by Travis Smith
Now Christopher watched out the diner’s window as a white pickup turned in. He tipped his head to signal Richie to turn and see.
“Oh, wow,” Richie said, turning back as three of their classmates climbed down out of the truck, “Caleb’s date must’ve sent him packin’ early.” The young man in question was descending from his oversized vehicle wearing the remnants of his prom tux and his usual brown boots.
“Do ya think it’s ’cause he showed up wearing those boots with a tux?” Christopher asked.
Richie turned around and looked again. When he saw the get-up, he burst into laughter and leaned forward across the table.
Christopher laughed, too, and reached forward to touch Rich’s hand.
A thump startled the two out of their giggles. Christopher turned to see a stern-looking, middle-aged waitress with tobacco creases aging her haggard face. She had slammed the boys’ drinks down on the table and now stood glaring at them with her hands on her hips.
“Th—thank you,” Christopher chuckled. He added an inquisitive inflection to the end.
The waitress shook her head and walked away.
“Oh fuck,” Christopher said, “they’re eyeballing my car.”
Caleb and the other two boys were pointing to Christopher’s silver Prius and laughing visibly.
“Are they messing with your tires?” Rich asked.
“I can’t tell …” Christopher craned his neck to see, but one of the guys was behind the Prius, and Christopher couldn’t see him from his current position.
They watched for nearly a full minute before Richie said, “Yep, he’s definitely fucking with your tire.”
“Christ,” Christopher murmured, making to stand up and go confront Caleb and his goons. Before he could get up from the booth, though, an older man wearing an apron was standing before him, arms across his chest.
“Y’all gon’ have to leave, now,” the man said.
“We—what?” Christopher asked, his attention torn between the vandals outside and this new obstacle in front of him.
“We don’t serve fags here.”
“Excuse me!” Richie said. He stood up from the booth and squared up to the older man, his jaw nearly sagging to his chest.
“I said we don’t want faggots in this diner. Y’all need to get out, and don’t come back.”
Christopher felt the familiar heat rising up the back of his neck. In his mind, he wrapped his fingers around the old bigot’s neck and threw his frail body to the ground, but in reality his chest began hitching and quivering with the unpleasant adrenaline of confrontation.
Before he could say anything else to the man, his car’s alarm began sounding from outside.
“Come on, Richie,” he said, grabbing his friend’s shoulder. “Fuck this old prick.”
The two rushed outside to Caleb and his crew’s delight.
“Oh, I just knew it’d have to be a pussy faggot like you to drive this queer little piece of shit,” Caleb said. One of his friends stood beside the car’s driver-side rear tire. The tire had completely deflated, and the boy was holding a knife out in front of him.
“What the fuck have you done to my car?” Christopher screamed.
“Why am I not surprised it’s Mr. Rip Van Tinkle?” Caleb continued.
Christopher’s heart was pounding. His chest heaved, and he struggled to catch his breath and compose himself. “You can’t—you shouldn’t even be allowed to say that if you can’t even understand the reference,” he managed.
Caleb’s eyes narrowed, and he shook his head, clearly not understanding the insult either. He stepped forward and grabbed Christopher’s shirt in both his fists. He pulled the boy close and sneered in his face. “You don’t belong here, faggot,” he said, pushing Christopher backward. Christopher stumbled over the curb at the front of the parking lot and fell onto his back on the concrete. “You don’t belong anywhere!”
Richie looked on in terror and stood back from the small group of boys.
The one with the knife lunged forward and swung it at Richie. “Go on, faggot! Get out of here!”
Richie turned and ran off into the darkness. Caleb and his friends chuckled and made their way inside the diner, where they were undoubtedly met with excellent service and warm wishes to return soon.
Christopher swallowed hard and picked himself up off the sidewalk. He’d have a mile’s walk home to cool off and re-suppress his rage. For the next year and a half of his high school career, Richie never spoke to him again. Christopher always knew that Rich was gay, but the two had never outright spoken about it. Though they never spoke again, he presumed his old friend had lived out the rest of his days cowering frightened and alone deep, deep within that old closet of his youth.
7
“I hear the voice inside my head,
The voice of Christ, alive and dead.
It’s led me places that I’ve been,
To rid the world of vice and sin.
It tells me things I ought to do,
And now it’s led me here to you.”
Reverend Goodwin finished his mantra just as Faye Anne lifted the open window and began scrambling her way out into the snow. Goodwin stood in the darkness outside the window. A large, thick icicle that he’d stored in his freezer was grasped in his hand.
When Faye Anne clambered to her feet, David swung the heavy icicle into the side of her head. It exploded into a spray of ice shards that showered the side of his house, and Faye Anne crumpled into the snow.
Goodwin grabbed the young girl by her ankles and began to drag her limp body into the trees surrounding his house. She stirred minutely and managed to groan in weak protest.
“Don’t plead to me, you idolatress. Make your peace with The Lord.”
She had started coming around more by the time Reverend Goodwin got her to the tree deep in the forest where he’d tied a rope around a limb.
“Please,” she cried as he began to tie the free end of the rope around her ankles. She still was able to move only weakly. “Why—?” she managed.
“I know what you are,” Goodwin said as he tightened the rope around her ankles and began to hoist her up off the ground. “An enabler of faggotry and sodomy fit for Gomorrah. A product of a lost generation of adulterers and druggies and liberals.”
Faye Anne’s face was contorted into silent dismay when Reverend Goodwin had lifted her up to his own. She hung upside down, eye-level with the good reverend. Her chest hitched as she struggled to sob and protest.
“Yes, weep,” he said without emotion. “I see your mother do it every Sunday. She weeps for your soul. We do it together. Mrs. Garrison doesn’t understand that you haven’t just lost your way.”
“Please,” she whimpered again in a hoarse croak.
Goodwin picked up another icicle and grasped it in his fist. “Evil has consumed you,” he said levelly. He raised the icicle and thrust its point into the front of Faye Anne’s neck. Blood bubbled and spurted from the wound when he withdrew the icicle and dropped it into the snow at his feet. The girl writhed and gurgled through a waterfall of thick, steaming blood. “But the Good will always win.”
After a while Faye Anne stilled, and the stream of hot blood from her neck slowed to a steady drip. The icicle lay in the pool of evidence, all of which would soon be buried or melted away.
When the dripping stopped, Reverend Goodwin lowered the body from the tree and carried it back to his house. He opened the heavy cellar door, which he had modified to create a formidable seal with the frame, and descended the dark stairs to set to work.
He spent most of the day in rubber gloves, dealing with formaldehyde and dressing the newly deceased Faye Anne up in one of the many costumes he had for his projects. He shaved off her hair and tossed it into the furnace, for she would not need her long, seductress’s hair for her new eternal role. He draped her in red shawls and a plastic chest plate of armor resembling that of the Roman soldiers.
When she was finally situated in pla
ce, she had joined the ranks of four other soldiers on the dark stage in Reverend Goodwin’s cellar. He stepped back and admired the progress of his work. Five angry, misguided Romans stood in various positions of vexation as they sneered toward the empty cross. The souls, which Goodwin had single-handedly cast to Satan, had donated their earthly bodies to the reimagining of Christ’s crucifixion. Several spots at the base of the cross remained to be filled, and the cross itself remained empty, but as Goodwin looked on, he imagined himself standing there, looking down at the heathen savages below him.
The image sent a calming warmth down his spine, and for a moment, he heard no voices in his head, he felt no tension in his jaw, and he had no memories of his harrowing youth.
8
“You’re such a smart guy,” Matthew Sloan told Christopher during their senior year study hall one afternoon. “I don’t know why you won’t even consider it.”
“I don’t know,” Chris said. “Maybe it’s because I’m smart that it doesn’t appeal to me.”
Matthew chuckled as though the bitter slight rolled right over him, like water over Christopher’s immaculately sculpted hair. “You’re a good person. I know that. I’ve known you since second grade. You would make a really good Christian, too.”
Christopher rolled his eyes, desperately wishing this naive kid would let it go. “But you don’t have to be a Christian to be a good person. That’s my point.”
“I know,” Matthew said. “I just can’t understand what you have against it. Logically you should read all of The Word and find that its meaning is truth.”
Christopher sat silent, simultaneously trying not to think too hard about what Matthew had just said and to think of a response. There was nothing logical about it. “It’s just,” he attempted, “not for me.”
“But I’m just asking why. What’s so bad about it?”
“It signifies violence and hatred and discrimination.”
Matthew chortled. “It doesn’t signify any of that! Christianity is all about peace and eternal life.”
“Promises that can’t be kept,” Christopher mumbled.
“You can’t be saved if you aren’t willing,” Matthew said.
“That’s not a good reason to back a religion,” Christopher replied. “To double-down. For a maybe.”
“There are no bad reasons for backing Jesus.”
Christopher rolled his eyes again. “Sure there are. And I think failure to acknowledge that is why there’s so much corruption in the churches.”
“But just because something has corruption in it,” Matthew said, “doesn’t mean it’s all bad. You can’t help fix something that you aren’t a part of.”
“I don’t want any part of it. It’s all man-made scare tactic that has gotten blown way out of proportion and is taken way too seriously.”
“The word of God is not man-made.”
“Sure it is. The Bible was written by man. I’m sure every other religion’s books were, too,” Christopher said, feeling as though he were finally pushing Matthew into a corner.
But Matthew just shook his head. “It is the word of God. The witnesses who convey it had no agendas. The reporting of God’s miracles brought them no fortune.”
“Yes, they—of course they did …”
“The prophecies all came true. Not because of man, but because of God.”
“That’s not even—any prophecies that came true were witnessed and reported by men who read the Old Testament. Have you ever heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy?” Christopher asked.
Matthew just shook his head slowly, still wearing that oafish, stubborn, complacent smile.
“Just forget it,” Christopher said, turning around. “Why do you care so much? Let it go.”
“It’s my Christian duty to share The Word wherever I go,” Matthew replied. “Plus, I consider you a good person and a good friend. I don’t want to see your soul suffer.”
“So I’m going to Hell because I’m not like you?” Christopher said, turning back around in his desk. “Being a good person isn’t enough to escape your fictional Hell?” His voice rose as he felt the warmth of angst and confrontation crawling its way up the back of his neck.
“No,” Matthew said. “I didn’t mean that at all.” Still smiling he reached into his backpack and pulled out a deck of cards. “Want to play UNO?”
The Cave:
Part 2
“S o how did you die?” Christopher asked the strange man. He had unsuccessfully tried to incite conversation for what seemed an impossible amount of time for two men trapped together in eternal darkness.
“Uhh—” The Stranger began. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly and attempted to retrieve the events. Blinding flashes of light erupted in his mind. Shattered fragments of memories or hallucinations echoed throughout his head. “I’m not certain …” he conceded, pushing half-formed images of the risen dead out of his mind. Charred and rotted corpses rising from the soggy earth to wrap their slender fingers around his ankles and pull him into their realm …
“How did you die?” The Stranger deflected lamely.
“I died a martyr,” Christopher said with a gratified smirk. In dramatic flair, and with his tongue pressed physically into his cheek, he flung one arm straight out and followed it with the other. “Like Christ upon His Cross!”
“A martyr?” The Stranger asked.
“Yeah, like, someone who was killed for their cause.”
“I know the word,” he replied levelly. “For what cause were you killed?”
Christopher’s elation melted away and left him sounding reflexively defensive, like a man who had spent his life adopting that role. “You know, like, justice. Treating everyone equally and shit like that.”
“But everyone is not equal,” The Stranger replied. His inflection implied that it was more a question than a challenge.
“Wow, dude,” Christopher snarked. “I’m trapped in Hell for eternity with a racist.”
“Racist?” The Stranger asked. The young man exhibited a loquacious indifference, and something about him suggested that he was trapped in perpetual disdain, much as The Stranger had himself been for as long as he could remember.
“Yeah! Or homophobe, one.” Chris exclaimed.
The Stranger shook his head, dismissing at last his new companion’s rant in his peculiar dialect.
“Well?” Chris pressed. “Which is it? Because I hate to break it to you, but I’m gay, if you couldn’t tell!” He spread his hands before his face in a grand gesture of flamboyance.
The Stranger attempted to process this before shaking his head again. “I have the hardest time understanding you. It is very trying, and I haven’t the patience for it.”
“Haven’t the patience?” Chris mocked. He spread his arms wide and glanced around the dark tunnel dramatically. “Got somewhere to be?”
The Stranger nodded his head.
“Where are you off to, then?” Chris demanded. “Back into the abyss I pulled you from in the shape-shifting Hell rocks?”
“I have to find my son!” The Stranger barked, for the trillionth time, forcing that thought back to the forefront of whatever mystics were being played upon his memories.
Chris opened his mouth to make another snide remark, but he thought better of it. The Stranger was still sitting against the rocky wall where Chris stood. His head was in his hands and his eyes were closed.
“Where is your son?” he asked at last in a tone that sounded starkly gentle and out of place.
“He was taken,” The Stranger said quietly, “by a very dark man.”
Chris narrowed his eyes in mock contemplation. “A very dark man?” he asked. “Is this why you think black people aren’t equal?”
The Stranger looked up, the exasperated look of confusion on his face almost comical. “Black people? What are you on about?”
“Yeah,” Chris said, his body shifting to its nearly resting state of defense. “You can’t just say that people of a different skin
color are less than you just because a black guy hurt your son.”
“Not dark skin!” The Stranger exclaimed. “Dark within.”
Chris pondered this and replied lamely, “Oh.”
“And I didn’t say that a man’s skin makes him unequal. Merely that no one is born equally. Many are born more fortunate. Some may provide more than they take, and others lead lives that require more assistance.” The Stranger threw his hands up and stood to his feet at last. “Why are we discussing ethics if we are trapped in Hell?” he demanded.
“No, yeah,” Chris stammered. “I mean I think we’re both saying the same thing. I get you.” He clapped the intimidating bearded stranger on the shoulder to deflect the conversation. “Now let’s go find your son.”
The Stranger shook his head. With numb desolation, he said, “I don’t believe we’ll find him here.”
Chapter 4:
A Flash of Darkness
1
A sea of faces whirled around Fallon Stromage like a mystic cyclone. Flashes of light and contained explosions surrounded him. The deafening shouts and gunfire sounded muffled and unreal, as though it were all happening underwater. Even his own movements felt sluggish and drugged.
How had it all gone so wrong?
Fallon stumbled through the chaos in Krake’s market square. Stunned, he fixed his gaze on the blood-streaked ground before him and wavered above each mechanical step he took. A cacophony of murder and assault drew ever nearer, like two colossal waves crashing toward each other. Bodies collapsed to the ground amid a symphony of whizzing bullets and the thumps of metallic weapons against skulls. Fallon trudged along in a daze, absently awaiting his own time to be struck down by the mob of assailants.