At the Gates of Madness

by Shaun Meeks

  “Mark! Come here.”

  Mark moved quickly towards James and before he could react, James lifted the knife and buried it in his friend’s chest.

  Then again.

  And again.

  And on the last strike, he hit just under Mark’s sternum and torn the knife downwards the ground. James felt hot blood and intestines spill onto his hand as he heard the sound of flesh tearing under the t-shirt. Mark’s eyes widened even more as James heard wet slapping of his friend’s insides hitting the floor. Mark moved backwards and James looked at the wet, slippery mess slinking out of the wound, looking like bluish earthworm seeping out. Mark’s mouth continued to open and close as though he was trying to say something, trying to yell out or cry out James wasn’t sure, but it didn’t last long. He watched as his bloody friend fell to the ground, jerked a few times and finally stopped moving.

  James looked at his friend, guessing he was dead and let the knife slip from his sticky, blood soaked hands where the tip buried itself in the floor and it swayed back and forth, which was just like James felt he was himself. He looked around the room, seeing the disaster around him, then back to Mark’s body on the ground. He felt his emotions building up in him, looking at the red pool growing under Mark’s motionless body. His knees felt weak and he needed to sit down, so he lowered himself to the floor and began to cry as his mind swarmed with memories, dread and a sense of loss. He didn’t hear the sounds of people screaming outside any longer, the noise of car’s crashing or sirens blaring. Instead all he heard was the ghost voice of Mark echoing from somewhere in the past, words said during the good and bad times the two had shared together and would never know again. He looked at Mark’s blood on his hands, holding them on his lap and tried to wipe the mess off on his jeans thinking that if he did, the voices in his head would stop. He thought if he could get the voice of his dead friend to leave him alone, he could then decide what he was going to do with himself now that he was alone and everything in the world was going to hell. No matter how hard he tried to rid himself of the red staining his hands and Mark’s voice reverberating in his head, nothing seemed to work. He looked at Mark then, who was laying still; face down on a heap of his own insides.

  “I’m so sorry, Mark.” He said, feeling tears spilling down his cheek. “Why the fuck did you ask me to do this? Why did you make me do it?!”

  Did you do it because I asked you to? Or did you kill me because you have always had some fascination with death? Remember when you told me how you wanted to buy a real snuff movie so you could see someone die for real? Well, looks like you made your own snuff dreams come true. Was it fun?

  “That’s not true. I didn’t do this for any other reason than you asking me too.” He told Mark’s motionless body, as though his dead friend was actually having a conversation with him, despite the fact that Mark was not moving and had actually stopped bleeding. “I would have never hurt you if you hadn’t asked me to.”

  Really? What about when we were in high school and you tried to throw me over the second floor railing after math class? I guess you forgot about that.

  “That was different. We were fighting about something stupid and I lost control.”

  You lost control a lot. You tried to beat me up during basketball games, when I made fun of your haircut, when you started dating Rotten Crotch Carrie and even when I ate a slice of pizza you thought you were entitled too. You are an angry guy.

  “Shut up. Shut up or…”

  Or what? Are you going to kill me again? Good luck with that, James.

  “I told you to shut the fuck up!”

  James jumped up and ran over to where Mark’s body was and continued to yell at his friend to shut up, stomping his heel down on the dead man’s head. He didn’t look down as he did it, instead looking upwards as he crushed bones and began to liquefy his head as though he was trying to turn grapes into wine. When he was done, feeling that he was only stomping on the floor, that flesh, skull and meat had been utterly obliterated, he stopped, breathing heavy from the work he had just done.

  And what did you accomplish by that?

  “Shut the fuck up.” He yelled, looking down at how destroyed Mark was and was unable to understand how he was still talking to him. “You’re dead so you need to stop talking to me.”

  James gave the body a final kick and then stepped out onto the balcony, slamming the door in hopes of blocking out Mark’s voice and it seemed to work. He looked back into the apartment, staring into a room full of horrors and his friend’s ruined body, smiling that he could hear anything the selfish asshole inside was no doubt saying to him. He hadn’t killed Mark for some selfish reasons, so long ago curiosity of what it would be like to kill someone, he had done it because his friend had asked, no, begged him to do it so that he didn’t have to deal with what was going on in the world.

  That sudden thought made him turn around and look off the balcony to see what was going on, and the sight took his breath away.

  Fires filled the streets and blackened the sky while on the ground, a few people were running away from the shadows that rose from a wide crack that had opened up down Sherbourne, swallowing the buildings on the opposite side of the street from him and coming close to the building he was in as well. He could see what was rising from the depths of what must have the gates of hell; a single enormous shadowy creature that swarmed with smaller monstrosities all over its body that seemed to make up its entire being. The depth of the shadows that made up the smaller and larger beasts were so dark, almost seeming to pull in and eat the light that touched it as it rose up and out of the chasm. He could feel their movements in his skin, like a deep bass line at a club and the smell that came up with it was like wet garbage, burning matches and an old flooded basement.

  Guess I was right to have you off me, wasn’t I?

  Mark’s voice came from behind him and made James jump. He spun around, expecting to see his dead friend standing on the balcony with him, but he was alone, Mark still lying where he had been left.

  Did you actually think I was standing on the balcony with you, James? Does that even make sense?

  “Leave me alone. You got out of this, but I still have to deal with this. The last thing I need is a ghost haunting me.”

  Ghost? Is that what you think I am? I’m not a ghost, you fool. You have lost your mind and I’m not even talking to you, but if thinking I’m a ghost is easier, so be it.

  “What the hell am I going to do?” He said aloud, asking the ghost or his lost sanity, turning away from this apartment and back towards the street and the rising doom. “Look at this. There is no way anyone will survive.”

  Then jump. Just kill yourself and make it easier. Look at those things, or thing. I can’t even tell how many of them there are, or if it’s just one giant monster. How long do you think you will last up against that? And is it really surviving at all? You’ll be running for your life ever second of the day, eating anything you can, possibly your own waste. And even if you do live long enough until these things go away, what then? Then you will be running away from other people that will eventually turn cannibal since the food won’t last very long.

  Is that really living, James? Is that how you want to live the rest of your life?

  “No.” James told the voice that sounded like Mark, knowing that it was right, that there was no life left for anyone, no real one at least. He didn’t want to feel the starvation, the eventual cold; didn’t want to have to run every day from both what was rising from the earth and then from people that would no doubt be so desperate. He also didn’t want to die at the hands of whatever the shadowy thing was, in case Mark’s fear had been true that he wouldn’t die right away, but would be slowly consumed over the years inside the dark, feeling his skin melting from the bones, years of pain and loneliness.

  Death was the only real answer.

  He looked back over the edge of the balcony and saw that if he jumped, there was ten feet of ground to hit between the buildi
ng and the opening in the ground which meant he could fall safely and die without fear of falling into the opening and into the shadows. He didn’t think about it or consider it, once he saw that he would easily hit the ground, he went over the hand rail.

  James had heard that most jumpers die on the way down, having a heart attack before the impact, he hoped that it was true. He wanted to close his eyes as he fell, but was afraid to, afraid that he closing his eyes to it, would keep him from having the heart attack that would keep him from feeling the impact.

  It didn’t matter though.

  After passing five floors, James saw the shadows from below suddenly spring up from the tear in the earth, shooting into the air like a black, oily geyser, sending nightmares sky bound. In the shadows that flew up, James was able to see that there were creatures that look likes squids, lobsters and misshaped birds that flowed and melded together as though they were partially absorbed by one another. It was terrible and yet somehow beautiful at the same time, mesmerizing James and making him forget his fears right up until the moment the shadows flew towards him and swallowed him, surrounding his body in its almost watery darkness.

  The fear ended and the voice of his dead friend finally went away as James embraced his fate in the blackness.

  The Great Nothing

  Looking out the window, the silence behind me seems vast. I’m so used to the sounds of students in this class and in the hallways here that without them the sheer lack of their din is deafening. I try to ignore the ghost of loneliness whispering to me as I watch the snow fall at a quicker rate and wonder what I am supposed to be doing.

  The others asked that I stay behind and wait for a new arrival, yet none of the elders have told me who the new one will be nor when they are expected. We here have always been full of secrets and mysteries, that is part of the charm.

  Drinking my unsweetened green tea and watching as the rate of snow fall picks up, I think back to when I first arrived at Yale as a teacher. The day I returned to school, as a teacher instead of the student I had been, I was lost. Though I had gone to school for seven years in the same buildings, I was no longer a student, had no friends to hang out with a drink with. The teachers seemed to shrug me off at first, thinking of me as the smart mouthed student that had only left them a short while ago as an underling. Many of the staff had a problem with it, seeing me as the outsider I was. I had hoped that they would have accepted me more with open arms at first; having been part of the Skull and Bones Society when I had attended the school, and the fact that my grades had been so high and connections had been powerful enough to get me a position in the History department so quickly. I learned that none of that mattered to them.

  When I had been a student, as I said, I was part of the very well know secret society known as Skull and Bones. There are so many stories out there about which we were and what we were all about, but I can tell you that most of what you heard is untrue. That is unless you heard that we drank a large amount of alcohol, shunned people we considered lower than us and pressured the stupid women that wanted to be popular into having sex with us. We would meet together every three to four days, talk about how disgusted we were with the amount of women trying to become doctors, or how many blacks the school was admitting and how the two of them getting educated would be the downfall of western society.

  You have to know, this was a long time ago, back in the mid-seventies and things were different then. All of us had come from homes full of very wealthy men that feared nothing more than losing all the power they had attained over the years. These would tell their sons about how black men were backwards jungle people that would kill you as much as look at you and that women should never have any power because when they got their periods they were hot headed. Growing up for eighteen years before heading out to college and university, it’s no wonder we had those same ideals in our minds, racism and sexism was engrained into us, it was who we were. Years of facing the real world have taught me to see things in a different light.

  When we had our meetings we felt important because we were part of something different and special, a thing that people wanted to be associated with. We were the cool kids, the future leaders of the world as some called us, Yale’s version of the Illuminati if you want. I know that I walked the halls with a certain amount of pride knowing that I was in this exclusive club and that when people saw me, they envied who I was.

  Returning to Yale as a teacher, I felt like those other people that I used to look down on, an outsider, a loser surrounded by the “in crowd”. As I watch the snow falling now, sure that a blizzard will be in full swing soon, I see myself as the lone branch lying in the courtyard amongst all the snow, slowly getting devoured so that nobody will see it. I felt forgotten, a blimp on a radar screen that nobody was watching. Never in my life had I been the outcast, having come from a wealthy family which usually gave me an in everywhere I went, yet none of that seemed to matter to the teachers here. I would go into the staff room in between classes and from the hall I could hear the others inside talking and laughing, and as soon as I stepped inside, everyone would stop speaking and find reasons to leave shortly thereafter. It made me feel like the relative with cancer that nobody wants to be around because it makes them feel bad. I had never really know what it felt like to be lonely, until I had returned to Yale my first year as a teacher. I started showing up to work and instead of going to the staff room to be made to feel like a loner, I would stay in my class and read a book I had picked up while in Europe. One thing I have always loved to do is read, especially antique books that seemed less like literature and had more to do with tales of ancient rituals and evils. The small towns I visited were full of these treasures and I brought more home than I probably had room for. Since I was to be the loner, I figured I would simply lose myself in the books as the kids our Skull and Bone Society had done had equally rejected.

  I found comfort in the books, though the seemed to all depict an evil that seemed so farfetched and unbelievable to me, I found myself chuckling as I drank coffee and looked over the yellowish pages that smelt of mold and dust. There were books on the Crusades and how they were all a farce, setting up by a secret society inside the Catholic Church, not to find the Holy Grail or to convert the heathen Muslims to what they believed was the true religion, but for something called the Anna. From my readings, this book was older than the bible, the pyramids or logically, before the human race ever walked the earth. As a historian, I knew these were fantasies, ancient horror stories the likes of Tim Lebbon and HP Lovecraft, nothing more than something written down to scare the readers to death. I enjoyed them, but I couldn’t understand how so many books from so many places across the globe all seemed to be speaking of this same book that couldn’t possibly exist. It was ridiculous.

  Or so I thought.

  I can see a car approaching now, in the distance, almost invisible in the blanket of snow that the sky seems to be bleeding. I know this must be who I am waiting for, so it is time to head downstairs. I set my tea down, watching the steam rising from it and disappearing into the air inches above the cup. Some days I feel like we are that steam, inches away from being forgotten and lost to the world, no way to grasp onto the cup of the world that we think we belong to. There is no holding on though, like the steam, we have no hands to grip onto this world that tries so hard to get rid of us.

  As I head down the hall, my shoes echoing to remind me that I am alone again, I pass by the staff room where I was once shunned; I am also brought back to the day where the teachers began to accept me.

  Having run out of coffee, I walked to the staff room, absently reading my newest book as I went, looking just like one of those geeks I once teased. When I walked in, two teachers I didn’t know at all were sitting there, silent as soon as I appeared. Ignoring them, I went about my task of getting something to drink, still nose deep in my book. I was reading a particularly strange entry about how Stonehenge was not built by the Druids, but were built by an anc
ient society for the use of bring evil doers to the alter and their bodies were opened so that their souls were set free and a trapped soul lost in what was called The Great Nothing could take over the body, when someone spoke behind me.

  “What are you reading?”

  I turned and saw it was a female, that she had stood up and was heading towards me, a curious look on her face as she moved. I lifted the book up, showing her the name and she smiled. The other teacher stood up and walked over.

  “You read a lot of ancient text?” He asked.

  “A fair amount. I spent a few years in Europe and picked up quite a few old books like this. I am especially interested in works about a book called The Anna.”

  As soon as I said the words, I knew that things were going to change. They exchanged a look, smiled and looked back at me.

  “We are having a meeting tonight, here in the school. Only a select group is allowed to attend though, but I think that you might be a good choice for our little parties.” The woman held out her hand. “I’m Janet and this is Harold. Are you interested in coming?”

  “Is this like a Skull and Bones kind of thing?” I laughed, feeling a bit awkward by the whole situation.

  “Not really.” She said.

  “Skull and Bones is a lark. What kind of secret society are you if everyone knows about it. No, we are more of an academic group, like Mensa, only we are into ancient worlds and beliefs, like what you are reading there.” Harold pointed to the book I had. “You do have an open mind I assume?”

  “Of course.” I said, though I didn’t have that much of an open mind. I was sure what I was reading was little more than fairytales of the old world, but being accepted was reason enough to fib a little. I was told to meet them that night by the library at seven and I left the staff room with my coffee and great feelings.