by R. D. Tarver
The silhouette was soon joined by several others who stood huddled over Seth. One of the figures spoke as a hand was extended towards him. “Thought we almost lost you there, man.”
Seth took the young man’s outstretched hand and was pulled up into a seated position.
His eyes immediately went to his brother Michael, who was being held in the lap of a sun-kissed young girl, barely older than Seth, wearing cut-off jean shorts and a bikini top.
Another woman, some years older and wearing a long, flowing bandana, was rubbing a towel over Michael’s hair. She stopped periodically to kiss him on the cheek and offer a soothing whisper. Seth could see the outline of her bare breasts beneath the open robe she wore.
Seth looked on in shock as women were joined in the waters by young men who brandished their genitalia openly, almost proudly, as they jumped off the rocky cliffs that lined the opposite side of the river. Everywhere he looked, the waters were teeming with scantily clad youth.
Strange music exploded from the open windows of a parked van whose side door was ajar. Through the beaded curtain that lined the open doorway, Seth caught a glimpse of a couple having intercourse. He watched as they continued their lovemaking, hypnotized by the pounding rhythm of their flesh as it intertwined, oblivious to the others that had gathered to observe the newcomers pulled from the river.
The surrounding voices echoed through his ears as though from a distance.
Seth gathered his wits and realized he had not been deposited at the gates of heaven, but had instead washed upon the shores of a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, a hedonistic bacchanal, rife with wanton carnality.
“Hey, dude, are you all right?” asked one of the gathered throng.
“We need to get him some dry clothes. He’s probably in shock,” another voice called.
Bolts of electricity shot across his back as someone slipped a t-shirt over his head. He looked down at the shirt, too numb to recoil from the image of the five snarling faces that stared back. The figure in the center foreground held a barbed tail in his hand and appeared to possess horns that protruded from his forehead. Above, the words highway to hell seemed to claw at Seth’s very soul, confirming his intuition.
“Hey, man, where’d you all come from? Do you live around here?” asked one of the silhouettes.
“I think they might be from that mission upriver that Riley was telling us about.”
Seth turned his attention back to his brother. The sun-kissed girl in the bikini top and her robed companion looked at Seth uneasily as they conversed in hushed tones.
“Oh, shit, you mean like one of those Jonestown cults?”
“Yeah man. The place is a freakin’ time capsule, totally cut off. Should we go tell someone?”
An empty beer can was hurled against the side of the van as someone called out, “Hey give it a rest, will ya? We got kids out here.”
A voluptuous female parted the beaded curtain, whipping her long, blonde hair back over her shoulders as she cupped her breasts for all to see. She cast a devilish grin towards Seth, flicking her rose-pink nipples with her thumbs in an erogenous display. Seth felt himself blush as she slammed shut the door to the van from the inside.
Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven, and he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground.
Ghoulish laughter filled his ears.
Fool. Now you’ve gone and done it, the voice chuckled from inside.
Even the women who had helped Michael were now giggling. They stood, shielding their bodies as they helped his youngest brother to his feet.
“I think he’s going to be fine,” laughed another voice.
Someone tossed a towel into his lap.
Seth looked down, suddenly aware of his folly, and wrapped the towel around his waist to conceal his body’s wickedness. He pushed through the circle of fiends that preyed upon him and grabbed Michael by the arm as they stumbled through the biting milkweed and into the solace of the surrounding forest.
The sun began to set on the brothers as they traversed the dense foliage. Michael proceeded with an onslaught of questions as they marched wearily ahead. “Who were they?” he asked. “Are we lost?”
“Quiet, I need to think.”
Seth had become disoriented in the thick brush after being cast so far downstream beyond the safety of the bend. The added trauma of nearly drowning was still very much a factor inhibiting his sense of direction, yet somehow it paled in comparison to the sting of the heretics’ laughter still ringing in his ears.
You are filthy and unclean, and the others know. That is why the river tried to wash you away.
After what felt like several hours of hiking through the dense woods, Seth opted to find shelter for himself and his brother before nightfall. He cleared the brush near the mouth of a narrow rock shelter and laid out the towel for the brothers to sleep on as the sun sank below the horizon. Seth could no longer hear the rush of the river, and knew they would fare better in the light of day.
After Michael fell asleep, Seth was alone with his thoughts. He tossed and turned, recalling the embarrassment on the riverbank and the filth he had witnessed...the filth that sought to transform him, to lure him into a realm of wickedness. Had he stood his ground and emerged victorious against the temptations of Satan? Or had he been cast out of Eden into the wilderness?
The events of the day played over and over in his mind as he tried in vain to ward off the dark voice from surfacing. Unable to sleep, Seth pulled himself to his feet. He felt along the rock walls of the shelter and out into the moonless night so that he might relieve himself. He nearly doubled over in pain at the act of standing without his brace after such an ordeal.
After he finished, he supported himself against the cool, hard stone and felt along the walls of the shelter to find his way back to his brother.
With the absence of light, he relied on his memory of the space to find his way.
He pushed his broken body forward to find another handhold on the wall of stone, and instead found himself falling forward, tumbling end over end into perpetual darkness. He landed hard against the rock floor below and rolled to his side.
The darkness around him seemed to move of its own volition as it crawled beneath the earth. Dismissing the phenomena as some trick of the eye induced by the fall, Seth continued his search for a way out, and headed deeper into darkness.
As he ventured further, Seth thought he heard the distant bellow of a deep horn blast that seemed somehow to vibrate the very stone beneath his feet.
Gabriel’s trumpet. The end at last.
Ignoring the voice, Seth plodded ahead by feeling along the surface of the rocky enclosure. Rather than attempt to climb up the sheer rock face at his back, he opted to follow the path ahead in the hopes of finding a more suitable exit. In the distance, a shimmering tendril of darkness within darkness beckoned.
Guided by the strange phenomena, he followed the snaking shape down a narrow passage beneath the ground until it opened into a wide central chamber. In the center of the chamber, he could more clearly make out the inky shadow’s source—a swirling vortex that rippled through the air.
Thinking it a possible egress towards the surface, Seth entered the vortex. Once inside, he found himself standing inside a great cavernous hollow beneath the Earth. A network of shimmering tendrils reached out from the darkness in all directions, connecting to a central nexus set within the surrounding arcade of symmetrically placed vortices.
A great, shadowy figure emerged from the central nexus, which began to shimmer and pulse as it grew. The snaking tendrils seemed to manifest from the heart of the ominous shape, which appeared to move of its own volition, although its form was fluid.
Seth watched, awestruck as the amorphous shape gradually shifted into a terrible, horned beast of enormous stature. The beast pointed its great horn towards one of the portals and emitted a d
eep, resonating blast of sound that caused a shower of dust and debris to fall to the cavern floor.
A beam of shimmering particles emitted from atop the shadowy titan’s singular horn, crashing like a wave against the cavern wall. Seth watched in horror as another vortex opened in the stone from where the blank rock face once stood.
Behold! The Beast.
Seth summoned his last reserves of strength and stumbled back down the tunnel, through the open vortex that he had moments ago entered. He managed to climb his way back to the surface, where he eventually found his brother and set off once more into the woods.
After several hours of marching through the dark forest, Seth fell to his knees and began to pray aloud. His words were cast into the air as loud as his voice would carry, until he could speak no further.
A wash of lantern light broke from the darkness across the ridge, just visible in the breaking of day.
Just after dawn, the weary brothers were finally discovered by the mission’s search party, and escorted back to the safety of Temple’s Bend.
Upon their safe return to the mission, Seth recounted the trials he had faced: the river, the heathens who openly fornicated near its waters, and the vision he had received in the cave. Seth weaved the tale tirelessly, despite his lack of sleep and the physical toll taken on his broken body. Despite it all he felt rejuvenated, validated by a renewed conviction in his faith that had allowed him to persevere through the harrowing events of the previous day.
The mission elders conferred for several days before calling to witness in the chapel.
On the morning of their emergence, Seth was brought before the congregation and was presented with a bus ticket, one hundred and fifty dollars in cash, and a modest care package that included clothes, homemade bread, and the familial Bible that bore his mark—a solitary purple ribbon placed within the final passage of scripture. Seth held the generations-old tome that was as much a talisman as it was a sacred text, and felt its power surge through his fingertips.
His father addressed the congregation as Seth stood upon the dais. “Our beloved son. You have been chosen by the almighty God as a righteous emissary of Temple’s Bend. You will go out from this sacred space, and into the lands of darkness that shy from His light. You will speak the words from His great book and prevent the will of Satan from being carried out among the forsaken cities of man.” His father raised his arms high in the air as though addressing God himself. “You will return the children of God back to the arms of the Almighty, and destroy any and all trappings of Satan that appear before you on your righteous journey.”
Seth accepted the offerings and was ushered out of the chapel in song and many a warm embrace as he set off for the road that led into town.
He watched out the window of the passenger bus that plodded along through the expanse of endless scrub brush and red dirt. For the first time in his life, away from the safety of Temple’s Bend, Seth felt truly alone—a fact he was thankful for. The gnawing whispers and bleak prognostications of doom broadcast from the hidden recesses of his mind had ceased.
I am reborn.
After a sleepless night in a dingy roadside motel, Seth embarked for his destination: a bustling shopping center in the middle of the city’s urban center. He watched in amazement at the steady throng of consumers who buzzed about mindlessly in pursuit of filling their empty lives with material goods.
He followed a group of black-clad, long-haired teenagers into a small department store. The store’s windows were bedecked with a ghastly assortment of images all appearing to bear homage to the Dark Lord himself. Seth steadied himself as he recalled the encounter in the cave, and entered the store.
“Welcome to Sam Goody. How can I help you today?” a voice called out.
Seth followed the voice to the checkout counter and approached a blank-faced, middle-aged man wearing a dangling dagger earring. The man bore the likeness of the Grim Reaper on his forearm.
Seth reached into his pack and held out the sullied black t-shirt given to him by the river fornicators.
“Do you sell these?”
“All band tees are ten percent off this week. What size do you want?”
Seth reached into his pocket and laid out a crumple of bills on the counter left over from his traveling money. “How many will this afford me?”
The clerk raised an eyebrow. “Seriously? That’s like ten shirts. You want them all to be the same?”
“Yes.”
“Suit yourself,” shrugged the clerk. “Big ac/dc fan?”
“No. I’m not a fan at all.”
The clerk fetched the shirts from beneath a grid wall display. “What are you going to do with all these, if you don’t mind me asking? That’s a lot of ac/dc shirts for someone who doesn’t like ac/dc.”
“I’m going to release the world of these graven images,” said Seth. A few of the shoppers gave pause to gaze upon the young man at the counter, who was brandishing one of the ac/dc t-shirts over his head as he began to shout. “I’m going to bear witness to the flames as I burn these articles of Satan in the righteous and cleansing fire of the Lord God Almighty!”
C H A P T E R S E V E N
INVADERS FROM HELL
1
Several days had passed since Jesse had revealed the contents of Mal’s film roll, along with his own account of the incidents surrounding the mine, to Mr. Agostino.
Agostino had left town shortly after, during the Thanksgiving holiday, to “Confer with my advisor regarding the recent events at Macomb Springs.”
Curiously, he seemed unperturbed by the narrative Jesse had presented, a fact that troubled Jesse in hindsight; however, Agostino did seem interested in particular details, such as the precise locations of events and their chronology. Jesse felt some measure of relief in sharing his burden, and was doubly reassured in doing so by Agostino’s fastidious attention to said details, which the guidance counselor logged in one of the numerous leather-bound notebooks crammed within his briefcase.
At the conclusion of their meeting, Agostino promised a swift return with a decided course of action, along with several cryptic remarks that further cemented Jesse’s impression that Agostino knew more than he was letting on about the happenings in Macomb Springs.
“These developments are concerning, but we must not be hasty in our response. The timing must be right,” Agostino had said. “Until we meet again, stay above ground. And if you must leave the house, travel in groups.”
In the meantime, Jesse languished in solitude as he tried in vain to stave off the impenetrable darkness growing inside himself. The cold abyss of the mineshaft was hungry, swallowing up his every thought. He found himself gazing into the chasm beneath the winch house no matter where he deposited his physical body.
He was lying on his bed looking at the self-portrait Mal had given him when Rick entered his room. Rick appeared in full regalia, wearing his battle vest and the fuck parental advice t-shirt that he had ordered from an sst Records catalog.
“Come on, Jess. Wheels up in five, and you’re not even dressed yet.”
“I told you, I’m not going.”
“So you’re just going to let those opportunistic Jesus freaks capitalize on a community tragedy? You’re gonna let them censor artistic expression? Freedom of speech?” He made a fist and pounded the gauntlet against the field of pyramid studs on his vest. “Where does it stop?”
“Sounds like you have it under control,” said Jesse. He laid down Mal’s self-portrait and stared up at the ceiling.
“Look, man, I know what you’re going through.” Rick wheeled closer to the bed and picked up the photograph. “When I lost Julie, I didn’t want to go on. I didn’t want to sleep, or eat—I didn’t care if I lived or died. And I’m not trying to sound like a tough guy. I just didn’t have the will to care anymore. It wasn’t a choice.”
“How did you get over it?”
Rick handed Jesse back the photograph. “I didn’t. But it got easier. It took
a long time, but it got easier. And the thing that helped me through it—not the counseling, not the Prozac, and certainly not fucking God or prayer. It was music. Heavy-fucking-metal music. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the Tipper Gores and Susan Bakers of the world decide what I can listen to. Not just for me, but for all the other broken, miserable bastards out there who need to get on with their miserable lives.”
“I keep waiting for her,” Jesse said. “I just sit and wait at all the places we would go just to be together. Any place we could pretend we were somewhere else.”
“We’re gonna find her, man. Even if it’s just you and me.”
Jesse wiped his face and sat up in bed. “I feel like I’m going fucking insane.”
“Stop crying, pussy.” Rick laughed out the words through his own tears as a snot bubble exploded from his nose. The brothers shared a much-needed laugh before settling into a shared silence.