by Hixon, Wayne
Once there, they hid the wine in a knot at the bottom of an old sycamore, where it would stay cool and out of the dying sunlight. They built the fire. It was a small fire and they were experts in fire building by now. The lighter would not be put to it until after dark. A ring of stones encircled the dormant fire. They built a pyramid out of small dry sticks and filled the pyramid with dry leaves and newspaper. When that got roaring, they would throw a small log onto it. They didn’t really care about the size of the fire. The most important thing was that it burn for as long as they wanted it to burn.
They went about this act with the carefree nonchalance of dozens of Fridays over the past couple of years. They laughed about the stolen wine. They felt empowered by the hidden secrecy of their little fire as they retreated to Charlotte’s room to listen to music until dark. Doing so, they moved in the shadows of the town, on the outskirts of Lynchville, not knowing that they should feel so connected to it. Not knowing they moved on the surface of some dark, ancient, and ugly truth.
Twenty-two
Rain did the honor of driving the van up onto the hill. She turned it around so its rear would be the first thing to hit the house, figuring that would give the gas tank a better chance of exploding. They pulled it just far enough up the hill so it could gather some good momentum without curving too much either way and missing the house entirely. Of course all of this was rather suspect. They didn’t have any idea of where the house was actually going to be—if there was going to be a house there at all. They had to plan for this. They had to realize the house might just not show up and then they would be just as lost as they were before. A small part of Jacob hoped the Devils had moved on, that they had moved to some other town that wasn’t his. But he dismissed that part. He wanted them here. He wanted them right in front of him so he could try and knock them back into whatever hell they had come from and if he died trying to do this then at least he would die with the knowledge that he had tried to do something good.
Besides, he knew they were here. He couldn’t explain it. It was just some kind of quality hanging in the air around him. It was the way the wind felt on his skin when the breeze picked up. It was the fragrance of the dead leaves in the woods around him and the sweet smell of fire somewhere far out in the town. It was the look of the cold moon, coming up early in the blue sky. It was the cold cackle of a wolf or a wild dog.
They were here. Somewhere. He knew they were.
Twenty-three
Ilya and Ernst sat in the front pew of the Low Church, staring up at the stone slab of the altar. The pews were stone; they looked like they had been chiseled from bedrock, like they had always been there. Maybe they had not always been there, but they had been there for as long as either Ilya or Ernst could remember. This place, the Low Church, was what made Lynchville special. And what made the church special was the thing that thrived in the room behind the altar. They had to think of it as a thing because how else could something be both a person and a place?
The Dark Fire.
Neither a he nor a she, it had to be an it. It was both Heaven and God. Or maybe it was both Hell and Satan. It was the promise. That was how Ernst and Ilya thought of it. It was a place of the spirit. Most of the spirits, it rejected. The Dark Fire wanted seasoned spirits. It wanted trained spirits that had looked upon the world, the world that had rejected it, for hundreds of years.
Take the boy they had fed to the Dark Fire just last night. Immediately rejected. Sent into some kind of nebulous free floating region beyond human sight and mostly out of the reach of human understanding as well.
Ernst stood up from the pew and walked over to one of the walls. The walls were adorned with the dead; they hung there like sconces, in various stages of decay. He stroked the leg of the corpse nearest him, feeling her powdery gray skin beneath his fingertips.
“They’re here,” he said.
“I know,” Ilya replied, continuing to stare up at the altar.
Ernst looked at her, surrounded in the blue light that lit the church, that blue light that came from nowhere.
“I can smell them,” he said. “There are three of them.”
“Are we going to let them see it?”
“Of course we’re going to let them see it. I don’t think we can afford not to. It will draw them like moths to a flame.” Ernst chuckled at his trite metaphor.
“But not yet.”
“No. Not yet. It is not dark yet. We need strength. Do you think they have any idea why we are here?”
“I doubt it. I’m not even sure I know why we are here.”
“Because we are entering the Dark Fire.”
“It’s always been that simple to you, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, it has.”
“And you think it’s going to be that simple. You think we can just discard our old powers into fresh new bodies and it is going to let us in?”
“I think it’s time. Think of everything we have done for it. Nights we have starved so we can offer it up a nice juicy human. The years we have sacrificed.”
“What if both of us don’t make it?”
Ernst came over onto the pew, sitting back down next to Ilya. He placed a hand on her thigh.
“How could that be possible?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It just seems like something it would do... as a joke.”
“If you’re not there, then I do not want any part of it. Do you want to be there? You seem reluctant.”
“Of course I want to be there but there are going to be things about this world I miss.”
“Like what?”
“Like the feeling. Like the flesh. I like the flesh. I like my flesh. I like your flesh. All of our victims, all through the years, I have craved their flesh—the source of all their screams. All that pain.”
“You’re going to miss the pain.”
“Sometimes it seems so sweet. You can’t say you don’t feel it?”
“No. No, I’ve felt it. And I would be lying if I said that, at times, I didn’t relish it. The pain was always our art, wasn’t it? That was what we were good at? Pain and fear.”
“And fear is really just some other kind of pain. It is like a mental pain.”
“Are you feeling as cruel as I’m feeling?”
“I think so. If this is to be our last night of the flesh we need to make it something spectacular.”
“Without getting distracted.”
“Of course, without getting distracted.”
Ernst moved over to kiss Ilya, feeling her plump lips against his, her cold tongue inside of her mouth. He grabbed her arms, as cold as the stone they sat upon. Still, it stirred him. He longed for it but could not allow himself to become distracted. Not tonight.
“We need to go fetch the boy,” Ernst said. “For strength.”
Zack had come back from Lynchville High and collapsed onto the couch, knowing he would have at least a couple of hours before Ilya and Ernst needed him again. Now he woke up. It was not yet dark. Meager sunlight poured through the windows and he was pretty sure he heard voices from outside the house. In his brain, he heard Ernst calling him. He needed him to come downstairs. Zack went over to the window to see if he could see the source of the voices but the only thing he could see was dense fog, rolling past the window. He knew that meant the house had become invisible again. If there was no looking at the house then there wasn’t any looking out of the house either. It wasn’t like a two-way mirror.
He took a deep breath and went to the back of the house, opening the door leading to the narrow staircase. Already, he could feel their lips at his wrists. They would undoubtedly be hungry. They needed his blood. He was getting tired of the routine. He wondered when he was going to get some of their blood. When they were going to suck him dry and then bring him back to life.
He knocked on the door at the end of the stairs.
“Enter,” Ilya said.
He pushed the heavy door into the room.
They were seat
ed at the large table.
They looked pale, nearly as dead as they really were. Zack wondered what they would do if he was to refuse them. If he was to cut off their supply. Of course, he knew what they would do. They would simply find someone else.
He stood at the table and proffered his wrists to them.
“Thank you,” they each said, taking a wrist and sinking their teeth in, puncturing the skin, sucking the blood. Sucking gently, careful not to take too much.
Ernst pulled back from the wrist, blood smeared around his lips, his dark eyes going somehow through Zack.
“Tonight is the night,” he said. “Tonight is the night you become one of us.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“Do you think you are ready?”
“I know I am ready.”
“It is going to be a difficult night. Are you aware of that?”
“Yes.”
“You need to bring us the girl. This one you have been chasing. We need her. We cannot wait another night. Before you go to get her, I think you need to see what all of this is for. I think you need to see the Dark Fire.”
“Yes. I would like very much to do that.” Zack had read about the Dark Fire in the Leaves of Six. He only knew the book said the place was too beautiful to describe.
“Follow me,” Ernst said, standing up.
Zack felt a kind of excitement rise up within him. It felt like he had waited so long for this and now that it was actually happening, it seemed like it was happening too fast. From what he had read, he knew what Ernst had proposed to show him. Yet, it was still a complete mystery. It was like reading about Heaven. What was an individual’s idea of Heaven and did it change from person to person? Was the Dark Fire some kind of concrete paradise or would it be specifically tailored to him?
He followed Ernst into another room, into the Low Church. Zack had never been in this room. The stone pews rose from the stone floor. He looked, open-mouthed, at the corpses dangling from the walls and he looked at Ernst’s back, how the man slid through all of this casually. Of course he slid through it casually, he had seen it all countless times before.
It all seemed so simple now.
Everything clicked into place for Zack.
He was a replacement. Ernst had specifically sought him out and then tested him to make sure he could perform in Ernst’s place. And where was Ernst going? Off to the Dark Fire, of course. Zack felt his excitement rise further. If he was taking Ernst’s place, did this also mean he was going to “inherit” Ilya? No, he knew this could not be the case. Although he had not spent a lot of time around Ilya and Ernst, he felt there was something very much like love that passed through them. Sure, it may not be conventional love, but it was as close as they could come. Zack didn’t think anything could transplant spending that many years being near one another. They had to either love each other or hate each other and he knew that if one of them hated the other then at least one of them would be dead. But, weren’t they both dead? Okay, one of them wouldn’t be around.
When Ernst reached the large, elevated stone altar, he turned to Zack and said, “Now, when we go in here, you are not to say a word. Do you understand that?”
Zack nodded his head.
“And we are not going to be in there a very long time. A few seconds at most. And if we do not have a lot of time to talk tonight, you need to remember one thing—do not come in here again. What you are going to see is very powerful and you will not want to leave but if you stay, it will consume you. And the Dark Fire will need to be fed. It needs its sacrifice. That is what keeps it in existence. But when you bring people to it, use the lesser Devils. They are about. You will know who they are. They are the shells. They are the ones without sight and the ones without souls.”
“Zombies,” Zack said.
“If that’s what you want to call them. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Very well then. I hope this does not destroy you.”
Ernst swung back the door and Zack expected the man to enter the room with him and then remembered the flaw in that thought. If he could come in the room with him, that would negate everything the man had just told him. He was alone. On his own. He walked into a vast room and heard the door shut behind him.
It was more like a cavern.
He stood surrounded by stone, staring at a huge fire on the far wall.
Was this what he had come to see? A fire? It didn’t seem that spectacular.
Nevertheless, he stared into the flames, squinting his eyes against them. Suddenly, he lost himself. There was no other way to describe it.
A sensation snaked through his body and he fell to his knees. Not only did he look at the fire, he somehow saw through the fire. What he saw on the other side was what he had always wanted to see. He wasn’t exactly sure what it was. He didn’t think he would be able to stare at it long enough to see exactly what it was and he didn’t think he would be able to know that without being in there because it seemed to be so many things at once.
It was a beautiful, full-moon night.
It was a lush woods or a garden, green and sunlit.
There were people there. Every beautiful person he had ever seen in his life was on the other side of that fire and they all looked at him with a kind of longing that seemed terrifying. And he knew that if he could reach through the fire and touch just the air of that place then he would be able to feel the air on his skin and wherever he touched it would be like a million different orgasms.
The door opened behind him and he heard Ernst call his name.
He didn’t want to go back but he wasn’t so far gone that he had forgotten the warning. Yes. He needed to shut his eyes on it now. He needed to turn his back on it now so that sometime down the road it could all be his.
Unable to shut his eyes, he put a hand over them, stood up and nearly ran back to where he thought the open door was. He smashed into the wall and felt along it with his free hand until he reached the opening door.
Stepping out of it, Ernst shut the door behind him.
Zack removed the hand from his face and looked at Ernst. “Do you think it will be worth it?” he asked.
“I know it will be worth it,” Ernst said. And that removed any doubt Zack ever thought he would have. He realized he was crying with the sheer beauty of the vision. It was the first time in his adult life he had ever done that.
“You are touched now,” Ernst said. “Tonight you drink and become one of us. And everything you do from there on out is to sustain the fire. And how well you do that will be what helps you gain admittance to the land beyond.”
Ernst clapped an arm around his shoulders and led him into the Low Church.
Twenty-four
The threesome lazed on the hillside. Lazed as much as they could, anyway. Their ears were all a little sharper. Their eyes a little shiftier. Their reflexes a little tighter. Jacob had retrieved an old blanket he kept in the back of the car and threw it down over the grass. They all stared at the bowl of the hollow, waiting for something to happen and each of them were probably thinking the same old cliché: “A watched pot never boils.”
“It’s getting chilly,” Rain said, crossing her legs over each other, tugging Rachel’s shorts down as far as they would go.
“It’ll be getting dark soon,” Jacob said.
“Then it will only get colder,” Rain said.
“I meant, maybe it will be over soon.”
“Yeah... over,” Rain said, wondering exactly what that meant.
Rachel sat quietly, Rain on her left and Jacob on her right. She stared up at the sky, as though willing darkness to come or mentally pushing it away. Jacob took the opportunity to look at her. Even though they had been together nearly constantly for over two years he still liked looking at her. The way her dark hair, tinged with just a little red, fell behind her ears, the absolute flawlessness of her skin. If they were not in the middle of all of this, he didn’t think he would have been able to keep his hand
s off her. Another thought crushed him. What if this really was the end? Not of the Devils, but of them? What if tonight was the night they died? And what if they could not be together in death? What if all of that were just superstition and the dreamings of Christianity? What if he never, after tonight, had the chance to look at her again? What if he never had the chance to hold her, to slide inside of her, to feel the heat that seemed to grow and pulse around him?
Rain disturbed him from his musings.
“Shit, guys, did you see that!” she blurted.
“What?” he and Rachel said simultaneously, immediately alert.
“Something... Down there,” she pointed toward where they all apparently thought the house should have been.
“I don’t see anything,” Rachel said.
“Me either,” Jacob said.
“I saw something,” Rain said. “I know I did.”
“Well what the hell was it?” Rachel asked.
“I thought it was a man.”
“A man?”
“Yeah. But I don’t see him now either. It was just a second. I swear I saw him. He took a couple of steps, looked up towards the sky, and then he was gone.”
“I guess we could go look around,” Jacob said. “Did you just see one person?”
“Yeah, one person. It was a guy.”
“Was it Bones?” Rachel asked.
“No, it wasn’t Bones. Definitely not Bones.”
They all stood up at the same time. Jacob brandished the tire iron out in front of him. “Do you think a tire iron is a cool weapon?” he asked.
“No,” Rachel said.
“Why not?”
“I think it’s a desperate weapon. It’s like what people use when they’re not prepared. It’s like having to wipe yourself with leaves if you get stuck out in the woods.”
