A Haunting of Horrors, Volume 2: A Twenty-Book eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

by Brian Hodge

  Used to, I’d taken solace in the belief that once I was dead, that’d be it, a total snuffage of my flickering spark, but Nihil had ruined everything. I’d heard the body squirm in its springs, heard it sigh and complain about the light, and coming back like that seemed the worst thing I could imagine. Jamey had only wanted to be dead — was nothing sacred? — and me, I’d spent too much time thinking about all the things I never wanted to be, with anything eternal strictly bottom of the list.

  I couldn’t bear to burden Rachel and Mae with this, because Rachel was so happy that the other half of her sexuality was now out of its shell, and Mae saying how wonderfully relaxed things were with us as compared to her family in Los Angeles, all that tradition and old world servitude and everyone’s expectations of her being a world-class soloist if only she’d strive harder, and how everyone out there dumped on Koreans, even in the Asian community, especially the Japanese, because it’s just not life if you can’t lord it over someone. I hated to spoil their honeymoon.

  Nathan. Nathan would help me through this crisis.

  “Why are you telling me this?” was the first thing he said to me. “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “But…” I said, and watched him scowl, something I’d never seen him do, not at me. “You were the one with the theories about this. If it hadn’t been for you, all I’d’ve thought was he’d been in a coma all this time.”

  “No, no, no, no, no.” Nathan was shaking his head, the two of us squared off in some bureaucratic line downtown where I’d confronted him, wasting another day outpaced by snails. “Don’t you get it, I was just basically bullshitting when I said that about his eyes, I didn’t expect you to take me seriously.”

  “You didn’t see them blink?”

  “I figured it was maggots, finally, that his time came,” and when Nathan started twisting and wrapping himself inside his coat and trying not to look around at the faces that were trying not to look at us, I knew what the problem was.

  Nihil was okay as long as he was a static concept, a joke, a theatrical prop, a conversation piece, our private urban legend, our scarecrow on the hayride. Let him slip those boundaries, though, start looking us in the eye, and it wasn’t fun anymore.

  “It never happened and you know it,” Nathan told me, hooked on dogma as much an opiate as Jamey’s smack and the family values of my mother and stepfather, whichever they’d settled on. “Never.”

  Everything Nathan said sounded so much like an order that I didn’t see any point to continuing, so I left him to his denial.

  On the bus home, I counted pawn shops and Vienna beef signs as they slid past my window, until a woman near the back wearing purple stretch pants bent her little boy over the seat and started swatting, and as he cried his older sister let a thin stream of drool run from the corner of her mouth, but the only movement she made was to turn her head away and pop a finger in her mouth, and then came my stop, and when I got off and the bus rolled away in its stinking roar, I could still see her empty face against the window and the hammy flailing arm behind her, smaller and smaller down the block, and I just knew that Andre was dead.

  During the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Mass was assuming the form that came down through the next thousand years or so, it followed the structure of the octave, a succession of steps from one’s state of consciousness on walking into the sanctuary, and on through an escalating series of credos and prayers and music and acts that climaxed in divine union. Peasant or king, whoever participated was tuned by the ceremony, resonating like a string plucked by their one true God.

  Now, gods come and gods go, thriving awhile then fading away in favor of new gods or spiffier reconfigurations of the old ones, and I have to wonder if among the newest might not be cities. Not the places so much as simply the idea of them. Say, the concept of Chicago that binds it all together, ‘burbs and downtown, El train and Sears Tower, sewer and gas pump, and those scurrying millions who tend and pay homage, and appease it with murder and babies.

  All that energy has to go somewhere, has to, because as any physicist will tell you, energy can never be destroyed…

  Only transformed.

  I figured Andre must be dead because no one had heard from him in so long, which wasn’t at all like Andre, who would call and cling to your ear and in his more insecure moments never speak in periods, only commas and semicolons.

  That I’d find him at the slaughterhouse began to make sense. After discovering Jamey there, Andre would regard the symmetry as irresistible; and too, in my experience, whenever life got twisted that’s where people went. How many times might I have been already but overlooked his corpse, in some shadow or musty chamber of its own, empty of life out of envy for the attention given Nihil’s, or because he’d been feeling otherwise impressionable.

  It was late afternoon when I arrived, sky spitting the year’s first tiny snowflakes. Then I saw that our padlock had been pried from the door, wrenched into the weedy brown stubble. Surely that hadn’t been Andre’s doing. Discovery by the outside world?

  I moved through the slaughterhouse with more care than usual, and the closer I got to that one-time theater of pain where cattle bled and Nihil waited, the more clearly I heard it. The creaking bedsprings were familiar, the choppy but unending moan less so.

  I watched from the doorway as they went about their work, and maybe it should’ve occurred to me to get territorial, since no one had said anything about sharing Nihil with anyone, even if he was starting to make me goofy, but they were so diligent in what they were doing that I couldn’t begrudge them. And they were so young, not yet ten years old, boys in that prepubescent state where they could still legitimately be called beautiful, even if they were grubby.

  One of them, dark-haired and long-lashed, held his tongue in the corner of his mouth as he knelt with a pair of cutters and snipped the end of another crosslength of wire, drew it back, and began boring its sharp tip through the meat of Nihil’s thigh. His technique must’ve been perfected by now. He’d been working his way down the body, skewering Nihil through each cheek, both arms, and beneath the skin of chest and belly, although it was the scrotum job that really made me wince. Nihil was trembling, clearly of his own volition and rapture, both eyes wide open and rolled back in his head with only the whites showing, and a rusty sound scraping from far down in his throat, a jittery quaver caught between a laugh and a moan, higher in pitch with every inch the wire ran through his thigh.

  The other boy was a blond little brute of a kid, frowning in concentration as he sat on the floor with an S.O.S. pad, scouring at something held in his lap, something curved and pale and still greasy with blood. It looked like the dome of a skull.

  The dark-haired boy used a knife to punch an exit on the inside of Nihil’s thigh, the skin now stretching from beneath, and once the wire was all the way through, Nihil rasped with relief or letdown, and when I walked in the blond boy only looked annoyed.

  “You two broke in here, you’re the ones who did that?”

  He glared, then shrugged me off in favor of scouring.

  “Are you…?” started the other, more shy, like my elder status still counted for something with him. “Are you a friend of Andre’s?”

  “You know Andre?”

  “Sure.” He started to bore the wire into the opposite inner thigh, which triggered the trembling and moaning all over again. “Andre’s the one who brought us out here.”

  “When did he do that?”

  “I don’t know, like yesterday maybe.”

  I walked around keeping mostly within the drab sunlight from above, spotting the remains of a fire to one side, a few sleeping bags around it and balled-up burger wrappers across the concrete.

  “Andre gave us the combination before he dropped us off,” the blond kid said, then jerked his head at the slimmer, more delicate boy, “but dumbfuck there lost it.”

  “That’s not my name,” he said. “My name’s really Cheyenne.”

  “Has he bee
n back since?”

  “Who? Andre?” he asked, and I said who else, and he nodded, then must’ve hit Nihil’s femur, because he yanked the wire back and tried again.

  “He was here this morning,” the butch kid said, bored with waiting for Cheyenne, holding up the wet skull. “He left me this to do. He was pissed about me busting the lock so he went to get a new one, but he hasn’t been back, that was…”

  “Days ago,” said Cheyenne. “Days and days and days.”

  So I prowled, and the boys paid little attention, although I learned that the other’s name was Oscar but he would only answer to Axl. Then I found another one flat out on the concrete, and for a moment thought here was the source of that skull, but this one’s was still attached, if no better for it. Thick as mud, dried blood caked the misshapen back of his head and the sledge mallet nearby. I wondered what it had sounded like, if it’d been anything like the skulls of those antecedent cows.

  “Who” — I pointed — “did this?”

  “We all took a turn,” Axl said. “Andre went first.”

  “Nihil heard it loud and clear,” Cheyenne told me. “Andre says he needed it to wake up more, you know, like a clock radio?”

  “And that worked?”

  “Did it work, shit, look at him,” said Axl. “Now we’re just waiting for him to come around the rest of the way.”

  “The rest of the way from where?” I asked, and if the boys couldn’t articulate it, maybe they understood the same way I was beginning to, below the skin in a place where it took more than words to cut to.

  Maybe, being so much sooner out of the void than I was, they unconsciously knew that great power flows along the path of least resistance. Paradises demand gods, and gods demand mouths of their own, to eat and to proclaim, and a lost or fallen status changes nothing. Where there might’ve once been glory, hunger will do just fine, and it’s better to be the one doing the serving than one of those being served up.

  Trying not to shake so hard, I said to Axl, “What’s with the skull, Andre give you any reason?”

  “I hate this blue shit, it gets all over everything.” Axl poured a can of water over the skull and squeezed the S.O.S. pad and wiped away blue and pink suds. “He wants to make something out of it, I don’t remember the name, something weird, he says Nihil told him what it was and how to do it.”

  “A damaru,” Cheyenne called over. “That was the word.”

  “How’d you remember that?” Axl wondered.

  Cheyenne’s shrug was very elaborate as he, almost singing it, said that he didn’t know, he just remembered things, so I asked what a damaru was and got the shrug again, “Something you make out of skulls, I guess,” and then he cut another wire and started on Nihil’s quaking knees.

  I waited for Andre, long enough for things to start seeming more normal, not that they were, but you get used to whatever’s around. We were starting to lose the light overhead when he came back, carrying something in a vinyl bag, with another young boy at his side who showed no sign of recognizing the other two, and I thought, What’s he doing, scooping them up one at a time?

  “Oh, hey,” Andre said, and he shuffled in his olive canvas coat, with darting eyes. “Been here long?”

  I said yes, and Andre gave the vinyl bag to Axl, who looked inside and started going on how it wasn’t fair, it was Cheyenne’s turn to clean one, or get this new geek, or me, so Andre tried to calm him, saying it could wait. Then he had to calm the new boy, who’d winced so hard at being called a geek by someone older that I thought he’d be sick.

  “Where’d they come from, Andre?”

  “The skulls? Just … around.”

  “The kids. These kids…?”

  He looked as if I’d asked the too-obvious. “They’re all over, Angus, they’re like puppies, you know. Everywhere you look.”

  “Except they don’t have tags, I guess.”

  Andre, turning on me, said, “You think I’m kidnapping them, do you? Because I’m not, there’s no need for that,” and he spun the newest arrival around, this thin wisp of a little boy with the cringing eyes under choppy bangs, then he yanked up a sleeve to show me the constellation of crusty pocks along that undersized arm, cigarette burns of varying recent vintage. “You think he does that to himself? You usually have to get a little older than six before you start doing that to yourself.”

  I couldn’t react, waiting for something that wasn’t true.

  “Believe me, I know,” he went on, then sent the new boy over by the remains of the fire, which Cheyenne was trying to rekindle now that he was finished with Nihil. “I’m just trying to make things better for them, is all, make things better for myself.”

  “By bashing in the backs of their heads?”

  “Only that one. You can’t save everybody.”

  “Yeah, but Andre, they’re kids, you can’t make decisions like this for them. How much did you know when you were eight, nine?”

  “Enough to know how much I hated when those assholes would beat on me just to hear me cry. That’s why I’m doing them a favor, either giving them power to survive, or putting the weak ones past all the hurt, forever. Either way it’s done out of concern.” Andre slumped and let his face sag as though he hadn’t slept for days. “You don’t understand, I’m just trying to get the dreams to stop.”

  “Dreams?”

  “Dreams,” then he pointed to the quieted Nihil, proud and terrible and mighty in that mangle of flesh and metal, and for the first time I realized they’d wired him into his own antenna. “I was the one who dreamed he was dead, wasn’t I, the one he called to first? So I’m only giving him what he wants.”

  “And that includes the damaru?”

  Andre looked surprised. “You know about that?”

  I said only from Cheyenne, and asked what it was.

  A damaru is a kind of magical drum, he explained, hourglass-shaped and Tibetan in origin. Right away I knew this was nothing Andre would know about, it sounded more like Jamey talking, Jamey and his lore about things that made noise. Jamey’s incorruptible brains picked by Nihil, the coagulated voice of rust and impulse.

  Damarus could be made of wood, but the truly powerful ones were made from two skulls, tops sawn off like bowls, then joined at the crowns, with membranes affixed over the ends. You didn’t beat it as such, but shook it, and two knotted cords whipped back and forth and did the rest.

  “Skulls, they’re really resonant,” Andre said. “He told me in one of the dreams that powerful damarus can wake the dead.”

  The idea was interesting enough to get me sidetracked, forget the moment and think of what was really going on here. The raising of a new army, maybe, or founding of a new religion of the null and void. Of course it was very Darwinian in nature, you couldn’t deny that, but it had gone this far, so who was I to judge.

  Axl was compliant again, scouring the second skull, and I saw that it’d already been peeled and partially cleaned, and so easier to ignore that not all that long ago there had been a face on it, atop someone’s shoulders, someone who’d been laughing or shouting or crying.

  I looked up, far above Nihil in that gabled tower, past the pulleys and chains, looked toward the day’s last light, thinking they’d better get the fire going again, or no one would be able to see and maybe they would freeze. Through the broken boards swirled fine snow, and now out of the wind it drifted straight down, and I moved over before Nihil and shared it with him, that first kiss of winter.

  The snowflakes melted upon his skin, Nihil warmer than room temperature at least, while behind drooping eyelids the orbs were twittering back and forth again, dreamer’s eyes. I wondered if he was privy to things miles away, in Chicago’s coldest heart. If in his vast expanding mind he saw a canvas of brick and cinderblock, and on it a constantly unfolding mural of slaughter and kickbacks, and if it flowed, a story like in a movie, or if it was just what it was, random and senseless, like coming attractions.

  Snowflakes on my face, I remembered
being here that winter day with my father, hating how such a simple sensation can take you back so far, so fast, so thoroughly.

  And I remembered Jamaal, being with him in this room the day after his sister was burned. Where was he now, anyway, and did he that day wonder where his life would lead, or did he try to shut out all thoughts of the future, suspecting that nothing good could come of it?

  Snowflakes running down our faces, Nihil grunted and grinned.

  The fire was going by now, smoke rising pale gray, and in the play of flame and shadow, among their four silhouettes, I saw the tallest lift his arm above the smallest, staggering off balance as he swung the sledge mallet. In the meat locker hush came a thud of case-hardened steel against curving bone, occipital I think, and at the instant of impact Nihil twitched and strained and panted and pulled at the wires that traversed his inner realm, as though he’d felt it across the room and all the way down to marrow.

  The blow had been glancing, the puny boy screeching as he buckled to his knees, but Cheyenne and Axl caught his shoulders. I was flying across the room without having thought to, Andre braced for another swing, telling the keening boy how sorry he was that he’d messed up, he’d do better this time, and maybe it was true, that if slaughterhouses had glass walls we’d all be vegetarians.

  Andre malleted the boy a second time before I could ram into him, and everybody tumbled, and I could hear the excitable squeak of the bedsprings, then I wrested the sledge away from Andre and knocked him on the knee, and when we disentangled he was crying, crying and hiccuping, sounding no different than when we were in third grade, except the spectators weren’t laughing.

  He rolled onto all fours, favoring the one knee, and after I stood over him, sledge in hand, he lowered his head and stretched his neck out, body still except for the shudders from his sobbing. When I didn’t move he began begging me to do it, although whether he wanted to sacrifice himself to Nihil or simply end everything wasn’t clear to me. But nothing much ever was.