by John Everson
FAILURE
John Everson
First Digital Edition
February 2010
Darkside Digital
A Horror Mall Company
P.O. Box 338
North Webster, IN 46555
www.horror-mall.com/darksidedigital
Failure © 2010, 2006 by John Everson
Cover Artwork © 2010, 2006 by John Everson
All Rights Reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
To Shane Ryan Staley
For believing.
Thanks to Charlee Jacob and Edward Lee for inspiration and to Bordo’s in Chicago for my candle-lit table in the back where most of this story was written.
Table of Contents
I. On The Edge
II. Looking Back
III. Blood And Bullets On The Floor
IV. Blood On The Move
V. Sal Arrives…And Remembers The First Time Around
VI. Second Coming
VII. Last Look Back
VIII. Last Chance
IX. There Were No Bullets In The Gun
About The Author
I. On The Edge
There were no bullets in the gun.
Raymond realized this after pulling the trigger repeatedly, and swearing loudly when, after each click, no skull-slushing explosion occurred.
No flash of light. No smell of sulphur. No acrid taste of gunpowder and blood in his mouth for the split second he remained alive even as the remains of his brains began to slip like wet oatmeal down the white wall of his bedroom.
Raymond removed the shaft of steel from between his lips and tossed his father’s .44 at a pile of dirty laundry on the floor. His eyes welled, but instead of crying, his lips curled up slightly, and he laughed.
Another brilliantly unsuccessful attempt. He was even a loser at being a loser.
He stared at the white latticework of his wrists and cringed. The scars were long healed, but they still itched. And nagged. Every day he read the roadmap of his failure. And that map was alive and visible for all the world to see, if any cared to look. The pain had been worse after the bleeding had stopped. Sometimes the scars shivered and pulsed of their own accord, as if striving to open again. Even now he could feel the stiffness of the ruined skin. And ruined to accomplish what? So that he could leave the spilled stain of his unsnuffed life marking the grit of the grout between the tile? So that his mother and father could walk around him forever-more on tiptoes, mouthing each word with soothing tones even if they were just asking if he wanted hamburger or chicken for dinner, as if his feelings were precariously balanced shards of cut glass? As if he’d run his wrists through a cuisinart again if they chose the wrong animal to grill?
He’d wanted to send his lifeblood down the drain, not end up lying there, twitching, exposed and helpless yet frustratingly alive amid the undeniable evidence of his actions.
He was permanently stained with the blood of a man. His own.
And still he’d failed.
Raymond went back to his father’s closet to look for bullets.
* * *
B. B. C.
B. A.
D.
E.
And maybe another C. She couldn’t be sure. Andy’s arm was partially obscuring the view.
Damn.
Cind guessed. E. All of the Above. What the fuck. Who cared which dead guy had or hadn’t signed the Declaration of Independence? There were more important questions to be answered.
She squirmed a little in her seat, moving her thighs apart and then hunching low over the desktop, until the pain subsided.
Yeah, she had some important questions to ask. Important questions like whose dick had fuckin’ knocked her up at that perverted little occult house party back in March. Sal’s? Ray’s? Did the twisted old man do her when she was out cold?
Fuck.
C. C. C. C. She guessed. Didn’t care. What difference did it make now whether she passed or failed? Andy flipped to the next page of the test and she had to catch up. But the cramps kept coming.
She’d been used. Pounded like a nail with a sledge, and every slap of thigh on thigh and chest on chest had driven psychedelic colors through her head in seismic time. The boys had been an avalanche on her psyche, a rivet through her bones. Every spasm of their faces made her grin and grin and grin that stupid Absolut grin and she’d risen to meet them one more time, one more time, one more time until all that was left was...
The sun, creeping in to remind them that this was reality and fuck you if you thought the night was sweet. Fuck you and the dicks you rode through it on because you’re gonna be one bloody pregnant bitch come the day...and the day is here.
Rise and shine.
Something shifted inside her again as she greyed in another letter with her well-chewed #2 pencil. “D.”
Did anyone really know what the 8th amendment was?
Cind moaned out loud then, as the thing inside her dug its nails into the soft pink flesh of her intestines and scraaaaaaatched its way down what felt like the outside of her colon like a cat on a curtain. In her mind’s eye she could see small flaps of filleted flesh peeling loose from her innards and pissing and spitting blood into her belly, her guts leaking in pumping time like the fine spray of a watering hose.
Call it summer and baby was taking a crimson bath in the sun. Only it was dark as winter inside her.
Dark like the night he was made.
Dark like the way the classroom suddenly got for Cind, as she pressed her pencil to color in the answer to question 34 as “E” and then, as a white spot still remained on the Scan-tron hole, let loose a scream.
Dark as the blood that seeped out the creases of her skintight bluejeans and left its vaguely purplish rorschach mark on the light blue plastic of her chair as she slipped out of it to the floor.
Dark as the blackboard at the head of the class which read “Part One of this Test will End at 2:30.”
The test was done for Cind, but it was only 2:15.
* * *
Sal pressed harder on the pedal and the car whined in dismay. An eight-cylinder ought to be good for something, seeing as the puke-green body looked like shit, he thought, but the car didn’t completely agree. Zero to 95 in 6 seconds on a steady incline wasn’t one the manufacturer’s specs.
Girls called it a boat, but Sal thought of it as wheels, and that’s all that should have mattered. If you had wheels, you should get girls, right?
The thought only made him stomp the gas pedal harder, though it was already on the floor. Sal was driving up Donnen’s Hill alone because Brenda had pulled the “I have to cream rinse my hair” excuse on him and he refused to sit home and think about the ramifications of that.
Fuckin’ bitch took his class ring and Valentine’s Day candy and Friday night movie money when it was convenient to do so, but if someone offered her anything else to do, Sal had his suspicions that she blew him off without a blink and went off and blew someone else, blaming the ol’ curlers and cream rinse. He knew for a fact that last Wednesday when he wanted to get together with her to study, she’d actually hung out with Blane Cohen instead. Her “science project partner.” They “had to work out what they were going to do for the quarterly.”
Sal knew what they had to work out. Which part of her anatomy was going to accept Blane’s penis. That’s what the negotiation had been. Fuckin’ whore. Could a guy named Blane even have a penis?
He’d leave his own rubber marks on her crotch and high-tail it out of her rank box for good if he thought he could get some from another b
itch, but Sal was nothing if not honest with himself. And honesty reminded him that before Brenda, he’d never got his trousers unzipped by any girl. When you’ve got a nose like a clay hook and a pair of lips so thin they could slice cheese, the girls didn’t come curtseying and flashing their baby blues and pointy pinks too often.
Sal was a realist. Brenda might fuck around on him when the mood struck her, but at least she fucked on him now and again. And that feeling was worth looking the other way about some things.
Donnen Road angled to the left and the old Impala’s tires squealed as he forced the car to stay on the road. To go off the road at this point meant taking the high dive into Donnen Bay…not something he was quite ready for.
Maybe someday.
Raymond would probably test those waters out first though, Sal thought. The sick bastard was always trying to gas himself or cut himself or who-the-fuck-knows-what his way off of this mortal coil. Like he knew what fuckin’ heartache was.
Selfish bastard.
Egocentric prick never seemed to notice that Annie Lynd never took her eyes off him. Never seemed to care that Sarah Peters always wanted to do her homework with him. Never counted up the number of big-boobed babes who asked him out to the Turnabout Dance the past two years. Sal had counted.
Six.
Cuz Ray told him, offhandedly, as each one came in.
“That Maryjane Cullens chick asked about the Turnabout Dance today, can you believe it?” Ray had said a few weeks back during lunch. Cullens had tits to choke a guy. And all Ray could say was “I told her I was real sorry, but my family was going on vacation that weekend.”
Like Ray’s family ever went on vacation. The little pale pecker was just too lillywhite scared to go out and thrust his ‘nads in and out between a hot bitch’s skirts. And Cullens was one hot bitch.
Meanwhile, Sal, who actually HAD A CAR (unlike Ray, who was always borrowing or stealing his parents) couldn’t keep one fuckin’ slit on the hook. His Turnabout count was one. And that’s only cuz she had to keep up appearances so he’d taken her to see Tom Cruise on his dime once in a while.
Sal stomped the pedal in emphasis and turned the wheel hard at the cutoff.
He pulled the car into the parking lot for the Point and killed the engine. The glow of a joint soon lit the cab. For the first time in an hour Sal held his breathing down to a slow, hitching sigh.
Talk about life stories. His was one big fuckin’ failure.
* * *
Mariachi horns punctuated the gloom as two hands sliced and blessed the bloody chunks of meat on the wooden bench.
Herb Alpert was the king of mojo. And plenty of mojo was needed now. Let the Tijuana Brass blast. Maybe the sound itself would animate the dead flesh before him. Lord knows, the Madame’s charm hadn’t lifted a sinew. Not that moving masses of muscle was what Aaron was after. His aim was higher.
More intellectual.
He needed to move mouths.
Well, one mouth.
One pair of betraying lips that had gone to the grave without surrendering their secret. He needed the Madame’s lips to speak to him again. And he would make them.
She had known the secret.
The secret that he needed to know.
She’d let him feel the evidence. It had struck him between the eyes with a bolt of searing lightning one cloudless summer day and he’d never shown up at her door without invitation again.
No wizard or witch held or channeled that kind of power. But when she’d seen Aaron on her doorstep, the Madame had opened the door a crack, smirked and shaken her head, and then called out a name. A moment later Aaron had been lying flat on his back outside of her house, the foul smell of burnt hair encircling him.
The only explanation for that kind of power was that Madame had somehow managed to put a spirit in thrall.
Oh, he’d strived for years to gain her confidence, to winnow into her secret spellbooks, but the locks on both her heart and her house were too tight for him to crack. And then one day, he went to ply her with gifts of rare antiquity, and found her door ajar, and the house empty.
Or nearly so.
As with all mortal creatures, she’d at last become only mortal remains, and her rotting bones were all that remained as evidence of her life. With her death, the demon had been released back to its own realm, and the spells that had brought her home riches released. A house full of treasures became, at the last beat of her heart, a house full of empty floorboards and cobwebbed corners.
But Aaron would not let her cheat him of her knowledge by death. He was determined that he and the Madame would speak again…but this time with her as his indentured slave.
Just as she’d bound a demon to her bidding, he’d bind her soul to him from beyond the grave. Capturing a human ghost was a far simpler process than harnessing a demon. She could be reborn as his eternal slave. And then he’d finally learn how she had commanded the truly powerful elementals of the spiritworld as easily as most women called their dogs.
Aaron had tried callings many times in the past. The skin that twisted and puckered across his forehead, and remained dramatically raised in frozen waves across his paralyzed cheeks bore testament to his aborted attempts. His face was a tortured braille script documenting his failures.
Spirits were not the type of creatures who took to the leash without struggle.
He’d tried every permutation he could think of. Ancient Peridian herbal circles, fasting meditations, goat sacrifice, virgin disembowelment…his callings were either ignored, refused, or violently spurned.
As a wizard, Aaron had been a comical failure.
But now he’d attempted his most careful calling. He’d recruited a gullible coven of teens to create a safe vessel within which to call and bind the dead witch—through sex magic. They’d smoked and drank and screwed at his direction for the bulk of a night. And in the morning, the most burly of the boys had thrown up on his shoes before staggering home.
No demons had appeared.
No portals had opened. Not visibly, of course.
The kids hadn’t taken him seriously (though they’d accepted his pot). But they would see. The vessel would grow with the forces of hell inside the girl, and when he spread the witch’s ashes over its newborn skin, the Madame would be his to foster…forever.
He spat a chewed frog liver onto the still, unmoving shoulder of the dead man on the table in front of him, and drew a sigil of black power on the corpse’s chest with a lipstick he’d borrowed from the purse of his coven cunt.
He recited the last words of the spell again.
Agave terrintuum ulta noda est fine. Relig tuad es vinum.
It didn’t move. He pushed the spellbook to the floor in disgust.
Apparently he wasn’t very good at raising zombies. But he knew his coven kids would be back. Oh, they’d be back all right.
II. Looking Back
Sal sat alone in his cab, focusing inward as the high gathered, deep in the back of his brain. It seethed there, like a furnace breath, warm and dangerous. All of the edge that made him want to put his fist through a pane of glass began to slip and soften. The orange of the joint’s end flashed like a firefly as he sucked it in, praying for relief. Praying for the kind of release he’d experienced when he’d last smoked the stuff that he’d gotten from the old man in the forest.
“You ever had a light of real Columbian?” the man had asked.
Sal looked the guy over closer. He’d been sitting in the forest preserve, staring out at the pond minding his own business when the man had approached. A hundred acres of empty crabgrass, winding twists of rutted, muddy walking trails and listing park benches and this fuckhead had to come sit next to him.
He tapped his pack of Salem’s another five times against his palm and then let a smoke slide out into his waiting fingers. Without answering, he lit up, and blew a cloud into the newcomer’s face. The guy didn’t flinch. But the silver brows above his colorless eyes drew closer.
; Sal replayed the scene in his head for the hundredth time
“I don’t know if you understood me,” the man began.
“I gotcha fine,” Sal said. “You want to sell me some weed. Why? I look like a doper? You some kind of entrapment cop?”
The man’s mousetrap-tight lips spread apart in what Sal guessed was supposed to be a grin. He didn’t see any teeth though.
“I’m no cop. But I’m looking for someone to join me in a little business proposition.”
“What makes you think I’m looking for business?” Sal asked. “I’m sitting here minding my own. You could do the same.”
The man reached into the pocket of his jacket, and pulled out a partially smoked jay. Looking away from Sal into the newly greening branches of the forest, he lit up. The cloying perfume of pot filled the air. After a couple puffs, the older man held out the crumpled white roll to Sal and nodded. Then, with a sigh that bordered on ecstasy, he released his hit, and let a flash of teeth color his lips.
“Good shit,” he promised.
There was only so long that a guy could resist the temptation of that smell. The sharp tang of burning leaf filled the air and Sal found his mouth watering for it. His lungs ached. His hand raised, slowly, on its own accord.
The sun had gone down and come up again before Sal found his way home, shivering, starving, but somehow, more fulfilled than he’d ever been in his life. In his pocket was the downpayment on a promise to be kept, and the bait for more promises to win. He knew that a couple hits were all it would take to win the man his willing slaves.
His coven, the man had called them.
“They must be willing,” the man had said. “They must know what I’m asking them to do. They should be people without too much to lose. Those are the kind that will be the most willing.”
It hadn’t taken Sal any time at all to think of Cind and Raymond.
III. Blood And Bullets On The Floor
“Shit, man, she’s bleeding all over,” someone was yelling.
Cind heard him through a fog of red pain, and then another voice, closer to her, chastising.