Under-Heaven

by Tim Greaton

  Once he'd thrown all the others, eight separate loads, into the fiery chute, Sedge stood looking at the one remaining book. LAST RITES NO RIGHTS, a manual that detailed a battle with a demon. The book had been written thirty years ago by a man who was currently locked in a mental institution. Sedge tucked the book under his arm and returned it to his apartment.

  It took one more hour to pack his few remaining belongings into two plastic trash bags. Then, he placed his key on the kitchen table, scribbled out a quick note, which he tacked to the outside of his door, and descended the stairs to the front hallway.

  He dropped the bags to the hall floor and drew in a series of ragged breaths.

  The bags were more awkward than heavy. But that, combined with Sedge's lack of exercise, made them difficult. He expected to have to stop a dozen times along the way to the bus station, ten blocks south.

  He steeled himself for the long walk, but before he could get the outside door open, Mrs. VanGasbeek pushed her heavy girth out into the hall. Her eyes darted to the primitive luggage at his feet. "We need to talk, Sedge."

  He sighed and let the partially opened door swing shut again. He knew what was coming. He'd scrubbed and scrubbed, but hadn't been able to get that God-awful smell out of her pan.

  "Yes," he said and started to reach for his wallet. He hoped he'd have enough for the bus ticket after paying her for the pan.

  "Isn't there something you forgot to tell me?" Her voice held a harsh accusatory tone.

  Sedge felt a crimson flush spread across his face, the way it had whenever his mother caught him in a lie. He couldn't seem to lift his eyes from the worn floor boards to look into her face.

  "Well?"

  Like always, Sedge's hand darted to nervously rub at his neck, almost as if trying to protect it. "I'm sorry."

  "Is that it?"

  Sedge wished he was better with people. His heart was pumping like a bellows, sending surges of blood into his face, ears and neck. His head felt like a fire ball on a stick. He remembered that his wallet was empty. Reluctantly, his hand dropped from the brass door knob, his only means of escape, and pushed its way into the pocket of his black woolen coat.

  "I really am sorry. I'll pay you. Here." He counted out thirty dollars in crumpled bills and started to hold them out to her, but then he drew back and added an extra ten dollar bill. "Is this enough?" he asked and stuffed the bills into her plump hand.

  "What's this?" She brushed the money aside. "You think I need food more than you?" She laughed deeply from her considerable belly, and when the rumble faded the cheerful smile was still spread across her face.

  Sedge wiped a cold hand across his feverish forehead and prayed that something would make sense to him soon.

  "Why didn't you tell me you were leaving?" Mrs. VanGasbeek asked. "Haven't we been in this same building for a long time?"

  Sedge stared numbly at the money in his hands. "You mean you're not mad about the damage I did to your pan?"

  "What's to be mad about? You brought it back, didn't you?"

  "But...but—"

  "Are you going to give me a hug before you leave, or aren't you? Seems the least you could do since you weren't going to tell me you were leaving."

  Sedge stepped away from her. "No. I can't."

  The big woman's mouth protruded into a forceful pout. Her hands dropped to her hips. "You can't, huh?" She stepped briskly toward him.

  "It's too dangerous," Sedge said and tried to back away, but his lower back was already jammed painfully into the door knob. Having no choice, he succumbed to her forceful hug.

  Finally, she released him. Sedge was surprised to see her cheeks redden and tears form at the corners of her eyes. Over the last five years he could have counted the number of times they had actually spoken. Usually, it was nothing more than a brief greeting as he came or went from the building.

  "I wish...I mean," Sedge fumbled for the right thing to say. "I hope your kids visit soon."

  "You're a sweet boy," she said.

  Embarrassed, he wished her well, picked up his two heavy bags and left the building. It was to be for the last time.

  2

  Dan Aldridge spent the most confusing fifteen minutes of his life inside the ambulance that carried him from Jenny's apartment to the Pittsburgh Medical Center. The first thing he remembered was Jenny's concerned face staring into his own, her curls cascading down to caress his forehead and cheeks. Her mouth opened and closed, but all he could hear was a low murmur at the extreme edge of his hearing range. Then a man's face appeared beside hers. His mouth also opened and closed, emitting no sound.

  Dan's eyelids felt heavy, but he forced them to remain open. His vision was blurring again. Jenny's face seemed to float up away from him until it was as though he were lying at the bottom of a deep well and she was peering down from above. Then, the fight gone out of him, his eyelids fell shut.

  An immediate jolt of movement snapped them open again. Jenny was still hovering over the stretcher, as was the strange man beside her. From his new vantage, though, Dan couldn't see their faces, instead getting a full view of the man's pale bald spot. That's when he realized he was lying against the ceiling of the ambulance.

  An explanation for what was happening came in the form of memories, memories that he had done everything short of suicide to eliminate: The punishments of Saint Thomas had been mild at first, but as Dan's rebellious actions had grown, the harshness of the reprimands had followed suit. The skin of his wrists had been worn raw by his struggles against the steel bands that were clamped around them. The bands had been attached to chains which were, in turn, bolted to brackets mounted to the concrete blocks of the basement wall. Eventually, after a few days, the wounds healed directly to the iron clamps. (Later, Saint Thomas would personally unlock the padlock and, with a smile, rip...)

  This was the basement of the chapel, which was roughly at the center of the twenty-acre, South Carolinian compound that his parents had been duped into entering. They hadn't known it—his mother and father—but they had been duped: taken in hook, line and sinker by the fanatics that ran the place. Only Dan had seemed to realize what was happening, and when he made the mistake of scaling the wall to the men's sector and explaining it to his father, his father had explained "Dan's problem" to Saint Thomas. Saint Thomas, who prided himself on helping others, was now helping Dan to repent from his transgressions.

  It was on the fifth foodless day in that musty basement when it happened. Dan hadn't been able to break the physical bonds that held him. But his mind, his soul, needed to escape so badly that it finally did—albeit mentally, but it did. One minute he was chained to the wall and the next he was soaring through the concrete blocks and out into the open air. In utter terror, he tried to stop himself, to will his escaping soul back into his body. But with no success. It was as if he had been strapped to the back of a invisible winged stallion. At a hair-raising speed, his soul soared in wild bobs and weaves all across the countryside. In and out of homes, through dark hills, and into the depths of a nearby lake where he confronted a creature that was too horrifying to describe (he was later to see another: hornpout).

  Finally, when his soul did return to his physical body, he couldn't be certain that it had ever happened at all. Once again, he was just an imprisoned fourteen-year-old boy. Only now, he feared that insanity had been unwittingly added to his personal list of woes.

  It was fortunate that Saint Thomas chose to leave him there for several more days, because it was during this time that Dan learned that his new-found "astral" talent was true and real. A frightening yet necessary gift granted by an unknown power. It was, he later surmised, this travel that had given him the outside frame of reference that had kept him sane while the rest of his family slipped further and further into the religious lunacy around them.

  Only a few months later, that lunacy had killed both his parents and his younger brother.

  Looking down at his body lying below, Dan knew that a chapter
of his life that had been closed over thirty years ago was wide open again. And, quite frankly, it scared the piss out of him.

  3

  The hospital was ablaze with activity. Dan had been wheeled into an emergency treatment area and a male nurse had asked Jenny to stay in the waiting room until they knew more. According to the ambulance attendant, Dan had slipped into a coma.

  Filled with nervous energy, but having no choice, Jenny chose a seat beside a tall, elderly man whose graying hair was as sparse as the few spindly but darker hairs on Dan's chest. On the old man's otherwise pale, wrinkled face were two aging spots: one, a dark oval on his right cheek; and the other an amoeba that extended from the center of his forehead into the lower reaches of his thin white hair. His shaking hands were fleshless and skeletal, covered with a thin layer of leathery, spotted skin. She tried not to notice, but tears were tracking paths down the creases of his aged face. And every few seconds he would whimper with a pain that Jenny intuitively knew was deeper than physical. She guessed he was awaiting word on a loved one.

  Many of the others in the room seemed normal enough: a mother holding the hand of a pale and tired-looking girl, an Afro-American couple joking back and forth between themselves with no evidence of pain, three elderly women seated and talking softly among themselves (the middle woman, judging by her green pallor, the sickly of the three).

  But not all of the waiting patients were normal. Diagonally across from Jenny was an obese woman dressed in a tattered, aqua-colored house coat. The woman pounded her fist repeatedly and loudly against the wall beside the Coke machine, while simultaneously quaking as though plugged into a weight-loss vibrator. She wailed over and over, "I can't take it any more. Can't someone please help me? I can't take it. Please, someone..."

  Leaning against the bank of six-foot windows to Jenny's left were two male nurses, or possibly ambulance attendants. The white uniforms of both men were covered in blood, and both looked as though they had tried to sell pornography to the Amish. Sections of blood-soaked gauze, small areas of raw flesh and patches of dried blood dotted their arms and faces. A number of the wounds appeared to have been caused by raking fingernails. Jenny wondered if they might have tried to treat a violent criminal, or possibly they were hired by the hospital: to sit here in the waiting room looking wounded but content to wait, thereby, shaming those around them into similar compliance. In any event, Jenny assumed the abrasions must not have been as serious as they looked because they continued smiling and talking, seemingly unconcerned about the wait.

  "Mr. Callahan?" a stern blond woman said from the stainless steel doorway to the recesses of the hospital beyond. She was dressed in a baggy blue uniform that gave no hint of the figure beneath.

  "Yes," the elderly man answered from beside Jenny. He brushed the back of a trembling, papyrus hand across wet cheeks. "How—how is she?"

  "Come speak with the Doctor directly, Mr. Callahan," the stern woman said.

  The old man's head shook violently. "No—no. I can't move." He wiped the tears from his cheeks again. "I can't move when I'm like this. Please...just tell me."

  The blond woman glared at the elderly man for a moment longer then disappeared, the steel door closing with a thump behind her.

  Just then, two white, teenage boys urgently pushed their way through the double-glass, outside entry doors. One held the shoulders and the other the legs of a chunky Asian girl. One boy let her feet drop harshly to the floor and he rushed to the window where an impassive Spanish receptionist sat.

  He stabbed a thumb behind him. "That girl needs help baaaad. She been fucked up."

  Before the receptionist could ask any of the typical questions about the circumstances of her "fucking up", nearest relative, etc..., the boy turned and bolted from the building. The second boy had already let the girl drop the rest of the way to the floor, and he was only a few steps behind his friend. The heavy glass doors swung back, and they were gone.

  The bloody male nurses hurried to the girl's side. Jenny couldn't see what was happening, but after only a few moments she interpreted the quick glances between the men and the slow simultaneous shaking of their heads.

  The girl was dead.

  Apparently alerted by the receptionist, the stern blond woman appeared on this side of the sacred steel door again; this time shoving a chrome and white stretcher before her. With the help of the two male nurses, she lifted the girl onto the portable bed and wheeled her away. When the bloody attendants tried to follow through the door, the stern nurse vigorously shook her head and pointed for them to return to their seats and wait.

  "What a bitch," one of them said.

  "Needs a man is her problem," the other responded as they went back to their positions beside the bank of windows.

  Just then, a tall, sculptured gray man opened the door and peered into the room. He scanned the patients. "Mr. Callahan?" His steel gray eyes, lighted upon Jenny's splotched and aged neighbor. "Mr. Callahan, would you come with me please?"

  Reminding Jenny of a weak newborn kitten, Mr. Callahan pushed himself up onto his trembling legs. "Are you the doctor?"

  The grey man nodded once. His expression was serious, but Jenny couldn't tell if it was a result of the news he had for this poor man, or if it might have been his personality. She imagined this environment could easily suck the life out of even the most fun-loving person.

  "I'm not going through that door—" Even though the old man's entire body was quivering, his voice was firm. "—until you tell me how she is."

  The gray man glanced at the others in the room and then back to the old man. "We need to speak in private, Mr. Callahan."

  A gut-wrenching whimper came from the old man. He fell heavily back into his seat. "I knew it," he said. "I knew I would lose her this time. I just knew." Then he buried his face into trembling hands and sobbed, as was befitting a man who might have lost a wife of three or more decades.

  The gray man studied Mr. Callahan for several more seconds, then pursed his lips and shook his head. Glancing briefly at the clip board in his hand, he again searched the faces in the crowd. "Jenny Aldridge?"

  Jenny glanced at the pitiable old man. On the one hand she didn't want to steal his place, but on the other she had to know how Dan was. She stood.

  "That's me."

  "Could you come with me please, Mrs. Aldridge?"

  Jenny glanced down at Mr. Callahan and was thankful his anguished eyes weren't staring at her. She went with the gray man.

  The smaller, private waiting room was a perfect square with soft rose-colored paint on the smooth walls. Six maroon overstuffed chairs surrounded a coffee table filled from end to end with old copies of Time, Sports Illustrated, and Highlights for Children. A small television sat upon a chrome stand in the far corner of the room. Its screen was black. The tall, gray doctor indicated for her to take a seat. He sat awkwardly in a chair across from her.

  "I'm Doctor Bryden Reynolds," the man said. A smile flickered across his lips but then disappeared as though feeling unwanted on his normally stony face.

  "Is he okay?"

  "With proper treatment, I believe Mr. Aldridge will be fine. He's still unconscious, but his vital signs are strong and his brain wave activity is bordering on the normal range. Given a little luck, he'll come out of it in a few hours. He would, of course, have a minor concussion, but a few aspirin and a couple of days rest would straighten that out."

  Jenny felt the lump that had been crawling up her throat stop and begin a slow decent. She took two shallow breaths. "I was really scared."

  "Why is that, I wonder?" the gray doctor said. He leaned slightly forward, knees touching the magazine-laden table. Gray eyes stared into hers.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that I know you signed in Mr. Aldridge under pretense of being his spouse. And yet you had no I.D. with you."

  The lump stopped in Jenny's throat and reversed direction again. Her right hand reached up and began twisting her hair between its
thumb and forefinger. "I didn't...didn't think to grab my wallet on the way into the ambulance."

  His eyes darted down to her lap. "I believe that is a purse, isn't it?"

  Jenny clutched her pocketbook protectively. "So?"

  "Most women," he raised his right eyebrow, reminding her of Spock from the Starship Enterprise, "carry I.D. in their purses?"

  The statement was a question and Jenny knew she should respond, but her mouth hung slack.

  "Jennifer—if that is your true name—I intend to ask you only one more time. What is your relationship to Mr. Aldridge?"

  "Oh, hell," Jenny grumbled. "What's the difference?"

  "It does make a difference to us...to me." The doctor's complexion had grown red, and Jenny knew she was seeing actual, true emotion on the stone man's face. "I struggled through ten years of expensive and very difficult schools to become a doctor. Not to mention the years of internships," He got to his feet, "and frankly it irritates me that you assumed the right to endanger my medical practice. That release you signed is worthless. Do you realize, if he were to die right now I could be sued by his family? And THEY WOULD WIN!"

  "I didn't—"

  "It doesn't matter what you did or didn't. This is the reality. Now, may I ask who are you and what your relationship is to Mr. Aldridge? And the truth this time?"

  Though sorry, Jenny was feeling defensive. It wasn't as if she'd intended to hurt anyone. She stood and glared at the doctor. "I'm a concerned friend. Is that all right? My name is Jennifer Tracy."

  The doctor's face was slowly returning to it's original somber color of gray. "Does he have any family in the area, Ms. Tracy?"

  "No. He's divorced. His ex-wife lives somewhere on the east side, but I don't believe she'd come anywhere near him—even if it meant picking up the winnings on a lottery. She and Dan had a very messy divorce."

  "Parents, siblings?"

  "I don't know the details, but they're dead. What's this all coming to, anyway?"