“These really were something, hey?” Graham smiled as best he could; his body had begun to slip away from him. His hands were completely blue. He looked like a Smurf.
“Yeah, they won’t hurt your throat,” Bobby offered, deadpan as ever. “Or something like that anyway. There were so many taglines around I get ‘em all confused.”
Graham took another drag. “What’s it like, Bobby?” he asked after a while.
The kid looked at him, his eyes showing a glisten of emotion – or was it just moisture from the decay that had spread through his body? “I don’t know, Sarge. We’re all still there. None of us came home. We’re all still here, standing around this fucking church. It just never comes to an end, Sarge. I don’t think any of us knew why until recently. It’s you; until you come back then it can never end... we hope.” The last sentence was whispered, near inaudible.
“They call these cancer sticks, did you know that?” Graham chuckled to himself, offering a bit of modern wisdom to the kid.
“Cancer, these things gave you that?” Bobby asked in disbelief.
“No, that’s the funny thing, kid. I smoked my whole life, drank whiskey straight up, nothing more than a lump of ice to help guide it down – and yet my lungs and liver are the two bits of me that ain’t completely dead with it.” He gasped as he spoke, a gargled rattling sound. The room began to spin, his head felt light, as if he had been strapped to a wheel and left to spin for a few hours before being cut loose. It wasn’t the Chesterfield, but something much more permanent.
“Come with me, Sarge, please. Something is coming, don’t you hear it?” Bobby asked. Once again his dead eyes gazed at Graham, and now appeared to be pleading to him.
Graham was about to say no, when outside of his window the world lit up: an explosion ripped through everything. Brick and mortar dust fell from the walls, filling the room with a thick grey cloud. “We’re all here for you, Sarge. Just come with us. Can’t you feel it? There’s something coming,” Bobby pleaded above the din, for in the background came the rattle of automatic gunfire. Graham looked through the dust and saw a large hole in the wall, and on the other side a tank – or rather the barrel of one peering through the building’s gash like one of the Tripod eyes in War of the Worlds. Graham didn’t need to see any more to know who it was behind the controls. Besides, he could hear them all calling him, beckoning him and cheering him on like friends and family waiting at the finishing line of a marathon.
“You coming, Sarge?” Bobby asked, and as Graham looked over at him he saw Bobby as more of a ghost than a figure; he could make out the shadow of the door through him
“No, kid, I’m heading home to my wife,” he answered. It was the same answer he had given all those years ago when the war ended. He had done well in the forces and they had been all too keen to have him stay on, as an officer on the path to greatness, one rather poetic solider said from his risky position behind a desk back home in the United States. Again, just as the last time he had used the line, Graham knew that his wife would be waiting to take him someplace else, or at least he hoped, his resolve in the final minutes seeming to weaken.
“Good luck, sir,” Bobby answered, his shadow disappearing just as the familiar buzzing sound of an incoming air attack began to shake Graham’s bones. Bobby was gone in an instant, leaving Graham once again alone in the small cell that had been his world for far too long.
“Come on, you son of a bitch. Come and get me,” he called aloud to the room, challenging God to come and claim him with the same finality that he had used on all of Graham’s friends and loved ones over the years.
It started; he could feel it. The pain was gone; not just numbed or forced into temporary hiding from the chemical concoction of pills had had to swallow several times a day, but completely gone. For the first time he could remember, Graham was pain free. It started in his feet. It felt like smoke snaking its way through his body. He breathed a heavy sigh, for death had arrived to take him home, to those he cared for, and oh how he planned to have a few choice words with the man upstairs if ever he got the chance. He raised his head and looked down at his feet. They were completely numb, and to his eyes they were gone: everything below his knees had just been erased.
As a final thought, before he turned his attention to his wife, two words formed on his lips. “Forgive me,” Graham whispered to the room, talking to Bobby, his men still out there, somewhere, to the Germans he had killed or helped to kill, to his wife, to God – just in case. He wasn’t sure why he said it, but with nobody around to hear any real final words, he figured they would have to do.
Death finally took him. Graham’s heart stopped beating, an instant moment, no wearing down as often described in old age: it simply ceased. Calm washed over him. His lungs cramped, his brain drained itself of information, and as a smile passed over his face, Graham closed his eyes and let the darkness envelop him.
As he slipped away, all thoughts of the war were gone, eradicated. He was in his own garden, standing looking at the house that he and his wife had purchased not long after he came back from Europe. A new career, a new house, new state... a new start. They had lived in the house until the end, tended its two gardens for as long as was possible, planting flowers each season to keep it cared for, but now Graham stood out the back, knee deep in weeds, the only flowers were the dandelions and thistles that seemed to rule the roost. The house was dark; several windows were broken.
~
The mind is its own place, and in itself
can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
John Milton
Paradise Lost
~
CHAPTER 2
I
Marcus: An Old Friend Returns
Marcus woke with a jolt. He was surrounded by darkness, shrouded in it. He tried to move but couldn’t. He was restrained.
“Hello?” he called out, his voice strained and distant. Sounding like the final repetition of an echo before it fades away.
His mind was a blank; he couldn’t remember anything. A few images fluttered in his mind; a woman holding a baby – his wife? The idea sprang into his mind and connected with the picture. The baby was his first daughter. Marcus remembered the day; the entire labor had taken five hours, which everybody told them was incredible for a first baby. Then, like the memories of a drunken night out, various events that surrounded his demise filtered back into his conscious mind. He remembered the shopping arcade. The woman and the man; it was still hazy. He couldn’t remember what had happened. Only that he had fallen – tripped? Marcus didn’t think so. He could hear a baby crying, constant and at a tone which suggested more than a simply case of hunger or a dirty nappy.
Marcus was hot. Sweat covered his body and soaked his clothes. He tried to move, but only managed to pull his bonds tighter, forcing his body against the wall behind him. It felt like rock, sharp and unforgiving. Marcus steadied himself and managed to work his bonds a little looser, when a cramp hit his left leg. Just behind the knee a knot of pain exploded. It felt as though his knee was going to twist right off. The lack of visual stimuli coupled with the solitude of his dark world made it seem worse than it was, or so Marcus told himself over and over, repeating it like a mantra. He tried to focus his attention to the external situation instead. Something had been placed over his head. It wasn’t dark: his face was simply covered.
Have they taken me somewhere?
“What happened?” Marcus asked aloud. His thoughts stumbled around like a drunk on Friday night.
His body ached. That dull rusty ache you get while fighting off the flu. His joints swollen with fluid, the skin stretched taut over them.
Marcus heard something moving. He felt it, no... not it, but them. Something crawled over the exposed skin of his forearms. Something tickled his scalp beneath the mask. Marcus threw his head around as panic started to tighten its grip on him.
“Get off me!” Marcus called out. The light cancelling cloth that covered his head stu
ck to his mouth like surround wrap clinging to warm leftovers before you put them in the fridge.
He felt a breeze against his chest, and Marcus became startlingly aware of his nudity. Something slid down his chest, descending like a lover’s kiss, caressing his skin to just below his navel.
Marcus’s stomach felt as if it were on fire.
That was when it came back to him. The darkness lit up and Marcus was back in the shopping arcade. A small crowd of elderly people and a handful of store employees had gathered. Marcus looked at them, their faces pale, mouths motionless circles, like unwanted fish left on a boat’s deck to rot in the sun.
The scene changed again, another flash of light; Marcus was on the floor; his hands were raised before his eyes. They were covered in blood. Another snapshot. Standing again, he saw a man and a woman – God, she looks like a whore, – arguing. The scene changed again. Marcus now looked down on it. He saw his own body surrounded by a pool of blood. Not far away lay a woman – My God, she looks like a whore. She was bleeding. Her face was also missing: someone had crushed it. What remained was a bubbling bloody mess. Her body twitched, and beneath her was a child. Marcus could see its arms flying around in blind, panicked movements. He also saw bloody footprints leading away from them all, the stride getting longer with each print as whoever it was picked up the pace of their escape. Another flash, this one followed by darkness.
“Get this off!” Marcus roared, not in fear or panic, but in anger.
“Now, now, baby. Play nice,” a voice said. It cut through the silence, bringing sounds of life and hope into his world of endless night. It was a slimy voice; the vocal chords sounded as though they were drowning – yet there was something familiar about it.
“Who’s there? Who said that?” Marcus called, trying to get a bearing on the sound. It wasn’t in front of him, no, off the side, his left.
“Just an old friend.”
Marcus moved his head so that he faced the direction from which he was sure the voice came.
“You’re no friend of mine. Take this thing off now. Let me see who you are,” he said with confidence, defiant to the end. The simple knowledge that there was someone there, good intentions or bad, gave him a focus and grounding point for his anger.
“I don’t think you’re ready for that yet,” the voice laughed.
“Take this off now. I’m a police officer. There will be people looking for me. Trust me. We look after our own, with an old fashioned view on justice,” Marcus threatened, hoping the slight wobble in his voice wouldn’t give him away. His stomach throbbed, but he felt calm.
“Poor baby, you still don’t have any idea, do you?” the voice said with kindness. “You adulterous cock whore, you’ll get what you deserve down here. Oh yes,” it snapped, spitting venom filled words that burnt Marcus’s chest.
His skin was on fire. Drops of something seared his flesh, something other than words. Marcus winced in pain but couldn’t move more than a few inches at most. “What the hell is going on?” Marcus called out to the darkness, when without warning the cloth was pulled from his face. It didn’t take long for Marcus’s eyes to adjust as the darkness was more dusk than midnight.
The first thing Marcus noticed was the discarded sack that had covered his face wasn’t a mere hemp sack, but rather a sack of a different nature. Scrotums. They had been split open then sewed together, creating what looked like a magnified version of what they were.
Unsure of how long his captors would give him before plunging his world back into darkness, Marcus looked around trying to gauge his location, absorbing as much information about his whereabouts as he could. He was in a small windowless room. Despite the lack of illumination the dusk never threatened to darken further. It was the walls; they seemed to cast such an eerie glow. They were red; a shade so deep that in places it looked black. Their surface seemed to be moving… flowing. The ground and roof were separated by a gap of about three meters, the latter of which had the same flowing appearance as the wall. The way they swirled was hypnotic, and after a while Marcus began to feel nauseous.
I’m in a cave, Marcus thought deductively. The way out would be up.
“No you’re not, lover boy.” The voice read his thoughts. It sent chill up Marcus’s spine; an avalanche in reverse. With it came a dawn of realization. The final pieces of the memory puzzle he had been working on during his time in the dark fell into place.
“I’m not dead,” he said under his breath – although, as he spoke, his mind showed him everything he needed to see. The churchyard, the mourners dressed in either black or formal police dress. He saw his wife and kids standing on the edge of the grave. He saw a coffin… his coffin, being lowered into the ground. He saw his wife sink to her knees, where she remained until his son picked her up and held her.
“Oh, poor baby. So confused. Sure, it may end with a box buried in the ground, a quiet neighborhood too, no troublemakers, no noise.” The voice paused.
Marcus had been looking at the floor in a trance of disbelief, struggling to make his way over to acceptance. As his captor talked, Marcus raised his head, determined to look them in the eye, whoever they were. He saw nothing: the cave (or whatever it was) was empty.
“That is merely the physical world,” the voice continued. “That body you had was little more than a transportation system. A shell; some outer husk you call a body. But, dear… dear, dear, dear, your soul, the life that filled that festering pile of cells you called your home for over forty years, that will live on forever.” The voice trailed off, but Marcus knew the owner was close. His captor was there with him, hiding.
“Who are you?” he asked. A standard question made even more pertinent given his recognition of the voice.
“Kiss me, my Knight and I will be yours forever,” the voice answered, and the small chamber was filled with wind, a hot acrid wind that felt abrasive against Marcus’s skin. With it came a wet, damp odor like a rotten log in the middle of the forest. As if appearing out of thin air (which it did) a figure appeared. Nothing but a shadow at first, it was large; that was all Marcus could fathom. It was at least nine feet tall, wider than a normal man and straight, no clear widening for appendages like arms of legs. It looked for all intents and purposes like a...
It’s a giant talking shit, Marcus thought, his mind conjuring up an image of a large brown turd holding a cane, top hat perched on its head and a monocle against one dark brown eye with long, feminine eyelashes.
Slowly, the thing revealed itself. It was covered by wet, glistening skin. No, not skin, but a shell.
It’s a roach. The answer dawned in Marcus’s mind long before the creature had fully appeared.
The creature had its back to him, and Marcus noticed that the walls around him were no longer wet but had become tacky. He turned around to look, and saw the walls were bleeding. He could taste it: a heavy coppery flavor like a mouthful of old pennies. Marcus gagged, yet at the same time it brought along a sweet undertone which made him want to swallow.
The giant body oozed a thick opaque slime, which fell to the floor and congealed instantly. The creature was shuddering, quivering, with a respiration rate faster than a dog in the heat of summer. The brown, scaled body was bald save for a thatch of thick, wavy, black hair, which flowed from what Marcus hoped was the creature’s head.
“What.... what the f-fuck,” Marcus stammered as his brain tried to get a grip on everything that had happened. “Let me go.” The simplicity and the meek sound of the request made him feel ashamed.
“I will, don’t worry, my dark champion. It’s no fun without the chase,” the voice said.
“Listen, I don’t know who you are, but if you think I’m gonna crack you’re wrong. I don’t know what you want and I wouldn’t tell you if I did so just get it over with.” Marcus’s voice was strong and defiant.
The creature laughed at him, a mocking, belittling laugh that made Marcus angry. The same sort of laugh generated in a classroom when a student stands up and
says something he doesn’t mean. Marcus remembered a moment from his childhood where he stood up in a biology lesson to give a presentation and kept saying orgasm instead of organism. The reddening wave of heat that had washed over him then stroked his cheeks once more.
“You’re dead, Marcus, and I’m your judge, jury and executioner. It doesn’t matter what you say; none of it matters. Not down here.” The beast turned, revealing itself to Marcus, who felt his skin tighten as if it had shrunk two sizes.
When Marcus was twelve years old, his family had rented a cottage in the middle of the woods. They spent the vacation hiking, cycling, swimming and kayaking from sunrise until sunset, and had slept long and hard each night. However, one night towards the end, something wrenched Marcus from his sleep. A strange scuttling sound, as something scurried over the wooden floor. Marcus had ignored it as best he could; telling himself that, bugs are a part of nature, and the strange itching feeling on my legs comes from the cheap blankets, and the buzzing in his ears nothing more than the sound of mosquitoes, awake and thirsty for blood. The excuses kept him in a quasi-sleep for a while, but the excuses ran out around the time something crawled over his closed eyelids. They moved fast, like a sudden chill on a warm night. Something forced its way through Marcus’s semi-parted lips. It choked him. Legs probed his tongue, and antennae brushed the roof of his mouth, while a hard shell clacked against his teeth. Marcus sat upright, choked and unable to breath. He tried to call out. To scream for his parents, his sister, anybody, it didn’t matter. Marcus threw back the bed covers and that was when they descended on him.
Highway To Hell Page 8
