by David Beers
He couldn’t dress up what he saw, could put no spin on what was occurring at the end of the hall. Rape. Twenty feet from Alex, a woman lay pinned to the floor with a gun held against her temple—the man holding the gun moving up and down on top of her. His other hand held her throat and it was not a light choking. She kept her eyes closed, but her face looked crimson, nearing purple. The man was ravaging her—pumping inside her like he might have been a jackhammer on concrete rather than a person on another.
“God,” Brittany said. “Is it real?”
Alex never considered answering.
The woman opened her eyes and looked to her left, seemingly at the ceiling. She screamed something, the words lost to Alex—his mind handling too much already. The man on top turned too, looking at the ceiling, same as the woman.
“What the fuck are they doing?” Brittany asked but still no answer came from Alex.
They watched, all three, as the man hit her and then shot her in the forehead. Her face appeared to cave in first before mushrooming outward. Her head exploded upwards, blowing the top of her skull off. Blood hit the man’s pants and shoes. Alex could still see his erection, through his jeans and twenty feet away.
The man turned from his mess and walked into the wall. He should have hit it head first, followed very shortly by the rest of his body. Instead, he went in it—his body bleeding into the paint, spreading as soon as a part of him touched the wall. It continued to spread, diluting the colors of his hair, shirt, and pants until everything he had been blended in with the paint. Nothing left.
The woman lay on the floor, her head an absurdity. From her eyebrows down, her face looked at peace. A half inch above her eyebrows, dark blood leaked from the open cavern of her skull. Her scalp had disintegrated, and the parts that had not collapsed to tiny particles were now skin flaps hanging to bone.
Daniel wept. His mouth hung open in a silent scream; Alex watched as he bent over, placing his hands on his knees and looking at the floor. Spit dripped from his mouth and snot from his nose, but still he kept silent.
Alex moved toward him, but Daniel dropped to the floor first.
He pulled with his lungs, so deep he could have moved air a mile away, and then screamed.
Angry, vicious noise coming from a place Alex had never contacted.
Alex moved to wrap his arms around Daniel but was shoved, hard, the moment his hands touched him; Daniel whipped around and shoved him.
Alex flew backwards—his ass sliding across the carpet.
“DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME!” His voice raw, some part of him now open and bleeding into the world.
Brittany bent to Alex, but he put a hand up telling her he was fine. Keeping her away. He pulled himself up some and leaned against the wall. “What is it?”
Daniel looked back at the floor, falling to his hands now, allowing his ass to sink to his ankles so it looked like he might have been praying. “NO!” he screamed, his voice turning into a sobbing wail.
Alex didn’t move. “What did that mean?”
The three of them kept their places, Brittany standing next to Alex and Daniel’s sobs weakening from the floor.
Ten minutes passed without a word. Then finally, “my mother.”
“Down there?” Brittany asked, her voice a whisper.
Daniel nodded, not looking up from his bowed position.
“I told—” Alex would have finished with callus words, if truthful. He didn’t though—the movement at the end of the hall put his words to rest as both he and Brittany turned to see the wreck rising to her feet.
The blood that had somehow managed to stay above her eyes began flooding down her face. Flaps of skin and hair, nearly obliterated, hung down over the bottom half of her skull. Blood dripped from her eyebrows, flowing into her eyes, pooling, then continuing down her face like blood tears. She never blinked, only continued climbing to her feet.
Alex flashed his eyes to Daniel who still stared at the floor. “Listen to me, Daniel. Don’t look up. Just keep your head down.”
The woman, the impossibly alive woman, found her feet. “Daniel?” Her voice sounded like it might have seen a thousand lifetimes.
Alex saw Daniel’s head turning up and started for his own feet. Brittany was faster though—both of them only concerned with stopping Daniel from seeing her, knowing instinctively the fatality of the act.
Brittany reached him, slamming his head into the ground by her sheer speed. She pinned his head to the floor, his eyes unable to see the dead thing now walking. Daniel’s arms started flailing, but Alex arrived and mounted his back—rendering him immobile.
The thing, the mother, paid them no notice but only walked forward. “Why did you let this happen? Why didn’t you lock the door? Look at me. Look at what you did. You told your dad, promised him, that you locked the door. No one had to break in, because you lied to your father.” The sentences machinegunned out as if simply being in the world would make all the difference.
The shriek which erupted below Brittany and Alex matched the first; fury come alive.
“Talk to me, Daniel.” She was a short distance away, but walking toward the three of them huddled on the floor.
“Don’t listen,” Alex whispered from his place on Daniel’s back.
“Let me see her.” Daniel’s words were caged rage, barely in check from the previous roar. Alex and Brittany had never witnessed something like this from their doctor—who had walked Alex out of despair so deep it seemed impossible light could ever penetrate it. Daniel met the entire experience of a man who felt he was haunted by a dead God with a clinical calm that appeared unbreakable.
Now Daniel’s face lay in his own fluids and he shook with emotion.
“You don’t want to,” Alex said. His mouth remained at Daniel’s ear but his eyes looked at the shuffling monster. Brittany kneeled with both hands on Daniel’s neck—but also watching the thing from Daniel’s memory.
She glanced back at Alex, and without a word spoken, both understood. It’s going to be here in a second.
“You don’t get to make that choice for me,” Daniel said from beneath them. “YOU DON’T.”
Alex looked at Brittany again. The thing was ten feet away. Daniel spoke true; Alex couldn’t hold him down here. Couldn’t guard him from this hotel, from this God. It wasn’t his place; he was no judge—no one to decide another’s fate. Nayek had walked beside Alex, never commanding, only guiding. So Alex couldn’t pin this man down now, and in the long run it wouldn’t save him—something else would wait for him at the end of the next corridor.
He nodded at Brittany. She took her hands from Nayek’s head.
Alex whispered once more to Daniel. “You don’t have to. Whatever this is, you can let it go.” He stood then; Brittany and him backing up as the woman moved within five feet.
They watched Daniel lift his head up—seeing the blood drip over the curves of his mother’s face, flowing into her mouth as she spoke.
Daniel knew the voice, gone now for twenty years. His mother was in front of him, and he would see her when he looked up—not dead, but alive and questioning, wanting to know why he had left the door unlocked.
It happened when you were a child. You moved on years ago. Move on now.
He understood the internal voice, knew there was truth in it, but—
“Why won’t you look at me?” his mother asked, closer now.
—her voice called stronger.
Thoughts of this situation as a giant maze in his head, one he navigated with these two projections of his mind, scattered—like loose papers on a windy day. His mother had returned, asking questions that she deserved an answer to.
Where’s Dad? Shouldn’t he be here? No, because none of it’s real.
“We gave up our lives for you, both of us. Now you sit here denying my existence. How dare you? You look at me, son, and see what you did.”
He rose, moving from the bowed position. She stood three feet from him, the sight he had escaped
as a child when he ran from the room. His mother drenched in her own blood; her skull hanging around her ears—eyes accusing only him.
It’s not real. She’s not real.
“Shut up,” he said through clenched teeth, not wanting to hear that voice anymore—unwilling to send his mother to whatever purgatory she had lived in all this time.
Daniel looked into his mother’s eyes. Blood filled ovals in her head, looking at him with malice.
Those aren’t her eyes. She would never look at you like that.
“What do you want from me?” he asked, pleading, begging for penance.
The blood from her face dripped to the floor.
“I want you to answer for this, Daniel. Your therapy, your hiding, even your goddamn grandparents—all of it kept you from fessing up. From admitting you killed us through your own negligence. I want you to go through what I went through, what your father went through. I want your fucking brains leaking down your forehead, Daniel.”
She stood so close to him that her blood dripped onto his cheek, below his right eye. He didn’t wipe it away.
That’s all he wanted, too, for so long—years, maybe even a decade: he had only wanted to die. The drugs and booze during his teenage years weren’t some joy ride, no experimentation; it had been a death wish. He stopped before he succeeded in killing himself, though. Tried to learn that none of it was his fault, that things just happened and sometimes they happened no matter what you did. Just lies, all of it. It was only a cover story everyone told him to hide what actually happened. He lied to his dad, left the door unlocked, and both his parents were murdered. He could sum up everything that mattered in one small sentence. What could he say, or do, in the face of those facts?
He nodded, the blood running down his cheek past the corner of his lip. “Okay, Mom.”
They were watching Daniel’s death and both knew it. He saw the thing before him as his mother, not as any apparition inside his head and certainly not as the deity it was. To Daniel, this thing came from his past, his life, and now held sway over everything.
Brittany’s arms were wrapped around Alex, her face on his chest.
“He has to stop listening,” she said.
“I don’t know how to make him.”
Brittany let go and stepped forward—moving a foot from Alex and a foot closer to Daniel. Alex reached for her, finding her fingertips, but didn’t pull her back. He knew It would come for them, but not yet—It was here for Nayek. It would take his sacrifice first and then come. Alex wanted to stop this, but he had nothing for Daniel. Fear didn’t hold him back, because he understood the thing here now would not break him or Brittany—but a simple realization, cold as it was, that Daniel Nayek wasn’t making it out of this place.
Alex cared for the man but knew his entire life had shaped him to fall to a sight like this. He wanted Daniel to live, but what could be done? He couldn’t plead with Daniel any more than he could the monster.
As he thought, Brittany reached down—her fingers letting loose of Alex—and placed her hand on Daniel’s shoulder.
The dead woman’s bloodied eyes did not look at her.
“Daniel, come with me,” Brittany said.
“And where will you take him?” the mother asked, still not glancing away from Daniel.
“Don’t listen to this. Let’s go.”
“Where is she taking you, Danny? Are you going to leave me again, like you did as a child? Do you remember that?” She moved to her knees slowly, never losing eye contact with Daniel. She held her hands out, palms up.
Brittany moved down too, squatting, putting her arm around Daniel’s back and her cheek to his. She faced the woman, looking at her half destroyed head—her eyes not faltering and her hand not shirking from Daniel. “We can go deeper. Away from this. I don’t know how far or for how long, but I know this isn’t your mother. This isn’t what you believe and you don’t have to give it power over you. You can come with us and we’ll…” She hated the thing in front of her; Its blood dripping down Its arms, to Its wrists—brains discarded on the carpet. “We’ll get away from this.”
“Is that what you want? To leave me again?”
Brittany felt Daniel shake his head.
“No, Momma. Where’s Dad?” An adult’s voice using children’s words.
“He’s with me, sugar. He didn’t leave me.”
“Daniel, just listen—”
Daniel’s hands went to the woman’s.
“There’s nothing you can do.” Alex sounded desperate; the internal struggle to save his friend and the inability to do so splitting him. “I don’t want to see this.”
“LEAVE HIM ALONE!” Brittany screamed. She flung herself at the dead thing, reaching for Its throat but finding a flap of skin hanging first. She pulled, ripping it until a raw, bleeding patch of flesh stretched down the thing’s face. She lunged forward again, trying to find the throat.
Daniel hit her first, clouted her across the back of the head. Alex watched from behind, not moving.
“Don’t fucking touch my mom,” Daniel said from clenched teeth. Brittany was on her hands and knees as Daniel came down with his fist again; connecting now with the side of her face. He climbed to his feet slowly, like the work in front of him would be finished at his pace. “Don’t you ever touch her again.”
Daniel grabbed Brittany’s hair, pulling her neck backwards as she struggled to remain conscious. His fist came down across her cheek again; the sound of skin smacking skin echoed through the hall. He held onto her hair and his fist rained down again.
Brittany went slack: Daniel’s hand in her hair the only thing keeping her from falling to the floor.
“Good, honey. Don’t let her hurt me.” The dead thing’s voice held no emotion, no longer sounded like the mother from seconds before.
Alex watched it all: his wife beaten unconscious by his doctor and the dead woman sitting near them with a calm disinterest. He didn’t move, not even when Brittany’s arms gave out from under her.
She was going to die in this hall with her husband watching.
“Stop,” Alex managed. A weak and ridiculous word in this place. Daniel turned his next punch, causing it to glance almost harmlessly off Brittany’s face.
He looked to Alex; his head slightly sideways and his brow furrowed, as if he didn’t quite understand what he saw. He held onto Brittany, her body swaying as he turned to see this apparent stranger.
“Let her go,” Alex said, his eyes tearing and his voice wavering. “Don’t hurt her.”
“She was trying to kill my mom.”
“He saw it, Danny. He saw and was going to let it happen.” The woman spoke from behind Nayek, but she didn’t sound like a woman anymore—hardly human either.
“He was, Momma?”
“Yes.”
Daniel let Brittany go. Her face collided with the floor, sounding vaguely like a book dropped from a shelf.
“You were going to watch my Mom die?” Daniel stepped forward.
Alex swam in an ocean of confusion, lost and unable to focus on what was happening: His wife lying on the floor and Daniel turning to attack him. The God that had pulled them here, watching. Ripping them apart with a single memory from Daniel’s mind.
“You didn’t really think you would survive, did you?” The emotionless voice came from the dead body.
Alex’s watery eyes found the thing still on Its knees behind Daniel. It looked solemnly out on the toys It had set against each other.
“Don’t let him hurt me either, Danny.”
Nayek came then.
Alex had been unable to protect his wife, simply stood and watched. If not for instinct, he would have allowed the same to happen to himself. It was only reaction, no calculation, that saved him. Daniel’s eagerness, his complete belief in the righteousness of his act allowed him to think he could not be hurt, and this led to the opening. Alex pushed Daniel, connecting with his chest. Daniel stumbled backwards, almost losing his footing, stabili
zing, and finally tripped over Brittany’s fallen body.
“Get up. Kill him.” The sound of a knife sharpening came from the woman’s mouth as she spoke.
Daniel began scrambling to his feet, unfazed by the shove that took him down.
“KILLHIM!” The words came out as one—the monotone calm gone.
Alex had time to think and time to speak if he wanted. Daniel was still on his ass, still trying to get up, but he would be there soon. The two of them would face each other as equals then—the time gone. Alex might die, and if so, Brittany came next. If he used this time to think or to try and reason.
Alex stepped over his wife, and brought his foot hard across Daniel’s face.
Nayek’s jaw dislocated and his head jerked backwards. Alex’s foot met the ground, leaving his back half turned to Daniel, who rolled screaming on the floor.
“Do you want him to hurt me?” the voice hissed; the teeth long and scraping against each other now. The woman’s flesh stretched and paled—the skull completely reshaping.
Daniel held his broken jaw, but with his other hand tried to climb back up. Trying to save his mother.
Alex turned and his hands found Daniel’s throat. He squeezed and pushed Daniel back to the floor—giving himself distance between his face and Daniel’s frantically searching hands. His own fingers tightened, trying to stop any circulation, be it blood or air.
The thing behind Alex held its wide mouth open, teeth jutting out, perhaps in a grin.
Daniel’s hands slowed down in their search for help. He was going under and Alex knew it. Alex kept squeezing, even as his hands started aching. He didn’t let go, not as Daniel’s hands fell away. Not as they went to his chest and finally limply to the floor.
Alex could have let go then.
But he didn’t.
He choked past dark purple skin.
He choked until breath would never move through Daniel’s throat again.