Those Who Follow

by Garza, Michelle

  His eyes fell on Celia, studying her as she sat stone-faced while the other woman kept their heads bowed.

  “This sanctuary was constructed by the hands of specters, consecrated by the blood of the nonbelievers.”

  His eyes, blue and clouded with age, never left Celia’s face. “Are you a believer, fourteen?”

  She didn’t speak, only stared at him as he paced behind his altar. The rotting corpse of the last woman who defied him hanging there, stripped of most of her flesh.

  “You took part in the sacrament, ate of the flesh and drank of the blood of the lamb who died to make a place for you to become my bride.”

  She was reminded of being forced to eat pieces of the crucified woman hanging on the wall. She had only been known as Seventy-one and had been killed only a few days before Celia found herself trapped in the church in the middle of nowhere. Those cowering beside her accepted their meal and even reminded her that it had kept her alive. She found herself hating them as much as she did the old yellow-toothed bastard standing before them. Terror radiated from them. He basked in it, consumed it until he became drunk on knowing that he was exalted in their eyes, higher than any god from any bible and feared more than any devils in the imagined hells of their childhoods.

  “I believe something,” she said at last. “I believe that you are a worthless piece of shit.”

  The old man cleared the space between them in four long strides. He was not at all as feeble as his white hair and deeply wrinkled face proclaimed, though she knew that fact all too well. He gripped her by the throat and drew his knife.

  “Ninety-seven once dared to speak the same way and now she don’t speak at all.”

  He slid the knife between her lips until it rested against her teeth. She kept her jaws clenched shut in an effort to keep her tongue from meeting its dirty steel tip.

  “Shall I remind you of why she’s so silent?”

  He pulled the knife out and ran it up her cheek. His face was red. She could feel his hand trembling with rage. If he chose to, he could take out her eye in a single jab. She lowered her gaze, concentrating on his white polo shirt. It had a gold crown embroidered on the pocket. Below it, a company name Jeskey Antiques.

  “ANSWER ME!” He screamed down into her face.

  His spittle fell in stinking drops on her face as the tip of the knife dug into her skin just below her eye. His hound came from its resting place beside of the door, drool hanging from its mouth in thick strings as it growled, the only warning it would ever give.

  “Maybe I should feed your eyes to my dog. Teach you a lesson,” he threatened.

  “No,” she whispered. Defeat soured her stomach.

  “If you speak to me with insolence again, I promise you’ll regret it.”

  The cuff around her ankle, along with its heavy chain, reminded her that she had nowhere to go. His voice still assaulted her ears, yet it was now muffled as she felt herself growing nauseated. Her chest felt heavy as she struggled to remain conscious. He released her face, but stood hovering over her as her eyes rolled back in their sockets. She felt disconnected from her own body as he dragged her by the wrists up to the splintered altar. The room felt like it was a ship rolling with the waves of a stormy sea. Celia fought to remain alert, shaking her head as he forced her to lay upon the blood-soaked table he used for initiation and slaughter. She wondered to herself if she was dying… She hoped that she was, prayed it was over for her.

  Between her eyes, it burned like a smoldering blade was being forced through her skull and into her brain. She thought he was opening the marking on her forehead once more until she heard a voice. A screaming resounded in her own mind. A voice so much like her own cried out, yet her teeth were clenched together until it felt as if they would surely crack. The wailing became that of a newborn child, intensifying the fire that raged in her head.

  Her vision went dark. She was consumed by black, unaware that the wanderer stood over her demanding her to open her eyes.

  A multitude of possible reasons ran through her mind. Was it starvation? Withdrawal from being cut off from her usual supply of drugs and alcohol? Was she experiencing an extreme flashback from those same chemicals that were dormant in the cells of her body?

  It was unlike anything she had ever experienced. It terrified her, and for a moment she thought the old man, the traveler of roads between worlds wielded such power that he truly was a deity of suffering.

  Before her stretched a starlit highway. Approaching her was a figure. She moved forward, not even feeling her feet beneath her. She drew near the person, realizing that it was herself, walking with her arms outstretched, desperation in her face.

  Celia held her hands out. A stillness enveloped her, and though she felt her heart racing, she could not force herself to move any faster than a slow glide forward. Longing filled her up inside, wanting nothing more than to embrace the vision of herself. The other her stopped suddenly. A voice shook her to the bone as it echoed down the black highway.

  A barrage of pain erupted in her face, causing bright red starbursts to take over the vision before her. Her heart ached more than any violent blow being inflicted upon her unconscious self as she awoke to the old stranger pummeling her face with his fists. He rolled her from the altar table where the decaying wooden floor caught her in a bed of splinters and fragmented boards. She was too dizzy and completely disoriented by the sudden trip into her own consciousness to understand his commands.

  “Kneel before your god!” He raged.

  She got onto her knees, lowering her head, more out of exhaustion than obedience, yet his attack abated. Celia spit out a mouthful of number Seventy-one. The old man had attempted to force feed her once more while she was lost in her own mind. He left them there with his dog standing watch over his brides, cursing about fixing the flooring Celia destroyed in her fall.

  ****

  Casey was left in the infirmary most of the day The numbers in her forehead stung and the skin around them felt tight as scabs began to form. Javier came in the evening to return her to her room. He helped her to her feet and took her by the arm.

  “Let’s try to have a better night,” he said softly.

  Casey remained silent, embarrassment turning her stomach into knots. She didn’t want to look him in the eyes with the number cut into her face. The doctor never told her what was carved into her head but, as she felt it with her own fingers, the number fourteen repeated in her mind in the voice of an angry man. She couldn’t forget the vision shown to her—the man’s face, the knife in his hands. Casey knew these were not things from repressed memories but something taking place in the present. She was never a religious person, but she couldn’t stop the terror swelling within her that she was being tormented by an evil spirit.

  “Do you believe in the devil?’ she asked, her voice barely audible.

  “Yes, but not in the traditional sense,” Javier answered.

  Casey stopped for a moment, wincing as she turned to face him and his eyes fell on the bandaged wound left from what had occurred the night before.

  “Do you think that I could be being tormented by entities?” she whispered.

  Her eyes looked exhausted beneath the white strip of gauze taped over the number fourteen that had been left bleeding in her flesh.

  “No,” he answered truthfully.

  Javier wanted so badly to explain to her that he felt human energies swarming around her, though it seemed impossible. He could feel the touch of the dead since his youth. It was frigid like winter winds, but attached to her was hot electricity, the signature of a living being.

  Her eyes softened at his answer and she nodded, hopelessness flourishing just behind her pale irises. Javier knew she only wanted an answer—the name of something—anything to fight back against. He could feel the anxiety and fear radiating from her that she was simply going insane, and that she still might if she wasn’t shown the truth behind her attacks. He opened his mouth, contemplating how he could explain
it to her. Her eyes searched his face, needing an answer. The sound of soft footsteps stopped him from explaining. He held his response, though it pained him to see her disappointment. Jackie came walking down the hallway to greet them, leaving Javier to keep silent.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  NOWHERE

  The walls of her room were off-white, the tile the same. When the door was closed, it felt like being trapped in a shoe box. Casey sat on her bed, feeling her skin tingle. The small hairs on the nape of her neck stood on end. She looked out the window, expecting to see a stormy sky or crackling lightning, yet it was violet with falling night and cloudless. The static electricity brought with it nausea. She put her hand over her stomach hoping whatever medications she had been given her wouldn’t result in vomiting.

  She brought her fingers up to peel away the tape holding the gauze in place. It took with it a few stray strawberry blond hairs. The sterile pad stuck to the dried blood of her wound. She winced as she pulled it free. The number fourteen was left behind, soaked into the cottony fibers. She wondered the significance of it. Why she would cut that into her own forehead… and with what? Casey remembered laying her wrists open. Even in the haze of too much prescription medication, she could recall it clearly.

  It was half a lifetime prior to finding herself trapped in the small white room. She was seventeen years old and depression had been a constant intruder in her life since she was twelve. Sometimes she held it at bay, other times she wrestled with it, but it was always there waiting to consume her again. Like so many who fought the daily battle, she grew exhausted and something in her brain told her it would be so much easier to concede to it and offer her flesh and blood to free her soul for good. The scars on her wrists had diminished, yet never left her. Neither had the cold feeling of her blood leaving her body.

  John had saved her life, but he had also cast her aside. Her decision had been shameful to him and had caused a wildfire of rumors. The most important among them had not been confirmed until she was an adult watching the woman she had always believed to be her mother die.

  Casey knew that she had not carved the number into her own head, though Dr. Greenburg insisted that she did. She hoped that Javier was correct… that she was not being taken over by angry spirits. It wasn’t any comfort to think that those demons were not real because that could only mean that she had inherited whatever malignant disease of the mind that had killed her blood mother… the woman John had told her about… Annemarie.

  Casey’s stomach churned. Acid stung her throat. She weakly pushed herself out of her bed and went to her door. Her mind was assaulted by visions of an old man, violence in his eyes and a golden crown embroidered on his pocket.

  “Jackie!” she called, but her voice sounded far away.

  Her knees buckled and she sank to the floor. Her mind fixated on a single image for a moment. The feeling of the cold tile against the side of her face ebbed away. The stark brightness of the white room and its fluorescent lighting dimmed until it was absolutely dark.

  Casey could see only black for what felt like hours until small pin pricks of light started to shine in the shadows. A wind swept over her face, smelling of damp earth after a rain storm. Something white was moving in the distance, drawing near to her. Casey felt herself gliding along. Her eyes made out what appeared to be a blacktop highway beneath her as the figure before her became apparent. It was herself, hands stretching out, beckoning her forward. Her heart seized. She lifted her hands, waiting to embrace the mirror image of herself.

  A silhouette rose in her peripheral vision, tall and black, its arms stretching up to the starlit sky. She turned her head to see a great saguaro cactus. Fear halted her there. She wondered if it was the dangerous man that her other side had shown her, the man with the knife. She could hear the voice of someone raging split through the sky like a roll of thunder. When she turned back, her heart broke, the other her was gone. Casey cried out, reaching her hands forward to the empty night. Her voice was still hollow in her own ears as she wailed. Javier had spoken to her of the journey to finding herself and the happiness within her. She felt that slipping between her fingers. She was crushed when she realized she was awakening again to the white walls of Whispering Creek.

  “Shhhhh.” Javier hovered over her.

  Casey wept uncontrollably as he gripped her shoulder.

  “Let the pain out.” He whispered.

  “I was so close this time,” she said once she finally got control of herself. “I could see her walking on a dark highway. The stars were all around us. There was peace between us…” Casey couldn’t finish her sentence, she felt abandoned once more.

  “What is goin’ on with me?” she asked.

  “Why am I always seeing myself in danger? Is it a premonition?”

  “I can’t say for sure but I know someone who can,” he answered.

  “Help me, Javier. Please.”

  Javier was the one who had answered her call for help. He had opened the door to find her lying on the floor, shaking and screaming. He had known when he found her that way that he could no longer keep himself from trying to help her. Once he opened his mouth to speak, he knew he was risking his entire life but if he didn’t act Casey would certainly end up to be worse than Martin Benchman, beating her head against walls… the energy around her was just too great.

  ****

  The roar of a bored-out engine settled her nerves, like a knight barreling towards her in a coal-black steel steed to frighten away the villain who sat outside watching her shadow as it passed through each room of her house just beyond the windows. Betty raced to the front door to look out the peep hole and, sure enough, the weirdo sped away. She grinned, but her satisfaction was short-lived knowing he would only come back.

  Byron came through the door minutes later; he went immediately to the restroom to wash up and Betty stashed his pistol back where it belonged.

  “That man was back again today,” she spoke through the bathroom door.

  “He’s probably here visiting one of the neighbors,” her husband answered.

  “He sits in his car, Byron. Out there on the street, watching our house,” Betty said.

  “I think you are worried over nothin’, honey,” he answered after a long pause.

  Betty could tell he was in a foul mood by the way he dismissed her and, after living with the man for over thirty years, she knew better than to keep prodding him. “Alright,” she said and scurried back into the kitchen.

  Byron washed his face and hands; the stink of the decaying corpse inside of the rotting church clung to him. His mind was fixating on someone else. He had warned Allan to stay away and keep his mouth shut, but now it seemed that he hadn’t heeded the old man’s warning. He toweled his cheeks dry and stared into the mirror, his gaze hard with contemplation… his wives would need something to eat soon and Seventy-one had left his work shirt perfumed with her rancid smell.

  He decided that Allan would get an invitation to hear a sermon at his church and never walk back out. It was against the rules of those that wander, but Allan had already broken one of the most important laws of their kind by imposing himself into Byron’s real life and threatening to call attention to what went on in his sanctuary in the other desert.

  ****

  Javier was thankful that he still had a while before Cameron started his shift. It gave him time to follow through with what had to be done before his overzealous partner was there to stop it.

  “Listen to me very closely,” he whispered to Casey as he helped her to sit in her bed. “You need to get out of here. I can take you to see someone who can help you.”

  She nodded, but the look of confusion in her face worried him.

  “I know this is all too much. I will explain it as we go along.”

  Casey sighed, “I just want this to stop.”

  “It will, but you must fight to make things right.”

  “I’m ready to fight.”

  ****

  Th
e floorboards had been replaced with old pieces of wood from the dilapidated hand rails that were already uselessly laying in the dirt beside the front steps of the church in the desert. Celia went to watch through the window as the old man fired up his car. An orb of light opened before the hood as it rumbled impatiently. A doorway was opening. Beyond it was the real world—the one she had grown up in. The desert she found herself imprisoned in was on some other plane altogether, one where the stranger was both God and the devil.

  He stepped on the gas pedal, kicking up dust as he maneuvered through the pulsing gateway. Celia could see the crooked saguaro again, the same one that she had stood beside while thumbing a ride. Hitchhiking had been a necessary danger of her former life as a drifter, but she had never imagined she’d take a ride straight into Hell.

  The ball of light swallowed the old black car and soon closed completely, leaving her sick with helpless anger. Her eyes studied the unassuming landscape for a moment, wondering and calculating if she could survive out there once she broke free.

  “Where the hell are we?” She asked to anyone who was listening.

  “He has called it the other world many times, though we don’t know for sure,” The frail woman with sixty-eight carved into her forehead spoke. “Sometimes he just calls it nowhere—wherever we are—he claims it as his land.”

  “Any of you know what’s beyond the desert?” Celia asked though she knew the answer already.

  “No one gets out alive,” Eighty-two said. “I told you that, because it’s true.”

  Celia looked to her, “I’d rather die out there than in here.”

  “My sister said the same thing. He came back carrying only her arm… made us eat it,” she answered.

  Ninety-seven never approached the three as they talked amongst each other. She only sat in a splintered pew, staring up at the putrid remains of the woman who had been known as Seventy-one.