him immediately as the kid I’d seen at other times during my visits to the underworld and, though I’d never been in his presence exactly, his attention directed toward me stood the small hairs on my arms on end.
I decided I didn’t like him.
The cages at their backs were occupied but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the dynamic duo. I’d seen what I assumed was a small fraction of Azrael’s capabilities and figured they’d be multiplied here in Hell.
“Hello, Icarus, my son. We meet again.”
It felt as if his words made the ground quiver beneath my feet but it may have been my knees wobbling at the sound of his voice. At my back, I heard a distressed squeal from Poe’s throat. Again the feeling of being tricked overwhelmed me, kept curiosity from turning me to see what prompted the sound. I gritted my teeth and forced my knees to keep still.
“What do you want?”
“Your freedom. Nothing more, nothing less.”
My eyebrows must have come dangerously close to touching as I peered at him through slitted lids.
Why would he want my freedom?
“Why would you want my freedom?”
“You’ve messed up the balance and it must be restored.”
My eyebrows inched closer together.
“What are you talking about?”
Azrael opened his mouth to answer but the boy at his side raised a hand, stopping him before any sound emerged. I suspected his gesture would have the same effect on any living thing.
“You don’t belong here,” the boy said, his voice the high-pitched, slightly girlish tone of a young man not quite through puberty. But it contained undertones, too: evil, discordant undertones loaded with menace.
“You’re damn straight I don’t.”
The boy smiled.
“And you have attracted too many others who don’t belong.”
He gestured and I followed the wave of his hand, saw for the first time the people housed in the cages behind him: Marty and Todd, Tony McSweeney, Orlando Albert, Father Dominic, my mother and, finally, Piper. All but my mother stared at me; her eyes were fixed on Azrael, an expression of adoration on her face.
“You must leave,” the boy continued. “And you must take one of these souls with you.”
I blew a single, sharp laugh through my nose.
“I’ll do better: I’ll take all of them off your hands.” Father Dominic’s expression brightened. “Except the priest.”
“One,” Azrael said, the index finger on his left hand pointing skyward in both a gesture indicating how many available for the taking as well as what direction I’d be headed with said soul. “You take one or you take none.”
“But I thought you were over-stocked.”
The boy smiled more broadly, as if I’d told a joke which he alone understood.
“Arrangements can be made, Icarus. Do you want to try me?”
I shivered and glanced at my feet—nothing interesting about them other than the fact I didn’t have to look into the boy’s blazing eyes. Exactly my goal.
“Okay. One.”
The choice would be easy. I turned toward the cage behind me and saw Poe kneeling on the floor, Trevor standing beside her. His eyes stared beyond me, fixed on Azrael and the boy. It struck me that my son and the guardian angel would have made a cute couple; Poe only appeared a few years older than Trevor, a gap too big at age fifteen but more than acceptable in a couple of years. The idea felt good for the heartbeat before reality settled back in to my brain.
We were in Hell. They were in a cage. The woman stole souls.
“What did you do to him?” I growled.
Poe looked at me, eyes brimming fake tears, and shook her head.
Does she mean she doesn’t know? That she didn’t do it?
Part of me remembered the times she’d saved me and wanted to believe her. But too many other things crowded my head, too many times she’d been the cause of my problems. I’d seen her take my mother’s soul. I knew she’d brought my son to Hell.
“I’ll take Trevor.”
“He is not one of the choices.”
I spun around fast enough at Azrael’s words I teetered on the edge of losing my balance.
“What? You said I had to take one of these souls. Why can’t--”
The boy raised his hand again and I stopped talking. I didn’t mean to, my mouth just stopped as though I was Achmed the dead terrorist and he had his Jeff Dunham hand jammed up my ass to determine my lips’ actions.
“He is not one of the choices. The angel brought him here by mistake.”
My heart jumped in my chest, beat faster like it wanted to break free.
He’s not supposed to be here.
My lips trembled as I said: “So, he can--”
Azrael stretched his arms out mimicking the pose of Christ on the cross then, with
his arms still straight, brought his hands together in front of him hard. His hellish version of the clapper didn’t extinguish the lights, but I heard the same popping sound behind me as when Trevor and Poe appeared out of nowhere. I pivoted back toward the bars, my head starting to spin with so much back and forth.
The cage was gone.
I stared, struggling to control my breathing and keep panic from rising in my chest.
It’s Poe’s fault this happened.
My son was gone, the Carrion disguised as a guardian angel to blame. I spun back toward the angel of death.
“Where are they?”
The other cages had disappeared, too, and the tents and the trees. I stood facing Azrael and the boy across a smudge of orange-brown dirt scattered with straw. Neither of them answered my question.
“Where?”
“It is time to choose.”
Another thunderous clap echoed, the force of it buffeting my chest and forcing me to my knees. My head spun with the impact, my ears rang with the sound. I closed my eyes to settle my brain; when I opened them again, the ground under me was no longer soil and straw. Instead, my knees rested on a piece of soggy cardboard spread across pavement. I raised my head. Azrael and the boy were gone.
To my right was an over-flowing garbage bin sitting in front of a brick wall scrawled with graffiti. I recognized the place, or places like it, at least. A man sat across the alley from me, staring, a moth-chewed blanket pulled across his shoulders.
Orlando Albert.
“Icarus,” he said.
His voice came out a croak, like a toad lived in his throat and needed to speak with me. No surprise given the damned souls who’d had a go at him at the labyrinth had done quite a job. Crooked, yellow teeth showed through holes in both cheeks. His breath wheezed through another hole in his throat; he lacked both ears; one eye bulged on the verge of bursting out of his head, the white tinted pink with blood.
“No.”
I got to my feet, wobbled to get my balance right, then sidestepped away from him. I didn’t know where to go—the alley appeared to stretch on pretty much forever in both directions—but I knew I didn’t want to be there.
Orlando struggled to get up, propping himself against the brick wall to do so. When he finally made it to his version of standing—more the slouch of a man well into his centennial year—the tattered blanket fell off his shoulders. He was naked beneath, though the word doesn’t do justice: no clothes and little flesh. Bone and muscle peeked through what remained of his shredded skin, bite marks showing at irregular intervals, pieces of meat hanging from his legs and torso where the job of rending his flesh was left not-quite-done.
“Please. I shouldn’t be here.”
“What are you talking about? You ruined lives, killed people. Why shouldn’t I leave you here?”
“Because I gave you what you wanted.”
I don’t know where he’d been hiding the needle he waved at me—naked men have few options for concealing things. The one possibility I could think of made me shudder.
“Take me with you and you can have it again. All you want.”
He shuffled forward a step, a loose bit of flesh flapping where his genitals once dangled.
I gagged.
“I don’t need it anymore.”
As the words left my mouth, a shiver pulsed beneath my skin, an itch. My gaze fell on the needle in his hand and stuck.
“Yes, you do.”
The croak of his voice echoed in my head as he came closer, arm extended. Offering? Trying to stick me? Saliva filled my mouth, threatened to over-flow as though he offered a particularly appetizing meal rather than a substance which had stolen my life and came close to ending it.
I licked my lips, rocked back and forth on the balls of my feet. My body remembered the feel of the drug coursing through my veins, the way it made my head inflate. The rush, the calm.
I shook my head, dislodging the thought.
“No.”
I turned my back on him, unafraid he possessed the energy or ability to jump me, and walked away.
“Please,” he croaked after me. “Please, Icarus. Don’t leave me here.”
I ignored his pleas and the itch bubbling under my skin subsided. Six paces passed beneath my feet when the alleyway began to fade around me. I hesitated, waiting to see what was going on before I continued into the unknown. Unfortunately, the half-eaten man was more dexterous than I’d thought and he lunged, the needle piercing shirt sleeve and flesh as the last of the alley disappeared. I jumped away, rubbing my arm, and my thigh bumped against a chair.
Orlando was gone. The stench of garbage and excrement: gone. I found myself surrounded by tables and chairs, a wooden-topped bar. The place hadn’t been aired-out in a long while and the smell of dried beer spilled by intoxicated hands permeated the room.
I’d ended up in a bar.
Sully’s.
I let my hand fall away from my arm and took a step forward, wondering if I merely needed a tetanus shot or if he’d gotten some of the evil liquid into me.
A minute later, the feeling in my head, the sensation in my limbs, answered the question.
Shit.
Bruce Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost
Chapter Thirty-Two
I glanced over at the bar, expecting to see Sully’s ever-present smile peeking out from beneath his bushy Ned Flanders moustache, but the area was vacant. Bottles sat lined up in orderly rows along the back bar, little galvanized pails of peanuts at regular intervals along the bar’s dark wood surface awaited hungry fingers, but no bartender.
How’s a guy supposed to get a drink?
For the first time in my life, I struggled against the feeling revving up in my brain, in the muscles of my arms and legs like a pencil wound at the end of an elastic. I took a few steps toward the row of stools at the bar, intending to peer over and see if someone hid behind it, but the clink of glass against glass caught my attention.
The room was empty of people except for the two men seated at a table by the big screen TV in the corner. Images flickered across the screen, a contest which might have been considered a sport in ancient Rome involving men dragged behind horses and skeletal beings with over-sized axes, but I didn’t let my gaze linger once I saw the first man beheaded, choosing to scrutinize the men at the table instead.
The growing feeling in my brain made it more difficult than it should have been, but I eventually recognized Marty and Todd.
“Yah,” Marty cried out and pumped a fist in the air at an event on the TV. “I told you they’d take it this year.”
I took a careful step toward them, thinking I’d succeeded at being quiet until they whirled around as if I’d stepped on a cat.
“Look. It’s Ric Fell,” Todd said.
“Hey, Ric. Come sit with us.”
Marty pushed a chair away from the table with his foot by way of invitation and I felt drawn to it. Hell, I needed to sit down. They watched as I crossed the room and settled my ass onto the chair’s faux-leather seat.
“Ain’t seen you in a long time,” Todd said and raised his half-empty beer glass in toast. Marty did the same but paused before drinking.
“Wait a second, Todd. Ol’ Ric doesn’t have a drink. Hey barkeep.” He raised his other hand and gestured. “Bring my friend a drink. Vodka soda with lime, right Ric?”
My brain said yes—exactly what I needed to calm my increasingly jangled nerves—and I thought it told my head to nod, but the damn thing shook side to side instead and my mouth followed suit.
“No, I--”
A man placed a drink on the table in front of me, interrupting my renegade words. Ice and clear liquid filled the tall glass, sweat ran down the side, a quarter lime perched on the rim. The man’s presence startled me—I thought only the three of us occupied the bar. I looked up to thank him out of habit and, for a second time in a row, it surprised me not to see Sully. Instead, I looked up at the man I’d last seen ogling teenage boys in a
Hell-bound locker room.
“Tony? What are you doing here?”
He wiped his hands on the short, white apron around his waist as if he was normally a bartender rather than a borderline-pedophile high school coach. In life, I’d never seen Tony at Sully’s or any other bar, but this wasn’t life, this was Hell.
At least, I assumed it was still Hell. In a bar, with a drink in front of me and a major buzz brewing in my head, didn’t seem like such a bad place to be.
“Never mind him,” Marty said. “We need to talk.”
I looked from the misplaced Tony to Marty as he leaned forward, smiling. His nose seemed to have grown, his ear lobes flopped at the side of his head. I repressed a giggle and looked at my drink as Todd pushed it toward me. The droplets of water running down the side of the glass looked so refreshing, the lime so tempting. I swallowed hard and licked my lips, trying to concentrate hard enough to shrink myself down and dive right in.
“Yeah, we have to talk,” Todd repeated.
“So talk.”
I reached for the drink and tried to imbibe its refreshment through the fleshy pads of my fingers as they touched the cool glass. When that didn’t work to my expectations, I went to pick it up, bring it to my mouth, but Todd held its base and wouldn’t relinquish his grip. My tongue lolled across my bottom lip.
“You’re our ticket out of here,” Marty said, voice hushed to keep our conversation from Tony standing at my elbow. “You can make things right.”
I started to shake my head but Todd interrupted.
“We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”
I glanced from Marty to Todd. If not for the drugs distorting my perception, he’d have looked much like he did in life: red veins stood out on his nose, dark circles colored the area below his eyes. In my current state, they stood out comically, like he was a caricature of W.C. Fields.
“But I--”
“You don’t have to answer yet,” Marty said. My eyes floated back to him and his gaze flickered to Tony looming behind me. “Why don’t you move on, pal. My friend’s got his drink.”
I sensed Tony shift his weight from foot to foot but he neither left nor responded. Marty’s face darkened to the unusual shade of pink it tended toward whenever he angered—usually when his team lost and Todd poked fun at him. Or a server took too long getting him a fresh beer. He pushed his chair away from the table.
