by Derry Sandy
Chapter 10
He had died and gone to hell. This is what Clarence concluded after what seemed like an eternity suspended in the cold, dank, foul room. Pain danced through his body every time he took a breath. His only companion was the woman, except that now she was something more, some sort of monster or demon. She spoke to him, sometimes in the voice of the woman, shrill, breathless and scared, but more often in sibilant gravelly tones. That she was now a demon made sense as they were in hell.
Clarence had no way of tracking the passage of time. No natural light entered the room. No sentry came to feed him or to give him water. Water, that was it, he had to have been down here less than three days or he would have died of dehydration, unless of course this was hell, then he would be able to hang here indefinitely, with his thirst increasing forever but never reaching the crescendo that would usher in his death.
In time the pain, the thirst, and the terror nullified each other, and he passed into a fitful sleep. He awoke with a jerk when light entered the room briefly as a door groaned open. Clarence was suspended with his back to the door, so he could not see who had entered. The door closed again allowing the blackness to reclaim its dominion and impose itself twice as strongly as before.
Someone struck a match then lit a candle. Clarence began to tremble involuntarily. This series of events was similar to those that preceded the cell mate’s transformation. She let out a gravelly chuckle and spoke in a voice that sounded as if she had swallowed broken glass. “It’s your turn, Clarence. Time to join us.”
Clarence wanted to scream but his parched, abused throat would not lend itself to anything stronger than a breathy hiss. Though his voice was inadequate, his terror was absolute. Clarence heard the low shrieks of rusty gears being pressed into service and felt his body rotate counterclockwise slowly.
He was thankful that he was not rotated in the other direction, this way he was spared the view of what the woman hanging on his right had become.
He could now see that there were two men in the room. A short man, who Clarence recognized as the chauffeur, worked a large manual crank on the wall. The man was short and lean almost to the point of malnourishment and so the effort of turning the crank required both of his hands. The second man held a candle. Even in the light of the candle, a gloom bathed the man’s face, rendering the details of his features indiscernible.
Clarence was sure he was the passenger from the car, the man who had beat him. He was well over six feet tall, broad through the shoulders with excellent posture. His black leather wingtips reflected the candle light. He wore a crisp shirt that may have been white or light blue tucked into well-tailored gray slacks. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to reveal strong forearms. He exuded confidence.
When Clarence had rotated 180 degrees, the man handling the crank stopped working and took the candle from the taller man. The gloom around the man’s face deepened in the absence of the direct candle light.
The tall man walked forward deliberately. The creature, now on Clarence’s left chortled in delight. When the man was within arm’s length of Clarence, he produced a bottle of water from behind his back. This close Clarence could make out a few features of the man’s face; a strong chin, an aquiline nose.
“Clarence Jeremy, or do you prefer Caramel? You have been here for roughly two days and you must be dying of thirst.”
Clarence nodded that he was thirsty, suppressing a suspicion that the contents of the bottle might not be water. The man lifted the bottle to Clarence’s lips and fed him a controlled stream of liquid. The first sip burned his throat like acid and Clarence thought the man had fed him some sort of poison, but then he realized that it burned because his throat was ragged and dry. He drank until the bottle was empty. The man tossed the bottle off to one side and produced another. Clarence drank again. He almost cried in relief. When he was done drinking the man also tossed that bottle away.
“Since you know my name, it’s only courteous that you tell me yours, and why am I here?” Clarence was surprised at how confident he sounded.
“I have had many names, but if a name makes you feel more comfortable you can call me Lucien. Why you are here is an infinitely more interesting question. I need you to bring me someone, Clarence.”
Clarence cleared his throat and tested his voice again. “I don’t understand why you would need me. You picked me up pretty easily, why can’t you just get this person too?” A voice in the back of Clarence’s mind was shouting that he should be silent, but he reasoned that he was probably going to die here, so he would at least die having his curiosity satisfied to the full.
“She will see me coming if I go for her personally.”
“See you coming?” Clarence was genuinely confused. “In that case why can’t you send the lady-thing hanging next to me.”
“Rebecca?” The man gestured to where the woman hung just outside of Clarence’s peripheral vision. “Rebecca and those of her kind are also part of the reason you are here. Rebecca’s is not completely within my control. She is murderous and always hungry. If I send her to do my bidding, she may very well eat the target and I need the person brought back alive. I want you to become like her, but I want you to control her and those like her.”
“You kidnap innocent people, perform some sort of experiment on them and you expect me to be your willing guinea pig?” Clarence almost burst out laughing at how ridiculous this conversation was.
“None of my subjects is innocent. Rebecca here is a child murderer.” The man gestured to Clarence’s left as he spoke. “To everyone else she was Nurse Rebecca, an accomplished midwife, but I know that in any given year she kills about two babies born in her hospital. Thrusts a needle between the uncalcified joints of their skulls sending them into a coma. The deaths are passed off as a sudden infant death syndrome, crib death. The wound is almost impossible to detect. She has been doing this for about fifteen years, so by a conservative estimate she has killed thirty babies, although I suspect that she has killed many more. She fights the urge to kill so valiantly, but the evil is within her. It’s like a stain on her soul that she cannot get out. All I have done is free her of her last inhibitions.”
Clarence said nothing. The man continued speaking. “I have made a couple dozen of like her, and none are innocent. They are the worst that humanity has to offer, molesters, rapists, and murderers of the most deviant sort. They walked around passing themselves off as normal but in truth they are happier now that they have been freed to be their true selves.”
“But I’m not a murderer or a molester,” Clarence stated.
“That is exactly why I need you. The obeah I used to make Rebecca and her ilk is very old, and parts of the procedure have been lost. As their creator, I can compel them to do my bidding, but I can only control one of them at a time and even so it requires my full focus. Any lapse in concentration and they break free of my will, and if they are outside of my control things get very messy. However, they are all joined by a psychic link that will allow the strongest amongst them to control the others in a more complete manner than I could. I can make you the strongest and you will control them to do my bidding.”
“Why do you think that I would be less likely to break free of your control than the others?”
“You already know why. You can be controlled because you are nothing, Clarence. A dying and abused whore. Your entire life you have submitted to the will of others. You have no will of your own. None of the others that I have turned is as servile as you. That is the difference between you and them. Join me and I will give you strength, strength that you have never had and you will serve only me, instead of the hundreds of others who have used you night after night, year after year.”
“But what if I just want to go back to my life?”
The stranger chuckled. “Clarence, if you truly wish to go, I won’t let you return to that shell of a life you had. I will heal your disease, I will give you a change of clothing, I will give you money and I will
set you free. I will allow you a two-day head start. Then I will send Rebecca after you. It will be difficult to control her, to keep her on target, but I may manage. If you survive Rebecca, I will send Anthony and Marcus, controlling two of them simultaneously is a stretch but if I really focus, I might just manage it. If you survive them, I will send Juma, Nathan, and Antoinette. It is impossible to keep three of them controlled, they will stick to the basic plan, finding you, but they will slaughter many, many people before they caught up to you. You see where this is going. One of the beasts will eventually catch you, and when they do they will slowly eat you alive the only aspect you can control is how many other people die because of your selfishness.”
Clarence considered his odds. How far could he run in the two days before Rebecca was sent on his trail? How hard would she be to kill, how hard would Anthony and Marcus, Juma, Nathan and Antoinette be to kill? How many more of them were there, the man had mentioned that he had dozens. Could he just go to the police? As quickly as he thought them up he dismissed these possibilities. He had never been a fighter. His talent lay in succumbing, submitting, bending like the reed in the storm and surviving. This man had displayed power from hell, had spoken to him in the voice of his dead father, had obscured his face with permanent shadows and had turned kidnapped serial killers into…whatever the hell he turned them into. However, if he was going to be Lucien’s errand boy there was one more thing that he had to do.
“Let me look at her.”
“Rebecca? Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Lucien nodded at the chauffeur, who set the candle on the floor and went back to the wall to the gear crank. The room filled with the grinding creak of rusty gears and Clarence spun slowly to his left. His heart pounded as he turned then the grinding sound stopped.
His vision was completely black for a moment until he realized that his eyes were squeezed tightly shut. He opened them. Rebecca was stripped naked and was suspended by her wrists from ceiling chains just like Clarence. Apart from her suspension she seemed to be in no worse shape than he was. She appeared to be unconscious or asleep, or simply ignoring them. Her head hung between her shoulders. Her damp stringy hair obscured her face.
Rebecca looked to be in her mid-thirties but apparently kept herself fit. Her stomach was flat and her body was toned but not overly muscular. She was neither short nor tall. Clarence could not believe that this woman had been a child killer and was now something more.
“She looks normal,” Clarence said.
“The changes can be seen by some if the light is right,” Lucien replied cryptically. “So, you will do this? Unlike the others, you must invite it willingly.”
Clarence had already made up his mind. There was no escaping Lucien or this dungeon. And even if he somehow escaped, his old life was worthless anyway. “Yeah, I guess I’m your guy,” Clarence replied, and as soon as he said the words he felt relieved.
Lucien did not hesitate. He touched both his hands to his face and some of the shadowy gloom transferred to his hands when he took them away. As soon as he did this, the woman bolted awake. “No, Clarence do not accept it, every word he says is a lie,” she shouted. But then the creature took over and Rebecca let out a nasty, gravelly moan of delight. “Yes, Clarence, join us.”
Clarence was about to shout that he had changed his mind, but Lucien thrust the shadowed hands into his abdomen. Lucien’s hands went through his clothing and into his body as easily as a white-hot ice pick would pierce lard. There was no blood but the pain was so intense, so all encompassing, so complete that Clarence could perceive nothing else. There was no dark room, no Rebecca, no weird Igor-like chauffeur-assistant. There was just Caramel the whore and his pain.
Every nerve in his body was exposed and torn by mad dogs made of flame. Every tissue and fiber, every muscle was being speared with lances of iron and ice. He was simultaneously being scalded and lashed; scourged and crucified; burned and branded; and frozen, mauled, blinded, eviscerated, and flayed. In his suffering he bit through his tongue and the sensation was a cold candle against the backdrop of a thousand suns of agony. He suffered at a cellular level. Fat beads of blood sprouted on his forehead and crawled down his face like sweat.
Clarence would have gladly repeated every painful, humiliating moment in his life if only this horrific agony would cease. The pain would not let him go unconscious. Pain this exquisite demanded that he remained awake to savor it. His heart pounded faster and faster, Clarence knew that his mind and body could not stand much more. His body was giving out, succumbing to the agony. Finally, a cool, velvety black descended over his mind and he died from the pain. In the end Clarence had the last laugh, Lucien had lost his man.
Chapter 11
“Them want them pocket full with blue, blue silk,
Them want them statue drinking full cream milk.”
- "Madman’s Rant" by David Rudder
When Clarence awoke, he did not know how long he had been dead. The room was silent. He was no longer chained, but lay on his back on the cool, stone floor staring up at the stone ceiling. The room was weakly illuminated by a thin shaft of light entering through the gap left by the ajar door. He was naked and Rebecca was gone, or perhaps he had been moved.
Sensation slowly leaked back into his body and Clarence realized he felt better than he had in years, perhaps better than he had ever felt in his whole life. For the first time in a very long while he felt truly alive. He stood, flexing his toes, stretching his back. He felt strong…more than strong. Then he realized he was not alone; the room was empty but he could feel others. He was intimately aware of them; Rebecca, Anthony and Marcus, Juma, Nathan and Antoinette along with dozens more. Some were in this building in adjacent cells, others were further away, but if he wanted to he could point the way to each one of them accurately.
These were Lucien’s soldiers and they were his to command, he could tune into their thoughts and could see their memories. In short order he knew about all the people they had murdered or raped or mutilated. The group was collectively responsible for several hundred killings. Their cumulative wickedness was staggering. Together they operated as a unified consciousness, like a hive of insects.
Can anyone hear me? He spoke to them through their shared mental channel. None of them responded. He knew they were testing his mettle. They were aware of him, just as he was of them. They were wary, exuding a predatory malice, poised to strike like the vipers they were. His inclination was to reason with them, to try to persuade them. But he reasoned that when he was on the street the strongest people did not persuade, those people gave orders and punished those who did not obey. He was the hub, he was their commander, he would command, but first he would punish them for resisting him. He focused on an image of blinding light combined with searing heat and he unleashed it on all members of the hive.
They groaned at the psychic onslaught. Speak to me, identify yourselves by name, one by one. He did not need this information, he already knew them all, but this was an exercise in compliance and for the first time in his life Clarence relished being dominant. This time they responded. One by one they identified themselves. In all fifty-six souls named themselves. But there was another, number Fifty-seven, who had not responded to his command.
Number Fifty-seven lingered on the outskirts of his perception. Clarence applied more force to his inquiry. SPEAK, his psychic voice echoed off the walls of a telepathic well. Still there was no response from number Fifty-seven. Clarence focused and could see her more clearly in his mind’s eye. She was a small skinny girl in a torn dress, chained in a room, just like he had been. He tried one more time, but this time the girl slammed some sort of metaphysical wall between them. He lost the mental image. She fell completely out of his extrasensory perception.
Clarence was intrigued. Lucien had said that everyone who was chosen was guilty in some respect, monsters masquerading as men while they waited for someone like Lucien to authorize their worse inclinations. But thi
s girl could not be more than nine or ten years old. Surely, she did not fit Lucien’s criteria. And why was she chained when the others were free to roam their cells?
Lucien’s voice filled Clarence’s head, severing his connection with the others, and demanding his undivided attention. Clarence tried but realized that he could not determine Lucien’s location like he could for the rest of the hive.
Welcome back. How does it feel to be powerful? Lucien did not wait for an answer. Remember though, you are mine, Clarence, just as they are yours. Have a sample of what will happen if you disobey me.
The pain returned, surging up from some internal reservoir and striking him like a hammer between his shoulder blades. It was just a sliver of what he had experienced before, but it was enough to flatten him completely. When the agony dissipated and his vision cleared, he managed to get to his knees. He coughed and spat up a rusty clot of blood. Lucien continued to speak into his mind.
The others are yours to command, use them to complete the tasks that I will set for you. Leave this room and go upstairs. Someone is waiting. They will give you something to wear and further instructions.
Clarence hastened to comply, not willing to risk another dose of pain. He rose to his feet, went to the thick wooden door, and pushed it the rest of the way open. Outside the stone room was a long hall with a low ceiling. The hall was lined with many other doors that led to rooms he knew housed some of the others. The air was stale and smelled faintly of mold and more faintly still of decaying flesh. Overhead a string of naked electric bulbs flickered on and off and swayed on vagrant drafts. The inconstant lights cast multiple dancing shadows in various shades of black and gray, an effect that was altogether disorienting.
Clarence hastened down the hall eventually coming to a staircase that led upwards. The moment his foot touched the bottom step all the lights in the hall simultaneously dimmed and then died. The darkness was so complete that Clarence felt as if he had been dropped headfirst into a barrel of crude oil.
