by Paul Kane
“As you promised. As we ordained,” the woman corrects him. “You could only obey.”
The broken-faced one says nothing at first. His eyes flash suddenly, emitting a light that speaks of Hell, or worse. And then he mutters in a low voice, barely audible: “No, they have not obeyed.”
You worry that he has directed this at you. Every part of your body feels locked into place, shackled to the cement floor beneath you. You are aware of taking shallow breaths, blood rushing through your head with the roar of a tidal wave. You listen and count the beats of your terrified heart to calm yourself. How did it come to this? What were you hoping for? Why you? “I . . . I have obeyed,” you hear yourself whisper, knowing you are struggling to please, to put off the inevitable.
“Let me out! Someone let me out!” Candy has pushed between us and is clawing at the door. No one aids her. No one is willing to go against the demonic figures. All but Candy know what they are capable of.
“Look, we came,” Jeremy says reasonably. “We obeyed.” The implication being: What’s your problem? Wasn’t the last time enough?
The one with the demon eyes turns those orbs onto Jeremy, who jerks and cringes as if he has been struck.
The last time you were all here, Andrew, sweet Andrew, who loved wearing PVC and piercing his nipples, and once hung with hooks in his flesh from a tree branch, Andrew was with you. The thirteen of you gathered to drink cheap wine, laugh, listen to music, share psilocybin mushrooms, and commune with the dead. And see how many of your friends of either gender you’d end up fucking. And you had, all of you, ending up fucking each other, wildly, drunkenly, and then Jeremy found the stones. The stone puzzle that moved the marble, just like tonight. And when you and your intoxicated friends snatched the bones from the coffins and began dancing with them in a wild, ecstatic, orgiastic danse macabre, what you came to call Cenobites emerged from the land of severe darkness like religious flagellants from another time, tortured to the point of ecstasy. To the point of ultimate power. They came to tell you that when you choose death as a dance partner, death reciprocates.
They wanted Andrew. He was the sacrifice to save the rest of you and he went willingly. You watched him climb eagerly into the black hole in the wall that swallows everything. The relief you felt is shameful still.
It is his voice you hear now, calling from that darkness, not words, only sounds that crease reality and you do not know if Andrew is in pain or in pleasure. To avoid letting them touch you emotionally, you count the number of moans, thinking: he could not have lived behind the marble slabs for twenty years! And yet he has.
“You have brought another,” the female Cenobite says. Her mouth opens and she sticks out her tongue, which is also sliced into strips. She stares, impassive, at Candy.
Candy is hysterical. Ritz chokes out hopelessness. Everyone else is struck dumb by their terror, the rank stink of fear-laden sweat saturating the air. You cannot believe you are living this déjà vu. Living your nightmares.
Jeremy says nothing and in that moment you understand. The vow you twelve made back then—to return here tonight, when the Cenobites would take another from your number—Jeremy has altered things. He has brought Candy. He wants them to take her into the darkness instead of one of your group. Instead of him.
“She is not the offering, but we accept,” the one with the chilling eyes declares.
You cannot believe you are hearing this. No one can. Could salvation come to you through this vacuous woman as the new sacrifice? Has Jeremy tricked the Cenobites?
“We accept this offering, as well as one we choose.”
As a unit, the three Cenobites turn toward Jeremy. Now it is clear. They will take both of them.
Jeremy steps back. The look on his face is a mixture of betrayal and pure horror. “I brought you her!” he declares. “She’s the one. Not me!”
“Jeremy, what are you talking about?” Candy screams. She knows but does not want to know.
But already the Cenobites are pulling Jeremy and Candy toward them with invisible strings. The female Cenobite opens her arms toward Candy like a dancer awaiting her partner. Candy’s screams become ear piercing and bone chilling; you are certain those screams will reverberate within you until your dying day.
“You said one. Not two, one! Take her!” Jeremy yells, all the while closing the gap between him and the broken-faced one, who does not look at Jeremy and yet Jeremy is dragged relentlessly, his body bending in supplication toward the feet of the Cenobite.
The four of them, two human, two not, flow into the openings, the blackness seeming to suck at their bodies until they are obliterated. Bodies, but not voices. Candy is still shrieking. And Jeremy has joined her, protests about unfairness giving way to cries of terror. You can still hear Andrew moaning.
Only the tall Cenobite remains. His frightening otherworldly eyes seem to take in the eleven remaining all at once. Despite the terror, you sense relief in your friends. The promise was kept, this is finally over.
“Three thousand, six hundred and fifty-two days. That is when all of you will return. This time, keep your promise. Do you agree?”
There are gasps and cries of disbelief all around. Someone mutters, “Damn Jeremy, he fucked it up!” But one by one your friends nod and whisper, “Yes,” and “I agree,” because they cannot do otherwise. They are traumatized. And trapped. They just want to leave here alive and will say or do anything. Like the last time.
You are the only one who has said nothing. The dangerous eyes zero in on you like lasers that burn hot, then sear cold, past your skin, through your muscles, into your bones and organs, rocking you with the excruciatingly exquisite pain of opposites. You burn and chill so rapidly your teeth begin to rattle and small sounds you did not know you were capable of making come from between your lips. The demand is that you comply.
But you have calculated the numbers, what you do best, and the Cenobite is aware of this. He blinks and whatever he has been doing to your body stops abruptly, leaving you limp and breathless, dizzy. A small movement occurs at his thin lips, not a smile exactly, and yet you cannot see it as anything but grim humor. “You’re going to make us come back again and again, one less each time, half as much time, aren’t you?” you gasp. “Ten years for eleven. Five years for ten. Two and a half for nine. Half as much time for eight, half again for seven. And by the end, when there is just one of us left, it will be only ninety hours before that one must return.”
You do not say it, but everyone here understands: as the years pass, hope will diminish.
The Cenobite stares at you for a moment. “Your skill with counting will be . . . interesting to explore.”
The being drifts backward, entering the darkness out of which still flow the haunted voices you recognize: screams, cries, shrieks. Pleadings.
The marble panels slide down and into place as though they had never moved. The crypt is filled with tense silence.
Someone pulls the handle and the crypt door crashes open. The light of day rushes in. Your friends flee, as if getting away quickly will erase the memory, stop the nightmares, block out the reality of returning, for you must all return. Each of you understands that if you do not come to them, the Cenobites will come to you.
Alone, you walk down the hill, automatically calculating the number of graves in each of the family plots you pass. You are good with numbers. You always have been. Counting rescued you as a child, and became your vocation as an adult. Numbers provide order to chaos. Comfort. And you have calculated correctly—you will be the last one standing. But that is as it should be. You are responsible for all of this, for everything that has happened and will happen. It is you who guided Jeremy’s hands twenty years ago. And now you are the only one left who knows how to open the stone puzzle.
You will suffer day and night until you are old and feeble, then this suffering will end. And true agony will begin. You have no doubt that your counting skills will be sorely tested.
However . . .
Gary A. Braunbeck and Lucy A. Snyder
“The great epochs of our lives come when we gain
the courage to rebaptize our evil as our best.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, “Fourth Article,”
Beyond Good and Evil
Of the three it was Penny who was finally able to get free from the manacles. So emaciated had her limbs become that she easily slipped her left hand through, but her right was still swollen at the base of the index finger and thumb where the bones were broken. She didn’t make a sound, even though it was obvious to Lewis that she was in terrible pain. Pausing only long enough to pull in a deep breath, the frail nineteen-year-old gripped her right wrist and bore down with what little strength remained in her body. Her face turned red from both the agony and the effort, but still she did not cry out.
“I’m fuckin’ stuck,” she finally whispered through gritted teeth.
“Hold on,” said Carl. “I got an idea. But . . .”
From his corner, Lewis said, “But what?”
“It’s pretty gross,” the cadaverous twenty-year-old replied.
“I don’t care!” said Penny. “We gotta get some food or we’re gonna die down here.”
“Do it,” said Lewis.
Carl blanched. “But—”
“Just do it, already!” Penny snapped.
Lewis watched Carl rise to his blistered feet and limp toward Penny, his chains slithering rusty trails across the concrete floor. She held out her broken, manacled hand. Carl unzipped the front of his pants and pissed over the bloodstained metal cuff. Aided now by the lubricant of Carl’s urine, Penny’s broken hand squeaked through the corroded manacle and she fell back against the wall, swearing under her breath as she cradled her torn, swollen, bleeding appendage. She looked ready to start crying. Carl was already tearing away part of his shirt to make a bandage, so Lewis pulled out the lace of his left tennis shoe.
Working quickly, they dried Penny’s hand, wrapped it, and used the shoelace to tie the bandage in place so that the pressure was more or less even. All of this they did in less than one minute; they’d had plenty of practice. Lewis had learned first aid in a summer internship at Grand Teton National Park and taught everything he knew to the others; college and his family seemed so long ago, so far away he sometimes wondered if his old life had just been a pleasant dream. His hands knew how to tie a bandage or make a sling, but if he tried to remember the first time he’d done these things, sometimes he was sitting under an oak tree with the park ranger, but sometimes he was sitting here in the basement. The hope that he could get that dream back was all that kept him sane some days. He’d told the others time and again that when this day came, they would have to move fast, no matter how sick, broken, or weak all of them felt because the Cold Ones had taken to starving them for days at a time.
The Cold Ones. Carl had started calling them that because the guy was always telling the woman he was going out for “a couple of cold ones.” Lewis thought the name fit. What the couple’s actual names were—Smith, Jones, Cleaver, Partridge—none of them knew, and the longer they were kept down here, the longer they were used as toys, as furniture, as ashtrays, as toilets, as objects to be abused in ways none of them had ever imagined and now would never forget, and the longer this went on . . . the more power the Cold Ones gathered to them. Lewis could feel it. The ice behind their gazes, the frost in their fingertips, the chilly echoes of their voices coming from some dark pit buried deep in the wintry chamber where a human heart should have resided, all of these things and more turned them, with every passing minute, into things beyond pain, beyond damage, beyond any Earthbound sensation that might, for a moment, stop them in their tracks.
Penny took a deep, shuddering breath and climbed to her feet. “Okay, guys. It’s showtime. Wish me luck.”
Lewis looked up at her. “If they come back—”
“—I drop everything and just get the box. I know.” She gave the boys a quick smile, then limped toward the staircase that led up to the kitchen. She disappeared around the corner and soon Lewis heard the old wooden stairs faintly creaking under her bare feet.
Carl whispered, “What if the door’s locked?”
Lewis shook his head. “He didn’t lock it this morning. I listened; the door only clicked once.”
They fell silent as Penny pushed open the door. Both boys stared up as her footsteps moved across the ceiling; she was in the hall heading toward the kitchen.
Lewis’s stomach growled. All of them knew where the refrigerator was; they got dragged past the kitchen whenever they were taken to the upstairs living room or bedrooms. Its low hum taunted him on those nights, transforming his stomach into an angry demon. Penny was supposed to get just a few pieces of whatever was there: a couple of slices of American cheese from the fat, greasy block in the refrigerator, a couple of pieces of bread if the loaf was already started, a little bologna, a few grapes, maybe an apple if the Cold Ones had a whole bag. They’d agreed she wouldn’t touch their fancy gourmet food, that she mustn’t take anything obvious, nothing that would be missed. And whatever she did, she couldn’t spill anything, or leave any smudges behind to let their captors know she’d escaped from the basement.
“Dude, what if they come back?” Carl was knocking his knees together like he had to pee again.
“They won’t,” Lewis said, making himself sound more confident than he actually felt. “It’s already been more than fifteen minutes.” He’d counted it down in his head: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . .
“But they never leave together, what if—”
“Carl, chill. They used to go out together all the time. But that was before they brought you and Penny down here. If they were gone for more than fifteen minutes, they’d be gone for hours. They’re going to a swinger’s club or something.”
Lewis didn’t actually know where the couple went, and told himself he didn’t want to know, although his imagination got the better of him sometimes. Sometimes the Cold Ones videotaped what they did to him and Carl and Penny; he figured they probably sold the tapes to like-minded perverts. Or maybe they were the ones with the money, and today they were touring another basement in another isolated house. Lewis hoped they were selling the tapes they made, because then maybe the FBI or the sheriff would find one and figure out where they were.
However, if there weren’t any tapes for the good guys to find, maybe Penny would find the black box. There wasn’t any easy way for her to get help on her own—the Cold Ones had no landline phones in the house, they never left their cell phones behind, and the house was too damned far out in the country for Penny to try to walk to safety in her condition.
He hoped she found the box. There’d been many nights when he’d overheard the couple, mostly the man, talking about it, their voices filtering hollowly through the floorboards into the basement. From what Lewis had been able to make out, the box had some tremendous power to grant wishes. Maybe it was sort of like Aladdin’s lamp with a genie inside, except it was a puzzle you had to solve instead of just rubbing on it. He’d glimpsed the box himself a couple of times, and Lewis could feel the power in it. Usually the Cold Ones kept it locked up in a fancy glass cabinet in the living room, but sometimes, sometimes, the guy forgot and left it out on the coffee table after he’d been up all night trying to figure out how it worked.
Lewis had never believed in fairies and magic and crap like that, but listening to the guy’s voice . . . clearly he believed in the power in the box. And here, trapped in this stinking dungeon with nothing else to hope for, all his prayers to God met with utter silence, Lewis had found himself believing, too, grasping at this one thin thread of improbable hope in the face of unthinkable horror.
He had never made the best grades in school, had never been the smartest kid in any of his classes, but he knew he was damn good at solving puzzles. His uncle had given him an old Rubik’s Cube one summer, and he’d been able to solve it way before any of the
other kids in the neighborhood. By the end of the week, he could solve the thing within two minutes, no matter how messed up it was. In his freshman dorm, he’d gotten through the new Resident Evil before any of the other guys, and the week before he was kidnapped, he’d won a Sudoku contest sponsored by the math department. He was dead sure he could do better than their captors.
Penny’s footsteps were moving across the ceiling again, and soon he heard the basement door open.
“I got it all, guys.” Penny padded down the creaky stairs, carrying a big white picnic plate piled with odds and ends from the refrigerator and pantry. She had a big, lidded Styrofoam cup tucked in the crook of one skeletal, cigarette-burned arm, and—Lewis’s heart skipped a beat—in the other was the black lacquered puzzle box.
Penny carefully set the plate of food down on the concrete floor between the young men, then the cup, and then handed the box to Lewis, her expression doubtful. “It was right there on the coffee table, just like you said it would be.”
“Outstanding!” Lewis ran his fingers over the surface of the box, mesmerized, his hunger forgotten. This was the first time he’d been close enough to see that each side of the box was shaped like a face of some sort, but not a human face . . . or maybe they were faces of things that had once been human but weren’t anymore. Oh, whoever had made this was some kind of genius. Lewis envied anyone who was that smart, that clever. Just looking at it—even looking at it up close—he couldn’t find one seam, one indentation, one pressure point that even hinted at how you went about opening it.
The horrible pressure of the situation suddenly made his hands shake and his heart pound. If he couldn’t open it, or if he did open it and nothing happened, oh, God . . .
Pretend it’s that stupid Rubik’s Cube, he told himself, trying to calm himself down. Pretend that you’re doing this on a dare. Pretend that it’s something fun. This was the best way to go, to think of it as a fun game . . . because, holding it in his hands now, feeling as if the six faces were laughing at him, Lewis realized that there was no going back. He had to solve it, to open it before the Cold Ones came back. If he didn’t, if he was still messing with it when the couple got home, they would probably gut him like a fish—or gut Penny or Carl. And make him watch.