by Bryan Smith
Chad sighed. “I’ve died and gone to the land that time forgot.”
The guard pulled a folded piece of paper from a vest pocket and passed it to Cindy. “A duplicate of your emancipation endorsement. You’ll need it to get past the next checkpoint. The man you’ll need to see there is Stephens.”
Cindy nodded. “Stephens.”
Something flickered in the guard’s eyes, a hint of some private shame. “There’ll…” He cleared his throat again. “There’ll be a price to pay?
Cindy met his gaze. “It won’t be one I haven’t paid a hundred times before.”
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The guard sighed. “I know.”
Cindy started walking.
Chad, ever reluctant, had no choice.
He followed her. “I would really like to go home now.”
Cindy ignored him.
“Good luck,” the guard called after them.
She ignored that, too.
The guard waited there until he saw them disappear around the bend in the tunnel. Then he went back into the holding facility and returned to the warden’s office. He examined the bodies of his former colleagues, checking to be sure they were dead. He detected a faint pulse from one of them, Nitkowski, a problem he took care of with another bullet to the back of the head.
Then he moved to the warden’s desk and took a seat.
He surveyed his bloody handiwork and judged it a job well done.
But not quite finished.
He racked the 9mm’s slide, ratcheting another bullet into the chamber. Then he put the gun in his mouth and thought about all the terrible things he’d done since coming Below. The slaves he’d killed. The innocent children he’d consigned to a life of slavery. Unspeakable, unforgivable acts of brutality. He wasn’t an evil man. Not really. These things had been an almost unbearable burden on his conscience, which was alive and well despite his repeated efforts to suppress it, even kill it. He’d allowed circumstance and his own fears to override his morality.
To turn him into a henchman of the devil.
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But fate had turned and granted him an opportunity to atone for his deeds.
An opportunity he’d taken with gratitude. There was just one more thing left to do. Seal one more dead man’s lips forever. He pulled the trigger.
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This is a dream. A dream but not a dream. A warped reflection or inversion of reality, like the dreamer’s odd visions of the beautiful woman called Dream. He experiences the same awareness that he’s dreaming. The lucid quality of the scene in his head distresses him. His sleeping body writhes on the bed, and he covers his face with his hands. Only then does he realize he is no longer tethered to bedposts. In fact, he senses he is alone in the bedroom. So this is it, the miraculous opportunity he’s been praying for, another chance to get out of this place. All he has to do is wake up.
WAKE UP!
an internal voice commands.
But he cannot.
How strange it is, how frustrating, to experience this dual awareness. Knowing that what he’s seeing in his head
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is something more than the usual juxtaposition of weird images conjured by a brain at rest. That random quality isn’t there. Nor is there any overt symbolism. He watches the drama unfold like scenes in a movie. A movie he can’t look away from. He is reminded of that guy in A Clockwork Orange, the singing sadist, who is immobilized and forced to watch a series of grotesque images, his eyelids held open with metal clamps. This is like that. Something restrains him. Monofilaments of psychic thread knotted in strategic areas, effectively preventing a return to the conscious world. The knowledge of his unbound body in the bed is like that proverbial carrot at the end of the string-always just out of reach. Maddeningly close.
Not for the first time, he experiences despair.
He is in a room lit only by candles. He sees this. He knows it’s an image in his head. But he’s there. Really there. He can feel the ground beneath his feet. Can feel the warmth generated by the flickering flames. There is an altar of sorts against the back wall. Upon it is the nude body of a middle-aged man. His chest is sunken and his ribs are visible through yellow, papery skin, the way plastic wrap might look stretched over a skeleton. His ankles and wrists are bound with lengths of rope, a measure that seems unnecessary-nothing about this obviously doomed man suggests “flight risk.”
The man is awake.
And resigned to his fate-no pleas of mercy issue from his mouth.
But the dreamer senses something more than mere resignation; the man on the altar seems almost… eager.
Yes, that’s it.
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He’s eager to die.
He eagerly awaits deliverance from a long period of suffering.
The dreamer-who maybe isn’t really dreaming-is horrified by the revelation. Not for the sake of this man, who is obviously beyond help, but for himself. Because he knows how easily he might embrace a similar fate. It is all too easy to imagine that sense of serenity, of blissful acceptance, in that last moment before death.
There is a small crowd in the room. A dozen people. All there, the dreamer supposes, to bear witness to this man’s death. Witnesses are an essential part of the ritual. He isn’t sure how he knows this, but it is fact, as immutable as the tide. He can’t make out their faces, and none of them speak. They are waiting for something. This is a reverent silence, a silence of solemn anticipation.
They wait.
And wait.
The dreamer wills his sleeping body to open its eyes. His concentration is so focused the intensity of the scene in his head wavers just a bit, goes soft-focus. His eyelids flutter. Once. And then the scene snaps back into focus. There is a flashing moment of utter despair and frustration. Then the mute witnesses drop as one to their knees. The dreamer is on his knees in the same instant, not at all sure how he knew the precise moment to genuflect. But the same mysterious impulse causes him to bow his head in the next moment. His peers in worship do the same. That sense of anticipation remains, but it is more intense now, and there is a collective holding of the breath.
Footsteps.
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Someone has entered the room. A presence of authority. The footsteps draw closer. The sound is the thump of boots on wood, and there is something ominous about it. The dreamer begins to shiver and experiences symptoms like the onset of a cold, a headache and chills, a dull throb at the back of the throat. The clip-clop of the boots is like a hammer in his head as the person wearing them passes by him on the way to the altar. The person ascends the few steps to the altar, stops, and turns to face the small crowd. The worshipers, if that’s what they are, look up now.
The dreamer shivers again.
It’s her. Giselle. His tormentor. The awful mute woman who tied him up and tortured him. The candlelight seems to grow brighter. No, the dreamer realizes, it’s not just a matter of perception. The light actually is brighter. Giselle has somehow willed it. She is capable of such things. Magical things. She is not as adept as the one who taught her, The Master, but he thinks her power should not be underestimated. This knowledge appears fully formed in his head, intact from nowhere, like a file added to a computer’s hard drive via a floppy disk.
Giselle looks more beautiful than ever. She is wearing an ankle-length black skirt over black boots and a burgundy top that exposes her arms and breasts to stunning effect. Her long black hair is pulled back and gold hoop earrings dangle from her delicate lobes. The light from the candles seems to lick at her porcelain flesh. Her eyes are alive with the raw power of dark magic. She is the most striking female he has ever seen.
She smiles.
And extends a hand.
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A person near the front of the crowd stands, extracts something from the folds of a robe, something that glints in the light, and walks with her head knelt down to the altar. She proffers the shiny object. Giselle takes it from her and the robed woman returns to her kneeling
position. Giselle’s gaze takes in each person in the room, one by one, seeming to linger longer on the pale face of the dreamer.
The dreamer swallows hard.
Giselle’s smile broadens. The object in her hand is a wedge of razor-sharp steel. A knife with an ornate handle. Ceremonial knife. She turns away from the crowd. The dreamer has a side view of her slender figure now. She walks over to the bound man and kneels beside him. She brings the blade to her lips and kisses it. All a part of the ritual. The dreamer knows this, but the purpose of the ritual eludes him-a missing floppy-disk file?
The next phase of the ritual becomes apparent when another member of the crowd-the dreamer himself, actually-stands up and approaches the altar. Dread fills him like a fast-acting poison. The last place he wants to be is anywhere closer to Giselle or that altar. But he continues his approach on damnably steady feet. There is an object in his hand. A thick, leather-bound book. He wasn’t aware of it before, but here it is.
An image flash. Giselle nude. Standing over him.
Standing on him.
He wants to be far, far away from this sadistic bitch, but here he is ascending the steps to the altar, turning to face the crowd, opening the book, opening his mouth to intone lines written in a language he doesn’t know.
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Except that he knows it now. Words swollen with madness emerge from his mouth. Repetitive and rhythmic, blocks of strange verbiage form like passages in a song. This is a chant. An invocation. The dreamer speaks the words with the rote familiarity of one who has spoken them many times before. A possibility occurs to him, a notion imbued with enough unexpected hope to cause his physical body to grunt with surprise.
What he’s witnessing is real. Or very nearly real. He suspects any exaggerations supplied by his own mind are minimal. Slight embellishments. However, he’s now certain he isn’t actually in the candlelit room. Instead, he’s a visitor in someone else’s head, an unseen voyeur. His host, this sentient conduit between his own sleeping brain and this strange place, is unaware of his presence. He shares some of this person’s store of knowledge, which is how he knows this strange language. But there are gaps in the interweaving of the two minds, places where the synapses don’t quite mesh. The dreamer knows his host is a male. He knows the man once had a normal life in the world outside The Master’s domain, but that all ended more than seven years ago.
And that is all the dreamer knows of his host.
He stops reading. The book snaps shut. There is utter silence in the room again. Another phase of the ritual has concluded.
Only one phase remains.
Giselle grips the bound man under the chin with one hand, forcing his mouth open. The other hand, the one gripping the knife, moves with practiced deliberation toward the gaping orifice. Moisture leaks from the corners of
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the doomed man’s eyes. Helpless tears. The dreamer experiences a surge of anger that nearly-but not quite-overrides the terror he’s feeling. This just isn’t right. Hell, it’s a fucking travesty. Things like this should not happen in the modern world. But, hey, this isn’t really a part of that world, is it? That place, though still subject to the forces of random chaos and violence, is a world that has achieved some degree of civilization. Of enlightenment. This terrible thing would not happen in that place. …
Here, on the other hand …
Giselle slides the knife into the man’s mouth with the same unhurried precision. The man’s body jerks as something in his mouth gives way beneath the pressure of the blade. There is pain, sure, lots of it. Like all other sentient creatures, he remains a prisoner to the instinct of nerve endings. His mouth tries to close around the blade in a desperate effort to halt its progress, but Giselle merely tightens her grip around his jaw. She works the blade up and down while gouts of blood jump out of the man’s mouth. The look on her face is one of rapt concentration as the blade continues its inexorable excision.
Her eyes sparkle with nearly orgasmic joy as she springs to her feet and holds the blood-flecked knife high above her head. Impaled on its tip, almost unrecognizable beneath a coating of gore, is a small flap of flesh. The mutilated man on the altar has rolled onto his side and is coughing up blood. He is choking on it. Someone should help him.
Someone…
Be careful what you wish for, the dreamer thinks.
His host is moves toward the bound man. A moment
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later, he is kneeling beside him. The book is set aside as he reaches into his robe. His hand-the host’s hand, he reminds himself-closes around cold metal. A knife. The blade comes into view, and this is no ceremonial instrument. Six inches of dented but very sharp steel. This is a working man’s knife. A killer’s knife.
The host’s hand rears back. Then the blade swoops down in a merciless arc. The man on the altar dies, his throat cut ear to ear with stunning precision.
He steps away from the corpse, holds the dripping end of the knife away from his robe, and Giselle again takes center stage. She lowers the knife, pries the bloody piece of flesh loose, and opens her mouth.
I’m going to faint, the dreamer thinks.
The tongue is drawn into her mouth. She swallows it whole. There is a moment when the dreamer sees a lump in her slender throat, then it is gone, like the body of a mouse passing through a snake’s gullet. Something in the atmosphere of the room changes. It reminds the dreamer of the way it feels outside in the moments just before a storm hits.
Giselle’s nostrils flare and her body abruptly goes ramrod straight. The muscles in her arms and neck convulse like those of a condemned prisoner getting that first jolt of electricity. The throbbing veins look ready to burst. Her eyes glow a brilliant yellow, then morph to red a moment before resuming their normal dark brown hue. A great sigh issues from her mouth and her body returns to a normal posture. The strange power gripping her is gone-at least its visible signs-but her cheeks are imbued with a rosy glow. And that sense of almost erotic excitement remains palpable.
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She looks at the dreamer again.
At his host.
She opens her mouth—
Then the scene starts to fall away from him, like the glint of a nickel tumbling down a well, diminishing to a pinpoint before disappearing altogether. There is a moment of total blackness, and in the next instant the dreamer is jolted back into his own body.
His eyes snap open as he jerks awake.
He sits upright in the bed and breathes hard.
My name is Eddie, he thinks.
Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.
And I am not a murderer.
Eddie quickly scanned the room for signs of Giselle, but she was nowhere to be seen. This was the best news he’d had in, oh, ever. He’d rather get whacked repeatedly in the nuts with a Louisville Slugger than ever encounter that scary bitch again. Images from the dream assailed him, disjointed now, but still all too vivid.
The rational side of his mind began its inevitable assault of these things. The dream couldn’t have been real. He certainly couldn’t have been inside the head of another man. Eddie, the voice of reason told him, these are things a crazy person believes.
Eddie told the voice of reason to get fucked, because he wasn’t buying it.
It had all happened.
It was all real.
Whatever it was.
He had no idea what the purpose of the ceremony he’d
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witnessed had been and had no interest whatsoever in finding out. He knew it was some fucked-up kind of black magic, and he knew he wanted to put as much distance between himself and its purveyors as soon as possible.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, found his jeans on the floor, and pulled them on. This was the same pair of jeans he’d been wearing for the last year, and the filthy fabric felt nasty on his flesh. Nastier than usual, that is. He frowned, ran a hand through his hair, and frowned some more. His hair felt… clean.
He held out his arms an
d examined the rest of his torso. All the accumulated grime and muck of a year spent living in a cave was gone.
Psycho mama had washed him.
Eddie grunted.
Weird.
It was almost as if she’d been … well… preparing him for something.
His eyes widened as he thought again of the ceremony.
GO! the voice of self-preservation urged. MOVE YOUR ASS!
So Eddie moved his ass.
He went to the bedroom door, gripped the doorknob, and tried to turn it. It didn’t budge. He frowned, gripped it with both hands, focused his strength, and tried again to make it move. Nothing. He sighed and slumped against the door, breathing hard. Okay, this was depressing. The door wasn’t locked, yet it wouldn’t yield to his most concerted efforts. He supposed Giselle could have sealed it with a spell. Yes, she would be able to do that, wouldn’t she?
Damn her black magic-practicing ass.
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He would just have to think of something else.
His gaze fastened on the window to the right of the bed. Yes! He ran to it, jammed his palms under the edge, and tried to throw it up its tracks. His muscles protested and a wheeze rattled out of his constricted throat.
“Aw, shit.”
A closer examination revealed the window to be as effectively sealed as the door, but, hey, he could deal with this. Glass would yield, spell or no spell. He went to Giselle’s writing table, picked up one of the chairs, took one step back toward the window…
… and froze.
He heard a muffled sound, but its source was a mystery. Then there was a louder sound. A grinding, shifting sound. Stone moving over stone.