To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows

by Sam Richard

  Karen scratched at her eyes and managed to tear one out, swallowing it whole. Damasus wasn’t fairing any better, having torn open his own belly, trying to grab hold of any organ he could, but they all appeared too slick with blood. From the golden horn came more green mist; so much that it was almost a solid. And then it began to take form. As it did, the green flames grew darker and hotter, with many members of the crowd being consumed by the heat; their bodies would become completely engulfed in flames and left smoldering in seconds. From the center of the miasma came an incandescent figure. Towering and verdant, it stared at the chaos below with an air of satisfaction radiating from its glowing silhouette.

  The golden horn, this was a Djinn – somehow. All I needed was to get to the horn, and then I would, at the very least have some kind of bargaining chip, if not control. If there had been shadows, I would have stuck to them, but there was no place to lay low, no avenues of sneaking; so I wandered through the madness, trying to avoid touching anyone, for fear that they would try to devour me. Slowly, I reached the pool of blood and climbed in. It was scalding my legs, but I pushed through, with no other reasonable options. Because of course trying to control this fucking Djinn was the most reasonable choice I could make. If it had spotted me, it didn’t do anything to indicate one way or another. A few steps more and I reached the column and pulled myself up. My feet were sizzling, but I couldn’t tell if my legs were red from being burned, or merely all the goddamn blood.

  I approached the golden horn, carefully stepping over Karen’s lifeless body to get to it. She had managed to tear open her throat, pull both eyes out, and while she must have swallowed one, the other was staring back at me. She had managed to tear a messy hole in her throat, wherein the second eyeball was lodged nicely. I’ll always wonder if she bled to death or choked first. As sad as I was, it was hard to feel anything at that point. I reached the golden horn and pried it out from Damasus’s limp, blood soaked hand. The moment my skin made contact with the horn, the flames jumped violently and the Djinn was atop me, staring down with menace in its vacant, featureless face.

  “If you seek power, strength, worship, ask of me what you will. Welcome to my fertile holocaust. If you seek love, life, and hope, go elsewhere, or you will join my congregation,” its loud, booming voice passed through me and shook my bones.

  I shouted hoarsely, “Look asshole, I don’t care about any of that. I’ve got the horn. I’ve got the power. All I want is for my friends and I to be safe, driving, across the country, like the Pacific Northwest and shit. I don’t care about your, I don’t care about your holocaust, and I don’t care about your congregation. Now maybe this horn doesn’t melt, but I’m sure I could find a way to fuck it up. I’m covered in blood, dead flies, dirt, and honey – for some reason. I’ve got a pounding headache, it’s a million fucking degrees in here, and I’m done with all of this goddamn garbage. I don’t want power and I don’t want worship. I want you all to fuck off and I want my goddamn fucking friends.”

  “I’m not gonna say he relented, that my one impassioned, exhausted speech worked, that I brought you two back to life and that’s why were almost to Washington state, you know? I’m not just gonna come out and say it, but I’m also not going to not say it,” she sighed, pleased with herself. Mary and Karen sat laughing, UK Decay blasting on the feeble car stereo.

  “Look Sue, I know my uncle and his friends were fucking weird, and they have some fucked up views, but it wasn’t that bad,” Karen stated, defiantly.

  Mary sat there, unmoving. Thin lines of red moved down her forearms, light at first, then increasingly dark. Blood began to pool under the skin before bursting past the fleshy prison and coating the entire car in red. Sue began wailing and screaming, the car swerving on the blacktop beneath, before finding rest at the base of a large redwood tree. Upon impact Sue’s face smashed into the steering wheel, breaking her nose and fracturing her cheekbones. Karen laughed, and then force of the impact pushed the whole weight of her body into the seatbelt. The pressure on her stomach pushed the contents outward, the passenger side of the car now covered in the remains of several sacrificial children, the flesh of a few worshipers, and her own eyeball; the other remained lodged in her throat.

  Sue tried to scream, tried to run, but you can’t run. She tried to fight, but you can’t fight. This was the means to her end. She touched my golden horn, now she will see my fury, my holocaust, my inferno, my hell. Eternal.

  THOSE UNDONE

  “Branches into the maple will bring the undoing.” My sister, Molly, and I would say this to each other often. A quote from one of our holy books. The esoteric meanings of the phrase didn’t faze us, at that age. At first, we just thought it sounded funny. But the words felt deeper and stranger the more I pondered them.

  When our mom fell ill and died, it became a way of sharing our pain with each other inside of a religious community that valued a stoic, passionless temperament. Molly would sneak me maple candy, whispering the words in my ear, a blank expression on her face clouding the pain and love in her amber eyes. I was nine, she was twelve.

  Each man and woman, or in our case, boy and girl, was expected to carry their pain, grief, trauma, and loss with gentle silence and an unwavering, neutral expression.

  Day in. Day out. Always.

  Emotion was declared an enemy to both our Lord and order, passion a criminal act. So we hid them behind those strange eight words. They followed my whole life; my own private prayer.

  As a grieving boy, there was nothing but work, devotion, and worship. Even at that age, I tended to the maple trees, making sure the taps were clear of clogs and bringing buckets to be processed. Our community ran on the stuff. It’s how we were independent from society, selling it to distributors at an arm’s reach. Maple was our community’s source of wealth.

  The years after mom died, life fell apart. Dad couldn’t keep his drinking secret, something expressly forbidden by the body. Word got out he had been making hooch in our basement; they came to the house, kicking him out of the community.

  Molly and I chose to stay. Or rather, were told we were staying because important things were at work, the body was sure to evoke Him at any moment. I think we could have left with dad, had we raised a stink about it, but I felt little for him; mom having basically raised us. Before he left, he had already abandoned us. I felt betrayed, neglected.

  We moved in with Aunt Lynda when dad left. She wasn’t really our Aunt, that’s just what adults were called, as we were one big family under Him. Molly tried to keep our minds off the pain and loss and abandonment during this time. At night, after Aunt Lynda went to bed, Molly would sneak into my room and we would tell stories of mom’s adventures in the universe; not with sorrow, but with joy. This wasn’t what we were taught to believe, it had been drilled into us that all souls return to him, but I tried to believe that mom was out there, somewhere, having adventures in the stars. When I got too sad, Molly would say the words to me. It always made me feel better.

  Dad hadn’t been gone but a few months when we it happened. Aunt Lynda came with the news; I was in my bedroom reading from the sacred texts, trying to understand why so many bad things could happen to those of us who were devout. They said that our group was the only that we knew of who served him, the rest of the world a pathetic wasteland of misery, godlessness, and pain. They had abandoned the Lord, and as such been abandoned by him.

  But I was in pain. My life had become nothing but sorrow. By fourteen, I had already lost my mother to illness and my father had abandoned our family, our faith, in favor of drunkenness. I felt nothing and our Lord seemed to not hear my cries. It was while pondering this that Aunt Lynda burst into the room in a panic, telling Molly and I that it was time. He was here. The Prophet had made contact with our Lord, Fiannarna. We all had to go down to the barn.

  Fear clutched my soul. I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t be one with him. I wasn’t ready, I was impure; I was a bastard child of a dead mot
her and a drunk father who had abandoned me. I was nothing; I was the discarded. And I was afraid he would find me abhorrent. I had doubted him, for so long I had doubted him. More than that, I hated him.

  So I lied. I told Aunt Lynda that I couldn’t go meet him like this. She tried to shut me up, to get me to obey, grasping at my arm, but I told her that I was filthy and in unclean clothes for working in the forest all day. If she would simply let me clean up quickly and change, I would meet them at the barn. I would not be moved without purifying myself first. After much protesting, she gave in and allowed me a few minutes. She would be waiting for me there; they would all be waiting for me there.

  The coward I was then, I went into the bathroom and waited for the front door to close, watching Aunt Lynda drag Molly away, towards this new, horrible unknown. It was the last time I would see her. Through tears, I went and packed what few clothes I had. I was leaving them all behind.

  On my way out the door, I heard the first boom of thunder and looked to the sky, cursing our Lord for doing this to me. For doing all of this to me. But the sky was clear of clouds and full of bright crimson stars that made me lightheaded when I looked towards them. Nothing felt right. Not just the leaving; there was no moon but there were whirling cosmic bodies I had never seen. Black formations and several dull, pulsing planets littered the sky.

  Another loud burst of thunder shook the earth; it was coming from the barn. As quietly as I could, I ran over to see what was happening. Had I cursed myself to be outside of His holy plans? I fought against myself; hope and fear, rejection and desire to be a part of it, hate and pain all tore at my spirit.

  The fear won, so I peeked in through the barn door, the whole family standing in silence as The Prophet stood upon the altar dressed in his formal robes; his feet between the bones and horns, the mossy antler between them. Old, tattered furs covered his body and bent, broken branches framed his head like an iconographic halo. His arms were raised in surrender or reverence or both. A look of terror and awe betraying his once commanding authority as his eyes ran with blood.

  More thunder pounded in the room, causing me to jump and let out a whimper. The clatter of hooves echoed following the thunder and I saw a black and green figure walking above the unmoving crowd. Its long, thin legs creeping between the standing masses who were all staring up at our once formless Fiannarna, now made of flesh; gnarled and surreal flesh.

  I felt terror. Nothing but terror.

  I turned and ran. Thunder boomed out across the unnatural sky, the crimson-red stars, the dull, pulsing planets. Out of the compound, I kept running. My knees strained under the stress, my muscles tightened to marble, and I kept running and running until the sky made sense. Until I could no longer hear the thunder.

  Though it never really went away - the thunder, the chill through my soul, the memory of those long legs moving through the unflinching crowd - they chased me. I would see and feel them in dreams, in quiet moments, when I was alone in the dark of night. The thing in the barn, it knows.

  The bigger, national newspapers didn’t pick up on the story, which didn’t surprise me. When a cult simply vanishes, they don’t assume group suicide as there aren’t bodies. Most folks just thought that they moved on, to another part of the country or world. It didn’t seem out of character for a reclusive, religious sect. But two hundred people up and vanishing caused a fracture to the larger community. We were the largest producer of real maple syrup and the disappearance disrupted the local economy. Plus there was the mystery, so it was thusly reported on.

  I had only been gone a couple of months when I saw the paper. Two towns over, sleeping in the woodshed of a local campsite and scavenging for food and water, I came across it in a park garbage can. “Two Hundred Sectarians Vanish.” They didn’t know when, but I knew it was the night I fled. Even then, I could still hear the thunder ringing in my ears. He took them home. I spoiled my own ascension.

  My life was spent fighting what I knew to be true. I tried to embrace a different faith, non-belief. My experience didn’t align with everyone else’s reality, so I fought to forget it. I tried to drink my nightmares away and find something to give meaning to my existence, to my survival. I tried to forgive myself for abandoning Molly to die; or vanish or whatever happened to her. And I tried to forgive myself for not saving her, for leaving her behind when all I had to do was bring her with me.

  Years went by. GED program, jobs, girlfriends, boyfriends, fights, shitty roommates, shitty friends, alcohol, medication, therapy, several different states and cities, more shitty jobs, more therapy. Always moving; typically alone. I thought that if I stayed in any place for too long, He would find me. Which I know is ridiculous; he always knows where I am. I can feel him watching from behind the obscured, crimson stars.

  Seventeen years of running, of not knowing what exactly happened. Seventeen years of guilt and self-loathing. Seventeen years of muttering that prayer under my breath, before I was called home.

  The news reports said that they had found a body, one of the missing two hundred. His body found on the abandoned grounds of the former cult compound. Clothed in animal skins and a wooden halo. Freshly dead.

  I woke up from the black silence of sleep and heard myself repeating it back to me in my mind, over and over again. I was the branch.

  If the body of faith was the tree and I a broken branch off that tree, perhaps returning home, embracing Fiannarna, would bring them back. The body was a sign that it was time; or a threat. Either way, I needed to go.

  The idea made me feel ill, like my soul had been coated in microscopic shards of glass. But it wormed its way into my brain and I couldn’t get it out. Maybe I could bring Molly back. Maybe I could undo this whole fucking mess; then it was worth any amount of risk.

  This thought clung to my skin everywhere I went for weeks. It wouldn’t leave. But the more I thought about it, the more right I felt. My sleep got better, my nightmares diminished. But the fear never left. So I packed my car and headed across a few states towards the compound, towards home.

  When I got there, the gate to the compound squeaked in dusty breeze, worn police tape flapping along. All the trees surrounding the place long dead and the grass was gone. Nothing but sandy dirt and dry wood. I pushed the entrance open and walked into the compound. The buildings that had been there were mostly in pieces scattered around the grounds, though the skeletons of a few structures still remained. Sweat ran down my back in the humid, midday sun.

  Walking forward, towards the barn, a sickly sweet smell met my nose. It crawled up my sinuses sending tears down my cheeks. I hoped I would pass it, that it was just hanging in the air in that one spot, but as I got closer to the great barn, the smell got stronger and more pungent. I gagged and pinched my nose, trying to breathe through my teeth for fear of taking in a mouthful of the foul odor.

  Ice dug into my heart as I imagined the rotting bodies of my family decaying inside the holiest sanctuary on these grounds. They couldn’t be in there, though, I reasoned with myself. They would have been found, if not back then, then recently. But what if they came back, too, after The Prophet was found. The closer I got, the thicker the smell became. It felt like I could bite through it, that the oils of putrefaction were sticking to my skin and clothing.

  Trembling, I reached for the barn door and opened it slightly. A loud creak came from its rusty hinges and I jumped at the sound; my heart blasting hard in my throat. Sweat dripped down my arm and off my elbow onto the dusty earth below. Taking a shallow breath and then holding it, I pulled open the door.

  Empty; at least of death and life. The smell stuck around, but no corpses littered the floor of the stiflingly hot barn. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, at least to me. I walked towards the altar. A variety of bones and horns adorned the dark wood surface. The remnants of long since decayed flowers and plants surrounded a solitary, moss-covered deer antler. It was soft and moist when I touched it, something that was forbidden my entire childhood.
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  I had actually never been this close before. Only The Prophet was allowed to touch the altar. Only The Prophet could commune with Fiannarna. With the thought of its name, thunder crashed above me and the sun went dark through the barn door. I knew what it meant, and that the sky above was different, that I had returned.

  The clattering of hooves on the old, splintered wooden floor echoed through the barn. Clutching the mossy antler, I turned to greet Fiannarna, our Lord. Coughing as I struggled to breathe through his smell, his gnarled, gangly legs stepped towards me. I could feel the moss crumbling in my hands as I gripped the antler tighter and tighter as he bent down to gaze into my eyes.

  An amber eye met mine, shimmering in his skull. The skin and fur on his face was tattered and pulled back, revealing old, dried blood, gnarled muscle, and a browning skull covered in small bugs. His wooden antler clacked together as he moved, as if on hinges. With each hit, the room was once again filled with the deafening sounds of thunder.

  My ears rang with the sound, pressure building in my skull.