Purgatory

by K M Stross

  “Excuse me,” Cross said. “The well… I need the well.” He stood up and made his way for the door.

  “We have water here!” George called after him, but Cross waved away the suggestion as he stepped out into the night.

  Outside, he could see only the vague black shadows of other homes peppering the area. Clouds parted. The moon was large, and the stars surrounding it shined heavily but offered little illumination to Cross. The stars and their comforting constellations were finally beginning to shut him out. Even through his right eye, it seemed impossible to digest their full beauty.

  He took a few steps, stopped, and looked around again, hoping to find the familiar outline of the well, or perhaps another living soul who might be heading in the same direction. But the town was quiet and empty, and the darkness laughed at Cross through the wind.

  He heard the door open behind him and felt the skin on the back of his neck break out in goose bumps. He stared at the ground, squeezing out a painful salty discharge that ran down his left cheek.

  Maria rested a hand on his shoulder. “This town is easy to get lost in.”

  Cross nodded, not turning around.

  “The homes are all the same.” She laughed lightly. “Like the ranches outside of Purgatory. All the same shape, only here they are not that awful rust color.”

  She took his hand in hers, and he followed next to her, letting her hand lead him through the darkness that had begun to swirl in front of him like one of the funhouse tunnels one might normally find in a traveling carnival. He tried to keep his left eye closed, opening it only when the painful irritation grew to be too much.

  “This is why I don’t miss my town,” Maria said.

  “Why?” Cross asked.

  “Because,” she said, “this town is like my town. It is small, too far away from everything. I need more than this. I want to experience all of life, not the life of a small town.”

  “Then you should listen to your sister. You should leave Purgatory,” Cross said.

  He felt the cool nip of air run across his bare arms and opened his eye again. The cold air felt good when it brushed against the water under his eyelids, temporarily dousing the flame. His own fault, he knew—always, it was his fault for letting the irritations consume him, to the point that his fingers would instinctively reach up to his face at the slightest itch. His fault.

  Maria guided him to the well and pumped the metal handle a few times. “How long until you can no longer see?” she asked quietly.

  Cross shrugged, keeping his gaze on the silhouettes of the small homes on the horizon. “I don’t expect to see much longer out of my left eye. For my right, I don’t know.”

  “Here,” she said.

  Cross bathed his left eye in the small cup made by his palm, then splashed more water over the rest of his face, letting it trickle down his chest. The irritation had begun to subside, but the hot tears continued a moment longer.

  “Will you be okay?” she asked.

  “No,” Cross said. Finally, he forced his eyes to meet hers. In the darkness, he couldn’t make out the colors of her irises—they were just eyes and nothing else, certainly not a window into her soul, certainly not looking upon him with some distorted form of infatuation.

  She reached up and gently touched the back of his neck, pulling him close. She pressed her lips against his, and he felt electricity shoot through his body. This. This was what he’d wanted since the moment he’d seen her. She let go, looking up into his eyes. He felt like he could tell her everything. He could confess all of it, and then his sins would evaporate into the air, traveling up toward the stars.

  “I’m afraid of the dark,” he whispered.

  “Everyone is, I think,” Maria said.

  “I need my medication.”

  “We can leave in the afternoon tomorrow,” she said. “After the sun begins to go down, it will be easy to cross the border.”

  “The vigilantes might follow our trail,” Cross said.

  Maria shook her head, smiling in the darkness. “It is better not to think about them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that is what they want,” she said.

  Cross stared at her for a moment, watching the wind catch a few strands of her long black hair and push it across her face. His mind wandered vaguely to the time he’d spent in Montana, when he had found himself drinking too heavily in one of the local bars, found himself staring too longingly at a mildly attractive woman sitting alone with a pack of cigarettes for company, the last thing he remembered before plunging headfirst into the blackness and letting a soft hand guide him through it. He woke up the next morning in an alien bed miles away from the truck stop.

  “Besides,” Maria added with a smile, “if we run into them, my sister will charge you more. Best to forget about them.”

  “Like the boogeyman,” Cross said. “Keep him out of your mind, and he can’t hurt you.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  Cross frowned, using his cupped hand to sip at the water. “That doesn’t work. I wasn’t thinking about them at all when they stopped me and jammed a gun in my face.”

  “Well, maybe you…” she stopped mid-sentence, cocking her head slightly.

  Cross’s hand reached down for the knife in his boot. “What is it?” he asked.

  “I thought I heard a siren,” she said.

  Cross closed his left eye and scanned the darkness for any blue or red lights, an instinct that he knew could have been wrong—for all he knew, Mexican sirens didn’t even have accompanying lights. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Of course you don’t,” she said, laughing.

  Cross smiled. “That’s good.”

  “I am sorry,” she said. “But sirens have always frightened me, and I make jokes when I am frightened. It was a mean joke.”

  “It was funny,” Cross said. He leaned on the hard brick of the well. He wanted to hear another joke, something to relieve the tension growing in his shoulders, running down his back. Take his mind off Purgatory and the murderer hiding within it.

  “In our hometown, my sister and I would occasionally hear the siren from the ambulance that would come in from the nearest city thirty miles away. It always took so long to arrive that whenever there was an emergency, it was usually too late to save whoever was hurt or ill.”

  “So maybe where we grew up wasn’t so different after all,” Cross said. He leaned against the cold bricks of the well. “There were no hospitals near my town, either. Maybe if there had been, my grandmother…” his voice trailed off. He didn’t want to think about her right now. What she might think of this crusade and this curse.

  “I am glad your grandmother was around to take care of you,” she said. “You had a very Mexican upbringing.”

  Cross smiled. “The town I grew up in had a volunteer fire department. When there was a fire, local residents would have to drive to the garage where the fire engine was parked and then drive to the fire. Some people lived on the other side of the lake behind the town.” He thought back, laughing. “I remember once, during high school, the bar across from the fire department started on fire. Before the volunteers could arrive, the entire building burned to the ground.”

  Maria laughed. “I can’t remember any homes in our town ever…”

  Cross held up a finger, cutting her off sharply. Something behind her voice, something hiding in the darkness—it was barely audible but existed nonetheless, taunting Cross behind a veil of black shadows. “The noise—I heard it too.”

  Maria cocked her head. They listened to the soft night wind as it slid silently through the crevices of their ears, whispering over the soft tendrils of their eardrums. A cricket. The leaves of a small plant rustling against hard, thirsty branches.

  “A scream,” Cross whispered. He reached down, pulling his knife from its hilt.

  Maria grabbed Cross’s left hand and pulled him back in the direction of George’s home, the same direction as the scream. He could
feel her pulse and his pulse mingling together and throbbing under their palms, picking up a staccato rhythm as their hearts began pumping adrenaline through their body.

  “We must hurry!” Maria said. “Please, hurry!”

  Cross ran with her, letting her lead him into the darkness. He could feel his heart racing the quicker they moved. The safety of the inhabitants barely crossed his mind, and even his fear of running face-first into some hard object—a fear that had stayed with him since the sun first began to set—had substantially subsided. No, it was the adrenaline coursing through his veins causing the rapid heart rate, the rhythmic drumbeats against his rib cage. The adrenaline was preparing him for an encounter that he had waited years for. Hope that maybe, just maybe, he could alleviate this curse once and for all.

  They had passed two large homes before the empty desert began to expand. Ahead of them, less than a hundred yards away, was the outline of one small home pressed against the backdrop of wet darkness. Cross let Maria lead another ten yards until he was sure it was George’s home, then broke free of her grip and ran ahead.

  As fast as he could.

  He pressed the wooden hilt of the knife into the folds of his palm. It felt so comfortable, as if every curve, every swelling had been made to fit into a specific crease, between two specific muscles, an interlocking piece of the whole to complete the jigsaw.

  Cross’s left hand reached out for the doorknob, but the tunnel around his left eye provided little more than shadows and outlines, distorting the image his right eye was sending to his brain so that his hand missed the handle and folded against the weight of the door and his left shoulder slammed into the frame, hard enough to snap one of the metal hinges. He pulled away and gave the door one strong kick, breaking the second hinge and knocking the door to the ground.

  Inside, the only light had been extinguished, leaving only shadows and a sick blue moonlight coming in through the windows. The air had a cruel, sulfur-like stench to it, the kind of lingering smell left by an overheated appliance. Cross could see enough near the windows to know that at least some parts of the room were disheveled, at least one window broken—cleanly—and the end table resting on its side against the far wall. Under it: the radio, still playing momentarily between crackling static, its antenna snapped and hung from the back like a broken tail.

  Cross risked one step into the room, keeping his left eye closed and trying to make out the shapes in the darkness. His breaths came out in pounding gasps, cutting the silence lingering between his ears. There was a body laying on the floor, next to the doorway that led to the small bedroom off to his left. Cross made his way toward it, his good eye still monitoring the darkness, searching for any movement.

  Maria burst through the door. “Luone!” she screamed out between hurried breaths. Any softness to her voice had disappeared, replaced by a frantic, grating howl that tore at Cross’s eardrums.

  “Over here,” Cross said, leaning over the petite body blocking the doorway. He didn’t lean down, not to check her pulse or her breathing or even to gently move her out of the way—he stepped over her, into the bedroom.

  There was a body, large, laying on the small twin-sized bed that took up the majority of the room. Cross walked closer until he was sure it was George, then moved to the only window in the room. He raised one shaky hand up to the drapes, pulling them back and looking outside into the darkness.

  “Cross!” Maria said. “Luone is hurt! We must get her help!”

  Cross closed his left eye again. He focused more intently on the darkness outside, forcing his good eye to absorb as much of the moonlight as possible, begging for a sign.

  To find anything, anything. To prove Morrissey was still close.

  Maria quietly sobbed in the living room, but still Cross did not turn away. This curse, this promise of eventual darkness… he wouldn’t let it stop him. He was so close now.

  Then: a shadow, a flicker of black moving between two larger cacti to the north. Cross pulled away from the window, darting around George’s body.

  “Cross!” Maria said when he emerged from the bedroom. He jumped over Luone’s unconscious body, stepping cautiously toward the damaged door to prevent his feet from tripping over anything hidden by the shadows. “Cross!” she called after him. She stood up and followed him to the doorway, reaching out for his sweat-drenched shirt and grabbing hold. “Cross, Luone needs help!”

  Cross reeled around, grabbing Maria’s hand and pulling it away. “Don’t you get it?” he screamed. “I don’t care! All I care about is him! I don’t care about you or your fucking town! I just want him!”

  Maria froze, unable to respond. She pulled her hand away, watching him turn and disappear through the broken doorway.

  Outside, Cross pressed his free hand against the cool surface of the house’s worn bricks, following it around the corner. He pulled his hand away, taking a step as he did so and immediately feeling the front of his boot stopped by something solid under his feet. His other foot moved forward to compensate for the weight shift, found its path blocked as well, and momentum carried his body forward. Cross dropped the knife, falling forward over the large object and landing hard on the soft dirt.

  He turned immediately, coughing once into the dirt when his nostrils registered the shit-heavy stench of the body. The image coming from his left eye was blurred, tunneled and without detail. But his right eye saw enough for him to recognize the familiar features of Yolanda: her eyes open, the wrinkles of her soft neck tattooed with a dark cut caused by something thin and wiry, her pale cracked lips parted to allow for a small trail of drool to run down the laugh line on her right cheek.

  Cross turned away, not allowing his right eye to take in more of the details. He used both hands to search for the knife, his fingers dancing over the dirt like a skilled pianist over ivory keys, not caring what minor cuts they may endure if it meant having the cold steel back in his hands.

  “Cross!” Maria’s scream penetrated the home’s thin layer of brick. “Cross, please!”

  Cross’s fingers fumbled for the wooden hilt of the knife. He grabbed it, pulling himself to his feet and pushing off in the direction of the shadow, his heart beating violently against his chest. He made his way closer to the clump of cacti where his good eye had spotted the dark man-shaped shadow and fell to his knees, searching for footprints. His right eye picked up a fresh set on the dry ground, long shoe prints that led north, occasionally disrupted and thinned by the harder patches of ground, but they were there.

  Morrissey.

  Cross broke into a run, stopping a few paces ahead to check the ground again, only to find the footsteps had veered left to avoid a cluster of cacti. He continued again, keeping his head down and risking collision with a cactus so he could let his right eye follow the prints and trusting Morrissey to avoid the cacti.

  “It has to be him,” he said through raspy breaths. He looked up, certain of where the footsteps were leading—the North Star was above him. Morrissey was heading north, returning to Purgatory before the sun could rise.

  The images of the church haunted his mind’s eye. Images of Morrissey standing in front of the altar in place of Father Aaron, preaching to the dedicated and then Cross’s imagination took over, and he imagined the murderer washing his bloody hands in holy water, diluting it while he continued preaching. Every instinct in his body told Cross to turn left, to turn right, to search the darkness because there was danger, there was danger all around him and he was ignoring it.

  “It has to be him,” he whispered between dry breaths.

  Another hundred yards and his mind forced him to pay attention to his body once again. The rhythmic tap-tapping against his left leg had become a bourdon that was creating a very real sore on his skin. He paused briefly enough to glance down and realize he still had the bottle of water strapped to his belt loop. He stopped and snapped the string from the loop—immediately, he became aware of the dry cotton taste against his gums, the hollowing pain in his sto
mach. He opened the bottle and drank quickly from it, emptying it and tossing it next to one of the smaller cacti nearby. His good eye took in the rest of the scenery, and he realized now that the trail of footprints was no longer heading directly north. Instead, they zig-zagged between the cacti, which spanned in every direction, every size, and shape, littering the landscape like a forest of sapling pines.

  Farther ahead, he saw the shadow. It was near the horizon, which was broken in half by two large hills that blotted out the backdrop of stars. The shadow was climbing the smaller of the two hills, struggling under the soft dirt but moving quickly. Cross watched it disappear over the other side of the crest, noting the location before returning his attention to the maze of cacti.

  He moved as quickly as his eyes would allow, skirting between the cacti with as much finesse as his boots permitted, looking ahead as far as his tunnel vision could provide. The water in his stomach churned with each step, forcing a portion back into his esophagus. He swallowed, slowing his breaths and trying to convince himself that he had truly seen a shadow in the darkness.

  The image of Gabriel Morrissey—the last clear image he could remember—burned inside his mind’s eye. That smile, the sick half-crescent tucked between two thin white lips. The scar, running down his cheek, taunting curious bystanders, daring them to look, to stare, to question where it came from. What could have caused that scar? What sins had he committed to warrant such a penance?

  Twenty yards before the foot of the hill, Cross stumbled, stopped short in his tracks, the skin along the right side of his stomach cut open. Warm blood soaked through his shirt. His body fell back, and the thirsty dirt between the vague blades of grass and budding cacti soaked up the wetness. He clutched his sticky wet side, blinking hard and then closing his left eye so he could see the barbed-wire fence standing in front of him. A piece of his shirt remained stuck on one of the barbs. Carefully, he stood up and felt his way to the fence, pricking his open palm on one of the barbs. He tucked his body between the wires and crossed back into the United States.