The dragon’s body opened like an overripe fruit. It swayed, uttered something obscene from its bowels and fell onto the deadsmith with a heavy splash. Ben’s vision shook violently for a moment, then all was still.
He ran. He ran, every detail of the terrible dragon burned into his mind, and remembered the rhyme sang around the bonfires of his village:
All the Kingdoms Forged in Flesh
A seat above the Lord.
O’er Heaven angels’ horns did sound
But ‘twas the Devil who cut them down
And cursed them by his sword.
For lay the serpent in the west
To plot against the dawn.
O’er Heaven reached the arms of men
But blind were they to doors opened
Below – dragons, dragons,
Thus shielded from the sun!
So was told the fall of Man and the rise of the plague.
Ben’s parents and their parents had not known a world without plague. Perhaps there had never been such a thing. Ben studied the ruins as he climbed through their craters and tunnels. Occasionally he paused to listen for the deadsmith’s pattering feet; there was only silence at his back. Encroaching shadows behind fallen stones proved to be not the long necks and curled claws of dragons but only dead trees.
A tower at the city’s center was remarkably intact. Ben pushed aside the debris barricading the doors and entered.
A pile of soiled rags rose in the doorway with a shrill cry. Ben threw his arms out, only to have them caught by the flailing thing. A hood fell back to reveal a face that was vaguely human: infected! Ben’s mind screamed. It wasn’t until it croaked words that he stopped struggling. “Child! Child, you’re safe here!”
Releasing Ben, the man reinforced the doors. He spoke rapidly as if his words had been bottled up inside him a lifetime. “They don’t come here. The dragons. This place is still holy.” He was as short as Ben, though thinner, and his hands danced in the shadows. He pointed to a word stitched onto his torn robe: Abbot. “I have no food, but I have water. You look exhausted. I have beds.” I, I, I…it occurred to Ben that the abbot was alone here, and maybe hadn’t spoken to anyone in what indeed seemed a lifetime.
The sun cut through grime-streaked windows to light a stairwell beyond the doorway. The abbot supported Ben as they climbed. “Abbot?” Ben said quickly. “I must tell you something.” Stopping on a landing, he held out his wounded thumb.
The abbot’s eyes lit up – not from terror or revulsion, but wonder. Ben was reminded of the way he himself had stared at the dragon. “Child,” spoke the abbot, clasping the bloodied hand in his own, “I minister to the sick. You are welcome here.” He pushed open a heavy door. “What is the beast’s venom but the last step toward humility and salvation? The body suffers, and dies, and rises again – but not the spirit. You must free yourself from this notion of being bound to your flesh. Surely such thinking brought this plague upon us.” Though Ben found his words difficult to understand, the man spoke with an air of authority.
Down a hall lined with empty rooms, the abbot led Ben to a washbasin. The water stung, but it was cold, ice cold unlike anything he had ever felt. He finally relaxed his aching limbs and loosened his tongue. “Abbot, are they angels?” The man frowned at this. Ben pointed to the emblem stitched on the abbot’s robe, two serpents intertwined around a staff. “Did the Lord send them, as a judgement?”
The abbot fingered the emblem anxiously. “Did He send them? He made the makers of all things. Are they angels? No, but…” He seemed to be puzzling over the question. “We aren’t meant to know all of the Lord’s mysteries while in this flesh.” That satisfied the abbot.
The door to the stairwell clanged loudly. The deadsmith dragged his bloody club into the hall.
Ben stood behind the abbot. “He wants to kill me,” he breathed.
“Sir,” shouted the abbot, “this is a holy place.” One step closer. “No harm shall come to the child here.” One step closer. The club knocked against stone. “His life is God’s to- -”
The deadsmith, without a word, swung.
Still sputtering platitudes, the abbot’s head fell at his own feet.
Ben ran down the hall with no idea of what lay ahead. The blood-encrusted deadsmith allowed his bone hammer to mark his slow pursuit. Thunk-thunk-thunk. The shadows ahead materialized into flat doors forged from steel. Ben ran into them with all his might and bounced back like an insect.
The deadsmith was not expecting the boy to ricochet toward him. He was bowled over with a grunt. Fear stabbed through Ben; he was entangled in the man’s legs! The deadsmith cried something as they struggled: “You have no life left…” And he plunged the club’s tapered end through Ben’s hand.
Ben tugged at the stuck appendage, and registered pain, but was oddly detached from the feeling. Indeed it wasn’t so much a feeling as the dull recitation of neurons that would soon lack purpose. His body was dying, and he pulled his hand from the club with a sucking sound and looked through the meaty hole left there.
The deadsmith, seeing the look in the boy’s eyes, began fighting their tangled limbs even more furiously than Ben. The world groaned and rumbled in his head, and when he broke free, yet the rumbling continued, the deadsmith glanced over his shoulder to see the dragon hauling its foul ruin into the hallway. It hunched over as it squeezed through the door, scales being flayed away from its shoulders and skull. Teeth gnashed beneath tatters of scales. One eye rolled ceaselessly in its skull, like a madman’s; the other was missing, as was the flesh around the gaping socket.
But it pulled itself along on the deadsmith’s scent with nostrils flaring, and the claws of the sightless thing found purchase in his back.
Ben retreated to the steel doors. Though turned away from the dragon he was unable to shut out the rude din of its feeding. He pawed at the wall, and felt a button depress; the doors withdrew and he fell through. They closed. Lying in darkness, Ben felt the floor, the very room, begin to descend. Hell would have him now, it seemed. Maybe it was a gesture of mercy from the Devil to this young convert. The room shuddered and stopped.
The doors opened.
Ben saw a new corridor, brightly lit, but not by torches; glassy blue-white stones laid into the ceiling revealed every detail. He shielded his eyes with his good hand and walked. As he advanced, he heard a voice speaking.
In a room at the end of the corridor, also garishly lit, a face stared at Ben. It was only an image, in some sort of mirror on the wall. It was a man, dressed in the abbot’s robes - but not the abbot. And the robes were a spotless white.
“This is project leader Dan Abbot. I’m making this recording because – I don’t know – because we don’t know what will be left, but if there are survivors, they deserve to hear this.
“In hindsight it was nothing but hubris, the rapture of playing God, but at the time we did have a rationale for bringing them back. We wanted to know what ended their time on Earth, perhaps to extend our own. It wasn’t until Phase Four, the Cretaceous series, that we found out what killed them. Oh, Christ” – A word Ben had heard, but whose meaning he was unfamiliar with – “we found out. Some anomaly in their blood. The infected die and the dead rise again.
“They were unstoppable. Now the infection’s spread to us. Maybe this all was meant to occur. Maybe we as a species reached our peak, and there at the summit waited this plague, as it always has. But there’s no comfort in that. Especially for men who thought they’d beaten God.”
The image flickered, then the man reappeared and started his speech over. Ben sat cross-legged on the floor, his senses dwindling, and thought of the old rhyme. It still made no sense.
He heard not the doors opening down the corridor, nor the slow, heavy approach of his devourer.
New Eyes
“Did you know it could blind you?”
“What?”
“When you drank it. Did you know?”
Dr. Hilger was sitting a few
feet from me, probably behind a desk; I couldn’t tell. I could only barely see the light in the ceiling, a dull gray smear in a storm of dark shapes that may or may not have been real.
It was Thursday. I’d started going blind on Monday. The job was nearly done.
I didn’t know how to answer his question. I didn’t know how to tell him that yes, I’d known. I’d even known it could kill me if I drank it. I hadn’t cared. I regarded my mortality with the same aloofness as I did my sight. It wasn’t about that teenage mentality of it won’t happen to me. I’d grown out of that long ago. I simply didn’t care. I cared about few things.
Hilger asked me what exactly it was I’d drank. He sounded like glasses and a ponytail. I imagined a silver hairline and a goatee. He could just as well have been dressed like a birthday clown and I wouldn’t have known the difference. I guessed I was going to have to get used to that, to not knowing.
I wondered what my next wife might look like. I wondered if I would have another wife. The first was filing divorce papers today.
Hilger repeated his question. He had something in his mouth and was making obnoxious sucking sounds as he spoke. Jolly Rancher, I surmised. Guy’s addicted to candy. Well, it gave him a bit more character. I was really believing that ponytail now.
“Methanol,” I answered.
“And what’s that stuff?”
Damn. It sounded so much better as methanol. It sounded like the poison it was, not like the unfortunate punch line that was...“Wiper fluid.”
“Like for your car?”
“Yeah.”
“What made you drink wiper fluid?”
Was there any way to put it into words? How do you answer something like that, ever? Well, I drank wiper fluid because...
Nothing would finish that sentence to anyone’s satisfaction. But what the hell.
“I couldn’t get any alcohol. I moved in with my parents, see, after I lost my job, and they got everything with alcohol out of the house – beer, orange extract, you name it.”
“Orange extract has alcohol in it?”
“Yeah, a lot.”
“How did you know that?”
I knew my face was red now. He had me. This guy had me pinned down on the savannah and was going for the jugular. He was sharp. Maybe because he knew the whole story, unlike other psychiatrists; maybe because there was nowhere left to hide when the whole world was black. Was that a Stones lyric?
He decided to press on. “So you found the wiper fluid. Where, in the garage?”
“Yeah.”
“How much did you drink?”
“A few ounces.” Enough to kill me, even though I wasn’t trying to.
“What does the eye doctor downstairs say?”
“I won’t regain any of my sight.”
“And how do you feel about that? You know, because the eye doctor put in his notes that when he told you, you didn’t really seem to care.
“Why don’t you care?”
Finally, a question I didn’t have to answer. Because I didn’t know.
He left me alone in my room.
* * *
They had me on an IV to try and flush some of the shit out of my system. But the damage was done; the blind spots that had appeared in the center of my vision Monday morning had expanded to fill it all.
On the plus side, I was adjusting pretty well in terms of getting about. I was able to get out of my hospital bed and wheel the IV stand to the bathroom.
The light over the toilet was a smeared halo surrounded by darkness. I probably wouldn’t even be able to see it by Friday. And that was almost a good thing, because the little bit of light I was getting was creating strange phantoms in my vision – waxy, flailing things that sometimes resolved into grim, judging faces. They seemed so real. I supposed my brain was simply trying to resolve the phantoms into recognizable images. I sure as hell couldn’t see my nurse’s face, or Hilger’s.
I was on the fifth floor. The nurse said it was a general medical ward. Hilger wanted me on his psych ward, but I’d be here until they were done pumping saline through me. It seemed pointless, and almost cruel; was the saline going to restore my sight? Was a week in the psych ward going to excise whatever thick-skulled demon I’d been born with?
I told myself not to complain. It was my fault, and that was that. And it was.
I was being wheeled down the hall, on my way to see the ophthalmologist again, when I glanced sideways - mimicking alertness and vision for the benefit of anyone staring at me – and saw a man lying in a bed. I only saw him for a second, and then we’d passed his doorway, but I saw him. He was a ghostly outline of a man, and he’d been sitting upright in a hospital bed; although I hadn’t seen the bed I had guessed by his position.
I should have been excited, overjoyed; a flood of emotion should have overcome my muted state. But it didn’t, because of what else I’d seen.
Standing beside the man in the bed had been another man. He had a white face and dark robes. He held a scythe.
* * *
It was just my mind trying to make sense of random shapes again. Had to be. So I didn’t tell Hilger.
“How are you taking things today?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Fine I guess.”
“You’re obviously depressed,” he said, “have been since before you did this to yourself. I looked at your records – you’re young, how long have you been drinking?”
“Six years.”
“And you have tried to hurt yourself, though that’s not what you did last weekend – two suicide attempts in as many years. So the depression is why you drink?”
“Yeah.”
“When did you first start to feel this profound depression?”
“Always.”
He was silent for a bit. I heard him sucking on that godforsaken candy, if that’s what it was. Maybe it was a pen lid. Gross.
“So, depression. But there’s something else here. I just don’t know what it is.”
Hilger sighed. Here we were again, just like my hospitalizations following the pills and razor: on the cusp of realization, but always, always falling short.
He did prescribe me a shitload of meds though. I was grateful for that. Like the alcohol, I’d take them in my fist, wind up a fast pitch and hurl them at the problem. Whatever it was.
* * *
I was being taken across the ward for a physical when I saw another patient.
It was a woman, late twenties – around my age. She had close-cropped hair and sad lines around her eyes. She was all lines, in fact, another ghostly shape that may have been a trick of the mind; but then I saw the chains, and they, by God, were real.
Two chains hooked into her chest, between her breasts. They were pulled taut, as if anchored to her very heart; and standing over her, tugging the chains with dull insistence, was a naked thing.
It was like a man, but not, most certainly not; it was a waxy, almost liquid humanoid; a highway mirage, a bleeding afterimage. Yet I knew it was as real as the woman and her chains.
Her chains. Not the thing’s. Hers. And somehow, the thing was hers too, wasn’t it?
The chains snapped, and the thing fell back in slow motion, body twisting like a diver’s, and it fell into blackness.
The woman fell limp. I heard machines protesting, nurses running. I saw the woman’s outline jostle, then fade.
I’d just watched her die.
Fear seized me. If she was dead, then that meant—
The white man in the dark robes appeared where the woman had been. He had empty black eyes. They were fixed on me.
* * *
I was cowering under the covers of my bed, eyes shut tight. He wouldn’t come for me if I didn’t look. He wouldn’t come to punish me for my trespass.
“You can see me?”
I screamed. The voice was in my head, inside me. It was a flat, toneless voice and it filled me with horror. Where was he? Beside my bed? In my head? Everywhere?
“I’m not going
to hurt you. I would only mark your passing – and it is not your time.”
Don’t ask me why I believed him. I guess because he was Death, and, according to my mind’s logic, he had to follow certain rules. He wasn’t a ghoul, just the messenger.
And if I was going to die, to hell with it all anyway.
I opened my eyes. He was standing over me, scythe in hand.
Seeing the way my eyes were drawn to the blade, he slipped it into his cloak, offering an apologetic glance. “I forget.”
“Are you who I think you are?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not here for me?”
“No.”
“The woman. And the man I saw yesterday. Is he dead?”
“Soon.”
Death wasn’t much of a conversationalist. I figured he didn’t keep much company. It occurred to me that I was taking this way too well; all part of my aloof nature, I supposed, the mystery that Hilger had yet to solve.
“You’ve lost your vision,” Death said, a frown splitting his pale, clay-like face. “Yet you see me.”
“You and the other guy,” I said. “The one with the chains. Did he kill her?”
“I don’t know of what you’re speaking.”
“The man...the naked man with the chains in her chest. I heard the nurses say it was cardiac arrest that killed her. Is that how it happens? Does someone have to come and break us down?”
“I still don’t understand,” Death said.
I sat up, as if that would help me make sense. “He was standing right over her. Like, on the bed. He disappeared right before you came – oh, I guess that’s why you didn’t see him.”
Death placed a cold hand on my wrist. My heart skipped a beat.
“Come out into the hallway,” he said. “I want you to show me.”
“But he’s gone—”
“Just show me.”
I groped my way out of bed and, clutching the back of my gown with one hand and the IV stand with the other, walked out of the room.
“Did you need something?” My nurse’s voice.
“Uh...I was wondering if you’d help me take a walk? Just around the ward?”
Dark Entities Page 9