by Hixon, Wayne
The townsfolk retreated out of the house, convincing themselves that the Devil, the evil man in the vacant house, had taken control of their souls. Gathering around the house that night, not caring if Ilya and Ernst were inside sleeping, they burned it to the ground and cursed the ashes it became.
As it turned out, Ilya and Ernst were in the house. Yet, somehow, they had changed. They were dead but not dead. And they had powers they did not have before. They had powers they thought the Devil had revealed to them only as some kind of hoax. But now they knew all of that to be real. And they realized this was part of their journey beyond the Dark Fire. The Devil had told them certain things, mostly what they were telling Jacob now, and they knew these gods must be inside of them, empowering them and giving them the ability to empower others, or remove that power when it was necessary.
That was a violent year in Lynchville. There would always be disappearances, but never as many as in that year when, by next summer, there were only seven members left in the community.
And now, Ilya and Ernst felt as though they had served the gods well. They thought maybe it was time for the gods to move onto someone else and for themselves to move into the awesomely powerful land beyond the Dark Fire.
Maybe that was it, Jacob thought, even though he was not really capable of rational thought at this point. Or maybe it was all lies. He didn’t care. He was as good as dead, he knew. Once a large stone had been smashed onto his pelvis to shatter it in half, he stopped feeling the pain. He could only see out of one eye and the only thing he wanted to do was close it and slip away but he knew he would not be able to do that.
Thirty-nine
Rachel opened her eyes and couldn’t believe what she saw.
The house was back. She was certain she had seen the house burn down until it was little more than a pile of rubble but there it was in front of her and she had a terrifying thought that it looked better, stronger than it had before.
Her heart jumped when she realized she shouldn’t have been looking at all. She had fallen asleep behind the wheel of Jacob’s car. Why was she out here, on the grass, looking at the house? Why wasn’t she in there, trying to help him?
In a rapid flood, the present exploded through her. She was being dragged toward the house. Someone’s hands were around her ankles. She was very confused.
“Jacob?” she said.
“I ain’t Jacob,” a voice, frighteningly familiar, called back to her.
She saw broad shoulders under the moonlight. With every bit of energy she had left, she tightened her leg muscles and clawed her fingers into the ground, trying to bring the descent down the hill to a halt. She knew who it was dragging her. It was Bones. In Rachel’s world, she figured people only really got one chance to kill her and then it was time for her to fight back.
She remembered her tools, the can of tire sealant and the lighter that were, hopefully, still up by the car. Now it was just a matter of reaching them.
She plunged her legs to the ground, trying to turn over onto her stomach so she could stand up and bolt.
Bones did let go of her ankles, but only for a second. She scampered momentarily along the grass, trying to stand up, before he hurled his crushing weight down on her.
“No you don’t, bitch,” he whispered harshly in her ear.
“Fucking watch me,” she said, driving a sharp elbow back into his ribs.
He grunted with the blow, retaliating by taking a fisted swipe at the back of her head. It felt like a rock shattered her skull, knocking her forehead into the mercifully soft ground. She was too focused to let the pain stop her. The only thing she wanted to do was get to the car. Once she got to the car, once she reached what she needed to reach, she would worry about finishing this guy off for good.
He seemed surprised when she brought her head back up and began her scrabble anew. She knew if she could just manage to break away from him, she could manage to get to the car.
Bones grabbed the back of her shorts, dragging her up. She let him do this and when she felt her feet leave the ground, she brought her foot back, ramming it up between his legs.
“Fuck!” he shouted, still holding onto her. “You can’t hurt me!”
Maybe he was right, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t try. She just didn’t know how she was going to do it.
She surprised him by planting her feet on the ground and running toward the house. He had his weight leaning the opposite direction and this toppled him over. She took a couple of steps, just enough to allow her to turn around and go charging up toward the car. He was right behind her. He seemed bigger than she remembered.
She charged up the hill as fast as she could.
Within feet of the car, Bones caught up with her. She made one more desperate lunge for the car. Bones simultaneously reached his hands out for her, unable to get a grip, and this only served to propel her into the car.
The door was still open. She cracked her head on the roof of the car and collapsed on the soft cushion of the driver’s seat. Blood began a rapid rivulet down her forehead but she saw the can in the floorboard and grabbed for it. Bones had her by the left ankle, yanking her out of the car. On the way out, she saw the lighter lying in that no-man’s-land between the seat and the door. She flicked her hand out and grabbed it.
Once outside the car, she flopped to her right and banged her shoulder on the inside of the door.
She wasted no time. She knew Bones would be leering over her any moment now. She tried to hide the spray can as much as possible in her right hand. She let him get right down over top of her, until she could feel his hot breath and smell its death stink.
Quickly, she held the can just inches away from his face, flicked the lighter, hoping like hell it ignited on the first try, and depressed the tab on the tire sealant. A thick blue-orange flame shot out, spewing into Bones’ face. His hair caught fire instantly and Rachel thought she saw a look of genuine surprise on his face.
This stuff was like napalm. Drops of it dripped, burning, onto her lower stomach where it felt like it melted into her skin.
He leapt off her.
He backed up a couple of steps and she followed, igniting another flame, showering his body with the burning fluid.
Bones screamed as his clothes burst into flames.
Finally able to think for just a second, Rachel found herself entranced as Bones burned. Something wasn’t right. She had learned to never ignore intuition. Something told her that Bones was already dead. There was just too much of a difference between this Bones and the one who had kidnapped her. It was impossible, she knew, for a boy to bulk up this much overnight. And then it hit her. He was dead, of course. He was one of them now. Which meant that when his body burned, his soul would be free to go wherever it wanted to go and why would it want to go anywhere when there was a perfectly good girl standing there in front of it? A girl who could easily get into that house and go places Bones had only dreamed about going.
Rachel sprayed him once more with the fluid. He moved toward her this time, rather than backing away, like he wanted to hug her with this fire that consumed him.
Rachel sidestepped until she was behind him. The burning was at least confusing him, distracting him. She thought he was burning entirely too fast and then... and then he would be loose. The thought of him inside of her, spiritually or physically, made her want to vomit.
What was the thought she had earlier? she wondered. Something about healing them to death. She almost laughed at herself. There wasn’t any healing for something as far gone as Bones and she didn’t really think she wanted to heal him anyway.
So she thought about her power, about how she had made the blood move back into Jacob’s body, his skin solder back together, and then she thought about this power in reverse. Surely those who can heal can destroy just as adequately. It was just that, usually, the power to destroy was not in her. It was not something she let herself think about an awful lot.
But now she did. She focused on
it. Feeling that screaming blue magical power roll through her.
She wanted to destroy Bones. And not just his body that burned before her very eyes, now nothing more than a dancing black skeleton. No, she wanted his soul. She wanted to destroy it and make sure it could never escape.
In her mind, knowing that was where Bones would end up going, she created a kind of horrorshow. A kind of hell, waiting for his arrival.
His bones crumbled and she felt him come screaming into her. She turned back toward the house with a smirk, casually brushing the blood from her forehead as though it were so many stray hairs.
Forty
The soul must consume itself. That was the realization Bones came to that night. Whether it is through dreams or nightmares, the soul must consume itself. There is not a third party who can extinguish that vital essence of life. That night, Bones’ soul did just that. He saw things he never wanted to see. And he realized his soul had no place else to go.
He entered the girl thinking he had beaten her. Wouldn’t it have been something, for her to have burned him up, thinking she had won some small victory, only to realize he was in her head, destroying her from the inside? But as soon as he entered her he knew something was wrong. There was blackness. And a door stood in front of him.
On closer inspection, it looked like the door was made of hundreds of bird skulls. There was an intense odor coming from the door. It was worse than death. It was the stink of his soul rotting. He knew that without consciously grasping it. It was an all-pervasive stink and seemed to induce a physical reaction in him only there was no longer a physical part of him to act. He opened the door because there was not any place else to go.
The door opened into a room filled with murky light. The stink, if that was possible, was even greater in the room. Once across the threshold, the door slammed behind him. He saw things he never wanted to see. Beneath his feet, maggots squirmed across the floor. The whole floor was white-gray with them and he could feel them squirming up his legs, getting thickly caught in his leg hair. He wanted to retch but he couldn’t. It was like all the nausea just got caught in the back of his throat.
The room didn’t make any sense. There were tables nailed to the ceiling and chairs nailed to the wall. There were bones strewn across the floor, maggots squirming over them. Thin spiderwebs brushed his face, something that had always caused chills to shoot over his spine and panic to scream through his veins. He tried to brush them away but his arms wouldn’t work. Fat spiders with skinny legs danced down his back.
In the center of the room he saw his father raping Rain, holding the severed head of his mother in his right hand.
He knew this was not happening but he also knew it was happening because there was not any going back. He tried to turn his eyes away from the atrocities in front of him but every time he turned his head it kept whirling back to the same disgusting image.
The walls around him were black and glistening, breathing and oozing. Bulging. A hundred different shapes stretched out of them, rending the wall outward until it popped like a bubble of tar and Bones recognized the decayed corpses that emerged from it.
They were his victims. All come to join him in this final dance of insanity.
Bones’ soul could have lived. He knew that. If he was willing to spend eternity in this room, he could have stayed until that horrible girl died.
But he didn’t want that. He couldn’t want that. And even though there was something inside of him saying this was it, this was his price for wanting to live in an eternal state of life, he chose to close the eye of his soul, blacking everything around him.
And that was the end of Bones—soul and all.
Forty-one
His vision stained red, Jacob wondered how it was still possible he was conscious. There was not a single part of him that had not been somehow broken or mutilated.
“Now I think it’s time we destroy his brain,” Ernst said.
Jacob thought he would be beyond horror but he cringed at this thought. He didn’t know how they intended to do it. Would they stick something in his ear? Would they open up his skull and remove just enough gray matter to be brain damaging?
“The Dark Fire,” he heard Ilya mutter.
“Yes. The Dark Fire. We’ll take him in there and once he sees it he will not be able to think about anything else. Like a junky always going through withdrawal.”
Ilya reached down and put her hand upon the stone belt holding Jacob fastened to the altar. It vanished beneath her touch and Ilya and Ernst were on either side of him, carrying him through yet another door.
“Zack will be here shortly,” Ernst said. “And then it will be over.”
Once through the door, Jacob heard a deep rumbling and knew this was the same fire he had seen in the video or whatever he had been shown last night. Then he remembered that the fire was never actually seen. It was implied. He hadn’t actually laid eyes on it. Last night seemed so very far away. He could barely hold his eyes open but the fire was impossible to miss.
They dragged him across the stone floor and let him collapse in front of the fire.
“We’re not finished with you,” Ernst said, running a long fingernail beneath his chin. “We’ll be back later. Or someone will be back later. We have better things to do than deal with weak little meddlers like you.”
Jacob heard their footsteps retreat into the distance. He lay there on the floor, staring into the fire. It didn’t take him long to realize this wasn’t an ordinary fire. There were things behind the flames. There was a whole other world behind the flames and, suddenly, things made a lot of sense to Jacob. In a way, it was like Ilya and Ernst weren’t even responsible for all of this. It was whatever lay beyond the fire that had soiled them. It was that place or that person beyond the flame they longed for.
Jacob wanted to laugh. This was the reason for all the disappearances. This was the reason for all the legends and all the terror. In a way, it was like an entire religion spread before him. It was a religion that both intrigued and terrified him.
He felt the Dark Fire, or whatever lay beyond the Dark Fire, working on his brain.
There was a green depth beyond the flame, lush grasses and thick trees, a perfect blue sky, people too beautiful to imagine and he had the distinct feeling that if he were to cross over he could have any of those people he wanted, or all of them. But he didn’t want them. He didn’t want the Dark Fire, he didn’t want Heaven or Hell. The only thing he wanted was Rachel.
He could not die like this. He could not become what the man and the woman had set out to make him become.
Yet, he had no choice but to lie there. There wasn’t any way possible he could move and that was the most disturbing thing he had encountered, coming this far only to be rendered utterly powerless. Somehow, he managed to draw a little closer to the fire. He didn’t know how he did it. His bones were gone, shattered and broken. It felt like he did it by wriggling his skin and moving like a snake. There were people behind the flame. Surely, someone could help him. Surely there had to be something.
Within a foot of the fire, Jacob stopped, knowing it would not burn him if he continued. But it would kill him and, by killing him, it would make him its servant.
He looked up into the towering wall of flame. A multitude of people looked back at him, their faces sallow and forlorn. They all looked relatively young. Jacob made eye contact with a frail looking boy toward the front.
Their eyes locked and energy shot through Jacob.
Completely unlike looking into the empty eyes of the man, Jacob saw everything within this boy. He saw how he had been lying in his bed, afraid of everything, when Ernst had entered and dragged him away.
He let his eyes trail to other members of the pack. Jacob saw more of the same. And behind every set of eyes, Jacob could sense something else.
Anger.
Raw and hurting, intense as everything he had ever felt. Their stares could not put Jacob back together again but, maybe, he would
be able to reach out in some way toward them. He strained his mind to think as clearly as possible.
Forty-two
Autumn screamed hysterically as Zack and Charlotte dragged her through the door. Ilya and Ernst sat on that strange blue couch, staring toward them. The sight of them sent fresh waves of panic though Autumn. Ernst stood up and came toward them. Autumn quivered at the sight of him. He did not look like the type of person who had ever had wholesome intentions. She was surprised when he reached out to touch Charlotte instead.
“You brought her,” he said, running a finger down her cheek. “Are you ready to begin?”
“Yes,” Zack said.
“The other one is on her way.”
“The other one?” Zack asked.
“Yes. You didn’t think you got to choose who you crossed over with, did you?”
Zack looked down at the floor.
“First we need to gather our strength.” He turned to Autumn. “Two for the price of one.”
“Yes,” Zack said once again.
“What?” Charlotte said. “What’s going on, Zack?”
Close to Ernst, Autumn saw he was covered in blood, it glistened on the surface of his black garb, ran in streaks down his cheeks.
She wouldn’t have time to think anything else.
He reached out one large hand and slashed her jugular with his sharp fingernails. Blood shot out of her neck, covering him. Zack and Charlotte let her fall to the floor. Ernst was on top of her, sucking hungrily at her neck. Ilya sauntered across the floor, kneeling down and following suit. Charlotte and Zack stood watching them as they drained Autumn, the color leaving her face, the life leaving her body, absorbed into Ilya and Ernst.