The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  “What’s…” The ghoul steadies his breathing. “What are they doing?”

  Mr. Haemo points to the torchlight-drenched multitudes. “Those sorry bastards are Vold’s most and least wanted. The sons of Vold’s fat cats convinced their fathers to let them mine the Nameless Forest. The entitled shits haven’t worked a day in their lives, so naturally, they’re going to get the poor to do it for them.”

  “There’re so many,” the ghoul whispers, the river of flame never drying up, as more and more cross the ridge.

  “Thousands,” Mr. Haemo says. “A good chunk of Vold’s population. We’re not that far into the Trauma and the rich are already back to trying to kill the poor.”

  “The Trauma…” The ghoul had forgotten the Corrupted… the humans… were calling this time period that.

  Mr. Haemo shrugs. “Your kind kills me. You name your wake-up call the Trauma. Boo-fucking-hoo.”

  “Some people still believe in God,” the ghoul says, childishly.

  “Have you ever seen a longer lasting abusive relationship?”

  The ghoul doesn’t say anything.

  “Trauma, my ass.” Mr. Haemo’s wings lift him into the air. “They love it. What good is a God you can see, touch, hear, and smell? You can’t find salvation if it’s staring you down every day of your life. You’ll have to actually take responsibility for once.”

  The ghoul, somewhat offended, asks, “Why do you care?”

  “I’m tired of waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “Exuviae.”

  “Isn’t that…” The ghoul wonders how far he can run before the mosquito catches up. “Isn’t that in your tree, though?”

  “Everywhere can be Exuviae,” Mr. Haemo says, dreamily.

  “It’s Latin? What does it mean?”

  “Things stripped from a body.”

  The ghoul doesn’t ask any more questions. It’s dangerous to ask questions about dangerous subjects. Mr. Haemo’s intentions are clear to him, however muddled by madness they might be. If the ghoul becomes too enlightened, he’ll become indentured.

  The damned march on into the morning hours. When the last of them disappear into the ridges, the clouds begin to glow, like a piece of skin through which a strong light is shone. The ghoul doesn’t know why the mosquito made him watch the whole procession, but when Mr. Haemo tells him it’s time to go, he does as he’s told.

  Bedlam is fifty miles away.

  “I can get us there in five,” Mr. Haemo says.

  The ghoul follows him back to his tree. The portal inside it is sealed, but amongst the roots is a boiling pool of smoking blood. The hot, sludge-like cruor creates crusts on the crimson surface in the shapes of fingers and hands and screaming faces. It is a surface in its purest, most elemental form.

  “Hop on in,” Mr. Haemo says.

  The ghoul stops at the edge of the pool. The blood reaches for him, but its forms cannot hold, and they stop short of touching him. This has gone on for far too long. Though he’s a ghoul, he’s still himself, whatever that might’ve been, whenever that might’ve been, a century or so ago. He has to be something. Like the blood begging before him, he cannot be hollowed. He must be hallowed, like the flesh he keeps. He is ugly and repulsive and a cannibal, but he is not a monster like the monster beside him.

  Defiant, the ghoul steps back and shouts, “No!”

  Mr. Haemo rolls his thousands of eyes. “Tough titties,” he says.

  And then he shoves the ghoul into the blood well.

  End over end, the ghoul plummets through the blood. When he thinks it can go no deeper, it goes deeper still. From a puddle to a lake to an ocean, the blood expands at an exponential rate. He squeezes his eyes shut, but the blood peels his lids back. It worms its way into his irises and pupils and stains his ocular nerves. The blood seeps into his veins and arteries, replacing his own, and invades his heart. It fills its chambers like a cuckoo bird would another’s nest and forces it to foster the filth in its throbbing chambers.

  The ghoul cannot breathe. The ghoul cannot think. He cannot hear or move. He can only see. Surrounded by blood, his vision is blood, and by blood, he sees.

  It comes to him in a blur, but it is there, at the bottom of this darkening Abyss: stars, and the massive moth drawn towards them, and farther still, beyond the grey place in the corner of his eye, Exuviae.

  It’s there, and then it isn’t. A claw sinks into the ghoul’s shoulder and jerks him out of the blood. He flies out of the blood well and slams into a pile of concrete and bricks. His thick skin bears the bashing well enough, but from where the claw had punctured him, he bleeds.

  Kneading his shoulder, the ghoul, with not a drop of blood on him, rises shakily to his feet. He blinks his eyes until they are able to adjust to light.

  Mr. Haemo’s here, but that’s no surprise. What surprises is where he’s brought them.

  Bedlam. The heart of Bedlam. He knows it’s Bedlam because they are standing in the remains of a gymnasium. The ceiling is gone, most of the walls have collapsed, and the bleachers have been scattered and smashed, but on the tiled, maple floor, surrounded by murals of blood and shit and blackened bones, is that telltale logo of the town’s local basketball team: a man in a straightjacket, his tongue out, his eyes bloodshot—the Bedlam Madmen.

  Except madmen had been crossed out and replaced with “madpeople” with black paint.

  And all around the logo, painted, drawn, carved, and sprayed, were the words “Don’t Assume My God.”

  He remembers them well. Before he died, they were written everywhere, in every color and every font. At the time, Lillian had taken to the television and declared with utmost certainty and irrefutable proof the existence of the one true God.

  At the same time, Lux had taken to the streets, a born-again liberal, and on the backs of her devoted followers, was thrust into the limelight, where with nothing but short-term sweet nothings, she gave the Internet a slow, repetitive, ultimately empty drip of dopamine in the form of balled fists, nasty letters, poorly edited videos, and the promises of a better god, a universal but personal god.

  Don’t Assume My God. The ghoul stares at the slogan, which had been on so many bumper stickers, right next to the ones celebrating pastafarianism, and his heart starts to ache. Don’t Assume My God. His daughters had written the words on the front of their three-ring binders. They hadn’t even known what it meant, but goddamn if it hadn’t been ‘in.’

  Mr. Haemo whispers, “You remember Lux?”

  The ghoul looks up at the mosquito, then at the bubbling blood well behind him. It’s closing up with awkward, jerking movements, like a stop-motion video. There’s no getting away from the bug now. He’s going to have to see this through. He wonders: did a part of him want to, regardless? If the flesh he kept could keep its history and share it with him, would that be worth whatever atrocity Mr. Haemo is going to ask him to do? Would it stop the eating? Slow it down, if nothing else? Did he really eat out of hunger, or embarrassment?

  Mr. Haemo tucks in his wings, closes his skin cloak tight like a shivering grandmother, and goes forth into Bedlam. The ghoul goes after him.

  The gymnasium lets out to the pulverized suburbs of what once was Bedlam’s largest suburb, Six Pillars. It hadn’t always been that way, with Six Pillars barely registering on the county map; but after Lillian emerged from her home there, the suburb was expanded and consumed all neighboring ones.

  The gymnasium was supposed to be connected to an expensive, privately funded Lillian school built shortly after God’s arrival, but all that was left of it was a crater and some piping.

  Six Pillars wasn’t much better. There had been hundreds of identical houses here once; now, there was only dirt and debris and the dead vermillion veins wrapped around them. It looked like a garden you might find behind a dilapidated house: dry, rigid, and blackened; covered in weeds and fungus; abandoned by the thing that’d created it; cursed by the thing that’d demanded it.

  It w
as a battlefield without bodies; a warzone without a war. The destruction stretched on for as far as the ghoul could see in the fog, but where were the Lillians? Where were the Bedlamites who were supposed to be fighting them for the right to live on this land?

  The ghoul turns to ask Mr. Haemo what is going on, and then his answer comes to him, not from the mosquito, but from the west.

  Prayers. Slow, melancholic prayers from phantoms in the fog. They come to him one utterance at a time, each speaker’s contribution weak and wanting, like a begging child. When the words wash over him, they reform behind him in a unified drone. It was as if the prayers and those praying them were, for a moment, speaking directly to him.

  “Serial killers often return to the crime scene,” Mr. Haemo whispers. He nudges the ghoul. “Follow me.”

  They cross Six Pillars without making an effort to hide. Mr. Haemo knows there’s nothing here, and if they do find something, who’s going to challenge him? The ghoul feels a kind of sickening safety as he trails the mosquito’s shadow. It’s exciting; he hates it.

  Reaching the wall of fog out of which the prayers pour, Mr. Haemo puts a single finger to his proboscis, and then pushes forward.

  The ghoul plants his feet. He watches the fog swallow the giant bug without spitting it back out. He could run. Now is the time to do it. They are out in the open, and clearly whatever Mr. Haemo has come to see, he has no intention of letting it see him. The distraction might be enough for the ghoul to get away.

  He starts to turn, but stops himself. Where will he go? Who will he go to? Who will he go as? He can’t be himself, looking like the corpse he is, in a world where monsters are being hunted down and slaughtered to secure a place in line at the front of heaven’s barred gates. He is the river he’s walked so many times along. But is he worth the erosion he brings to those around him?

  Mr. Haemo clicks for to him follow.

  And, like a lapdog, he follows.

  They wander through the fog for minutes, the ground becoming less uneven, the debris becoming more recognizable. Then there are patches of grass, and the foundations of houses. Every thirty seconds or so, Bedlam’s Six Pillars is put back together before him, until the fog finally parts and they find themselves standing at the end of a road, where ahead, four houses are completely intact in an otherwise obliterated field.

  Between each of the houses runs a network of dead, dried out vermillion veins, but looking closely, the ghoul sees that all the veins seem to have the same origin—one of the four houses, and the same house the prayers are coming from.

  Mr. Haemo shoulders the ghoul to the side of the road where one house stands alone from the three opposite it.

  “Inside,” he whispers.

  He and the ghoul go around the vein-choked driveway, up the porch, and through the front of the house, where the door has long since been torn from its hinges.

  He tries to get a good sense of the inside of the house, but before he can, Mr. Haemo spins him around and pushes him towards the window in the living room.

  “The house in the middle of the three,” Mr. Haemo says, nodding to it, his proboscis plinking against the busted glass.

  The ghoul’s attention drifts to the mantle, where graffiti reads: “Never Forget Filipa.”

  Near it, there are two holes in the ceiling. Nubs of rope dangle from them.

  Mr. Haemo stabs his finger into the ghoul’s stomach, right through the bullet hole that killed him so long ago.

  The ghoul gasps. The cold pain squeezes his gut, and he retches.

  Mr. Haemo rips his finger out with a sucking sound. “Pay attention,” he says. “The house in the middle.”

  The ghoul tells himself he should have run. He closes his eyes, puts on his Judas suit out of reflex, and wears it for a while. Coming to, he takes it off and says, “Yeah. What about it?”

  “The ‘Holy War’ here has been over for weeks,” Mr. Haemo says. “The Lillians killed every Bedlamite here.”

  “I thought…”

  “News doesn’t travel as fast when you can’t put hashtags in front of it,” Mr. Haemo says, snidely.

  The ghoul presses his forehead to the glass. “Aren’t we here for the bodies?”

  “No, I’m here for the holy rollers in that house. You’re here for what comes afterward.” Mr. Haemo purrs; blood dribbles down his lips. “I’ve seen a lot of shit in my time, but this is exciting.”

  “What’s about to—”

  Mr. Haemo shushes him. “Don’t get fussy on me ghoul, or I’ll tuck you in for the long, dirt nap.”

  Movement in the middle house. Men and women in hooded white robes with rope sashes emerge from it, one at a time, and file down the steps to the front yard. There, the six spread out, forming a circle. In each of their hands, they hold a silver goblet.

  Several agonizing seconds of silence pass. The ghoul expects a surprise attack at any moment. He turns to Mr. Haemo, thinking he may strike, but the mosquito only palms the ghoul’s face and turns his head, like a parent would a child’s, back to face the scene.

  Out of the middle house, a seventh person appears. She is swaddled not in white, but red. From her neck to her toes, she is covered in a writhing dress of tightly packed and fitted vermillion veins. The woman is ancient, an unearthed relic too dusted and worn for even the most skilled archaeologist’s brush. She has no hair, and no eyebrows, and her mouth sinks in because it has no teeth in it. Seeing this, and then seeing how she moves so effortlessly, so gracefully, down to the front yard, the ghoul realizes this: the vermillion veins aren’t a dress, but her actual body.

  The seventh woman breaks the circle and places herself at the center. Her face and her eyes are vacant. She is lost in a twilight beyond Dementia, beyond Alzheimer’s, but her body, or rather, God’s body, is oriented and aware, and filled with dark intentions. She holds her arms out to the side. Vermillion veins snake down her fingertips and stab into the earth.

  And then the earth begins to rumble.

  “Girl’s got game,” Mr. Haemo whispers, snickering.

  The ghoul presses his hand against the wall. The whole house is shaking. “Who is that?”

  “Lillian.”

  The ghoul swallows hard and chokes on the air. “L-Lillian? The Lillian?”

  A body flings across the window with a vermillion vein, like a fishing line, attached to it. The vein slams the dead body into the ground outside the circle of seven. Nobody notices, or seems to care.

  Lillian flexes her arms.

  A second body, followed by a third, followed by a fourth, drops outside the circle from the vermillion veins lifting out of the ground.

  “She’s out in the open,” the ghoul says. “Someone’s going to attack her.”

  Mr. Haemo shakes head. “I think they already tried. Obviously.”

  Lillian opens her toothless mouth and mumbles.

  A great tremor rocks Six Pillars and then stops as soon as it started. Long shadows slither over the circle. Light gives way to darkness.

  Hearing a loud crash on this house’s roof, the ghoul jumps. There is a tumbling, and the scratchy sound of shingles sliding over one another.

  A body falls in front of the window. And then another. And then another.

  The ghoul presses his face to the glass and looks to the sky.

  Except there is no sky.

  There are only veins. Vermillion veins knitted together for as far as he can see. And hanging from their weeping ends are bodies. Hundreds of bodies.

  All at once, the bodies fall from their bloodied boughs and break around the circle. Never stacking, the corpses carpet the neighborhood with a grotesque geometry. The bodies do not explode when they hit the ground. They keep, as if petrified, as if preserved. As if something had been saving them for this moment.

  Once the last body hits the ground, the vermillion shield retreats back into the earth, like a forest growing in reverse. The shadows disappear, and the light returns, and Lillian is smiling.

  Th
e ghoul says, “What is she—”

  But doesn’t finish his sentence.

  The circle closes around Lillian, their chalices outstretched. She raises her arms. Two of her followers take out daggers. She nods to them. They jam the daggers into her armpits and rip them out. Thick streams of blood pour down her body.

  “The Blood of Before!” Lillian shouts at the top of her feeble lungs.

  The followers crowd around Lillian, filling their goblets with her blood. She bleeds more blood than she could possibly have, for on her hands, she has the blood of billions.

  Once the last cup glows crimson at its brim, the followers back away. They raise their chalices to Lillian.

  Lillian reaches into her chest, pushing her arm through the vermillion veins of which it is comprised. She pulls out a piece of jewelry, a silver, white-gemmed necklace, and dangles it before her followers.

  “The Agony of After has been too great,” she shouts. “May our prayers be enough. May our souls be the soil the Worm finds favorable.”

  Lillian puts the necklace around her neck.

  Her followers guzzle their chalices, spilling blood down the front of their white robes.

  Lillian takes the necklace’s gem in her hand and kisses it. She screams, “I offer myself to thee!”

  The followers go stiff. The chalices drop from their hands and bounce along the ground, drained.

  Lillian releases the necklace as it begins to glow. She tips her head back, and the vermillion veins that are her body crawl up her neck and cover her skull.

  A flash of white light bursts across Six Pillars. The ghoul covers his eyes, but Mr. Haemo’s thousands drink it in.

  The ghoul stumbles to the window, rubbing vision back into his eyes.

  The followers are shaking. Their mouths open wide and split at the corners, giving them a horrifying grin. Their heads tip back, their jaws unhinge. Jellyfish-like chandeliers of white light heave their way out of the followers’ mouths and stretch upwards to the sky, like seaweed.

  From the hundreds of bodies scattered across the neighborhood, the same glowing growths sprout from the dead, until Six Pillars is covered in them.

  Terrified, amazed, the ghoul stares in wonder at the malignant blades of light swaying before him. At this moment, he feels such a strong want for God’s love that he cannot help but weep.