The Church of Broken Pieces

by David Haynes

  “Where did you hear the word? Bath...”

  “Baphomet,” he interrupted. He couldn’t tell her where he’d heard it. She had heard enough without telling her about the vision in the bathroom at the motel. A vision of her on her knees in the bathtub squatting in front of Donovan flashed across his mind. He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed it away before Donovan cut his arms to ribbons.

  “Just in some book, I read at the motel. I just wondered...”

  “Liar,” she said over his shoulder.

  He typed ‘Baphomet’ into Google. The results were almost instant. They were also very disturbing.

  28

  Wilson stared at the page. He had never seen or heard the word ‘Baphomet’ before this week, he knew that for sure. He never had any dealings with the occult in his work. He’d been asked to find an antique book once but there were many specialists dealing in that field, people who knew that world like the backs of their hands, so he stayed well clear.

  A stripe of images ran across the top of the page. All the same, all depicting the recognizable goat-headed sigil. He clicked on the links, finding the words ‘deity’, ‘Satan’, ‘demon’, ‘worship’, ‘occult’. None of them made him feel any better. In fact he wished he had never sat down at the computer.

  “That looks heavy,” the Doctor said. “What’s this got to do with Hemlock Mill, or the hospice?”

  He shook his head. The last link he clicked on was a trailer for a movie. Skeletons lay about a sarcophagus that leaked blood onto the dirt floor. Bugs crawled through the skulls, tracing bloody lines across the bones. They looked like slug trails. Like the creatures in the bathroom at the motel.

  Demonic laughter echoed in the empty space, and text dripping in blood declared, ‘He’s Coming!’

  He closed it down. “I never liked horror movies.” He turned to her. “Probably nothing.”

  “Oh come on! You just happen to read something in the motel about demons and Satan and... and all of that stuff we’ve just seen on the web and you claim it’s probably nothing?”

  He shook his head.

  “Frank, what’s going on?”

  He stood up. “I honestly don’t know, Louise. And that’s the truth. I did hear that word at the motel and until now, I had no idea what it meant, or what Baphomet is.” He pointed at the dark screen. “And I don’t really know now either. Goat-headed devil, demon Satanic worship. It’s just a load of crap, that’s all.”

  Whether she knew it was a lie or just didn’t call him on it, he wasn’t sure, but he was pleased when she didn’t push him any further. He didn’t know what to think right now.

  There was a moment’s silence when he thought she might start asking questions he wouldn’t have the first idea about answering. Thankfully, she pulled her jacket off the back of the chair and put it on. Maybe she was just as confused as he was. Although he imagined she would make sense of it long before he did.

  “I’ll walk you to your car,” he said, heading to the door. She offered no resistance.

  On the way out, they stopped at reception and talked with Joe. He didn’t protest about letting Donovan into the building – he too had been at the mill, watching Donovan at work.

  As Wilson walked Dr Hamilton to the door, Joe was already heading to the store to fetch a blanket. He had a feeling Joe would do just about anything Dr Hamilton said. He thought most people would. She bred confidence, even when the world around her was going crazy.

  *

  Wilson knocked before walking into Frances Pace’s room. It seemed like the right thing to do. Although if anyone had answered, he might just have run screaming down the corridor. Since scan-reading the articles on the web he felt jumpy, and he disliked the feeling immensely. He had never been prone to nerves and didn’t want this to be the start of some new, unwelcome sensation.

  He closed the door and stood beside the bed. All the tubes, needles and machines that kept her alive were familiar. His mom had been subjected to the same treatment, and not for the first time did he question how right it was to keep someone in this state indefinitely.

  Beneath the sheets, her skeletal frame created miniature mountain ranges where her bones tried to push their way out of her body. It was disturbing to look at. The single daisy someone had slid into her wispy hair was dead but it had more life than Frances Pace at that moment.

  He crossed the room to the corner opposite the door and sat down. Apart from the monitors, the only light was a dim night-light and a sliver of brightness that stabbed beneath the door. The machines, he knew, would whirr, whine and beep their way through another night of keeping her alive.

  The room was warm and the hypnotic sounds coming from the monitors made him feel drowsy. Not that he wanted to sleep, shattered as he was, but he recognized the irrepressible sensation of approaching sleep washing over him. He wished he had brought a book with him, a magazine or something to keep his mind active and awake. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t got anything except for a scratchy woolen rug and a chair that wasn’t quite the right shape for a human body.

  His own mind was obviously struggling to make sense of what had happened over the last few days. It had dragged up the name Baphomet from somewhere. A name he didn’t know but had obviously heard at some point in the distant past. It was just a word, a name, nothing more. All of it could be explained by what he and Donovan had been through in the last week. And if it couldn’t, then he wasn’t going to try. They just needed to leave.

  He had been truthful with the Doctor about his reason for wanting to spend the night in the room. But not entirely. Waiting around for something to happen had never been part of Frank Wilson and he wasn’t about to start doing it now. Yes, he could wait for Donovan to come back but, as much as he wanted it to be the case, he didn’t think he would.

  He wanted to try and communicate with Frances Pace. He wanted to be with her, force her somehow to reveal what the hell was going on. He had no idea how to make that happen but it was better than just waiting. Anything was better than that.

  He stood up and walked to the window to change perspective. The blinds were down but he parted them with his fingers and peered through. Rain splashed against the glass, making a faint percussion on the window. The lights of Hemlock Mill traced a diseased vein through the darkness and down to the river. Beyond that, there was nothing, just blackness.

  He turned away and sat back down. Where was Donovan tonight? It hurt, actually hurt, to think of him lying somewhere, afraid and cold, wondering where he was and what had happened to his mind. He would need rebuilding after this, Wilson knew that with certainty. He would find him the best doctors money could buy and, if he needed it, the best lawyers too.

  He closed his eyes, squeezing them shut to drive away any chance of tears. Wherever Donovan was, there was only one man responsible. Frank Wilson. He grabbed the blanket, bunched it into the tightest ball he could manage and hurled it at the door. It sailed through the wood and disappeared.

  “What the...?” It was a dream, it had to be.

  But it was upon him quicker than his mind could wrench him free. Bony fingers gripped his shoulders and pulled him down. Down, down, down.

  *

  The chamber was empty. No, that wasn’t true. He had no idea if it was empty or not, it was simply too vast to see where it started and where it ended. He walked forward, his steps echoing on a stone floor that was worn and wounded with deep scratches.

  “Hello!” he called. It didn’t feel like any dream he had ever had before. “John?” he shouted. His voice echoed all around him, bouncing off a wall concealed by the darkness.

  Above him, enormous ribs as thick as his car formed the beginnings of a vaulted ceiling. The tops of the arches disappeared into some gloomy space miles and miles above him. What was this?

  The darkness was not absolute. Although there were no lights, not visible ones anyway, the chamber seemed to contain a half-light that suggested what might be here. The vastness was disorientating,
nauseating.

  “Hello!” he shouted again. “Is anyone else here?” Nothing except for his own voice, like a mocking mimic coming back at him.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted out. Dreams were not supposed to be like this. It was his own mind creating this and his own mind would bring him back out again.

  Yet as he closed his eyes, he grew dizzy and could feel his body moving of its own accord. Rotating, spinning and lifting him higher and higher into the darkness.

  He opened his eyes. He was no longer looking up into the vaulted ceiling but looking down from it. Below him there was nothing, nothing save for the unending blackness from which he had just risen.

  He screamed, holding onto the wooden ribs at his side. They crumbled beneath his fingers as if they were rotten. Tiny worms spilled from the wood and dropped down into the abyss. He screamed again.

  As his frightened voice came back to him, everything started moving again. Was the void moving around him, or was he moving around it? It was too desolate a place to get his bearings. The rotting vaults were the only things he could see and now they too were receding away into the darkness.

  “Help me,” he shouted. “Someone, please!”

  The great rotation churned his stomach afresh. Which way was up and which was down? His back slammed into a cold surface. Rock. Stone pressed into his skin, jagged chunks of it. He reached behind, trying to hold on but it broke away beneath his fingers, crumbled like chalk.

  Again and again for an interminable length of time he was tossed and rolled from one surface to another, each one as temporary and decayed as the last. How long passed? Months, years, millennia. It was impossible to say, impossible to fathom.

  His screams became one constant piercing wail as his terror filled every corner of the void. Up and down no longer mattered, they were the same. Wood, stone, sand, gravel and dirt, they were one in his fingers. They offered nothing. There was nothing to fasten his mind to. Nothing to secure his body to. He was alone and nobody was coming to rescue him.

  Tears streaked down his cheeks; tears of despondency and self-pity. He could no longer discern between the voice in his head and the pathetic sounds coming from his mouth.

  “Help us.” A voice distinct from his own called. It was faint, probably a whispered echo of his own pleas.

  “Us,” it came again.

  Us? He had only asked for his own salvation.

  Were his eyes open? It didn’t seem to matter – there was nothing to see. He raised his hands to his face and ran his fingers across his flesh. Old, it felt wrinkled like his grandmother’s had felt all those years ago, loose and saggy. He teased his eyelids open and stared into the place between light and dark. Between life and dream.

  Between.

  Movement to his side, in the soupy gloom that stretched in every way conceivable. Shuffling, shambling humans; their heads too large, their limbs too small, or deformed in all ways imaginable. Crooked, warped people edging toward him.

  A great wave of sadness washed over him. Utter despair and anguish became a pestilent cloud that covered him in a shroud of hopelessness. He wept. He wept because he could do nothing but sob for them.

  “We are between,” the voice whined.

  And as the world started moving again, slowly, as if their weight of numbers could hold it still for just a little longer, Richard Pace stepped forward. His body was not as twisted as the others but his limbs were already stretching and twisting to match his environment.

  “Between,” a man to Pace’s side whispered. Gray matter bulging from his skull, his eyes and ears. Wilson blinked. He recognized the man. It was... it was the man from the shop. The man who had smashed his head in and pushed glass in his eye. What was his name, dammit? He couldn’t think. Thomas?

  “He wants them, he wants their souls, but suicide saves them. He can’t touch us here,” Pace said, his neck stretching grotesquely upward. Speaking looked an incredible effort. “I thought she was here, my mom, but no.” He raised a withered arm and pointed into the vaulted murk. “Look.”

  And then they were gone, whipped away in a flash, an instant; their faces as contorted and perverted as their bodies.

  He tumbled through the void again, waiting for the inevitable collision but none came. He allowed his eyes to close again, to bring relief from it. How deformed had his own body become? Richard Pace was barely human.

  A feather-like touch tickled his cheek. He brushed it away. But again his skin bristled at this new touch; delicate and pleasant. It had been so long since he had felt pleasure that it took a moment for his mind to react. Sweet scent filled his nostrils, sweet and amplified against the musky dampness of this place.

  He opened his eyes. More feathery tendrils brushed against his skin. He could almost giggle at how sensitive his flesh was.

  Flowers. They were flowers. Falling on him from all around, floating upward, sideways and on him like a blizzard. He knew at once what they were. Daisies. Millions of them generating their own luminescence, offering light where there was only perpetual dusk before.

  “Frances,” he whispered. She was here. Not as the others were, not as her son was. But her presence was everywhere. It was in her favorite flowers, in the daisies.

  A thin wisp of understanding crept into his brain as the flowers covered his face.

  Between. This was the between. Between heaven and hell? Was that it? So why was he...

  Spinning upward, or was it downwards? Corkscrew movements that made direction impossible to determine pushed him away from the flowers. Away from Frances.

  *

  “Mr Wilson?”

  A rough shake pitched him to his side, banging his ribs on the arm rests. He batted the hand away before he had opened his eyes and shouted, “Let go of me!”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to...”

  He opened his eyes. The blurred image of a large man in a white uniform looked down at him.

  Wilson blinked, waiting for the image to clear. “Where am I?” he asked. “Between,” he added although the word came out before he could work out why he said it.

  “Between? Between what? You’re in the Kennebec Health Consultancy, Mr Wilson. In Mrs Pace’s room.”

  “What?”

  “Look.” The big man stepped back, his face just about recognizable.

  Wilson looked past him. He could hear strange beeping noises. A blurred outline of someone lying in a bed. A hospital bed with monitors, tubes and wires stretched across it.

  “Frances,” he said. He looked up. “Joe?”

  The big man laughed. “Must’ve been some dream, huh?”

  Wilson nodded, rotating his neck. “Must have been.” Perfectly straight shafts of light jagged across the sheets, dissecting Frances’s skeletal frame into chunks. “What time is it?” he asked without looking away from her.

  “It’s just after seven. Thought I’d see if you wanted some coffee before I went home.”

  Wilson knuckled his eyes with clenched fists. “Thank you, that would be...” He opened his hands, allowing a dozen daisies to fall from each palm. They fell into his lap.

  “They’re her favorites,” Joe said, walking toward the door.

  “Wait,” Wilson said softly and then more urgently. “Wait a moment.” He didn’t want to be alone, not until he had made just a little sense of what had happened.

  Joe turned around. “You okay? You don’t look so good.”

  “What time did I get here? I mean when?”

  “You came in here just after ten-thirty, I think.”

  “Last night?”

  Joe laughed but he stopped short when he saw the look on Wilson’s face. “Shall I ask Dr Hamilton to come see you when she gets in? She’ll be here in a...”

  Wilson shook his head. “No, I’m okay, just a little confused that’s all.” Joe was still staring at him like he had lost his marbles. Maybe he had. “Deep sleep, that’s all.”

  Joe shrugged. “If you’re sure.”

  “
Just one last thing, Joe?” he asked, standing up. The dying flowers fell to the floor. Joe watched them drop.

  “Sure.”

  “I was here alone, right? Nobody else came in.”

  “Nope. I’m not making that mistake again. Anyone comes in or out on my shift and they sign that book. No exceptions. Nobody came in or out all night, and when I looked in on you at two this morning you were snoring like a trooper.” He checked his watch. “Which is what I intend to be doing in about thirty minutes’ time.” He smiled and walked out.

  Wilson watched him go and then crouched down to take one of the flowers. The ventilator squeezed air into Frances Pace’s lungs and he heard a word that sounded very much like between as it returned to the tops of its stroke.

  29

  Wilson stayed for while after he had finished the coffee. Sitting in the chair, the chair he had seemingly spent all night sitting in, was the safest place to be right now.

  Even an hour later, the vestiges of that other place crawled about his body like a bad case of flu. It seemed madness to think it but his body ached like he had been thrown every which way for an eon. That physicality couldn’t be true, but his mind still saw the deformed and gray people shuffling their way through the soupy half-light toward him. Richard Pace with his grotesquely elongated arm and Thomas Newsome floundering with his brain pushing its way through his skull. The images were there as if he had just seen them this morning. As if they had been in this very room.

  He opened his hand. The daisy had withered, browned and was limp in his sweaty palm. Yet an hour ago it appeared to be freshly picked from a summer meadow. None of it made sense. A wave of sadness hit him like a truck, forcing tears from his eyes.

  “He wants them. He wants their souls. Suicide saves them.”

  Those were the words Richard Pace had used.

  “I want you to find my mother’s soul.”