I looked around, dropping the two shirts and thin windbreaker I had picked up.
“Leonard, you in there?” I asked for no reason in particular, a smile more like my own etching my lips.
The room did not answer.
Shrugging, I stepped deeper amongst the clothing, stooping lower, feeling with both hands, trying to understand through touch. Everything, all of it – the jeans, the socks, the underwear, the wife-beaters, the push-up bras, the scarves, the gloves, the tunic-like tops, the bell-bottoms, the hip-huggers, the running shorts, the camisoles, the trench coats, the ascots, the long johns, the slacks, the blouses, the tuxedo shirts, the sweat pants – every single article of clothing I touched was the same. There wasn’t a drop of moisture, not a speck of decay, only the impression I could glean was they were old. They’d been here for a long time.
I waded deeper into the pile, high-stepping, bringing my knees nearer to my chest in order to negotiate the ever-thickening amount of cloth underfoot. The further I went, the harder it became to walk without the use of my hands to steady myself. The amount of compression beneath my slippers was increasing dramatically. The garments continually shifted and bunched as my weight altered from above.
For some reason I cannot readily describe to you, I kept on. I continued to search the pile. I would step and grab, toss handfuls aside, dig down a few feet until I had to move on or risk sinking deeper into the morass of fabrics and buttons and zippers. I would crab-walk aside, wary of the depression I’d created, knowing if I wasn’t careful I could be up to my knees, maybe my thighs, in clothing. I would skirt the edge, turn, then grab more, throw it in another direction, then part the way with my fingers, gaze down deeper. Always, I would find even more, whether it was cotton or rayon or wool or cashmere there would always be more below.
I continued for twenty minutes maybe until I began to sweat in my pajamas. I wiped at my brow with a forearm, leaving a trail behind sweat on my sleeve, wondering why I was so frenetic. I gauged the situation, realizing I was a good seventy yards into the pile. I twisted at my beltline, amazed that I hadn’t even made it to the outskirts of the outskirts of this monumental mound. The sheer amount of human coverings was overwhelming.
“He’s not here,” I said aloud. Even if he is, I will never find him. My shoulders slumped. I ran a hand through my stubbly hair. You have only checked one room, Jeremiah. There are hundreds, possible thousands, out there in the alley.
Something shifted. The moment the word “alley” crossed my mind, the pile of clothing moved. Not all of it, but a sizable portion nearby.
I side-stepped, hands thrust outward for balance, fingers splayed, should I fall I could grab onto something quick. Despite the chill, I was still sweating, but ignored the perspiration beading above my brow. My breathing was hoarse, felt harsh in my lungs. Had I overdone it? My pulse was in my ears.
Another movement came, jerkier than the first, but from a different area below the surface of the pile.
I squared my body to it, crouching lower, walking away, poised upon the balls of my feet. It was something an athlete did when on guard, whether on the court or on the field – get up on your toes, be ready.
I felt my eyebrows rise when something long, sinuous seemed to stretched, then settle ten of feet below my position. Whatever it was, it was bigger than me, and longer by more than a dozen feet.
Though I hadn’t seen anything, not a single feature, I decided it was time to leave. Unheeding, I began to stride down the slope made of cloth, my feet plunging to the ankle, but I didn’t care any longer. I wasn’t being careful. I wasn’t methodically searching anymore. I wanted to leave. I was doing so in a hurry.
I stumbled forth, my movements faster with each second. I used my hands to gain additional purchase, clasping at wad after wad of clothing. Each was like a handhold, giving me a net gain in leverage. It was like pushing off something solid while swimming, each hold gave me a slight burst of velocity before it bled away and I had to find another. And, I did. Over and over, I stepped, sank, grabbed, pulled, repeating the process. I could see the solid concrete of the warehouse floor wasn’t more than twenty feet away. I was making good progress, swimming through an ocean of apparel.
The notion lightened my heart. Good thoughts, Jerry! Keep up with the good th -.”
I tripped.
Something hard and unyielding caught the edge of my toe and I went down on all fours, my feet still hidden. I was about to push off with my hands when I felt something new. Whatever was below the textiles, no more than a quarter of an inch from the skin of my palms, it was warm. No, it was hot. I could feel the heat being transferred from it to my hands, then my arms. It was an incredible amount of heat. Maybe that’s why the garments were so dry. Whatever was beneath them was searing.
Faster than I can recall, I bolted upright and sprinted for the concrete. I didn’t care how many times I fell or rolled or summersaulted, I was going to get off this uncanny mountain of fibers.
I scrambled, scurrying like a rodent across the uppermost regions, using every available part of my body. Clawing when I had to, scratching when it was necessary, and kicking when I was sure there was something unnatural beneath me. I came toward the edge. I was no more than six feet away, the height of your average man, when I struck something hardness with the back of my right hand. My wrist crumpled painfully, and suddenly I felt myself overbalance. Where my fingers should’ve given support, they were no longer capable. I lurched forward, shoulder first, hitting the clothing, and then unceremoniously flopped onto my back.
I had no more than a second’s respite when something long, very hot and round roiled below the entire length of my body.
I recoiled like a spring, repulsed, using its’ own firmness to attain my feet. Within moments, I was off the garments and on the concrete, cradling my wrist, which was throbbing now. Unsure why, I continued to stare at the pile and felt my jaw become unhinged when I saw the entire expanse of clothing was moving now. It wasn’t the movement of a solitary thing. It couldn’t be. There was nothing coordinated, nothing congruent. All along the pile writhed what had to be hundreds of long, ropey structures. Things I couldn’t describe, but things all the same.
Whoever had written the sign had been correct after all. It was time for me to leave. It was the wrong time to be in this place.
I swung toward the double doors, then thought better of it and placed myself perpendicular to both the exit and the pile, which allowed for me to see what was coming from either direction. I wasn’t about to be surprised again. I wasn’t going to be one of those idiots in a Hollywood horror movie who turned away right before they got mauled. No, that wasn’t going to be me. I was smarter than that.
I got to the doors, scuttling through them with my proverbial tail between my legs, and made to close them. From without the vast chamber, I could see the things beneath the pile were still moving. No faster or slower than before, but moving all the same. They were worms, huge, or maybe tentacles or both. I was too far away and they were too well covered to make an adequate assessment.
I slammed the doors shut and replaced the sign written my some very smart little kid and stepped back into the middle of the alley.
I probably would’ve left then. I most likely would’ve decided enough was enough, that Lenny wasn’t worth it and made my way for the door leading back to the basement. I know I should’ve, but I didn’t.
It was the blood-curling scream of Leonard G. Favor that stopped me - stopped me cold like I’d been frozen in place.
Further into the alley, “a few doors down” like Dolly Parton would’ve sung, on the opposite side, were two more doors much like the one’s I’d just shut. Only, they were wide open. From within, Lenny was wailing. It sounded like he was being flayed alive.
~~~~~~~<<< ᴥ >>>~~~~~~~
Chapter Nineteen: Frenzy
Thoughts of self-preservation forgotten, I ran for the doorway. It didn’t even cross my mind that I’d been accosted by something I couldn�
��t easily explain less than a minute before. There was fear clutching my heart, nearly paralyzing my chest, making it difficult for me to breathe. Cognitive thought was beyond me as well. I was caught up in the present, devoid of processing thought. I was reacting, though a small part of me wanted to run away and hide, wanted to do no more than that. But, a larger portion of me was in control. Not my brain, not my ability to rationalize, not even my sense of survival. It was pure impetus, stimulus. I was compelled against my better judgment. I ran forth. I ran toward the screams. I couldn’t help myself. I was frenzied.
I came up to them so fast; I nearly tripped over my own feet. I wracked my shoulder purposefully against the steel frame of the doorway unable to use my hand. My sprained wrist would’ve made it impossible to halt my forward progress. I winced in pain, and not only from the jolt racing through the upper portion of my body.
The light from within was nothing short of brilliant. I squinted, placing my left hand over my brow, shielding my eyes, trying to gaze through the multitude of color assaulting my retinas.
“What the fuck?” I breathed, astonishment painted upon my tone. The hues were so thick I could almost smell them.
I hiked myself into more of a standing position, hoisting myself along the edge of the doorframe. Before me was a junkyard’s worth of broken bottles. Colored glass laid everywhere, chipped and shattered, piles and piles, stretching as far as I could see.
This chamber was even bigger than the first one!
The walls - furthest from me – the ceiling, were both so far away I could barely make them out. It was as though some type of low hanging mist was obscuring the view. The room was large enough to make its’ own weather. It could only be a morning mist I was seeing. There was no more apt description. I was peering into an overarching haze, thicker toward the center of the chamber, almost cloud-like, but it couldn’t quite form. Every time it tried to coalesce, it could do so for no more than a short duration before it dissolved into mist once again.
I could just make out the steel struts and tresses supporting the farthest reaches of the structure. They had to be incredibly large to support such an immense roof. Only steel of the highest tensile strength had the capability of sustaining weight that tremendous.
Where came the blinding light, I could not tell.
I became aware of an odd sound. A tinkling, a scraping of a comingled sort, resonating, pulling my attention from the far corners of the room, making me focus on the more immediate area about me. Almost at once, my eyebrows shot up. All thoughts of Lenny had suddenly vanished as I tried to understand what I was seeing.
Before me, far into the chamber, the shards and splinters and chunks of glass were tumbling toward one another, forming jagged clumps and boulder-like constructs. They moved slowly at first, but with an ever-increasing rate of speed. The pieces rolled individually, then began to group, forming a tricked of movement flowing in the same direction. Within seconds those trickles became streams, which became brooks, which turned into rivers in miniature. The jumbles, where these watercourses of glass converged, melded into large lumps, then even larger accumulations that seemed to loom before me with every passing beat of my heart.
Some mysterious force was at work that science had yet to discover. It was like magnetism only this affected melted and colored sand, not metal. I could almost imagine someone turning up the intensity of the attraction, but I couldn’t ascertain what sort of machine or magic could make glass come together like that. It seemed to go against nature itself, frightening, made my skin crawl. What could do this? What could make broken bottle form into huge lumps?
The tinkling became a roar. I winced at it. The sound was immense.
Whatever scream I had heard before, whether it was my one-time father or not, it was gone now. There was no sign of Lenny anywhere in the room.
I eased away from the doorframe, upon my own two feet, watching as the lumps became hulking masses, then hill-sized, and still they continue to grow, form, take shape. Something inside was howling at me, shouting what I was staring at wasn’t supposed to be happening, wasn’t of this world. It was begging me to retreat from the doorway.
Close the fucking door, you idiot!
But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Seeing the shards of glass coming together was something I’d never even dreamed about, and yet…
…I should’ve turned away. But how?
Suddenly, the roar had a voice, issued from a ghastly throat. I heard a low-level, AaaaaooooooOoooooo! echo throughout the chamber.
My orbs sought out the source of the sound. I had no trouble finding it. I caught sight of it within moments.
It was the mouth I saw first, surrounded by a set of crumbling, shattering lips that reformed as fast as they seemed to decay. Actually, it wasn’t decay. It was more of a falling apart and then a remaking by more glass pushing outward from within. I froze. I felt my lower abdomen clench. I am certain if I’d been any younger, I would’ve peed in my pants.
It was massive, nearly twice the mass of the aggregate blobs of glass closest to me. It had a face about those ever-melting lips, and a head about the face. I could barely believe what I was seeing. Maybe I was going mad. Maybe the excitement of the early morning had pushed me over the edge. Maybe I was things that weren’t there. Maybe…
But, it was there. I know, to this day, the giant beast made of glass that howled and screeched upon its’ birth was there.
When it took its’ first step and I felt the resounding thud! of its’ foot crashing upon the ground, I knew the right of it. It was evidence enough. When its’ head came around and it peered at me from the incredible distance separating our two forms, I was fucking convinced.
Yet, it was the voice, at my side, so close I could feel the hot breath in my ear, confirming what I was seeing was real.
“She’s making them all come to life,” were the words, so raspy and distorted it was impossible to tell if it had come from a woman or a man.
I felt every hair on my body go rigid. The muscles in my jaw went taut, making me look as though I was writhing in pain.
“She’s bringing us all back…” A slow chuckle followed as if speaking took a tremendous effort.
I turned.
I saw horror.
I squealed with revulsion.
She merely smiled as though my reaction were the most normal thing in the world. Maybe she’d been expecting it, which was a distinct possibility. Her smile was simply terrifying. When her visage moved, the muscles and tendons were only partially in evidence. In places, where her cheeks or her teeth should’ve been, there was nothing. Her skin was desiccated, worn away here, thickly wrinkled and bunched there. Her nose seemed to have been snapped off or eaten away with time. Her hair was a wispy, inconsistent growth upon the top of her head as if she’d suffered from years of mange. She wore some kind of gown, though it was so rotted and addled. It clung to her form rather than covered it. I could see one of her sagging breasts and nearly all of her pelvic area, though I forced myself to keep my vision from wandering too far down. After months of seeing Myra’s youthful pubis, I couldn’t bring myself to see what one over a hundred years old might look like, especially one that had been buried for nearly three decades.
“Did She bring you back as well?” said the specter that was my grandmother. She was a woman I had never known, a woman from the countless black and white images floating here and there about the various homes of her children, my aunts and uncles from Lenny’s side of the family. “You look quite scrumptious for one of us…”
I lurched away from her, my mouth agape. I was incapable of making words.
She shuffled toward me as I backed out of the threshold. “Let me taste you, young man. I have always enjoyed the feel of a strapping boy upon my lips.” Her leer was anything but innocent. Her eyes were twin shards of the blackest coal. Though I couldn’t discern iris from pupil, I knew she was intent upon me. The intensity of her gaze was too great to think otherwise. “…both s
ets of them…” Her cackle was horrendous.
I backed away further.
She reached for me.
She was slow and her movements were jerky and lacked coordination. It was easy to avoid her grasp.
I back-peddled into the middle of the alley, sputtering, “What are you?”
“I am a woman,” she hissed, grabbing at herself, long, withered fingers made bright with exposed bone, clutching, rubbing, and then disappearing into her unsightly folds.
I swallowed hard to keep the contents of my stomach where they belonged. “Leave me alone,” I tried to warn her, though my voice was so strangled I didn’t sound all that menacing.
Her smile was so broad, her skull, beneath her parchment-like flesh, began to crack. Tiny motes of dust fell to the floor, wisps of the same popped outward to either side of her. “All boys like me, young one. They all do. Come and let me show you.” She reached for me once more, though I was well out of the way.
“Stop!”
“Come -,” she began, intent on saying more.
Without warning, a huge claw-like hand shot forth from the chamber behind her, the light reflecting, refracting in a thousand, thousand rays – every single shade in the rainbow and a million more. With fingers as big around as my waist, the glass-beast squeezed, holding her firm, pulling her back into the chamber.
She laughed like she was being tickled, her head thrown back, her mouth as wide as it could go, while her midsection was systematically crushed within the creature’s grasp.
I was rooted where I stood. My slippers seemed to melt into the asphalt water-channel, running down the middle of the alley.
The thing made of glass, too big to see through the doors, bent down, balanced upon its’ other implausible hand, shoving what was left of Lenny’s mother into its’ gaping maw. Bizarre, needle-like teeth ripped her to shreds in seconds, dust and other detritus from the grave littered the ground below it.
My lascivious ancestor was consumed. She convulsed with laughter the entire time.
The Birth of Bane Page 21
