Undead as a Doornail

by William F Aicher

  “Your spray bottle. The one you had to find your signs to the party. Do you still have it?” I asked.

  “I do,” she whispered. She reached her left hand into her jacket pocket and retrieved a small mister bottle with a pump trigger and handed it to me. The gun remained in her right hand, barrel pointed down but her finger still on the trigger.

  I turned and pointed the beam again to the parafairies, still sucking away at the stone floor. As it lit upon them, another sucking sound echoed behind me—that of Sofi taking a reactionary inward gasp of air. My hands full, I could do nothing to stop the scream erupting from between her lips. Their pointed ears perked up, and their eyeless faces snapped in our direction. The tiny hose-like proboscises retracted into their mouths as the skin around their mouths peeled back. Circular rows of tiny teeth spun like microscopic blades inside the suction-cup-like opening one could only call their lips, and their wings flung open.

  This only made Sofi scream louder, and I cringed at the sting of her cries against my eardrums. The parafairies were about to take flight and attack, and with the situation we currently found ourselves in, the last thing we needed was to fight off an infection from one of their bites. They were notorious carriers, and the kinds of viruses they’d probably been exposed to were not the kind you healed from. Without thinking, I lifted a heavy boot from the ground and slammed it down onto the first. Another found its wing caught under my heel, and I brought my second foot up and down onto its screaming face before it had a chance to break free. The third, however, I missed entirely, and before I could bring my foot up and down again, it took to the air, directly toward my face. With one heavy swing of the flashlight, I clobbered it, and it burst with a sound like a baseball bat smashing a grapefruit. A cocktail of various fluids and fleshy bits exploded into the air, and its dead body slapped against the far wall with a wet smack.

  Sofi’s screams continued, even as I lifted my boot from the smashed remains of the other two flattened parasites. “Please, for the love of God… shut the fuck up,” I shouted, as I spun and raised the flashlight over my head like a club. Her eyes met mine, wide with shock … and she began to laugh.

  “You’re nutty, you know that?” I asked as I lowered the flashlight.

  “You were going to hit me,” she said through her bellows. “I should shoot you.”

  “You shoot me, and you’re never getting out of here,” I replied.

  “We are never getting out of here,” she said and raised the gun. “We are trapped here with these monsters until we die.”

  “You want to shoot me, you go right ahead.” I tried to shout, to knock her out of her new psychosis through the stern sound of reason. But the pain in my gut stabbed through me again, and I only managed to answer with a wheeze. I paused and took a few slow breaths. “How did you say you got down here?” I asked.

  “We followed signs on the wall. Signs we see only with the spray the men give my sister.”

  “Do you know what those signs were?”

  “Arrows. Painted with something invisible.”

  “Blood,” I replied. “Arrows painted with blood, then washed away like they were never there at all.”

  From the mangled expression on Sofi’s face, I could tell she was now stuck between the place between laughter and screams. The mere mention of blood seemed to remind her of what kind of a mess she’d gotten herself into, even if she couldn’t fully comprehend it yet.

  I knelt, held the spray bottle out before me and pumped a few squirts onto the stone surrounding the mashed corpses of the parafairies. The goopy mess that had gushed out of their insides when my foot brought them to their end immediately lit up with a bright iridescent blue, but soon the stone floor around them started to light up as well. I took a few steps away from Sofi, sprayed again, and took a few steps more. With each step, I squirted another mist from the bottle, and with each squirt more of the room lit up. Soon the entire space was aglow in a soft electric blue, some areas brighter than others, but all painted in spurts and sprays like a Pollack had decided to paint the room with glowsticks.

  “I think we found your party,” I said, grimly.

  “But there is no one here,” she replied. “Where are the bodies? Where are the speakers and the lights? This room is empty.”

  “It may be now, but it wasn’t. You see all that?” I asked, gesturing to the ghostly glow all around us. “That’s luminol. Your bottle was full of it. Glows when it reacts with blood.”

  Laughing and crying were now both well past Sofi. All her body wanted to do now was to wretch. To physically reject the place in which she now recognized. The place where she’d seen countless killed and her sister stolen from her. But, to her credit, she swallowed it down.

  “We need to get out of here,” she said.

  “Do you know the way out now?”

  “Yes. I think I do. Suis moi,” she answered. “Follow me.” Before I could respond, she’d snatched the flashlight from my hand and started off again.

  I spun on my heel to follow, and that white-hot pain again seared through my gut. The tip of my boot caught on the stone, and I toppled forward, collapsing in a heap. Sofi returned to me and helped me back to my feet.

  “Come. I help you. Not much farther and we are free home.”

  “I think you mean home-free,” I mumbled. As she brought me to my feet, my world began to swirl. Wherever that bastard had stabbed me, it hadn’t been someplace nice. But I wasn’t about to let a slow death of infection and delirium take me. Not here. Now all I wanted was my gun back, so I could punch a slug through my brain and go through the whole resurrection process and start over fresh. But the words couldn’t come, and my mouth refused to work.

  From there on, all I remember are fleeting glimpses of flashlight beams over yellowed stone and stacked bone, down one tunnel after another. A door. The sickly smell of damp earth. Steps, another door … the twinkling of Paris streetlights.

  Then, for a long while … nothing at all.

  Chapter Seven

  There was no way to tell how long I was out. Or how long it had been since I last saw sunlight. But when the morning came some several days later and peeked in through the crack in the drawn shades, I finally woke up. Not for long, mind you. Just a moment. And it was possible I’d woken earlier than this. Had maybe been awake time and time again since we escaped those hellish catacombs, but this was the first time I could remember being conscious.

  It didn’t last long, though. I shivered violently, sweat pouring down my brow and a piercing headache shrieked through my skull. I remember grumbling, trying to make out words … to ask for someone to please turn out the lights. Nothing nowhere near that intelligible came from my lips though, if I’d managed any sound at all. Still, something signaled I’d woken, and a shadow passed before me, then drew the shades completely closed. I dozed off again, and again, I have no idea how long I remained out.

  Time went on like this, in little bits of frenzied spasms of wakefulness—but wakefulness in name only. My mind reeled and spun like a monkey on a tricycle on a high-wire balancing an array of spinning plates. Ready to fall apart and crash at any point. Headaches, fever, and nausea wracked my every waking moment, and in time, I’d thrown up enough that all that remained between my grunts and moans were outbursts of dry heaving.

  I do remember her, though, as she took care of me. Sofi observing me with pitiful eyes as she dotted my brow with a wet washrag. Why she brought me here, rather than leave me for dead on some hospital stoop, I had no idea. Then again, I couldn’t ask. I couldn’t form a single word, let alone quiz her on where we were and what she was doing with me.

  I remember wanting to die. Many times, just wanting to die. To shut down, reboot, and start over again.

  After what must have been days but could have been weeks for all I knew, I managed to take down some liquid—mostly water, but at times some broth. But I wasn’t getting better, so much as acclimating to the ongoing pain. That stab in my gut, it had
hit something alright and whatever it had hit had leaked all over my insides. Sepsis is what some call it—infection and rot from within. Maybe a doctor could have saved me, I don’t know. What I do know is a regimen of ibuprofen and Perrier is not enough to cure a dying man.

  “Let me go,” I whispered—the first words through my lips since we encountered the cleansed massacre scene in the catacombs. Or, the first words I could remember speaking. My head had been filled with all manner of twisted dreams while in my feverish dying state, from memories of past run-ins with all manner of boogeymen, to nightmares of being lost in Eitherspace for eternity, to a dinner with my mother turning into a zombie film as my lost sister clawed her way from a hidden grave in our corner garden while dad roasted a pig over a pit to hell. Words surely came during those visions, but not conscious words. Just the raving mutterings and screamed obscenities of a man trapped in the violent throes of death.

  “Let me go,” I whispered again. “Kill me.”

  Sofi, seated on the bed beside me, reached her hand to my forehead. Though I knew it to be soft and warm, it felt like pure ice against my roasting skin. “I am taking care of you,” she replied, her voice like velvet. “You saved me. Now I save you, Phoenix.”

  “Please…” I stammered, barely managing to form the words. “Don’t under… die… okay.”

  “Shhh,” she whispered and pressed her soft lips against mine. “You rest.”

  The next time I woke, it was to the sound of a door opening. My eyelids felt like steel shutters, but I managed to raise them far enough to make out the blurred silhouette of two people talking in the doorway. After a quick exchange of words, Sofi opened the door further and let the visitor into her flat. The door closed behind him, and the room fell back into hushed darkness. The two spoke again, a hurried, focus conversation wholly unintelligible to me because they spoke entirely in French. A pause, what looked like an exchange of money for something the man took out of his inner jacket pocket, and he left. My eyelids fell closed again, and sleep washed over me.

  Sometime later, I again woke, this time to the gentle shaking by a hand on my shoulder. “Wake up, Phoenix,” Sofi whispered. “I have medicine. It will help you feel better.”

  My eyes fluttered, catching a few fleeting glimpses of her concerned face, and then closed again. I again tried to speak, to create words to tell her to put me out of this misery, but only managed a pained groan. She responded by slithering her fingers into my mouth, gently prying my lips apart, and slipping in a pill. I tried to swallow, but my dry throat erupted into a fit of coughs. The lip of a glass found my mouth, and she poured a small amount of water in, and I managed to swallow it, and the pill, before falling back asleep.

  As I slept, dreams hit me again. But this time they weren’t so much fantasy as disjointed remembrances of past reality. With the fever and the drugs and me on the literal edge of death, it’s hard to recall what all went through my head, but what I do know is it centered around Belinda.

  We’d been kids at the time—no more than eight or nine years old. I can’t exactly recall, even now in the lucidity of current hindsight. Either way, though, it didn’t matter all that much. Just that we were young enough to be children still but old enough that Momma didn’t mind much when we wanted to go off on an adventure. No, back then us kids were free-range. Momma loved us, that I know. But she didn’t hover over us like some parents do today. Looking back, I can’t tell if that was a good or bad thing, especially when you consider what ended up happening, but it there wasn’t a lack of love in our family. Fact is, love is what let us be the kids we were—love and trust.

  Must have been late summertime. In my memory, the trees are still dense with leaves and the air so thick and heavy with humidity you’re almost swimming through it. Take too deep a breath and you might drown. The time of year bugs buzz about in swarms and you best watch where you step before you bring your foot down on a cottonmouth and it gets so damned pissed off it latches its fangs onto your ankle, and you scream and holler well past the time you’ve been taken to the hospital. Of course, that never happened to me, but I had friends who told me about their own friends whose feet found them sons-of-bitches. I’d seen a few in my adventures too, usually slithering off in some swampy land we knew better than to go mucking around in. But never been bit by one. I’m not stupid.

  Far as I can remember, this was the first time Belinda and I ever came across something “not-quite-normal.” Sure, she’d told tale of other strange goings-on she’d come across out on her solo adventures, but up until then I never seen nothing like that. Usually, I put it up to her wild imagination, and usually, I was probably right. But a few weeks back she’d come screaming through the screen door of our little house just about sunset, wild-eyed and out of breath. Yammering something about monster or wolf-man or something-or-other she’d seen tearing into a deer. From then on, she didn’t want to go out in the woods alone, so we’d started going out again together. Mostly she tagged along when I was going out adventuring, but I didn’t mind so much. Not that I was scared myself, mind you, but that I knew she was, and it felt noble to play the role of big brother … even if she was technically a few minutes older than me.

  The sun was going down, sending little beams of light through the gaps in the summer leaves and branches, streaming down onto the forest floor like little spotlights. The western sky turned a wondrous shade of pink lemonade, and the two of us scampered through the trees on the path we’d worn bare through our countless travels. We hadn’t been up to much of anything that evening. Just off on our own, hunting for whatever kind of mischief a few kids might find. The falling sun though, it was our cue to skedaddle and head on home. Dinner would’ve been well-past over, but Momma and Daddy knew better than to wait for us. We’d eat whatever was left over when we got home, and from the smell wafting our way on the summer breeze an hour or two earlier, Daddy had been grilling up something tasty.

  This exploration had taken us considerably farther than we normally ventured, so the trip home took longer than we planned. Or at least that’s how I remember it. Looking back at it now, the memory’s quite a bit clearer of course … but when I was in Sofi’s bed, sweating and fussing and delirious as a rabid cat, things didn’t make quite as much sense. Back then, when the memory dream hit me, it hit me in bursts and spurts. The sun went down, and that signaled it was time for us to head on back home. But after that? I don’t know if things started hitting me harder, what with that “medicine” Sofi had shoved down my throat and the continual slide into madness as the infection brewing in my gut took hold and ventured into my bloodstream, but after that, the memories started getting jerkier and hazier.

  Thing is, even now I can’t remember exactly what happened that night, other than it was surely a harbinger of things to come years later. The sun went down, and the bright sky turned from yellow to pink to murky purple dusk, and the trip home began to feel as if it were taking longer than it should have. Soon night fell completely, plunging the forest into complete darkness, and us without any flashlight had to try to figure our way home through the tangle of wood. Twigs crackled under our feet and a hoot owl started in with his questioning who, who? The forest erupted in a cacophony of bugs all around us, and we pushed on through it, sure home couldn’t be much further. Never, ever much further.

  At least that’s what I kept telling my sister. She was alright at first, still high on the adrenaline from our scampering and playful jaunt through the woods. But as night fell, I witnessed a new realization hit her, and as much as she tried to hide it, fear was starting to settle down on her bones.

  She managed to keep it to herself though, mostly … until the moon came up, full and bright and peeking at us through the breaks in the canopy. Shadows danced across our path like little demons scampering from tree to tree. The wind picked up as we moved and soon started to whip through the branches, letting out a series of horrible yowls, accentuated by the occasional crackle of a fallen branch.

&
nbsp; And this is where things get murkiest of all. Even now, when I think back to it. Those sounds, they started to come from all around us, even when the wind didn’t blow.

  “Don’t be scared,” I told Belinda. “That’s farther off, none of that ruckus is here. Just branches breaking off farther in the woods and it echoes a lot more cuz it’s night-time.”

  I feel we must have been about home when it happened. Another crack, this time from behind us … and this time far too close for me to consider lying to Belinda. She might have wanted to believe my lies earlier, believe them because they made her feel safe. The time for false bravery left with that crack though. Because something was there, and it was just about on top of us. Belinda broke off in a run, screaming, in the direction I assumed our house was. I turned around, and something like a man rose from the brush about twenty feet away. Nothing I could make out, other than it was bigger than me. A silhouette against the moon. But another crash from my right distracted me, I turned to see, and found nothing, for the woods had become too dark and whatever made that second noise had hidden in the shadow.

  When I finally made it back to the house, I expected a firm scolding from my father for being out so late and not taking proper care of my sister. Nothing of the sort happened though. Because Belinda hadn’t come home. She didn’t come home at all that night, and I spent near until sunup crying and worrying about her while Momma and Daddy searched the woods calling her name until their throats were hoarse. Still, sometime throughout the night, I did manage to nod off and it musta been while I was out that after Momma came home to check in on me. I woke to the sound of joyous screams as Momma found Belinda, safely asleep in her bed.