by Bruce Blake
It felt like we’d been pursued by the elephant-thing for hours but time and perception in Hell are skewed. And not in our favor. We crouched silently behind the fern, finding ways to deal with its putrid, wet-towel-left-in-the-washing-machine-too-long smell as the beast crashed through underbrush and knocked over trees looking for us.
At least we knew where to find it.
“We can’t stay here. It’ll scent us eventually,” I said.
Detective Williams turned his head toward me, eyes wide and bottom lip quivering. This wasn’t the way I expected a seasoned cop to react to a challenging situation.
“Where do we go? What do we do? You said you’d get me out of here. Take me home. Take me anywhere. Just get me out of here.”
“Sshh.”
I put my hand on his shoulder to calm him but he stood and backed away a couple of steps.
“I can’t do this. We have to get out of here.”
The sound of the beast rooting through the forest stopped and I imagined its head cocked to one side, listening. Did it hear him? Nothing happened for a minute. I remained crouched behind the fern, struggling not to gag on the odor penetrating my throat. Williams stood shivering, knees practically knocking together.
“I can’t stay here,” he said, his voice high-pitched. “You have no idea what they did to me.”
The creature moved again, this time with no doubt about the purpose to its steps. The ground quivered under me and the detective’s cheeks lost their color as he stared past me between the fern’s enormous leaves. He’d seen it.
“Dammit.”
I sprang to my feet, grabbed Williams by the arm and dragged him away. The frequency and rhythm of the footsteps shaking the forest floor increased reminding me of a scene out of Jurassic Park when the T-Rex chases everyone and then eats them. One thing in my after-life I knew for sure: I didn’t want to end up an ingredient in one of the steaming mountains of dung the elephant-thing produced.
Anything’s steaming pile of dung, really.
Williams’ feet didn’t want to cooperate with my escape efforts at first; his lack of help nearly pulled me off balance. I stopped to encourage him to get-the-fuck-going and saw the beast bearing down on us.
It thundered through the brush, galloping along on four of its six legs while using the other two to clear a path. What brush and smaller trees it missed with the hands it easily shouldered aside with its bulk. The trunk-appendage snaked out on front of it and the twisted black tusks atop its head crashed through the lower branches of trees, splintering wood and sending a shower of dead leaves in its wake.
“Come on!”
I yanked the cop’s arm and this time he got his legs moving. I forced my way through brush and brambles, felt thorns claw my flesh; without any doubt the plants were purposely slowing our progress. Behind us, the beast kept coming, undeterred. We ducked under a fallen tree, swam through a dense swath of bushes, clambered over an expanse of deadfall and emerged onto a short plain. Thigh-high, gray grass stretched to a sheer cliff face that went up and up forever. I glanced at it, formulating a plan of action before the elephant-thing trampled us or worse, and thought I saw a crack in the rock. At this distance, it looked like it might be wide enough to allow a man passage but too narrow for the thing hot on our heels.
Williams must have seen it about the same time I did; he sprinted into the grass leaving me with my mouth open, about to tell him to make a break for the fissure.
Bastard left me behind. See if I save him next time.
I shook the thought from my mind and set off after him, resisting the urge to glance back and gauge how close the thing was to overtaking me. Judging by the quaking of the ground, it couldn’t be far behind.
I can’t believe those fuckers sent that thing after me. They said I’d have my freedom.
Did it really surprise me? I was in Hell, dealing with the deposed angel-of-death and a kid with a big attitude problem.
Maybe I’m a little too trusting.
Kinda what got me here in the first place.
I crashed through the grass, narrowly avoided an obstacle lying across my path as I saw it at the last second. I jumped it, spared it a quick glance, and thought I made out the shape of a corpse which may or may not have begun life as a human. It definitely smelled dead, but I’d passed the odor before it had a chance to penetrate.
Williams was thirty yards ahead of me, nearing the crack in the wall. About the time I felt relief at his safety, my foot caught on another hidden obstacle. My elbows scraped against rough grass, my shoulder struck a rock, and my nose came to a stop an inch from another corpse.
Dead, yes. Human, no.
The sickly-sweet stench of rot wafted up my nostrils making me gag. Decay blackened the thing’s head; maggot-like bugs crawled out of one hole in its putrid flesh and into another. I rolled over and scrambled away coming within inches of burying my hand in another corpse. I struggled to my feet and took a step back. Bodies littered the area near the cliff, all of them rotted beyond recognition, most of them contorted in odd positions suggesting they’d plunged to their deaths from the cliff top.
“Shit.”
Williams stood at the opening in the rock face. He didn’t speak or gesture, only stared. I didn’t realize the elephant thing was right behind me until I felt its breath on my neck.
“Fuck.”
I closed my eyes.
How did I forget about that?
Its snake-ish trunk huffed another breath against the base of my skull, stirring my hair. A glob of beast-snot slapped against my neck but I didn’t have the time to register disgust at it before I broke into a run.
I’d never been much of a football player but realized my opponent was faster than me, so running straight for the fissure might not be the best idea. Williams hadn’t moved. He didn’t so much as wave encouragement, offering only an expression of unfathomable terror.
Thanks.
I faked left, went right, and got one full stride in plus half of another before the thing’s trunk slapped me in the side and sent me flying through the air. I landed on one of the corpses and it exploded in a cloud of black dust that adhered itself to the sweat on my forehead and cheeks. It didn’t smell as bad as the others—must have been dead longer—but the dust clogged my nose. I sneezed once, twice, each time sending a puff of dead-guy into the air.
I wiped my nose on my arm to clear it and managed to stem the sneezing—little consolation considering I still needed to deal with the Hell-beast. And, unlike the other creatures I’d bumped into during my visits, I figured this thing wouldn’t stop at one bite. I scrabbled away on hands and knees, a huge, pathetic baby desperately dragging itself from one place to another.
Elephant-thing was having none of it.
Its trunk coiled around my left ankle and jerked me off the ground hard enough to wrench my hip. I bent at the waist doing my first sit-up in years and clawed at the snake-like appendage but my fingernails slid off its slimy surface.
It dangled me upside down, blood draining from my extremities and collecting in my head, then it lifted me high into the air until my head was level with the three bloodshot eyes lined up under the base of the trunk. The eyes didn’t concern me as much as the mouth.
Somehow, the first time I’d seen the beast, I didn’t notice the mouth slashing across what passed for its face. Hard to believe about a maw containing so many teeth. Pointy, sharp-looking teeth designed for tearing flesh off bones.
“Okay, calm down, big boy. We can all just get along.”
It didn’t agree. It gave me a shake, presumably the elephant-kind’s way of saying ‘shut up’. I did.
It waved me around for a minute, twisting me back and forth like a feather on a string blown by the wind. I’d see a flash of the forest then the expanse of dead grass, the black corpses, the cliff.
Williams no longer stood at the crack in the rock wall.
“Williams!”
The beast took exception to my u
ttering a sound when it clearly didn’t want me to and shook me harder, twisted me more violently. I grimaced at the pain in my groin and wondered if the thing could shake me hard enough for my leg to part with its socket. Some questions you don’t want to find out the answer to, this being a prime example.
Forest, grass, corpses, cliff, the twisting continued. Corpses, grass, forest, person, grass, corpses.
Person?
I twisted and saw a figure approaching through the grass. A brief flash, not enough for recognition, so I waited for another chance.
And the beast ceased its twisting.
I wriggled and gyrated but couldn’t see past it. I did another sit up, pounded my fists against the trunk. It squeezed tighter and I felt the bones in my ankle grind together. I sucked a pained breath through my teeth and stopped hitting it.
“Bastard,” I said hoping it would bring the same result as before.
It reacted as predicted, but more violently. My leg screamed in pain, the tendons in my groin stretched like the elastic of a slingshot. My head swam; I concentrated on breathing and holding on to consciousness. It twisted me, swung me. At first, I couldn’t think about looking to see who approached. When I got my wits back, I concentrated on looking for the figure when it swung me back toward the forest.
There.
My glimpse showed me wasn’t Detective Williams come to my rescue—no rumpled suit jacket, un-pressed shirt or tie pulled askew. The person wore plain clothes of drab colors. I saw no horns or wings or claws and decided to take a chance.
“Hey! Help!”
The elephant-thing had had enough.
It whipped me over its head, then forward, sling-shotting me to the ground. I hit with a crack of ribs and bounced once before coming to rest in a puff of dust. The thing may have released my ankle, but the pain enveloping my body precluded me from noticing such details. One of its hand-feet came to rest beside my head, but I couldn’t move my head to see, only my eyes, and even they hurt. I felt its breath on my face—it had circled around in front of me. Its breath was different than before, firmer, stinkier. Mouth breath, not trunk breath.
I forced my head to move, pushed my eyes as far as they’d go, and peered up into the creature’s toothy mouth.
So close. I was so close to getting out of here.
I wanted to close my eyes, a last gesture of surrender to the inevitable ingestion of my head, but my eyelids fluttered and remained wide open. Apparently, someone wanted me to bear witness to my own demise. Again.
Nice.
The elephant-thing’s maw edged closer, closer. Saliva spilled over its teeth and down its slimy, gray, wrinkled chin, dripped onto the ground by my head. Closer. Closer.
Then it stopped.
The mouth closed. The thing pulled its face away, back to the edge of my vision, and tilted its head like a dog does when it's listening. I listened, too, but heard nothing.
A second passed, two. The beast remained unmoving. I struggled to quell the pain ringing in my ears and eventually made out a faint hum. Not the sound of someone who forgot the words to a song, but the kind of humming you feel as much as hear, like when you ignore the caution signs and jump the fence into the power station.
The humming grew, expanded. It seemed other sounds added themselves to it, voices doubling the volume and thickness of it, trebling it.
The beast reared up and let out a growl that transformed into a screech I wouldn’t have expected from the creature, a sound more appropriately emitted by a giant parakeet. I winced at the noise as it drowned out the hum. When the beast paused to take a breath, the other sound was still there, louder, more powerful.
Then it stopped. My ears rang with it even after it ceased.
The elephant-thing took a step out of my view so I felt rather than saw when it leaped over me. I wanted to twist myself, see it happening. No chance of that—even the thought hurt.
The ground shook and shook again. The beast screeched and then the ground shook once more before everything went silent. No hum, no screech, no tremors beneath my pained chest.
I held my breath, waiting, listening without knowing what to listen for or what to wait on. Nothing happened for several seconds, then I felt a touch on my back.
I stiffened and sucked a breath between my teeth, tensing in readiness for the snapping of my spine. The two actions shot pain through my limbs suggesting the damage the creature caused wasn’t limited to my ribs.
What now?
I opened my mouth to inquire. If I was in this bad of a shape, how much worse would speaking make it? The pain proved too much to form words through. The pressure of the touch on my back increased, causing more pain at first, but then a warmth began flowing, sending an electrical pulse along my back.
A buzz flowed through me, filling my torso first, spilling into my arms and legs until all my muscles tingled to the point of numbness. My teeth chattered, my eyelids fluttered. I tried to curb them, to wrest control back with no success. My breath came in short bursts, sucking dust from the ground which I longed to cough from my lungs. Just when I thought the dust would choke me and the electricity would squeeze the air from my chest, the touch disappeared and the buzz vanished. I regained control.
First I coughed and spit to clear my mouth.
After a moment recovering from my hacking spasm, I tested my limbs and ribs, found them pain free. Carefully, I pushed myself to sit, wiped gritty spittle from my chin, and faced my rescuer.
When I saw her while hanging upside down, her blond tresses had been hidden beneath a hat. It had fallen from her head during her confrontation with the elephant-beast. Her hair fell across her forehead, hung in her eyes hiding her expression.
Poe.
Behind her, the creature lay on its side, one leg stuck up in the air like a swatted fly.
“Is it...?”
After the words came out of my mouth, it occurred to me I should have thanked her first. She responded without giving me the opportunity to correct my oversight.
“Stunned. Go before it wakes.”
“Poe, I--
“Go.”
She tossed her head to clear the hair from her face, and I saw a hardness in her expression that wasn’t there before. Her jaw was set, her eyes unreadable. No timid smile or caring look. This was a different woman, and yet it was Poe.
I condemned her to Hell yet she saved my life.
“Why did you--”
“Go!”
The force in her word startled me to my feet. I stumbled back a step and then opened my mouth again, determined to ask my question, determined to get an answer. Her eyes flashed, silencing me, and she pointed past me. Behind her, the elephant-beast stirred. Its trunk flicked toward her.
“Poe--”
“Go now.”
Her words spun me around against my will, made my feet carry me toward the fissure in the cliff. I wanted to look over my shoulder at her but needed to concentrate on my footing as I navigated the corpses. I jumped over the last one and reached the opening, then stopped and looked back.
The elephant-thing gripped Poe around the waist, its trunk cinching tight, yet she continued staring at me, eyes urging me to go and not look back. As I turned away, I saw the beginning of the glow I’d seen her utilize before, though it wasn’t golden this time, but gray. I knew I didn’t need to worry about her, at least not when it came to what would happen in her struggle with the creature.
I jammed myself between the sides of the fissure, forcing myself in, and tried not to think about it as I wriggled my way through, stranding my guardian angel in Hell.
Bruce Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost
Chapter Forty
The path through the fissure twisted and turned, switching back on itself uncountable times, sometimes running straight for miles. It widened to the size of a banquet hall and narrowed until damn-near impassable. At one point, damn-near impassable and switchback came together as one and I got stuck for a panicky minute. I wriggled and gyrat
ed, eventually working my way around the corner to find the path widened and straightened beyond.
And, not too far ahead, it ended.
The green-painted door set between the stone walls sported a push bar worn silver with use and might have been the exit door out of any school in North America. I slowed my pace to sneak up on the door, untrusting.
How does that come to be here?
It’s Hell, stupid. What do you think?
Twenty feet away. It didn’t move, only stood placidly, keeping me on this side away from whatever lay on the other. I stopped and listened: no electric hum, no screams, nothing. I moved closer.
Ten feet. The ground didn’t become quicksand; dead hands didn’t scrabble through the rocky ground to grasp my ankles and pull me into their graves.
Five feet. The earth didn’t quake; rocks didn’t tumble from above to crush me before I escaped. No voice boomed warning me away; no ancient runes scrawled in the rock promised a grotesque and hideous fate if I crossed the threshold.
Something’s wrong.
Closer.
I reached out with shaking hand. My finger brushed the push bar where the paint was worn off. I pulled my hand away immediately like a child touching a hot stove.
Cold metal.
It didn’t shock me or burn me. No man-eating slime leaped onto my flesh. If felt exactly the way it looked.
Someone’s fucking with me.
I touched it again, wrapped my fingers around the bar—smooth except where a stubborn chip of paint clung tenaciously to the metal. I traced its edge with my finger and wondered why the bar was so worn, how many years the door had been here. The fact the bar was on this side suggested its job was to keep things out rather than to keep me in.
I filled my lungs with warm, gritty Hell-air, using the breath to collect enough nerve to push the door open and find out what lay on the other side. My pause stretched on for several seconds as I thought about Poe, the elephant-thing’s trunk wrapped around her waist, squeezing, squeezing. I glanced back over my shoulder, down the path to the impossibly narrow switchback. No way to get back to her, not before one of them destroyed the other, or maybe both. Even if I could, she didn’t want my help, not now, not after my betrayal.