Under The Blade

by Serafini, Matt

  Then everything happened at once.

  Trish rolled onto her back and saw Melanie coming. She screamed out in horror, attempting to shield herself from the inevitable blow…

  Melanie’s head tightened as her vision grayed. She lost her footing during the charge and tumbled down, the axe cluttering somewhere beyond her reach.

  If this was death, a part of her welcomed it.

  “Not death.” Something slurred.

  Her eyes fluttered, but there was nothing to see.

  “Not yet, at least,” the voice said as if reading her mind. “Not until I say you are ready.”

  Then let me die, she thought out of pure exhaustion.

  “Let you? After everything you went through? Here, look at this…”

  Melanie’s eyes opened in the brilliant sunlight. She squinted and turned her head, finding herself on a beach. The edges of Lake Forest Grove lapped the soles of her naked feet as she stretched out on the sandy towel.

  Brady was beside her, dressed in a wet and clingy bathing suit. He was shirtless and Melanie admired his athletic physique every chance she got. He looked at her with a reciprocating smile. “You’re not so bad yourself…”

  This didn’t feel right, although it was hard to say why. They hadn’t been together this way, despite her deepest desires. So this familiarity was alien and artificial.

  And yet, it was natural too. Wasn’t it? They were here just as they spent every Sunday throughout the summer. Lazing on the lake with a picnic basket of turkey sandwiches and Blue Moons. They drank too much always, and then went home to screw like jackrabbits. A perfect way to cap off the weekend—and always something to look forward to again next week.

  “I know this is what you want. There is no reason why it cannot happen. Let me in, and it will be.”

  In truth, it sounded great. The cool summer breeze in her hair, Brady’s wet skin shining in the sunlight and grains of sand rustling against the palms of her hands—all of it real enough.

  “But this is not…”

  Nate leans in for a forceful kiss, exploring her lips with intensity that went beyond what she’d wanted that night at Desiree’s. She touches his bulging arms and slides her long legs up and down the sides of his torso. She hasn’t done this in years, but feels ready to do it now.

  Nate’s ready, too. He tugs at her bikini string, pulling it away from her chest as the threads come loose. His hands cup her small breasts. And then he’s kissing her everywhere.

  “Let me taste you,” he says in a voice that isn’t exactly his. It sounds hollow and devoid of emotion. “I want to be with you. IN you.”

  Wasn’t this man married? In a second, she decides she doesn’t care. Nate’s tongue makes it harder to concentrate on anything else. Her blood boils all the way up to her brain. Any hotter and her skin would cook right off.

  Then she remembers Brady dying. The crackling sound his skin made as the fire took him from this world.

  That was real. The pain from that memory was a fresh wound, sensitive to attention and irritated beyond belief. The rest of this—was something else.

  She pushes Brady off and gathers her clothes. The façade of Camp Forest Grove falls away like a bathroom towel, leaving only darkness.

  Candlelight flickered on all sides, basking the cavern in low light that brought every inanimate object to life through leaping shadows.

  Melanie steadied herself on her knees and took a long pull of air while she reclaimed her thoughts. Her head still hurt and there were memories in there that did not belong. But she could think clearly now.

  For now.

  Trish was out cold. Her jet-black hair was slick with blood from where the axe had landed. She wasn’t getting up from that any time soon.

  Something grabbed Melanie’s hair and yanked it. Lips pressed against her ear, a wet tongue tracing the length of it. A nose sniffed the base of her neck and a coarse hand slipped beneath her shorts and caressed her ass. “I want to be inside you. To crawl across your innards and spread my seed throughout your brain.”

  Melanie saw something—or the outline of something—when she turned around. There was an occasional flicker of negative space that moved and a yellow light grew out of nothing, flickering at eye level. She squinted while it widened into an orb, but she couldn’t look away. Every so often, she saw its form. It was indescribable, and far from human.

  “You understand nothing.” Hot breath blew across her lips. “I know you think terrible things, Melanie Holden. And I know you’d like to do them even more.”

  She wanted to writhe free, but convulsions of white-hot pain shot off to every neuron in her body. The presence tugged her hair with so much force that she was sure it was about to tear off her scalp.

  It purred soft approval. “The darkness within you is tremendous. Decades of despair and resentment have corroded you. Tell me…when you are not plagued by remembrances of your past, how often do you sit awake, obsessing over those who have the lives you want? Happy families. Loving husbands. Beautiful and healthy children. You pretend not to want these things, but only because they are so far out of your grasp. Would you kill those with better lives than yours?”

  There was no way of knowing whether it spoke aloud or inside her head. Either way, the words weren’t true. At least she didn’t think so. Everyone suffered a little envy. A good friend gets a better job than you, or lands a better-looking husband. Buys a better house. Whatever. Colleagues talked often about dates, proposals, engagements and weddings. Once Riley was able to marry, well—she’d been happy for him, but jealous too.

  She didn’t feel as bad when she had him to revel in the misery. A foolish sentiment, considering Riley had a lover while Melanie had a cat. But without marriage, it hadn’t been official. And for some reason, that mattered.

  “It doesn’t have to be miserable. We can kill Dennis Morton and his whore. And what about that self-hating wife beater you once called ‘husband.’ Imagine the ways in which we could make him suffer. Let me inside of you and we can do so much more than that.”

  The offer sounded like an invitation to freedom—to a life without confines. What could be better than that? Let everyone envy her for a change. This thing wanted companionship. It promised something that her life had been completely devoid of: satisfaction.

  “That’s right, my dear,” it snarled. “No more being the victim. Can you begin to imagine?”

  Oh, I can…

  Brady popped a can of beer and thrust it forward.

  She took it and glanced at Desiree’s Bed & Breakfast. “Am I supposed to be drinking with the chief of police?”

  “The great thing about being chief,” Brady said with a smirk. “Abuse of power is a-ok, provided it’s used to bend the whims of a beautiful woman.”

  “Ohhhhh,” she laughed, “aren’t you a little forward tonight?”

  “Liquid courage.”

  “So is that all this is,” she asked with more confidence than she’d ever had. “Just a fling? A tawdry one night stand?”

  He threw his beer to the ground and hoisted her onto the hood of his patrol car. “Not even close, Miss Holden.”

  “Not here, Nate! Someone will see us.”

  “Doesn’t that make it more exciting,” he laughed, sliding her shorts down past her thighs and kissing her legs.

  It definitely did.

  It was all a lie, and she knew it. But wasn’t it oh so much more preferable to dying at the bottom of a cave beside the chief of police’s widow?

  It definitely was.

  THE INTRUDER

  I have no name, girl.

  You struggle with this. As if suddenly knowing what I was once called would permit you to understand.

  You can never.

  We’re taking a step forward, you and I, and it is frustrating that I cannot get you to move as I wish. I try to take you one way, and you fight me to go another. This—process would be smoother if you simply rescinded control.

  Of course, I
have no excuse. I used to be much better at this.

  Prowling the corners of your mind proves a fascinating exercise. There is so much pain in you, and your knowledge is extensive—far beyond the last human I occupied, though that was a long time ago, when beliefs were primitive and the world was coliseums and tunics. Unbridled faith, then. Hilarious superstition.

  Yes, the last time I was here, things were different. The world wagered its hard-earned bronze on the outcomes of gladiatorial slaughter. On the bloodiest arena days, when the city stunk of spilt entrails and excrement, I savored carnage that was set to the enthusiastic roars of an entire city. That should have been enough to sate me, right? Thousands of people’s bloodlust reaching hysteric heights, the more brutal the demise, the more satisfied the cheer. But mutually agreed upon slaughter grows surprisingly boring and uneventful.

  For you, I suppose it would be like suffering through—Sunday football. That is the most appropriate comparison that I can find in your head.

  Anyway, if I was to stick around, I needed things to get worse.

  Even then, there were men who refused to fear me. Men for whom it was not enough to interpret the word of their Gods, they had to enforce it as well. They roved the world, battling heretical beliefs wherever they surfaced. At that time, the heretics were a barbarian tribe—pests, really, and more primitive than the primitives. I was delighted to watch the blood spill—both sides dying in equal measure. While those lives were discarded like pawns on a chessboard, I cast my watchful eye on their mourning families—succulent grief that was a welcome ripple effect of the skirmish.

  The sweetest death is innocent collateral. I enjoyed crawling the minds of those wives and children, feasting off their final, most terrified seconds. In troubled times, it is all too easy to blend in among the lost, though my chameleon ways were not enough.

  Despite the enduring war of ideologies, the men, those…believers, sensed my hand in the mayhem and hunted me still. And it was because of one particularly careless evening that they got me.

  It’s what led me here.

  I had been enjoying my time on the inside of a pestilent beggar. His body was sick and rotted from so many diseases that he should have been dead several times over. He would have gone silently from the world had I not slipped behind his eyes one evening. I have seen lots, but the hardships suffered by this creature were—delightful. Can you begin to imagine a life where you knew not a single instance of kindness? You have suffered some, girl, but nothing compared to this rotted mongrel.

  I caressed his mind, and came to realize this man could not grasp the concept of happiness. No opportunity, no friendship and certainly not love.

  His thoughts were corrosive even before I arrived. He fantasized about raping the women who happened past. He hardened at thoughts of killing their men and taking what he wanted. He had never known a female’s embrace and that withdrawal grew to muted aggression. It occupied every thought. His desolation was so severe that he could not recall his own name. Understand then, that all he needed was a simple nudge.

  We followed a shop owner, a plebian girl, one evening. I was along for the ride, yes, an intruder in my vessel’s thoughts. But, unlike you, he was determined to do all the work. He only needed a little assurance, which is what I offered.

  Only we were not going to get away with it.

  My vessel was fucking and murdering the shop girl when the believers caught up. She rattled around on the floor in a death spasm, and you would have thought that it would have been enough to slow the leper down. But his thoughts…the perversion…he found it all so very exciting. It made him want to thrust his diseased sex into her harder, while hacking her head from her neck with a jagged stone blade.

  Every atrocity this man had suffered in his life was channeled into this act of bloody depravity. And he would have just been getting started if not for the interruption.

  They jammed a spear through his back. A blade blessed with the words and water of their holiest man. His flesh wilted in the most painful allergic reaction you can imagine.

  Before I could understand the severity of this, robed men descended, hacking with daggers, broadswords and spears. Each blade was embossed with more than just purified water. The incantation was sworn into every piece of hungry metal.

  They knew whom they’d been seeking.

  The violence did not harm me, but my vessel was as good as dead from a thousand injuries. In his fleeting seconds, he wondered why he had ever believed in my whispers, but perhaps I should not tell you that.

  The sanctified weapons had a different effect on me. I cannot find the right word in your modern tongue, although I suppose ‘tranquilizer’ works well enough. The blades had a tranquilizing effect, forcing me into manifest submission. All I could do was dwell in the thoughts of the dying—a man who held no remorse for his actions. As his body failed, he admitted to me that he wanted more. Begged me for it.

  If my own situation had not been so—uncertain, I might have been touched.

  The weapons seared me to that body while sprays of holy water repressed my abilities.

  You theorize that it has been two thousand years since those days. Can that be true? It explains why I can barely get you to put a foot forward. Let’s try that again, by the way. One foot, and then the other. Very good. Don’t fight me, girl. I only want to get you out of here.

  To help you take revenge.

  This helplessness you feel, I felt it then. When the believers wrapped the leper head-to-toe in a linen shroud that was damp with the Holy One’s words. It burned so much, even for a non-corporeal, such as myself. But I never felt as defeated as when the Holy One knelt beside me and pressed an opened palm to the leper’s head.

  When I heard his words, harsh and jagged on his tongue, I knew that I had lost.

  It was a dialect not of that time or place, and he navigated it with familiarity. As soon as he was finished, that diseased pile of flesh became my prison.

  They took me then on a tiresome journey by sea. All I could do was settle into the vessel’s bones, and pour through his depressing memories, one-by-one.

  It was sustenance enough, but just barely.

  Months passed before the body was completely rotted. Rats and bugs tried feasting on the gray and purple flesh, but the believers always shooed them off. Had they known that they were relieving me of such an unpleasant sensation, they surely would have left the creatures to their devices.

  Horses dragged me across rugged terrain for several weeks, and my powers waned with each mile. The believers knew what they were doing, and once the caravan ceased, incessant digging filled my ears. When they were not burrowing, they prayed over me—their effort to smite me with love, I suppose.

  Yes, they called me “demon” in the language of the day, but only because they felt compelled to define me. I will tell you that I do no care for that word, and it does not describe me.

  I already said there is no way to do that.

  They tied rope around what remained of the leper’s body, lowering us into the earthen tunnel. I assumed that would be the end of it, but there were men down there with us—entombing us so that the world would never hear from me again.

  Over time, I was able to reclaim traces of my influence and ability—even if the bones served as my prison bars. The problem was that in the deepest, darkest pit on earth, I was powerless to do anything other than simply exist.

  Yes, it was Tullus Abblon who stumbled across my grave. As misguided as he was, the fool believed he could circumvent the end times through acts of kindness and civility. He was weak-willed, however, and I was able to twist his thoughts into something else.

  He heard my whispers. There was never any doubt that it was his vengeful God speaking, and he convinced his followers to commit atrocities in ‘my’ name. Just like the leper, every killing increased their hatred and madness, and the more they loved it.

  Would you believe that I could not use this sway to influence my freedom? So clos
e to it after all this time, only to be foiled by misplaced loyalty.

  I promised them rewards, but their refusal was swift. Abblon’s Priestess might have been smarter, for at least she recognized me for what I was. That is to say, she knew enough to consider me a demon, even though she enjoyed me in her thoughts.

  What happened next made me temporarily forget about my terrible fortune. My senses were aroused by a violent onslaught. Modern day weaponry is capable of such devastation, and it produced chaos so rich that I devoured every bit of it.

  Once it was over, the victors stacked the corpses of Abblon and his followers down here. Explosives entombed me once more, although vibrations shook the very stones used to detain me, and my prison’s most brittle bones ground to dust beneath the weight of sliding rocks.

  I was free. Or I should have been…if not for the cross suspended directly overhead.

  The Christian symbol somehow supplemented the binding incantation—a stroke of unfortunate luck that left me with no choice but to be amused. Freedom was in the air, and I was perpetually tormented by an obstruction.

  I put my faith in a young survivor. A boy who did not take part in the battle. Who instead wandered the caverns, fantasizing about his earlier murder of a stray dog. A child whose mind was so scrambled and detached that I could not influence it—no matter how hard I tried.

  If I were paranoid, I would have wondered if this was not yet another extension of the Holy One’s incantation. The cruelest part, perhaps.

  But the boy, wow you are very curious about him, was black-hearted. He was fixated on the slaughter of innocents. Nothing provoked or created it. His Obviate brothers showed him how liberating it could be to murder the unsuspecting, but the desire was always there.

  The kid used every ounce of energy to clear a path out of his would-be tomb. Then he went after any one he could get his hands on, motivated by a fear that the same brutal fate of his family would befall him too, should anyone else trespass on his property. The child honed his skills gradually for over a decade and always returned here for shelter. Eventually, he forged multiple entrances and made this place his home. During that time, I might have filled his ears with whispers that encouraged more violence. I do not think it had any effect, but how could I not try?