The Price

by Joseph Garraty

  Old Man Chebyshev broke with protocol, though. He didn’t say a single word—just started cutting.

  My screams echoed off the walls and the concrete floor, coming back to my ears distorted and even more horrifying. I tried to throw myself backward, anything to get away from that knife, but two of Chebyshev’s thugs held the chair in place. A third put his gigantic hands on my shoulders and clamped down, keeping me still as Chebyshev peeled a strip of skin off my right arm. I closed my eyes, so as not to witness the horror of it, but I couldn’t miss the wet splat when he threw the strip to the floor.

  Chebyshev paused, giving me enough time to contemplate my fate. Was he going to do the whole arm? Was he going to skin me alive? My breathing came fast and hot, scouring my lungs and throat like the exhaust from a semi. Maybe I’d pass out, maybe I’d find merciful unconsciousness before he did the whole arm. Maybe he’d nick an artery or something, and I’d bleed out. Please, God.

  I cried out in shock and surprise as the knife bit somewhere else, somewhere unexpected. I felt the soft weight of my left ear plop onto my shoulder, then tumble to my lap. Blood poured down my shoulder in hot rivers. One of the guys grunted, either in appreciation or disgust, I couldn’t tell. I screamed and whimpered.

  The blood poured down my arm, and I felt a surge of heat on the back of my left hand. Whether it was really there, or it was my imagination reminding me, I suddenly remembered the diagram I’d drawn on my hand.

  If anything could save me, that was it.

  I started mumbling the chant, the words I’d written on my arm and now tried with every ounce of energy I had left to remember. If it worked, I didn’t know what I’d call up, and it would probably kill and eat me, but that would be quicker and cleaner than death at the hands of this monster.

  The magic swelled and swirled within me. Distantly, I felt Old Man Chebyshev dig his fingernails into the wound on my arm and grind. There was more pain—God, there was always more pain, the whole fucking world, I was slowly realizing, was an endless reservoir of pain—but I mumbled faster, fitting the words to my rapid breath, forcing them out through gritted teeth. They couldn’t have come out any louder than a whisper, must have sounded like the ravings of a man who’d snapped even sooner than expected, but I felt the magic in my guts, my mind, my cock. This might actually work.

  I felt the familiar rushing sensation, only this time it was like somebody dropping an ocean liner from the sky, and intense heat flared up on my hand. The horribly familiar stink of burned flesh reached my nostrils a second later. A second after that, another stink flooded the room—sulfur, and rotten flesh, and wet black shit seething with maggots, the smell of pus and infection and a festering abscess the size of a world. Somebody to my left swore. Somebody to my right vomited.

  I opened my eyes, and immediately closed them again, squeezing them shut against something so awful I’d never allowed its like into my imagination. The thing I saw materializing in a haze of smoke and flame was like a man, and like a crocodile, and like nothing you ever saw or imagined, impossibly ancient, impossibly evil—and, somehow, I knew it was smiling.

  Gunfire, deafening, reverberated off the hard surfaces inside the warehouse. The screaming started moments later, about the same time as hideous ripping and tearing sounds. A body hit the ground nearby, the gurgling sound coming from that direction testifying to a man drowning in his own blood. Another scream, and behind me, blood fell like rain. More screaming. And more screaming. And more.

  Then, silence. I was lying on my back, still tied to the chair, with no idea of when or how I’d fallen over. The stink of blood and decay pressed down on me, suffocating.

  Something moved. One footstep, then another. It was coming toward me. I squeezed my eyes shut even more tightly.

  It stopped near my side, and I felt the presence of that awful thing as it leaned down next to me. My face hurt from squeezing my eyelids closed.

  Inches away from me, low, guttural laughter burbled from the throat of something horrible.

  I kept my eyes shut, willing it to be gone, but it merely laughed and muttered. At some point, mercifully, I lost consciousness.

  Chapter 21. Neither Here Nor There

  Darkness, heat, and pain. Was I conscious? Dreaming? Insane? No way to know. Some of those distinctions, I was sure, no longer applied. What was the line between sanity and insanity when boundaries between worlds blurred, when shit happened like the shit I’d just been in the middle of? Drooling and gibbering seemed like the only sane response possible. I felt weirdly calm, which I took to mean I was crazy. Or maybe not. Who the fuck knew? Find me a therapist who can sort that one out.

  The darkness around me flickered with deep, elusive colors, reminiscent of the purples and greens you sometimes see after somebody shines a flashlight into your eyes . . . except I wasn’t sure if I actually had eyes anymore. If I did, I couldn’t close them. I couldn’t look around. I couldn’t see my body.

  With a start, I realized I couldn’t feel my body, either. I couldn’t tell my hand to wave in front of my face, since I couldn’t feel a hand, or a face. Just pain. The pain came from nowhere, coursing through nothing, but I felt every searing electric jolt. That doesn’t make any goddamn sense, I thought, but nothing did, nothing had to anymore. I was in crazy land now. If only I’d gone down something as benign as a rabbit hole.

  Faint sounds reached my—ears?—reached me, a chorus of screams rising and falling. As it got louder, a melody emerged from those horrible cries, as though a master torturer was conducting a symphony made of thousands of suffering souls.

  Souls. Ah. Maybe I was in Hell. Throw that on the list next to “dreaming” and “insane.” I was afraid I knew which of the three was most plausible.

  The chorus of the damned leveled out, and still nothing was in sight. I felt a strange turning sensation, don’t ask me how—I still couldn’t feel my body, and there was nothing in the background to serve as a reference point. But I rotated slowly, dreading what I might see.

  A figure came into view—well, half a figure. It was a man, or what was left of one, suspended in the blackness as though by chains on his wrists, though no chains were visible. His head hung at an angle, eyes closed, reminding me uncomfortably of the figure crucified in my neighborhood church. The resemblance stopped just below the man’s rib cage, though, because that’s where the man stopped. He didn’t end in a tidy way, either. Gobbets of glistening red tissue hung in ragged strips from his bony torso, and . . . stuff dripped from the cavity.

  A fat, gray-green grublike thing crawled around the side of his body. I say “grublike,” but it was the size of my forearm, with a mess of slitted black eyes and glistening mouthparts. As I watched, it started snacking.

  The man lifted his head, and the curtain of stringy hair fell away from his face.

  It was Kelsen. His head was whole, at least.

  “Nasty, huh?” he said, twisting his mouth in a grin through his agony. Another grub-thing crawled around his armpit and dug into his side with a rough crunching sound. He sucked in a breath—I have no idea how.

  “What did you do to me?” I asked him.

  “What did I do to you? You asshole. Are you being serious?”

  “If you didn’t do something to me, then why . . .”

  “Why are you here?” He showed me his teeth. The grub-thing that had been snacking on his intestines or whatever crawled around the edge of his ribs, up into the bell of his chest cavity. It gnawed and ripped, tore and swallowed, and bloody red shit poured from its back end and spattered on the floor. I hadn’t even known there was a floor, but there was—a black plane, visible only because of the splats. The creature disappeared up into Kelsen’s body. Another followed it, then another. Others seemed to appear out of thin air, and soon his body was teeming with them. Bloody shit fell in an unceasing patter from his innards.

  Kelsen shrugged his shoulders in a way that suggested an expansive spreading of his arms. “Why are you here?” he asked ag
ain. “A little Cassandra action, asshole.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He smirked at me. “Here but for the grace of God . . .” He glanced down at the creatures covering his body, then back to me. The message was unmistakable.

  “Bullshit. No way.”

  “Think what you like. I’m just the messenger.”

  “Why warn me? Why would they let you?”

  “I hear that years of dread impart a particularly savory flavor to the meat,” he said. I thought for a second he winked at me, but no. One of his eyes was pulled backward into his head. Through the hole, I could see something squirming.

  “No way. Not me,” I said. If I’d been there in the flesh, I’d have been shaking my head violently back and forth. “No fucking way. Never. I will not let this happen to me.”

  Kelsen’s grin widened so far I could see his molars. He inclined his head at me. “A little late, don’t you think?”

  Suddenly, I could feel my body again, and raging pain raced through it. It felt like I’d stepped in a bear trap. I followed Kelsen’s gaze down.

  My legs ended mid-thigh. The truncated, bleeding stumps crawled with big, gray-green grubs.

  * * *

  To say that I woke up screaming gives way too much credit to the usual meaning of the word “screaming.” I woke up with inhuman shrieks ripping their way out of my throat, flaying my vocal cords, slashing the back of my tongue and palate with red-hot razors. I woke up with sound tearing out of my throat that should have blown the top of my head off.

  “Jesus Christ,” somebody said, and then there were hands on my shoulders, my chest, pushing me down, and a sharp prick at the inside of my elbow.

  The world, which I’d seen none too distinctly to begin with, went fuzzy and faded out.

  * * *

  The next time I awoke, I was calm. Calmer, anyway. I opened my eyes, and I barely screamed at all. Whimpered some, but that wasn’t so bad. I’d earned it.

  The first thing I noticed was that I was in the world’s most fucked-up hospital. It was mostly a big, dark, black, empty space, lit locally by one dim forty-watt bulb hanging from a chain above my bed. Faint yellow reflections came back from vague shapes in the darkness, shapes that gave the sense of hulking machinery of indeterminate purpose.

  Nearer to hand, a rust-spotted metal table leaned on rickety legs. A bone-thin woman sat at the table, hunched over some implements I couldn’t make out. She spoke quietly, and though I couldn’t make out the words, I recognized the rhythm of incantation. She finished the incantation with a wave of her hand, then measured out a couple of chunks of something into a spoon. Then she picked up a dirty glass syringe—it looked older than me by a comfortable margin—and squirted some water into the bowl of the spoon. A moment later, she conjured a tiny flame in the palm of her left hand and held the spoon over it.

  I realized with a start that I was watching a woman cook up charmed heroin.

  She melted the chunks down, said a few words over the resulting soup, and set the spoon aside, the handle propped up on a cigarette butt so that none of the precious liquid spilled. Her precision and economy of motion suggested she’d done this many, many times. She stirred the mess with the syringe, and finally sucked the liquid up. I knew guys who’d filter the shit—regular heroin, anyway, or sometimes coke—through cotton or even the filter off a smoked cigarette, but this lady was so fuckin’ far gone, she didn’t even bother.

  When she bit down on the end of the rubber tube tied around her left arm, she turned her head to tighten it, and that’s when she saw me watching.

  She grunted acknowledgment, then turned back to her gear.

  “Where am I?” I asked. “Who the fuck are you?”

  She slid the needle into a prominent vein in her forearm. Her veins hadn’t collapsed yet, so I guessed she still had a way to go before she hit bottom, horribly enough.

  She didn’t bother to suck a little blood up, make sure the syringe was in the vein. She pushed the plunger home.

  Then she slouched back in the chair, and, as the H hit her bloodstream like the chemical equivalent of an A-bomb, she let her head roll sideways onto her shoulder and grinned at me with half-lidded eyes. Drool oozed from the corner of her mouth. “Who the fuck am I?” she repeated. She opened her eyes wide. They were all pupil.

  “I’m your doctor, Jimmy.” Her grin faded, her eyelids fell slowly, like dust settling through the air, and she nodded off. A second later, the sharp tang of urine hit me, and a second after that, a heavier, fouler stench.

  It occurred to me to wonder if I was still in Hell.

  I continued the inspection of my surroundings. This pool of sickly light contained little more than the table, the zoned-out doctor, and the bed, which had once been painted white, but now showed mostly rust with a few flakes of white paint holding on with grim tenacity. There was something looming at the corner of my eye, up by the bedpost, but I couldn’t make it out. An experiment in head-moving succeeded in triggering waves of nausea and weirdly distant pain, but little else. It was tiring enough just to move my friggin’ eyes.

  I couldn’t make out the something up at the corner, but I did see a trace coming down from it, a thin line at the corner of my vision. I followed it down with my eyes—slowly, since moving my eyes quickly made me want to puke—and saw an IV line climb up on the bed like a tendril of ivy. It was red. Full of blood, then. Maybe I was getting a transfusion?

  I followed the line to my elbow.

  My heart stopped. Or, at least, it felt like it did. I tried to scramble backward, to get away, but my body wasn’t taking orders. I just had to stare in shock and horror.

  I was draped and swaddled in once-white sheets that were now covered with slick, shiny blood. The sheets were red everywhere except the edges, and there was even a little pool in the concavity of fabric between my legs.

  I took a breath, somehow, and my heart resumed its usual duties, though it seemed to be in a bit of a hurry. What the fuck? I looked at where the IV needle punctured my arm. My forearm was wet with blood, too, wide smears of it in most places, little beads in others. There wasn’t a single square inch clean. As I watched, some of the little beads swelled, merging with others before forming droplets that ran off my skin and down to the saturated sheets.

  Holy shit. It’s coming out of my pores. What the fuck happened?

  I waited, unable to do more than stare at the horror of my hospital bed. I verified that I did, in fact, still have feet. That had to count for something, I thought, but I didn’t dwell on it long. Thinking of those oversized demonic maggots—no, thanks. Maybe later.

  My biggest concern, at first, was the itching. It seemed to start up everywhere at once, beginning with a little tickle, like a thousand flies had landed on me, but ramping up pretty quickly to full poison-ivy insanity. Thirty seconds of that, over my entire body, and I was ready to sell my mother to Satan himself to get it to stop.

  Fortunately, it stopped by itself. Unfortunately, what replaced it was more pain, this time not so distant. It felt like my whole body had gotten worked over by a cheese grater in the recent past. Then the very recent past. Then it felt like my body was being worked over by a cheese grater.

  “Doc,” I croaked, “what’s going on?” She said nothing, of course. She was dead to the world. If it weren’t for her snoring, I would have assumed she was actually dead, period. “Help? Please?”

  I couldn’t do anything as the pain got steadily worse. What the hell had triggered this? I’d been sitting here, minding my own goddamn—and messy, and bloody—business. I hadn’t done anything. Not in the last twenty minutes or so.

  Then it clicked. I was probably on some kind of heavy-duty pain medication, or had been, and the shit was wearing off, and my fucking idiot asshole doctor was on the goddamn nod.

  How much worse was this going to get, I wondered, as the pain ramped up to the swimming-in-broken-glass level.

  A lot, as it turned out. The docto
r didn’t so much as vary her breathing while I screamed myself hoarse.

  I lost consciousness again, and I gotta tell you, I was pretty fucking glad to see it go.

  * * *

  “What did you do?” Benedict asked. I was lucid again, for the first time in days, and I didn’t feel any better. My bed was still a blood-drenched ruin, my body a wreck. At least the idiot doctor had doped me up, so most of the pain was dulled down to a maddening itch.

  I stared at Benedict, trying to convey without talking the concept that I had no clue what he was talking about, and didn’t really care.

  Benedict ignored me. “That day, with the old man. Chebyshev. What did you do?”

  “Who cares?” I mumbled.

  He leaned closer, standing over me now. I liked to imagine the alcohol fumes wafting off him acted at least partially as a disinfectant on the giant wound I called a body. “You think this is an accident?” he asked, gesturing at me and the bed. “It’s—it’s a side effect, or something. If we know what you did, maybe Doc Haverty can help you.”