The cold morning comes in bone-chills. Forgotten hours come back to me in rays of light and the absence of another person stirs my shivering, unsteady body to wakefulness. My eyes search the tent mess. Food wrappers, empty bottles, old sweat. I clothe myself quickly and go out the front into the cold brush, leaving the tent flap open as I walk through the dirt and rotting autumn leaves.
A little sense comes back to me and I look for a sign. Shallow indents from feet trail away from the tent’s entrance. Tossed leaves of canary yellow, blood orange, bright red. I follow the trail for minutes till it hooks round a great pine, its branches prodding at me, just at eye-level.
An elfin body lies slumped on the other side, pale and veiny from the cold. One leg is stretched, the other curled up and tucked under her. A head hangs to the side.
“Care!” I run to her.
Her ruffled hair covers her face, full of twigs and pine needles and silence. I fall to my knees and shake her. She grunts.
“Fooled ya,” she groans. Her face suddenly fills red and she lurches to the side, spilling her guts over an empty bottle beside herself. She finishes her retching and lifts it with finger and thumb, looking it over, and tosses it. “Ah well.”
Her feet are marred and blistered from a long night treading the icy forest floor, her hands are cracked and smeared with blood. “Guess it’s morning.”
“Come on.” I struggle to drag her back to the tent.
I wrap her in both our sleeping bags, placing a flattened grocery bag next to her head to throw up into. She can’t seem to keep her face over it but it doesn’t matter, she doesn’t throw up again, only twitches and shakes and reaches for a bottle that isn’t there. I give her water. She snatches it greedily and gulps, suddenly becomes sick and falls back down limp.
“Almost time for the big bad business,” she mutters, barely comprehensible.
“It can wait. Just rest.”
She yawns and turns over. Her shaking seems to calm down. “Yeah, a lil' while I guess...”
Why did you...? The words never come. I sit in silent vigil, shaking in union with her tremors. My eyes droop.
I come to in a daze of flashing lights that coalesce into murky daylight in the soft, sour smell of the tent. Care is alive, breathing, and I am too. Shivering, I bundle up beside her. I catch a waft of dried puke. I want to prune her and clean her but instead fall back asleep.
Midday, a tease of mild warmth radiates through the tent. She is gone and I shuffle outward on all fours, the tent door half-sealed. Suddenly it zips open and she enters in carelessly, strangling a near-empty water bottle, plopping on the corner of stray sleeping bags.
Weary beyond comprehension, I patter closer on my hands, but she waves me off boredly.
“Just waiting for when you’re ready.” she yawns. “I can wait though.”
I wait forever. Nothing seems prepared, least of all me. An ache in my chest and bones is all that comes, and a flurry of wants passing through my head. To leave the tent, to leave town, to be done with all of this, to make up my insult to her by finishing our escape and flying away together to some better place with no one else. But part of me is reeling from last night. Part of me almost hates... her... myself... I push it aside.
The things we did and the things we said tumble through my mind like mouse-bitten film, flayed pictures of joy and terror. A new future seems to shine ahead brightly, beckoning through murky clouds. I shake my head clear, hating my imagination for playing tricks on me.
This is reality. I snatch the 1911 pistol from under a pillow. “Let’s get it done, then.”
“Yeah?” she struggles to sit up. “Yeah, let’s do it.”
She reaches for the last bottle, a pint of cherry-flavored whisky. I rush over and find us staring eye to eye, each gripping the bottle.
“Don’t,” I say.
But I loosen my grip and she snatches it away, swigs. “You know what fuel I run on.”
“You run on you,” I go. “That stuff’s a crutch, an excuse to be happy or upset.”
She stands, wobbling back and forth, catching her balance. “I’ll lean on what I can lean on.”
She eyes me spitefully for a split second. I look away, ashamed and confused. She puts on acid-washed jeans and black socks that sting her cold-chapped toes. She lifts her worn purse with a groan and fits her denim jacket round tiny shoulders. She flicks the collar up, as if for one last show.
She bumps into me and pushes off abruptly, somehow heavy as a titan and light as a feather. “Let’s get this over with.” The whisky breathes its sweet, woody aroma. Goddamn her.
(...)
Torn charcoal streets with crumbling potholes, scattered with blood red leaves. The once-warm sky looms overcast, throwing a grim paleness over our silent journey through suburbia, shadows streaking through pocked brown telephone poles and silent grey houses.
Care’s whisky sipping grows as we approach a looming three-story colonial house of mottled cedar siding, standing sentry amid the neighborhood of newer-style but dilapidated shanties. The wind whistles through our clothes.
“This is it,” she says flatly, bottle in hand. “The guy we sell everything to. If he doesn’t eat our lungs.”
I look at her. She’s holding back shaking, and it’s not just from booze or the night in the cold. Fear.
“Stay out here,” I say. “I’ll handle this one, and we’ll be done.”
I step and feel a squeeze on my wrist. She’s staring at the ground. “He won’t deal with you without me. We go in... together.”
Her grip loosens, arm drops. No convincing her. I sigh and rub around my lower back, where a gun hides.
“Keep your head then,” I command, but in my mind I’m begging.
“Always.” She gulps one last shot. I sniff annoyedly at the boozy smell emanating off her.
I walk toward the front door slowly. It turns to a stomp that pounds on the creaking deck. I rap at the thick wooden door, a flat dark grey with a dull silvery handle.
“Good. Sure he’ll think we’re selling cookies.” Care’s eyes roll.
“At least he’ll know it’s something else.”
Silence at the door. A second knock responds with nothing but the chilly air behind us. I suddenly twist the knob and the door falls open to dim light. Care squeaks and I look at her, but she silences herself, squeezing her bottle in both hands.
I breathe deep and step inside. Quilted burgundy loveseats, polished mahogany tables and ornate vases and sculptures reveal themselves. An ancient marble bust. A dark suit of steel armor shining like obsidian, gauntlets crossed over the hilt of a longsword. Tan persian tapestries and rugs with rich red borders.
“Nice enough place,” I whisper, to no reply. “Almost reminds me of the house Dryden took us to.” She follows on the tips of her toes.
“Hello!” I shout, searching about the place, soaking in details. Old tomes, sets of leaded drinkware sparkling in the shuttered light, dustless old-fashioned mugs and souvenirs from faraway places, snowglobes and models of Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, other places I don’t recognize.
“Snowglobes,” I remember Dryden’s penthouse. “What is it with these fuckers and snowglobes?”
“Kade, maybe we’d better go back...”
I’m lost in a trance as my eyes brush across the relics and follow into a kitchen-dining room with black granite countertops and table, six chairs and six stools. Spices lay across the spotless counter by a flat stove stop reflecting our wandering forms, eighteen dark bottles pointed at us from a full wine rack to our right.
Care’s ever-heavier breathing follows our steps. Only a grim fascination makes me ignore her quiet fear as we enter a hall, and I’m drawn to a radiating warmth from my left. A doorway opens into what looks like a study. The room houses a blazing fireplace, the walls a deep red, adorned as the rest of the house or fancier, dripping with trinkets and ornaments and lined with walls of books on both sides.
Beside the fire rests a small, wide table, tall and dark. On it, three candles of different heights lit on each side, burnt down with grotesque wax brims. In the center, a dark glass dish like a punch bowl, but decorated with intricate designs that cast slivers of fiery demon light that dance on the wall like folktale stories.
“Kade, let’s get out of here. This was a bad idea.”
I nod but walk slowly to the table, a final indulgence of curiosity. In the great glass dish is a pool of black, no, dark scarlet touched with flames. I touch it with my fingertip and its surface dances, a drip falling back into the pool. A familiar scent. Iron and flames. I reach my hand in, connect with something. A soppy mass ascends from a mess of pouring blood. A ruined black-bound book, its cover marred ruins, its once-gilded pages melded together into abhorrent sludge.
“I keep it there so its lies will remain there,” a thin man says, appearing behind Care. His hands are slender and veiny, his long pointed nails grasping her shoulder, holding her frozen. Her eyes are full of abject terror. His hair is ashy brown, falling down in curly wisps. A thin, black mustache frame his thin, chapped lips, and beard alike. He’s wearing a tied robe of crimson velvet trimmed with gold. His pale legs peek out from underneath, covered with thinning dark hair and his feet are padded with soft slippers beneath.
“Welcome, my children. I see you’ve been taking in the sights?”
I look at the ruined book and drop it back in with a small splash that scatters drops of blood on the floor and my sweatshirt, my right hand pure, dripping red.
“Ah, don’t worry. That stain I know how to remove.” He chuckles. “Why do you delight me with your presence?”
“Drugs,” I say. “A lot of them. We want you to buy them all.”
“And what would make you think I’m interested in these... illicit substances?” he asks curiously. He sniffs, digging his nose into the top of Care’s head, huffing. “Ah, yes, this one, I know her smell.” She trembles.
“Then do you want them? We just want ten thousand. Easily double what they’re worth.” I try to keep my cool.
“That’s a lot of cheddar cheese, my dear. If you have such an offering, you must present it.”
I look at Care and nod. She looks up at me scariedly, tosses her stuffed purse into my arms. I place it on the low, black coffee table in front of the elegant sofa and lay out our bounty of stolen drugs straight across the top. Acid, ecstasy, mushrooms, LSD, cocaine, amphetamine, pharmaceuticals, heroin, crank, and the countless pills and powders that we could never name.
“Oh my... this is quite the collection...” He ponders, holding a savage talon to his pointed chin. “But is it enough for the bargain you seek?”
I eye him carefully as he guides Care over to an end table, unlocks it’s drawer with a key produced from seemingly nowhere. “Is this enough?” He tosses a wad of bills my way and it slides toward me. I duck down to pick it up, finger through it. It’s in fifties. It must be a thousand dollars.
“Ten thousand,” I say sternly. “No more, no less. That’s the deal.”
“Oh... Well, is this enough?” He throws over another handful that lands in front of me, sliding close to my still-bent knee. The same amount.
“Ten thousand! Just ten thousand!”
“I’m sorry!” he chuckles apologetically. He begins tossing one after another, begging if it is enough. Each new stack of bills lands by me with a thump, till they begin to explode in scatters of cash. Fear creeps up my spine steadily, as his payment seems to surpass my demand.
“I’m sorry. You see, neither the greedy nor the lustful can be sated, and I am not greedy.” His eyes hone in on me, growing thin. A twisted blade of mottled grey-black steel rises to Care’s throat, scraping a trickle of blood down with it.
“Don’t! Let her go!”
“Shh, shhh. Let’s not jump to conclusions. I simply want that gun in your back pocket placed gently by your side. It’s not so much to ask for a little trust in a trade between... new friends?”
My teeth grit uncontrollably as I sear him with my eyes, but he seems immune, as if forged from hellfire.
I pull the gun out, place it slowly beside me.
He giggles girlishly and pulls out more cash, tossing it into the air around us. Money that could feed thousands scatters all over the room, over the furniture, over his and Care’s and my heads, into the bowl of book and blood.
“I must say, I never expected such a treat. Two dolls walking into my very own home with such a bag of candy. What fun we’ll have!” His eyes thin again, his voice deepening. “In a cellar below, where wine mingles with blood, and toys of pleasure and pain blur. I will teach you the meaning of pain and the meaning of joy. And when I’m done with you...” His voice trails off for a moment as he sniffs Care’s scalp deeply once more. “I’ll taste you completely.”
“Aaaaeeeyaaaahhh!” she screams, and a blast deafens the house. The gangly man lurches back and Care falls to the ground with a yipe.
“Such... beautiful color...” he reminisces, and collapses, his red robe darkening further with a pool of flowing life.
I dash over to Care, my trembling hands ready to hold her throat together. She looks up in pain, with a trickle of blood from her neck. “I’m okay.”
We shuffle toward the door of the cursed study. The wooden floorboards whisper at us, hollowly echoing the patter of our feet, muffling the Devil’s death throes, weak gurgles of bubbling blood.
The money!” she cries, and we rush to bundle up as much as we can with bloodstained hands, stuffing it into the drug bag- and then when it’s full, our bras. “Let’s get out of here!”
We rush for the door we came in. We open it, and a long hall stretches before us, lit by a hanging yellow light. Terror grips us.
“T-that’s impossible!” Care screams.
The Devil behind us is groaning, struggling to his feet, and blocking the way to the back door.
“Wait!” I shout, as Care flees down the hall.
“There’s gotta be a window or something, K!” The door slams behind us. “Fuck!”
Two doors line each wall, directly across from one another. We shake and tear at the handles, bash our shoulders into them. “Won’t fucking budge.”
She manages to open the last one at the far end of the hall. “Kade, this way!”
“Wait! maybe I can break this one,” I plead, still jiggling the first door’s handle.
“With him waiting out there? Let’s go! It’s dark in here!”
“Damn it.” I fumble around in my pocket for the flashlight and turn it on. The hanging lightbulb bursts into darkness and slivers rain over the hard floor. With it, the torch in my hand dims, barely cutting through the fog of black.
“Come on!” I blindly follow Care’s voice, trampling glass.
I slam through the doorway into her. We tumble into a void. Wooden steps creak and whine as we slam down, sprawled over the floor. Our small light bounces away from us, revealing a hall of ancient grey brick, thick with dust.
“Fuck...” her pained voice whimpers. “You okay?”
I sprint up the stairs two steps at a time. The door is jammed.
“This is bad.” I kick it. Solid metal. “Down is not the way we want to go. Goddamnit, Care, Goddamnit!”
“I’m sorry, okay? Please just get down here. I can’t see.”
I stomp down the steps and lift her to her feet like a child, picking up our flashlight with her. The dungeon-like walls lead into seemingly infinite darkness, but there’s nowhere else to go.
A few failed clicks sound in the darkness. Sparks from the lighter illuminate her face in tiny flashes. “It won’t work!”
“There’s something seriously wrong with this place.” I take her by the arm. “Stay with me. We can’t lose each other when we only have one light.”
We follow along the rough bricks with our hands. I hear her trying the lighter again every few seconds. The sound reminds that she and the engulfing darkness are with me.
We half-blindly wander down the hall before we find a doorway that leads into a wide space lined with many more doors along a single wall, with one looming straight ahead. The doors could be infinite; the sides of the room are shadow.
“Straight ahead?” I whisper, holding the light to her terrified face. Her eyes are glazed over with fear. I pull her toward the door and we slowly enter. “Hold onto your gun.” She nods timidly.
“And don’t shoot me in the ass,” I add half-seriously, trying to ease her nerves as we venture on. I keep my pistol tight against my chest, pointed ahead, my left hand gripping knife and flashlight.
We step forward, entering the room and the door slams behind us, making Care shriek. We find ourselves in a small room with a door on each side of the four walls. We open the one behind us again, where we just came from. Only now, the hall was gone. In its place, an identical room. Four walls. Four doors.
“K, how is this happening?!”
“I don’t know.” I scratch a vertical line in the doorframe with the end of the small metal flashlight and run back the direction we came. “But this might help.” I scratch two more vertical lines beside the next door. “We have to orient ourselves somehow. It’s impossible there’s no way out. This is some kind of trick or drug. It has to be. We’ve got to keep our heads.”
She squeezes my arm and we shuffle backward and backward, marking each way we pass through.
Each room we enter is the same. Four walls. Four doors. Old wooden doors with brass handles and grey brick walls. We halt as I make my sixth mark.
“M-maybe... we should t-take a turn in the next room,” Care mutters. She anxiously strikes the lighter flint a few more times to no effect.
“If we go right or left, we may end up in circles. For fuck’s sake, these rooms can’t go on forever.”
She’s silent.
I take a deep breath and open the sixth door. Care is yanked away from behind, screaming out her lungs. The door slams shut.
“Care! CARE!” I kick at the locked door as her screams fade away. I shoot off the knob and kick it open.
The Devil stands before me in a hooded robe, a grim smile cut across his gaunt cheeks. Light flashes and a deafening blast sounds as I put two bullets in his chest. He falls back into darkness like a storm of crow feathers. Just then, I hear screaming from a few rooms behind.
“Care!” I dash through the seventh, eighth, ninth doors, marking along the way, but her cries only grow more distant. Doors slam shut behind. I turn back toward where I left the Devil, but as I open the door, I find an empty room, and no marks in it. Nor by what should be the eight door. Or the seventh.
“Aaaaaaughhhhhh!” I scream into the abyss. My torch flickers, creating ghosts of the Devil in the corners. I fire my gun frantically, but the flashes betray another empty chamber. Through the gunshot deafness I try to listen, but the sounds are like ringing, crying, screaming, and nothing. I try to feel her sound, if it isn’t just imagination now, and take a side door toward it. I mark one diagonal slash through each one, running straight through the endless maze.
Time passes. Minutes?... Longer? I stand panting in the middle of the same place. “Damn it... damn...” I reload and train my pistol on each opening door and looking for any sign. After a few, my heart stops... horizontal marks, deep and long, six of them. They must be hers.
In that room, I open all four doors again. In a room beside, more marks, lighter and more scattered... twelve...
“Care! If you’re there, make a noise! Shoot! Shout! Anything!”
Through muted hearing, a gentle sound. Cries like pups whining, far off. Then a great, dreadful scream from all directions. I turn and aim frantically, feeling only heat and horror and a pounding pulse. On the door are eighteen shallow cuts. My senses and I flee through that door.
Door after unmarked door, I run forever. Endless grey rooms in the musty dungeon. Minutes lose meaning. The terror seems forever. Now. Before. And projected ever into the future. Time fails me. Only fear-moments remain like frames over frames of the same endless nightmare repeating.
Suddenly I run into something in the middle of the room. Pieces of it clatter and fall.
Bones. A skeleton in tattered black rags, hanged by its neck by a tattered rope noose.
I reach to check it, and the hollow eyeholes point straight at me. I freeze.
Its jaw slowly unhinges. The skull laughs. It laughs and laughs and laughs through broken teeth and kicks and thrashes and falls to pieces. The laughter follows as I flee.
I run in an ever-growing spiral, shouting her name. One door, turn. Two doors, turn. Three doors, turn... fourteen... forty-nine... only the count keeps me half-sane. The laughter follows in an unholy choir.
More marks appear on doorways and doors. They grow in number, soon covering them. The wood grows twisted and ruined. The handles break as I kick them, or crumble and fall off before I reach them. The walls grow darker, jagged, misshapen. The doors turn rotten, and soon I can only smash through them, covering myself in moldy splinters and the stench of damp decay. Soon they crumble in all directions, leaving only black portals encircled with ruined wood.
A room of broken skeletons crawl and grasp at my feet. Another room, they line the walls in chains. A row of them stand vigil on either side, clad in ancient weapons and bits of ragged armor. Robed forms hum and incantate. A dozen hanged skeletons laugh and curse and thrash and scream from ropes and meathooks.
The tortured yelping of pups returns and grows. The Devil appears ahead in each doorway and scatters into shadows as I shoot at him. I begin to run straight through his forms, but his mimics watch from the sides in rows and from behind, surrounding.
Suddenly, I topple into one who stands in my way. My light and blade slide away from the floor as I dig my gun into his head and fire, fire, but the fire reveals only a shattered skull in black robes. Demon laughter surrounds. A lurking figure steals my torch, skittering to a room off my path even as I fire at it, crawling to my knife.
The number, the count, I almost lose it, almost become lost again. But I am lost. I get on my feet. Never lost. Reorient. Blindly, I listen through the shadows, roam through doorways, following the spiral path.
“Maybe...” I whisper, flicking my lighter. It sparks but makes no flame. I can hear the fuel inside as I shake it. I smell the butane it spits.
I sit and clear my core. I listen. I smell and taste. I feel.
In the darkness, sounds and voices sound afar off and close in. My eyes open. The shadows twist and take on nightmare forms of man and beast and unspeakable images, crawling and lurking all around. They moan and groan and curse in unearthly tongues in a chaos orchestra.
Slithering bodies and crawling things on the floor come over me, up my sleeves, down my collar, over my breast, into my pants. Hands tug at my garments, pinching and grasping my flesh. The voices shout and cackle and grope, seeking to fuse my senses. I breathe and find my center. Hands and claws all over. Growling, gasping, muddled weeping.
The creatures stir and rage in the darkness, circling and snapping. A shrill cry breaks through, seeking to deafen. A banshee’s shrieking, rising like a storm over all things. I hear my breathing. I smile.
“Enough!” The voices and I shout in unison. And the noise and forms dissolve into darkness.
A sliver of light on the floor ahead, a gold glow beneath a door. I walk forward, tap it and feel it over. Metal, scratched and dented. It opens with a long creak. Care stands with the Devil’s mottled knife in her hands, ragged and bruised. The Devil is gagged and chained before a row of six mirrors that partly encircle us. The fieldstone walls and concrete floors are lit with blood and gold by shining black braziers reflecting off of them. The room is wrapped in shadows.
“See you figured it out,” Care says smugly.
“How did you...?”
“I’ll tell you later. Let’s finish him and get the hell out of here!”
I walk forward. Out of the corners of my eyes, snapping jaws and flailing chains roar and yelp. My gun jumps six directions but I hold back from firing. A pack of hounds thundering and clamoring for blood, the reds of their eyes and grizzled mouths glistening.
“Oh, them. They’re our new friends. His new friends,” Care says, swiping the tip of the blade across the Devil’s throat as he struggles and whimpers. There is an oddly familiar look in those scared eyes. “Do the honors?”
I take the knife from her. An ornate kryss of Damascus steel shining with a mottled water-like pattern. It’s seen much use and has been recently sharpened.
I slash her across the chest and arms and she cries out. The braziers flicker.
“W-why?” she cries.
“Where did we meet?” I demand, stepping toward her.