“Sweetie, it was only a dream,” she says, sensing my uncertainty. “Are you still afraid?”
I shake my head. This time it is my turn to lie. “No.”
* * *
“Leave her out of this,” I said. “Leave her alone.”
“But I gave her to you, Alan. I gave you your perfect mother.”
“You don’t frighten me.”
“Everything frightens you,” it replied, again using Bernard’s distorted, gargling voice. “You’re still a terrified little boy whistling in the dark, Alan. And I see you. I’ve always seen you. Now, you see me.”
“And what do I see?”
He hunched over a bit, turned, looked down at the floor and back at the wall as if he too were dissolving into it. “The beginning. The end. The old. The new. The past. The future. Different faces, different names, different lives, but you’re always with me and I’m always with you, feeding on you, on your fears and weaknesses.”
“A parasite,” I said. “A bleeder of innocent women and children.”
“No one is innocent.” More blood poured from his nose and mouth but he seemed not to notice. “I set those silly cunts free. I let them see their useless gods.” The thing grinned again with its gums. “I’m on the threshold of something wonderful, Alan. You’re the lost one, lost in your own self-righteousness just like the rest of them. The world doesn’t want to stop me, not really, it gave birth to me—created me—and made me whole. The truth is in the dark, Alan. Here, with me.”
“You’re a disease.”
“No, only a symptom. I’m the open sore festering and blistering across their flesh, eating them from the inside out and laughing at their arrogant attempts to ignore me. They don’t try to stop me, they only pretend I’m not there. Nero fiddled, Alan.” He sighed, ran a bloody hand across his equally bloody dome. “And Rome burns.” He looked around like he had momentarily forgotten where he was. “I set those women free of their hypocrisy and meaningless lives. I gave them purpose. No one cares about some low-rent single mothers and their bastard children. No one cares if they live or die, if they suffer or bleed. The world won’t miss them. The world misses nothing, no one. But I made them immortal. I brought importance to their useless existences. In death, they matter, don’t you see? They have purpose. And now, like all of you, they belong to me. In my darkness, they belong to me. I’m their God. I’m their messiah.”
The figures in the corner stepped forward, their forms crossing into the pool of light, their eyes black as a shark’s, just like in the dream.
I squared off between them, doing my best to keep both in my line of sight. The bloody atrocity against the wall straightened, and a cage of ribs rose then fell within its slimy skin. Unseen things scurried beneath its flesh, scuttling about like spasmodically stirring insects. He caught my eye and grinned at me again, slurping blood from his gums.
It was no longer possible to find any semblance of Bernard in this creature. Gone were any traces of the little boy I had grown up with, played baseball with, rode bikes with, laughed with and experienced so much with. Gone was the young man I had become a teenager with, experienced the loss of our friend with and graduated high school with. Gone was the grown man who attended my wedding, who had been my lifelong friend. Yet even in the midst of this madness I couldn’t help but remember him as a young boy, as it was perhaps the only time he had truly been who and what I believed him to be. For that little boy, for what happened to him, my heart broke, because the innocent small town boy Bernard had once been was long dead. And simple death had apparently not been sufficient. He’d been completely annihilated.
Bernard nodded. He had heard me thinking again. “You and I, we know quiet little towns are never what people think they are,” he said. “Quiet little towns hide quiet little secrets … quiet little screams. Listen to the screams, the whispers in your mind. Obey them. The voices are mine, don’t you see? In this world, and the next.”
“You’re no prophet, no dark messiah,” I said, spitting the words at him. “You’re no sorcerer. It’s all lies. Fucking lies meant to frighten and intimidate. You’re a lie.”
“Not me, Alan—you. You’re only real because I made you real. I fucking made you, all of you. My rituals made you real, and they made me a god.”
The world is not always what you think it is.
“You’re just a sad and pathetic little man,” I said. “A loser full of rage and violence with delusions of grandeur. A deeply disturbed man, nothing more.”
He smiled at those awaiting us in shadow, then at me. “There’s no need to be anything else. Our capacity for evil, mindless brutality and destruction is unequalled. We’re never free of it, Alan. We pretend to be, but we’re never free of it. Those black places in our souls never let us go. Never.”
The real world is the one underneath, and that world is different. It’s shadows.
I ignored the ringing in my ears and motioned to the others. “I know why they’re here. Just like in the dream, they’re here for you.”
“They’re not here to take me to Hell, Alan.” He blinked blood drops from his eyes. “They’re here to take you.”
My blood turned cold. “No.”
“Come together, Alan,” he said. “Wash with me in their blood, feel it running over you while it pumps free of their slowly dying bodies. Let it run in their filthy fucking streets. Bleed them with me, Alan. We’re gods.”
I held the knife down by my thigh, gripping it tightly. “I’m sorry for what happened to you as a child, Bernard. I’m sorry for what your mother did to you—to all of us. For that little boy, I’m sorry. But for what that little boy became, I’m not sorry. For that sorry excuse of a human being I feel no compassion whatsoever. You’re the same now as you were then, the same as you allowed yourself to become. You’re nothing. Powerless. Alone. And you need to die.”
Bernard laughed, his voice bellowing and echoing through the empty space. Blood again gushed from his lips. “What happened to me as a child made you possible, you fucking fool. My rituals allowed you to stay behind, made you real. You should have paid more attention to what the whore told you. I’m already dead and buried. It isn’t me you’re dreaming of. It isn’t me you see. It’s you. It’s yourselves you see, the part of me that lives in you, in all of you.”
Screams cut the night, screams of unimaginable terror. Rick’s screams.
“We’re all one. We’re all the same. Come home to me, Alan.”
Rick’s screams grew worse. “Stop it.” I said.
“Everything you have, I gave you. It all started with me.”
“Stop it!”
“Such beauty,” he hissed. “Such beauty.”
I pitched forward and lumbered toward him. Bernard rose from his crouch but made no attempt to defend himself. With a primal scream of my own, I slashed the blade down across his face then back across his throat. Swinging my arm in a violent repeating arc, I slashed again and again across the crimson mass, spraying us both with blood and bile. Bernard staggered back, still grinning, and finally fell back against the wall.
Winded, I slammed the knife into Bernard’s belly, fell back and dropped to my knees. I reached beneath my shirt, fingered the crucifix my mother had given me.
Do you still believe?
I slowly regained my feet. Spattered with blood, I watched the creature watching me, slashed and punctured but still standing and still staring me down, still grinning.
Do you still believe what it stands for?
Blood pulsed from the thing steadily, and he slowly sank to the floor, sliding along the wall until he was sitting in the mixture of flesh and bone.
I stepped closer. “Do you believe in Hell?”
“Hell is on Earth,” it gurgled. “See what’s right in front of your eyes. The whole planet, they’re all damned and don’t even realize it. They’re already in Hell. I’m just closer to the core, and now, so are you. You’re all fucked. All of you, fucked.”
Ar
e you still afraid of the dark?
With a quick tug I snapped the chain holding the crucifix around my neck, pulled it out from under my shirt and held it tightly in my free hand. The flashlight had become surprisingly steady.
Do you still believe He can protect you?
“Do you believe in a God who never punishes?” I asked.
That He loves you?
“A forgiving God?”
That He has never forgotten you?
“Rather than a vengeful God?”
Are you still afraid of the dark?
I saw the crucifixes dangling in Julie Henderson’s windows, her reality protecting her, remembered the day my mother had pressed this crucifix into my hand and told me she loved me. I remembered how not long afterward, she was dead, and all I had left of her was what I now held in my grasp.
Do you still believe?
“Tell me…do you believe in that kind of God?”
Blood ran from its mouth. “I don’t believe in God at all.”
“No,” I said. “But I do.”
I slammed my fist down into its mouth, past its slimy gums to the sticky wetness of its tongue, and as it tightened its jaws around my wrist, I pushed my hand deeper and stabbed the crucifix into the back of its throat.
It vomited up my arm with such force that I toppled backwards and crashed to the floor. I dropped the flashlight and it rolled away, sweeping circular light across the walls as it went with a strobe-like effect.
I saw my arm, slick with its blood up to my elbow. I saw the nightmare forms watching from the shadows.
“I gave you your beliefs.” The thing that had once been Bernard stared at me with its wet white eyes then began to convulse and writhe. Faster and faster still, it became an impossibly rapid blur of frantic, hideously violent movement.
Growls and whispers circled me like a pack of wolves, and the old mill began to tremble and quake.
The building was coming down all around us.
CHAPTER 36
As the building shook, pieces of ceiling began to fall, the walls crumbled and the floor split. I got to my feet, stumbled through a pile of debris and saw a thick piece of old wooden beam within reach.
I snatched up the board and closed in on Bernard. His bloody form sat collapsed against the wall, still a blur, still writhing and shuddering with inhuman force. I raised the board over my head.
He stopped, suddenly still, the violence now around him, transferred to the collapsing building. The wet eyes opened, looked up at me with something akin to innocence. “Alan?” His voice was high-pitched, like when we were kids. “Alan? Help me, it’s—it’s so dark here, I can’t find my way out.”
I held the weapon suspended above me.
“I’m afraid! Alan, I’m—I’m afraid!”
“You’re a lie. You’re not real.”
“But I’m you, Alan,” he said. “I’m you.”
I swung the board as hard as I could. It connected with the side of his face, splitting it open. He slumped over onto his side, spasms wracking his body, and with the mill imploding around us, I raised the board like a bat and smashed it down again and again, disturbingly calm and collected—cold—while I pummeled his head to a thick soupy pulp. I stood staring down at what I had done, oblivious to all else.
Maybe he was right.
I heard commotion in the distance followed by labored breathing, and somewhere through the numbness I heard Rick screaming my name. Everything came back into focus and suddenly he was standing behind me. His clothes were dirty, he was scraped and disheveled and had a small cut on the side of his face but otherwise looked unharmed. He was shaking from what appeared to be equal doses of fear and anger. “I saw him down there,” he said. “I fucking saw him.”
I looked back over my shoulder, but darkness had swallowed the creature.
“This way!” Rick called.
I dropped the two-by-four and dodged a chunk of ceiling as it hurtled past me and exploded against the floor. Shielding my face with a forearm, I ducked and ran toward the sound of his voice. The floor tilted and shook, and I lost my balance but kept running, rubble falling all around me.
Rick had found a pair of large vertical windows against the back wall of the building that reached to the floor and had been boarded over. By the time I got to him he had begun smashing the wood with his fists. It splintered and we both began peeling and tearing the pieces free. Ignoring his bloodied hands, Rick kicked and punched at the breaks until he’d made an opening large enough for us to squeeze through.
He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me toward it. “Go! Go!”
I pushed through, the jagged edges tearing at my shoulders and legs, and was met by a burst of fresh sea air. I tumbled to the ground, found myself lying on sand and surrounded by the tall grass that signaled the beginning of the cliffs along the rear of the property. The fireworks had ended but the sky was clear, and a three-quarter moon perched high above provided enough light for me to find my bearings.
I knew even then that if we took the time to negotiate the steep slant of the cliffs we’d never make it. The building would topple and crush us before we could reach the cover of overhang on the beach below. We’d have to run and jump and hope to do so with enough velocity to clear the beach and reach the water. From there, it was a matter of pure luck. The drop was not enormous but considerable—at least ninety to one hundred yards. Even if the water was deep enough at our point of entry, we’d have to pray the tide would bring us back to the beach in enough time to find safety against the base of the cliff. Otherwise we’d have to swim to deeper water and hope to get far enough to avoid the falling rubble.
Rick climbed through the opening and fell next to me in the sand. “The whole goddamn thing’s coming down right on top of us,” he gasped. “Keep moving!”
“There’s nowhere to go but down!”
Rick and I exchanged a quick, frantic glance. We were out of options.
With the sounds of destruction exploding around us, we ran as hard and fast as we could, right off the edge of the cliff.
I leapt, my fear of the ocean screeching in my ears as I clawed and kicked at the air in an attempt to straighten my body for the fall. I knew I had to hit feet-first or I’d be in trouble, but the moment I left the cliff I couldn’t be sure of anything. I closed my eyes, and all the air in my lungs left me in a single frenzied rush.
I remembered plummeting as if in a void. Time stopped, all sound ceased.
Until I felt the crash of impact on the bottoms of my feet and the rush of water as I plunged into the ocean.
* * *
I kicked reflexively and rose to the surface, but initially had no idea where I was or in which direction I was facing. I was swallowing a lot of water and knew I needed to fight the panic and relax to the extent that I was able. Once I had accomplished this I felt the waves carrying me, drawing me toward the beach.
I turned over, spinning toward shore. It came into view through the darkness then vanished beneath my line of sight as I bobbed along the surface. Still stunned and disoriented, I kicked my feet and swept my arms through the water, this time deliberately and to make sure they were still intact and functioning properly.
My legs brushed something solid, and I realized I was no longer floating but bouncing along the ocean floor with the balls of my feet. I climbed from the surf and flopped belly-down into a foamy pool of shallow water and moist sand breaking against the shore. I coughed out more water, wiped my eyes and face and forced myself up into a half-pushup. I could hear things crashing into the ocean, and saw debris raining down around me. Calling out for Rick, I jerked my head to the left then right, searching for him hysterically.
Across the narrow stretch of sand was the base of the cliffs. Safety. I rolled onto my knees and saw Rick tumble out of the ocean behind me, rolling lifelessly with the tide onto the beach.
Still gasping for breath, I crawled to him, put him on his back and dragged him away from the reach of waves. He ca
me awake with a sudden, agonizing scream, and I noticed the sickening position of his lower body. His left leg was bent at an obviously unnatural angle, and a nub of thick bone with chunks of flesh dangling from it protruded through the torn pants on his right thigh. I had never seen a fracture so horrific but tried to downplay my reaction for Rick’s sake.
I pulled him the rest of the way and collapsed against the base of the cliff with his head and shoulders in my lap. I tried to find my breath as his screams subsided and became muffled sobs. “My legs,” he moaned. “Christ Almighty, my fucking legs.”
I held him tight, his wet hair against my chin and my arms wrapped around his chest. “Hang on, man. Hang on. I’m gonna get us out of here.”
He went limp, and for a moment I thought he’d died. But I felt his chest rise and fall. Though he’d only passed out I knew he had to get to a hospital, and fast. Police and fire personnel were more than likely already rushing to the scene, as the collapse of the building had surely rattled everything as far as downtown, and the disturbance in the ocean could easily be seen further down the coast, where the fireworks display had originated. But it would take them a while to locate us, and I wasn’t certain Rick could hold on that long. I’d have to get him out on my own. It would mean carrying him on my back along the water’s edge for nearly a mile. Once I reached the forest I could make the lesser climb then cross back to where we had left the Jeep. If I got lucky, someone might see us as I trudged along the waterline.
I looked out at the ocean. The ground had stopped shaking and although numerous small particles of debris still flickered about like swarms of flying insects, the massive portions of the mill that had fallen into the sea had now come to rest.
Exhausted, I allowed my eyes to close a moment.
As they opened, the moonlight revealed dark figures slowly breaking the surface of the waves, creeping toward shore, emerging from the surf and walking toward us like zombies, black eyes sparkling.
The Bleeding Season Page 36