Dominion

by Greg F. Gifune

  Cocking her head with a sudden jolt, she turned her sightless eyes to Daniel, like she had only then realized he was there. Slowly, she turned back to Russell. “He doesn’t know yet,” she said in a gurgling voice. “Does he?”

  Russell began to laugh.

  Applying slow but violent pressure, she pushed her thumbs into and through his eyes. As they burst he slumped forward lifelessly, a marionette released from its strings.

  Wresting her fingers free of his sockets, Natalie placed a hand on each of his shoulders, gently laid him back in the snow then joined him there, cuddled against him like a lover.

  The snow fell across them as Daniel watched, unsure if what he’d witnessed was real or just the demented hallucinations of a dying mind. He wasn’t sure it much mattered anymore. “What don’t I know?” he asked the night.

  Strange noises echoed in his mind, memories of the womb sounds perhaps, as a gust of icy wind swept down the street.

  Just as suddenly, the streetlamp bulb burst, showering the area with sparks and glass.

  Darkness absorbed the pool of light, further obscuring the prone figures.

  Clouds passed over the moon, and another gust of wind whipped by, blowing the drift covering the bodies into the air and away like ash. And when the wind had gone, it had taken the bodies with it, as nothing remained but fresh snow.

  Alone on the corner, Daniel’s knees began to buckle, but he pressed himself harder against the building. Agonizing pain fired up through his abdomen and into his chest. He spat mucus and blood into the slush-filled gutter.

  In the distance, the first sounds of sirens drifted across the city, crept through nearby alleys, warning of their eventual arrival. Lights from surrounding buildings blinked on, filling previously dark windows. The neighborhood was awakening.

  A man appeared from the mouth of an alley across the street. Mostly concealed in shadows, Daniel couldn’t make out his features, but he could tell the man had begun to violently thrash back and forth as if being throttled.

  Face twisted in horror and pain, Daniel looked away.

  Headlights suddenly split the night as an old and dilapidated Ford Fairlane banked around the corner, skidded, then slid through the snow and ice and slammed into the curb.

  The passenger door creaked opened, and a woman behind the wheel leaned over. “You know me,” she said urgently. Short but thick black hair dangled and poked out from beneath the beret she was wearing. “Look at me, Daniel. You know me.”

  Through the flakes he saw her face. She was young, maybe twenty at the most, with a pale complexion and striking ice-blue eyes. He did know her, but couldn’t quite remember from where. He pressed his back flat against the building so he wouldn’t fall, and his coat fell open, revealing the hideous wounds across his chest and stomach.

  “I can help you,” she said, wincing at the sight of him. “I can make this stop. I can show you how. Do you understand? I can help you.”

  Daniel watched her listlessly. Was she really there? “I don’t think I can walk.”

  The sirens were getting closer.

  The woman slammed the car into park, got out and ran around to where he was standing. She was petite and wore a long winter coat that looked too big on her. “Then let me help you.” She offered hands covered in a pair of white mittens. “I can’t force you. You have to accept it.”

  Eyes rolling back into his head, Daniel fell forward into her waiting arms.

  * * *

  The pain was gone, replaced by a sensation of pins and needles, like his entire body had gone to sleep. He could breathe, but only in slow and shallow intervals. Anything more resulted in a coppery taste in his mouth and a violent constriction at the base of his throat. His limbs felt useless, already dead.

  Unseen things rattled in the car as the woman drove along deserted snow draped streets, the headlights barely cutting the darkness and swirl of flakes. Blue plastic rosary beads hung from the rearview mirror, a crucifix dangling from the final length and swinging back and forth with the motion of the car. A plastic Star of David, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, was stuck to the dashboard and a small Buddha sat further back, between the windshield and glove box. An array of religious symbols and holy charms tied to nearly every religion and spiritual path conceivable were scattered about the interior of the car and evident everywhere he looked. Daniel’s head lolled to the side, his cheek coming to rest against the cool glass of the passenger window. Snow and the dark silhouettes of buildings loomed over him, crept past as they maneuvered through the unnaturally quiet city.

  “Stay with me,” the woman said.

  “I’m cold.” His voice was so raspy and weak even he didn’t recognize it.

  “The heat’s on as high as it’ll go.”

  “I can’t breathe.”

  “Keep taking small breaths like you’ve been doing.”

  “Hospital,” he gasped. When she didn’t answer, he rolled his head back toward her, his skull rotating as if the bones in his neck had been removed. He looked down at the horror below him, evident even in the minimal glow of dashboard light. The entire front of his body was soaked with blood. “I’m bleeding to death.”

  “Don’t look. Close your eyes.”

  “I’m…afraid.”

  “I know, but it’s all right to close your eyes. I promise.”

  Unlike his, her voice was soothing and calm. He trusted it.

  Darkness fell like a slowly drawn curtain.

  Alone in the resultant silence, Daniel was sure he had died.

  * * *

  Through a world painted black, a pinpoint of light emerged, winked and gradually grew stronger. Daniel could see the woman sitting next to him, though his vision remained blurred. She held a lighted match to the wick of a hurricane lamp. After a moment, she shook the match to extinguish it, tossed it into an ashtray on the nightstand and adjusted the lamp flame until a sufficient amount of light filled the area. He was too weak to raise his head or rub his eyes, but realized he was lying on a bed. Above him was a slatted wood ceiling. In a window on the wall to his right, snowflakes tumbled through darkness. Daniel was sure he could hear the ocean, not intimately, but in a remote way, much like the whisperings of a seashell placed to one’s ear. Amidst the steady thud of his heart, he could also hear whistling winds and the occasional structural creak.

  The woman placed the lamp on the nightstand and smiled pleasantly.

  He tried breathing deeply. It worked. He swallowed, no longer tasting the coppery flavor of blood. The pain and pins and needles had gone, survived by a vacant sensation void of physicality altogether. Perhaps the pain had been preferable after all.

  “I can’t feel anything,” he said.

  “You will.”

  “Am I dead?”

  “You’re alive.”

  “Where am I?”

  “Somewhere safe,” she said, removing her beret and setting it aside.

  “I remember you now.” His vision remained slightly out of focus. “You gave me the tissue that day…on the street…in front of the Chinese restaurant.”

  The woman nodded.

  “But that’s not the only place I’ve seen you.” Just when he thought he’d escaped it, fear exploded through him again, stronger than ever and rushing at him like a wave he had no chance of avoiding. “I saw you in a nightmare too. You were in a room and your arms were full of bloody body parts. You were gathering them up.”

  “It’s all right,” she said gently.

  “It was my body, in—in pieces.”

  “Shhh, it’s all right now.” She put a hand on his arm.

  He could feel pressure but little else. “And then on the street, you—how did you know where to find me? You’ve been following me all this time?”

  She ran a hand through her thick hair and shook it loose until it fell neatly about either side of her face. “Not exactly, no.”

  The concept of being followed reminded him of the private detective. “Do you work wi
th Bartkowski?”

  “No.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  He wanted to move but was too weak to make the attempt. “Who are you?”

  When she answered it sounded garbled, but he was relatively sure she’d told him her name was Sophia.

  “You said you could help me, that you could make this stop.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s happening to me?”

  “Do you see the snow?” He gave her a quizzical look, so she leaned closer to the bed. A fragrance similar to fresh flowers radiated from her. “The snow, Daniel, do you see it falling?”

  His eyes moved to the window. He managed an anemic nod.

  “There are those who believe that at the moment life begins, when a soul crosses from the spiritual to the physical realm, that in order to accommodate the vastness of eternity, the soul breaks into several distinct pieces, each with its own unique characteristics.” She motioned to the window. “Just like the snowflakes, do you see? And just as snowflakes fall to earth, those pieces fall too, all of them landing in different places and at different times, all of them existing in their own independent realities in a sense, individual pieces of a larger whole…separate, yet one.”

  He watched the flakes twirling in the night, so close he might touch them, feel their wetness if only he could penetrate the glass and reach out to them.

  “The body’s a prison,” Sophia told him, “and as long as you’re in a physical realm you’re trapped by it. But no soul can transcend this place until the hosts for all the pieces die in all the physical realms. With the death of each piece the soul becomes one step closer to unification. When the final host dies, the soul is again complete and transcends this world for the next. The process by which this takes place can often be violent and frightening, as the soul is finally escaping its shackles and phasing to another place. After all, it’s natural to fight to survive, to want to live, and to struggle against what you perceive to be death. But in the end, all you’re really fighting are different parts of yourself. No souls or any part thereof exist in a void. As those you love die, so do pieces of yourself. And nothing dies quietly. Not really. Not in the transition. The struggle to unification and freedom is a fight, usually a vicious one. Along the way there are those who’ll try to stop you. But in your state of loss and exile from reality as you know it, you’ll also find those who want to bring you understanding and completion, those who want to help you in your final days.”

  “Final days,” he said listlessly.

  Sophia turned away from him a moment, bent forward and dug into a large canvas bag. She came back up with a laptop computer in one hand and a battery in the other. She snapped the battery into place on the undercarriage then set the computer across her knees and flipped it open. After a moment light washed across her face, blinking and shifting at various angles as her fingers tapped rapidly across the keys. “It’s OK. It’s just a tool of the trade these days, a weapon.”

  “No,” he whispered.

  “The same as if I’d brandished a sword in some earlier time,” she told him, her attention focused on the screen as she continued typing furiously. “It’s the way things are now, we don’t have much choice.”

  He looked again to the window, to the snow. Something else had joined the flakes. Daniel squinted in an attempt to better see, but his vision was still too blurred.

  “The window,” he said.

  Sophia nodded absently, fingers tapping keys.

  An outline, Daniel was certain he could see a dark outline slowly forming, separating from the flurries and nightscape. Darkness within darkness, the form moved, shifted and drifted closer to the pane. What might have been a shadowy human face pressed against the glass, as if hoping to push its way through.

  “The window,” he said again.

  Sophia continued working furiously at the laptop, her attention completely focused on it as the freezing wind grew stronger still, howling like an animal caught in the teeth of a steel trap. “The dark sides hang on the longest. They’re usually the last to die,” she said, “and the hardest to kill. Sometimes there are victims too, and that’s all they are, victims of circumstance, or darkness, a roll of the dice they were never meant to win. Only God creates. Those in the dark have found ways to corrupt that, to break through walls that were never meant to be broken and to pervert it, to make it seem like creation, when all it really is when all is said and done, is a distortion of the balance, the nature of things and the way they’re supposed to be. ”

  The face at the window backed away, absorbed into darkness as a particularly violent gust of wind assaulted the cottage.

  The door beyond the foot of the bed flew open, swinging back and smashing against the wall as an explosion of icy air rushed into the room. Daniel could feel it cutting through him, running from his feet across his torso and up into his face. But his ability to move remained limited. As the cottage shook and debris blew about the room, he realized he could also again feel the pain pulsing through his gut and chest.

  Sophia snapped the laptop shut, backed away and raised an arm to shield her face as something stepped into the bedroom doorway.

  Big, Daniel could tell it was big and muscled like a human being yet held the shape and stature of an animal, perhaps some odd hybrid of the two. Blurred and swirling through bands of black and red, it stood watching them, the wind firing through it.

  The hurricane lamp fell, the light spiraling across the walls and up to the ceiling as it rolled away.

  A wall of white engulfed Sophia and covered her like a garment, but as the lamp tumbled off it took the light with it and she was gone, leaving behind only dark fragments of the monstrosity in the doorway.

  In a flash Daniel saw its eyes, otherworldly and inhuman, reptilian.

  As the pain in his stomach peaked, Daniel’s body convulsed, nearly sitting him upright. The blood from his wounds had left him and the bedcovers sopping wet. Gagging, he saw things moving in the blood, slithering through the gore like worms.

  “Make it stop,” he said, vomiting the words.

  “This is as far as I go, Daniel.” Sophia’s beautiful blue eyes pierced the darkness in strobe-like flickers, the feathery cloak still held in place just below them but its brilliant white luster now spattered with drops of blood. “I’ve done what I can, the rest is yours.”

  A savage pain ripped through him and he rolled to his side as his stomach distended and burst in a spray of blood. His screams barely audible over the wind, he watched helplessly as what appeared to be a tiny human hand—the fingers crawling like a spider—walked up and out of his destroyed abdomen, the flesh shiny and slick with crimson. The hand became an arm, part of a shoulder and the back of a small head, its childlike owner attempting to climb free of him as Daniel went limp, his face sprayed with blood, eyes glazed and lifeless.

  The window burst, shattering the glass and raining it down upon them.

  And then Sophia was standing over him again, the downy cloak she’d protected herself with gone; hands instead clutching a multicolored patchwork comforter.

  Just as Daniel recognized it as the same one he and Lindsay had used the night they’d spent at this cottage together, the thing in the doorway leapt toward him, extending its arms like a giant winged bat.

  Sophia shook the comforter out to its full size and quickly tossed it into the air.

  It descended and covered him, blocking out all else, and amidst screams and growls, the wind, the cold and the agony, he heard Sophia tell him: “Let go, Danny. You need to let go.”

  And he did.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Night had fallen. The street before the brownstone, snow-covered and quiet in early evening, appeared before him like a surreal painting come to life, the streetlights on and gentle flakes still falling from a dark gray sky. Lights filled the windows facing the street, revealing a warmth and life he had not sensed there in eons.

  He pulled open his coat an
d searched his abdomen and chest for wounds, but found nothing. No blood, no gore, no pain, only a wrinkled shirt and a chill from a steady winter breeze. He’d spent so many nights walking the city since Lindsay had died, had this somehow simply been another?

  As Daniel crossed the street he saw Mrs. Bayer rounding the corner with her poodle Jean-Pierre, both bundled in winter gear as they negotiated the icy sidewalk. She flashed one of her typical inquisitive expressions and offered a tentative wave. He returned the gesture then slowly climbed the steps.

  The door was unlocked.

  He stepped inside, crossed into the den. Heat enveloped him.

  Faint sounds of a CD played, perhaps from the kitchen, featuring quiet, somewhat melancholy piano solos. It had been one of Lindsay’s favorites.

  Daniel glanced down at the coffee table. A handbag and set of keys had been left there, the same as his wife had done countless times in the past.

  He squeezed shut his eyes.

  Can you feel me?

  Up out of darkness came a scent. Her scent. Lindsay. Neither memories nor lingering sketches, this was something else entirely, something of resonance. Her essence. Her flesh. And with it came an unexpected tranquility Daniel had not felt in a very long time, a sensation of peace and an awareness of things and places and the life he’d known before.

  He opened his eyes and there she was.

  He saw her clearly, felt her presence there just feet from him. Not a ghost, but a living, breathing, whole human being standing in the kitchen doorway. Wearing a white cotton pullover jersey and a black skirt, the same outfit she’d had on the last time he’d seen her, she had at some point removed her pantyhose and kicked off her heels.

  Daniel had expected fear or sorrow, perhaps disbelief, but the only thing he seemed capable of was overwhelming relief, like this had all been a misunderstanding, a hideous nightmare now escaped and rendered a cruel hoax in the lucid realm of consciousness.