Through the In Between, Hell Awaits

by Robert Essig

  Jeanie stood. She called her small army of soul snatchers. They emerged from her legs and ascended one by one, crawling into the knots of muscle that her body was constructed of, hiding within the hollows.

  In her natural state at nine feet tall, she towered over the men of Earth. Her skin was the color of old brains and dark clouds. Her body resembled the twisted roots of a swamp tree, each hand and foot ending in a series of vicious claws. Her head was something only dreamed of in nightmares, lined with curled horns and thorn-like protrusions. All of the sentinels were designed to ward off demons and predators when they had been protectors once upon a time ago. Demons themselves were ugly as sin, but sentinels were something else altogether, something evil feared.

  She willed herself back to her motel room where she took on the disguise of a tramp named Jeanie. She could feel the presence of her two impish warriors. They were close by. She was sure that they would be with her by the end of the Death Fraud show.

  Jeanie looked at herself in the mirror. She applied makeup, though she was careful not to make herself look too good. She had a bad reputation to live up to and doing too good a job on her makeup would bring too much attention to her. It would be difficult to do, considering the appearance she had chosen, but it was imperative that she look like shit. Sane men should laugh at how burnt-out she looked, or be scared that she would give them VD. She had to look so wretched that the only poor sods who would touch her with a ten-foot pole were the lowest, filthiest bastards of the bunch. These types rarely had anyone in their lives who gave a damn about them, which kept suspicions away town after town. The kind of shits she ate for dinner were the kind who OD’d under freeway overpasses or in moldy gutters, the type who choked on their own vomit or slit their wrists. The kind that wouldn’t be noticed missing after she killed them.

  The lipstick was red and smeared just slightly. Her eyes were very black with eyeliner, too much so. The eyelashes were fake and glopped with mascara, cheeks just a bit too bright with blush. Her hair was a rock n’ roll mess of tangles and too much hair spray, a throwback from two decades ago. Her dated appearance enhanced her trashy look just that much more.

  She looked like shit.

  Jeanie was ready to go to the show.

  11

  Austin found himself wandering Sunset Boulevard weaving in between drunk people, tourists, drug dealers, wannabes, and anyone or anything else you could imagine in a desolate city after dark. But he was mindless to his surroundings as anything more than a backdrop for something he couldn’t understand. The pull of the thing that was nestled at the base of his spine was voracious and magnetic. At times he almost ran into people when he turned his head in a direction the thing in his neck didn’t agree with. The pain was intense and shot through his skull into his brain like the flashes of the worst headache imaginable.

  The scene with Audrey was but an afterthought. It almost seemed as though it had never happened at all, but it was for the best. Far too much was going on for her to tag along. She could be placed in danger and Austin didn’t want that. There was something between them that he would have liked to explore, but not with a parasite digging into the back of his skull.

  He walked on. In the distance, he could see the Whiskey, a popular venue for rock n’ roll shows, and somehow he knew that was his destination. As he came closer, it was as if he couldn’t even direct his eyes away from the Whiskey without feeling pain. Once, when Austin was but a boy, he had fallen out of a tree and hit his head on dry Texas ground. At the time, he had thought that the pain would never go away. It was horrible, and his mother wasn’t there to comfort him. It was his nanny who took him in her arms. That was the moment he swore off his parents. They would always be in his life, but he would never look at them the same. When he fell out of the tree that day, he had thought the pain was the worst ever. He had been but a child. The pain he felt when he diverted his gaze from the Whiskey was the worst yet.

  Outside the Whiskey were patrons and bums, long-hairs and junkies, sluts, and whores. Austin didn’t really fit the bill with his plain gray t-shirt, jeans, and shaggy hair amidst so much leather, ripped clothing, chains, and wild hairdos.

  Now that the thing was closer to whatever destination it was seeking out, Austin was only able to look at a disgusting tramp of a woman without pain racking his brain. He didn’t want to look at her, but seemed to have no choice. She was so burnt that she practically had a char to her. She was the kind of broad who’d been making the concert scene for the past decade or two and it showed. He didn’t want her to notice him looking, didn’t want her to think he was interested or something. There was also an element of fear in play. For all Austin knew she could have a biker boyfriend who would undoubtedly get all kinds of pissed off when his girl told him that there was a strange normal looking guy staring at her.

  But, as hard as he tried, Austin couldn’t look away. The parasite caused him tremendous pain as he did so, pain that began in his brain and then shoot through neurotransmitters through his entire body. He wanted to run away, to forget this strange phenomenon that he found himself victim to. At that point, had he a knife, Austin would have stabbed the back of his neck just to penetrate the little beast that was using him as a puppet, damned if he was going to allow something to be his ruler.

  But he was powerless to its influence and the pain it pressed upon him, and he looked again at the stain of a woman leaning against the wall behind the crowd of oddballs. This time she stared at him and her eyes seemed to look deep into his soul. At that moment, the music began to play inside, heavy and loud, and Austin’s breath was taken away as he finally realized that he recognized the woman from the alley the other night.

  His body rushed with waves of adrenalin. If he wanted to run before, he wanted to even more so when she returned his stare with one of her own, with eyes that seemed like liquid metal.

  Austin turned. Screw the pain! He had to get out of there. He’d seen what that woman was capable of and he wanted nothing to do with her, yet he was connected to her and he damn well knew it. The thing inside him was a part of her. It was what drew him to her, as it drew other people into her embrace, as if he was to be her next victim.

  Pain shot into Austin’s brain like daggers laced with gasoline. He couldn’t bear it for even a moment. His retreating feet took it upon themselves to stop and turn him back around, as if they knew that was the only way to alleviate the dilapidating pain that surged through his body.

  She was almost close enough to touch him. His eyes went wide and he knew she wanted to kill him, to eat him the way she did the man in the alley. He could see it in her flowing eyes, in the smile that played upon her lipstick-stained lips.

  Before Austin could flee, Jeanie rushed and grabbed him by the throat. In that instant, his senses were replaced with skies dark and cloudy, walls of stone and old timber, and a quiet that caused him to feel as if he’d lost his ability to hear. For but a moment, her touch had shown Austin another realm—her realm.

  And then it was over. The bright lights and boisterous ruckus of Hollywood flooded him, louder than ever. Jeanie’s hand left his throat, and for just a mere glimpse, he saw what he had seen in the alley. She towered over him with knotted gray flesh. The parasite rose to the surface of his flesh painlessly, leaping from his body and disappearing into the folds of her flesh, and then the huge gray monster was a woman again. Her eyes were brown rather than silver. She turned back to join the crowd of misfits as if nothing had happened.

  Austin stood there in disbelief, astonished. She had taken back the parasite, but he was too dumbfounded to avert his gaze to see if the pain would return.

  When Jeanie found her place in the rear of the crowd, she placed her back against the wall once again and her eyes found Austin. They were silver again—threatening.

  Austin turned and the pain was gone. He took to the street like a speed walker, all but running back to the Wheeler hotel without looking over his shoulder once to see if he was being f
ollowed.

  It was a great relief not to have that damned parasite in his body, but he didn’t feel quite as relieved as he hoped. In his lonely room, Austin lay on his bed calming his racing heart from the shock of what had happened. He had seen things in her presence, visions that weren’t a result of hallucinogenic drugs. She had shown him something extraordinary, something . . . unexplainable.

  Austin laid there in that mystical moment just as sleep asserted itself and reality blurred. There was so much to think about and then Austin could just trudge along to the next city, the next state, the next country.

  The next bar.

  But he couldn’t leave. With everything else there was another thought pressing on Austin’s mind.

  Tonight, someone was going to die.

  12

  The concert was great, as they always were, but Rich was far too preoccupied to pay much attention. Where Dano’s words had seemed prophetic only a night ago, tonight he couldn’t wait for the show to be done with so he could congregate with the normal band of misfits and losers outside where he would lure some unsuspecting floozy back to where? He wasn’t sure. Anywhere would be fine. Perhaps Jeanie would know, because she was going to have to be there. She had much to teach and Rich was more than willing to learn.

  But where is she?

  Rich had been so used to remaining in the background after the shows watching the junkies and whores that he didn’t feel comfortable to be overtly represented in their presence. He wasn’t one of them; never could be. Sure, they shared one thing in that they were all huge fans of Death Fraud, but that’s where the similarities ended.

  As the night went on and the band came out to sign autographs and take pictures, Rich began to blend in, at times actually trying to replicate the lingo of the tattooed head-bangers and slutty women.

  Finally, he saw Jeanie with her back against a wall off in the distance, which was unusual. But then again this was an unusual night and she was to take his usual place.

  Rich made eye contact and she shook her head from side to side very slightly indicating that he’d better not come over to her. With that gesture, he felt comforted in that she was watching over him and she would be there when he managed to find a helpless wreck of a woman as his prize. His sacrifice.

  Rich returned his attention to the thinning crowd of hangers-on. There was a really drunk girl who was probably in her twenties though she looked forty. She was making a fool of herself and beginning to get grunts of dissatisfaction from several of the concertgoers as well some of the people walking by.

  Rich had chosen his prey; he just had to make his move. And that’s where the problems began. He had always been the one watching, standing in the shadows unseen and unknown, and here he was supposed to get this nauseating slut to come with him. Sounded easy enough, but he was finding himself shying away from the task.

  And then he felt a tiny pressure on his neck. A glance showed him that the little impish demon that had burrowed into his body had reemerged, gripping his shoulder like a pirate’s parrot. It whispered into his ear in the voice of Jeanie, “Take her next door to the Midtown Motel, room fifteen. The door is open.”

  Rich wanted to risk a peek at Jeanie, but somehow he knew that she wouldn’t be leaning against the wall any longer. She was gone, electing to use the parasite to guide him.

  Rich nodded before taking confident steps toward the wasted woman. Some of the others hanging around looked at him as if they knew he was going to take advantage of her, yet no one stood up for her because they were relieved that someone was going to get her the fuck out of there. She’d already bumped into a guy and caused him to spill a brown paper bag of Old English all over his shirt, and then spilt the cup of whatever she was drinking onto another guy. Luckily, both of the men she spilled on hadn’t come with girlfriends or she would have been in trouble.

  Rich leaned in close and whispered something into her ear. She was all laughs and mumbling and then she said, “What?” real loud as if speaking loudly would encourage Rich to speak up.

  “It’s getting kinda dull out here,” said Rich. “You want to come back to my motel.”

  Her drooping bloodshot eyes and wrinkled eyebrows gave off a clear sense of confusion. “Wha? Back to your motel?”

  There was a bit of laughter in the crowd that very well could have been a result of Rich’s poorly executed come-on to Miss Lush, but it was probably his paranoid mind getting the better of him. It was so much easier to be in the shadows watching the fuck ups in their natural environment. Just about now, he felt like a slab of meat in a feeding frenzy. One wrong move and they could lose their heads and turn on him.

  “C’mon, baby. It’s just over here.”

  Rich grabbed her hand as if he were escorting her after a nice dinner party. He was out of the loop here, he had never actually lived the rock ‘n roll lifestyle like these nimrods and losers he was mingling with. He didn’t know the proper procedure when taking a slut back to a motel. Perhaps they were like cavemen and he should have thrown her on the ground and dragged her by the hair.

  She managed to slur out, “D’jew ave nee odka?”

  What a fucking mess! “Yes,” Rich assured her. “Plenty.”

  As he all but dragging his sacrificial lamb down the street, he feared that they had become a spectacle and that perhaps he had not chosen wisely. In his fear and acute awareness of how he must have looked in the lion’s den, he had forgotten about being as discreet as possible.

  He had also forgotten about the translucent demon on his shoulder until it spoke to him again. “Go around the block and enter through the back door. The crowd must not see you enter the motel with her.”

  “Yes, okay,” said Rich.

  “Whaaaat?” her drunken head lolled to the side. “Who you alking to?”

  “To you. We’re almost there.”

  Then her eyes fluttered and she looked at him and for a moment there was clarity. Her brow wrinkled in that way when someone is confused and she asked, “Who are you?”

  Rich smiled. “We met after the show, don’t you remember?”

  She laughed and nodded her head, but right about now she would be lucky to remember her name.

  It took a little while and he didn’t want to attract too much attention (which proved to be very difficult with a drunkard who was walking around on jellied legs) but they made it to the back of the motel and there was indeed a rear entrance. It was a filthy shit hole of a place with carpets that had a dark trail worn into the center where people tread. It hadn’t been vacuumed in days if not weeks. The walls were stained and fingerprinted. This place had seen its share of debauchery.

  Room 22. The door was indeed unlocked.

  Rich entered cautiously. There was that fear that he was walking into someone else’s room, but that dissipated as soon as he saw Jeanie sitting on a chair next to an old stationary desk.

  The drunk girl didn’t seem put off. She just asked, “Who’s she?”

  “Someone you should fell blessed to be in the presence of,” said Rich.

  “’s she a rocks star, sumpin?”

  “Better than that.”

  The little demon leapt from Rich’s shoulder and scurried across the floor to Jeanie. It latched onto her leg and disappeared. Rich could see Jeanie’s molten eyes, but nothing else of her strange interior.

  “There’s no use in wasting time, Rich,” said Jeanie. “Kill her.”

  The drunk woman’s slack eyes tried to open wide when she heard the command, but she was too tanked to properly respond. Many nights had ended up this way for her and she would wake feeling sore and wondering how many men she fucked or how many raped her the night before, but never had she heard the call to kill her.

  She tried in vain to put up a fight, but the fury that had been building within Rich for so many years had finally found its release as he belted her with all his might. His fist made contact with the right side of her face and she flew several feet before landing on the floor li
ke some floppy rag doll. Consciousness was but a thing of the past.

  Rich was elated. He had never belted anyone in the face like that, especially not a woman. He never would have considered such a thing in the past, but Jeanie made everything different. She brought the worst out of Rich in the best possible way. The smile on his face would turn stomachs, but he was becoming not only a new man, but a new being. He had lived his life fearing the consequences of his actions, not living up to the precedent set for him. His fear had been anger that was always turned inward. Now that he let his impulses flow, he felt better than ever.

  Jeanie was in her human form. Her eyes shined of swirling mercury as she watched the glee present in her protégé’s demeanor. His general willingness and pride in knocking the woman out pleased her.

  “You must kill her, anyway you like,” said Jeanie, “and then you must feast on her entrails. I want you to develop a taste for human flesh before I introduce you to my world. Do you still want to see my world, Rich?”

  “Oh yes. More than anything. I want to be your world.”

  She nodded. Rich could see the gray gnarled flesh peeking through her human veneer. She was shielding her true form, but he was so enamored that he could see through in ways normal mortals couldn’t.

  “Good. Now kill her. Prove to me that you are evil enough to share my world.”

  Rich took a deep breath. He remembered the time he first smoked pot when he was sixteen and how he looked at himself in the mirror in the bathroom while his friends were waiting for him. They had all smoked before and told him about the experience, but he was nervous and it seemed like such a big step. It was something that would disappoint his parents and shame him, but after a few deep breaths and some peer pressure, he puffed the magic dragon.