What the hell? he thought.
He tried to raise his hand to touch his eye because he didn’t know why he couldn’t see anything out of it and he wondered what that ache was. That ache, so hollow, throbbing at the border of his brain.
And why couldn’t he move his arms?
Something was wrong. He was now sure of that. He was either more than just sick or... or Christina had done something horrible to him.
With his one eye, he looked down at his lap.
He was seated in a wheelchair.
A wheelchair? he thought. Maybe he had been out a lot longer than he thought he had. Maybe he had gone into some sort of coma.
No. No, that couldn’t be. Looking ahead of him, he saw the meadow he and Christina had looked down upon only the sunlight had disappeared and a little wind had picked up and it felt a lot colder now.
His hands were strapped to the armrests of the wheelchair. His heart skipped and thudded in his chest when he saw that his right hand didn’t look right. Three fingers were missing. It wasn’t until noting their absence that he felt the pain there too. A different kind of pain than the one in his eye but a very real pain nonetheless.
Where was Christina?
He turned to view the panorama before him. He spotted her to his right. She was bent down about four feet from his wheelchair, her back to him.
“If you’re wondering about your eye, I took it out.”
He wanted to laugh. It had to be a sick joke but he knew she wasn’t joking. He could see that some of his fingers were missing, why should he think his eye was anything but gone?
“What?” he coughed out.
“You heard me. If you’re wondering about your eye, I took it. We needed a theater.”
She patted the ground with her small hands and stood up, dusting them off on her jeans.
“Did you plant my eye?” he asked.
“Of course. How else would I grow a theater?”
She came over behind the wheelchair, leaned down close to his ear and said, “This is going to be the best town yet. I’m sorry you never got to see Durning. Kenneth Durning was this absolutely beautiful boy I met in Idaho. He was beautiful but so naive. You wouldn’t believe the things I wanted to do to him. I told him all about those things but he wasn’t interested. You could practically smell the fucking apple pie on him. So I planted him somewhere in Missouri. That’s where Durning really is. It’s a beautiful place. Real fucking pure. Just like him.
“I wonder what kind of place Strafe will be. I give the theater two months before they start showing porn.”
Christina pushed the wheelchair along. Adam jostled himself about, trying to topple the thing.
“Just let me go, Christina. Let me go!”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Why? Just let me go. I need a hospital. I need a doctor.”
“The town needs a concert hall. Where do you think we should put it?”
Hot pain. Slicing down close to his scalp. Screaming behind his ear.
Christ! She just removed his ear.
“Christina! Christina!” he shouted.
She walked in front of the wheelchair, in front of him, now to the other side of him, and planted his ear in the grassy ground.
Adam could feel himself sliding into shock. He realized he was alternately screaming and sobbing but he couldn’t do anything to stop that. He couldn’t help it. His chest rose and fell rapidly. He was very aware of the blood covering his body.
“Christina, just let me go and I swear, I swear to God I’ll do anything you want me to just please please please don’t do this.”
“You talk too much.”
She grabbed some other instrument from behind his head. It was a long knife. She drew it back on each cheek, severing all of the muscles controlling his jaw.
She doesn’t want me to bite her, Adam thought. Oh my God, she doesn’t want me to bite her. And that meant she was going to do something even worse.
She reached into his mouth and grabbed his tongue. Adam tried his hardest to jerk it away but she clamped with her thumb and fingertips and it hurt. Amazing, he thought, with all the other pains in his body, the way his tongue was able to take center stage and hurt the most.
Sticking the knife back to his throat, she drew the blade along the back of his tongue and the only sound Adam could make was with his now ravaged vocal cords. She held the tongue up in front of him.
“I wonder what we’ll do with this. A tongue can become many things. A church that spits lies. A coffeehouse of bad poetry. A townhall of bickering dissent. The rundown house of the finest whore in town.”
Adam sat in the chair, his body rigid, his one eye bulging toward Christina as she held the tongue up appraisingly. She turned to plant it in the ground. Now he couldn’t smell any trace of apple pie on her. The only thing he could smell with his last trembling breaths was the stink of death and he didn’t know from which of them it came.
Air Cathedra l
The room choked on blue dawn bitterness.
“Why don’t you show me?” Arthur asked the bleeding heap, the mere puddle of a human, behind him. Arthur did not look at the priest when he asked him this question. He sat in the old wooden chair, a blood-stained Styrofoam cup of cold coffee in his right hand, a burning cigarette in his left, staring out of the partially open window in front of him.
The man on the floor behind him didn’t say anything. Of course he didn’t say anything. Arthur figured he was probably dead. Beyond dead, even. Mutilated. Arthur fought the urge to turn around and look at him. To study him as some people study paintings, sculptures, or the beauty of a chosen sex.
He wanted to look at the priest because he thought the priest could show him something. Arthur still wasn’t sure what this something was, but he knew it was there. It had to be in one of his victims or else his work had all been fruitless.
How many had there been?
It was countless.
Only, it wasn’t really countless at all. Eighty-six. That was a very exact count. Eighty-six priests going back twelve years.
Arthur didn’t know why he had chosen priests.
No, that wasn’t true either. He chose the priests because they were eager for someone to hear their confessions. And Arthur was that person. Before using the knife or the gun or, in this case, the drill, he listened to their confessions. Everyone had confessions, he was sure, but there was something about the priests’ confessions that seemed weightier. Maybe it was because they, after hearing so many confessions themselves, knew how to tell a confession. Or maybe it was because their confessions were somehow entwined with all the confessions they had heard over the years, like the confessions they’d heard were some kind of bassy backbeat to their own.
Some of the priests’ confessions were quite nasty. Some of them made what Arthur was doing look like the work of a saint. Others were beautiful. These were the ones Arthur had the most faith in. These were the ones that filled him with the most hope.
Ultimately, he guessed he had initially sought out his first priest because that was who he had first shared his confession with. It wasn’t just a confession. It was a dream. It was a life’s journey. It was something he knew he had to find. He wasn’t sure if it was a place or just a something, some disembodied structure lodged in the reaches of his subconscious, but he knew it existed and that it was out there somewhere.
Come to think of it, it was hardly a confession at all. When he had told that first priest, it was more like a statement or a declaration. The priest had scoffed at him. Told him it was all metaphor. Tried to tell him he was on the path to righteousness and he needed to follow the footsteps of Christ.
But, well, Christ had never done this.
Now he sat on the third floor of an old abandoned warehouse, looking out over the city, where people were just filtering out of their apartments, getting into their cars and going off to work. This was a world he was not part of. There was a certainty to this thought.
A certainty that could not be denied.
This was a time of reflection for Arthur. Reflecting was something he was not a stranger to. He sat there and wondered why he had chosen this particular priest. It wasn’t just accessibility. No. It was something in the old man’s eyes. They were the same blue Arthur had seen in the sockets of a hundred Irish Catholic priests but there was something else to this man. There was a certain twinkle, a certain knowledge. And the complete ease with which this priest (who would not give Arthur his name) died hinted at something greater. Perhaps this man contained the peace and serenity Arthur had sought for so long.
He sat his cup of coffee down on the splintered wood windowsill, tossing the burnt nub of his cigarette into its dregs. He stood up and knocked the chair over as he did so.
“You’re the one,” he said as he stalked over to the body of the priest. “You have to be.”
The priest was a mess. Arthur’s gorge threatened to kick up as he approached him, knelt down beside him.
Arthur reached into the wound running down the priest’s torso, pulling it open with his hands, leaning down into the sick warmth of his body, the smell of early decay already there.
He swooned, his balance thrown off. He pitched forward and thrust his arm out, his hand hit the blood sticky wall and he hovered above the priest, drunk off the rush of scent rolling around in his head.
He stood up and walked back over to the window.
Time had jumped forward.
This was not unusual for Arthur. Strange gaps in memory. Time racing forward. No, not racing, jumping, like frames cut from a film. He was here, he was still here, but everything and everyone around him was suddenly five minutes or a half an hour ahead. He had to catch up with it, time, them. He felt dragged along, a slight nausea slithering in the back of his head as he stepped into the present.
Time jumped forward. It always did.
The city bustled now. Thronging with a thick presence seemingly borne out of its hard, manufactured surface, the city bustled. Car horns. Shouting. The whole sick and violent world thrown into motion for yet another day. He looked west out the window, over the buildings, toward the heart of the city and that was when he saw it.
This was the first time he had seen it in twelve years and this time, this time, it wasn’t just some image from a dream. It was something in front of him. In the distance but still vast. Vast and real, as solid as it could ever be and very much there.
The air cathedral.
He didn’t know of any other way to describe it. It was like all the cathedrals of his boyhood only this one was more immense and promising and looked like something Dalí would have painted. It wasn’t simply a bricks and mortar cathedral floating in the sky. It looked like it was actually inscribed in the air. There and not there at the same time.
A feeling came over him that he couldn’t describe. Seeing the cathedral was not enough. He had to be inside of it. He had to walk its crystalline halls and look down at the strange worlds it hovered over.
Arthur walked back over to the priest.
“How do I get there? I know you know. How do I get there?”
But the priest wasn’t talking.
Arthur went back over to the window. He shoved the window all the way up, never looking away from the cathedral glittering in the air miles ahead of him. He thought about jumping from the window but couldn’t put that much faith in anything like that. And if he was wrong, that would mean his quest was over. He also thought about running through the street, never taking his eyes off the cathedral, just running until it was right above him. But one did not run down crowded city streets while covered in blood and reeking of death.
So he sat on the ledge, only to be closer to the cathedral, feeling the cold wind swirl up from the cold street.
It was truly beautiful, how it hung there in the sky, looking more like a castle than a place of worship.
Then things got jumbled up inside of Arthur’s head. He didn’t know what happened but, suddenly, he desperately wanted to be off the narrow window ledge. He wanted to be back in the room, his feet planted firmly on the ground. But he couldn’t seem to move and when he finally managed to turn his head around, the priest was there behind him, smothering him in that bloody scent.
This could not be happening, Arthur’s mind shouted. This could not be happening. Arthur faced the priest, noting the way the air cathedral gleamed in the reflection of each eye.
“You wanted me to show you,” the priest spoke through vocal cords Arthur had ruined hours ago. “You wanted me to show you and I did.”
Arthur wanted to speak. He wanted to argue with the man but a loud bleating was the only thing that came out.
“And now you want me to take you there.”
The priest pulled Arthur back into the room. The room was now full of people, all dressed similarly to the priest. Arthur didn’t have to count them to know how many of them he would find. There were eighty-six of them in there and something screamed inside Arthur’s head. These people were not priests. They were not priests at all.
“We can take you there,” the priest said. “It is not a pretty place.”
Suddenly, Arthur didn’t want to go. He didn’t know what he had been doing all these years. It fell away. His whole journey fell away or, rather, he realized that maybe it wasn’t his journey but their journey. He felt all of their cold hands on him, looked at the wounds he had inflicted, and tried his best not to scream as they took him to the air cathedral. His life sprawled out behind him like a horrific photo album and all of that was nothing compared to what he was about to see.
The Nowhere Room
Anna Seifert sat in front of her computer, trying to work on a literary paper about the writings of Ambrose Bierce. So far, she hadn’t made it any further than the title page. The cursor blinked in and out of the grayish-white background, after the terminal “t” of her last name.
It was a beautiful early summer day. She stared out the window. Her study felt like a prison. The window afforded a perfect view of the children across the street. Three kids who looked to be around the age of five ran around the neighborhood yard in an insane pattern, no doubt driven by a perfectly understandable kid-logic. The next minute, she was yanked from their sunny imaginings and thrown to the floor.
It had been a while since she’d had one of these attacks but she immediately recognized it for what it was.
Once again, her memory was trying to kill her.
On the floor, struggling to crawl across the carpet and pull herself up on something, her vision turned a screaming red.
Her head throbbed.
Her muscles knotted up.
Her gorge rose and she exploded a pool of stinking vomit, some unseen hand forcing her down into it.
And then she heard the voice, calling her name like metallic fire and brimstone scraping at the inside of her skull, the backs of her eyes.
“Anna!”
She tried to answer it, but her gorge came up again, turning her vocal cords acid and watery.
“Anna! Anna! Anna! Anna! Anna!”
The voice always liked to wait until she was alone. Sure, it removed embarrassment but it also removed any sense of comfort she might gain from those around her.
The angry swarm in her mind and viscera, like a vicious hybrid of psychic bees, screamed on for a few more minutes before leaving her stunned, squirming in her own vomit, piss, and shit. Her pride was gone someplace else but the past, the past was right there in front of her.
Anna saw a small abandoned house in a stand of trees behind an empty field.
She saw a small fire burning in a thickly rusted grill without legs.
She saw a sixteen-year-old girl named Carmen.
She saw visions and colors, some of them beautiful, some of them horrible. She felt a glittering, revelatory magic in her veins and felt it turn ugly.
She rose from her expulsion, went into the lonely bathroom and washed the stink from herself. It had taken years b
ut she now knew what she had to do.
Once she started for Gibraltar, there was no turning back. Something pulled and pushed her along, forced the whining engine of her car to give as much as it could. Intent tunnelvision melted Anna’s eyes to the road, keeping her mind free from distraction. Almost eagerly, she cruised along the boondocks, those rural islands of Ohio, sandwiched in between the industrial sprawls.
Soon, with the gray coming of dusk, she reached the tiny town of Gibraltar. It was roughly the same size as Red Oak, the college town where she taught, but completely different. It was precisely the beaten down, worker-drone mentality of Gibraltar that had pushed Anna through the ranks of the university. When she finally received her Ph.D. from a small school in Pennsylvania, she hung the certificate by her desk and it was only then she felt separated from Gibraltar. Wherever she moved afterwards, the doctorate came with her, hung someplace where she could see it nearly any time she wanted to—hung up as a reminder. She couldn’t explain it, exactly. She just always had this fear that, without as much education as she could possibly get, she was forever in danger of sliding down some dark rabbit hole and becoming one of Them.
And now, as she entered the town, the same force that had been speeding her along slowed her down as if to say, “Look.” She cruised down Main Street, her eyes scouring the shabby buildings, the run down storefronts, the three bars with spraypainted, particle-board windows. A man stepped out from one of the bars, his skin as gray as his hair, thin shoulders protruding from his ancient flannel shirt. He stared at the sidewalk as he ambled along, his whole body leaning toward the ground, toward some premature death. Anna thought they should change the town’s name to Sorrow. The depressing sadness that had ridden with her the first eighteen years of her life was back.
Luckily, the town proper wasn’t that large and she was soon out on the state route, cutting through fields of low corn.
Pray You Die Alone: Horror Stories Page 4