Lambs

by Michael Louis Calvillo

  Here it comes. Arthur expected a SWAT team to kick down the door and cuff him. He put his head in his hands and awaited the onslaught.

  “Giuseppe Louie Fratelli was a small time criminal from New York City. He pledged eternal allegiance to the organization and then got cold feet. It wasn’t something he could just run away from so he killed himself with a bullet to the brain.”

  All Arthur could say was, “What?”

  Parks went on. “Adele Ann Parker moved to America from England with her family in the mid-1800s. She also tried to run by committing suicide. As for this guy,” the old man pointed above Arthur, “Fred, you call him, I’m not sure. I need to do some more research.”

  Arthur looked behind him. “They’re behind me?”

  “You can’t see them?”

  “I can only see her,” he pointed at Adele.

  The old man smiled and shook his head. “They are always with you Mr. Smith. They are being punished, or rather being held accountable for their disservice.”

  What the hell was going on here? “How do you know all of this?”

  “The Organization keeps very thorough records. Suicides. Deaths. Murders. Deserters.”

  “The Organization?”

  Parks ignored the inquiry. “In the plainest of terms Mr. Smith, you’ve been cursed.”

  “Cursed?”

  “Perhaps that’s the wrong word for it…but, yes, cursed. It’s unfortunate, but you’re paying for someone else’s crimes. It’s not your fault and there might be something we can do…I have to be careful, maybe study some more. I would like to try an exorcism. Maybe I’m making more of this than it is. If it’s a simple possession, a crossing of channels so to speak, we might be able to do something. If it is a curse as I suspect, you have returned to us and that may be enough to break it.”

  “What?” Possessions? Exorcism? Curses? “Returned?”

  The old man continued but it seemed like he was talking to himself. “Not sure. Not sure. Sanders paid. Felicia paid. You’re here with us. We…We will definitely work something out. The Organization will need to confer, we—”

  “Organization?” Repeating the question reminded Arthur that along with the zillions of new quandaries taking shape in his head, he really needed some old questions answered. Who were these people? Where were they holding his friends?

  Edwin got his head together and turned his inward talk outward. “You are owed some explanations young man. Rest assured you’ll get them. None of this is your fault, but the Lord Father works in mysterious ways. There is a lot to discuss yet, but you’ll get—”

  He stopped mid-sentence and his eyes rolled upward slightly as if they were searching his brain for the rest of the words.

  Arthur gave him a second to process, but the old guy just hung there, frozen, nothing coming, his mouth hanging open, his eyes glassy.

  “Sir? Mr. Parks?”

  Those glassy eyes bulged slightly, water splashing out and running over his wrinkly eyelids. Arthur reached out to give him a nudge. Was he having a heart attack?

  The moment his hand came in contact with Edwin’s shoulder the air around them crackled and hissed with invisible electricity. Arthur fell backward in his chair. His left buttock absorbed the smarting impact of the fall. Before the pain could flower all systems froze in fear. Adele hovered above Parks. Her spinning razor at long last stilled, its lethal blade pressing into the soft flesh of Edwin’s neck.

  Oh shit.

  Arthur didn’t know what to do or how to stop it. He yelled “Move!” in hopes that Parks would somehow dodge the phantom knife.

  Instead, Adele’s right wrist tensed and the razor hitched. The movement was minimal but the blade cut deep, bisecting skin and muscle until it clacked against Parks’ spinal column. A torrent of blood roared from the gaping wound, flowing through her spectral hand and over Parks’ white robe.

  Above him, Adele changed. In an instant, like changing a channel on the TV, her dour expression was gone, her dress was gone, her hair waved wildly, a black mass that covered a nipple here, a belly button there. The scarf was back. It whipped serpentine and classy as it crept about her body, obscuring the right parts at the right moments. Arthur had always thought he made up the naked, sexy version of Adele, but it wasn’t hormone-fueled fantasy (which made him feel better about himself), it was the kill that enlivened her.

  The razor pulled through the neck and hung in the air above Parks’ face. Blood flew from its blade and spattered the walls.

  Arthur shook off the mesmerizing spell of her body only to be hypnotized by her gaze.

  Her eyeballs were back.

  The black empty void, the twin tunnels to eternity, filled in with life. Her irises beamed a stunning blue that made her face all the more arresting. The whites humanized her and their effect was dizzying. Arthur forgot about the nudity and the bloodshed and longed for her to look at him. After all of these years he wanted the chance to communicate with her on some conscious level. Instead her lovely orbs stared off, aloof, fixed on some invisible point in some unknown distance.

  Her dark pupils, miniature versions of those eternal voids, began to expand and contract in time with her cutting hand. She drew the razor down, hacking Edwin’s face and the pupil overtook the eye. It blew up, her blue eyes to black, until the razor rose into the air and the blue bounced back.

  Her face, always a mute mask of sorrow in his memory, filled with expression. The eyes danced, and now the lips, still bluish, but a thousand times more alive, arched in time with the razor’s gouging. Each cut teased a look of pleasure, a look of sensuality, a look of heat. Arthur swallowed the lump rising in his throat and fought off the inappropriate tingling in his groin.

  The razor rose and fell until Parks’ wizened face looked like ground beef. His lifeless body cried uncle and fell from the chair, wetly smacking the stone with its dead weight.

  The void reassumed dominion over Adele’s eye sockets, her pupils growing until the tunnels opened into eternity. Her stuffy Victorian dress was back. Her hair tied conservatively. Her lips a line. The razor spun. And then she was gone.

  Arthur’s arms closed, his dangling veins disappearing into his wrists where they belonged. He marveled at the smooth surface of his forearms. Clean. Unbroken. Normal. Until the pseudo blood from his neck and temples spattered and ran, speckling creamy, new skin with gobs of red, red, red.

  * * *

  So much for resolve.

  Parks’ dead body didn’t really jibe with Arthur’s new outlook on life. Not that all was lost. He still had two more chances to thwart the fuckers and take some responsibility.

  And he had his wrists back.

  And a mega blast of adrenaline cleared away the fuzzies.

  Head high, refusing to look at the deceased, Arthur staggered to his feet, lunged forward and hopped over Edwin’s ravaged body. His bandaged foot thumped the floor and a lancing pain caused his whole body to wince. He growled through the hurt and pulled the door open. Logic ceased. The animal need to run drove him. He bounded into the narrow hallway and then careened to the left.

  The hall stretched out before him and ended in a sharp right turn. The space between was punctuated with doors on the left, solid stone on the right. Arthur tried the first door. It swung in to reveal a cell identical to the one that now contained Edwin Parks’ dead body. He tried the next. Another cell. And the next, but the door wouldn’t budge. Arthur threw a little weight into it. Nothing. He pulled instead of pushed and the door swung out. The room was completely covered in mirrors.

  Where the hell was he?

  The next room was another cell. He reached the end of the hall and followed it to the right. Another set of doors lined the left wall. Instead of turning at the end, the hall terminated upon a large wooden door.

  His first inclination was to bypass the doors to his left and try the large door at hall’s end, but Connor or Melanie might be behind one of the doors and though he was leaving with or without them, he h
ad to try.

  The first door was yet another cell, but it was different than the rest. First off, it smelled like Melanie. Like her perfume. Arthur entered the room and shut the door behind him. It was just as small as the other cells but it was furnished with a few accoutrements. There was a vanity with a mirror against one wall. There was a picture of him taped to the vanity mirror. He remembered when Melanie took it—about a week after they started dating. The memory allowed a smile. It faded fast. What the hell was the picture doing here? And why was there a strange little altar set up with another of his pictures (taken on the same day) propped up amongst candles and odd trinkets? This was definitely Melanie’s room, but where the hell where they? Was she a part of this “Organization?”

  Arthur spied her clothes, folded nicely on the kneeling stone in front of the altar. He was tempted to take them, if he found her she would need them, but then decided knowing where they were was enough. If she needed them he could come back and get them.

  The next room was another empty cell. The last doorway on the left opened into a much larger room. A heavy, bleach smell stung his nose. Arthur brought his hand over his face and peered inside. There was nobody around and the vibe set off by the hooks hanging from the ceiling was wrong. He turned to leave, the sooner the better with this room, but something on a table caught his eye. Jordans. Connor’s Jordans were sitting on a table atop his clothes (also neatly folded).

  Though this complex of cells and stone walls was strange, it wasn’t scary. Like he thought earlier, it reminded him of Medieval Times or an elaborate amusement park. There were other things to be frightened about. This room changed all that. The bleach smell was there to hide other smells.

  Arthur kept his hand over his nose and crept across the room to the table. It felt like he was being followed or watched. On edge, he glanced around and got the chills just looking at the freaky place—like something out of Hostel. There were a few sharp objects next to Connor’s clothes. Arthur picked up a knife and weighed the heft in his hands. If it came down to it could he stab someone? He put the knife down and seized the hand grenade resting alongside the clothes. It had a nice heaviness to it. Arthur held it in his right hand, then his left, then his right. This was the weapon for him. No cutting or physical contact, merely pull the pin and watch the enemy scatter. Just in case, he thought and took the grenade with him along back to the hall.

  The large wooden door creaked open. Arthur held the grenade before him as he would a gun and cautiously crept out of the hallway. The narrow hallway continued, this time both walls, the left and the right, smooth and without doors, until it hung a sharp right and then dead ended into a T. To the left, after a few more feet of hall space there was a stairway leading up. To the right the hall curved a bit and then opened into a much larger chamber. It was too dark to see but he could hear singing or echoing in the distance.

  Arthur stopped for a minute. Up and out (he hoped) was the only way to go. There was activity going on to his right and he couldn’t be around people. Not with Giuseppe ready to do his thing. He wanted to find Melanie and Connor, but his mere presence could get them killed. There might be more people like Edwin who could see his ghosts and possibly help him, but again he didn’t want to run the risk of killing them either. He had to get away, for the next few days at least and then he could return to figure out what was going on.

  He took the stairs as quickly as his foot would allow. Three flights up. The ceiling got closer and closer until the stairs ended below a hatch. He pushed the metal door up and over and climbed from that weird underworld into a gargantuan warehouse. Pallets of nondescript boxes ran for miles and miles in all directions. Arthur hobbled across the concrete in search of an exit. His bandaged foot was beginning to throb sharply. Blood soaked through the gauze. His good foot cringed with each cold step. The cement floor was freezing.

  Weaving in and out of the box towers, he finally found what he was looking for. Unfortunately, two men stood guard, the promise of freedom behind them in the guise of a partially open cargo door. They were smoking cigarettes, idly chatting. Arthur slowly pulled the hood of the robe over his head. He was about to pull an about face and find a hiding spot to think things through when one of the men spotted him and called, “Brother?”

  Shit.

  Well, what now?

  Did he run?

  Did he bluff?

  The men each took a drag on their cigarettes and then approached. The closer they got the larger they loomed. They were bouncer material through and through. Arthur’s mind struggled for ideas.

  If he gritted his teeth and ignored the pain in his foot he could possibly speed by them and keep running into the night. They didn’t appear to be carrying weapons and unless they caught him he would be home free. If his foot didn’t hold he was finished.

  He could walk past and act nonchalant, say he left his cigarettes in his car (a smoker would understand right?).

  He could raise the grenade and tell them to “Get the fuck down!”

  Arthur settled on the grenade and intimidation. But as he raised the explosive before their manly, strong faces, he chickened out and ran back for the hatch.

  The thugs gave chase. Arthur reached the hatch. The pain in his foot throbbed in the real world while he evaded his pursuers in an adrenalized alternate reality. The hurt couldn’t touch him through the overload of endorphins that pulsed thick over his nervous system like an anesthetic coating. He leapt into the stairway and pulled the hatch closed. Putting his bad foot forward he tumbled down the first flight and pirouetted through the air in slow motion. Arthur held the grenade close to his chest and cradled it from the rising, falling, rising, falling stairs.

  By the time he struck the landing the thugs had thrown open the hatch and were descending. Arthur hopped down the second and third flights, one hand on the banister, his good foot taking two stairs at a time. At the bottom of the stairway, he fast limped past the hall and rolled into the mouth of the darkened antechamber.

  Scrambling, he got back to his feet (foot) and covered ground until he emerged from the antechamber into a large, domed cavity.

  The room was expansive, like a stone church, barely lit by torches along the circular walls. The entire back half of the space was filled with a robed assembly. There were hundreds of them, heads bowed, chanting. Not a one noticed his entrance. Nor did the figures in the center of the room. There were patches along the wall, in between the weakly flickering torches, that offered deep, dark shadow. He quickly retreated into one such void and merged with the darkness just as the thugs entered. They didn’t burst in shouting. Instead they hung back, careful not to disturb whatever was going on and scanned the room from the mouth of the antechamber. Arthur pressed up against the wall and waited.

  His eyes adjusted and made out the spectacle at the center of the room. Connor was strapped to a stone table. He was thrashing and screaming, but his panic was lost amidst the sea of deep, forbidding chanting. Melanie was standing alongside. She had her arms raised to the heavens and was chanting along with the group.

  What the fuck?

  She was wearing a black robe.

  What the fuck?

  There was a nasty looking knife in her right hand.

  Arthur squinted his eyes and got a better look at his surroundings. There were banners hung about the chamber bearing a pentagram type symbol. Melanie wore a medallion around her neck with the same pattern. He saw the symbol again on the old man’s white robe and again, he looked down, though the dark shadow prevented him from seeing anything, on the very robe he was wearing.

  What the fuck?

  The chanting suddenly died and Arthur felt his insides do a little jig. Connor’s screams jumped to the forefront. He thought he had been caught and all eyes were going to turn to him. But the thugs still stood by the antechamber craning their necks, running their eyes past his hiding spot, and the assembly still kept their heads bowed (or so it appeared with their mass of black hoods buried in the
darkness). Melanie kept her arms raised and shouted, “Lord Father Satan Almighty…”

  What the fuck?

  Arthur was slow. Special Ed all the way. But it finally dawned on him. Satan. They were Satanists. The notion refused to settle. It was so out there and so goofy. His girlfriend was a Satanist. His best friend was going to be sacrificed. He was cursed by Satanic demons. Of course. It made perfect sense and he had to bite his lip to keep from guffawing aloud.

  He didn’t even think he believed in God let alone Satan.

  The girl he thought he loved continued rambling maniacally about “Great Horned Beasts” and “A Blood Fountain” and “The True Eden.” She went on and on, forever and ever, and heartsickness took root within Arthur’s chest. With each driving word the sickness grew. A lump rose in his throat and butterflies tore his stomach lining to shreds. A deep, soul-churning nausea, not born from smoke inhalation or his screaming foot (foot, what foot?), but supreme disappointment, watered his mouth.

  She brought her hands together and held the dagger between them. Her words gathered momentum, their volume intensifying, their cadence quickening. Her arms tensed and pushed the hilt higher, preparing to bring the blade down into Connor’s yelling body.

  The little sucker tried to kill him. He broke a bottle over his leg and tried to light him up. But he was royally screwed up and Arthur owed him understanding.

  The blade went even higher. Melanie’s delicate arms were shaking. The Satanic prayer roared from her little mouth like fire.

  Arthur wasn’t a murderer. His psyche or curse or whatever the hell it was murdered, but he didn’t. And he wouldn’t stand aside and let his friend go out like this. It had to end. He pulled the pin on the grenade, held both hands above his head, one holding the heavy little explosive tight, its metal safety lever arm held close and secure against its knobby surface, one dangling the pin for all to see, and then stepped from the shadows.

  * * *