“Where do you want to go?”
“How about Ash Cave?”
Ash Cave was in Hocking Hills State Park just a few miles from Lake Logan, where Tommy had been killed.
“That’s too close to the…” She couldn’t quite get the word cabin out of her mouth.
“Look, Denny, you need to reclaim your life, and this is one way to do it. We hike around in the beautiful hills on a nice sunny day, and then that part of the state will no longer be tainted by what happened there. It’s a way to make things good again.”
He let his rake fall so he could hold her. He felt big and muscular and sensible and… blind.
“I don’t know,” she said.
She noticed he was staring at the old house, and she hoped he wouldn’t ask any more questions about what had happened there. Last night she’d told him she had stepped out for some air and had fallen when a raccoon startled her by scuttling out of the broken window. She didn’t think he’d believed her, but he hadn’t pressed the matter.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Let’s have that old house torn down before it falls down. The roof is caving in. Why don’t I call around and get some estimates? You know what would be nice on that spot? A tennis court.”
She pulled away, suddenly angry. What the hell was he talking about? A fucking tennis court. It wasn’t his house, it was hers, hers and Carey’s. It was a sacred place, the place where Tommy had been conceived.
“What makes you think this is your land anyway?” she said. “Last time I looked at the deed, it belonged to me.”
“Sorry.” Greg picked up his rake and started raking.
“You don’t understand anything,” she said. There was a hard edge in her voice, and she felt the words weren’t her own. They were Carey’s words; she believed he was somehow speaking through her. “You’ve never made music or painted a painting,” she said, “and you’ve never tried to see what’s on the other side of the canvas. You’ve never really lived, and you don’t know anything about life or death.”
Greg leaned on his rake and stared at her. “You’re right, I guess I don’t know much about art and music,” he said. “I guess I’m stupid that way. But I know I love you, and I know I want both of us to be happy.”
“Happy,” she said. “Baby, I’ve seen the other side, and that word doesn’t mean anything to me anymore.”
She hurried back into the house and hid in the bedroom, trying to make sense out of her feelings. Greg was trying to help her become well again, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be well. His kindness was useless because he wasn’t able to bring Tommy back, and he wasn’t able to understand the dark power that was luring her away from his world of sunshine and sanity. She hated Carey but, at the same time, was drawn to him. Or maybe she was just drawn to death, because Tommy was there somewhere on the other side.
Guess our secrets are all that I can keep—
I’ve hid them safe beneath the ground, six feet deep.
It was getting dark when Greg tapped on the bedroom door and said, “Dinner’s ready.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
“I’m sorry for what I said about tearing down the old house. I apologize.”
“I’m not mad at you, I’m just not feeling good.”
“Denny, you’ve got to eat.”
She came downstairs, reluctantly. Greg had grilled two ribeye steaks in the backyard, steamed some little redskin potatoes, and fixed a salad. They ate without speaking. The meat was tender and juicy, but she found it hard to chew and left most of it on her plate.
“I should go pick up some picnic food for tomorrow,” he said after clearing away their dishes. “Want to come with me?”
“No, I think I’ll watch a little TV. Thanks for fixing dinner.”
She put on her coat as soon as his taillights disappeared out of the driveway. She thought of returning to the old house, but something told her that wasn’t the place Carey had reserved for their date tonight. She got in her car and drove south, not sure where she was going.
“Where will it be tonight?” she asked out loud.
She remembered a little fishing park with a few dilapidated picnic tables beside the river. She and Carey used to go there some nights. She remembered one soft summer night when they dropped some mescaline there and then drifted down the river in a rubber raft watching the stars throb and blaze like great pulsing hearts.
She drove to the riverbank, sat on the grass and watched the still water. She felt oddly peaceful, her mind nearly blank and her muscles comfortable and relaxed. She felt no fear or apprehension, only a calm eagerness. The air smelled like rain, and she felt a few drops.
Then she saw him in the distance on the other side of the river walking toward her on the water. His naked body glowed silver-white like a thin sliver of moon glistening in the night air. He was staggering, or maybe slipping on the still water, smooth as ice. He stopped a few feet away from the bank and gazed at her. He looked emaciated, his clammy white skin clinging to frail bones, and she wondered if dead people could waste away with illness like the living.
“I want you to take me to Tommy,” she said. “I want to be with him again.”
Carey tried to speak, and the bloody gash appeared in his throat. He clamped his hand over it and when he tried again an ugly squawking sound emerged. “Squaw! Squaw!” he seemed to be saying.
“I’m not afraid of death,” she said. “I no longer have anything to live for. You’ve taken everything away from me, so, now, take me to my son.”
Carey’s face contorted in a terrible grimace, maybe a malevolent grin or maybe something else, and he again inscribed a jagged circle in the air with his spasmodically jerking hands.
Thunder cracked overhead, and suddenly a cold, hard rain was falling, beating the surface of the river into an angry froth. The pale apparition seemed to melt in the rain until there was nothing left but a glowing puddle on the river, and then it, too, disappeared.
“You bastard!” she shouted. “Where did you go?”
She stood there in the rain for a long time, but he didn’t return. Finally, she pulled her wet coat tighter and went to her car, feeling jilted, as if death had stood her up.
Last night’s rain left the air clean and pure. The sky was a perfect blue and the sun shone warm and bright through the bare branches. After eating a picnic lunch, they climbed down steep steps carved into cool, ancient rock and eventually came to a large, open cave beneath a massive overhanging ledge. A waterfall ran from the top of the ledge to a small, clear pool in a rock basin beneath them. The cool cave air and the water’s echoing roar soothed her pain like an icepack placed on a sore muscle.
They stood inside the cave for several minutes without speaking and then descended into a valley green with fern. Despite the nice weather, there’d been few cars in the parking lot and, so far, they’d seen nobody else. The place seemed to belong to them and, as they began to climb out of the valley, she reached for Greg’s hand and held it tightly, as if he were guiding her up into a happier world.
He was pointing out birds and plants and other colorful details, obviously trying to cheer her up and keep her focused on the here and now, but she wasn’t paying any attention to his words. She was wondering why she was able to see Carey’s ghost but not Tommy’s. She’d never been religious and had never believed in Heaven or Hell, but, now that she had proof of some sort of afterlife, she was rethinking her beliefs. If souls survived, then there probably was some sort of heaven and hell, maybe nothing like what churchgoers believed in with angels and demons and all that, but surely murderers and fiends wouldn’t enjoy the same afterlife as kind and loving people?
Carey’s ghost was a hellish thing. Maybe his soul would always have to wander about on Earth, tormented and confused, because of the evil deed he’d done. Maybe his throat would always gape open with his own self-inflicted wound, rendering him speechless and isolated. Maybe his hands would always convulse and shake, so he coul
dn’t even communicate with them. Maybe, by killing himself and his son, he had removed himself for all eternity from the fellowship of others.
But Tommy had been cut down in his innocence, and it wouldn’t be his fate to roam about Earth helplessly, like his killer. That’s why she hadn’t seen his ghost. Surely, there must be a sunny and joyful place for the innocent, a place much better than Earth.
“Look, there’s a blue jay,” Greg said, and he went on cheerfully talking about how even though blue jays were beautiful birds they sometimes stole other birds’ nests and destroyed their eggs.
But Denise wasn’t thinking about birds. She was thinking that her desire to die was selfish and wrong. Tommy was in a better place—he had to be—and the terrible pain she was feeling was self-pity rather than pity for him. Surely, Tommy was feeling no pain now, and she was doing him no good by wallowing in her own.
For a long while they’d been ascending a steep, narrow path and, at last, they reached the pinnacle of a high ledge. They stopped to gaze down into the deep gorge in front of them. Greg stopped chattering, maybe because he couldn’t find words for what they were looking at. He slung his denim jacket over his shoulder and held her hand tightly.
The view here was magnificent, and the depth of the gorge caused Denise’s stomach to tighten. She made a silent promise to the natural beauty down there far below her feet. She would no longer seek out Carey or his dark ticket to death. She would devote every effort to becoming well again. She knew the pain of Tommy’s loss would always be with her, like a hollow place in her heart, but she would make the hurt a little smaller each day until it became a manageable ache, a distant throb.
But then she saw him. He was on the other side of the gorge, perched in the top of a stunted pine like a demonic angel on top of a Christmas tree.
She took a step back and let out a sound. “What?” Greg asked.
She pointed and said, “Can you see him?”
“I don’t see anyone,” he said. “We seem to have the place all to ourselves.”
“It’s Carey.”
“No, it’s not. Carey’s dead. It’s just your nerves, sweetheart.” Greg put his arm around her waist and held her tightly. “Look at something else, and the image will disappear. Look at those goldfinches.”
She tried to look at something else, but Carey had stepped out of the tree and was walking toward her on the air above the gorge. He seemed to be having trouble keeping his balance, and his thin arms were stretched out at his sides like a tightrope walker’s bar.
He stopped, maybe, twenty feet in front of her, still standing on air, so close now she could see the pale blue of his eyes. He looked out of place in this sunshine, naked and skinny and white with the pallor of death, a phantom of the night, far out of his element. He no longer looked frightening, but clownish, and even ridiculous, as he struggled to stay upright in the slippery air.
He stared at her and started making the same squawking noise he’d made last night. “Squaw! Squaw!” he screamed while clutching his hands against the bleeding wound on his throat.
“Go away,” she said quietly. “You don’t have any link with me anymore.”
“What did you say?” Greg asked.
“I’m telling Carey to get the fuck away from me. I won’t allow him to haunt me anymore.”
Carey looked desperate, his face contorted with some kind of agony. He pulled his bloody hands away from his throat and began drawing the same jagged circle in the air—but his hands weren’t jerking quite so badly today, and Denise suddenly realized it wasn’t a circle after all.
It was a box. A square box.
A terrible chill ran down her back. She pulled away from Greg’s embrace and said, “You.”
“Huh?” Greg said.
“Squaw! Squaw!” Carey was shrieking. And then the words came out: “Squaw-box! Squarebox killed us!”
She backed farther away from Greg and said, “You did it. You killed my son.”
“Are you crazy?” Greg said.
“No, you are. You had a spare key to the cabin. You drove down there and sneaked in and killed them.” She pulled her cellphone from her shirt pocket and said, “I’m calling the police.”
Carey was squawking and shrieking, his throat gurgling with blood. “He’ll kill you!” he shrieked. “Run!”
Greg grabbed her wrist. He wrenched the phone from her hand and tossed it into the gorge. He got ahold of her other wrist and pulled her close. She tried to put her knee in his groin, but he had her pressed too close against his body.
“Calm down,” he said. He shoved her to the ground and fell on top of her, pinning her there with two hundred pounds of hard muscle. When she started screaming, he reached for his denim jacket, which had fallen to the ground, and shoved one of the sleeves into her mouth.
His expression was calm and bland. “I didn’t mean to kill Tommy,” he said. “You have to believe me. I didn’t know he was there, nobody told me, and I’m sorry, I had to do it. But I think you can understand why I had to get rid of Carey. He was always going to be standing between us, ruining our relationship. You were too connected to him. You even admitted the two of you had some kind of link. And all that trouble we were having with Tommy, you know perfectly well it was Carey’s fault. Tommy was never going to accept me as a father because he was too wrapped up with that degenerate drug addict. And that’s all he was, Denny, a damn degenerate.”
She heard Carey shrieking somewhere nearby, and suddenly his naked body fell onto Greg’s back. Denise felt the cold bones beneath his icy skin whenever his hands brushed against her face, but Greg didn’t seem to notice anything. There was no link, nothing for Carey to grab onto, and he tugged desperately at Greg’s shoulders with no effect.
“But you have to understand, I didn’t want to kill Tommy. You have to believe that. I took care of Carey and was getting ready to leave when Tommy woke up and came wandering out of the other bedroom. I didn’t even know he was there but, after he saw me, I didn’t have any choice, and I did what I had to do.”
Denise was struggling desperately and choking on the jacket sleeve, but Greg was calm. His expression was blandly pleasant, and his voice sounded even-tempered and reasonable, as if he were explaining some everyday matter.
“You have to understand, Denny, I did this for you. I did it for us. I wanted us to have a happy life together, and we’d never have that with Carey standing between us. People sometimes have to kill, sweetheart. They do it for war and they do it for love. I’ve had to do it before, myself. I had to kill my own brother when I was just sixteen. He had some dirt on me and was going to get me in a lot of trouble, so I had to throw him in front of a freight train. I didn’t want to, but I had no choice.”
Greg raised his head and looked carefully around in all directions. “Don’t think badly of me, Denny,” he said. “I have a good heart, and I love you, and I wish I didn’t have to do this.”
Before she knew what was happening, he wrenched her to her feet and hurled her over the ledge. Time slowed and nearly stopped. She saw him gazing down at her from the ledge, and his face was pleasantly bland with a faint smile that seemed to say, “Job well done.”
The jacket sleeve was no longer in her mouth, and her scream pierced the sunny air and echoed off the stone walls of the abyss. She looked down at her feet and saw they were pumping up and down as if she were peddling a bicycle, and far beneath them she saw the rocky bottom of the gorge. It was coming closer, but slowly, slowly, as if it had all the time in the world and was in no hurry to extinguish her life.
And then she saw them standing together down there, looking up at her, and they looked so much alike, Carey and Tommy, both of them pale and skinny with long, golden hair and pale, blue eyes. They were watching her expectantly and, as she drew closer, they both raised their arms as if intending to catch her. In the last moment, just before she reached them, she heard Carey’s voice in her mind:
Just Tommy and me and babe makes three.
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Sheol
By Paul Stansfield
The end came quickly for Keith Moody, and relatively painlessly. In fact, it was precisely the sort of death that most people, given their choice, would pick; dying while asleep.
It was a brain embolism in Keith’s case. He was even dreaming when it happened. Like other outside stimuli, such as alarm clocks going off, or conversation, the slight pain and confusion of dying was actually briefly incorporated into Keith’s dream. One minute, he was having anal sex with Brooke Shields; the next, he was sniffing cocaine with the members of Mötley Crüe. The coke, when inhaled, caused some irritation, and weird images to go through his mind. Keith had never actually done cocaine, so he was unsure of how it felt or what it did, exactly. So, his mind threw in an approximate cause for his real-life trauma. But then his brain shut down and he died, all without waking up.
The next thing Keith was aware of was standing in a strange place. The sky was purplish-black, with no sun, although a dim sort of light nevertheless could still be seen. All around him were many, many people, more than he’d seen at one time ever, including at a rock concert in a stadium. Thousands and thousands, perhaps millions. All naked, too. Here and there, Keith noticed huge piles of worms. Two kinds; white tiny maggots and larger, brown-reddish earthworms. The ground—or, more properly, the floor—was a dingy light gray, and it felt like concrete. That was all.
He turned around, several times, to see if he could find anything more. He couldn’t. The same people, worms, and sky in all directions. Keith looked closely at himself. Aside from his also being naked, he looked basically the same. Same body hair, same height and weight, same moles, same scars. Well, he did look extremely pale, even by his light Irish ancestry standards. But maybe that was because of the light.
He looked around some more, and grinned. What a strange dream! This observation always cheered him. Whenever he realized in a dream that he was dreaming, he usually chose to change it, make it more fun. Keith tried to do this now. Thought of float-flying, but nothing happened. Pictured himself in a zoot suit, standing in a garish Monte Carlo casino; again, nothing. Imagined himself hitting the World Series-winning home run for the San Diego Padres, without success. Oh well, might as well make the most of it.
The Other Side Page 14