by Alexie Aaron
Evil
A Paranormal Short Fiction by
Alexie Aaron
This short story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright 2017 – Diane L. Fitch writing as Alexie Aaron
Table of Contents
Mar
The Church
A Conversation with a Light
The Walker
The Cold Blue Flame
Alexie Aaron
Mar
I was born into evil. My mother, happy to get rid of the major discomfort on her body, birthed me unceremoniously on the hardpacked ground of the cellar, not wanting to foul her sheets or toweling. She called me Mar, for I was the only of the ten children to give her stretch marks that marred her lovely fat body.
I grew up, not in poverty – though those who enter our part of the world, upon seeing our crumpled dirty buildings and questionable characters lying around, may have inadvertently formed this opinion. It wasn’t poverty; it was just the way we lived. My uncle Tag owned a bake and cook shop which supplied my mother and her brats with whatever we wanted. Notice I didn’t say needed. Evil only wants; it never needs, because it already has. So, if it wasn’t poverty, what compelled us to live amongst the filth and darkness?
When you’re brought up around evil, you never question it. It just is. None of us ever went to school. We never went to church. Yes, there was a church. It was an old building, set back into a dark alley surrounded by damp, mold-encrusted buildings, housing things that even the grownups never mentioned. No one ever went there, not just because of the nasty things that roamed the street. We didn’t risk the journey because we had no idea what a church was for.
If my siblings and I were abused, we never knew it. We had no basis for comparison. If you were beaten, so was every child and grownup around you. You acknowledged the pain, bound your wounds with a dirty scrap of fabric, and moved on just like everyone else. We had little contact with the outside world, and no one read. We never knew there was a nicer side to life.
My mother’s name was Gert, not Gertrude. Gertrude had two syllables, and that would be too hard for our community to utter. She had a massive frame and stood a hand span short of the doorway. Even though her height didn’t fill the expanse, her width did. Gert had long hair that she kept loose and snarled. If it had been washed regularly, it would have been blonde. I can only remember it as being ashen and yellow. My mother had large breasts and hips, which were used often by the men of our neighborhood. Gert loved to lay with men. She never craved any privacy, so we were educated early, and frequently, as to how many ways a man could have a woman. No one was shocked, only irritated when it came between us and sleep. For all of us slept on the floor of my mother’s room with, and like, dogs. We curled up with mongrels for warmth, for our mother never let us have blankets, even in the winter when the soot-crusted snow coated our part of the world briefly until it soaked into the filth of the streets.
My brothers, sisters, and I worked in our uncle Tag’s cook and bake shop. The girls decorated pastries – we had small nimble fingers – while the boys hacked heads off poultry and pounded the tough meat into eatable, sellable portions. My uncle’s shop was at the edge of our world. The front faced another part of town and serviced its cleaner customers. The back faced our filth and, likewise, serviced our filthy customers.
Uncle Tag treated us with cool indifference when we behaved and with cruel beatings when we didn’t. We felt a lot of his strap early in our lives because our mother never bothered to teach us how to behave. We had to learn the hard way. Sometimes Uncle Tag let customers take my older sisters upstairs for a price. My sisters never hesitated. They just took the hand of the man and climbed the stairs. They knew that Uncle Tag’s belt was worse than what any of the customers did to them. Uncle Tag never sent me up there. I thought it was because it was rumored that he and his sister produced me. The real reason was because I had a knack for making the flakey pastries known far beyond our evil streets.
My uncle was also the undertaker. If you could call what he did with the dead undertaking. Uncle Tag and my brothers would collect our dead and take them to the medical hospital and sell the bodies to the medical school. What the school didn’t want, he dumped unceremoniously into the river on his way back. For this service, he charged the heirs the same amount he sold the bodies for. This wasn’t unscrupulous. It was just evil.
Uncle Tag had outsiders work the front of the shop because they were clean and talked well beyond our guttural short sentences. We were not allowed to talk to them and never were permitted up front when the shop was open. Late at night, we were allowed in there to clean while my sisters took care of the men, who were let in after the legit business hours were long gone.
I can’t remember what age I was when I started to question our way of life. I have a faint memory of coming home alone after dark, stumbling over the prostate bodies of the drunks, and pushing off the hands that grabbed me in the dark. In the confusion of defending my young body, I ran down the wrong street and ended up in front of the church. I stood there and stared at the large black outline. I remember feeling quite ashamed of my appearance without knowing why. I twisted my red curls around my fingers till my head hurt. My brown eyes squinted as I tried to see through the stained-glass windows that were remarkably unbroken.
I moved through the dark to the door and tried to turn the knob. I found the door not only locked, but a wax seal was stretched along the doorjamb to deter anyone from entering. I sat down and cried. I can’t remember why I cried. I just know that my body was wracked with sobs, generated from my very soul.
A voice from the street cut through my despair. “What are you doing?” The man’s voice held authority and anger.
I was so shocked that someone was there that I didn’t move or speak until he grabbed my arm and jerked me to my feet. I was surprised how clean he was. Could he have followed me from the shop? The fingernails that bit into my flesh were clean and his hands bore no calluses. “You don’t belong here!” he growled.
I looked up, way up; the man was extremely tall. His eyes shone, although there couldn’t have been any light in which to see them. Still, I knew they were blue, and the way they flashed told me he was angry.
“I took a wrong turn, and it was too dark to find my way safely back,” I explained while I jerked my arm from his grasp. “I’m afraid of the things that creep out of those buildings at night.”
“They only guard this street. Here, let me guide you home, Mar.” He took my hand firmly, raising it upwards until I had to stand on my toes. He tucked it through the crook of his arm and we started forward.
“How do you know my name?” I questioned the tall shadow.
“I know everything here, for I own everything here.” He paused a moment. Into the darkness, he called, “Make way. Make way for the Walker.”
I could hear slithering sounds as the inhabitants of those horrid houses retreated from our feet. Every minute or two he would repeat, “Make way for the Walker,” and we would progress further from the church. When we entered Main Street, he stopped calling, and I heard the raspy sound of slithering as the things in the dark reentered the street leading to the church.
“Now, Mar, you get home and never come here again,” he warned, “for the next time, I’ll let them have you!”
“What are they?” I asked. “And why did you save me?”
“They are my guards, and you were saved because I like your pastries,” he said, his tone no longer serious. He smiled, and I thought I saw his blue eyes turn red. But maybe it was just the poor light f
ueling my imagination.
“Who are you? Do I know you?” I asked, angry with myself for my voice shaking. I never liked to appear weak, even with this man who made my skin itch and my stomach turn. Just standing next to him, I felt like my soul was being invaded. Not the same invasion I felt when I was alone at the church. This was more… well… evil.
“I’m the Walker, and if you don’t want to feel your uncle’s strap, then you’ll not mention your encounter tonight.” He adjusted the tall hat he wore on his raven-black hair. He turned and walked back into the darkness, leaving me with the feeling of horror.
The Church
Y ears later, I still ran when I crossed the street that led to the church. I felt the Walker’s eyes bore into me even though I couldn’t see him. I never asked anyone about the Walker and kept the incident to myself. But I couldn’t help, night after night, replaying my evening with the Walker and my time at the church. I felt that the “guards” weren’t guarding us from getting into the church as much as something from the church getting out.
After that time, I felt the need to be clean. Water in our world wasn’t sanitary. It was siphoned out of a river that was thick enough to stand upon. Fortunately, the rain, after an hour of washing the soot out of our sky, was clean. I would run out of the house stand on the broken pavement and let it wash the filth from my hair and the grime from my body. I had pocketed some of my Uncle’s soap and scrubbed both me and my clothes.
A strange purity, which grew from inside of me, made me feel ill at ease with my mother. Bile would rise in my throat when my uncle touched me. He never touched me sexually. No one did. It wasn’t because I was ugly or marred in any way. Ever since my night with the Walker, no one beat, abused, or more cruelly, no one talked to me. I mended the rents and lengthened my frocks as I grew. When I grew out of my handed-down dresses, new ones arrived at our doorstep. Amazingly, the clothes only fit me. One night, my sister Nell pulled one over her head, and before she got it buttoned up, she ripped it off, ran to the chamber pot, and threw up. No one ever tried to wear my clothes again after that.
In my sixteenth year, my uncle moved me from my mother’s house to the shop. He fired one of the shop assistants, and I replaced her out front. Tag moved the pastry-making equipment out front so that the customers could watch me make the pastries. I had to get used to the way the clean-siders talked. I learned to answer back as elegantly as they asked. One day, a wealthy client came to Tag’s shop instead of sending her housekeeper. I felt her watching me. She leaned over the counter and handed me a slip of paper before walking quickly out of the shop. I opened the paper. On it, were lines of pen scratching. No one had taught me to read. Baffled, I gave the paper to my uncle.
He read it to himself first before enlightening me, “It seems, Mar, that the lady would like you to leave my employ and go and work for her.” He pinched my arm hard. “You will never leave here!” he growled before he addressed all the clerks. “No one will wait upon Lady Hedge or any of her household!” No one questioned him. After that, he moved me back into the kitchen. And for the first time in my life, I regretted that I couldn’t read.
Life was so much simpler before I had found the church. When my eyes were opened to what else life could bring, I became unsatisfied with what I had. A raw hunger built, a hunger for bettering myself. The hunger became pain. Finally, the pain moved from my mind into my heart. I resented those who had clean air to breathe and water in which to bathe. I ignorantly shifted the blame. The clean-siders were the reason I was still living in squalor.
Modesty aside, at eighteen, I became a beauty. My hair hung down my back in ringlets and my skin was pale and clear. It was mostly because I had little time to be out of doors, and in our world, the polluted skies let in little light. My older sisters scowled at me because they looked ten years older than their due. Some had already bore children before they were thirteen. I had not been touched. I had no facial lines from the forced smiles they had to use upstairs.
My sister Nell disappeared one night and never returned. Optimism filled me when I thought Nell had escaped. If she had found a better place to be, then there was hope for me.
Although, the night before her disappearance, we heard screaming from the room above, the one that the customers used. My uncle pounded on the door, and when he entered, he cursed. The customer left in a hurry without any of the cash he brought in with him.
Uncle Tag came down the stairs and assured us that all was well and to get back to work. He closed the doors and put on his undertaker’s hat. My brothers swore that it was Nell’s arm that slipped out from the bundle of the other bodies that Tag sold to the school that evening. Uncle Tag denied everything, and my mother didn’t press him for an answer. I sensed that she didn’t really care.
The next day, I slipped away to go and look for Nell. I knew that she was too afraid of the clean side of town, and there was only one place to hide in our world. I paused at the corner of the church street, fighting a war with myself. The dread that the Walker put into me, battled my need to know if Nell had found refuge down the street. I ran all the way to the church, being careful not to awaken the day-sleeping inhabitants of the houses.
When I reached the church, I didn’t bother with the sealed front door. I ran around the building. I found all the windows at ground level locked. The back door was my only hope. It was not sealed, but the porch leading up to it was so decayed that I had to find something to bridge the gap. I found a castoff piece of wood and dragged it over to the church. I pushed it over the expanse, hoping that it would hold my weight. One careful step after another brought me to the back door.
I called into the keyhole, “Nell, are you in there? The Walker won’t be pleased finding you here. Come home. Come home with me now.” My hand touched the dull brass knob. It seemed to tremble under my grasp, but I realize now that it had to have been the shaking of my hand. The connection of my hand on the brass knob brought me the realization that I had been living in denial, and that my brothers were right. Nell had been killed the night before, and my uncle sold her body to the medical school.
I leaned against the door and cried for the pity of it all. I cried for the knowledge I didn’t want to have. The longer I stayed there, in contact with the building, the more truth that flooded my mind. One piece of information brought me to my feet. “The door is not locked.” I straightened up and pulled open the door. I stood there, still afraid of the Walker, but more afraid of not entering. I needed to know what was in there that had awoken my curious mind.
The door opened into a dust-laden room. There was rotting wood stacked along the brick wall. I heard the scurrying of small feet. My toes curled. “Mice.” The hardwood floor beneath my feet gave a little as I walked through the room. I was careful to watch for broken boards. Because I was concentrating on the floor, I didn’t notice that I exited the room and entered a dark passage. The walls were cold and narrow, but there was a faint light ahead of me. I followed the light and found myself in a large room.
For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. A vision stung my eyes. I stumbled forward, my arms in front of me, until my fingertips touched cool glass. It was no vision; it was a stained-glass window. I took a few steps backward to study the colorful scene before me. A woman and child were depicted in the window. The woman’s eyes shined proudly as she held the infant boy securely. The infant was wrapped in a cloth, and he appeared to be puzzled by the world around him. The light behind the window reminded me it was midday. I knew I shouldn’t tarry long.
I turned slowly and looked at the rest of the room. It was blanketed by windows showing other scenes. I quickly took them in. They didn’t mean anything to me, so I gave them as much attention as I gave the inhabitants of my world. The floor of the room was covered with crumbling benches. It looked as if someone had, with much power, thrown them around, breaking them as if to say, “I hate this place!” I didn’t agree with the destroyer. I felt calm here. I took a playful step and spun a
round and around. The light from the windows danced along with me.
I stopped and staggered as a horrific scene assaulted my ignorant eyes. There, up on the wall opposite the loving mother and child, someone had nailed a man to a cross of wood. He was hung there to bleed to death. I ran towards the man to help him. His eyes were open in agony. I remembered stumbling up some steps. I ran into a large marble table, and I pushed my way around it. I called the him, “Hold on, I will help you. Are you all right?” Silence stopped my steps. The light was dim, but as I got closer, I saw that I had mistaken a painted statue for a real man. To me, it had looked so real.
He wasn’t real, but I still wept for him. I don’t know why, but I felt that, somehow, I was at fault. I reached up and touched the statue’s toes. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why you’re up there, but I’m sorry.” My words echoed through the building. I started thinking about the Walker and thought that maybe he had something to do with this. Was he trying to protect me from seeing this sight? No, I didn’t think so. For I had seen worse on the streets of my world.
I got up and walked back into the large room, seeking the peace I had felt before. As I examined the rest of the room, my rage roiled to the surface. Why had this beautiful place been kept away from me? From us? Why were we kept from all that was beautiful?
A Conversation with a Light
M y tour of the church stopped at the long marble altar. I knelt to see the carved letters on the front of it, even though I knew that couldn’t read it. I stuck my fingers in the crevices of each letter, trying to see if I could discern its meaning from the mere contact of my fingertips. Alas, it was not to be. A sadness overcame me, and I called out, “Help, oh help.”
My heart quickened as I felt a presence in the church with me. The feeling that I was being watched was as strong as when I knew the Walker was viewing me. Although, instead of fearful, it was kinder. I felt as if someone reached out and held me. This presence pulled me to my feet. I shook the dust from my dress. I felt so dirty, but something in my head said it was okay. There was no need to feel ashamed.