Hellbound Hearts

by Paul Kane

  A terrible certainty settled over Ron. Lenny had played him from the start. If he’d been thinking clearly, he would have known the guy who killed your wife and child didn’t just invite himself back into your life. His kindness had been anything but. It was too late to kick himself now. He had been stupid, and the price would be high.

  “You handled the santos, too, Leonardo,” Buttons said.

  “Sure, but . . . he had ’em last!”

  “But I knew you first.”

  Ron’s heart lifted. Was he getting a reprieve? Did the Cenobite hold a grudge against Lenny?

  “You didn’t know me!”

  “Do you think I wasn’t aware of you? After Escalante brought me here . . . when you all ran like frightened rabbits . . . I swore none of you would escape if I could lure you back.”

  Lenny backed away from the Cenobite, lips quivering, a line of drool running down his chin. When Buttons fixed Lenny with a burning, four-eyed gaze, Ron caught a rank ammonia scent. A stain spread down the front of Lenny’s pants.

  A chain darted out—from the Cenobite? From behind him?—with a hook on the end, catching Lenny under the chin. The hook sliced up under his jaw and the barbed point thrust out his open mouth, glistening red. It reeled him in like a recalcitrant fish, Lenny stiff-legged and blubbering and weeping until he disappeared into the softly glowing blue corridor.

  His screams seemed to echo for a long time.

  Ron’s legs felt like celery stalks days past their prime. He realized that he was ready to follow. He knew now that cruelty was as lasting as kindness, hate as powerful as love, pain was infinite and loneliness ultimately unbearable. There was nothing left for him in the world. “My turn?” he asked, his voice a pathetic whimper.

  Buttons turned his full attention to Ron. His natural eyes glowed with an inner fire, and even his button eyes danced like they were alive. “Did I somehow give you that impression?” With that horrible, pinned-open mouth, he seemed to smile. “I must have been joking. One day, you’ll beg to be let in.” He tapped a fingernail against a button eye. “And then, we’ll see.”

  He stepped into the blue glow and vanished, leaving Ron alone.

  Another moment, another new beginning.

  And once again, the emptiness he faced was beyond measure.

  The Promise

  Nancy Kilpatrick

  You stare in disbelief at the e-mail from Ritz, unnerved by the undercurrent of what you are reading. “Goth reunion,” she euphemistically calls it. The old crowd will meet at the cemetery, the usual place. The place where every August 30 for five summers of your youth you spent the night in a graveyard with your friends. Is she insane? Can’t she remember what happened? But she is just keeping a promise.

  If you close your eyes and don’t look, maybe when you open them, this e-mail will have disappeared into the vapors. Your heart slams against your chest wall in fear; anything can happen, like last time.

  You peruse the excuses flitting across your closed eyelids like the digital numbers you scan all day long. But despite wanting to run fast and far, you will be there because no one can ever move fast or far enough to escape the past. And you also made a promise.

  You’ll be there, as you were the last time the group picnicked like the Victorians, although it’s unlikely anyone from the 1800s spent the night in a crypt. Briefly you wonder if Jeremy will be at the “reunion.” But of course he will; he promised, too. You have to confess, the idea of Jeremy at the cemetery is intriguing. So many possibilities. And impossibilities . . .

  It is Saturday, seven in the evening, warm, the sun has not yet set, the grass is end-of-summer green, and you admit to yourself that this close-of-day is beautiful, reminiscent of twenty years ago, the last time you set foot in this garden of the dead. Time has changed little here. Eighty seasons have passed, toppling and shattering tombstones that caretakers have cemented back together, like the lovely distressed filigreed cross for which you still feel an affinity. Other stones, victims of recent violent weather, quietly await repair. One decapitated angel, the head beside the feet, eyes turned heavenward, clearly mourns its missing hands which some collector of necroabilia has walked off with.

  The climb uphill isn’t as easy as it once was; two decades makes a difference. You know you’re out of shape from sitting for eightplus hours a day and microwaving frozen supermarket meals on too regular a basis. By the time you reach the first plateau, you’re winded.

  To the left, farther up, mostly hidden by old-growth trees and lilac bushes long past the flowering stage, is a row of enormous mausoleums belonging to wealthy families. You quickly calculate an estimate of what crypts like these would cost to build today.

  The economics of crypt building leads to thoughts of death. Your own. Once so easy to digest, such musings now send a deep shudder like an earthquake in the making through your body as horror builds, and you turn away trembling, the past intersecting the present. Death has become the least of your worries. Coming here was a bad idea. A very bad idea. The past can’t be undone. The future is set. What’s the point of this? On shaky legs you turn to head back down the hill and get away from here while you still can, consequences be damned!

  “Shadow!”

  The sound startles you, and your bad knee locks. Jeremy has appeared out of nowhere, it seems. He was always good at that. “I call myself Karen now,” you say, eyeing this Dorian Gray who, on first glance, has not aged.

  Jeremy laughs, the sound as familiar as his skin and the muscles of his body once were, bringing you some calmness, although that doesn’t make sense, just as it made no sense in the past.

  Now that your tremors have subsided, you notice he has a cute, petite blonde attached to his arm, her cerulean eyes intelligent in a direct-marketing kind of way, her hair matching the white-gold color of his; maybe they patronize the same salon. Both are lean, healthy-looking, probably vegetarians into working out regularly. You bet they drive a BMW or Volvo and she’s got some kind of high-powered, high-paying secure job with the government. The gold rings on the third fingers of their left hands speak of union in the biblical sense, and you imagine these DINKS live in a reno’ed town house featured in some glossy interior-design magazine, a property worth three times the market value of your small condo.

  Suddenly you are shocked by your own cynicism. When did you become so petty? Bitter. Unhappy. You know when. And why. And who is to blame.

  “This is Candy,” Jeremy says, and you’re startled by the name. “Karen. Once Shadow.” He laughs, introducing you.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you guys and your goth days,” Candy says, as if teasing a child.

  You’re not sure what she knows but you’re certain that Jeremy hasn’t told all. How could he explain it? How could anyone?

  “Yeah, well, that was quite a while ago,” you mutter. “When we were young and wild and Jeremy was known as Midnight.”

  “You were?” Candy turns to him and laughs, a sparkling sound, full of vitality, and you wonder why she’s here, in this cemetery, destined to head up the hill and greet the darkness. There can’t be anything in this for her. For you, as there must be for Jeremy, there are the searing memories. And the promises made. Despite the warm air you shiver as if it is January.

  You have donned a bare-bones version of a goth outfit, black tights, black minidress with an asymmetrical hem. You found a pair of Fluevog Angels you haven’t worn in a while that might not be Doc Martens, but they work. An old Alchemy silver bat at your throat and seven PVC “barbed wire” bracelets you hung onto over the years around your wrist. You have nothing else left from the past. You had to get rid of everything, hoping to exorcise the memories. As if . . .

  Jeremy and Candy are both clad in black designer jeans, stylish Western boots for him, Jimmy Choo ankle cuts for her, wearing complimentary black T-shirts, hers a babydoll with a picture of Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein silk-screened on the front, his bearing the image of Karloff as the monster. Too
cute. Back in the day, when you and Jeremy were an item, before reality fractured, he would never have worn anything vaguely matching your outfit. Or anything as commercial as this shirt, which is brand-new, or so the folds suggest. Your favorite mental photograph of Jeremy is him wearing two long, studded armbands and that faded Cure T-shirt, his raven hair à la Robert Smith.

  “So, Karen,” Jeremy says casually, “are you married?”

  The question you’ve been dreading. How can you explain that what happened here so long ago has tainted your life, left you waking from increasingly terrifying nightmares sweaty and trembling, your dream-screams ringing in your ears? You are filled with distrust of anyone and everyone. No, not relationship material anymore. Clearly, Jeremy has not been adversely affected.

  “Not yet,” you say, as if you are not forty-five years old and you have all the time in the world. “One day, when I meet the right industrial-music man.”

  Jeremy chuckles. The sound annoys you not only because he can see through you. You resent that he has continued on with his life as if nothing happened, as if four hundred and forty months ago life did not change forever? Suddenly you are angry, for his callousness, for what appears to be his easy and perfect life, for your own childish capitulation to be here, and your fantasy about grasping some sort of “closure,” all the while knowing there is no such entity available to you. Fury like hot lava builds and you are about to pivot and head back down to the real world, sans excuses, promise broken, despite what will be the result of that.

  “Oh my God!” A shriek that rings more of terror than excitement comes from Ritz. “Shadow! Midnight!”

  “Vampira!” Jeremy says in a large and inclusive way. The edgy nicknames you went by back then sound banal on lips now. You could write it off to youthful folly but really, in retrospect, the names have a profound meaning.

  Your little group of four, Ritz orchestrating a group hug, faces uphill. Mired in shadow, nearly obscured by trees and shrubs, not fifty meters away stands the brooding Lemarchand crypt. Suddenly you realize that it is too late to run. You are doomed.

  Others come up the hill and you are surrounded by friends from the past. They all have wrinkles, gray hair, some more than others, and no one is cadaver thin anymore.

  This crowd is not full of laughter and teasing. As more join the group, a somber mood descends, until the twelve—thirteen if you count Candy—have all arrived. The emotional texture is reluctance, duty being carried out, obligations being filled with a clear understanding that this is not in anyone’s best interest and yet cannot be avoided.

  As the sun sets you all trudge up the second shorter hill, circling around the Lemarchand crypt, and return to the spot where you used to meet, a small clearing sheltered by trees, hidden by the crypt itself, a realm disconnected from the rest of the cemetery, and the world.

  You sit in a circle, by instinct. Frightened eyes lock, then look away. There is silence until Stan—who used to go by Morpheus—asks, “Anybody have that Bauhaus final tour CD?”

  People nod or shake their heads. “Not the old Bauhaus, are they?” Mari Ann says.

  “Nothing’s like it was,” Mitch adds quietly.

  And then the silence takes over as you all wait for the darkness to wrap around you like a shroud.

  Someone has brought a bottle of Chardonnay that is passed around—the days of cheap red and homemade absinthe are over. After that a large bottle of Evian water appears. The ground is lumpy, and as hours grind away, your butt grows annoyed with sitting. Shadows deepen and there are moments when the silence feels like an invocation.

  When there is no more light from the sky and faces have vanished in the gloom, you can still hear breathing, a bit of shifting, fruit bats flitting above, the rustling of nocturnal animals in the bushes, and the occasional snapping twig. The wait seems interminable, but wait you must, all of you, until midnight. Promises were made.

  Finally, Jeremy lights a candle and gets to his feet. One by one you all stand and follow him as you did years ago to the door of the crypt.

  As you approach, the coolness of the stones reaches out like tentacles to brush your bare arms, the back of your neck. It is as if this is fall air, not late summer; you notice the three steps leading to the crypt door are covered with dead leaves. A chill coils up your spine that has nothing to do with the air. You do not want to be here! You want to go home. You want safety. But there is none.

  Jeremy finds the key in the bushes, just like before. The rusted keyhole accepts it readily.

  Candy breaks the silence. “This isn’t such a good idea, hon. This is private property and—”

  The thwack-thwack of the key flipping the tumbler silences her. The door creaks as Jeremy pushes it open and leads us like lambs to the slaughter.

  “I want to go home!” Ritz says, her high voice breaking. Blonde Mike puts an arm around her shoulders and Dark-haired Mike, no doubt distracted by his own terror, pats her head as if she is a rambunctious puppy. Jeremy stares blankly at her, his face aglow from the candle flame, which brings out the macabre highlights of his features.

  Once everyone is inside the crypt, Stan closes the door and the sound is so final that your heart skips beats.

  Jeremy sets the candle on the little stone altar of this claustrophobic chamber. Opposite the door are three white marble slabs, each three by three feet, engraved, the writing worn with time, the words indecipherable. Behind the marble are the dead. To the right of these, left of the altar, is a configuration of thirteen stones imbedded in the wall. Jeremy taps the stones in a particular order, as if this were a security system entry code. Suddenly, the stones move as one unit out of the wall and hover as a group in midair.

  Someone gasps and another groans. Candy says, “What in hell . . . ? ” Your heart becomes arrhythmic and you feel there is not enough oxygen in the air. Every cell in your body screams: Escape!

  You watch as if time has slowed. Jeremy grasps in both hands the stones, which do not appear attached to one another yet they form one unit. He turns them around and around. There are thirteen on all sides, a strange ancient puzzle concealed here with the dead. Your memory resurrects a similar moment twenty years ago and maps it onto today. You watch as Jeremy twists the stony puzzle pieces, gaining confidence as he goes, with only one glance in your direction, until the stones glow an eerie color that you cannot put a name to.

  He replaces the reconfigured puzzle of stone back into the socket in the wall, his hand still touching it as if he is charging the puzzle in some way, or vice versa.

  Time pauses. The group waits quietly, passively. You are struck by the fact that there is no resistance, no bravado shown. What occurred before has eroded all of you who were so enthusiastically attuned to the dark side, who were once rebellious, defending your individuality at all costs. Back then, Jeremy insisted on spending the night here. No one protested, but the mood was different. The fervor of that evening is overwhelmed by the pensive silence of this one. It was Jeremy who found the stones. Jeremy who opened the gate. Jeremy who cut a Faustian deal, one you and your friends were grateful to get at the time.

  Only Candy, an outsider not privy to the history, with no idea of the future, voices concern. “You know, it’s cold in here, Jeremy. And dark. Why don’t we take that outside so you can play with it?”

  No one answers her because all attention is riveted on the three large marble squares. One by one they are sliding upward, revealing the darkness behind them. Candy says, “Oh . . . my . . . God . . . !”

  Ritz sobs, her face pressed against Blonde Mike’s chest. Everyone else stands alone. The sour sweat of fear permeates the crypt’s close air. But not for long. Quickly the odor shifts to something worse, the rot of countless years, physical corruption that makes your olfactory nerves brush by everything rotten you have ever smelled, all of it balling together into the unbearable. You gag on the stink, and you are not the only one.

  Dark-haired Mike and Martine bolt for the door, struggling
to open it, but the door is sealed, as you knew it would be or you would have tried that yourself.

  “What’s happening?” Candy shrieks.

  Ritz sobs loudly, the sounds of despair coming from her lips making your knees buckle and it’s all you can do to stand upright and await your fate.

  The rank air has a misty quality that blunts everything, which you only realize when suddenly that dissipates as if a wind has blown it away and now all is sharp-edged. Emerging from within the blackness, one by one, are three figures. Their faces, their bodies, everything about them is burned into your psyche. Now, in their presence once more, you can only hope and pray that you die, here, now, quickly, so that you will never, ever encounter them again.

  The one on the left has no face. Scraps of putrid flesh cling to more breaks in bones than can be counted, shards jutting insanely in all directions. Next to him stands a woman, or so you believe. She is lean and naked, skinless, every muscle in her body sliced into precise strips that fan out from her skeleton, undulating like a demented extremophile existing in impossible conditions. The third, concentration-camp thin, is, on first glance, the least shocking. Until the eyelids flash open. These eyes are not human. Nothing like human. Within the black and red orbs you see all the torture and death people have inflicted on one another over the millennia the human race has called this planet home. Those eyes distract from the clamps and staples and safety pins and surgical sutures and barbed wire clinging to his raw, swollen flesh and make the hardware and the fact that he is over seven feet tall seem insignificant. Those eyes are all that matter. They foretell the future.

  Candy is screaming. Everyone else is pressed back against the door, even you, without being aware that you moved. Only Jeremy stands facing them, like some kind of confident, demonic peer. “We came back,” Jeremy says almost proudly, “as you asked.”