by Scott Hale
Oblita reached out, grabbed him by his bloody, likely broken elbow, and wrenched him forward. Yelping, with hot stars of pain burrowing into his bones, he went past her and her monster, through the front door, and out into the third-floor hallway.
Except it couldn’t have been the third-floor hallway. Gone were the spotless tiles checkered with red and black diamonds—in their place, a long stretch of smoothed dirt, with fleshy, throbbing pustules bleeding maggot-white liquids around themselves. Gone was the wallpaper and garden of pink flowers it played host to—like a dirty magnifying glass pressed to ancient art, the designs were enlarged, unfocused abortions of color behind the fatty walls. Gone were the chandeliers that twinkled out twilight light—from where they were now hung roots, vermillion veins not unlike those in E.A.973’s eyes, and in their clutches, bones.
The air was oppressive; wet, scummy, it was like the bottom of an old rock in a sewage pipe. Dario could hear water running all around, as if it were raining inside the opaque walls; or as if the Manor had finally plummeted into the river.
There was no sunlight, either, because there were no windows. The only light that lit the hallway came from the tenants holding candles in their yawning doorways. Four to Dario’s left and five to his right, each tenant was different when it came to age, sex, and ethnicity. The commonality that which they could all claim was that someone or something had claimed a part of them. Each tenant was disfigured, disabled; each one was missing pieces of themselves, and they wore the badge of their amputation proudly, practically waving it at Dario to give witness to their sacrifice.
There was the mother and child he’d seen earlier with the squirt guns, and past them, the jackass who had been jerking off to TV static. And then there were the others. The gray-haired guy with gecko-like features, whose lips, as far as Dario could tell by the gouges in his enamel, had been literally ground off. The twenty-something woman with rainbow-colored weaves, whose cleavage was the gray scar tissue from where her breasts had been removed. The four-hundred-pound bowling ball of a man, whose skin was craterous and whose right arm was missing completely. The little boy with the fast-food crown and one hundred-dollar bills exploding from his pockets, whose throat had been ravaged and whose body sagged, as if bones had been removed. The elderly woman, with no eyes or feet, who leaned against a coat rack with IV bags hanging off it, alternating between puffs on her cigarette and asthma inhaler.
And then there was the person he must have heard earlier, the one who’d spoken to him as he knocked on Oblita’s door—the one who he couldn’t tell was male or female by their voice alone. Looking at them now, he still couldn’t discern their sex. They had no arms or legs, and pouches were attached to their torso, where urine and feces passed through plastic tubing that fed in and out of their body. They had been shaved, and they looked soft, pliable; bed sores or some form of psoriasis left them looking raw. The candle they held was wedged into their belly button. They didn’t seem to mind the hot wax that coated their stomach, or the flame that was inching towards it. And why should they? For all they’d undoubtedly endured, the pain had probably gone so far it might’ve transformed into something like pleasure. Transubstantiation of the most terrible kind; a cannibalized coping skill.
Dario’s sensations were shutting down. One by one, feeling by feeling, thought by thought, his body orphaned him to numbness. He didn’t know what he was looking at, or where he was, or what was going to happen to him. His arm was useless to him; his elbow was swollen like a balloon, and he could feel things breaking inside his flesh when he tried to move it. His eyeball felt like a marble in his skull; the skin around his face felt tight, as if it were constricting into one great mound. There was no getting away, only going along. He had been marooned here once, in the same kind of dangerous, unknown hell, and here he was again—nothing learned; everything gained, immediately lost.
E.A.973 took out the butcher knife and gently pressed its blade against the back of Dario’s neck. It cut into his skin, worked itself into a gap between the bones of his spinal cord. Using it like a rudder, the creature guided Dario to where it and Oblita wanted him to go.
Dario didn’t dare resist; he knew all too well what would happen if he did. He walked past each tenant, and as he did, they blew out their candles and retreated into their apartments. The only person who didn’t move was the one who couldn’t: the sexless puddle of flesh, kept alive by some maniac’s miracle, who lay in the middle of the ground, chewing on the tubing stuffed down their bulging throat.
“This floor is reserved for those who have given to the cause,” Oblita said.
Dario blinked the tears out of his eyes. He had worked with many people who had been born with disabilities. He knew the capabilities, the strengths they possessed that not even the so-called “able-bodied” could compete with. This trunk of a person wasn’t disabled; their body was a massacre made flesh.
“It has been here longer than the others. It has given almost everything, and it has been rewarded greatly.”
“It?” Dario said, shaking. “That’s a person.”
Oblita snorted and asked the quadriplegic, “What are you?”
They struggled with the spit in their throat. “Whatever… I—” vomit dribbled down their chin, “—need… to be.”
“See? With the right sacrifice, a person at the Manor can be anything they need. And what need have they for limbs they do not use? What good are legs if a person does not leave? What good are arms if a person is fed and bathed and clothed by another?”
Oblita tapped E.A.973 on the shoulder, and it urged Dario forward.
“Tongues are unnecessary, when I can speak on their behalf,” she said. “There are so many parts of the human body that can be put to a better use. Those that live in the Manor are not living. This is where the dead go to die.”
Dario stopped at the cavernous hole in the wall where the stairwell should have been. He turned to face Oblita, and in doing so, noticed that all the candles had gone out, and all the tenants were gone.
“These are people,” he whispered. “They’re not things.”
“They are useless. They feed off those who have more, and give almost nothing in return. They are parasites, spreading their disease of poverty throughout their communities. If it ended with them, I would understand, but it continues on with their children, and their children’s children.”
“Bullshit,” Dario said, regaining some of his courage. “I’ve known… so many. I’ve seen so many. You can’t… say that. I was one of them.”
“And yet here you are, where you’ve always belonged.” Oblita cocked her head. “I can help them in ways your programs cannot.”
“By butchering them?”
E.A.973 applied more pressure to the butcher knife. Dario could feel hot blood slipping out of the cut on his neck, down his back.
“Trimming the fat, bringing them back to their most basic needs. I get what I want. They get what they want.”
Dario slipped into the darkness filling the stairwell, using the tips of his toes to prod for steps. “What do you want?”
“What you’ll all want, when the time comes,” Oblita said. “Now, hush, please. It’s best to limit communication while crossing the Membrane. We wouldn’t want to draw… unwanted attention.”
The Membrane? He wanted to decipher her cryptic statement, but navigating his surroundings was more important. She was leading him somewhere, to some unspeakable act; if there was an escape along the way, he had to take it, despite how badly his biology was begging him to do otherwise. Action would solicit a reaction. All his life he had been a deer in the headlights; never killed, only clipped by the oncoming atrocity, it had worked so far. But something deep inside him, something primal, told him that wouldn’t work anymore. He couldn’t stand by, like he’d done when he was young, and watch the beatings, and take the leftover licks. Those three were only kids, like himself; it had gone on for too long, but…
Dario felt a sinking fee
ling in his groin as his feet slipped off the edge of something in the stairwell’s dark. He scrambled backwards, into the slimy embrace of E.A.973’s leather apron. Oblita whispered something, plucked something; in her outstretched palm, an orb burned with nightmarish green light. Immediately, the stairwell was illuminated, and like back the way they’d came, nothing here was the same. She handed the orb to Dario.
The stairwell itself had been transformed into what appeared to be a large drainpipe. There were no steps, only a single path carved into the gunk-covered stonework. Even with the limited light he held, Dario could tell that this vertical drop went far beyond the original property of the Manor. Listening closely, he could hear what sounded like water roiling in those black depths. But when he leaned farther over the ledge and his nose caught the bitter updraft, he realized it wasn’t water at all, but blood. A whole river of blood, flowing beneath them.
E.A.973 jammed the butcher knife deeper into Dario’s neck. A sharp stinging sensation shot into his skull, and so he made the descent.
Dario was a religious man. He believed hell came in many forms, whether it was homelessness, spousal abuse, or even war itself. But the truest form of hell? It was personal; specific and unique to every individual. That was what his mother had taught him, and that was what he believed with every ounce of his being, especially now. Because he was in hell. And this drainpipe? He recognized it. Maybe it wasn’t the same as before, but he got the hint. After all these years, it was time for him to be the one who truly suffered.
There were cracks in the walls. Large enough to look through, so he did. On the other side, across what seemed like a chasm, was another vertical shaft with a path carved directly into it. Marching down this path were people, too—tenants, he assumed—holding candles, or holding one another, depending on the nature of their mutilation.
Dario’s busted eye started to hurt badly. He tried to apply pressure to it with the arm Oblita had bashed and retched from the pain it caused him. His head felt fuzzy, like the TV static the wheelchair-bound man had been jerking off to. Desperate, he took the ball of green light Oblita had given him and held it to the swollen pouch of skin around his eye. It was simultaneously warm and cool to the touch, and numbing. It was good enough.
At the first door-sized hole in the drainpipe, Oblita told him to stop. E.A.973 flattened Dario against the wall with its arm to his neck, to give her enough room to get by. She slipped into the hole, the hammer raised high, and disappeared into the darkness it held.
“She…”
Confused, Dario glanced at E.A.973. The thing was trying to speak to him.
“She…” It sucked on the vermillion veins that poured out of its eyes. “Trusts.”
Dario did a double-take of the doorway—she was still gone—and said, “Please, help me.”
“Help… her.” E.A.973 pressed harder with its arm into Dario’s neck. “She… trusts.”
Dario closed his one good eye. Tears, like burning pitch, melted down his face. “I don’t know what the fuck…”
“Listen. See.” E.A.973 pressed the butcher knife to Dario’s forehead and dragged the blade down his skin.
Immediately, his eyes snapped open, and he let out a stifled scream.
E.A.973 nodded and said, “See.”
Dario gulped for air as the creature jammed its arm harder into his windpipe. For its bulk and brutality, there was a child-like quality to it. The thing wasn’t just guarding her; it was almost as if it loved her. Was she a witch? Had she conjured it from this Membrane place? It could have been one of the tenants; its body and brain taken far beyond the limits of pain, to something almost transcendental. She said she was making the most of them. Was this the most of them?
He could hear Oblita returning, so quickly Dario asked, “What are you?”
“Better.”
“Than what?”
“The last.”
“Nine-seven-two?”
It nodded.
“There were nine-hundred-and—”
Oblita emerged from the doorway. She was smiling and swinging her hammer back and forth, gleefully. Her hands were covered in shit, and the festering stench of it almost knocked Dario off his feet. She’d been digging in something.
“Let’s go. I don’t want this to be one time She stops turning a blind eye.” Oblita was consistently using her English accent now. “Come, now.”
E.A.973 finally removed its arm from Dario’s throat. He took a big gulp of air and massaged that knotted, choking sensation from his neck. As Oblita took one impatient step after the other towards him, Dario realized how bad of an idea it had been for him to have stopped moving. Like the man or woman who lifts a car off a loved one, his body had been so tightly-wound and adrenaline-soaked that now it was damn near useless to him. His muscles ached in ways and places he’d never experienced before.
Yet, he was moving. Drifting, really, towards the center of the drainpipe, where the blackness yawned and blood flowed. It was like he was being sucked inwards, called forth. His mind named it the Abyss, and it seemed so obvious, as if he’d known it before, and would know it again.
Oblita grumbled, spun the hammer. She drove the hammer downwards, claw first, into Dario’s right shoulder. It sank into his skin, let loose the blood within. He screamed in her face. She ripped the hammer away, out of his shoulder, sending a fleshy chunk of him into the salivating dark.
“Stop. God, please, stop!” Dario shambled forward, unable to apply pressure to the wound, because his left arm, his bad arm, couldn’t reach it. He dropped the orb of light into the Abyss. “Goddamn it. I can’t take this anymore.”
“They could,” Oblita said, gesturing to no one in particular. “Come see what I have brought you here to see, and listen to what I have to say, and then this will all be over.”
“I don’t know what this is!” Dario screamed.
E.A.973 fixed the butcher knife to its belt.
Oblita wiped her shit-covered hands on her jeans. “The Membrane? It’s somewhere in between Earth and elsewhere. The barrier was weakest here, and it has been growing weaker with every passing year. It is the perfect place for my work. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“You’re not going to let me go—”
The images finally hit him: Darnell, and his two over-privileged cronies, Mark and Brad, closing in on some snot-nosed kid whose name Dario couldn’t even remember. He had been their first of the day.
“I have a family—”
He wondered what time it was, and if it was too late. His wife had said it was too late, already, but she didn’t really believe that, did she? She wouldn’t have made the call or the invitation. Another image of his wife and daughter, sitting down to have dinner with Darnell, Mark, and Brad—and Dario was the main course.
Oblita raised her hammer, as if to strike him again, and then said, “I had a family, too. It’s why we do as we do.” She took a deep breath. “Do as I say, or I will feed you to it, too.”
Dario’s tightly wound body began to unravel. Her threat hit him just as hard as her hammer would if he didn’t do as she told him. He didn’t know what she was referring to, but if it was anything like E.A.973, it was undoubtedly ungodly. Pain meant nothing to this woman, he realized, but the plan, her plan, was everything. If he could just get his shit together long enough to see it through, to make her happy… maybe there was still a chance.
With a battered eye, a broken elbow, and a bleeding shoulder, Dario went down the slope and entered the darkened doorway.
“Oblita Vesper isn’t my real name,” she whispered.
Dario stumbled, caught himself against the ribbed walls. Blinded by the blackness, he skirted the edge of this second tunnel. Occasionally, his knee would give out, as his foot dropped into a small hole, or ditch. If this was hell, he was being tested. Social work had been his penance, but apparently, it wasn’t enough.
“Surprised, I’m sure. I was young. It means something along the lines of ‘forgotten evening
star.’ Again, I was young, but it stuck with me.”
Light, and sound. Dario strained himself to see father ahead, but it was still too dark. Preoccupied, he slipped, crashed down to the ground; cracked his chin against something somewhere along the way. His teeth clenched together, catching a bit of his tongue. They sank into the muscle, and like a vampire, drew blood. He gagged, drooled, and got back up.
“My real name is Ruth Ashcroft.”
She shoved Dario, and he went spilling into the next, dimly-lit room.
“In time, it will be the only Ashcroft name history will bother to remember.”
Dario scrabbled forward, eye still adjusting to this new place, and slammed into a washer and dryer. He glanced up, gasped. Four faces a few feet above glared down on him—their glazed looks seeing him, and seeing him for what he was supposed to be. Backing away, he spun in semi-circles, getting a measure of the place and those that filled it.
He was in a basement, that much was clear to him. Ugly and grey, it had all the staples a basement in this kind of building would have. Washers and dryers with worn down slots from the weekly quarter deluge; exposed piping that snaked across the wall, leaking their clouded, yellow venom in pools and stains; an uneven floor, broken up by rusted drains and the cracks that crossed it—the Manor’s splintered timelines.
But that was all that made it a basement. What was different was what mattered the most. It was the way he couldn’t see the ceiling, the way the walls caved in as they ran upwards, as if coming to a point in that impenetrable blackness of that distant pinnacle. And it was from these walls the tenants of Brooksville Manor looked in on the basement. They were standing at balconies that let out to the basement from their own apartments. To Dario, the entire effect gave the impression of an operating theater, and yet, he wasn’t the piece of meat on the slab to which their attentions were tethered. It was something else. Something behind him.