by Bruce Blake
“Hi, Aaron,” she heard herself say.
Panic unfurled inside Poe because she knew it should, but resignation easily overcame it. She’d been to this corner of Hell before and knew it unchangeable—she’d tried a hundred times before.
“Hey, Paula.”
Her name before she became Poe, a name she’d neither heard nor wanted to hear in a very long time.
“This is my cousin. He just moved to town.”
“Hi.”
The bigger boy tilted his head and grunted.
Poe gritted her teeth at the sound of Paula’s voice, at the innocence it held and the underlying longing to be at least accepted, if not liked. Shrill, girly and joyous, but underneath it screamed to the boys to like her. The sound of it made Poe’s stomach clench.
“I was going to show him the hermit’s shack. Want to come?”
No. Nonononono.
“Sure.”
They strode toward the shed, a boy on each side of her. Paula enjoyed their presence close to her; Poe saw their positioning for what it was: to keep her from running away. The thought never occurred to Paula.
She stepped through the doorway first and inhaled the smells: must, rotted wood, bare dirt. Aaron’s cousin wore cologne, she remembered. Half-an-hour later, when the reek of the boys’ freshly let blood overpowered the aroma of the wood and the dirt, she would still smell the cologne.
The boys stepped in behind her and one of them closed the door. With her back to them, she never knew which one shut it but hoped it was the cousin, not Aaron. It was easier to bear thinking the boy she knew had been there against his will, that somewhere under the violence he’d actually liked her. Poe suspected it wasn’t the case.
“It’s dark,” Paula said.
She faced the boys and saw their expressions silhouetted in the daylight creeping through the cracks between the boards. They looked like they might have been in one of those monster movies: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolfman. Her mother didn’t want her to see such things, but she’d sneaked into a matinee. By herself. Even with the light hitting their faces, highlighting their expressions that were neither joy nor friendship; Paula still wasn’t afraid.
She didn’t know what lust looked like.
Run away. Get out while you can.
The words raced through Poe’s mind despite their futility. She knew they’d make no difference. In a moment, the knife would be out and they would be on her.
The next few minutes blurred into confusion for the young girl, but Poe relived every emotion, every feeling, every agonizing second. First, the surprise and concern at seeing the knife, but Paula brushed those feelings aside; surely the boys were playing. It was even exciting when Aaron grabbed her developing breast, though it hurt a little.
“No,” Paula said, brushing his hand away like a lady is supposed to do.
Aaron pushed her and she tumbled to the ground, landing hard on her bum. Her skirt flew up revealing white panties beneath. Poe remembered choosing her outfit on that Saturday morning in the spring of 1946. She didn’t have many outfits to choose from, but she always wore her best on the weekend, when she might see some of the other kids, especially the ones she wanted to like her, like Aaron Baxter.
A sliver of concern entered Paula’s thoughts but she convinced herself it was an accident. Aaron didn’t mean for her to fall, didn’t want to hurt her. But she had no time to think before he was sitting on her, straddling her hips, leaning forward to pin her arms. The feel of him against her made her excited and the thought of crying out never occurred to her. He moved his face close to hers; she smelled the tuna salad he’d eaten for lunch, felt the warmth of his breath against her cheek. She fought the urge to stretch her neck forward and put her lips on his.
Paula reveled in the new feelings of the boy’s attention until she felt the cousin’s hands under her skirt tearing the white panties brusquely off. Panic rose in her—he wasn’t supposed to do that. His hands groped her secret areas, his fingers found her places as Aaron Baxter sat on her, holding her down.
She screamed once, then the cold steel of the pocket knife against the flesh of her throat stopped her, threatened to cut her with every sob, every hard swallow.
The next few minutes came to Poe in disjointed snatches, like time lapse photography with some of the frames missing.
Bare flesh against bare flesh.
Aaron’s forearm over her mouth; her tongue tasting the dirty flannel of his shirt.
Pain exploding between her legs.
Sobbing.
The knife carelessly on the ground beside her as the two boys traded spots.
Her fingers wrapping unnoticed around the knife; the blade sinking into the cousin’s throat, into a vein called the jugular which Paula found by accident because she hadn’t learned about it in school yet; cousin screaming; Paula jumping to her feet.
Aaron reached for her, pants around his ankles so she saw his thing—the first and last time in her life she’d seen one. His feet caught in his pants and he stumbled. The tip of the knife entered his eye and found its way into his brain.
Poe felt empty inside, helpless.
Paula stutter-stepped away from the two boys lying on the dirt floor. Their blood looked black in the dim light. It was on them, in the dirt; it covered the knife, her hands. It felt tacky on her face. She sank to the ground pulling shuddering breaths through her clenched throat.
“Don’t do it.”
Poe heard her own voice and Paula seemed to pause for a second as if she’d heard a whisper. Poe tried to repeat it but nothing came out.
Paula hung her head. Her private place between her legs throbbed and ached, her heart threatened to explode and add her own lifeblood to that of the boys muddying the shack’s dirt floor.
“Why?” she squeaked. Snot bubbled at her nose, tears washed blood down her cheeks.
She only wanted to be liked.
Paula breathed a sharp breath through her teeth as the keen edge of the blade cut easily into the soft flesh of her wrist. She closed her eyes and drifted to sleep.
When Poe opened her eyes, she stood under the trees outside the shed. She looked down at her hands: they were clean. A slight spring breeze rustled the leaves on the trees overhead, stirred the skirt hanging around her knees and brought with it the scent of cologne.
Paula turned her head and looked up at Aaron Baxter.
Bruce Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost
Chapter Twenty-Six
Hell is a pain in the ass.
I tumbled through the stained glass window-portal and hit the ground hard, jarring my shoulder and sending a jolt of pain down my arm. I laid in the dirt, groaning, cheek pressed against the ground, until I realized this probably wasn’t the best way to be in Hell. I didn’t know where I was or who was around, so I untangled myself and climbed to my feet.
No burbling creek ran nearby like the last time I went through the window with Piper. No ferryman to be paid, no city looming on a distant horizon.
On the bright side, maybe I won’t get bit.
On the not-so-bright side, I had no idea where I’d ended up or how to get where I needed to go—wherever that was.
While there was no city set against the horizon, it didn’t sit bare. A conflagration spewed billowing clouds of smoke into an otherwise colorless sky. Rough and rocky terrain stretched out before me—the badlands gone badder—and a cliff rose behind me; the mouths of caves dotted its surface. Uneven stairs hewn from the rock connected the openings, and pairs of glowing eyes shone from many of them.
“Shit.”
Two choices: set out into the canyons and crags to find my way to who-knew-where using my limited rock climbing abilities and end up like the guy who got his arm caught and had to cut it off to survive, or chance the caves. Door number one or door number two? Behind one lies a tiger, the other a shark.
Some choice: die here or die there.
A lot of effort and wandering stood between me and the fires burnin
g on the horizon, and, truthfully, Dominic’s labyrinth had provided all the wandering I could stomach for a while. And I didn’t feel like scrambling over boulders and through crevasses. Once again, like so many times in my life, I made a decision based essentially on laziness.
I wandered to the nearest set of stairs and put my foot on the first step. The precarious staircase climbed steeply, switching back on itself time and again to connect the myriad caves, each of its steps less than a foot wide. I took a deep breath and stepped up, shoulder brushing the gray cliff face. I’d gone five steps when I looked up and saw the man on the staircase blocking my way.
He might have been the man piloting the ferry across the river Styx, or perhaps a close relative. Same hook nose and lank hair but without the ferryman’s eye patch. He didn’t sport the patch, but the eye socket it should have covered gleamed with taut pink scar tissue.
“Uh, hey. What’s happening?”
Not the cleverest thing to say, but even the best action hero runs out of amusing comments eventually. Hell, when Arnie Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood ran out, they went into politics. I hadn’t reached that level of desperation yet.
The man didn’t reply, only stared his one-eyed stare at me. Overhead, a huge raven circled. I watched it glide effortlessly through the air for a minute until it disappeared onto one of the ledges above. A second later, it cawed loudly and a woman screamed.
I went up two more steps and stood ten paces from the man. He smelled bad and the look of his hair suggested non-bathing the cause. Beneath the dirt and sweat, I whiffed a far more unpleasant odor I preferred not to identify.
“Don’t mind me, I’m just going up the stairs.”
More staring. Two more steps.
“Not going to bug anybody, just looking for a friend.”
Frown. Two steps.
It shouldn’t have surprised me when he lurched toward me, but it did. His head morphed into some sort of monstrous rooster; his body slammed into mine sending me sprawling down the stairs as his beak sank into my upper chest.
I’ll admit it: I screamed.
The thing rode me down the stairs like a living snowboard until my back hit the ground at the bottom and my breath whooshed out of my lungs. I closed my eyes, teeth grinding with the pain, and felt a rush of air on my face, heard feathers rustling. The man-thing’s weight lifted off me.
So much for not getting bit.
I didn’t know what it meant in the long run to have some of Hell’s denizens take bites out of me, but I imagined it couldn’t be good. A question to ask Mikey next time I saw him. If he ever talked to me again after all this.
Minutes passed as I lay there, eyes closed, waiting for my breath to return. Over the last few months, I must have set a record for the number of times a guy’s wind was knocked out of him. Where are the Guinness Book of World Records people when you need them?
My eyes jerked open when a shadow fell across me. I looked up at a figure with dark, wild hair, high cheekbones, a square jaw.
“Mother?”
“Are you okay?”
I am now.
†‡†
Trevor sat down hard on the wooden chair behind the huge desk and felt the empty eyes of the comedy/tragedy masks staring, heard the breathy hiss of laughs and groans passing their pulled-thin lips. He found himself wondering whose faces those expressions were peeled from, how they came to adorn a wall in the kingdom of Hell. Were their disembodied cheeks and mouthless lips pulled into those expressions, or were they alive when the flesh came off? Trevor shivered.
The boy remained by the tapestry where he’d revealed the events surrounding Icarus’ death. Trevor didn’t completely understand what he’d seen, but he realized it might mean something to his father.
“Make sure you tell Icarus what I’ve shown you,” the boy said, a chuckle camouflaged beneath his words.
Trevor looked up at the boy, but the tapestry behind him snatched his attention. A rainfall of colors ran and melded across its surface: a crimson lava flow, a yellow sun dog. Blue flowed into green into black, but the predominant color was red—the red of blood and fire and hate.
The boy appeared directly in front of Trevor, blocking his view, though Trevor didn’t see him move.
“Don’t look at it too long. You’ll see things you don’t want to see. Eventually, you’ll become part of it.”
Trevor glanced at his face, at the mischievous smile on his lips, then attempted to look around him. The boy extended his arm toward the wooden cage holding the skeleton-lizard, blocking Trevor’s view as he stuck a finger between the bars. The lizard scuttled over, snapped its jaws, and bit off his fingertip. The boy neither acted surprised nor jerked his finger away as the lizard chewed it with the relish of fully-fleshed lizard devouring a cricket. After it swallowed—Trevor couldn’t figure out where the fingertip disappeared to—it took another bite.
“Someone will be here to get you soon,” the boy said withdrawing his finger from the cage.
He walked out of Trevor’s line-of-sight and the teen felt a surge of relief when the tapestry came back into view. Short-lived relief, however—a static depiction of a head on a spike, a bleak wasteland stretching out behind it, replaced the riotous colors. Droplets of blood hung frozen in the air below the ragged flesh of the neck; unmoving black flies buzzed around the wound, one sat on an eyeball rolled back to show the white. The man looked familiar, though he didn’t know why.
Trevor shuddered and looked away.
“Who is that?”
His question found an empty room. He looked around, stood and paced the length of the floor to confirm he was alone. The boy had slipped out, or perhaps disappeared into thin air. Trevor glanced at the fleshy masks on the wall, the skeleton-lizard in its cage, sat back down on the chair and pulled his knees up to his chest.
Someone will be coming for you.
Now that he was alone, the words felt ominous—more warning than statement. Trevor clenched his teeth and suppressed a shiver; his eyes wandered back to the tapestry where he’d saved his father, where he’d been the first to find out the truth about his death.
Was what I saw the truth?
A vast blue sky had replaced the decapitated head on the cloth, the perspective making it look three-dimensional, like it stretched on forever. The sun hung high in the corner, its orange rays diffusing to yellow.
In the foreground, a man was falling from the sky, melted wings of wax trailing behind him.
†‡†
I stood and brushed dust off my pants and shirt, each movement of my arm causing pain in my chest where the nasty chicken took its pound of flesh—okay, maybe only a few ounces of flesh, but it hurt. My mother watched my pained expression.
“Can you do anything about this?”
She shook her head.
“I am neither angel nor demon. I can’t heal you.”
I breathed deep, felt the taut pain of the wound, the warm flow of blood trickling down my meager pec. If she couldn’t fix me, I’d have to deal with the pain until we found someone who could.
Where’s Piper?
“How do you keep finding me?”
“You’re my son.”
It didn’t seem like much of an explanation, especially since my reason for coming back was because my son was lost. If she could find me, why couldn’t I find him? I looked at my feet, kicked at a Hell-rock.
“Trevor’s safe,” she said.
She couldn’t heal me like an angel, but apparently she read my thoughts like one.
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
She mounted the stairs before I said anything else and I followed. I had to pivot my shoulders sideways to fit up the stairs, the position making the wound in my chest ache and throb. Ahead, my mother seemed to practically float up the stairs with the ease of someone who’s followed the same path a thousand times before.
We emerged on a wide ledge running the length of the cliff. More stairs ran up to
a second ledge overhead. I paused, waiting to see where she’d lead me, but she stood in place like she waited to see where I’d go.
“Well?”
She looked at me, dark eyes gleaming, and a shadow of a smile brushed her lips like something was mildly funny that she didn’t want to share. For the first time, I wondered if this woman who was not only my mother but had spent four decades living in Hell had my best interests at heart.
“Where’s Trevor?”
“Somewhere here.”
She swept her hand in front of her, gesturing toward the cave openings. I looked at them, counted them silently, stopping when I reached fifteen because each number beyond dampened my spirits.
How am I supposed to find him in there?
“How am I supposed to find him in there?”
“You will find what you are supposed to find.”
I cocked an eyebrow. For someone who wasn’t an angel, her response came off as a cryptically angelic answer.
“And what am I supposed to find?”
“Everything will work out as it should.”
She stepped closer and encircled me with her arms, pulling me against her. At first, I stood like a punching dummy. I’d never been hugged by my mother before, so it took a few seconds for my brain to reconcile the action and figure out how to respond. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and patted her on the back. She released me and stepped away.
“You will find what you are supposed to find.”
If anyone other than my mother had repeated themselves like that, I’d have been compelled to toss out a sarcastic response. Since she gave birth to me, and died doing it, I gave her a pass.
I sighed and glanced at the cave mouths stretching into the distance. Dozens of openings, all of uniform size and shape with no doors, no street numbers, no welcoming potted plants sitting outside to distinguish one from another.
Mailman Hell.
I went to the closest cave and peered in. Darkness strangled the light out of the place a few feet down the rough-hewn walls. Unidentifiable smells floated to my nose; water gurgled somewhere in the dark. Or maybe it was the start of a growl at the back of some creature’s throat.