Just to See Hell

by Chandler Morrison

  The icy chill in the air seized her veins the moment she stepped outside; she hadn’t bothered with a coat, and was thus garbed only in her maternity nightgown that fluttered about her in the cold wind as the frost-bitten grass crunched softly from beneath her slippers.

  “Who’s out there?” she called meekly, eyes scanning the foreboding edge of the dark, sky-reaching forest. The bat had grown heavy and she now simply dragged it along unthreateningly beside her as she trudged reluctantly forward, finally coming to a stop about five yards from the thicket.

  “Who’s out…” she started to call again, but didn’t have time to finish before something lurched out of the woods and answered her question for her.

  Janice did not, at first, recognize her…or, rather, it, in its current state of subsistence; its flesh was mottled and greenish, its hair stringy and falling out in clumps, its limbs spindly and its wretched eyes glassy and crazed. Janice gasped at the sight of it and took a quaking step back that faltered and gave out, sending her tumbling to the cold, hard ground as the awful creature half-walked, half-crawled towards her with its baggy stained clothes reeking of shit and puke.

  “Help me,” it croaked, clutching at Janice’s pregnancy-swollen ankles and pleading with its sick, horrible eyes. “I’m dying. You have to help me. You have to help us.”

  Hugging herself against the cold, Janice cocked her head and said, “Jane? Is that…is that you?”

  “I’m dying,” it repeated, and then Janice saw in its pale, sullen expression that yes, it was Jane, and this realization broke her heart…no matter how much trouble Jane had gotten Janice into, and even with all of the torment and misery she had caused at the end, Janice loved her nonetheless; she had brought her comfort and confidence where no one and nothing else could, and for that she was forever in her debt, in spite of everything.

  Jane suddenly turned her head to the side, gagged loudly several times, and then spewed from her mouth thick bile of a deep black color, spotted with chunks of lime-green and red.

  “Jesus,” said Janice, tears welling up in her eyes. “Come on, let’s get you inside.”

  Janice washed her friend off in the bathtub, gently running a sponge over her discolored skin and shampooing what little hair she had left, whispering comforting words to her as she did so. She feared her husband would awaken and find his pregnant wife sponging down a zombie-like thing in their bathroom, but the bedroom at the end of the hall remained quiet and dark.

  “You know what I need,” Jane said as Janice toweled her dry. “You have to give it to me or I’ll die.”

  “I don’t have any,” Janice answered with genuine dismay. “All I’ve got is cooking wine, and the salt in that will make you sick.”

  “Bring it to me.”

  “But you’ll throw up.”

  “Then bring me a bucket, too.”

  * * *

  Events like this occurred at irregular intervals throughout the remainder of the pregnancy, but regularly enough for Janice to become quite concerned about the health of the baby. She knew, of course, that she was connected to Jane, and even though she herself wasn’t indulging, the fact was Jane’s drinking, through some parallel or another, was having an indirect effect on her and thereby her baby.

  Despite these episodes, however, the infant was born healthy and with no visible birth defects, allowing Janice to be consumed with relief as she cradled her son…named Austin, after Dave’s cancer-stricken grandfather…in her weak, trembling arms.

  She did not permit herself, though, to acknowledge the true reason behind that cool, sweat-glazed relief.

  She told herself it was because she had a son, a perfectly healthy son miraculously unaffected by her selfish friend’s reckless habit (a habit that Janice willingly enabled, but she didn’t permit herself to acknowledge that, either).

  She was thoroughly convinced of her good-intentioned resolution to love and nurture this child with the motherly affection she herself had been denied as a child.

  She assumed with complete sincerity that she would never allow any harm to come to this child, and she was grateful to God or the universe or whatever for allowing it to come into life unhindered by the drastically damaging effects of the drink.

  She did not let herself even consider the fact that the child’s health gave her relief solely because it meant she wouldn’t have to explain herself to anyone. After all, there inevitably would have been questions if little Austin had emerged from her as a crippled and grotesque wretch, warped and malformed by nine months of on-and-off substance abuse.

  She didn’t like answering questions, and by the grace of something she did not know nor understand, there arose no need for questions to be asked.

  Not then, anyway.

  The gore-smeared walls, the knife, the gun, the blender…that was all in the future, on a bloody afternoon more than two years away.

  On that day, though, a lot of questions would be asked.

  On that day, she would have to answer.

  Things were okay for a while. Austin himself was okay, though Janice soon noticed that he had somewhat of a funny-looking face, with eyes that were a trifle too far apart and a thin-lipped mouth below a short, pug-like nose, but she attributed this simply to poor genes; her mother and father hadn’t been particularly attractive people, and while Janice didn’t consider herself to be beautiful by any means, Jane convinced her that she was far from ugly and had been lucky not to inherit any of her parents’ worst features.

  And yes, Jane was back. In secret, late at night after Dave and Austin were asleep, Janice would slink into the garage where she kept her liquor stashed in a box otherwise full of mouse traps and rat poison and various types of Raid and insect repellant. There she would sit, huddled in the corner of the cold garage, wrapped in a dirty quilt, warming herself with the fiery heat of her beloved Southern Comfort and Black Velvet. She and Jane would have long talks about the future, about plans to do great things and accomplish lofty goals, but in the morning they were forgotten and thus had to be either renewed or replaced come the darkness of late, late nightfall.

  In the day she nursed the baby and halfheartedly tried to entertain him, but her thoughts were clouded and her head constantly ached. She ate potato chips, and frozen pizza, and Twinkies, causing her to gain roughly thirty or so pounds…ten of which she’d needed, twenty of which she didn’t. If her husband was dissatisfied with her appearance, he didn’t vocalize it, though he made love to her less often and seemed distant in his quiet, soft-spoken manner.

  As Janice grew more and more unappealing to the eyes, Jane changed in the opposite fashion; her grotesque, withdrawal-induced leprosy faded into an astounding beauty that increased in splendor with each night of drunken oblivion. She was angelic and divine, a diamond-in-the-rough goddess of Kentucky white trash, so shockingly gorgeous that she could turn a man’s dick to stone with a mere passing glance.

  I am the real you, she assured Janice on a regular basis. This is what you really look like. Be proud of who you are, love yourself deeply, know that your earthly body is nothing but a protective shell designed to hide your inner beauty, because your true body is too perfect for the lowly human race, too heavenly and divine to be beheld by the sickly eye of worm-like mankind.

  This encouragement helped greatly, but there were days where the mirror was more powerful than Jane’s words, and Janice would go crying to the garage at night, hating herself and her fat, unkempt visage.

  One particular night, as Janice staggered to the box of poison and withdrew her own preferred flavor, she was so consumed with self-hatred that she was unable to summon Jane. She drank and drank and drank until there was nothing left to drink, but Jane would not come. So she lay on the cold floor, muttering pleading whispers for her savior to rescue her from her inner torment.

  After a long shivering time of throbbing delirium, she slipped from hazy gray half-consciousness to the sensation of a stirring restlessness deep in her loins. It was mild at fi
rst, but quickly perpetuated into a screaming feeling that she was on the verge of bursting.

  And then she did.

  Burst, that is.

  She tore at her clothes and saw her skin shifting and bulging, until a bleeding crack opened in the flesh between her sagging breasts, widening and lengthening until it spread all the way down to her groin, spewing scarlet gore, and her arms and legs tore open and there was blood, blood, so much blood, sticky and steaming hot. There came a great rumbling from within her squirming intestines, and then a hand shot out, and then another, and then something was pulling itself out of her, covered in blood blood blood, and bits of flesh like afterbirth, its emerging head matted with long hair glued to its scalp and the back of its neck and splayed down its naked shoulders, struggling to be free until finally it was, standing there before bleeding Janice lying shredded and disemboweled in her own innards...poor sickly Janice, Janice who wanted to scream but couldn’t, teeth chattering and tongue lashing, slipping out of bleary wakefulness into dark and unknown oblivious bliss for a short time before surfacing once more into shrewd reality, and the thing before her was no longer a thing, no longer covered in gore, but Jane, beautiful Jane with her glorious nakedness, tan and toned and flat-stomached, chest beset with perfect and perky round breasts equipped with big beautiful nipples untainted by the savagely destructive process of breastfeeding, hair flowing and shining, eyes glowing with youthful fervor, all of her beautiful, beautiful, so beautiful…and then she was down on her hands and knees in an animalistic pose, looking up at pained bleeding Janice, and suddenly her mouth was upon her mercifully still-intact vagina and her tongue lapped and the horrible pain was instantly replaced with unspeakable pleasure, and again Janice wanted desperately to scream, this time out of sheer ecstasy, but again she was unable and all she could do was writhe as Jane pleasured her with her warm fuzzy wet tongue, and when she came up for air Janice begged her not to stop, please don’t stop, and a great gush of clear watery liquid sprayed from between her legs and splashed onto Jane’s flawless face, and Jane laughed and went back down and drank deeply from the elixir that continued to spew from Janice’s shriveled vagina, and O how Janice groaned and moaned to thine own great ubiquitous beings above or below or wherever, and her toes curled so tightly that the nails bit into the bottoms of her feet and the pleasure went on and on for gawd knows how long until at horribly long last she awoke awfully to the coldness of her bed, still warmly wet between her legs, sobbing uncontrollably and just not wanting it to be over, and her husband wakened panicky by his wife’s gasping cries and trying desperately to console her, asking over and over again what was wrong, for chrissake please tell me what’s wrong, but Janice couldn’t tell him. She just couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t. She couldn’t.

  All of this went on for some time; the secretive drinking, the late-night sex romps with Jane, the weight fluctuations…all of this, and Dave said nor did anything because he refused to allow himself to accept the notion that his beloved betrothed, the mother of his child, had any real problem in the vein of that which she truly did have. He lived in constant denial, which required a fierce exercise of will that left him perpetually exhausted, which in turn aided in his ability to block everything out. He devoted most of his free time to caring for Austin, something of which Janice did shockingly little…she responded to his needs only on the most basic of levels, providing just enough motherly attention so as to prevent her from slipping into the category of neglectful.

  By the time Austin was two, Dave was deep in the throes of depression. All of the joy and color had gone out of his world, and the love he felt for his wife was little more than passionless habit, for he knew not how else to feel. Their conversations were dry, short, and occurring in minimal frequency, and on the rare nights they had sex it felt forced and awkward. His affection for his son was the only thing left unchanged in his life, but his misery was so great that he was oftentimes unable to convey it in the manner he desired, which only led to further depression and self-loathing.

  This ever-extending period of Dave’s darkness naturally culminated in an affair. He was now working as a somewhat underpaid assistant at a consulting firm, a job that had landed in his lap through a lucky family connection. His boss’s secretary, a fiery young redhead named Amanda with a penchant for discrete sexual harassment, had taken an immediate liking to Dave. He had ignored her advances for the first year and a half of his employment, until he finally let down his guard and submitted to an evening of sweaty fornication in a seedy motel room. Afterward, he’d gone home feeling different…not good, per se, but better. For the first time in a horribly long time, he’d felt something, something that was pleasurable enough to far outweigh the sickly guilt settling in the pit of his stomach.

  As time went on, though, and the after-work motel meetings became more frequent, the guilt started to go away, until it was finally replaced with a not-unpleasant hollowness that filled with gleeful gratification every time he slipped under the covers with Amanda.

  And so it was.

  The gears were turning, the wheels set in motion.

  The fuse had been lit.

  Nothing like this ever ends well.

  This would be no different.

  It never is.

  * * *

  “He’s cheating on you,” Jane told Janice one night in the garage while they shared a cigarette and passed a bottle of malt liquor back and forth between each other.

  Janice narrowed her glossy eyes and cocked her head to the side, where it remained lolling and heavy as if filled with a million marbles pushing against her throbbing skull. “No he’s not,” she said unconvincingly. “He loves me. Why would you think something like that?”

  Jane shook her head and brushed a lock of perfect hair behind her perfect ear and regarded Janice with her perfect bright eyes. “I don’t think, I know. He’s been acting different. Cheating men always start acting different. Something has been off about him. And he’s getting home late more and more often.”

  “He’s been working late, that’s all.” Again, unconvincing.

  “Trust me on this, honey, just as you trust me on everything else. He’s fucking some floozy and he’s not apt to stop. Not unless you make him.”

  Janice was quiet for a while, nursing the bottle and avoiding Jane’s gaze, until at last she said, “How do I do that? And how do I find out for sure that he even is cheating on me?”

  Jane shrugged. “Suck his cock on one of the nights he gets home late. You know how my juice tastes…his cock will taste similar, though I’m sure not nearly as good.” She gave a little smile. “He will likely resist, as he’ll know the taste and scent will be lingering there, so don’t give him a choice. Do it after he goes to sleep, as a matter of fact, which he always seems to do very shortly after getting home from one of those ‘late work nights’. If he’s asleep, you won’t even have to finish him off…just briefly put your mouth around it long enough to get a taste and he probably won’t wake up.”

  Janice nodded slowly. “Okay, fine, I can do that. So if he is cheating, what then? How do I get him to stop?” Anger was creeping into her voice as she considered the possibility that her husband really was fucking another woman.

  Jane smiled again, wider this time. “We’ll cross that bridge when it presents itself.”

  More slow nods from Janice, and then, “This is really bumming me out. Can I play with your tits? That always cheers me up.”

  Without answering verbally, as no verbal answer was required, Jane promptly removed her top and unhooked her bra, letting her great globular breasts tumble free. Janice seized them at once, massaging them and sucking them and rubbing her face against their soft flesh, and immediately all thoughts of her potentially unfaithful husband were forgotten entirely.

  Three nights later, Dave came home four hours late. He seemed in rather high spirits, though he unsurprisingly retired to bed shortly after preparing himself a plate of leftovers and eating silently at t
he kitchen table.

  After having a few drinks in the garage, Janice crept upstairs and did as she was instructed.

  The taste was unmistakable.

  She sat on the edge of the bed for a long while, listening to Dave’s rhythmic snores and not knowing how to feel but weeping silently to herself. It had been quite some time since she’d felt anything of note towards her husband, either positive or negative, so she wasn’t sure why this upset her so. Perhaps, she reasoned, it was because it was an affront to her dignity, her confidence, her sense of self-worth…or, at least, what little of all of this there was. Still, no matter how low her feelings were for herself, this treacherous act of infidelity was undeniably crushing.

  She went back downstairs, into the garage, and cried into Jane’s shoulder. Jane held her and listened to her as no one else would nor could, stroking her hair and licking the tears from her face.

  “What do we do?” Janice finally asked once the worst of the tears had subsided.

  “You,” Jane said, “don’t have to do anything. This is a job best left to me. So I must ask you, do you trust me completely?”

  “Yes. More than anyone. You’re all I have.” A flickering thought of Austin flashed through her head, but she quickly dismissed it. The child was primarily an inconvenience and a burden, and she’d long ago forgiven herself for her lack of love towards it. She was distinctly unaware of when she had stopped loving her son, but she fancied this to be unimportant, because Jane was all that was important, and Austin just got in the way.