by John Everson
Never give up, he screamed in his head, but his feet and calves screamed something else.
They screamed agony.
Mark cried and yelled and felt his skin blister and crack as the pain shot up his heel and toes. The fire was unbearable and yet, if he slowed or stopped, his entire body would be engulfed…face, arms, privates… Mark stayed on his feet three more hideous steps and then the pain was too much. He put his left foot down and it collapsed beneath his weight. But that just made the agony worse.
His knee fell to the fire and Mark put out his hands to stop himself. That’s when the pain really started.
“Oh God,” he cried as the skin of his hands seared and burned, and the hair on his legs curled and smoked, and the fire began to eat him.
He screamed so loud he felt something crack in the depths of his throat.
The wave of heat turned his vision to flame. But Mark refused to die. With some hidden vestige of strength he used the pain to throw himself upright again, and, screaming at the top of his lungs, planted his foot hard on the coals once more, and then again…
The stone path on the other side of the bed of coals felt almost cold as Mark threw himself upon it, shaking and quivering with burning pain. He screamed and cried, and rolled across the stone, every movement opening a deeper pain in his body. He could feel his flesh still bubbling, suppurating, dissolving from the heat he had just forced it to endure.
“Oh God,” Mark cried, as every part of him screamed in agony.
Something shifted behind him, rock grinding against rock. Mark struggled to turn, to look back. He could see Gordon standing on the other side of the fire, watching. And he could see the path that he now lay upon. The path behind him was disappearing. Brick by brick, the perimeter that bordered the fire was letting go, slipping into the pit of coals. He had escaped the fire, but it was not letting him go that easily.
The fire was moving towards him, brick by lost brick.
Mark struggled to move forward, but every movement was fresh agony. His entire body was burned, and his feet and hands and knees still felt as white-hot as when they were on the fire. The pain was hideous and he lay down for a moment, just letting the agony take him. But then the rocks beneath his feet dropped away, and the heat of the coals blossomed up to embrace his feet and ankles.
The pain was hideous and immediate. His feet were in an oven.
Another row of bricks disappeared, and the heat embraced his calves.
Mark slapped his blistered hands to the rock and pushed his body forward, crying the whole time. His breath came in fast, horrible gasps but he forced himself to keep moving. Dull grinding crashes continued behind him, and he knew that the coals were gaining ground. His only hope was to reach the stairs ahead and to pull himself up and out of this hell. He crawled forward, inch by inch, gradually increasing his speed until he was at the wall. The rocks continued to give out; the fire pit was now just a couple yards away from the wall.
Mark looked up at the stairs and saw that they did not actually continue down to the ground. The last step was a good ten feet above the stone floor.
“No way,” he cried. “Not fair.” Tears coursed from his swollen eyes as Mark looked at the only salvation he could see, well out of reach of his hands. “Not fair!”
And then he saw the tunnel near where the base of the steps should have been. A black hole in the wall that kept him close to the fire. Apparently he was supposed to crawl through that.
Mark crawled painfully over to it and looked inside. Behind him, the grinding smash of rock slipping against rock and then falling away continued. The heat on his back grew. And now he could feel it more acutely than ever.
He crawled into the narrow tube, and something poked his arm. He looked down and saw a steel blade, just a half-inch long, protruding from the stone.
“Great,” he thought and pressed on, but then his knee spiked with more than just the pain of burned skin. Then his palm did too.
He stared at the path ahead and saw that it was littered with silvery bits of pain, all protruding from the floor and walls of the passageway. He couldn’t go forward without getting sliced to ribbons.
Another crash of rock. Mark looked behind and saw that the orange bed of coals now extended right up to the entrance of this passage.
Can’t go forward, and now can’t go back.
Mark lay his head down on the stone for a moment and cried. This was not what was supposed to happen. He was supposed to visit the crazy sex club, remind his wife that she was his wife, and go home. They would have some long conversations and again find the thing that had made them get together in the first place. Bad episode in their marriage over.
This was not supposed to have been a trip through hell. A flash of the priest at their wedding crossed his mind and a memory of himself saying, “For better or for worse…”
“I did not sign on for this,” Mark grimaced and then pushed forward. “This is beyond worse.”
There was no help for it, love hurt.
He looked at the blades jutting out from all surfaces of the walls and floor of this ever-narrowing tunnel. There was a faint light ahead, and behind him, the rocks continued to fall away into the fire.
Love hurt real bad.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
A Shade of Being
After Kharon left her, Rae lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She’d never really looked at it before, but now that she did…she saw that it wasn’t just a flat black ceiling. The room had appeared to be painted black to her when she’d first come here, but now…she realized that there was more there.
She had felt from her first time in the room that someone was watching her. Now she knew why. Someone was. Many someones.
The ceiling was covered in pictures of faces. They were incredibly faint. Ghosts. At a glance the ceiling was dark as the night sky but the longer she stared at it, the more the faces became recognizable. Old men and women, children, girls in their twenties and middle-aged men. All of them appeared pensive. Or angry. None of them smiled.
And all of them seemed to be looking right at her.
Rae’s bladder turned cold. Who would put something like that on a ceiling? How could you go to sleep knowing that the ceiling was watching you? She couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it the night before.
She rolled off the bed, not taking her eyes off the faces. But as she did…the eyes followed her. The movement was faint, but it was there.
No way, she told herself. You’re imagining it. Rae walked to the bathroom and watched as all the faces on the ceiling shifted a bit, and the eyes remained trained on her. Wide, unblinking eyes that moved as she moved.
Her fear was realized. The faces were not paintings at all.
They were alive.
Or more likely, they were dead.
“I can’t stay in this room,” she said. Rae pulled a black robe from the closet and quickly tied the sash.
She stepped out of the room and into the hall.
There was nothing there.
Rae could not see anything in front, above or to the sides of her. No light, no walls, no ceiling. She stood in utter blackness, with only the faintest light from the doorway behind her making it possible to see herself.
“Holy shit,” she breathed. Where was everything? She stepped away from the door, holding a hand out in front of her to find the wall she knew had to be there just a few feet away. She stepped carefully, incredibly slowly.
Inches grew to feet and then to yards. She knew that she should have reached the other side of the hallway by now. She looked over her shoulder, and the outline of the door to her room was already beginning to look small. Far away.
“Kharon?!” she called out. Her voice seemed to disappear in the void. No echo. She hardly could hear it herself. The air in this black no-place chilled her skin; she could feel the goose bumps rising all across her thighs and arms. It slipped up the gaps in her robe to the bare skin beneath. The temperature seemed co
lder somehow than it had just minutes ago when she’d stepped out from her room.
Rae called again and again. And still her voice sounded tiny and faint in the endless black. There was no answer.
The idea that she could become lost here, separated forever from the comfort (if creepiness) of her room, occurred to her, and that made the cold feel even worse. Rae began to retrace her steps. She’d rather be stared at by ghosts than stand out here blind. Lost in nowhere.
Her heart beat faster and she quickened her steps towards the door. What if her doorway disappeared into the black just before she reached it?
What if she never saw anyone or anything again? What if the last light snapped shut and she was trapped here in the total black, with nothing in every direction?
Rae reached out to grab the doorframe as soon as she was close enough. She imagined that it would disappear just as her fingers touched it.
Instead, they slapped against the hard surface and she clutched the doorframe for dear life, at the same time forcing herself to breathe slower. She had begun to hyperventilate.
“Why are you out here?” a voice asked.
Rae jumped. She turned to see the faint outline of a man a few feet away. His eyes seemed to glow in the faint light that escaped her room.
“Kharon,” Rae said. Her voice was filled with relief. “I was looking for you; I was afraid…”
“It’s daytime outside,” he said. “When the sun comes up, the carpets of NightWhere all roll up too. This place only exists at night.”
He took her by the arm and pushed her ahead of him, back into her small apartment. “You’re one of us now,” he said. “You need to sleep now, so that you’re ready for the night. You need to heal all of your hurts and be new again for the dark to flay.”
“My head is killing me,” Rae admitted. “And I’m not sure a few hours’ sleep are going to totally cure it. If I could sleep at all.”
Kharon shook his head. “You’ll wake renewed. We all do. It’s what NightWhere does.”
He led her into the bedroom and untied the sash of her robe. But Rae held his hand from releasing it.
“Wait,” she begged. Then she pointed at the ceiling. “What about them? I can’t sleep with them staring.”
Kharon looked at the faces that were faintly visible across the black of the ceiling. They all clearly were staring at Rae.
“They’re harmless,” Kharon said. “They’re from the Field of Flesh. The faces of those who have gone before.”
“Where did they come from?” Rae asked. “I woke up and they were there…they creeped me out.”
He smiled. “They’ve always been here, you just couldn’t see them before. Now that you’re sleeping in NightWhere, and you’ve been blooded…you’re becoming one of us. Your eyes are opening. You’ll see more and more in the coming days. Your inner eyes are awakening. They won’t hurt you. They’re voyeurs. They only live to see. And there’s just one thing they want to see.”
He pulled her hand from his and drew the robe down past her shoulders, exposing her skin.
“Lie down on your back,” he commanded.
Rae licked her lips. The idea of lying naked below a sea of ghostly faces…
“Lie down,” he said again. His voice left no room for argument.
Rae did as he commanded.
“Pinch the nipples of your breasts,” he said.
She complied, hesitantly. But the thrill that shot through her chest and down her spine quickly alleviated her nervousness. She had never been shy, in fact she got off on being watched. She just wasn’t comfortable with ghosts as her voyeurs.
But the voyeurs clearly were pleased. Their faces all turned to focus on her, beneath them on the bed, and scowls turned to anxious smiles.
“Now show them what they want to see. What they want to do.”
Kharon took one of her arms and guided it towards her thighs. With whitened fingers, he pulled her legs apart, exposing her labia to the crowd above.
Rae slipped one finger inside herself and began to masturbate for the faces of the Field. Heads nodded and eyes brightened.
She had always loved being watched. As she saw the excitement grow in her audience, she began to writhe and moan on the bed for them. She loved being a performer. The faces above answered her with open mouths. From somewhere she began to hear the faint sounds of sexual moans and cries. The fear she’d had at the start faded as Rae realized what they wanted.
They wanted what she yearned to give. She bucked beneath them, wishing in her heart that they could manifest and join her.
Her wish only made the faces above grow more solid and the groans of ecstasy louder. The room was soon glowing with ghostly desire.
Kharon smiled as he watched her work her hips faster. He began to back away from the bed. He nodded to himself. He’d been right about Rae from the start. She was his best student in years.
“Sleep soon,” he whispered, as he stepped out of the bedroom, leaving Rae to perform for the ghosts of those who were rooted here, never able to leave The Red behind. They would gladly spend an eternity, watching.
Chapter Forty
Afterburn
Mark picked his way through the tunnel, struggling to put his hands and knees down on ground that didn’t hold razor edges. The more he focused on keeping his hands safe, the more his back and shoulders and thighs ended up getting nicked and bit by the blades that also pierced the walls and ceiling.
He knew now that he was going to make it. He could see the opening of the tunnel just a few feet away.
Mark wanted to sprint there, but he held himself back, carefully picking his way past the knives that jutted out of the stone on all sides of him. And finally, he arrived-bloody, shaking-at the exit.
He hesitated before putting his hand over the threshold.
Was there some last trap, some guillotine blade that would swing down to punish the foolhardy who leapt over the gap?
Mark felt his body tremble. He couldn’t remain on his hands and knees for much longer. Willpower alone had kept him from collapsing before now. But willpower was running out.
He took a deep breath and extended his hand through the opening, gritting his teeth as he anticipated…something.
Nothing happened.
“Fuck it,” he whispered. “If it kills me, I’ll be better off.” Mark pushed himself out of the tunnel and onto the flat, cool grey stone of an open, empty room.
Nothing happened.
He lay his entire body down on the cold stone and cried. Actually, he did more screaming and swearing than actual crying. His body was an open nerve. His legs and arms sent nonstop, white-hot pain to his brain. The skin felt as if someone held a flame to it, without pause. It hurt like hell to move and hurt even worse to just lie there and feel the throbbing, blistering complaints of his dying flesh. Add to that the flaying he’d received on the way to the fire pit, and the dozens of nicks and deeper cuts that covered his back and legs and arms where the tunnel’s obstacle course of blades had beat him, and there wasn’t any place on his body that didn’t scream from abuse.
He had made it through the tunnel of blades before the fire caught up with him, but now, he wasn’t sure how long he would actually survive to enjoy the victory. Mark couldn’t move. His eyes were swollen nearly shut, and his hands were thick with blood. The cuts were not closing, and he had nothing to wrap them in. If he could even move enough to bandage himself.
In his mind, Mark pictured Rae as she’d been when they’d first met. A pretty, quick-witted, funny girl. She’d seemed a little shy that first date, when they’d gone to see a bad Nicholas Cage movie and he’d kissed her afterwards in the car outside of her apartment. Her lips had been warm and full against his, and he’d breathed in her breath like the sweetest fragrance. The memory of that first kiss, of the more tentative girl she’d once been…that was the Rae that he still loved with all of his heart. That was the Rae that he knew still existed, somewhere beneath the scarred skin of her
back and the demanding sexual creature who simply could never get enough anymore. Of anything.
She’d been descending in a spiral of degradation for years now, but NightWhere had found whatever that last barrier was in her soul…and had stripped it away completely. Mark juxtaposed the image of first-date Rae with the pain slut he’d watched the past few times at the club, and prayed that after all this, there was still something left of the Rae he’d fallen in love with to bring home.
“Having second thoughts,” a high-pitched voice taunted. “Maybe in the end, she really wasn’t ‘all that’?”
Damia.
Mark struggled to lift his head. He blinked one eye open in a swollen squint. The hermaphrodite stood just a couple feet away, hands on hips. Behind Damia, he saw a row of black-robed feet. Kharon stepped to the front. “You’ve passed two of your three trials,” he said. “But the next may be the hardest of all.”
“I can’t move,” Mark hissed.
Damia and Kharon reached down and grabbed Mark beneath his armpits, dragging him upright. He let out a horrible scream as the balls of his feet touched the stone and tried to accept some of his weight. The blisters that ballooned from the skin that wasn’t completely charred black burst and wet the floor around his heels.
They walk-dragged him down a long stone hallway with walls that glistened red in the dim hellish light. Then Damia took him completely into her arms and held him against a stone wall as a shower of water cascaded from somewhere overhead. Where it touched his skin, Mark felt a strange mix of both ice and fire, but his screams of anguish diminished to coughs and moans…his vocal chords were shot. He didn’t even try to open his eyes anymore, he simply hung against Damia’s breasts and let the water wash the blood away.
A few minutes later, he was lying in a bed, shaking so hard his teeth rattled. Mark struggled to open his eyes, but they seemed locked together. The pain screamed inside him, but he couldn’t let it out…he was locked inside himself with the waves of agony.