Psychostasis

by Ezra Blake

  Jake is no stranger to fear. He’s afraid of bad trips and failure and being alone. He was terrified before Ash’s surgery and when they boarded that plane. When he was a kid, he was afraid that aliens would steal his cerebrospinal fluid while he slept, but that wasn’t fear. He hasn’t felt true fear before this moment.

  Black dread grips his stomach and rips it out through his asshole—it obliterates everything but the sound of his own racing heart, and he knows this for certain: Chris has disappeared.

  He’s alone. He’s failed. Reality is one endless bad trip, his life means nothing, and he will die here.

  “Chris?” He whispers. “Chris!”

  “Up here, come on!”

  Jake can’t move. He can’t stay here and he cannot find out what’s at the end of this tunnel. If he takes a step forward, he’ll enter a door which only opens inward, and behind it is nothing. No Ash, no Elliot, no Chris. Only Jake, and not the Jake with memories or dreams. Jake the observer with nothing to see. He isn’t breathing, or he’s breathing so fast that it blurs into silence.

  He can’t do this. He can’t. He’ll leave alone. He turns around and comes face-to-face with the Void.

  It’s seven feet tall with long, gangly limbs: a cutout of man, as imagined by someone who’s only read about men in books. It isn’t an object in space; its body is the absence of space. A person-shaped window into nothing.

  Jake stumbles backward, clutching his skull.

  He’s blowing out candles at his seventh birthday party, wishing to be as important as his dad. He’s vandalizing the boys’ bathroom at Allegheny High School and filling out questionnaires in a psychiatrist’s office. He’s in a locked ward, screaming, “Please come back! Don’t leave me alone in here!” The Void listens.

  He’s dumping pills in the toilet and buying pills on the internet; he’s selling, sniffing, setting up cameras. He’s sitting in a circle, smoking a joint, and Scott says, “Jake, dude, you wanna kill the ash?” The Void watches.

  He’s peaking on acid and making meaning from random noise. He’s the Holy Ghost and Ash is inside him, and The Void speaks:

  Nice to finally meet you, messiah.

  Jake runs.

  He skids around the corner and into the torrent of water spewing through a crack in the wall. It knocks him off his feet. He bashes his tailbone on the concrete and slides down the hall, scrambles up and swings around to see Chris, staring; he slips again. The shadow is gone.

  “C’mon!” He shouts. “Chris, help me up, I can’t—fuck!” He slips down the hall. Its gentle slope has become a deadly water slide. Chris steps forward.

  “Jake,” he says, extending his hand.

  “Where—where is it?”

  “Grab my hand.”

  Instead, Jake tries to stand and falls on his ass again. Another panicked stumble to his feet and he catches Christopher’s wrist, pulls himself up. “I can’t,” he gasps.

  “My prosthetic gets traction. Just hold on.”

  They press forward through the gushing water, arm in arm, and he can’t stop to wonder if the tunnel is going to fill up and drown them. The Void swallows the hallway behind. There’s no turning back.

  “Up there!” Chris shouts. “There’s a drain!”

  He braces his hand against the wall but slips twice more before they reach the end. Water sloshes into a metal grate, leaving a path ahead.

  “What the fuck,” Jake sputters. His feet touch dry concrete. “Shit. Shit, this is fucked up, did you see that thing back there? How the fuck do we get Ash up that hall, can we even go back? Can we—”

  “We’ll deal with it. Keep walking.”

  “Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck this.”

  Christopher’s nails dig into his wrist. “Keep walking,” he repeats. “We’re going to find your friends. There’s a door around here.”

  Jake plants his feet and yanks his arm away, but Chris only digs deeper. His breath tastes like blood and he can’t see anything, he’s blind, and Nothing can see him.

  “There,” Chris says. His rubber foot strikes metal.

  A low moan emanates from under the heavy, oxidized door. Jake squeezes his eyes shut.

  “Don’t open that. Please, please, let’s go back, don’t—”

  The pressure drops. The air is full of human smells. A horrible wail escapes Jake’s chest. He’s sobbing, and then he’s shoved forward onto the cold floor and Ivan says, “Jacob, open your eyes.”

  He bites his tongue and prays to wake from this fever dream.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  It’s Ivan’s voice, but he’s never met Ivan. He never left home. It’s a hallucination.

  “Jacob.”

  He opens his eyes.

  Before him is a painting of a photograph of an impossibility. It exists in dimensions his brain wasn’t designed to perceive. He observes the scene from every angle at once, and every angle brings with it a wave of fresh revulsion.

  The room is low stone, the ceiling arched. On the wooden stage before them stands a black, human-sized cross, shimmering under red and blue theater spotlights. Two worshipers kneel before it. The slight, brown figure is choking. A noose stretches from its neck to the ceiling and taut, white rope anchors the meat hooks in its nipples to rings in the floor. It trembles with the effort of balancing between two traumas. The pale boy on the right is twisted into a knot. His legs are folded and tied in place, jamming his bony kneecaps into the concrete. His arms are contorted behind his back, palms together, suspended from a pulley in the ceiling. The other end connects to a huge, silver hook. Penetrating him.

  Ivan steps from the shadows. A black butcher’s apron protects his button-down, whose subtly pinstriped sleeves are rolled up to his elbows. He approaches with care; he touches Jake’s shoulder as he would an old friend. “I’m glad to see you both,” he says. “Did you have any trouble finding us?”

  Chris scowls. “You left me alone with him.”

  “It seems you handled the situation without me.” His voice is low and calm. “Forgive me. It was a matter of convenience.”

  In the background, Elliot screams. Jake is deaf to the sound, oblivious to all sensory experience save the interplay of red and blue light on Ash’s damp brow and the shattered, purple microcosm refracted through each bead of sweat. He opens and closes his mouth, but no sound comes out.

  “Jesus, Ivan, you didn’t have to...” Chris trails off as he scans Elliot’s shaking, sweating form.

  “Ah, but I did. You were so indecisive with the first one.” Ivan places both hands on Jake’s shoulders and guides him forward, toward the cross. “Boys,” he says. “Say hello. Your friend is here.”

  Elliot screams and twists, dripping blood. The hooks rip deeper into his breasts with every motion.

  “What did you do,” Jake says faintly.

  “What does any man do, Jacob? I made order from chaos.”

  Something snaps. He darts from Ivan’s grip and toward the door. Ivan has him in a headlock before the halfway mark. “NO,” Jake chokes. “FUCK YOU, GET OFF ME! CHRIS! CHRIS!”

  “Calm down. Don’t make a scene.”

  “MOTHERFUCKER, LET ME—”

  “Your friends are suffering,” Ivan says. His words are quick and clipped and quiet, too close to Jake’s face. “Elliot can’t hold his position. Given enough time, he’ll bisect his own breasts and strangle himself. Ashton has been restrained for nearly ten hours. There is a very real possibility that he’ll lose his hands if we don’t intervene.” His grip loosens, and Jake sucks in a deep breath. “I’m going to release you,” he says. “Cooperate.”

  He collapses on his hands and knees, coughing. In the distance, Elliot is still screaming. Maybe he never stopped screaming. Maybe he’ll scream until he dies of shock.

  They murmur to each other above him. They kiss. Chris pulls away, half-frantic, and Ivan kisses him harder. They’re distracted.

  The gun, messiah!

  He crawls toward Ash and cup
s the nape of his sweaty neck. His eyes flicker open—recognition, despair—and close once more. “I’m here,” he whispers. “Ash. I’m gonna get you out of this. Just breathe, okay? I need the—“

  “Jacob.”

  He spins around. They’re flanking him like sentinel crows, black-beaked and terrible, and Chris says, “Stand up.”

  “Eat shit.”

  “It’s easier if you give in.” He reaches for Jake’s shoulder, but Ivan stops him.

  “Gentle, darling,” he says. “Jacob, we don’t intend to kill all of you tonight.” He steps forward, into the red spotlight. His mouth moves in slow motion; his words precede his lips.

  “Fuck,” he groans. “Fuck, fuck…”

  And then it stops. One moment his electric rage is arcing ever higher, and then the power is cut, and it’s gone. He hit the threshold, blew the fuse—he can’t feel anger past this point.

  Ivan says, “Would you like me to let him go?”

  He nods slowly.

  “I thought so.” He flashes his pointed incisors. “Step onto the stage, please.”

  Puppet strings tug him forward. As he approaches the cross, the elements fall into place: two icons of pious hope, venerating a parody. The Rapture saves no one.

  Chapter 30

  “The placement of the nails in is a contentious subject among theologists. Though the Bible seems to place the wounds in Christ’s hands, the Greek word χείρ can also refer to the forearm. Some speculate that his hands were merely tied. I opted for a nail driven between the radius and ulna, to keep things simple. I’m not especially concerned with historical accuracy.”

  He slams the mallet down. The stake stabs through Jake’s wrist and into the wood. As he screams his earth-shattering agony, Ivan crashes their mouths together and slips his tongue inside. Chris can hear it. Slimy, soft sucking. He pulls away, Jake’s snot smeared across his face, and says, “For your grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”

  Chris snatches the mallet from his hand. “Let me do it,” he says, positioning the next stake at Jake’s wrist. He drives it through in one quick motion. Jake lets out another wretched scream.

  With a little help regarding placement, Chris makes quick work of his ankles. By the time he’s done, the room reeks of blood and fear sweat. Everything is wet with the condensation of three gasping mouths; Elliot and Jake are begging, bellowing, blubbering, but Ash simply sways on his tortured kneecaps, eyes half-lidded, panting.

  “Isn’t this more fun than the wooden horse?” Ivan asks.

  Chris only grunts. He stands by his assessment that the cross is a little ham-fisted. They should have stuck with the original plan—he said as much when he caught Ivan nailing beams together in the middle of the night, but Ivan said, “Metaphors mean more when you live them,” or something like that. Never mind that this isn’t fucking performance art. Jake will live, suffer, and die for a throwaway gag. A visual pun. It’s sick.

  “You’ll direct the action from here on out,” Ivan says, “I promise. Most of our equipment is still in the woodshed. Can I retrieve anything for you?”

  He glances around the room. They have knives and needles, clamps and screws and a pallet of bottled water. All this for him. All this because Chris was getting bored.

  “Christopher?”

  “Everything,” he says. “Just bring everything.”

  Ivan sighs. “If you insist.”

  He leaves through the hatch in the ceiling. The moment it opens, rainwater dumps inside and sluices toward the drain. Chris lifts himself up onto the stage and dangles his legs off the edge. In the unlikely event that he survives another twenty or thirty years, he’ll never acclimate to the uneven weight of his prosthetic.

  “I’m sorry it had to be you guys,” he says, eyes fixed on his lap. “That’s some rotten luck.”

  “You fucking psycho! Untie my fucking hands!” Elliot bellows.

  “He did this to me, too, y’know.” He speaks softly. If they hear him, they hear him. If they’re too loud, it doesn’t make a difference anyway. “He kept me for months. Just pain and boredom, on and on. Anyone would lose their mind eventually. I mean, eventually, you just have to do what he says.”

  “Sick fuck! You think you’re the victim here?” Elliot’s face is ruddy and his tits are strips of meat and fat with huge, bleeding furrows down the middle. His thighs are soft but he’s lean in the waist, and the way his cuffed hands strain and curl behind his back—Chris looks away. “Untie me!” Elliot screams. “Untie me! Latzke is going to fucking kill you!”

  He rips a strip of duct tape from the roll and pastes it over Elliot’s mouth. Jake stops screaming the instant he sees what Chris is doing, no doubt afraid of burden a gag would put on his already strained breathing. Smart.

  “Latzke sold you to us,” he says quietly, crouching at Elliot’s side. Fresh tears leak from his bulging, bloodshot eyes.

  Ivan arrives with the first load of supplies, then, which Chris absently examines. VMM provided almost everything on their list—they can do without the embalming tools. He picks up the bottle of capsaicin and squints at the label. Not medical-grade, but pretty strong.

  “I can help,” he says, holding the bottle for Elliot to see, “if you agree to shut up. I think Ivan was saving this, but…” he pops the seal on the cap and siphons the clear liquid into the dropper. The pepper oil was his idea, back when this ritual was just an abstraction.

  He snaps the bottle shut. “If I take off the tape, will you stay quiet?”

  Elliot nods as much as his noose will allow.

  He rips off the gag. Elliot takes a great gasp of air through his mouth and starts coughing uncontrollably.

  “This can numb the pain,” he says. “I’m not really here to torture you, but I will if I have to. Do you promise to stay quiet?”

  Elliot nods frantically.

  “Alright.” He fills the dropper once more and crouches to examine Elliot’s mutilated chest—completely ruined; there’s nothing for it. His fault for being indecisive. “This will hurt,” he says, and squirts oil into the wound.

  Elliot screams like a steam whistle, but it only lasts a second. He sways on his rope, sucking in wet, rapid breaths.

  “Better?” Chris asks.

  “Nn…”

  Good enough. He douses the other hook and turns to Jake, who’s muttering faintly. “What’s that?” He asks. Jake mouths something unintelligible. Only when Chris steps onto the stage can he make it out: water. He takes a bottle from the palette, drips it into Jake’s mouth, and watches the relief flood his eyes, the desperate bob of his adam’s apple. He’s cute. He can’t blame Ivan for kissing him, really. Just for kissing him while he’s still alive.

  Jake swallows a few times and tilts his head toward Ash. His choppy, wet hair slaps against his cheek. “Hands,” he croaks. “Please. Please.”

  The shutter clicks; the flashbulb pops, and here is a moment of that massive, fluid grief, too quick and broad to grasp before it disappears. Chris blinks away its afterimage, lays a hand on Jake’s quivering waist, and nods.

  Ash’s hands are crushed together in the reverse prayer position. The rope digs too deeply into his biceps and forearms, and as Chris approaches, the flesh bulging around them turns mottled blue and purple. It’s not the light.

  “Christ,” he mutters as he works out the knots. “You’ve been down here way too long.”

  His arms fall like dead fish at his sides. He doesn’t even whimper. Doesn’t twitch.

  The hatch clatters open while Chris is massaging his wrists, while Ash is lying on his back with glazed eyes and bitten lips, surrounded by a heap of white rope. Ivan shows up shirtless, drenched, with neat plastic bins of rubber hoods, leather floggers, steel manacles. Bin after bin, down the ladder. And Chris keeps rubbing Ash’s purple hands.

  “Not prepared for an amputation today?” Ivan closes the hatch and replaces the skeleton key around his neck.
r />   “He was losing circulation.”

  “That could have been avoided, darling, had you made suggestions when we restrained him.” He nudges the lid off one of their crates, revealing assorted bottles and needles and gauze. “If you’re going to criticize my methods, you should be prepared to improve upon them,” he says, and before Chris can stop him, Ivan procures an autoinjector and shoots Ash full of ephedrine.

  Ash sits bolt upright. He pushes himself onto his hands and knees, skitters forward. Something cracks. His arms give out. He lies curled and shivering on the floor, his heart visibly throbbing in his cadaverous chest. “Jake,” he croaks. “Jake.”

  “Ash! Stay where you are, just breathe—”

  They watch as he drags himself a few agonizing feet toward the stage. He dry heaves, groans, and collapses. Christopher’s eyes are getting misty but it’s only because he’s so pathetic. He turns toward the only wall where nothing is happening and says, “I want to get this over with. At least him.”

  “No!” Jake says. “Not him, please, kill us but don’t—”

  “Speak for yourself,” Elliot says. His voice is dry and hoarse. “I’m not supposed to be here. Latzke’s coming back for me.”

  “Didn’t you hear them?” Jake croaks. “Latzke put you here.”

  “Quiet,” Ivan snaps, and this is the Butcher speaking. Everyone listens. “They don’t deserve your pity. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but I suspect you boys fall shorter than most.” He wrenches Ash up by the hair. His body arches, arms limp at his sides as he gasps and whines. Ivan drags him across the stone, to the cross—it should rip his knees to shreds but he leaves no trail behind him—and forces him down again. “Ashton,” he says. “Tell Chris why he should kill you. I know you’ve been dying to confess.”

  Ash’s world is ache and color. Blue and red are the colors of cop cars and ambulance lights, dissolvable stitches in slit wrists. It’s better when he closes his eyes: green and orange afterimages, butterfly weed growing in the unkempt fields at Holy Trinity.