“No,” Jack said, trying to force him off.
“I call the shots here,” Mr. Grin said.
And he sliced at the left side of Jack’s face, opening up his cheek from the corner of his mouth to his ear.
Jack screamed. He didn’t want to. Couldn’t believe this man had brought him to a scream. He tried to bat the knife out of Mr. Grin’s hand but Mr. Grin only brought the haft of it down on his forehead. He felt the crack echo through his body.
Then Mr. Grin opened up the right side of his face.
This was it, Jack thought. He was losing. The pain was already making him waver in and out. He reached around, trying to grab onto something. Trying to grab anything.
Mr. Grin chuckled. “You liked that, didn’t ya? Wish the old come farm could see you now but she went out some time ago. Guess the body don’t like it when you shove one of these up its ass.”
He held the bloody knife up in front of him and Jack didn’t have to imagine too hard where all the blood on the bed had come from.
Jack tried to talk but it was very difficult.
“You said you wouldn’t hurt her until I got here.”
“I don’t hear you so well,” Mr. Grin chuckled. “Your mouth’s all fucked up. Anyways, I guess I got kind of bored.”
Mr. Grin stood up and Jack lunged at his knees with everything he had. He felt the man buckle and come down on top of him like a slab of concrete.
The knife entered his back. He heard it punch through the skin, maybe a rib or two, and felt the air whoosh out of him.
Shit, he thought.
A lung. The fucker got a lung.
He felt the knife punch down again and again.
He reached back, trying to grab Mr. Grin’s head. And Grin started biting his arms.
Jack’s body feeling like so much meat, he slid out from under him.
He stood up, coughing up a gout of blood.
“No chance, shitcrawler,” Mr. Grin said.
He, too, was standing. And looked much better than Jack felt.
Jack slid his hand, shaking wildly, into his pocket, palming one of the keys so the point jutted out between his middle and index fingers. It didn’t seem like much compared to Mr. Grin’s girth and his butcher knife but it was all he had. Behind Mr. Grin, he saw Gina on the bed.
He took a quick step toward Mr. Grin and took a swing. The tip of the key punched into his right eye.
“Fucker!” Mr. Grin shouted, clenching the knife in his fist and driving it into Jack’s skull.
He waited for the blackness but it didn’t come. The knife must not have penetrated all the way through his skull. Before Mr. Grin could work it out, Jack took a savage uppercut at his chin, feeling the key jab into the flesh. Then he stepped away, the knife still lodged in his skull.
Mr. Grin squealed.
Then he went for Gina. Defenseless Gina there on the bed. He straddled her, wrapping his giant hands around her delicate throat.
Jack thought about trying to work the knife free but knew he didn’t have time.
He repositioned the key, determined to open Mr. Grin up.
He jumped behind him on the bed, running the key along his fat throat.
Mr. Grin was growling, strangling Gina.
Jack could hardly breathe. He took the key across Mr. Grin’s throat again and again.
He heard something pop and saw Gina covered in a spray of red, smelled the sick copper scent.
With what last bit of energy he had, he yanked Mr. Grin back off the bed. He felt the knife twanging back and forth in his head. Jack pounced on top of Mr. Grin.
On Mr. Grin’s chest, he jabbed his hand in through the open neck wound and squeezed the bundle of veins, artery and cartilage there. He felt the beating of a heart. He squeezed until it grew faint. Until Mr. Grin’s eyes rolled back in his head and the beating stopped altogether. And, unbelievably, once the heartbeat had ceased, he felt something else. He stuck the key into the man’s open throat, poking it around inside until he felt the hole. He inserted the key, twisting it until he felt a barrel turn...
And found himself sitting on a bloody carpeted floor, the sounds of his ragged breaths very loud in his ears.
Standing up, barely, dazed and staggering, he crossed to the bed, to Gina.
He pulled her up. She was still out.
“Gina,” he said. “Gina?”
He could tell she was alive only by the whistling breath between her lips. Was this the real Gina or the Gina-double? And what was the double anyway? Was it the essence of a person? Was it their soul?
If this was Gina’s soul, it wasn’t in very good shape.
“Gina, it’s over...”
“Not,” she breathed. “Not over.”
Thirty-one
He found it hard to breathe and didn’t know how much longer he was going to be able to move. If this was his soul, then it was dying.
“No, Gina, it’s over. He’s gone. For good, I think.”
“No. Gotta find my body. My real body. Have to.”
Her eyelids were heavy, shutting completely only to open slightly.
Okay, so they had to find her body. Then it stood to reason that maybe he should be reunited with his body also. He knew exactly where his was, supposing it wouldn’t be too difficult to make it back to the Utility Shed. And, like a faint glimmer in the back of his brain, he thought maybe he knew where to look for Gina’s also but he couldn’t quite wrap himself around the idea just yet. Complete loss of consciousness couldn’t be that far away.
“Come on,” he said, standing up on what felt like a moving floor. “We gotta get up.”
He grabbed her hands, just happy to feel her flesh against his even if it was this weird glossy spirit flesh. It was something. It was more than he had had in twenty-four hours which, when faced with the prospect of never touching her again, seemed like an eternity.
The knife twanged back and forth in the top of his head. He wanted to pull it out, not liking the way it felt in there, but he was afraid doing so would release a torrent of blood and that might just be all the blood loss his body could take. With a great jerk, he pulled Gina up and over his shoulder. It felt like spikes were driven into his lungs, massive steel clamps squeezing them tight. Once firmly over his shoulder, his knees threatened to buckle. They couldn’t— he couldn’t— buckle. He had come too far to lose it all now. Now he had to go all the way. Never mind that this whole thing didn’t make any more sense to him now than it did when he first came home to find Gina missing.
Had to press on.
He went out through the door and realized he had not had to come through a door to enter this room. For that matter, he didn’t know how far away it was from the Utility Shed. He half-expected to step through the door and into an entirely alien landscape.
But, once again, he was in that sprawling field, the Utility Shed in the distance. Curiosity dictated he turn and look at the room he had just come from. It seemed to be one half of the train engine pair that he had seen at the entrance to the Wilds. Only, this looked even more peculiar because the train was stopped, not on any sort of track, and while the front of it was pulverized looking, there was absolutely no evidence of it having hit anything.
Jack felt like they would have to stop at the Utility Shed first to reclaim his body. A strong body would get them back to the hotel that much faster. The hotel was where they needed to go.
One key left.
He wondered if he would need the key to get back in the Utility Shed. If not, he wondered what that key could possibly be. Was there some other trial awaiting them? The desire to simply get it over with propelled him forward. He swam in and out of consciousness. Black periods where he couldn’t even remember putting one foot in front of the other. It took every ounce of concentration he had just to keep from falling over or drowning completely in that inky black sleep that called to him.
The Utility Shed almost jumped in front of him.
Gently, he sat Gina down in front
of it, resting her back against the cinderblock walls.
The door was cracked.
He pushed it open.
The sight of Mr. Grin, John Briggs, suspended there was shocking. He had to fight an urge to destroy the body but, he told himself, it wasn’t the body that was bad. It was possible that Briggs had even been a decent body before whatever it was that Jack had destroyed moved in.
As Jack drew closer to his own upside-down body, he felt the black wave finally pull him under and when he came to he was looking through the open door upside down. All of his pain was gone except for the feeling of blood swelling his head and the numbing prickles throughout the rest of his limbs. On the floor beneath him were the remaining key and the knife. Hysterically, he thought it was nice to know that he didn’t have to wander around with a knife in his skull.
He reached his blood-engorged hand out to clasp it around the knife. Raising himself up, he slashed at the rope holding him suspended, bracing for the nasty spill onto the floor. Mainly, he tried to be careful not to hit his head. After several slashes with the knife the rope finally snapped and he came down with a sickening thump on his shoulder blades. The pain was explosive and alive and he thought that, maybe, he liked it.
Taking several deep breaths, he bent to scoop up the key and hurried out of the Utility Shed to gather Gina, making sure she was still breathing.
The breaths were shallower still but they were still there and he hoped the hotel wasn’t that far away.
After a few minutes of moving at a quick trot, he could see the roof of the hotel.
Gradually, it became larger and larger and then he stood in the parking lot, ready to enter the cracked and broken front door of the lobby.
Mr. Thick was nowhere to be found.
The door to the office, Jack noticed, was shut. With Gina still slung over his shoulder, he attempted to open the door. Not surprisingly, it was locked. Digging into his pocket for the key, he realized he was breathing quickly and his hands were shaky. This was it. Maybe they had made it. Maybe they would pull through this, after all. After several attempts, he finally fitted the key into the handle, turned, and pushed the door inward.
The laundry bag sat on the now decayed desk.
Jack unzipped it and saw Gina curled into a ball inside.
At that moment, the office went up in a blinding flash of white.
Thirty-two
Gina stood before him in the decaying office of the Hotel Eternity.
Jack felt the key in his right hand and looked at it. Only, instead of a key it was the ring he had bought. He dropped to one knee in front of Gina and said, “Gina Marie Black, will you marry me?”
She smiled. It looked like it took everything she had, but she smiled.
“Of course,” she said.
And he slid the ring onto her finger.
It felt like the perfect ending but it wasn’t over just yet and Jack knew that.
Gina was still in her underwear and tanktop. Jack looked like he had been dragged through the mud. They held hands and walked out into the Wilds, careful to avoid any main roads on their way back home.
They reached the house near sunset. He was sure some people had seen them but probably just wrote it off as a curiosity. As soon as they got home they showered. Then they went to bed.
Lying there, Gina on his left, he tried to put his arm around her but she moved away. He just wanted to hold her. Just wanted to feel her solidity in his arms, to know she was real. But she didn’t want any of it.
There were also a lot of things he wanted to ask her. He figured she must have the answers to so much of it but, lying there and smelling the exotic scent coming from her, he didn’t know if he wanted to know all the answers. He realized he didn’t necessarily want to know if she knew she was adopted or if she knew where she really came from or why Mr. Grin wanted her for his or why he wanted to destroy Jack. He figured she probably knew the answers to all of those questions and maybe that was the great mystery about her. Maybe all of that was what kept him attracted to her.
He cleared his throat, staring at the ceiling.
“If you could choose to forget everything that happened to you, would you do it?”
“Yes,” she said, unhesitatingly.
“Before I can help you, I just need to know one thing.”
She said nothing.
“What happened to Briggs’ soul?”
“It went bad.”
“What made it go bad?”
“It was always bad.”
“You know what I’m thinking, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And there’s no chance your soul will go bad?”
“It is a healing substance. But, if a person is bad, it can only accelerate the rot.”
Jack nodded.
“Just do it. And then I never want to talk about any of this again.”
Jack did it.
Thirty-three
The next morning, Jack went back to The Tent. The car was in worse shape than usual but someone had at least removed the enormous section of tree from it. This was the second day in a row Mr. Briggs hadn’t come in and nobody was really working. A number of people had ascended the dirt pile and were engaged in a vigorous game of King of the Mountain. The lady who worked across from Jack lay in her work space, dirt smeared all over her face, nearly passed out.
No one noticed him.
No one noticed as he took a wheelbarrow and filled it full of that rich, almost black dirt.
No one noticed as he took the wheelbarrow out to his car and filled the trunk with it.
He thought about all the dirt he breathed while working at The Tent. Even with the painter’s mask on, it was still a fair amount. He thought about how hard it was to remember what went on there when he came home. In short, he had had an idea.
When he got home, pulling into the driveway, he made Gina come outside and stand by the car.
“Okay,” he said. Then he flipped open the trunk.
She grabbed handfuls of the dirt and began smearing it over herself, huffing some up her nostrils and coughing. Jack thought about doing the same thing but realized he never wanted to forget what he went through. He never wanted to forget what led him up to this point in life. Everything after would be simple by comparison.
Mr. Moran stood in his yard.
Oh, God, please, Jack thought. Don’t let him make eye contact.
Moran caught him trying to look away and raised his arm, coming over.
“You know,” the old man said. “I had the strangest dream about you.”
“Really?” Jack said. “Conversations that start with that never end up very good.”
“I don’t remember it so well anyway. I’m old and addled. Say, why’s she coverin herself in dirt?”
“Don’t ask,” Jack said. “She’s a weirdo.”
“Guess so,” Mr. Moran said. But he seemed to be so overcome with the oddity of Gina standing at the car and covering herself with dirt that he turned and walked away. He guessed now he knew what it took to end a conversation with Mr. Moran.
Later, as Jack told Gina about Sam, because he had to, he asked her if the dirt had helped and she said she thought it did. She sounded a little bit more like herself. Saddened at the loss of Sam, of course, but there was a bit of the old Gina there. They decided they would wait a few days and then declare him a missing person, realizing it was sort of incriminating that the police would have documentation of Jack being the last person seen with him. But Jack doubted the cop who had come to Sam’s apartment was really a cop at all.
The next day, they went to Sam’s apartment, just so they could straighten it and remove anything too incriminating. They didn’t want the ghost of Sam to be tainted. Jack opened the door, not at all surprised to find that Sam didn’t keep it locked. Gina entered behind him.
From the kitchen, he heard a rustling.
“Go wait in the car,” he told Gina.
“I most definitely will not.”<
br />
“Gina, please, I think there’s somebody here.”
“I’ll just stay behind you.”
“Fine. But if it is somebody, I want you to take off running.
“Hello?” Jack called toward the kitchen, wishing he had a gun at this moment.
“Hello!” he barked this time, taking a few cautious steps toward the kitchen.
Gina didn’t even flinch when Mr. Grin came out from behind the wall. Hopefully, she didn’t even remember who it was.
Mr. Grin threw up his hands.
“Wait! Wait!” he said.
Now Jack was confused. That didn’t sound at all like Mr. Grin.
“Sam?” he said.
“The new body’s pretty much like the old body, don’t you think?”
It still looked like John Briggs to Jack but he guessed, with some scruff around the face and some longer hair, some time, he would actually look a little bit like Sam.
“I had a fucked up trip you wouldn’t believe,” Sam said. “I dreamed I was dead and then my soul left its body because it was all mangled and maybe even dead and then I found this one and then when I woke up, I looked like this. But I couldn’t even remember what I used to look like. Fucked up shit. Hey, babes,” he said to Gina, coming over and giving her a kiss on the cheek.
Jack couldn’t help the small tremor that ran up his spine.
Sam grinned at Jack and told him he was glad everything worked out okay.
Jack patted him on the arm and said, “I don’t think you should ever smile around me again.”
About the Author
Andersen Prunty lives in Dayton, Ohio. He is also the author of The Overwhelming Urge, Zerostrata, Market Adjustment and Other Tales of Avarice, and The Sorrow King (forthcoming). Visit him on the web at www.andersenprunty.com.
Jack and Mr. Grin Page 13