Abasement of the Remorseful

-Kaleb worked with window fixture repair and installation. A twenty four inch plate of glass streaked with morning rain trapped between its brother pane in the track. The sun rose. Purple clouds looked like looming spacecraft. He set the glass, and sealed it. The owner of the home watched over his shoulder. A surgeon, with his arms crossed, his mind contemplating, wanting to help, no doubt wondering if he could do this work himself, but Kaleb set the glass so quick and so immaculately flush that his troubles eased and his inspection harvested no complaints. Kaleb ran through the usual business and wasted no time being idle. Six more appointments waited. He never arrived late.

-Across town, Imogen sat in the back. The kitchen smelled like onions. The waiters sat idle and bored. She put the paperwork down and confronted them. The floor manager among the waiters, fifteen years older than the teenagers and young ladies that worked below him. He begged Imogen to see for herself. Only one person entered the whole day. He sat in the back, and waited. “He has his water, the floor manager explained, “and he wants nothing more.”

The customer wore a black suit. A silver cross around his neck. When he drank water, Imogen saw his wrist. Tattoos sleeved his flesh, and she imagined they ran all the way down his form. He wore a high white collar that reached to his sharp, raptor jaw. A buckled hat covered his head. Imogen went back to her paperwork. When she came out to steal a shot of whiskey from the bartender she saw the back table empty. Not even a ring left from his glass. No empty sweetener packets. No spilled liquid. She looked at the clock. Four more hours, provided she finished the paperwork.

-Hildegard walked from school everyday. Alone. She kept her silence among her peers, lowered her head, preferred to remain unnoticed, yet felt no fear nor remorse in her actions. If one did call on Hildegard, she politely ignored them, though some of the kids felt her capable of damning tricks due to her antisocial nature. In truth she wasn’t antisocial, she was anti fool. And fools never believe they are capable of making bad decisions when their entire existence serves to leave a warning behind for those fearless, unremorseful spirits that walk among us in the quiet lanes. She loved them for that. Her teachers too, hard skinned individuals whose profession is to wrestle with these fools, and force them to learn something they believe will not enrich their character. Hildegard understood at a young age, due to her long walks with no company other than her own thoughts, that there are two kinds of people in small towns. There are the people with a lot of money that move away from big cities, but don’t want to live in the country. Or fools that simply never left. Hildegard dreamed all day of places she wished to see. Foreign places where the roads are gardens, and thriving with wildlife to accompany her. She liked animals. They bit and scratched things that came too close. Just like her. She looked forward to turning twelve at the end of the month. She figured her party would be just like the others. At least there would be a pie. She hated cake. She walked in the middle of the street, imagining that the world ended and she needed to rebuild this ghost of a town. No cars on the road. No people. The fantasy could be reality if only a strong disease wiped the humans away but for the ones without friends.

A single car waited on the railroad tracks. A Mercedes. A man in a black suit and high collar sat there on the trunk. He smiled at Hildegard with a beakish mouth. His eyes buried under the shade of his hat. Silver cross glowed. He asked her for help.

“By the Christ, am I glad you came by. My engine died. I need someone to help me push it.”

Hildegard ignored him.

“Now, little girl, you won’t leave me here to get crushed by a train. Will you?”

Shy walked by.

“Okay, then. You don't know I seen you before. What about I offer you something? I know what it's like to have not a friend in the world. Help me out, and I show you.”

“I like being alone.”

“Me too- been alone my whole life. It’s your birthday coming up? It’s no fun to celebrate one's birthday by themselves, hear me speak truth. Let me give you a present! It's the least a friend can do.”

She went over to him, wary of strangers, but intrigued by the proposition. What manner of gift do men such as these provide? She wanted to know.

“Now, why not give this car a push. And I will give you your gift.”

She lay her palms on the sun baked steel of the rear bumper. The preacher went back to the front, and took the brake off. . She pushed with her legs, digging her toes into the gravel between the rail ties. The preacher pulled a tire iron from the front seat, but slid it back under after feeling the car shift an inch. The preacher smiled, impressed.

     The trunk popped open. Hildegard screamed at her discovery as curiosity furrowed into revolt. Blood soaked dresses and numerous pairs of lady’s footwear poked up from the fabric like fish heads. She pushed away , her body still that of a little girl, but her mind she was a sprinter. But the preacher already had her trapped. She felt her skin adhered to the steel just like glue. She pulled until flesh peeled away, but before she could work herself loose the preacher pierced her chubby sides with twelve fingers tipped with toxic claws. She tried to get a look because he no longer sounded like the same man- or a man at all. His voice now that of another being. He smelled too! Like pure copper. A leathery hand clasped over her mouth. Her vocal chords strained. Foam dripped from between his fingers. They tasted like rubber chalk. She kicked and scratched but nothing she did injured the preacher. Even as she took a hold of his ear. She dug her nails in and tore the tip away. She hurled it to the ground while he wrestled with her. In a glimpse she saw that his ears weren't round, but sharp and pointed. Blood dripped down the side of the preacher’s face. Though he smiled just like before, but this time with a jubilant sprite dancing on his tongue. His teeth, she noticed, all flat, and long like nail files that extended from his deformed features. He hurled the girl into the trunk, and slammed it shut on her. He picked his ear back up. It almost twitched out of his hand, but caught it by pinching the pointed tip between his sixth finger and the index finger. He noticed it changing color and hurriedly jammed it back on his head. The girl still screamed and beat on the trunk. The preacher couldn't wait for his ear to re attach. He jogged back into the mercedes and drove off.

-Ulysses walked into town. He found the silence heavy like a tidal wave hung suspended. Strange, even for a small town. Not one car drove down the road. He knocked on the door. His mother opened it and she gleefully embraced him. He changed from his road greased rags, and into nice clothes from his closet. Then he came back into the kitchen where mom watched the sunset with troubled eyes.

“Did you hear about what happened?”

“No, mother.”

“A little girl’s disappeared. Kaleb and Imogen’s little girl. Been listening to it on the radio.”

“That’s a shame... A damn shame.”

“She didn’t come home. They found her school bag by the railroad tracks.”

“Don’t worry. Nothing stays lost forever.”

That night, Ulysses laid in bed without sleep. He climbed from bed and left the house with a rusted piece of jewelry dangling before him. He followed its whispers around the old shilohs, and the abandoned loading dock by the river, and then around the trailers. He wrote down the noises he heard. An old man smoking on his porch waved at Ulysses with two fingers. He waved back. Along the river bed he walked, then up onto a shelf of trees he hiked. Thunder brewed in the distance. But the rain would go south and miss the town, he hoped.

Kaleb saw his daughter every night. Sometimes walking in the halls, sometimes riding her bike up and down the street. Sometimes eating at the kitchen table with her elbows on the surface- the way He and Hildegard scolded her not to do  at every meal. It didn’t make him angry anymore. Only made him miss her more. Yet still, if he called to her to be careful, to mind her manners, to brush her hair or teeth, she vanished. Imogen saw her too. Near as much as she saw her husband, because she spent most of her time at the restaurant ever since the disappearance. They saw someone else too. A preacher in black with bleeding fangs and starving, desperate eyes bulging from his skull. His steps echoed at night. He held a night claw hammer in one hand, and nails in another. He spike in latin verses while Imogen bathed. He stood in the corner and counted to one thousand while Kaleb read in the living room.

One day, Kaleb woke up and found the marital bed empty, and three suitcases missing, Imogen’s closet cleaned out, the bathroom sink cleared, and twelve thousand dollars missing from the bank account. She took the car too. No note, but he knew where she went. She left weeks before, but every morning it felt like a fresh development.

“Even if you find him, there’s bringing her back.” Kaleb recited to his steaming coffee. His only prayer in the world. Morning fog covered the streets. He waited for Hildegard's likeness. Even if he couldn’t touch her, at least he could hear her bare feet against the hardwood. He neglected his appointments, sitting around, listening and watching. But she didn’t come. The searches recovered no body. The river flooded and kept searchers away from much of the land they would otherwise be able to transverse. Rain storm after rainstorm came. The search is delayed, the search is delayed. Eventually, it's been weeks. Not even a sign of the girl. Before Kaleb knew it, the day ended and night fell. He wasted the light away, and didn’t even feel tired enough to fall asleep. He sat in a lounge chair, the ticking clock lost. A glass in his hand. Eighty proof. He hoped he’d find it a sleep aide, but all it did was make him wish for sobriety. No fun or ease came from the booze, only a feverish feeling that he could not kill. A knock disturbed his drunken trance. Small raps, two at at time. Ulysses, he knew- the town weirdo, a former classmate. Harmless, but a nocturnal animal with "obscene hobbies". Naturally, many suspected Ulysses of the disappearance. Most in town blamed him whenever someone ran away or died. Kaleb encouraged them all to stop treating poor Ulysses like a witch, issuing that they mind their own business and let the wierdo be weird if it's not hurting anyone. Still, no one knew what this man did in his spare time, but none liked the family he hailed from because of their scandalous history. One great ancestor was a slave catcher. Ulysses’father a con artist. His mother now too old to continue her drug habit, but in her  younger days she hustled fools in the bar. Ulysses, as much as Kaleb knew, nothing like them. In fact, he realized why he liked Ulysses so much- he reminded him of Hildegard.

He got up, calling for the visitor to stop because the knocking drove bolts into his brain. Kaleb turned on the porch light. Ulysses wearing a raincoat and boots stood outside. He looked like a ghillie suit, covered in all manner of growth, as if he’d spent these few weeks living in a bog. Kaleb opened the door, exhausted and sad, he told Ulysses to go home but the town weirdo insisted. “I know where she is.”

Ulysses lay out five cards in a cross, two in the middle he overturned them. The lights flicked. Kaleb neglected to pay the power bill. And the water bill. And the cable bill.

“You saw her?” Kaleb asked again.

“Yes. Shall we go to the police?”

“No…. they’ll take her away.”

“Then, I will show you.”

Ulysses held his hand out for Kaleb to grab, and then they set out. Ulysses asked Kaleb to wear boots at least, pointing to Kaleb’s bare feet, but he ignored Ulysses and left the house. They crossed down a stone stairway through the foliage down to leafy hills where pioneer cabins once stood. Kaleb knew it will. He used to walk through these trees everyday. Ulysses held a dangling piece of metal, and he watched its every movement like a hunter watching a doe. He even held it to his ear, and stopped moving until he collected some new information, and pointed a new way forward. They marched through a flooded woodland. Branches and rocks stabbed his feet, but Kaleb didn’t care. Even as the water rose to his knees, and the thick mud clasped his feet. The cold! Despite his wounds, he felt no pain. The mud and water numbed his lower body. Mist floated on top of the water. Before long, Kaleb did not recognize the land. The trees each looked ancient as if composed by secrets. They reached up, the autumn claiming their coats, but with black bark against the moonlight they appeared as horrid spirits reaching for the moon as if it were fleeting hope. The branches swooped and dripped. He feared they searched for him, hungered for his bones to be splintered and flesh removed, replaced with the blackened bark, and he would live as one of their cursid selves. But the metal that Ulysses held caught his attention as if glowed in the moonlight, without rust, a silvery luster sparkled.

   “We’re near.”

    “I need a minute…” Kaleb leaned on Ulysses. He took rapid breathes. Anxiety shook his spine. “Just to breathe.”

    “I came to you the minute I found her. I warn you-”

   “What happened to her?”

   “It looks like…” Ulysses pulled a flashlight out from his pocket, hit the switch, but no light came on. He shook it, opened the back panel and started fumbling with batteries.

“Looks like what?” A poison syrup flowed into his guts.

“Someone experimented on her.”

“What? Experiment?”

“You won’t believe me until you see I’m afraid.”

“What did they do? What did they do?” Kaleb knocked the flashlight from Ulysses’ hand and grabbed him by the shoulders.

“They tested magic on her.”

    Kaleb let go of Ulysses, but stared at him with conjecture, until the silence between them indicated to Kaleb that Ulysses believed what he said. Ulysses reached down into the mud. The flashlight landed with the source faced down, the mechanism standing upright. He picked it like a flower, and scraped the mud off with his thumb. He turned it on. Kaleb never saw him insert the batteries. The light cut through the dark, and focused on one tree not twenty feet away, yet hidden under a veil of vines and swamp smog. Ulysses focused the light on what looked like a darkened star. Her narrow limbs bound to the tree trunk. A bag over her lopsided head. The light revealed her lifeless body, and the inflictions taking her to judgement. Kaleb covered his mouth, his teeth nibbling on the fat of his hand. His attention unbreakable. He and Ulysses marched until they stood mere inches from the tree. Kaleb reached upwards, but could not reach her. He asked Ulysses for help getting her down-

“And what do you intend on doing with her? Not bury her, or you would've called the police. So what happens once you have her down?”

“I… I don't know, I only want to look at her.”

Ulysses shined the light on the stones growing from her thighs. Each one a different color, though each shined like a piece of  silicon, and shaped like a network of cubes interconnected like a chain.

“That’s from overcharging the body with alteration energies. These are from the body draining the excess.”

“Is it painful?”

“Life a truck being squeezed into your skin. The bag kept her screams quiet. See that marking? No matter how much she screamed, the sound echoed only in the fibers of the canvas. Resilient girl, looks like she almost fought her way free…” he shined the light on a small hole in the middle of her chest. No blood, nor burns- a perfect ring cut into her clothes and flesh. Ulysses walked around the tree with the light to show that the hole exited the opposite end of het tree. “So they killed her with that.”

Kaleb vomited. No matter how much he purged, the noxious syrup stayed in his gut. He wiped his mouth and stood back up, but kept his view away from the corpse of his spawn pinned above him. What  unknowable horrors inflicted onto the girl remained both fascinating, and heart wrenching. Ulysses kept inspecting the body, writing down notes.

“I can bring her back, Kaleb. If you wish for me to do it.”

“Will she be the same as before?”

“No. She will remember everything that happened to her before she died, and she will take everything she gained from the afterlife with her. Do you want me to go through with this?”

“Yes. Yes, Please do so.”

“As you request. Go home. Rest. I won’t promise perfect results. I’ve only done this one other time. But I’ll need to be alone for the ritual.” He began producing artifacts from his pockets. Kaleb remained, looking at Ulysses with disbelieving concern of a lost child. “You don’t want to see this. Go home. I’ll tell you if I am successful in the morning.”

“You expect me to leave?”

“I don't want you to see this. I don't know what you will do. Go home.”

“I want to see her…”

“No, you don’t.” Kaleb looked again at Ulysses, this time his eyes glowed in the dark a faint blue. Mist and ice flakes dropped from his lashes. Ulysses no longer minded Kaleb. He already begun.

Kaleb watched some. His heart raced, but his stomach ached like a ticking bomb. A strange affection warmed his shoulder, an invisible hand. Betrayal is leaving this place, he thought, struggling to watch, too afraid to intervene because the voice of Ulysses’ was no longer his own- he spoke to someone, a stranger in his throat. The tree dropped. Not a thundering collapse, but as if lowered by suspension cables, it leaned over slowly, landing in the mud without a sound, stirring no mist and disturbing no life. Ulysses climbed on the trunk, and unwound the bindings about Hildegard. He took the canvas away, and gagged at what he saw. What the perpetrator hoped to achieve from her Ulysses would never reveal to Kaleb, but Kaleb saw Ulysses put the bag back on and swear. Kaleb felt curious, so he approached. Ulysses’ whole body misted, and cold blossoms of air exhausted from his nostrils and mouth, but also ears and hair. He produced a mason jar filled with a homemade concoction. A dark, but sweet looking solution. Ulysses pulled out a paint brush, dipped it in, and began to coat Hildegard, clothes, hair, bag, and all. Kaleb figured his toes must be blue by now because he didn’t know if he was sinking or just collapsing under his own fatigue. A wandering hand lifted towards Hildegard, Kaleb had no control of his body. He wanted to see her, to see her sugar sweet face just once more, he’d give anything, anything… he reached, Ulysses concentrated on his work and did not noticed the wandering hand until the bag had slid part way down, where a mouth should have been. Kaleb gasped. His spine shook. His genitals lifted and his ears twitched as bodily fluids rioted inside his body. She had no mouth, but instead the proboscis of a mosquito. He fell back into the mud. As Ulysses attempted his spell- the body remained still, but wings- transparent, paper thin wings far too small to carry even a small human, flapped against the trunk from behind her shoulders.

Kaleb heeded the advice of Ulysses, and disappeared from the scene as fast as his condition allowed. He walked like a drunk, though the alcohol already passed. Even as he stepped out from the chilled swamp of flooded river and stepped on hard ground. He felt like a walking dream. Until he came home. He saw the car. And a light on. He wandered inside, finding the door wide open. Inside he walked, seeing Imogen there at the kitchen table, every pore of her body filled with blood and mud. He recognized her by her steel glance, those black pearls in her sea of blue. She held something for him to see. He tip toed closer, a great happiness reborn, but along with it, a dire sense of regret for he knew what Ulysses was doing, but began to fear that he made the wrong decision.  In fact, deep in his heart, he knew it to be a terrible idea…. But he couldn’t leave her alone, once she was dead.

He stood at the opposite end of the table. Imogen held in her filthy palms a severed ear. Kaleb took a closer look. Imogen anticipated Kaleb’s disgust, but he looked at it with a matter of understanding. A pointed ear.

He told her nothing of Ulysses and Hildegard. They bathed, and went to sleep. At sunup, both found themselves deep in the wonderland of all powerful sleep. But the house was cold. The front door hung open, and autumn drafts chilled the house. Muddy footprints lead up the stairs, a rain coat dragged against the wooden steps. His cargo slept soundly. He carried her wrapped in a wool blanket to the top of the stairs, and then silently through the hall. The room at the end, he determined to be hers because it was the only one locked. With a quick whisper, the lock undid itself, and Ulysses entered. He felt uncomfortable in this house, in this room. He did not intend to idle, so he lay the girl down, and tucked her in. Ulysses left her door open, but shut the front door as he left. Feeling his work done, Ulysses re entered obscurity where someone might need his talents.