“You don’t know me!” Helen screamed. Bitter tears stung her eyes as they rolled up her forehead and into her sweat-matted hair. “They wouldn’t let us live our own life. Even our holidays had to be booked by them; where we went for a day’s shopping or a romantic meal, everything had to be run through them first. They had us trapped like naughty fucking children, so what does it matter that sometimes, just sometimes, I wanted to see them in the cocksucking ground? Fuck them and fuck you!” Helen spat a ball of dark red bloody spit into Luther’s face. He allowed the clot to ooze down his face before falling off into oblivion. Helen couldn’t see it, but her own pale blue eyes had become as black as the night.
“I think that’s enough progress for today. I would offer you another chance but I know you won’t take it. I am a great many things, but a fool is not one of them. So I will leave you with your children and return tomorrow. I have something rather interesting in store.” He smiled and without speaking another word he was gone, as was the light. The sun set with visible speed. The shadows of the trees grew longer and the air cooler. The pain was gone; the insects retreated; her flesh and body returned to its pristine condition, as was always the case. Only, tonight Helen felt a strange, fluttering in the pit of her stomach. Nerves, Helen told herself. Yet it continued to grow, and soon, just as the last remnants of light left and a howling wind began to rustle the trees, it became an itch. The deep seated kind, and no matter how she moved and wriggled it would not let up in the slightest.
“Fuck you!” Helen screamed into the night. A howling gust of wind blew through the trees, echoing her mournful cry as if in sympathy. Helen began to thrash about like a filly yet to be broken in yet fastened with a saddle nonetheless. The feeling grew. Her flesh began to crawl, her head to thump and ache. Long shadow fingers from nearby branches began to fondle her still naked body as her flesh began to ripple and bubble as though her fat and blood had begun to boil.
Helen coughed once and a fat swollen bluebottle burst from her throat. It flew drunkenly through the air before crashing into a tree and exploding, its yellow insides splattering the impact zone like a burst white-head hitting the mirror. Helen had experienced all manner of pain over the years, she had suffered unspeakable act after unspeakable act – with one in particular guaranteed to haunt her time of reprieve each day without fail – yet the pain that washed over her was new. Even for Luther it was agony. For he felt everything as she experienced it; it was a bond he had shared with her.
Next came a stronger gust of wind. It rustled the trees and their leaves; it sounded like flapping wings, wings so large they caught amongst the branches.
Birds, he sent birds to just peck away at you. Close your eyes; they always go for your eyes, Helen told herself, trying to remove the image from her mind’s eye. That of the neighbour in Bodega Bay whose face had been fed upon by Hitchcock’s flock of hungry feathered friends.
The rustling grew louder, intensified further, and then all at once Helen was bathed in light as if a spot lamp had been opened up and she was center stage. Helen’s body froze. The light burnt her eyes, yet she couldn’t close them. The deep ache that had burnt from within her for so long, the itch of her healing wounds, died. Her body felt her own again. Yet before she could do anything about it her body was wrenched free from its bonds, her world returned to the right way up. A warm breeze enveloped her like a blanket; it protected her as she rose higher and higher. Above the trees she climbed, as though conveyed by the glass elevator itself. As Helen’s world went black, her body filled with warmth. I finally get to die happy, were her final thoughts before the welcomed darkness overtook her. Just as the curtain fell Helen saw the trees of the forest stretching out for as far as she could see. They rose and fell like the optical illusion of the never-ending staircase. It was as if she were trapped in a Leonardo DiCaprio movie. There was a small clearing in the center of it all – or at least in the center what Helen could see – and in the middle of that she saw him. Luther. He stood, dressed not in a business suit but a robe, a white robe. He stood staring up into the sky, watching her ascend. The last thing she thought may have been about having a happy death, but the last vision her mind processed was Luther as he blew her a kiss, flashing her a smile that said, “See you soon, my love.”
~
V
Graham: Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks
“Do you not fear God?” a voice cut through the darkness, slapping Graham in the face like a bucket of cold water, shattering the rather comforting darkness that had overtaken him ever since he had died.
How long had it been? He felt as if he had slept forever. His body tingled with energy. It hadn’t hurt. Dying. Not in the way he had expected. The worst part by far had been the waiting. Graham had never known what to expect once life had ended. He had been raised a believer and for all his talk, his faith never left, but rather faltered.
After a while Graham opened his eyes. He was tied to a chair, bound tight at the wrists – and with a shuffle of his legs his ankles were also added to the list of secured limbs, fastened by large steel cuffs that looked like something you would find on the electric chair. They were hinged and locked into place by large old fashioned bolts.
A gust of cold wind sent a shiver up Graham’s spine, creating a full body wave of goose bumps which ran along behind it like the wake from a boat. He was in a dark room. It was cold, and somewhere he could hear water dripping in slow steady drops; a leaky pipe? The floor beneath his feet was bare concrete, and above his head a naked lightbulb swung back and forth. Its dust encrusted shell only offered a limited level of sight. To Graham it looked like a basement.
“I asked you a question. Do you not fear God?” the voice asked again. It was neither angry nor threatening, but rather curious. Its question posed with genuine – or at least well-acted – interest.
“Why would I fear him? I’ve seen what he can do; I lived through it. From my way of working things out he should fear me,” Graham said. His voice came out strong and proud despite his dry throat and feeble shallow breaths. “I survived his petty games and came through the other side still willing to play my role. That makes us at least even.”
The voice laughed. It was not a mean spirited laugh, but a simple chuckle of continued amusement.
“Oh yes, your war; all those years ago, yet the memories so fresh in your mind. I can taste them,” it whispered. “I know the things you saw; we use them here as tales to calm the younger ones of our kind.” Graham couldn’t see its face but he could tell that wherever it was, it wore a smile. Its eyes gleaming in the darkness, quite possibly red; or green, an absurd yet certain thought came to him.
“You don’t scare me. So just get it over with already,” Graham said, drawing his shoulders back as far as his bonds would allow.
“Very well, let’s see if you can accept you judgment.” The voice changed to a snakelike hiss.
As if on cue, the room began to spin. Colours flashed, filling Graham’s entire field of vision with the power of a thousand flash bulbs going off at once: the Hell Press, eager to get front page pictures of the newest recruit. When it all cleared, Graham found himself still tied to the chair, in a dusty field. A few straggled plants jutted from the ground, not growing so much as reaching out of the bulb trying to claw their way out of the soil and escape. Vines and stems twisted and hooked like bony fingers scratching away at the earth. A choking air hung all around him. Graham coughed. He could feel – no, he could taste the dust; it was putrid and dried out his mouth immediately.
It was hot. There was no wind. Graham looked around and knew where he was. He wasn’t surprised at all: he had always said to anybody who asked him, that a large part of him had died over there, here, the Netherlands, in Europe. The whole godforsaken war had murdered him. Yet the field, this one small place, had been the spot where the final nail had been driven into his coffin. It was the cornerstone behind every dream or nightmare he had for the rest of his life. And now it seemed he
had finally come home.
In the distance Graham heard a thundering explosion. Another blast followed soon after, and with it, as if carried away from the battlefield, were the screams and shouts of those caught in the path of the blasts. Several lesser explosions followed, like an echo. They came in waves, volleys of fire. The determined artillery unit made not war, but rather a work of poetic beauty; a vicious score to orchestrate their side’s movements and intentions. The earth around him shook, as if it were scared by what approached. Accompanying the explosions was a mechanical sound, a tired groaning source of motion that was unmistakable even to ears long since unaccustomed to war: a tank. It was moving fast, and in their direction, and it was then that Graham realized that he was not alone. He was in fact surrounded on all sides. Men stood behind him. The majority were in uniform. Graham couldn’t tell where they were from; the only thing he saw was their dead, lifeless faces, all staring blankly towards him. Eyes white, not empty but bleached by standing in the sun, immobile for too long. The group stood, their weapons on the floor, discarded, clutched at by the grasping digits of the war-ravaged greenery. There were civilians among them also, men, women, and even a few children; a quick count had Graham thinking they numbered around fifty.
They all simply stared at him, yet Graham doubted that any of them could see. “Hey, hey, could one of you come and untie me?” he called out but got no response. All the while the mechanical whining grew louder as the tank, no, wait… tanks, approached.
“They won’t help you,” a voice said inside his mind. Graham didn’t recognize it as one of his own. Over the years he had created many different voices that dealt with his past. Each character had their own role and part to play in his dreams. It was the same ownerless voice that had spoken to him when he was still in the basement. “Don’t you remember where you are?” it asked him.
“I couldn’t forget this place if I tried,” Graham said inside his mind. He learned early enough that talking just made him look even crazier. “I remember everything about this place,” he said. His voice threatened to break, yet he did his best to remain defiant. “Who could ever forget something like that?” he asked.
“That’s good, because all of these people remember you,” the voice answered. It ignored Graham’s question in favor of a chortled laugh.
Graham recoiled in his stool; images flashed into his head like a slideshow. Images that weren’t new to him, but seemed somewhat more vivid than the last twenty years’ dreams had been.
“What do you mean?” Graham asked, dumbfounded.
“Oh, I never like to spoil the ending. I would rather let them tell you themselves anyway. I enjoy a bit of a role-play from time to time,” the voice sneered. So just close your eyes and cast your mind back. Go, they’re all waiting for you. Don’t worry; maybe you can win this time.”
“Bobby?” Graham whispered.
II
It was 1944, the start of winter, Arnhem Bridge still stood, yet operation Market Garden had been deemed a success despite the fact that casualties and unplanned problems – an arguable consequence of war – had depleted numbers in the north of Holland by more than double the estimated figures. Graham led his small company – they totaled twenty – on a regular tour of their designated stretch of countryside.
They had not been part of the market or the garden, but rather had been stationed closer to the Belgium border. Graham was the first one to see the church. He led the way, whistling a nameless tune to himself as he went. The first thing he saw was the wisp of smoke on the horizon. It had snapped him out of the comfort zone he had slipped into, for smoke meant fire, fire meant people, and that invariably meant Nazis, or so they had all come to think. As they got closer, however, a strange calm washed over them all. They came over the crest of a slight rise in the road and it was then Graham saw the church. A small fire was burning out front. The emergence of a figure from behind the church set them all on alert. Yet the closer they got the more confident they became with the knowledge that whoever was there was friendly.
Graham was the first to make contact with the family; a farmer, his wife, and their three children. A boy of about thirteen, a tiny scrawny thing with a mop of unruly jet black hair which had already begun to thin in places, giving the kid the look of a middle aged man. The two daughters were in no better physical condition. The youngest, Wilhelmina, would have been a cute looking thing if not half staved. She was only six years old, and despite her skinny frame and a swollen left arm that hung limp at her side, she still had a sparkle in her eyes; the eternal optimism of youth. Comparably, the eldest daughter, Johanna, who was eighteen, was quite the opposite: her face was sunken, her eyes dark and deadened to all emotion. Her hair was a beautiful chestnut colour, her body not as skinny as the rest but certainly on the wrong side of healthy. She had smiled when Graham approached, and part of him, that small part nobody can control, fell in love with her. She looked utterly helpless, scared and indefinitely damaged by what she had borne witness to. Yet despite it all she was, for lack of a better word, beautiful. She wore a shirt that came to just below her hips, and a pair of shorts that had been so damaged, Graham would have believed it if they had said they had once been trousers. They welcomed the American troops with open arms and kisses to each cheek. The only one who didn’t offer her cheek was Johanna. It was the mother, a woman who looked twice her forty years, who told Graham through a rudimentary mix of English, sign language and Dutch that her daughter had been raped by the German soldiers in the town they had lived when the occupation happened.
Just as they let their guard down the ground began to tremble as tank tracks tore at the dried dusty soil.
“Sarge, targets approaching from the south. My count is at two tanks; Panzers is my best bet. Not enough movement for a whole platoon. I would say just a couple of stragglers,” Henry Balfont said. His thick Southern accent disguised every other word. Graham was the one person who seemed able to understand him well enough to not have to ask for a repeat of every other sentence.
“Move the men; head into the trees yonder. Henry, take the family with you, just for precaution. Let’s not make any hasty decisions before we know what we’re up against,” Graham answered. The trees would give them the best position for mounting a possible attack while also offering enough shelter should the unexpected guests be too strong in numbers. Better then to wait for them to move on, radio the news and then stage an attack under more favorable conditions.
“Yes, Sarge,” Henry called in response although it came out sounding like, “Ayuh-Saage,” before signaling to the others. They moved silent and they moved fast, but when Graham turned back to the family, they were gone, the doors to the church just closing behind them. Graham ran over to the door but it was locked. He knocked and waited, then knocked again, harder this time. The drone of the approaching tanks grew closer. The door didn’t open. “Come out, we will protect you,” Graham called to them. “You don’t have to be scared,” he added. It was a blatant lie, but he guessed they either couldn’t understand or wouldn’t listen to him anyway. He tried once more, refusing to give up until the last possible moment. They would not be able to explain their presence in the church and would no doubt be killed.
“Sarge, come on, will ya?” Henry called, grabbing him by the shoulder. “Jimmy’s got the base rat on the wire. What do you want us to say?” Henry asked him as they ran for cover.
The air turned grey as a lone tank approached, and offered Graham the first clue that things were not as they appeared to be, but he waited nonetheless.
The tank drove up to the church, stopping close enough for the barrel of the cannon to be inches away from the sidewall. The other held back, standing point.
Graham and his men watched as seven men clambered out of the machine, not wearing the expected Nazi uniforms, but rather a mixture of what seemed to be every uniform involved in the war; the American Army and Air-Force, British infantry and RAF colors. Some of the men had even gone so far as
to mix and match their military ensemble with British shirts and American trousers and boots. Graham couldn’t see any of the marks of the 30 Infantry; his unit.
“You seeing this, Sarge? They’s tryin’ to be us,” a New Yorker called Martin Brittori whispered. They were the same words that were on the lips of the entire group. Martin laughed under his breath. Graham smiled in spite of himself. “Shall we go t’em?” Martin asked.
Graham was about to answer when one man, dressed in a complete British uniform, walked to the church, picked up a rock and threw it through one of the small windows. This seemed to be some sort of signal, for the others walked over to the door and with a small burst of gunfire succeeded in wrenching them apart before storming the building like a modern day SWAT team. They all heard the screaming, followed by the familiar rattling burst of gunfire erupt from within the church. The men emerged soon after, holding both the wife and Johanna by the hair. They dragged the women behind them as if they were mules at auction. There was no sign of the father, son, or young Wilhelmina.
“What do we do, Sarge?” a voice said up from the background. Graham didn’t hear who it was; he was focused on the scene unfolding before his eyes. The fight or flight syndrome, as people had labeled it over the years, raged through his body. Graham knew that any action would result in bloodshed, and although it took him many years before he would admit it to himself, the only thing he had thought about back then was which way would be the most likely to leave him alive.
The group remained in the trees and watched in silence as first the mother and then the daughter were bent over the tank then stripped and beaten by the soldiers, who cawed with laughter throughout the whole ordeal. Johanna screamed, while the mother was silent, her face unemotional, broken; she had surrendered.
Highway To Hell Page 14