GARDENS OF NIGHT

by Greg F. Gifune

  The interior of the farmhouse doesn’t match the exterior, and he’s surprised to find himself standing in a large, rather formal front room that smells vaguely of cinnamon and burning wood. Candles glow in ornate holders positioned strategically throughout the room, thick gold curtains hang open in the windows, classic paintings fill the walls in bulky wooden frames, and the furniture – chairs, a sofa and various end tables – are all wildly dated, as is everything else. It’s as if Marc has crossed over into the 19th Century. He identifies the aroma of burning wood as flames crackle in a fireplace on the far wall, the room shielded from fire by a freestanding mesh screen positioned in front of a stone hearth. But the cinnamon smell remains a mystery. He moves about awkwardly for a moment, not entirely sure where or how to stand, his wet shoes squeaking on the hardwood floor.

  “Why don’t you sit by the fire and warm yourself,” Sarah says, motioning to the fireplace.

  “Are you hungry? Would you like some hot food or a warm drink?”

  “Where’s my wife?” he asks, looking around nervously.

  “She’s safe,” Sarah tells him through another smile. “Would you –”

  “Listen to me, sister – or whatever the hell you are – I need to see my wife right now, do you understand?” He wipes the rain from his face with the back of his sleeve. It’s so much warmer here, he thinks, somewhat stifling. In fact, is it rain he’s wiped away, or perspiration? “And my friend, I –”

  “He took a nasty bump on the head, but he’s going to be just fine,” she assures him pleasantly. “He and your wife are both resting quietly.”

  “Fine, then take me to them.”

  But for the sounds of their voices and the occasional snap of the fire, the farmhouse seems oddly quiet. On cue, heavy rain sprays the windows and a booming crack of thunder explodes overhead. Marc tries to see behind the nun to a narrow hallway just off the front room. She looks behind her, as if to see what he’s looking at, then turns back to him with a benign but puzzled expression.

  The heat quickly becomes overpowering. Marc sweats profusely, and the lightheadedness he experienced earlier returns. He feels sick to his stomach as well. Does he need his medication? Is this simply another of his anxiety attacks? Or is there something more here, something purposeful causing this reaction in him? Either way, he’s running out of time, and knows it. “I need you to take me to Brooke and Spaulding,” he says evenly. “Now.”

  Sarah watches him, her irritating smile still in place. “First, you must rest.”

  The universe has fallen silent. Marc hears only trivial sounds anyone else would in such a setting. Has he been abandoned? Or is nothing else here truly alive?

  “Listen to me,” he says, or tries to say, his mouth thick, tongue heavy. Suddenly the room tilts like a carnival ride. He reaches for something to grab hold of but it’s too late. His legs buckle and the floor rushes up to greet him.

  Just before darkness claims him, a voice – one he’s heard before in the desperate madness and lonely isolation of his hospital room – speaks.

  The night nurse…

  “Take him down,” her sultry voice commands. “Take him down to the catacombs.”

  Eleven

  He remembers waves of dizziness washing over him again and again and then a deep and frightening silence. The chilling silence of the grave. He imagines shaking his head to clear it but has no real sense of physical self, like he’s suspended and dangling helplessly between consciousness and dreams.

  Then I’m dreaming, is that it? Is it that simple?

  No, because there’s motion. Motion he can feel. His world is moving, rocking and bobbing as if he’s lying atop a raft in open water. His eyes open. Above him, endless blue sky…but in the distance storm clouds are gathering, black and evil and full of hate. He sees, hears – feels – the ocean around him. He can smell it as a gentle breeze filters past and he struggles up into a sitting position. Not a raft but a small, time and weather-ravaged boat.

  And he is not alone.

  An older man, hunched and obviously suffering from some sort of degenerative spinal disease, stands in the rear of the skiff, steering and paddling a battered wooden oar with gnarled hands. Dressed in a dark hooded cloak, his features are craggy and one eye is covered with a black leather patch. The other, bloodshot and dark, is distended, causing it to bulge abnormally, as if the eyeball might pop free of the socket at any moment. The man’s nose is hooked and sagging with age, his mouth thin-lipped and speckled with tiny scars.

  Marc looks to the horizon. They are headed directly into the coming storm.

  “Where are we going?” he asks.

  The man’s only response is a crooked, toothless smile. But there is no humor behind it, only hatred the likes of which Marc has experienced only once before…in himself.

  Marc feels tired – drugged – and is unable to shake it. He tries to get to his feet but can’t. His heart is racing and the smell of the ocean is overpowering. Yet somewhere nearby there is safety, there is God. The whales…

  He closes his eyes. Their songs come to him, sadly beautiful, and like him, chained to realities they can never escape. No one, nothing is free.

  Sleep, they tell him. Sleep, Victim Soul.

  And he does.

  Later, he awakes. The boat has come ashore and lies in wet sand. The shrouded man is gone, his old oar lying in the back of the boat. Marc rolls onto his hands and knees then struggles to his feet. The wind has picked up, night has crept closer and the storm clouds have grown stronger, blackening the sky as they roll in over the heavens. But for a pair of tattered denim shorts, he is nude. Shivering, he climbs out of the boat and stumbles along until he reaches dry sand. The tall grass on a nearby dune catches his attention as it dances in the wind. He looks around. The beach is deserted. Or so it seems.

  The whale songs are mere whispers now, legends at the edge of his consciousness, drifting in and out, in synch with the rhythm of ocean lapping shoreline. Marc trudges up a slight embankment to the dune, his feet sinking in the soft sand. The mounting sea winds push him along.

  There, in the tall grass, on hands and knees, is Brooke, wearing a startling red bikini he didn’t know she had. She frantically buries scraps of bloody clothing and other items in the sand, working furiously and looking back over her shoulder every few seconds. It isn’t until he is nearly upon her that Marc realizes that it is body parts she is burying – severed arms and legs, hands and feet – and by her own feet, a human head caked in blood and bile, eyes gouged out, mouth frozen in a twisted grimace of agony.

  He stops, tries to look away but cannot. Instead his eyes fill then spill free with tears as he retreats, nearly falling as he slides back down the side of the dune toward the ocean. “Stop,” he whispers, barely able to see her now through the swaying grass. “Stop it.”

  Swept into a cyclone of madness, he runs for the ocean.

  “It’s all an experiment,” a hollow, disembodied voice tells him. “That’s what you are, what this life is, this world and the hideous things Man endures. It’s all a celestial experiment gone horribly wrong. And someone has to absorb the sin and pain so that others might survive. You, Marcus. You. Find joy in the suffering, as the prophets did, as all Victim Souls do. Embrace transcendence through violence, cleansing through bloodshed. You’ve chosen this path, Marcus, it belongs to you.”

  He’d been running for the ocean… hadn’t he?

  Inside now, where it’s warm and quiet, he is led by Brooke across a candlelit room to a bed, her arm around his waist as she guides him. He can feel her bare flesh against his, damp and sprinkled with tiny grains of beach sand, the coarseness tickling his skin. “Sleep,” she whispers. “You need to sleep.”

  “We have to get out of here,” he says, voice garbled. Why do I sound like that, why – why can’t I speak without slurring? “What have they done to me?”

  She lays him down on the bed and although he doesn’t want to, he obeys submissively, allowing her
to position him there on his back lifelessly. “What you need is a good night’s sleep, Marc. Sleep now, OK?”

  Brooke takes off his shorts, leaving him nude and exposed on the bed.

  “Why – don’t – why are you taking my clothes off?”

  “You’ll be more comfortable this way.”

  I don’t want to be here I want to leave, where – where are my clothes – why can’t I move, I want to get up why can’t I get up I – Brooke, you – that’s – that’s not Brooke, that’s not my wife – what are you, what – you’re not my wife you’re not my wife!

  He realizes then that the bikini he thought she was wearing is in fact painted on…in blood…

  She smiles seductively, running her fingers through the blood, smearing it across the rest of her body. “Yggdrasil,” she pants, “it’s dying. It needs you, Victim Soul. Water and fire are the keys. They are life. They are passage.”

  This is a nightmare, I – I’m dreaming – this isn’t real, that’s not Brooke, I –

  Something moves in the corner. Marc’s head lolls to the side.

  Two eyeless men, whose souls have become forever entwined with his, stand in shadows. They’re bleeding, their faces battered and horribly misshapen.

  “Absorb the sin,” she whispers, head thrown back in ecstasy as her hands move furiously between her legs. “Assume the pain, the suffering and the sin. So others might live, swallow it all and spit back wrath. Be the hammer of fate.”

  Back on the sand, Marc walks toward the ocean on an otherwise calm and bright moonlit night. There is no chaos, not anymore, as he stops near the waterline, removes his clothes and looks up at the stars. In their brilliance, he remembers earlier days, long ago but never forgotten; sees the beauty, the love and wonder in the breathtaking eyes of the woman he loves, the way she looked at him with such uninhibited hope and joy whenever they danced and held each other tight. Be it in a formal setting or just playing, it never mattered, the feeling was the same. What he wouldn’t give to see that look in Brooke’s eyes just once more. But even in dreams, even in the torment of his devastated soul, he knows it will never happen. They are moments captured in time, like photographs, something relegated to the past that one can see but never truly replicate again. It is dead. Gone. Murdered.

  Through the blur of tears he gazes out at the ocean.

  If Brooke were with me, he thinks, she’d hold my hand right now, and together, we’d go swimming. We’d cling to each other, and looking into each other’s eyes, let the waves carry us from shore. Nothing else would matter…only this moment…only us…because we’d be safe in each other’s love.

  But not this time, my love. Sleep.

  * * * *

  Marc comes awake in a small room. His first visions are of a ceiling cracked and stained with watermarks. The residue of nightmare clings to him with good reason, as he lies on a similar (if not the same) bed in the same small candlelit room found in his dream. Only this time he is alone. He rolls from the bed, feet finding floor as his head clears and his surroundings come into clearer focus.

  A mild headache has settled in his temples, his clothes are still damp from rain and perspiration, his scraped palms throb with pain and his entire body aches, but he seems otherwise unharmed. Except for the bed and a small table against one wall where a candle burns in an antique holder, the room is barren, with a low ceiling, a cement floor and close, empty walls that create a boxlike, claustrophobic feel. There is only one way in or out, through a heavy wooden door on the far wall. Marc rushes to it, tries to push then pull it open but the door has been locked from the outside.

  Frantically, he smashes at it with the flat of his hand, ignoring the spikes of pain shooting through his palm with each blow. “Let me out of here!” he screams, his voice unusually hoarse and deep. “Goddamn it! Let me out! ”

  Several minutes come and go before he hears movement beyond the door, followed by the sound of someone throwing back a deadbolt.

  Unsure of what’s coming, Marc looks around the room for something – anything – he might use as a weapon, and chooses the candle. Scooping it up he holds it out in front of him at the ready as the door swings open with a loud creak. Through the flame, he sees Sarah in the doorway holding a tray on which a wooden bowl of thick stew sits steaming.

  “You’re awake,” she says with a pleasant smile. “How are you feeling?”

  “What did you do to me?”

  “You’re exhausted, you need rest.” She raises the tray as if to remind him she’s holding it. “I’ve got some hot food for you and –”

  “I don’t want your food!” he snaps. “Where’s my wife?”

  Sarah blinks at him innocently, her pale skin flushed in embarrassment. “I wish you wouldn’t raise your voice like that. I’m only trying to help you.”

  “No, you’re not.” He moves out of the way and motions for her to come into the room. As she does, he steps into the doorway and takes a quick peek down the dimly lit hallway, which is actually a stone tunnel of sorts, arched and dark, the floor tightly-packed dirt. He turns back to the nun. “Put that down.”

  She places the tray on the small table and backs away, hands held down in front of her, fingers entwined.

  “Where am I?”

  “The catacombs.”

  “Below the farmhouse?”

  She nods.

  “Who are you?” He moves closer.

  “Sister Sarah.”

  “This is no longer a convent,” he reminds her. “The old man outside told me it hasn’t been in years. So I’m going to ask you again, sister, who are you?”

  Her lovely green eyes watch him cautiously. “Some of us are still here.”

  “From the order?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “Thirteen, including myself… but… I’m usually kept apart from the others.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not like them.”

  “What are they like?”

  She answers in whisper. “Evil.”

  “And you’re not?”

  Looking as if his accusation has mortally wounded her, Sarah shakes her head in the negative.

  “If the nuns here were slaughtered decades ago,” Marc asks, subtly pushing the candle closer to her, “how is any of this possible?”

  “Nearly anything is possible here.”

  “And the other sisters here? The three?”

  “Urd… Verdandi… Skuld… fate… necessity… being…”

  “Who are they?”

  “The past… the present… the future.” She bows her head as if in sudden prayer. “We serve them.”

  “You and the rest of the remaining nuns?”

  “Yes. As do all living things.”

  “Nuns are supposed to serve God.”

  She raises her eyes. “They are God.”

  A shudder quakes through him. The candle wavers, casting shadows along the wall. “What do they want with me?”

  She motions for him to close the door and then raises a finger to her lips.

  Marc does as she asks, then stands with his back against it.

  “Yggdrasil, it’s dying.”

  He raises a questioning eyebrow.

  “The large tree you saw outside near the wells, it’s dying. It has many names in many different cultures, and has grown in the soil of nearly every corner of the globe. It is the literal Tree of Life, and if it dies, everything else dies with it.”

  “Including the three sisters?”

  “All living things. Nothing is truly immortal. Everything has an end. But they can slow it down and prevent its death for now, through the water they draw from those wells. The liquid is magical. It stops the decay. But the wells are nearly dry, and as the fate of living things draws nearer, they must cleanse the darkness that draws us all toward death. They need a Victim Soul. A devout person chosen by God to absorb the pain and suffering of others, the Victim Soul accepts his or her role selflessly so that others mig
ht live. They need a Victim Soul now more than ever. They need you.”

  “Devout in the religious sense?”

  “Not necessarily, just someone devoted to their efforts… and God’s.”

  “I’m not devoted to God’s efforts.”

  “You are. You just don’t realize it.”

  “I’m not a holy man.” The candle begins to shake in his grasp. “I’ve experienced horribly violent things.”

  “God is violence, Marcus. His angels are violence. Violence is simply the expression of His wrath. In that devotion to your task, your violence, you absorb your sins and the sins of others. You become their suffering, through the violence inflicted by you, others, Man and God. And in that suffering you find transcendence… deliverance not only for yourself but others. You become the hammer of fate.”

  “No,” he says, emotion strangling him. “God is love. I – we – are violence. Man is violence.”

  “Do you see? Even in your suffering, your faith lives and you serve Him.”

  “The Three Sisters… what do they want to do to me?”

  She looks to the floor.

  “Sarah, tell me. What, exactly, do they need from me?”

  “All that is inside you.”

  “I can’t survive it, can I?” he asks, though it’s not truly a question.

  “No,” she says softly. “The blood in your veins is the blood of a martyr.”

  “This is fucking madness,” he says, choking back equal parts sorrow and rage. “I’m completely insane. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “One has nothing to do with the other.”

  With his free hand, Marc angrily wipes the tears from his eyes. “Where the hell’s my wife? Where’s Brooke? Where’s Spaulding?”

  “I can take you to them, but we have to be careful.”

  He thrusts the flame at her. “Do it.”

  Reluctantly, Sarah takes the candle, and with a slight nod, leads him into the labyrinth of catacombs.

  Twelve

  And then, God. Dreaming. Like His creation Nero, the emperor who had countless subjects executed, including his own mother, and fiddled while Rome burned, He sleeps while Man wreaks havoc. But unlike Nero, neither neglect nor tyranny is the culprit. Instead, it is love. His is the weary sleep of an exhausted parent, the slumber of escape, of hope that when He awakens all He has created will finally understand what has been set before them. And while he sleeps, the rats run. Unseen things come alive; the magic of vanquished gods return and the world becomes fairytale, myth, a landscape of mayhem and martyrs, saints and sinners. All of it true and all of it lies. Everything, he thinks, and nothing…