Through the In Between, Hell Awaits

by Robert Essig

  This was different.

  Rich hadn’t a care in his mind. The domineering wrath he constantly felt in his mind from his father’s nagging was gone, and hopefully, forgotten forever. His fears and worries were gone. Everything was gone except the woman lying at his feet right now in this moment.

  Sometimes people “snap” and commit atrocities and sometimes people dream of atrocity and relish in every bit of their madness. Rich was somewhere in the middle, but when he lurched over to the woman’s body it was more akin to the act of snapping. When his fingers grabbed her neck and yanked until the flesh ripped and her red life force spilled out, he felt like a shark attacking with eyes drawn in the back of its head. His teeth gritted and his hands fingered her larynx and arteries and ripped them in a wash of gushing blood that diminished as her heart stopped beating. She didn’t scream when death came over her, but Rich wasn’t in it for the screams.

  He knew what Jeanie wanted of him, so he ripped her shirt off. He didn’t even remove her bra. His passions for the woman were not sexual. Rich grabbed the flesh of her stomach and dug his fingernails in as deep as he could. Once he had leverage he pulled. The sound of her flesh ripping was like a melody in his ears, and with a little elbow grease he had gained entry into her abdomen.

  “That’s enough,” said Jeanie. “Don’t ruin the entrails.”

  Rich’s head rose from the massacre. During his brutality against the dead woman’s body, he had felt alive perhaps for the first time in his life. He had felt like some kind of god, and then he saw something that bent reality, sending him into a state of awe. Jeanie stood so tall she had to hunch down to avoid hitting the ceiling. She had transformed into her natural state.

  It wasn’t so much that Rich feared her, but that he hadn’t quite seen her in such a revealing light. Her gray twisted flesh looked painful, as if her muscles had been tied in knots, and he couldn’t tell anything from the look on her gnarled face. He just hoped she was pleased with him.

  The voice that came from the monstrous beast was high in pitch yet rough like that of an ancient being, which she very well may be. Rich really had no idea. She said, “I will feed first, then you will have your chance to taste life itself.”

  Rich nodded and stepped back to allow Jeanie space. He watched as she used her giant hands to gather tubes of intestine and various organs shoveling them into her vicious maw, ferociously tearing and swallowing the remains.

  It was messy, and the room stank of blood and desolation. The blank look on Rich’s face was replaced with a glare like a sicko using binoculars to spy on his neighbor undressing. He watched as Jeanie stood from the mess and began to transform back into the rock slut. Her eyes remained like mercury and Rich could see the graying flesh beneath the pale, the way he had in the alleyway the other night.

  “It’s your turn, Rich. Do you have what it takes?”

  Rich held his gaze with her mysterious eyes, and rather than respond vocally he stepped toward the stinking mess on the floor, knelt before it, his knees becoming wet with blood, and dug his already bloodied hands into the viscera, warm and wet and indistinguishable. Mimicking Jeanie he took handfuls of bloody muck and shoveled it into his mouth like a champion speed eater. It tasted awful, but Rich managed to beat the gag reflex in his furious show of gratitude toward Jeanie. Hardly chewing, he swallowed the tough chunks of liver and kidney and intestine until his stomach was full. Only then did he manage a step backward and take a breath. Each breath tasted heavily of copper and iron and vitality.

  After a moment’s silence Jeanie said, “I’m proud of you.”

  Rich nodded. Before him was someone that had been alive and died at his hands, something that now looked like it had fallen on a landmine. He was full. He’d never felt this full in his entire life, not only literally but spiritually as well. In a life that had lacked so much, he had felt empty much of the time with nothing to believe in, nothing tangible.

  Now he had something.

  “We’re going to leave here soon,” said Jeanie, “So why don’t we have a seat. You can wash up a bit if you like. You’re going to have to anyway, but I wouldn’t worry about DNA. After tomorrow what you see in the mirror today will be but a shell that you will peel away. Tomorrow you can be anything you want to be. Rich be damned.”

  Jeanie took a seat on one of the couches in the living room. Rich wasn’t sure what to do. Uncertainty still dwelled inside, but he found that subduing those pesky emotions was much easier than it had been when he was just another sheep in the back of the pack.

  Rich used the bathroom to wash up. There was no way he would be able to leave the motel looking the way he did. Jeanie didn’t need to. It was as if her entire get up as a rock slut and the transformation from her bestial state had absorbed or somehow gotten rid of the blood that had coated her face and hands after she fed.

  “Tomorrow is going to be different,” said Jeanie. “Death Fraud is off for three days before the next show in San Francisco. But they’re not going to make it there. Tomorrow we’re going to kill Dano Grue and you are going to become a sentinel.”

  Rich emerged from the bathroom with pink smears on his face. “A sentinel?”

  “Yes. I am a sentinel, though my tribe long ago turned on those we were protecting for the sake of our own freedom.”

  “You belong to a tribe? What kind of tribe?”

  “I left them in the other realm many years ago. We’re going to construct our own tribe. You see, my old tribe would like nothing more than to decorate the walls of Hell with my blood. They look for me, but I cover my tracks very well. Once we have a tribe established we are going to destroy them so we can truly be free on Earth and our realm.”

  “Your realm? Is that Hell? Are you a demon from Hell?” Voicing such a question sounded ludicrous, but right about now everything was ludicrous.

  “Not quite. As I said before, I am a sentinel. My purpose used to be to watch over the infantile demons in the realm between Earth and Hell—the In Between—as they incubated into adulthood and made the journey to the land of Satan, commonly referred to on Earth as Hell.

  “But, things became fucked up and we decided not to protect the demons any longer. They do alright for themselves, or so they did when I was still a part of the tribe of sentinels.”

  Rich used a wet towel to wipe his arms and face clean as he asked questions and listened to Jeanie’s story.

  “What were you protecting them from?”

  “Even demons have predators. In the between realm there isn’t much. It’s a land of incubation and preparation for Hell, but spirits have slipped through, even mortals, and when they do, strange things happen. They become mutated and hungry and the longer they roam the In Between, the more mutated and vicious they become. The incubating and youthful demons are helpless against them. That’s what we protected them from, but things became twisted, as they often do. When the young demons turned into youths just before making the journey to Hell, much like a salmon journeys upstream to lay eggs, they began to think we were their servants. We couldn’t have that, so we broke our deal with Satan and made the littler demons suffer for the way they treated us. If you were to walk through the In Between today, you would see them tied to posts at the crossroads. The years of beatings and rape by the sentinels and the mutated spirits and mortals have left the poor bastards ruined and wishing for death, if a mutant hasn’t devoured them yet. Death is something to strive for in the In Between, and is not easily obtainable.”

  Rich remained silent as he took it all in. It was a lot to lay on a man’s mind at one time.

  “Enough chitchat,” said Jeanie. “We’ve got to get out of here. I have something I have to do. You will have to find a place to stay for the night. Tomorrow I will be in touch and let you know where we will meet for your becoming. I will provide Dano Grue. Now go, and be sure to take the back door.”

  “How will you know where I am?”

  “You’ll take one of my minions again.” Jeanie poin
ted to the bloody mass on the ground. It was crawling with the menial translucent demons swimming through pools of dead woman for the bits of her soul that had remained in the body after death.

  “Go head,” said Jeanie, “take one.”

  Rich knelt as close to the body as he could without soaking his knees again. One of the demons crawled across the blood-soiled carpet to his outstretched hand and climbed on it like an eager tarantula. As it made its way up his arm, it dissolved into his flesh painlessly and nestled at the base of his spine where it could slowly feed on his soul until Jeanie telepathically alerted it to action.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Rich.

  “Remember that you will be transformed tomorrow. You don’t have to fear anymore, Rich. You are becoming.”

  Rich nodded. There was only a sprinkle of uncertainty in his eyes.

  13

  It was easy for Dano Grue to get chicks. They practically threw themselves at him after the shows. He joked that he was going to have to start carrying bitch repellent to keep them off.

  Yeah, it was true, but the women who came to Death Fraud shows and hung around afterward were usually dogs. Some were old as hell, such as Jeanie, who had been around the rock n’ roll block a time or twelve, and then there were the young ones (Dano’s specialty) who wore too much makeup to cover the pockmarks from their ravenous drug habits. They always put out, and lately Dano was putting them out.

  Which was the case with Julie Bauerhaus. Dano fucked her seven ways to Tuesday and then he slit her throat and drank the gusher of blood that spewed from her neck. It was fucking beautiful and he was so high on crystal and booze that he just bathed in it like a goddamn baptism in reverse for his satanic majesty. Dano laughed at the dead woman in her final moments, laughed and drowned in her glorious crimson flow. And when the flow of blood had finally receded, he smoked the rest of her dope and got lost in a fugue of meddling with her corpse. He couldn’t quite remember what he did with her, but when he came to, he was naked, his pubic hair matted with dried blood, and her body was crooked over the bed in an obscene way that left little to the imagination.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Everything flashed through Dano’s mind: the drug stupor and the dead woman, Death Fraud, their latest single making the top 100 for the first time, the thick matting of blood on his pubic area, the acid he had taken before the show, the headache that had settled in.

  The knocking again.

  It wasn’t insistent but well on the way.

  Paranoia hit Dano like a small animal that wandered onto a NASCAR racetrack. Slowly he stepped away from the bloodstained couch. The carpet was sticky and felt sick beneath his bare feet. The odor in the room was terrible.

  Another knock.

  Dano made his way to the door and looked through the peephole fearing the worst. There had been some investigation lately concerning missing persons who had been last seen at Death Fraud shows and he had become worried that the law was watching him, and here he was caked in black dried blood and gore. He would have to play possum if it was the men in blue on the other side of the door.

  It wasn’t the cops. It was Jeanie.

  He was still reluctant, but he opened the door for her. She was the only one who would understand the massacre in his hotel room.

  ***

  “But the hotel room in under my name,” said Dano. He was half into hysterics and on the verge of crying. It was pitiful to watch, and made Jeanie’s stomach turn. She would have liked to kill him right then and there, just to not have to see him again.

  “It’s doesn’t matter, Dano. Remember what I promised you? About you becoming a sentinel?”

  There was a tiny gleam in Dano’s eyes. He was fucked. There was no getting out of this one. In the past few weeks, he’d killed girls from his shows using extreme caution and making sure to cover his tracks. This time he secretly got his own hotel room away from the band and their crew for the sake of anonymity, but he put it under his real name like some damn fool and now he was up a shit-creek without a paddle.

  “Yes, I remember. I’m very good at eating human flesh.”

  “Yes, that’s apparent. You will have to give up your part as Dano Grue. After tomorrow night, Dano will be a thing of the past. This—” Jeanie scanned the room, “—massacre will be the last thing Dano Grue will ever do before dropping off the face of the planet.”

  Dano sat on a char that somehow managed to remain free of blood spatter. After a good hot shower he was clean and wearing a bathrobe. He listened to Jeanie and sipped a vodka on the rocks. The worry in his eyes transcended his former lust and passion for the act of killing the miscellaneous girl from the show whose name he had never learned.

  “I have to give up the band?”

  Jeanie nodded.

  “But we’re just taking off. Our latest single made the Billboard top 100. Do you know how hard that is for a band like Death Fraud? Almost impossible. I can’t leave the band now.”

  Sitting across from Dano, Jeanie’s eyes were scolding, her lips pursed tight. “What about this. You think you can get away with what you did here? You’re a fucking maniac, Dano, a fucking murderer of the lowest order. Not only did you kill that girl, but you fucked her corpse and only the devils know what else you did to her body after she died. You’ll be sentenced to death if you’re lucky, and even then you’ll spend your life in a penitentiary and be lucky if you don’t get sodomized on a regular basis.”

  Dano’s eyes were vacant. He was weak and Jeanie knew it. His domination and killing of young women was the method in which he gained power outside of the roaring crowds night after night. By Jeanie’s design, he’d become troubled. Everything was crumbling, just as Jeanie had hoped.

  “I fucked up, Jeanie.”

  “Yes. You did. But that’s not the end. We’re going to go to a cabin tonight in the Sierras. You can stay there in case the police get wind about this hotel room. Tomorrow night will be your becoming. After that, Dano Grue will be another fugitive the authorities will never find.”

  Dano sighed as he nodded his head.

  14

  Austin found himself in his hotel room again. He’d had a few beers at a pub just off the strip where he had spent a substantial amount of time in the past. The place was the same as it had always been, and his life was the same as well. Same ole shit, different day.

  But that wasn’t altogether true. The parasite, for instance, was something very out of the ordinary. Meeting girls like Audrey happened from time to time, though she seemed to be something special. The pubs and bars were all the same and the hotel was a constant reminder that he was feeling bored, which in turn caused him to feel as though his life was being wasted. He’d often wondered if he should have finished college or even followed in his father’s footsteps. His old man wanted him to take over the Wheeler hotel chain, but how the hell could he without an education? He forced himself into the school of hard knocks and what has it gotten him? Anything at all?

  Yes, there were plenty of good times on the road, but the good comes with the bad, and right now Austin found himself obsessing over the woman from the alley. He’d seen her again and the look in her eyes was as if she knew something about him. As if she had seen him watching her in the alley and placed some sort of curse on him, not that Austin believed in curses. There was something in her eyes that haunted him.

  However relieved he was about the parasite evacuating his body, Austin felt the intense urge to seek the woman out. He wanted to find out what the parasite was and how she was connected to it. He also felt it his duty to make sure she wasn’t some kind of serial killer. If he could locate her, he could call the police anonymously in regards to the murder in San Diego.

  After another airline bottle of vodka, Austin began to plot a new way of life. He had to get the crazy eyed woman from the Whiskey out of his mind and focus on what was next. This whole adventure in search of the murderess of whom he’d been connected to through the parasite w
as just another experience for Austin to get caught up in to allow him to forget about everything that was lacking in his life. As long as he was doing something beyond merely traveling, he felt some semblance of success, if only momentarily.

  The pain in his neck was gone. Just as soon as the parasite fled, the pain ceased. He had expected it to linger for a while, but it was as if there hadn’t even been anything nestled beneath his skin at the base of skull. It didn’t even leave any evidence of ever having been there, as if it somehow disintegrated and then reintegrated on the outside of his flesh.

  There he was thinking about it again. Damn it!

  What about Audrey? What about her? He had regarded her as a pest when he left the hotel and practically had her taken away by the police to get her away from him. If he ran into her again it would be a miracle if she didn’t slap him in the face.

  He had to forget her. She was just a woman he gave a ride to. Nothing more. Likewise, the woman in leather who murdered a man in front of his watching eyes was nothing to him. Yet he couldn’t stop thinking about either of them.

  The women in my life . . . for now at least.

  Austin had women in his life from time to time but they never meant all that much to him. Brandy, his Venice Beach fraud, was the last woman he allowed to get too close to him. All the others in the time since were merely one-night stands or small town flings. Before Brandy was his nanny Gale. He had a special place in his heart for her. She was the one who raised him while his parents wined and dined their way across the world like selfish pigs. Gale was a good woman. Austin never forgave himself for not being in town when she died. It was terminal cancer that spread quickly and took her fast. He was somewhere in the world and unable to be contacted when she was admitted into the hospital. He visited her grave a month after the funeral and wept.