At the Gates of Madness

by Shaun Meeks

  “I will see you soon. I love you both.”

  Downey followed Steve’s gaze, forgetting the pain for a moment, and saw nothing but the walls and the space of the empty warehouse. Steve continued to talk to the empty room and Downey felt that the guy was crazier than maybe even he was himself, and if that was true, then there was little to no hope that he would get out of this in one piece. He looked at both of his wrists, dark blood bubbling from where the rusted looking metal was driven into his skin and tested how secure he was pinned down, but quickly stopped as white hot pain shot up his arms like he had never felt before.

  Steve turned his attention back to Downey, tears pooled in his eyes, but a smile on his face. He sat the hammer down, knowing that the killer wasn’t going anywhere, the looked directly into his face.

  “Why are you doing this? Please, just let me go. You know the police are looking for me.”

  “And they’ll find you soon enough, but not before I am done with you.”

  “But why? What the hell is your problem?”

  “You’re my problem. You took the only two things that have ever mattered in my life from me and you need to pay for that. You took Amy and Alden from me, and I have to make you feel the same pain that they did.”

  “Please man, Jesus Christ, don’t fucking do this. I’m not well, I’m sick in the head. I have problems, so just stop this and let the cops deal with me. Please.”

  “Don’t you dare fucking plead with me.” Steve reached close to him and pulled a bag towards where he knelt. “Do you know what you did? Do you how you didn’t just kill someone woman and her child, you killed my wife and my son. You took them from me, leaving them destroyed and exposed, humiliated and naked. You left them for others to find and stare at, to take photos of and to be remembered in that way. Do you know that I go to bed every night seeing their bodies the way you left them? The police brought me the photos to look at, thinking I was a suspect at first, and I see them like that every day, thinking about how many others have seen them like that. I hate you like I have never hated anyone before in my life. I want you to know what real pain is, what fear is. I don’t just want you to suffer, I want so much more than that.”

  “Is that why you’re doing this? Because you hate me and want to get revenge for what I did?”

  “This has nothing to do with me. It’s for them.”

  Steve pointed to the empty spot in the warehouse that he had been staring at and looking, and when Downey looked, there was still nobody there.

  “There is nobody there.” Downey said to him, and as soon as those words left his lips, he regretted it. He looked back at the man that had killed a cop in front of him and had him nailed to the ground and saw nothing short of pure rage in his face.

  “How dare you say that!” Steve growled, then turned to the bag beside him, unzipped it and pulled from it a long, thin bladed knife, the same kind of knife Downey’s own dad use to use when skinning animals after hunting. Steve brought the knife down and made quick work of slicing away the shirt Downey had been wearing as the helpless killer began to plead again, thinking that he was going to be sliced open at any moment.

  Downey did not like being the victim, had hated it as a child where he had always been the victim of his father’s cruelty and his mother’s vengeance. His father had been a cruel man that believed the only way to turn a boy into a man was with violence and lessons. He would take his son hunting and deliberately wound animals so that he could look into the creature’s eyes as its heart came to a slow and complete stop. Downey’s father had told him that taking life was only worth it if you truly took a life with your own hands. There were times when they would hunt deer, wound it, and his father would make him reach into the animals chest cavity and feel the heart as it slowed and finally stopped. These lessons were bad, but when they came home, the lessons became worse, more personal, usually aimed at his mother. His father would make Downey sit on the bed in the master bedroom and watch as he beat, humiliated and raped the woman he called mom. He told his son that a woman was not worth any more than the bruises she carried under her clothes, nor was a son.

  After Downey watched the lessons with his mom, it would be his own turn to be taught by his father. It usually started with having his clothes ripped from him, the sound of tearing fabric always brought shivering memories of those days back to him, some days the sound would haunt his nightmares. The following day, after one of these lessons, his dad would leave for work and his mother would turn on him, taking out her pain, fear and frustration on the boy she had given birth to, as though it would make her own pain go away.

  Rape and violence were visited on him at least once a week, after his father felt his mother had had enough, and as Downey lay under the knife of Steve, it was all that he could think of, making his terror run higher.

  He cried and screamed, thrashing as much as his pinned down arms would allow, begging to be let go. Steve ignored the pleas, back to whistling as he went through the bag and pulled out more knives, pliers, a saw and an electric drill, setting them down one by one slowly and with purpose. Each time he set one down on the concrete floor next to Downey, he looked back to where his dead family stood, checking for their approval before he moved to removing the next tool.

  In the distance, a chorus of sirens echoed in the night. Downey heard it and stopped thrashing.

  “Do you hear that? The cops are coming, they know you’re here.”

  “So?”

  “You don’t want to go to jail, do you? They lock you up forever. You’ll be just like me if you do this. Come on man, let me go.”

  Steve shook his head and pulled out another long serrated blade. “It’ll be awhile before the even figure out where we are, seeing as I disabled the GPS unit in the car and it’s out of sight in case a helicopter flies by. But to be honest, I don’t care what happens to me, nothing really matters aside from this. As long as it ends here and now for you, as long as my family can fully rest with you dead, that’s all that matters to me. Whatever happens to me, jail or death, it means nothing. I’ve been dead ever since you took away Amy and Alden, dead and lost.”

  Steve looked back into the faces of his family, smiling at them one finally time and whispering to them that he loved them. He then looked down into the face of Downey as he picked up the drill, pressing the trigger to test it, smiled and went to work.

  5

  There was blood everywhere; more than Steve would have ever thought was in a human body. He put down the knife he had been holding and looked down at the ruins of the monster that had taken away everything that had ever mattered to him. Blood bubbled and popped from the open neck wound as the last sparks of life blinked in Downey’s last remaining eye, almost seeming to plea to Steve with one final look, but he paid it no mind.

  Steve wiped at blood on his forehead, smearing it more than anything else, then picked up the hacksaw and turned back to Downey, to finish what had taken twenty minutes or more. The sirens had continued to get closer and closer, but he didn’t rush any of it, knowing that fate was still on his side and that he would finish what he needed to before the police ever found him. He knew that his wife and his son, still standing and watching over him, would ensure that he was not found until the last breaths and heartbeat in the killer under him, left Downey’s destroyed body.

  Steve brought the saw down to Downey’s face and began to move the sharp blade back and forth vertically, from forehead to chin, the speed of the strokes picking up with urgency as the sound of sirens echoed in the empty warehouse, police cruisers obviously outside at that perfect moment. Steve did his best to ignore them, wanting nothing more than to make sure that this was done before the doors opened, that vengeance was brought to the man under him.

  The sound of the doors of the warehouse bursting open echoed around him, drowning out the squeaking of the saw blade on bone. Steve did not slow his work, despite the sounds of numerous booted feet running towards him and the screams of “drop the weapo
n” being shouted at him. He did not look up to see the swarm of police officers that were no doubt surrounding him because he knew he was almost done his work, almost done bringing forth the punishment Downey so rightly deserved.

  When the first bullet punched in Steve’s arm, he did not slow down his cutting, continuing to ignore the police, looking only down at Downey as the saw finally made its way straight through the man’s face, opening it like an apple being cut in two. His cuts slowed once the saw had done the job of ending Downey’s life, but the police didn’t care. Since he had ignored the orders to drop the weapon, they all opened fire on him, spraying him with a volley of bullets. Steve felt none of them, as his body jerked with the force of each striking bullet, dropping the saw and falling on top of Downey’s ruined body. As the officers ran towards him, their boots thundering and squeaking around him, he looked up and saw his wife and son were beside him, looking down to him, holding their hands out. The no longer looked like the victims of Downey’s monstrous acts, instead looking as they always had. They looked perfect to him, angelic.

  “It’s time to go.” His wife whispered and he took her hand knowing that it was finally all over, that it had come to an end and he would finally get to hold Amy and Alden again.

  When the Darkness Came

  “I think these fucking roaches eat better than I do.”

  They watched as one of the brown bugs crawled across the coffee table, stopping to eat a Cheetos that had fallen earlier while they had been watching the news. The roach was a pretty good size and lingered at the cheese covered treat.

  “Pass me some of that.” James said, pointing to the joint burning away, temporarily forgotten in Mark’s hand as he watched the dirty little bug.

  “Oh, sorry. Here.”

  He handed it to him and went back to watching the bug.

  “You think that it’s true what they say about cockroaches, that if there was a nuclear war, the only thing to survive would be them damn things?” Mark pulled a penny from his pocket and tossed it at the insect, missing it by inches, but making it scurry across the table, where it disappeared over the edge.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “I think it was on some PBS show. It was all about roaches and how they crawl up on your face while you sleep and eat your nose hairs and eyelashes. They even went on about how they can live off soap or even stamp glue and how they could survive a nuclear blast. Pretty fucked if you ask me.”

  “You watch some stupid ass shows, bro. Who the fuck watches PBS anymore? You do know that cable was invented and you don’t have to watch shows that beg for money like some bum in front of the liquor store, right?”

  “Shut up.”

  James stood up from the couch, passing the joint back to Mark and walked over to the balcony, looking out at the busy streets below him. From the open door, the smell of something burning found his nose and it wasn’t pleasant like a campfire or a barbeque, but was something closer to when some idiot had set the dumpster behind the grocery store on fire. He wasn’t really surprised by that, things were on fire everywhere. The area always seemed to have some issues going on, the sound of yelling and gunshots echoed up to his apartment night and day. He couldn’t even count how many times he had come home to find piss in the elevator or blood in the lobby or even some half dressed woman passed out in his hallway, her crack pipe still clenched in her hand. Dundas and Sherbourne was notorious for these things, though what was going on now made it seemed worse than ever.

  “You know, PBS has some really great shows on it. I love getting wasted and watched Fawlty Towers, or even doing some ‘shrooms and laughing my ass of at Sesame Street. Oscar the Grouch is a true badass.” Mark laughed then took a long pull from the joint, leaving nothing but the smallest roach behind. “You don’t ever watch things like that when you’re high?”

  James ignored his friend choosing instead to look down at the people hurrying around below him. Crackheads, hookers, dealers, people that thought they were real gangsters running along with a sprinkling of normal people that were just too poor to live anywhere other than the crappy area they found themselves. James was one of the latter, a student that was paying his own way through school, going to classes four days a week and working almost every day. The pay wasn’t great and the bills with school were high enough so that finding a place better than the high crime area he ended up in was impossible. He was lucky enough if he could afford more than two meals a day that didn’t involve the words Kraft or Raman. He knew that he could have done without some things, like his weed and booze, but he weighed his options and decided that with all the stress work and school provided him, he needed some escape from reality.

  “Should we turn the T.V. back on and see if they’re saying anything else about what’s going on?”

  “Why?” James asked, turning back towards Mark, he leaned against the wall beside the open balcony door. “You think they’re going to say anything that’ll change this? You should see it out there. People are going apeshit.”

  “Really? Oh man, so it’s not just bullshit is it? Do you see any of those things?”

  “Doesn’t look like its bullshit, but I don’t see anything other than people panicking out here.”

  An hour ago, they had been about to play a game on James’ outdated Nintendo 64 when a news report had caught their eye. CP24 was showing video of people in the streets, running and looting, Molotov cocktails being thrown through business windows and at cops in full riot gear. The reporter on the scene was screaming into her microphone as men in gasmasks ran passed her carrying baseball bats and knives. The scene was hard to watch as the camera operator seemed unable to keep the shot from shaking wildly, moving it from the female reporter, to the crowds and turning it to a burning police car. Just before the shot went back to the station, James and Mark watched as someone emerged from the burning car, engulfed in flames. They could hear the person screaming in agony as they ran around madly with their arms flailing.

  When the shot had returned to the male and female newscasters at the CP24 station, their faces were pale and they sat in stunned silence for a moment. James knew that they were feeling the same way he had, that something terrible was going on. It was just how he felt when the first images of 9/11 had come on T.V.

  He had gone to the balcony right away, thinking that maybe the insanity was going on below him, but at the time, all he saw was the regular chaos he had come to know since he had first moved into the building. He went back to the couch, sitting back down beside Mark and watched as the newscaster explained what was going on.

  The reporters said that the video that was being shown was after an earthquake near Texas, which apparently was not a common thing. The earth shook harder than it had in recorded history and a fissure opened in the ground, stretching for eighty miles, east to west. That seemed bad enough and James guessed that they were going release the death toll and it would be astronomical, but instead the video cut to a shot of the crack in the earth where something seemed to be rising. At first James thought it was only oil bubbling up from the huge crack. It was Texas after all. There were people standing at the edge of the opening, taking pictures with their smartphones, making videos that they would later upload to Facebook and YouTube, happy to be a part of this strange history, while over head the news helicopter flew, recording the scale of the scene. When the shadows he thought was oil pushed up from below, rising and moving like no liquid he had ever seen, people only took a step or two back. The dark mass was huge and utterly black, as though it were repelling any light that came near it. On the video, James could hear the gasp of the camera operator filming what was happening.

  James sat in utter silence with Mark beside him, watching as the dark shapes, solid yet moving with a strange liquid motion, rose from the crevice, dwarfing the people that stood on the edge watching the scene. Still none of the onlookers did anything to get out of the way of what was coming, keeping their cameras on the rising creatures the whole time
, some standing as tall as a twenty story building. Weren’t they afraid of what was coming out, didn’t they sense as he did that there was something not right with the shadows rising? James thought that maybe people these days were just so intent on recording a possibly historic event, wanting to prove that they were at ground zero of the next big disaster, capturing their fifteen seconds of fame on their cellphone, that they were will to risk their lives for it. He was sure that if he was there, watching what was rising up, he would have run away from it, fear and cowardice blurring together as he ran. He knew that he wouldn’t even look over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of it like the idiots in movies did, usually causing them to end up dead. Luckily he wasn’t there; he was sitting on his couch with his childhood friend watching it on television.

  James saw things that looked like spider legs, octopus tentacles and scorpion pincers amongst the other strange, unknown shapes of the numerous things that rose from the depths, though it was hard to make out where one creature ended and another started. To him it almost looked as though they were all part of one giant monstrosity, hordes of dark beasts absorbed into one great shadow being. He was mesmerized by the scene, how it looked like something from a bad horror movie, but he also wondered why nobody that was there was running and screaming. It made him think of video he had seen of New York when the towers came down, how so many people had been just standing around, watching it and recording it, then finally running when it was too late.

  This had been no different.

  The shadow creatures spilled up and out of the ground like water boiling out of on over-filled pot and wasted no time in destroying every single thing in its path. The people that had been standing around watching, disappeared in the darkness of the beings, no blood or gore, they were just gone, wiped from view as though they had never been there at all. A long black tentacle shot skyward, towards the helicopter that was filming the scene, but somehow the pilot managed to avoid the dark arm and flew away, only to reveal the horizon, the entire length of the crack, was bleeding more of the dark creatures, turning the ground into night. James heard either the pilot or the cameraman curse, and then there was no more footage.