Undead as a Doornail

by William F Aicher

  I struggled again to push the man off, wincing in pain as my abdominal muscles clenched at the effort. About to give up and accept my fate, trapped for eternity in some sort of god-forsaken catacombs of horrors stuck under the stinking corpse of a blood-stained serial killer, I took a final breath and pushed.

  The body lifted from me easily, as if I’d suddenly added superhuman strength to my list of remarkable abilities. But when the body fell to the side with a thud and I opened my eyes, I saw it hadn’t been me, but rather the woman from earlier. I made to raise my arm so she could grab it and lift me from the floor but dropped it just as suddenly when she lopped one leg over my prone body and straddled me. The shoe she’d taken up as a weapon earlier was nowhere to be found, and instead both hands wrapped around the charred grip of my .45 like she was strangling a mongoose.

  “I ask you one more time,” she said, her accent thick as she fumbled over the words. “I ask one more time … avant que je te tue.” A lock of jet-black hair fell across her forehead as her thumb moved and she pulled back the hammer. Her finger moved to the trigger, and she asked again.

  “Who the fuck are you and where the fuck is my sister?”

  Chapter Six

  “My name’s Phoenix,” I grunted as I rose to my feet. “Phoenix Bones.”

  “Your real name. Tell me your real name. Or I shoot you.” She waved the gun at my exposed crotch. “I shoot your balls off.”

  “That is my real name.” Blood seeped from the wound around the knife in my gut, and it hurt like hell to talk, but I answered. “Grab me that, will you?” I asked, pointing to the dead man. But she didn’t listen. She just stood there with the gun pointed at my junk and took another step closer.

  “I swear, I’ll use one gun to get rid of the other,” she replied, and the heat of the recently fired barrel burned against the bare skin of my balls. “Where is my sister?”

  I raised my hands slowly, palms-out, so she’d hopefully understand she really did have the upper-hand here. It wasn’t like I was going to pull some crazy action-movie move and slide the knife from my gut and into hers. As cool as that would have been, I knew myself well enough to realize I severely lacked the strength to do something so badass. And besides, she was cute. I might have even been turned on should this same scenario been played out under different circumstances.

  “I told you, my name’s Phoenix Bones. Don’t believe me? Take a look in my—” I glanced over to the pile of ash where my clothes used to be. “Well, I had a wallet in there. As for your sister? I don’t know who you are, so I don’t know who your sister is. But if her name isn’t Nancy Langenkamp, and I seriously doubt it is, I can’t help you. Hell, I can’t even help Nancy Langenkamp. Not anymore at least.” I nodded to the blood-drained corpse hanging from the wall. “Assuming that was her, that is. Too late now.”

  The woman scanned the inverted dead girl, and her eyes went wide as the situation finally became real to her. God knows she’d already seen a lot of shit down there, what with the pile of bodies and all… but those were dead things. The girl … the girl had been a living thing, and now it too was a dead thing. And she’d seen it happen. She’d seen it happen and not done a damned thing to stop it. Not until it was too late. I’d seen that look before. Seen it in my own mirror. See it every damn day.

  She dropped the gun, burst into tears, and collapsed in a sobbing heap onto the floor. I considered asking again for a bit of help, but she was out of it and she’d stay out of it for a little while. I only hoped the hysterics wouldn’t kick in. That’s when things got dicey. So, while she sat there, her tears dripping to the floor and mixing in with the various pools of blood, I knelt and began to strip the clothes off the man who no longer had a face.

  He was a dirty, stinking mess—and not just from the blood. Everything he wore, from his jacket to his undershirt to his skivvies was caked in dirt, dead skin, roiling bugs, and old sweat. But it was better than nothing, I figured. The knife wound, on the other hand, was a bigger problem. I considered calling it a day and stabbing myself through the chest so I could come back fresh, but considering where we were, I couldn’t trust I’d come back where I left. You can’t find a portal to Eitherspace just anywhere, but they do tend to center around darkness … both literal and figurative. And this place? Even with the blazing light of the torches, it was still dark. If I popped myself then darted off to Eitherspace, I could deal with it and eventually find my way back home—safety line or no safety line. But I couldn’t leave this woman here. Even if she’d gotten herself here on her own, there was no way she could have ever suspected this was the kind of mess she’d find herself caught up in. If the hysterics set in, or the delirium, she’d never find her way out of here. And then there’d be one more dead girl on my conscience.

  Blood welled from the wound as I withdrew the blade from my gut, and along with the blood came some other stuff I didn’t want to think about. Wherever he’d gotten me, he’d gotten me good. But still, I could move. I could help us find a way out. I could help save the girl.

  Save the girl. Then save myself. Or die trying.

  I stumbled over to the cinders where I’d burned myself up and sorted through the ash pile. Not much remained other than my set of keys and a few heaps of melted electronics. I swore under my breath as I shoved aside what remained of my PKE meter and my night-vision goggles, not wanting to think about how much it would cost to replace the damn things. Then I found what I was searching for. There wasn’t much left of it, but the small piece of handkerchief that had survived my Ghost Rider act was still more than I needed. I balled it up, pressed it to the place the knife had been, and wrapped the dead man’s belt around my abdomen, holding it firmly in place.

  Might not be clean, but it sure as hell is sterile, I thought.

  Off to the side, the girl was still crying, but she’d let up some. She watched me curiously as I slid my arms into the sleeves of the blood-soaked jacket. The crying gave way to sniffles as I started going through the dead man’s pockets. When my hand found something cold, round, and metallic hidden away in his jacket, the woman’s eyes finally met mine. She stopped crying altogether when I pulled out what I’d discovered: a golden amulet with an amber gem inside, dangling from a sparkling chain.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Now fully clothed, I stepped over to the woman, took a seat beside her, and handed her the amulet.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, as she gazed into the sun-shaped gem embedded in its center.

  And that was the truth.

  -----

  We sat there in the silence of the catacombs for what felt like hours. Eventually, her sobbing subsided, and the only remaining sound was the ever-slowing drip-drip-drip of blood from the dead woman’s throat. The bucket had been knocked over in the fight, so what had been drained earlier now made a dark red slick on the stone, but with each drop of the fresh blood from the fatal wound, it spattered and made a kind of “plunk” while slowly expanding the puddle’s reach until it neared the edge of our toes.

  “What’s your name?” I ventured. She wasn’t about to give it up freely, not without some sort of prodding from my end. Or at least not until she finally broke out of whatever stupor all the shock had put her into. But we’d been down here long enough. Or at least I had. I’d lost track of time somewhere between the time I arrived and when I woke up from her conk on my noggin, but from the way my internal clock ticked, I figured it had been at least an hour or two. Chances were slim, someone else was coming any time soon as this looked like a solo operation. But you never can tell with these psychos. Sometimes they travel in packs.

  “Sofi,” she replied softly. “Sofi LeRoux.”

  “How’d you get down here, Sofi?” I asked.

  “I was already down here.”

  How long? I wondered.

  “Well, why were you down here? You said something about a sister. You asked me where she was. Is that why you’re here? Are you trying to find for your sister
?”

  “Who was that?” she asked, ignoring my questions and shifting her gaze again to the dead woman on the wall. “How did you …? Who are you?”

  The girl had a lot of questions, and I should have expected them. After all, this wasn’t exactly a scene from your everyday life diary. Well, at least, not if you weren’t me. I’d been through this before. Well … not exactly this, but the shit. Some people say they’ve seen the shit when they’re in ‘Nam or Iraq or some other war. But I’ve been in a war all my own. Been in it as long as I could really remember. Wasn’t time to dive into the gritty details now though. This called for the abridged version, that is, if we ever wanted to get out of there in a reasonable manner of time.

  I sighed and started. “Like I told you earlier, my name’s Phoenix Bones. What you saw? The fire and the burning and all that? Well, that’s just something I can do. Don’t ask me how. Don’t ask me why. I don’t have an answer to either question.” I sighed again at my statement, not because I was telling her lies, but because I hated to say it. I hated to say it because it was the truth, and the truth was a damned bastard of a thing. Where I’d gotten my abilities was anyone’s guess. They’d been there since the day I was born. Since the day I was dead. “I’m down here because I was following someone. Or something. And whatever it was, I’m pretty sure that pile of meat over there is the one I was after.”

  She scowled at the psycho’s now naked body on the floor, seemingly floating in a pool of blood. Little critters scrambled across his bare flesh, darting in and out from the mop of greasy hair atop his head. Worms wriggled down into the hole where his skull had once been. He looked like he’d been rotting for weeks. Had looked that way when I stripped him down earlier too, but I’d been in too much pain to give it much attention. The smell was probably horrendous, but with all the other stench down here it wasn’t something you’d notice. One thing I did know though, was the man on the ground was just that—a man. Not a zombie or a ghoul or even a ghost gone corporeal. No demon infested him, and he’d not been formed out of mud and voodoo. He was a man. Just a man. And now he was a dead one.

  “Why were you following him?”

  “He took someone.”

  “Someone you know?”

  “No. Nothing like that,” I answered. “Someone I was trying to help.”

  “If you don’t know, then why bother?”

  “Why? Why not? When someone’s in trouble, you help them. That’s what I was taught, at least. And sometimes people find themselves in the kind of trouble no one else can fix. Or if they did try to fix it, they’d end up in a big old mess of their own. Regular people aren’t ready for the kind of shit I’ve seen,” I hesitated, “the kind of shit we’ve seen. Because believe me when I tell you this: what you’ve seen here isn’t normal.”

  She let out a nervous laugh—the kind you can’t tell if it’s because the person honestly thinks you said something funny, if they think you’re nuts, or if they’re just too damned spooked by whatever the hell situation they’re in laughter is the only reasonable response. A chuckle of incredulity.

  “I think I agree. This,” she waved her hand around the room, “this is definitely not normal.”

  “So why are you here, Sofi LeRoux? Really. Tell me how you got here.”

  “I’ll tell you. But first I’d like to leave this place. I’m sure my sister isn’t here, and the stink is making me sick.”

  As to exactly how we were going to escape was another question entirely. I could pop back into Eitherspace. That’d be a surefire way to get out of there. Even if I had no idea where there was yet. But with the girl there with me and all the dead bodies stacked in a pile, I assumed wherever there was had to be somewhere close to other people. I surely hadn’t popped out in the middle of some jungle cave in the middle of Paraguay. Or if I had, this girl’s trip to the tropics had gone badly off track. Though I suppose even the track it was on right now was badly off. No matter where we were, thousands of miles from home or ten steps from our bedrooms, this was some nasty shit.

  If I popped back into Eitherspace one thing would have been certain: I’d have no idea where I was. Or how to get back home. The rope tethering me back to the bed in my house was long gone, so there wasn’t much of a trail. Sure, I’d gotten lost in Eitherspace before. But that was when I’d been wandering. First time I died I ended up there, and I was certain it was some sort of hell. After all, what place other than hell would you find yourself lost in the inky dark with no up, no down, utterly isolated, and trapped in pure silence? It’d be enough to drive you mad. Luckily, after a period of stumbling around and nearly giving up all hope, I’d found a way out. Turns out it doesn’t take much at all to leave Eitherspace. About as much as it takes to get there. But to know where you are? That’s something I still haven’t mastered, and I doubt I ever will.

  Besides, even if I did know my way back, I couldn’t leave my new friend alone here in this terrible place. Could I? I mean, she got there on her own, so for me to leave her behind to fend for herself and find her own way out really wouldn’t be that cruel. She got herself into this mess, and she could get herself out.

  Problem is, I’m not an asshole. And don’t try to tell me I only did it because she was cute. Yeah, she was—an honest-to-God looker. But back then stuck in the mire it wasn’t the right time or place to think such thoughts even if they were hovering in the back of my mind.

  She got herself into this mess … she could get herself out. That thought echoed again in the caverns of my mind. No, I couldn’t leave her here. But I could coax her to start finding her way out. Help us find our way out. However she’d gotten here, there must be a way to follow that path backward. All I had to do was convince her to follow it … and bring me with her.

  “You said you were searching for your sister?” I asked again. “I assume that’s not her?” I nodded to the now fully-drained corpse on the wall.

  “No… not her.”

  “You know who it is?”

  “Isn’t it the girl you were looking for?” she asked.

  “No, Not the same girl. This one’s too old,” I answered. “The one I’m after is much younger. Well, maybe not much younger, but younger. A teenager. And she wasn’t wearing a dress. At least not the last time anyone saw her…”

  “Saw her alive?”

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  “I don’t know who she is. But I have seen her before.” She took a step closer to the dead woman, careful not to put her shoes into the pool of blood that spread out underneath. Crouching to the ground, she lowered her head as close to the floor as she could, attempting to get a view of the woman’s face under her upside-down dress. The woman’s blonde hair hung down in red-stained clumps, the tips dragging through the puddle. “I think I saw her at the party. Earlier. This woman looks like someone I saw there.”

  “Party? What party?” I stood up, wincing at the pain in my gut.

  “Down here. Where they took my sister.”

  “They took your sister to a party?” I rubbed my stomach, and the pain shot fire through my abdomen. A burst of nausea slithered up my throat, but I swallowed it down. The room spun a little, and I took a breath and regained my composure.

  “Not to a party. From a party,” she answered. “That’s where I was … where my sister was. Where she was.” She took a few steps forward and put her arm around me, careful not to touch the place I’d been rubbing. “Come on, let’s get out of here. Before anyone else comes. Before you die on me.”

  “Don’t you want to look around more for your sister? She could be down here somewhere still.”

  “No, I already searched. Wherever she is, I do not think it is here,” Sofi replied. “I have been down here for a long time now. Maybe days. And I only found this area now.” She paused and peeked down the dark hallway where the man had come, dragging his bucket. “Down that hallway, where the man came from, there is nothing. But he was not there before. There is maybe a secret door, but I did not see i
t.”

  “We can give it a quick look, just to be sure,” I said. But I knew there wouldn’t be anything there. Wherever the guy had come from, it hadn’t been from a door. There’s more than one way to come and go from a place if you really know what you’re doing. And based on how I got here … how I followed him here, I was fairly certain he knew what he was doing.

  Still, he was human. And I’d never seen a human enter Eitherspace before. No one other than me, that is. But if you want to call me something other than human, maybe that’s true too. I’m not like anyone else I’ve ever met, and chances are high you’ve never met anyone like me either. No, the only way in and out of Eitherspace that I’d ever heard of was to either be dead or undead. And this guy had been neither. I supposed now he was dead there was no telling where he’d gone. Hopefully, straight to hell ... though you never can tell for sure. Sometimes people like to stick around a bit—even after their body’s lost its usefulness. Other times people stick around even if they don’t want to. God knows I’ve met my share of pissed off ghosts in my time, and most of them were pissed for good reason: they didn’t want to be stuck here on earth, even if they did have access to another plane of existence for convenient travel purposes.

  Still, we proceeded with our search. If only to soothe any worries she might have still harbored in the back of her mind she’d missed something somehow. Nothing down that hallway of course. Nothing, that is, except a worn down trail of scraped stone, from what looked like countless trips back and forth by that man as he dragged his metal bucket back and forth. It ended in a corner. A dark corner recessed in the wall. And at first, Sofi mistook it for a door. Hell, even I did. But it wasn’t a door, just a little space tucked away, big enough to hide in if you wanted to. And big enough to enter Eitherspace, if you could put a door there.