I took several deep breaths, braced myself as best I could and slowly, carefully began to insert my hand and arm into the orifice of the vortex. I expected to feel intense heat. After all, this was Hell, wasn’t it? As I broke into the membrane that separated the nightmare plane from reality, the fury of the maelstrom ceased and immediately became calm. Curiously, there was no heat to it at all. Instead, there was the strangest kind of nothingness, not really a feeling, but rather a total lack of feeling. There was no heat, there was no cold, there was no breeze nor wind, no humidity, nothing. The lack of feeling was so strong that first I wondered if my hand had entered a vacuum, but then I quickly realized that conjecture was wrong, for had it been, my hand and arm would have exploded upon entry. And since this other plane of existence, despite all of its seeming fury, wasn’t sucking me into it at all any more, I summoned up the courage to reach more and more of my arm into this mysterious world. Nothing cataclysmic was happening and my outlook upon being able to rescue the infant was growing more optimistic, since she was right in front of me. But the visual perceptions of this other world seemed to be more than a little out of sync with the normal one, and I realized the baby was a little further away from me than I thought, forcing me a little bit further into the void. Still, I felt positive that I would finally be able to reach her, an opinion I soon altered, because in this other dimension, distances were vastly deceiving. No matter how close I tried to get to her, no matter how far I reached into this dismal plane, the baby was always the same distance from me, no closer, no farther. She was always just out of my range. My right arm now totally engulfed in this other dimension, I realized I could go no further without losing total control. I was into it all the way up to my shoulder and any optimism I had harbored vanished completely and the unthinkable option of having to leave her behind became a terrible reality, because if I could not reach her, I could not rescue her. I’d reached my arm into this other dimension as far as I possibly could without putting my own stability in severe danger and I was still no closer to the child. No sooner had I made the horrible, yet unavoidable decision to abandon the attempt, than the sensory input from this other world abruptly changed. Instead of the nothingness to which I’d now become accustomed, a pulsing, drawing feeling that felt alarmingly good flowed around and into my right arm. All tension, stress and general stiffness flowed out of it, as if it were being expertly massaged from both within and without. It was a disturbingly relaxing sensation and, without my permission, my entire body began to unwind, to succumb in response. My mind snapped to attention as I suddenly realized that I had been, for a split second, relaxing my grip on the side of the tub. Clever, very clever, I thought, trying to avert yet another surge of panic that was on the verge of overcoming me. I tightened my grip and returned my focus to retrieving my arm, aching with impotent regret at my inability to rescue the pitiful infant into the real world, into a safe world. As if it sensed my intent, the forces within the red dimension changed. No longer seductive, it began to feed on more than just my tension. Not only were my stress and tension being sucked out of me, I felt now that my entire life force was in danger. In a matter of moments, I felt very little life or strength left in my arm and I knew that soon the rest of me would not be far behind. My hung over brain and body’s nerve endings began their edgy tingling again. My attempt at rescuing the baby had put me into extreme danger.
Suddenly she stopped crying. Could it be that on some level she realized that someone had finally come to her call, someone had finally, at long last, come to help her? Poor little thing, I thought. I had failed, and my heart was breaking behind my desperation to save myself. No longer crying now, she began to coo and giggle. It was then she began to change. She seemed to be getting fleshier, visibly gaining weight as, still fighting to retrieve my arm, I watched her. Her bloated belly disappeared, her thin little arms and legs fattened up, her sunken face plumped up in time lapse fashion and color came to her cheeks and lips. It was impossible, but she seemed a little older, too, still an infant but no longer a newborn. She continued filling out until she was now a plump little thing, laughing and gurgling as she stared at me. Then she aged from an infant into an older baby, able to sit up. She started to laugh again, but this time it was not the sweet, joyful glee of a baby but instead a mocking, ridiculing one.
She frightened me now for I realized at last that this was no real child, only a ruse to trick me, to draw me into this red nightmare dimension. With all my might, I began to withdraw my arm from the pit, but it wouldn’t come out. I leveraged myself with the side of bathtub to which I clung furiously and pulled again, as hard as I could, but to no avail. My right arm was stuck in the void up to my shoulder. Panic ripped through me as, futilely, I tugged and pulled. From within the edge of the red and black plane a thin, flexible object floated through the air toward me. Before I had a chance to blink, it wrapped itself around my hand and, like a serpent, wound itself around my arm. Once coiled around me, it made itself taut and metal prongs like rose thorns sprung out of it, piercing the flesh of my hand and my arm. I screamed. Blood began to pour from my punctures. The child, no longer a baby but now a toddler, sat in her spot, still laughing cruelly as the other end of the wire extended itself to her. She saw it not as a threat, but only as another source of amusement, a brutal toy, and her laughter increased. She expertly grabbed the wire between the barbs, tugging on it with the strength of an adult. She tugged as I pulled in the other direction, desperately trying to release myself from this hellish world as this tug-of-war caused the sharp prongs of the wire to embed themselves even more deeply into my tender flesh. The blood ran freely from my arm as she jerked the wire harder toward her with wicked delight, staring at me with eyes that were not those of a child. She coolly began to wrap the wire as if it were yarn to be done up into a ball. Then she stopped laughing and her expression became inscrutable. She just stared at me, her eyes never losing contact with my own. The wire, cutting deeper and deeper with its prongs, began to get uncomfortably hot.
“Stop it!” I howled. “Let me go! Please! Let me go!” Even as I screamed the words, I knew it would do no good.
The barbed wire became so hot that it seared into my arm and I screamed in agony. In my excruciating pain I could smell my own flesh burning. I lost all sense of myself except for the burning, piercing, torturous agony in my arm. I became my right arm. There was no me except for it right now, the pain was so extreme. Blinking through the hot, stinging tears streaming down my face, I stared at the child, whose inscrutability had turned into a smug, sadistic smile. She began to change again as the creature now holding onto the wire, the source of my anguish, presented itself as a little girl of about five years. At the next spurt she didn’t stop growing, but continued to develop before my eyes, from a five year old into a ten year old, a teenager, and finally, a young woman with long, dark hair, all the while clinging tightly onto the wire. My missing memories of last night came rushing back to me. The woman that stood before me behind the pulsating membrane, naked, reining in the hot, searing wire, drawing me into the vortex was the same woman that had stood at the other end of the alley last night, laughing at me cruelly as I had struggled to lift myself up from its filth. She was young and extraordinarily beautiful, but the evil creature inflicting this searing pain upon me was none other than Rochere. I was wet, shaking violently from the agonizing pain, yet I managed to curse her loudly through my screams, spewing at her every swearword and epithet I had ever heard. She didn’t react at all. She just stood there, holding the end of the wire, smiling coldly with evil, wicked self-satisfaction.
I thought things could get no worse, until that which I’d dreaded since first contemplating placing my hand into the miasma began to happen. The temperature in the pit became sweltering, more scorching by the second, until all of my arm was roasting. This pain was so intense that it merged with the torture of the hot barbed wire and became one with it. I screamed continually as I doubled my efforts to pull out my ar
m. My eyes, shut tight in absolute agony, thankfully could not see her now, but my ears could not shut out the cold, hard laughter of the creature Rochere. As I pulled myself backward, shrieking, shaking and racked with pain, I began to pass out from the torture I was forced to endure. Then my body began to shake all over and I began to choke. My survival reflexes were the only things keeping me from blacking out. My windpipe was being constricted from the outside; at the same time something was stabbing me in the upper chest, pulling me back like a carcass on a meat hook. This additional pain forced an awareness of the rest of my body upon me, reminding it that there was more to me than just my horribly wretched arm. I looked down for just a second and saw blood running down my chest and over my abdomen. Something was strangling me, something was stabbing at me. I struggled harder to release myself from the prison of the red otherworld as Rochere pulled the wire to force me even further inside. But the harder she tugged, the stronger the choking and stabbing pain assaulted me from the other direction. I could feel my eyes begin to bulge and I knew that if I did not breathe within the next few seconds that I would be a dead woman. No sooner had this realization forced itself upon me through the barrier of torturous pain than there was a sudden flash of light that actually seemed to be coming from me along with an explosive force that blasted me out of the miasmic world, clearing me completely of it. It blew me out of the bathtub, throwing me backward. I felt the flesh of my arm tear from the barbs of the wire; I heard my head crack as I hit the hard tile bathroom floor with force, my legs splayed over the edge of bathtub. I tasted blood in my mouth and prayed I had only split my lip or knocked out a tooth. My body was so racked with pain that I was beyond being able to feel how bad the damage was.
“Did you know that most deaths in the home occur from falling in the bathtub?” I heard a little voice within my head say. At least I thought it was within my head.
“Yes,” my mind answered it.
“Broken necks are not infrequent. Neither are drownings from being knocked unconscious and landing face first into water. You know you can drown in less than a half inch of water, don’t you?”
“I know, I learned about that a long time ago.” I responded sluggishly. “But I didn’t land face first into the water.”
“Are you sure your neck’s not broken then?” It continued.
“What are you trying to say?” The little voice was starting to upset me.
“Say? Oh, nothing, really, just making conversation. About deaths, I mean, you know, in the bathtub.”
“What about them?” I asked.
“I suppose the point is,” the voice, loud, dark and ominous, continued. “How do you know this isn’t one of them?”
“Such a cheery fellow you are,” I said to it as I my consciousness began to slip from me. “Will I die if I can’t stay awake?”
“That’s a thought. Enough to pass out on, don’tcha think?” the voice said.
“You really want me dead, don’t you?”
“Well, it really has been a rough few days for you, hasn’t it? Why not take it easy?”
“Because you want me to, you lousy, filthy bastard,” I thought. “If you want me to die so bad, go ahead and do it! You’re not getting me easy this time. You want me, you work for me!”
It took everything I had, every ounce of strength, every fiber of my will, but I began to move. Only a toe at first, and then my fingers, and then I made a fist with my left hand, for my right felt like nothing more than burnt mush, nothing more than pain itself. It took all my anger, all my hate, all my determinism, my love of life and my resentment of life to do it, but I got three of my extremities to move. All of my life’s triumphs and losses, all my rejections and all of my successes welled up inside me and by sheer emotion and will alone, I managed to move my head just a little. I was determined to show that bitch Rochere, who was now nothing more than an evil voice in my head, that I wasn’t dead just yet. But while I had moved a negligible amount, my body was still tightly glued to the floor. I just didn’t have the strength to push myself off the spot I where I’d crash landed. I started to cry, tears steaming down my cheeks so rapidly that only the heat of the tears differentiated them from the water splashing over me from the shower pipe now turned out of the tub, facing the bathroom, spraying water onto the tile floor. While I could move my feet and left hand a tiny bit, I knew I didn’t even have the strength to thrash about like a turtle, helpless on its back. Out of my peripheral vision, I could see that my torso was covered with blood and my upper chest was still bleeding. I wondered what my right arm looked like, but it was in such an awkward position that I couldn’t move my head enough to see it. That’s probably for the better, I thought. The barbed wire had flayed it gruesomely and what was left of the remaining flesh had gotten so badly burned in the vortex that it most likely looked more hideously mutilated than I could bear. I swallowed hard and immediately regretted it because my throat ached alarmingly from whatever had tried to strangle me. Whatever it was, it had almost killed me, but it also managed to pull me out of the vortex.
At least the floating, non-existent, obnoxious, evil voice was gone and no longer infiltrating my thoughts. I hoped it stayed gone because I’d already been tormented too much today, to say the least. Thankfully, my body was going numb now and I could no longer feel my wounds, not even my arm or the spot on my head where it had hit the floor.
With the voice silenced and no longer taunting me, at least I now could die in some peace. I forced opened my eyes for what I thought might very well be my final glimpse of the world. On the bathroom tile on the interior side of the tub where that horrible red dimension had previously been was now scrawled in what must have been blood, most probably mine, “YOU’RE DEAD.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“YOU’RE DEAD.”
Rochere’s words sent a single shock wave through my nervous system and then fell flat. She had tortured me and she needed now to terrorize me. Her efforts were in vain, however, because she had done her first job too well. The impact of her message upon my emotions was only fleeting reflex. Her threat had failed in its ability to linger in my psyche. How could it? I was simply too exhausted, too traumatized and too injured to react; I had no energy left for fear. Her death threat held such little weight only because she was just beating a dead dog. The joke was on her now, I thought, because after what I’d just been through, I realized that death would be a welcome friend to me, a relief. I was ready to die. Living was just simply too much effort at the moment. In death I could at least find rest.
Once the initial shock had passed, my response to the bloody message was passive and unreactive. Tell me something I don’t know, I thought dully. My mind, my body and my spirit were simply too depleted to be impressed. I closed my eyes, wondering if it would be for the last time. All feeling had left my body, but considering the vast amount of pain I’d been forced to endure, it was a true blessing. I felt myself begin to float upward, anticipating the most monumental event in life since my birth. However, instead of floating up into the tunnel with the white light about which I’d heard so much, I found myself back upon the familiar foggy boulevard, once more following the beautiful, mysterious gentleman that I now knew as Edmond. Once again he stopped and turned toward me when I approached him. He held out his hand, took hold of mine and pulled me to his body, enveloping me in his arms in a tight embrace. When I lifted my face up to his, his lips met mine and for a second time he breathed his sweet-tasting energy into me. It was now accompanied by a new sensation, a warm tingling that emanated from his body and ran into my own, an energy tremendously powerful and exciting as it flowed into me, returning me to life. By the time he relaxed his embrace, my own breath was coming in short, hot bursts. I forgot my former pain completely and my body was shaking once again, but this time it was with the heat of passion. I needed him desperately, desired him completely. I longed for him to throw me to the ground, to take me there and then; I wanted him to ravage me fully. His energy had taken a
way all my fear, trauma and pain, leaving in its stead a pulsing, radiating hunger. I felt not only whole again but excited, filled with an erotic, yearning desire for the two of us to become one.
Instead of giving me the consummation for which I sorely ached, he held me firmly about the waist with his left arm while releasing me with the other. His right arm, he outstretched, pointing his cane toward an unseen spot within the fog. Beautiful music once again poured from the mouth of its crystalline dragon headpiece, penetrating the dense mist to reveal a monolithic black door. As we walked toward it, the music, which I could somehow see with my eyes as well as hear, entered an enormous keyhole in the door’s center. The entryway opened slowly and we stepped through it. No sooner had we entered than it immediately clanged shut loudly behind us. Startled, I looked back toward the closed door as, before my eyes, wild thorn bushes suddenly sprang upward from either side of it, blocking it completely. A huge, single black flower then burst forth from the keyhole, growing huge in a matter of seconds. It moved in wavelike undulations, the blossom resembling more a sea urchin than a plant. Vulgarly appealing, its petals, thick, black and oily, throbbed and pulsated as it issued obscene sucking noises from a mouth in its center, noises mingled with evil, hollow, malicious laughter. The petals began to shudder profanely, discharging an earthy aroma that enticed me beyond belief. I could not help but stare. How bizarre, I thought as I let go of Edmond and, mesmerized, began to walk toward it. I got near enough to the flower to be able to stroke its outer petals, which felt rubbery, warm and wet, like a hot, thick inner tube from an old automobile tire. I was enchanted by it and wanted so to enter its mouth, to be consumed in its pungent perfume. The mouth continued making slurping noises as a large, eager tongue sprang forth from its center, licking and flicking. I felt compelled to reach out to greet it but Edmond pulled me back. The tongue began to drip blood as the flower moaned a disappointed sigh.
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