by Drew Magary
“Is this your journal?” she asked Ben.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why would you put these things in your journal?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I get angry.”
“Are you planning to hurt anyone, Ben?”
“No! No, I swear!”
He wasn’t lying. It’s just a journal. You’re free to empty out your mind in there and sort through the trash, aren’t you? That’s what the teachers said to do, man. He was a depressed, only child. The only-est child. The fuck did they think they’d find in that journal: unicorns? He never wanted to really hurt anyone, except for perhaps himself. Wasn’t that obvious? You don’t see me walking around kicking cats, do you?
The principal gave Ben a kind pat on the shoulder.
“If you ever need to talk to anyone,” she told Ben, “my door is open anytime. Or you can visit the guidance counselor, Mrs. Fazio. Okay? We know how hard it is for you, Ben. We’re here to help.”
But that’s not what really happened now, was it? No, not at all. The principal said nothing of the kind. When they see death threats in a kid’s journal and that kid has an honorary prison scar running down the side of his face, along with a record for public vandalism . . . yeah, no, they aren’t cutting that kid any slack. You were suspended for two days. Other kids found out why. Barely anyone at school spoke to you again. The rest of the football team froze you out. That’s what happened. That was the real world for you. Always ready to assume the worst.
• • •
When Ben woke up, Voris was hanging over him. He could tell it was Voris right away: the black eyes, the pupils bright like headlights in the dark, black wings with a span of twelve feet sprouting out of his back. His face was white. Sallow. Black gloves sheathed his seemingly endless fingers.
Ben rolled out from underneath Voris and grabbed the fox and handprint paper from the other bed, tucking them into his backpack. Voris turned his head and gazed at Ben with curiosity. The light in his pupils felt like its own distinct, separate creature. There was no need for him to explain that Ben would soon be under his complete and utter control. The pupils owned him. Voris could not be beaten.
“What do you want?” Ben asked.
Voris floated out from the bed, tucked in his wings, and came to a standing rest on the hotel suite floor. Still staring. Still curious. Ben reached over to his nightstand for the gun. By the time he had a hold of it, it was too late. Voris wrapped his praying mantis fingers around Ben and lifted him up off the ground, his lethal skin radiating through the black gloves. Ben shrieked in pain and dropped the pistol. Soon, Voris would melt through his skin and char his ribs.
Then Voris spread his wings wide and flew out the French doors and over the balcony, up into the sky, carrying Ben in his claws as easily as a crow would a slip of paper.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE JOB
Dawn was breaking, and the cold air whipped Ben’s face and body as Voris carried him in his burning talons between two white jet trails in the sky: the path. They were flying over the bucolic foothills now, and beyond that Californian mirage lay a red, cracked desert that stretched out in every direction. Ben’s cheeks and jowls were flapping as the wind roared against him, drowning out all other sound. After an hour, he felt the cartilage between his ribs searing off, and he gasped in agony as Voris descended lower and lower into the rolling sands, gently resting him on the ground in front of a small section of the rusty desert that had been cordoned off with a thin yellow rope.
It was a square lot, covering roughly an acre of land. To the left of the square were thirty pallets, each piled high with a pyramid formation of hard white stones. Hovering above the square were two small black cloud forms, each with bright eyes, white like Voris’s pupils. No mouths. These were the Smokes.
No one said anything as Ben clutched at his rib cage and groaned on the desert floor. The pain coursed through him like a steady electrical current. The sand remained cool from the night wind, but the sun was intensifying now. Soon, the desert would bake and burn. There wasn’t a single living thing or piece of vegetation in sight: no cacti, no shrubs, no scorpions or rattlesnakes. It was all just one big griddle, except . . .
The path. Beyond this plot of desert, Ben saw two parallel lines in the sand, just like back in Courtshire. That wasn’t all: There was a truck. A marvelous red pickup truck with a high cab and tires thick like rib eyes. Its bed was stacked with dozens of bags of dry concrete mix, pressing down on the truck and nearly making it pop a standing wheelie. The truck and the path were right there, ready for Ben.
But not quite yet.
Black, foggy pseudopods extended out from the Smokes’ bodies, allowing them to grasp tangible objects. They dumped a pickax and shovel at Ben’s feet, along with a pair of work boots. Ben stood up, dropped his backpack, picked up the shovel, and swung it at Voris, who dodged it nonchalantly.
“Rot in hell,” Ben screamed.
Voris tilted his head and stared at Ben, yet again curious, like a doctor performing a biopsy. Voris didn’t speak. He invaded Ben with his pupils, locking into his eyes, hijacking his optic nerves, and sending missives directly to his brain.
How do you know this isn’t hell?
That was the thought Voris left inside him. Then he took off one of his black gloves and revealed a pale hand with grotesquely long fingers, the tips glowing red like steel coming out of a forge. Voris pointed at the square, and then at the tools provided for Ben.
“What do you want me to do?” Ben asked.
Voris pointed back to where he had carried Ben through the sky, and then raised his ghoulish hand upward in a majestic swoop.
“You want me to build you a castle?”
Voris nodded.
“Here? By myself? It can’t be done. Where would I even start? It would take me years.”
Voris shrugged.
“Please, no. I can’t.”
But Voris ignored him and pointed to the Smokes. They were to be his guards. They would supervise the project. Ben would not be leaving this worksite until the castle was finished, even with the truck and the path right there to tempt him.
“If I build this for you, do I get the truck?” Ben asked.
Voris said nothing. Instead, he spread his wings and flew off, although not back to the castle. Instead, he flew in a straight line directly over the pickup truck and the path, disappearing into the west, or whatever direction it was.
The Smokes continued to hover. Ben unpacked his tent and staked it at the eastern edge of the worksite. The Smokes made no move to confiscate it, or to take his bag. He ducked into the tent library with his backpack and drank a bottle of water, ripping up a white T-shirt and wrapping it around his aching rib cage. He gazed at the bag. The pickle jar full of poison for Voris was still there. And his seed bag. He needed to hide them, but not here.
The Smokes poked through the flap. One Smoke was holding the shovel and pickax, the other a pair of canvas pants and a plain white shirt.
“You want me to start now?” Ben asked them. They advanced forward, the tools and clothing outstretched. He brushed the apparitions off.
“Gimme a moment,” he said, “and I’ll think about it.”
That wasn’t what the Smokes wanted to hear. They dropped the equipment and descended upon Ben, holding him down and burning his retinas with their halogen eyes. One of them raised a cumulus fist and plunged it into Ben’s face. The ash filled his nose and mouth and flooded the back of his throat with hot bile. He couldn’t breathe. His sinuses began to burn away, as if he had snorted pure fire.
“Okay! Okay!” he cried. “I’ll do it!”
The Smokes backed off him. He gulped the fresh tent air and hacked out the ash, coughing in berserk fits as if flu-stricken on a winter morning. He was ready to cough out all of his innards. The Smokes seemed unconcerned. Th
ey dumped the clothes on top of him and watched him dress.
Outside the tent, Ben took his shovel and dug into the loose sand. For hours, he piled it high off to the side of the rope, and then watched with great discouragement as a stiff wind came in and blew some of it back down into the tiny hole. There was a whole acre of this to go, and no telling how far down he had to dig before hitting bedrock. Mrs. Blackwell’s garden seemed much more appealing by comparison.
The next day, he dug a bit more. A skinless hand reached out of the ground, swiping at his ankles. Another ghoulish hand popped out, and soon a full-on skinless zombie rose out of the desert: a grotesque piece of walking meat. Its eyes bugged out as it stalked Ben, sending him scurrying back to the tent for a bag of salt. It came within ten feet of the flap—dripping hot mucus and reaching for Ben with its veiny, swollen hands—when he threw a handful of salt at it and heard it moan in agony. Its muscles shriveled and its veins hardened. The white cartilage of its nose turned to stone and its ghastly exposed jaw locked shut. Within minutes, it was a lifeless piece of jerky on the ground.
The Smokes carried it away.
It would not be the last Skinless he would have to deal with. They rose up and attacked every few days or so, a plasticine anatomy exhibit come to life, stripped of all dermatological tissue and displaying only the monstrousness of the human framework beneath.
Weeks passed. Every morning, the Smokes barged into Ben’s tent at dawn with the tools and sent him out into the searing hot desert skillet. He would wrap a shirt around his head for sun protection and go to work immediately, stopping only for a blip of a lunch break. The Smokes would hand him a metal tray of gray meat and lukewarm potato cubes and then prod him back into hard labor the moment he was finished. If he took too much time between spoonfuls, he got a fistful of black ash.
His progress was glacial. Every so often, he would come across a boulder and have to break it up with the pickax. His back ached. His arms became saddle leather. Massive sun blisters formed on his neck and shoulders: brown spheroids filled with burning hot plasma. The sweat would collect in the folds of his brow and then drip down and sting his eyes to the point where, by the afternoon, he was digging through a blind haze. The red sand burned like coal in the sun. When the wind kicked up, it would shower Ben in a fiery squall.
Every three days, Voris would pass directly over the site, never landing. Instead, he would fly from the western horizon back toward the hotel/castle, and then back again three days later. Ben made note of it. Every time Voris flew by, Ben hurled curse words and invectives at him from the ground, fuming at him like a disgruntled employee.
The Smokes let him keep his tent, and so he spent every night in the fluffy white bed, sleepwalking through corrected versions of his past: lost football games that were now triumphs, a car wreck he was once in that now never came to pass, bad dates that now went right.
He never saw his family, though. They were kept away from him, even when he prayed to the sky above for one more glimpse. The fluffy fox and handprint paper remained on the other side of his bed and he tucked them in every night.
One day, in the pit, he found a stray rock and slipped it into his pocket, then went into the tent and stared at it. If he stared at it hard enough, he could see eyes.
“Peter.”
After that, he tucked the rock into bed at night as well. He would kiss the rock, and stroke the top of it. When he closed his eyes, he could feel his fingers running through the dense thatch of hair on Peter’s ample skull.
• • •
The weeks turned into months. Ben marked so many days on his pad that he was running out of pages, and the paper was too precious to waste on counting. He laid the marked sheets of paper on the floor and began making notches into the hardwood to continue the tally. There were hundreds of notches. Perhaps more. But he had his routine to keep him sane. And he knew there was something after this. Crab. Meeting up with the Younger Ben. There was a next to this. That was important.
The truck and the path were so achingly close, but Ben shut out the idea of hijacking the truck for now because the Smokes seemed impossible to distract. They never slept. Ever. Sometimes at night, he would wake up and they would be in the tent with him, staring. Silent. Hovering in place even when Ben threw a shoe at them.
His hands grew thick with calluses and his skin red with sun damage. His fingernails became hard as quartz, with months of crimson sand and dirt built up underneath the cuticles. And soon he found that his entire temperament had grown calloused. Nothing surprised him much anymore. Nothing bothered him, not even fighting off the Skinless. He didn’t curl up and cry thinking about the dogfaces and rabid Mouth Demons. A hard shell was forming over him.
The Smokes would bring him more food and water as he needed it. His shoulders grew broad. You could have parked a car on top of them. Despite being enslaved, he didn’t mind the physical transformation. He felt stronger, more confident in his ability to withstand misery. In time, he excavated six feet down into the pit. He could see the results of his work, and it pleased him.
He consumed almost the entirety of the library inside his tent. There was an ingredient missing from his recipe: a final component for his pickle jar. He read Mrs. Blackwell’s reference book over and over, and scoured the library for related materials. He kept hoping he’d find another book written by her somewhere in the stacks—some companion volume that gave him the secret to the poison and a way of defeating the Smokes. But there was nothing. Many of the books were unfathomably dull: long treatises on peat moss, encyclopedias printed in Armenian, turgid histories of Olde England. A select few kept him rapt: old works by Chaucer and Ovid, the occasional Bible passage. Every book was a door; every page a new place to hide. He read Dante and began to wonder if he was truly in hell, and what he had done to deserve it. He used to curse and yell at his kids. One time he left a scratch on another car in a parking lot and drove off instead of leaving a note. He pleasured himself a lot. He had sex with an old flame in a time warp.
But those seemed like minor offenses. Mostly, his sins were within him, terrifying impulses that he had quashed at every turn over the course of his youth. His depression would lead to rage, and his rage would lead to fantasies of . . . well, Mrs. Blackwell had seen all of it in his journal now, hadn’t she? The violence. The blood. What if God had seen all that as well? What if God knew? One night, the thought of it made Ben weep uncontrollably, and he sat up in his bed, with the Smokes’ eyes on him, and began to apologize:
“I’m sorry, God. I’m so, so sorry for the things I’ve thought. I’m sorry for the things I’ve done. I’m sorry for the hurt I’ve caused that I don’t know I’ve caused. I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry, Teresa. I’m sorry, children. Please, please know that I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
There was no reply from above.
“I SAID I WAS SORRY. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME? Didn’t you hear me? Can’t you see how sorry I am? What is WRONG with you? Get me out of here. GET ME OUT OF . . .”
The Smokes rushed over and snuffed his cries out. He passed out that night in a fog of soot.
Like any other prisoner, he found rituals and small moments to make the intolerable tolerable. He got better at drawing, remembering everything Teresa had mentioned to him about light and shadow. Contours and perspective. Every day he gazed out at the dead plain and took note of how the shadows crept along. He scratched drawings on the library floor. He took out many of the leather-bound volumes lining the stacks, and if the books bored him, he would draw right over the text. He summoned the picture of his family from his phone in his mind and painstakingly drew it again and again, the same image a hundred times over until it began to roughly resemble the real thing. He talked to the drawings and felt along the faces.
Sometimes at night, he would walk out into the serene desert breeze and even the presence of the Smokes couldn’t ruin his view of the stars. They we
ren’t normal stars at all. There was no Orion’s Belt. There was no Big Dipper. He could make out all kinds of bizarre constellations that had nothing to do with basic astronomy: ampersands, topsails, a human foot. Someone had shaken the heavens and let the universe resettle above him. And of course, there were the two moons. Equal in size. Always full. Never waxing. Never waning.
One day, he finally struck bedrock and knew his foundation would soon be complete. He had unearthed ten feet of hard desert spanning the acre, a gradual slope at the front allowing him to climb in and out of the hole. He celebrated with a sip of peach schnapps in the tent. A few days later, Voris flew above him and he saw the Smokes look skyward. Just for a minute or so.
A week later, during a water break, while the Smokes looked up at Voris, Ben quickly bored a hole in the sand near his tent and stashed his pickle jar inside, the poison still missing its last, vital ingredient. He threw the seed down hard on the ground and nothing happened. It stayed a seed. Panicked, he threw the seed into the hole with the pickle jar and covered it up. The seed wasn’t ready to sprout right now. It worked on some kind of existential time release. But he had learned how to be patient. After all, he had years to play with. He could wait until he had the timing exactly right.
Every so often, he’d scream unholy things at the Smokes, or make a frenzied run at the pickup, and they would push him down and fill his lungs with enough toxins to make him beg for mercy. They made for horrible company. He missed Crab. He even missed Fermona, in his own twisted way. He missed the sound of another living being. A truly living being, and not the spooks haunting his every waking moment.