In the distance, Marcus saw the bodies.
There was something infinitely sad about the way they were piled up there in the clearing.
Knowing the answer, he turned to Ellen and whispered, “Is that… them?”
Gravely, she nodded her head and said, “Let’s move in a little closer.”
“What about the killer?”
“I don’t see him.”
Well, that’s obvious, Marcus thought.
Stepping out of the corn was like losing your clothing. They were naked now. If there was a killer on the loose, running around stark raving mad, they had little chance of hiding now. Running, maybe, but hiding was definitely out.
Marcus followed Ellen.
The grass in the clearing was worn down, as though it had been trampled quite a bit. Marcus thought it was probably from someone driving a truck out here. As they drew closer to the body pile, the stink intensified to a truly nauseating level. Marcus grabbed Ellen’s arm. She turned to look at him, her stare pinning him where he was. Since coming out here, something had changed about her. She came off as a little flaky before but now she just looked insane.
“I don’t think I can get any closer.” Marcus pulled his shirt up over the lower half of his face.
“Have some fucking respect, Marco,” Ellen said, shaking his grip from her arm.
Through the noisy, insectoid country night, Marcus heard a singular sound resonate—the humming of flies. My God, there must be millions of them on those bodies. He even thought he could hear the wet squirm of the maggots twisting through decomposing flesh. His gorge rose and sat stinging at the back of his throat.
“I’m gonna go wait in the truck,” he said.
Ellen turned to him once again. The craziness was gone. She had put on her seductive face. Pouty and girlish, it was the look she had used to get him to give up his keys. “Come on Marcus. It’s just a few more steps. You’ll get used to the smell.”
“Why don’t you tell me what we’re really doing here and I’ll think about staying.”
“But you’re already thinking about staying, aren’t you. Don’t you know what we’re doing here? We’re trying to find the killer, remember?”
“If that was the case then why aren’t we still hiding out in the corn?”
“You can’t catch anything by hiding.”
“Nobody said anything about catching anything. I’m not a cop.”
Marcus looked into the heap, arranged in a semi-circle. It had to be most of Green Grove in there. Exposed to the elements, they had decomposed rapidly, their skin gray, pieces of skin peeled back, probably the result of wild animals. All of them were rendered unrecognizable.
Ellen wandered right up next to the bodies and dropped down onto her knees.
“What the hell are you doing? Can we just go?”
“I’m saying a prayer. Can’t I do that?”
“Just hurry the hell up.”
Marcus turned around and looked up at the moon. What a night this was turning out to be. He turned back around and Ellen was back on her feet.
“Come here,” she said.
“I’d really rather not.”
“I’ll make it worth your while.”
“Jesus,” he muttered, thinking, I’m here anyway, aren’t I?
He slowly walked over to her and she turned, grabbing him around the waist, pressing herself against him. Her eyes gleamed with a wild urgency. He bent down to kiss her and leaned into the smell of a hundred rotting corpses. She fastened her mouth around his, trying to bring him down to the ground. His stomach fought to come up and he put his hands on her hips, nearly encircling her bare midriff, to try and push her away.
He felt the twitching of her skin like something was fighting to get out. Just when he couldn’t hold the vomit anymore, he let go, but it was forced back into his throat. He coughed and backed away, stumbling to his knees. Before he could stand up, his stomach convulsed again and he heaved, expecting the wet acid of his puke. Instead he felt the flies crawling over his tongue and all around the inside of his mouth. He looked back at Ellen and the crumbling wall behind her. The corpses were animated, Ellen standing at their center, flies crawling through her hair, covering her eyes and body.
Marcus bolted toward the corn, but the dead were there also. They had shifted, surrounding him. Flies crawled from their skin and hollow eye sockets, forming a cloud that blotted out the moon’s glow.
The circle tightened and Marcus waited to feel their hands on his body. From behind him, Marcus heard Ellen whisper, “You’re the last one, Marcus.” And he felt her hands, hands that he would have welcomed a half an hour ago, slide down his stomach and crush his sex in an unforgiving grip.
“What happens now?” he begged.
“You taste death,” she whispered. “The killer is here, somewhere. Only he didn’t kill just my boyfriend. He killed me too.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“A soul is not free until his work is done. He made that clear. You’re the last one.” With that, Ellen snapped his neck and let him fall to the ground.
It was a strange night that Marcus spent, lying on the ground, his body getting colder, his heart inactive in his chest. By morning, he had joined the pile, become food for the flies as he remained still throughout the rotting day. The next night, the dead rose again, dragging with them their veil of flies, and moved in to the next town, each of them intent on doing what had been done to them, hungry for some shred of justice.
Deathtripping in New Orleans
For two years, Tod Hoskins had followed a voice.
The voice was an insubstantial, shadowy thing. He was never really sure if it was inside his head or coming from somewhere externally, brushing past his ear like a moist whisper. Sometimes, he didn’t think it was a voice at all.
No, it was a voice and it did have an owner.
Unfortunately, Tod was only able to find this owner during moments when he doubted his mental faculties the most: just before sleep or immediately upon awakening, deep in the throes of drunkenness or simply in a darkened room where space was nonexistent and time yawned like an empty chasm.
Sometimes he thought he wanted the voice to go away. Sometimes he thought he could chase it away so the only voice left in his head would be his own. But he knew that wasn’t true.
If he lost the voice, then he lost her.
Her.
The voice was the last thing he had to remember Althea Jones.
It was her voice that called to him, nearly inaudible, intangibly soft, teasingly close, impossibly distant.
The voices had started after the car crash, two years ago, when they were both seventeen.
Tod was the passenger. He lived, emerging from the accident without a scratch, merely suffering from shock. Althea had died instantly, the steering column pulverizing her chest, crushing her heart.
Now, only memories and her voice. He did what he thought the voice wanted him to do, going wherever it told him to go.
Now it was September and Tod found himself standing at the far end of Jackson Square in New Orleans at the edge of a hurricane and he couldn’t think of any reason he was there, save for the voice.
He wasn’t a stranger to the city. His family had lived there until he was twelve, before moving to Ohio. He had always liked New Orleans. It seemed to have more than just a physical presence. There was another layer, another dimension to it. Maybe it was the strange history of the city itself. Maybe it was the city’s fascination with things like voodoo and the dead. All those rumors of vampires and zombies. Maybe it was the heat and the humidity. Undoubtedly, it was all of these things, forming a ghastly mélange that crouched in the brain and wrapped the skin.
He liked being there. Not only was he following the voice, he also took an adult view of at least one part of his childhood. Something that made him think about full circles and how beginnings are so often endings. Tonight, however, would be his last night.
He
would leave feeling somehow empty and unfulfilled. He had become accustomed to disappointment. Many times, he had gone where Althea’s voice told him to go only to find nothing there. And so far, there didn’t seem to be anything here either. Just emptiness.
According to the weather reports, a hurricane was only a few hours away. People had begun fleeing the city this morning. Tonight, it was practically empty. Businesses, not all of them, but most, had closed up, the owners shuttering their windows and going someplace safe to pray that the winds didn’t tear their buildings down.
He had always thought of any tourist city as being very similar to a whore. Visitors come to leave their money, have fun, and maybe look at the beauty, however decadent, she has to offer, but then they leave with only a foggy memory. And tomorrow, by plane or by bus, he would do the same.
For now, there was the gentle beauty of the nearly empty city, the damp darkness softlit by gas lights, and the winds that were hard, constant and vaguely refreshing coming, as they were, at the end of a massive heatwave. He continued walking through Jackson Square thinking he had never seen it without any pedestrians or musicians or tarot card readers. There was something spectral about the empty benches.
But Tod was wrong. The Square wasn’t completely empty. Maybe it had just been the murkiness of the night, but he had failed to notice the man sitting at the far end of the walkway. The man sat on a red milk crate, a brown man in a brown suit strumming a battered brown acoustic guitar. Tod came up behind him, veering off to the man’s left so he didn’t startle him. Tod waited until he was parallel with the man and began circling back toward him. The musician noticed Tod and nodded an acknowledgement.
Tod couldn’t tell if the man was playing a song or not. The man strummed the guitar and hummed a tune that was maddeningly familiar but still unnamed. A small white bucket sat in front of the musician and he nodded toward it. Tod always hated it when the street performers more or less asked for money. But something inside of Tod felt sorry for this poor guy, sitting on the edge of a hurricane and playing to an empty street. Tod reached into the pocket of his jeans, pulling out a dollar and approaching the musician.
Tod leaned down to put the dollar in the bucket before the musician’s leathery hand reached out to block him.
“You hang onto your money,” the man rasped.
“No, you deserve it,” Tod said.
“I’m not asking for money.” Tod looked at the man’s watery green eyes. The man looked down, voicelessly telling Tod to look in the bucket.
When Tod looked into the bucket, he saw that it was filled with black and white flyers.
“Take one,” the old man said. “That’s your free admission to a bit of fun on this most lonesome of nights.”
Tod picked one of the flyers up, read it, and said, “Thanks.”
The man nodded. Didn’t say anything.
Tod glanced down at the flyer in his hand.
“But there’s no address,” he said.
“You’ll know it when you get there. It’ll be the only place with its lights on.”
The voice, Althea’s voice, whispered across Tod’s ear, sending a shiver down his spine. He knew he would go.
“Well, thanks again,” he said to the musician before turning and walking away.
“Have fun,” the man said and went back to strumming his guitar.
Tod looked down at the flyer in his hand. It was an index card-size piece of white paper and, in big black blocky letters, it said:
FREE
SHOW
Simple enough, he thought. Now I just need to find it.
He nodded to the guitar player and turned around. A brief moment of hesitation filled him and he considered turning back to the guitar player and asking, “No, really, where is it?” but decided not to. A man who followed voices of dead girls to strange cities across the United States could not really spend too much time questioning himself about where he should go. Instead, he held the flyer out in front of him, almost like a flashlight. He glanced up at the green and white-striped awning of Café du Monde, noting the umbrellas on the tables had been removed, and turned to his left. The guitar player was right. Except for the street lamps, there wasn’t a single light glowing. No one was home. The city’s emptiness grew ever more palpable.
Aimlessly, he wandered up a couple of blocks and turned left.
Aside from the darkness, the city was ominously quiet. The only thing he heard was the wind in his ears. With a sudden exhilaration, he wondered when the hurricane was going to break over the city.
Damage.
That was what all the news reports had predicted.
Severe damage.
And he decided he didn’t care. If he was going to be caught out in the storm, he welcomed it. He wanted it to rage over him. He wanted the cold air to strip back his skin, lay his soul bare and run its icy fingers through him.
If it killed him, it didn’t matter. Two years of misery had him convinced that any sort of happiness, any lifting of his black cloud, was not going to come. Maybe that was why he heard the voice. Maybe that voice was death. Maybe that was what he secretly hoped for every time he boarded an airplane or got in his car and raced down the highway. Maybe he wanted some fiery death to claim him, twist his body up with metal.
And he knew Althea would hate him for thinking that.
Althea – the beautiful young girl with the old-sounding name. And just thinking her name sent a tight shiver down the center of his body. That feeling bothered him. There was almost as much fear as love in that feeling.
Lost in his thoughts, he stopped when he came to an opening in between buildings. An alley. Looking down the alley, he convinced himself he saw a light gleaming somewhere back there. On the building to his right was a black sign with white lettering advertising the opening as Ohio Alley. He had never heard of it. Normally, if the city wasn’t deserted, he would not have wandered down a dark, narrow alley but surely the pickpockets and thieves wouldn’t see a profit in stalking a dead city.
With the paper still held out in front of him, he started down the alley.
And that’s when he first got the feeling that, somehow, things just were not right. The darkness, the emptiness, the quietness—all of that was explained away by the hurricane. That was not part of the strangeness he now felt.
Now, being in the alley, it felt wrong. The buildings were higher than he remembered them. And they weren’t just darkened, they were black. The broken cobblestones beneath his feet didn’t feel entirely stable. They felt spongy, threatening to open up and suck him down. This was a prospect he would have completely welcomed. He wanted the earth to take him. It was what happened in the end, eventually, inevitably, anyway. Why not let it consume him now?
The air whistled through the cramped alleyway. For a moment, he felt like the alley was breathing around him, the mushy ground vibrating with a steadiness reminiscent of a beating heart. At the end of the alley, he could see faint yellow light pouring out of a door or a window. That had to be the place.
He walked the remainder of the way on legs that did not feel entirely his own.
The soft light at the end of the alley flickered in and out. Were the winds that heavy? he wondered. Could the power already be threatening to go out? It was possible, he guessed. Maybe the storm had already landed somewhere and would be on top of the city in no time at all. If that was the case, he should have been glad he was moving indoors only… he wasn’t. He could have stayed out in it. He could have let it take him and that wouldn’t have bothered him at all.
He reached the light. Something about it invited him toward it. It was meager lighting, not even bright enough to strain his night-focused eyes. The light invited him inside. Suddenly the light seemed the answer to his loneliness and his darkened mood. Inside, maybe there were people. And, inside, there was definitely that damp old wood smell he would forever associate with the city. It was a smell he found comforting. It reminded him of his grandma’s house.
There were people inside. Six of them. Three couples.
Tod went in to join them, still clutching the flyer in his hand like he would need it for admission. When he saw the others seated in old wooden chairs he knew he no longer needed his flyer and there was a sudden sinking inside of him. There wasn’t anything to do here. It was just someone’s idea of a cruel prank. Some malicious soul probably paid the street performer off to sit there and hand these false promises out to the last of the storm’s stragglers.
But, because he hadn’t felt quite right all night, Tod decided to sit down and give his legs a rest.
The others were seated in an evenly spaced out fashion, as though afraid of anyone else overhearing their hushed conversations. There were sixteen chairs. Four rows of four, separated by a narrow aisle. Tod counted them because he had nothing else to do. One of the couples stared intently toward the front of the dingy yellow room. Another couple sat in the back row and snickered over their own private jokes. The other couple stood up. They had been sitting in the first row and passed Tod as they left.
“This is some kind of fucking joke,” the guy said.
“Yeah, like what the hell?” the girl said.
When they got to the door, the guy announced, “You all might as well go home. Nobody’s coming. They do this all the time.”
There was an uncomfortable tension before the guy finally escorted his girl out into the night. Tod understood the tension. He felt sure the others now felt exactly like the guy who had just left but to stand up and leave now would be too much like following orders and people do not often want to look like sheep. At least not overtly.
Pray You Die Alone: Horror Stories Page 2