Highway To Hell

by Alex Laybourne

  At first Helen fell for his tricks, believing she had been let go, allowed to escape and return to her normal life, but then after a while, just has she began to relax, let her guard down, the hooks would come. Now she expected them: she would wander through the various colourful worlds he created for her, looking for flaws in it. The sun moving in the wrong direction across the sky, a tree with no leaves in the height of summer, anything she could see that seemed out of the ordinary became her earth wire. Once she noticed the mistakes, flaws in his design, it meant that the hooks were not far behind, and she would brace herself.

  It had all happened in the blink of an eye. Helen remembered working in the salon, and then there had been silence, a painful silence and then she fell, not to the floor, but through it.

  When she had woken up Helen was tied to a chair with ropes that smelt of urine and sweat. She was alone. In that first small room her tears had been enough. The visions she was sent, the places she was taken, places from her past that reminded her of how ungrateful she had been. She had seen the arguments that she had had with her in-laws, only petty things for the most part, but almost every time they got together a fight would ensue, and more often than not it would continue long after they had left. Helen and her husband would argue about them for days. Her father-in-law Herbert would start drinking, and this in turn would make her mother-in-law Jocelyn cry. Helen was shown over and over again not just the arguments but their consequences, the continued fights between the two as they drove home and often long after they locked their front door.

  Helen finally broke when she was shown a fight over the middle name of a child that hadn’t even been discussed, let alone conceived.

  Helen’s hands instinctively touched her own stomach; she hadn’t even been able to tell Mark that she was pregnant before she died.

  The argument had ended and her in-laws drove home and, once behind their own front door – in a quaint suburban area where their age was the perfect median for the neighborhood – Herbert had turned on his wife. He beat her with an open hand, then when Jocelyn still didn’t accept the blame Herbert used his fist. Helen couldn’t believe what she saw, and she called out her apologies to them, begging them to stop.

  No sooner had she called out and the images were gone.

  “You have been judged,” a figureless voice had said, and then he had arrived: Luther and all of his toys. He had wasted no time in sharing his ideas of fun with Helen.

  Above her, the trees had all linked together forming a sort of canopy, although the clear blue sky of the day was visible through the smaller less supportive branches. It was hot; it was always hot. Every day the oppressive heat would play an equal role in her torture. Helen would be drenched in sweat before Luther had even begun to apply his trade to her flesh, which somehow managed to regenerate each night.

  “Do you want to take a walk with me, my dear?” Luther asked. He was always polite. His manners were impeccable: that was part of his charm. That was what made him so dangerous. He would attack her body with the feral power of a serial killer in the height of his spree, and yet the next day he would arrive and whisk Helen away to a romantic candlelit dinner. Oh, how charming he would be. Walks were his favourite; he would often come and invite her to walk with him. They would wander through the woods, hand in hand like young lovers. The touch of his cold, slimy skin against her own warm flesh made Helen want to vomit, but she was powerless to resist him. As they walked, they shared intimate secrets and memories with one another. Luther would talk to Helen about his conquests, the people he had brought to and from the rack – as he liked to call his place of work. His tales were not special; they held no hidden meaning: they were simply a glimpse of all the things that he planned to do with her.

  “Okay.” Every instinct within her body told her to turn and run. She had no shackles, no bonds holding her in place, but Helen knew by now and had learnt over the years that running offered nothing. Luther or the people he worked for were in control. Helen knew that if she left the wood, she would blink and be back in the middle again. Her world had become a maze. It didn’t matter which way she fled: she would always come back to the same starting point.

  They wandered in silence, the woods thickening around them. The pine needles crunched underfoot until without warning they changed. Helen’s feet felt as though they were on fire. She looked down and saw that the carpet of pine needles had become a field of shattered glass. Along with this, scattered around as if for good measure were hypodermic needles, some clean, others used and dirty, caked in dried blood. Helen’s bloody footprints glistened in the sun. She screamed but before anything else could happen, she felt her body lift into the air.

  “Well, my dear, it appears that we have come around to that time of day again,” Luther said.

  Helen closed her eyes, bracing for the pain.

  “Fuck you, Luther.” It had become her standard response at this stage of the day.

  “My, my, my, nearly ten years we have been doing this –” Ten Hell years, that was. In the reality that Helen knew, it had been little over ten months – “yet still your dirty mouth comes forward first. It just isn’t the way a lady should behave, Helen.” He smiled as he pulled the scalpel from his inside jacket pocket. “And just think about how meek and mild you were in life. Tut… Such a waste,” he sneered.

  The first hook pierced through her shoulder, an invisible hand forcing it through the bone. Helen clenched her teeth and felt every sinew in her body tense in unison. Pain, it seemed, was the one thing to which the human body could never grow accustomed.

  The second hook passed through her left side, separating two ribs. Helen couldn’t help but cry. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she sobbed as she felt the third hook trace the contours of her body in search of a good place to strike.

  “Stop, please,” Helen begged as the hook passed through her ankles, stringing her like the famous Achilles. Her words came out slurred as the blistering pain began to affect her basic motor functions and speech abilities.

  “Helen, my dear, you know if you want me to stop, then you just need to say the words. Tell me you love me, embrace me, and I can begin to teach you. I think you have great potential, and me, well… I’m not getting any younger. I need to start thinking about a replacement,” Luther said, waving the scalpel in front of his face as he spoke. He swung the blade back and forth in front of her like a hypnotist waving his pocket watch on stage.

  “Then get on with it, because I won’t ever love a creature like you,” Helen spat. A clot of dark red blood flew from her lips.

  “I admire you, Helen. I really do, but we both know it’s just a matter of time.” He smiled at her and turned his back as the remaining hooks did their job.

  The chains rattled and before she could even think about fighting against it Helen found her world inverted. Pain exploded like fireworks behind her eyes. She could see the hooks by her ankles, see her skin stretching to the point of breaking – but it never would.

  Blood flowed down her shins and dripped from her knees onto her face and chest. She was naked, but that was not a surprise. Helen could recall one such session in which she had been hung by only her bosom, one hook passing through each breast. She had been left there for weeks before Luther came back to begin his torment.

  “I’m sorry, my dear, I do despise of vulgarity. You should understand that your naked body means nothing to me. I don’t see you like that, but times must, I am afraid.” Luther winked at her and walked away. He would leave her, allow her to stew a while with her own mind. What ghosts would it conjure up to haunt her this time? Over the years she had received numerous visits from wandering spirits who could not let go of their rage and were trapped in the forest as a result.

  Helen remembered the first spirit she had encountered. She had been hanging in a cave. It was only once he got close did she see what it truly was. Its skin looked as though it was three sizes too big for its skeleton; large flaps hung from its nake
d frame. Helen thought it was male, but its genitalia had been ripped off, or so it seemed from the gaping wound between the person’s legs. The one thing Helen did see was that in the centre of each flap of skin was a black, festering hole: the place where the hooks took hold. It hadn’t come too close that first time. There had been many encounters over the ‘years’ and they were a great deal more interactive and violent than that first time. Yet it was for some reason the only one that stuck in her mind.

  The final hook came out of nowhere, catching even Helen unawares. With her guard down the pain brought forth a scream that would have brought a Cheshire cat sized smile to Luther’s face. With her legs above her head and pulled out to either side the hook had an unobstructed path and pierced through both lips of Helen’s vagina, whereupon the majority of the weight was shifted.

  “Stop… Please… Luther…” she begged, but her voice trailed off and just as she lost consciousness she heard footsteps crunching on the broken glass.

  A sweet aroma caused Helen to stir from the blackness that had consumed her. It was the smell of… honey. She could taste it, and for the first time in a long while; several years she guessed. Her stomach cramped and tore at her in demand of sustenance. Helen licked her lips and tasted it again: honey, thick and sweet. She opened her eyes and saw that she was covered in it, from her bloodied feet to her swollen, weeping vagina, all the way up to and over face. It was as if some artist had brushed it onto her while she was unconscious, some sweet-toothed James Bond villain.

  “Oh good, you’re awake. I didn’t want to have to start this while you slept; it would have been rude not to give you a final chance to save yourself.”

  “Go to Hell,” Helen spat, her words harsh and strong, while inside every part of her screamed to be let free. She didn’t care what she would have to do, she just wanted the pain to stop, she couldn’t take it anymore, but…

  Maybe today is the last day, she thought. Maybe from tomorrow it will be less…

  “Very well. This will hurt, by the way – a lot.” With that Luther leaned in and kissed her on the lips. His skin was cold, his lips hard and stony, yet when he kissed her, in that fleeting moment of contact, Helen felt all the pain disappear. She felt free; she felt herself. As soon as the contact was broken it flooded back.

  Luther looked at her, his thumb held out before him, one eye closed, and he studied her like an artist admiring his latest model or chosen landscape. Then, with a few assured and strong cuts, the sharpened blade drew Helen’s blood once more. Today she saw he had opted for the rusty cutthroat razor. It meant two things: he was in playful mood, and it would be a long day. The pain bordered on being refreshing; it cleared her head from the lingering dizziness of the kiss. It was the first direct contact between them that hadn’t been meant to inflict pain and Helen forced herself to think that maybe, just maybe, Luther was losing his touch; she was winning.

  The blood that flowed seemed to bond to her honey skin, congealing rapidly like candle wax. Her body was still; struggling was no use. Once she had managed to wrench herself free from the chains, pulling them through her skin, fighting against the waves of nausea that had washed over her. Yet before she had even gotten to her feet they came back were back.

  “Luther, Make it sto- I… lov-” Helen was just about to cry, to offer herself in any form of service that would be accepted, but when she looked up, Luther was gone.

  A solitary bee was the first to arrive. It flew along more by luck than any scent or knowledge of the riches that lay ahead for it. Yet once it found the girl, it couldn’t leave. It settled on Helen’s stomach just above her navel. It stood for a while, wandering along the sticky contours of her flesh, before plunging its stinger into her skin. It left a small, burning swelling behind, one that soon began to pulse, continuing to grow in size until it was the size of a pea.

  Word soon spread however and before long an entire striped army clouded the blue sky. The furry bodied beasts roamed around Helen’s naked form, stinging with the unprovoked viciousness of wasps on a hot summer’s day. Beetles and other flightless creatures, their scuttling bodies bouncing off each other in the chaos, soon joined party, their jaws nibbling not just the honey but the flesh beneath. Helen felt the first few insects dive into her exposed raw meat, her silence only maintained by the simple knowledge that if she opened her mouth to scream they would come flooding inside of her.

  The insects and creatures continued to arrive; a pair of earwigs had perched atop each of her nipples and took it in turns to pinch them, drawing little spots of blood each time. Helen could feel her skin being stripped away one small bite at a time. They were inside her, too: she could feel them burying through her open wounds, deeper and deeper into her body, foraging for fresh, sweeter meat.

  The spiders were the last to the party, their fat bloated bodies swollen and wet before they arrived. Their legs were needle sharp and left tract marks all over Helen’s skin. One particularly bloated arachnid with a yellow lightning bolt running the length of its abdomen settled on her face. Helen’s blood flowed freer as her wounds were stretched. She felt something hard burrow its way deep into her body, hissing and buzzing as its powerful legs propelled it deeper. Her tears that seemed to excite her living second skin welled in her eyes. They erupted en masse, bursting out from within her. They spewed up her throat, a wave of living vomit. A tide of scurrying legs and mandibles ripped into her bleeding gums. Her tongue was stung and bitten until it was swollen and plump with venom and finally it simply exploded, like a cartoon shotgun, leaving her with nothing but a stump that fanned out at the end like a peeled banana. Then…

  … as if some invisible gag or weight had been removed from her, Helen found the power to her voice. She cried out, a long, ear splitting wail, a mix of terror, pain, and anger that had been boiling away under the surface. It had been displaced by the bugs and insects that now burrowed through her flesh; large tracks swelled all over her body, marking their progress like thick pulsating veins.

  She managed to form a word that expressed her pain: “Why?”

  Everything froze: the pain, the burrowing, everything. “Because it is necessary. You were a bitch on earth; you mistreated and abused those who loved you, the people who took you in to their family with open arms, people who loved you as if you had been their own,” Luther whispered in her ears, appearing as if conjured from thin air.

  “You keep saying that, but I don’t understand. I said I was sorry. Why can’t you just let me go? Please, I can’t take it anymore,” Helen begged. Her voice was tired and just as emotionless as Luther himself. Her hopes that the words would have any effect had long since died: this was merely a process that they followed; a script.

  “Well you know what you have to do, my dear. Admit your guilt, open you heart and release the hatred you have for people like your in-laws. Submit yourself to me. I’ll take the pain away from you, teach you how to master it, to gain control over it, and maybe, just maybe, when these parasites you hate so much die I’ll let you, my dear protégé, spend some time with them… alone,” Luther hissed, his tongue sliding out of his mouth. It was long and thin, and forked with three sharp points. He licked the side of Helen’s face and felt her entire body shudder.

  “No, I won’t do it; I’m not like you,” Helen whimpered. “I didn’t hate them. They just wouldn’t let us live our own lives. All I wanted was some peace. Was that too much to expect?” She stopped as the pain returned, just as intense as it had been. Her entire body cramped as the insects buzzed back to life. Only this time, instead of a feeling one mass body, Helen felt each individual creature, every stabbing motion their pointed legs made, every ravenous bite they took.

  Helen closed her eyes and saw her husband. He sat at home by their dinner table. A wedding photo in his hands, an open bottle of liquor stood beside him, his face red and swollen with tears. Between his body and the picture was an empty bottle of medication. He wore a suit; the same suit he always wore to work on a Monday. I
t was the first suit – it wasn’t a suit, rather a shirt, tie and trousers set – that Helen had bought him when they got together. He always said that wearing it on a Monday seemed to make the week seem much more bearable. The house was dark and messy; papers and letters lay strewn over the dining room table. Dirty dishes and several empty bottles of various liquors littered the floor, while a thick layer of dust had gathered across every exposed surface.

  “Mark,” Helen called, not thinking that he couldn’t hear her. Everything seemed so real. She raised her arms, and saw them, not the swollen poison filled flesh sacks that hung inverted in the air, but the slender tanned arms she had had in life. She reached forward to her husband, but just as she was about to touch him he turned to face her. His face was twisted as if it were a mask pulled over some other beast’s head, a head that was far too large for it to fit properly. His eyes were black as the night and his mouth curled into a snarl. “Bitch!” it roared, just as Helen was pulled back into her nightmare world. The pain thumped and pulsated deep within her body like an itch on a covered wound, and no matter what she did, Helen couldn’t quite find any release.

  “You hated them. Every time you saw them your blood would boil – ah, such a wonderful sight. You felt contempt for them like you had never felt before, and that is why I know you, know what you are capable of should you put your mind to it. You will break, so why make it harder on yourself? Join me, leave the pain behind and take your position on the other side of the rack,” Luther said. He was crouched down onto his haunches, his fists resting on the shard covered ground. As Helen watched he began to dig his fists into the glass and needles, twisting them in slow forceful circles.