by Tim McBain
He blinks a few times, his eyelids visible through the holes in the mask. Something about their expression reminds me of an owl.
Chapter 40
I lie on the altar, face pointed at the ceiling. It smells funny in here now. I think it’s the smoke twirling off of the sticks of incense and disappearing into the gloom, but it’s hard to say.
I drank a big goblet of something or other a while ago. It burned all the way down, and things have been a little funny since then. Everyone drank a cup of this stuff. It got pretty tense in here after that, like an aggression in the air between us.
Oh, and then I put on a white robe, too. These things were instructed by Woods. He kind of ran things while Farber walked to the four corners of the room, did some soft chant I couldn’t make out, and then thrust a dagger different directions. I don’t know, man. Some kind of routine that reminded me of martial arts or something. Would’ve been a lot cooler if he broke a brick with his fist or something.
Anyway, I recline on the altar, hands folded over my belly. A drumbeat starts somewhere out in the room, and I tilt my head to see the fourth figure banging on a pair of bongos. I spot what I believe to be white hair on the knuckles. I think it’s Randy. I almost forgot about him.
I guess he did a lot of the heavy lifting as far as churning me through those rituals, right? He made me into a being in some altered state, something worthy of sacrificing. He earned the reward of seeing what happens when I die.
Who would have ever guessed that my life would all lead to this moment? Am I a fool for partaking willingly? Should I be thrashing around, fighting?
I don’t think so. I can’t see a point just now.
I’ve lost the chase, the game of life where the rules are never clear and winning is an illusion. And maybe that’s where the relief, my unshakable calmness, comes from as much as anything. I don’t have to try to figure it out anymore. I don’t have to press forward into an endless string of empty tasks and try to figure out what they’re for over and over again. I don’t have to weather all of the bad connections where I can only ever transmit affection and never receive it.
I do what my dreams tell me, and if it doesn’t go well, I don’t think I’ll be in a position to regret it, at least.
As if they can hear my thoughts, Woods and Cromwell approach and begin tying my hands and feet down to the altar. I’m pulled into a cruciform--my arms spread out to the sides, my legs straight down.
Even if I remain mentally calm, my heart rate picks up some at this point. It must be soon, right? It must. The bongo beat falls into a steady pound, a throbbing rhythm that’s somehow hypnotic.
And Farber hovers over me, and I can see his pale eyes through the holes in the mask. He holds a little bowl in front of him, almost like a cauldron or something, and he dips a dainty ladle into it and sprinkles liquid onto me. Based on the consistency, I think it’s water.
And then he speaks, his voice deep, his cadence in time with the pulsing bongo. He speaks a language I don’t understand. It might be Latin. I can’t say.
And maybe this was a mistake. A huge mistake, right? Maybe I was hypnotized or something to think this was a good idea. I pull, but the ropes have no give to them. I can only move my arms a couple of inches either way. And the panic takes hold, rippling through my gut, frothing toward my mouth, my lips twitching, my arms and legs writhing the best they can under the circumstances, my throat tickling, ready to open up and let my voice out.
But no, no. There’s no need.
I reel myself in, pulling back from the edge of hysteria. I let my limbs go slack, the rope no longer biting at my wrists and ankles. I take a deep breath, my chest expanding for a long moment, and I let the wind out slowly.
There’s no other way. I know that now. Maybe I’ve known it for a long time, since Glenn’s demise or shortly after. Does that mean I believe in fate or that all of this is happening for a reason? I guess part of me does, yes. But maybe another part sees this as the only way out of a situation where the people I care about are threatened. Maybe it’s even the easiest way out. I’m not bragging or anything. I’m not some great hero, obviously. I’m more like a clown, maybe a sad clown.
But I’m tired, you know? I’ve been tired for as long as I can remember. And rest awaits. I mean, I can’t say for sure what will happen to me now, but it seems like rest, you know?
The bongos continue to grow faster, more intense. Farber rocks back and forth now, more gibberish spewing out of his mouth, his pupils huge like a pit bull’s as the animal lurches to rip out someone’s jugular – or maybe more like a demon, I guess.
And that’s the only thing I really don’t understand here, maybe. If this is all for some purpose, if the other world holds sway over things and wants me to be here doing this, does that mean it wants to help Farber? Is that possible? It doesn’t seem right to me. It’s the one thing that still makes me uneasy, as prepared for the end as I am. I don’t like helping this wacko achieve whatever he’s trying to achieve.
But it’s the unintuitive path for a reason, right? Yes.
Cromwell presents Farber with the dagger, the ornate one I cut my chest with a long time ago. Yet another fitting end, right? Farber lifts the weapon over his head, and the curved blade catches candlelight just right and gives off a glare for a second.
And I close my eyes. I can’t watch this. I can’t. But I remember that when Glenn died, I made a request. I wanted to disappear, and my wish is being granted. Maybe that’s all the other world really wants here, to help me fulfill my desire. To help me get gone.
So here it is. Here it comes.
And I open my eyes, and Farber’s lips move, his mask shaking with the fervor of his speech, but I can’t hear him anymore. Not that I’d understand his nonsense anyway. His torso quakes, his shoulders twitching with aggression, both arms quivering, the knife shaking at the end of them. And the veins in his neck bulge, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.
And his pupils just about eclipse his irises, as demonic as possible, like the dark inside of him is swallowing the light forever now. I fear death no longer, but I fear this beast standing over me. I fear what he’s capable of, what he may do once I’m gone.
And moist lips pull back in a grimace, revealing his teeth. And his torso arches, and his whole body seems to coil up, ready to erupt. And the knife twitches twice and plunges down and down, piercing the air in an arc, a burst, a thrust, delivered with great force. The point enters my chest with certainty, precision, hitting the gap between my ribs and ripping through the flesh to skewer my heart.
And the blade pushes and pushes beyond what seems reasonable, beyond what seems possible. Like surely by now it’s all the way through me, this cold, foreign sharpness penetrating my torso. It has to be.
And then the spike retracts, pulling out of my chest for a long time. Again, it seems impossible. Like he’s somehow pulling five feet of blade out of me. The knife draws back over the tissue it ripped, not cutting on the way out so much as taunting the tattered places with the kiss of its edge.
And now it’s out, and the dagger’s absence becomes shocking. I feel empty. Hollow. Air rushes to touch the hole in my body, the wet spot that leads to the cavity in my heart. And I must be bleeding, the life must be draining out of me, but I feel no surge of draining liquid, no pulsing arterial spray. I can only feel the air, the open place.
And I look down at myself, but I can’t really see it right. I don’t see my chest, my body. I don’t see my being among the red. I see meat, animal flesh, something to be carved up and wrapped in cellophane and placed under the white light in the meat department.
And the shock lets up for a split second, and the pain hits, and black spots dapple the periphery of my vision. I feel the ragged edges of the tunnel into my heart, and I gasp, the only noise I can hear as well as the final one. That scrape of air hurrying into my throat, my wound screaming as my chest expands on inhalation.
And the wind holds inside of me, m
y ribcage taut for a long moment. It feels like my eyes are quivering, water draining from the corners. And I hold the air inside of me. My chest squeezes it. My lungs cling to it.
I crane my neck and look into the stained glass window on the other side of the room. My vision zooms in on that place where the sun lights up colored segments of glass. All else is still. Silent.
At last, I let it go, the final breath.
And that’s it, a little hiss like I’ve been punctured and all of the air is leaking out of me.
Chapter 41
All is black. I see nothing, but I hear the wind blowing, an endless gust that moans and howls and shrieks all around me. I don’t feel it, though. I don’t feel anything now that I think about it. Just dead and numb all over.
But then my sense of touch fades in, and I feel it, the freezing air so cold that it burns, blowing over me and around me and through me. It never lets up. It feels like I am blistered by the cold, if that’s possible, skin cracking and flaking away. I picture my fingers and toes turning black and falling off within a few minutes, with the rest soon to follow, all of the cells in my body dried out and killed one by one. Like how when it’s 50 below your spit freezes before it even hits the ground. Like that.
Frozen.
Is this real? Am I in my body? Am I in the other world? Am I some place else all together?
I can’t move. Am I paralyzed?
Shit. I can’t even tell if I’m corporeal or not at the moment. I have no sense of having limbs or eyelids or lips or anything like that. Am I just too cold to feel them? Or am I falling again? Tumbling into the black nothing? I don’t have the sinking sensation. In fact, almost no sensations occur to me.
Cold blows the wind.
There is nothing but this.
I don’t understand it.
A groggy feeling comes over me, and I slip back into unconsciousness.
Chapter 42
I bubble up enough to feel the cold for a few seconds, but then I’m under again. Gone away to somewhere else.
And then I’m conscious again, freezing and confused, back in black. The wind still blows the cold, but perhaps at a lower velocity now. More of a whistle than a roar. Becoming conscious here feels like bobbing above the surface in a spot where there’s a hole cut in a frozen pond. The overwhelming sense comes over me that I was fully submerged in the cold and black, all the way. I was underneath. But that now there’s a little glimmer of something else happening. Not a physical glimmer that disrupts the black nothing in any visual way, but a feeling, a presence, a warmth.
I strain to grasp what it might be, what it might mean. Is it important? I don’t know. I can’t quite remember how I got here, where I’ve been, or where I might be going.
But whatever it is, this glimmer, this presence in the blackness, it’s right there. It’s close. It’s familiar somehow, some company I’ve shared before, and yet wholly unexpected here, out of place. I know that I know what it is, that the name is on the tip of my tongue, but then it’s gone. It’s gone, and I can’t quite remember it right.
The memory dissolves, and with it the hope of figuring out what just happened. And the wind picks up again, and the cold gets colder, and the emptiness pulls me back under.
Chapter 43
I’m awake... I think. Something like that, anyway.
I’ve become aware again. Let’s just put it that way.
The wind noise is gone. Silence pervades, the perfect match for the black nothingness I find myself draped in once more. And the cold remains, the chill of death permeating everything.
Am I breathing? I stop and try to pay attention for it.
Nothing.
So I don’t think I am respiring at the moment. Not great. I don’t know what that means, though I have my guesses.
Am I dead? I must be.
I try to let that sink in for a moment, but it might be too big to absorb. I don’t feel any particular way about it as far as I can tell. I don’t know. Maybe it’s too frigid for feelings.
Is this what death is like? Trapped in the darkness like being buried alive? Like a long night of fitful sleep where you wake up to feel the cold and nothing every so often? Helpful reminders that you are no one and nowhere. Wiped out. Snuffed out. Erased.
Maybe.
Maybe not, though. I am experiencing this. I am thinking. That’s not death, right? Not all the way, at least.
I am conscious.
The story isn’t over, is it? No, no. It drags on and on.
Or maybe these are the last gasps, and it’s ending in slow motion. Maybe I’m wading out into the cold, and once I’m submerged for good, it’s all over. Maybe this is the last flicker of the magic energy in my brain that separates life from death. That could make sense.
And I try to trigger some kind of memory montage, some rapid fire blast of images to conjure up all of the old feelings I had, to run through all of the people I knew, the relationships that meant something to me. I want to watch the pictures move and remember it all and bask in it for what could be my final moments.
But it doesn’t take. None of these things come to me. Like always, I am trapped in the cage of my own self consciousness, my own anxiety endlessly monitoring myself and my feelings and my experiences.
And this ongoing analysis of my immediate situation drowns out any attempts to remember connections I’ve had with people. It chokes out nostalgia. So I get no fond look back on things, no sense of wonder in remembering all that has happened.
I am stuck in this moment, scared and alone, where I find only the cold and the black nothingness. Were those the only connections I ever really made in my life? Maybe this is my montage. Not the sentimental movie version but an impressionistic one - some interpretation of my experiences rendered in cold feelings, the moan of the wind, the endless emptiness where the flame of my obsessive reflections that keep me awake in the dark can burn out forever.
Perhaps.
And it’s fine, really. It’s all fine. I don’t get mad or sad or upset about it. It seems a fitting end in many ways, the proper punctuation mark to end my life sentence. And in the bigger sense, I can accept my fate. I am prepared. I probably spent too much time getting mentally prepared, preoccupied with the end so much that it ate up some of the beginning and most of the middle. Not that time is worth worrying about now, of course.
And I don’t know. Maybe it’s the answer to the requests I’ve made for relief. Maybe it’s not so bad as it might seem. Maybe if you don’t think about it so hard, it’s not so bad at all. You drift out into something peaceful.
I mean, this might be the only way my self consciousness can flip off, the only way I can power down and find some rest.
So when my thoughts get quiet again and oblivion opens her arms, I crawl into them without looking back.
Chapter 44
A gasp. A very familiar sound. I know I’ve heard this exact inhalation before. But where?
I do that tongue clicking noise in my head, like a contractor feigning mental math before they give you an estimate.
Wait. I know this. Here it comes.
Ah, yes. The gasp uttered from my lips once Farber pulled his blade free from my chest in the process of killing me. That’s it. Right?
Oh, shit.
Am I alive?
Let’s think this through.
Wind noise? Negative. No noise since the gasp.
Cold? Nope. Feels about room temp. Feels pretty good, actually.
Black nothing? Yep, but...
I try to open my eyes, and I feel something. The blackness remains about me, but I think I felt eyelids. I just couldn’t get them to work. We might be in a baby steps type situation.
I try again, straining, pushing the little muscles as hard as my brain can push things. Ah, whoa. I muster a little flutter and see light, but that’s about it before my lids clamp shut.
Still. Light. Eyelids. Eyeballs. Pretty big deal, right?
We have life. I think I am happy
about this, but I’m not sure.
I try to move my hands. Nothing doing. I can’t even feel them for sure, just the faintest tingle in a wall of numb. In any case, that verifies it. I’m paralyzed, not completely and probably not permanently. Hopefully my nervous system will get caught up here in a minute.
The candle smell fades in. Yes, so I’m still in the church, probably still lying on the altar. Am I still tied up? Not sure.
I try to feel any possible pain in my chest, but I sense nothing. Maybe I’m in shock, though, and can’t feel things right. I won’t know for sure until I can see and move and this whole paralysis thing goes away.
Wait. Should I play dead? Farber and his ilk would just kill me again if they found me, right? Seems dumb.
I guess it doesn’t matter that much for the moment since I can’t move, but I will proceed with caution. Once more I will need to improvise, I guess. It worked great back in the hospital. I will remember to knock on wood once I can move my arms.
Another gasp erupts, not unlike the first, and it wasn’t me. Someone else occupies this room with me, and they are gasping up a storm.
Do they know I’m alive?
Doubtful. The sound seemed to come from out in the rows of pews somewhere.
And then a demonic moan spouts into the room, a guttural noise that sounds sad at first and swells into a thick-voiced scream that holds its note for too long. It sounds pained, anguished. Like some beast on fire.
Additionally, it is totally fucking terrifying.
Chapter 45
The scream cuts off.
The hair stands up on my arms, legs, and neck, that frightened tickle rippling over all of my skin in little waves. I swallow hard, my throat clicking, and the movement of my Adam’s apple somehow makes the flesh on the back of my neck tingle with even more intensity.