The subject awoke from his van ride. His head rolled around and he thought that if he didn’t stop rolling he’d fall to the floor, but in his confusion he didn’t feel the ropes or the heat from the hood over his head until A gauntlet gripped his head and removed the hood. The fluorescent bulb blinded the suspect and glimmering dust filled his eyes as the sting numbed and he saw one single man standing before him in fatigues and knee high boots.
“What now?” The subject asked through his bruised mouth. “The stress positions? The baby crying soundtracks?”
The interrogator cocked his head without losing a millimeter of focus.
“What’s the agent’s name?” His tone a bitter roast, flawlessly uttered in the subject’s own language.
“Fuck you.”
The interrogator straightened his head and walked back into the dark. The subject tried to see in the dark around him. Then the lightbulb snapped and shattered. The interrogator asked a new question.
“What scares you the most?” the same harsh tongue directing his language. Cold hands fell over both subject's shoulders and hot breath went down the back of his neck. The subject relaxed, slowed his heartbeat and breathed with the presence behind him until the grips lifted to caress his neck, his throat, his chin and cheeks. The bruised flesh caused the subject to flinch but the hands held on.
“There’s nothing you can do to make me talk.”
“No? After what I do to you, you’ll see things differently”
“Fuck off.”
“Such ugly words.”
Wood grinded against the floor. The dead lightbulb winded and another made the reverse sounds. The light snapped on. The subject looked for the interrogator but only saw a table with a foot tall object covered in a velour cover. The hands remained over his ears. Two fingers parted, the tone darkened even further- but now it danced with delight.
“Then we’ll have to do it my way.” The interrogator whispered. With one gloved hand over the subject’s head, the interrogator reached and lifted the cover and revealed the stone toes, the round belly, and sculpted round face of a foreign idol.
“That’s your doll?”
The interrogator squeezed his subject’s head with both gauntlets and forced his head towards the idol until he heard the ropes strain. The subject moaned like a stubbed his toe. The idol started to change before his eyes. First it grew flesh- gelatin blood and leather skin. Then it’s face twisted from the primal elements of human features to the long, beady features of a plague ridden possum. Other smaller possums drooled from its mouth as if moved with the body of a sturgeon squirming towards him.
The subject screamed louder than he knew his vocal chords capable and lost his voice as the possum sucked it away with its vacuum eyes. Into the vacuum he peered, and inside he saw only a rainbow tunnel with a formless monstrosity floating towards him. He tried to look away but the interrogator only pushed his head deeper, so close that the possum licked the subject’s nose and sunk its brittle fangs into his cartilage.
The subject gasped for air like a diver finding the surface.
“My nose is hurt! I can’t breath!” he claimed trying to break from the ropes. The interrogator sat back and watched him struggle. His nose unscathed. The idol just stone under a light, its shadow a ring on the table, but the subject fought to break free as if a buzz-saw inched towards his chest.
The interrogator picked up the idol and dropped it in the lap of his subject. The high pitch wail caused nails on chalkboards to plug their ears.
“ITS EATING ME” he screamed as if his voice could pull loose his spine, wide eyes with his pupils not dilated- but pure shine like the tip of a radio tower at sunrise. His fingers erected and shook- his feet lifted from the floor and tried to kick loose.
The idol fell between his legs, and the subject held his breath for a second before unleashing a horrid blizzard of obscenity. The gauntlets pinched flesh under his chin and behind his ears. He didn’t even notice the pressure splitting the skin.
“Help! Get me out!” The subject begged, tears and snot cascading down his face, his vitality bound to a sinking mast.
The light snapped off again. When it turned on, Ernest put his sculpture of breathing nightmares closer to the subject to show it as was. Dead rock.
Sweat dripped from his facial scars. The subject looked to his interrogator with shaking eyes. The interrogator sat in silence below the sweltering bulb. He sat as a fortress does on the coast. His subject shook and finally told him what he wanted to know.
“The agent’s name is Gracious.”
“His real name?”
“Petrescu. I don’t know his first name.”
“When does he leave?”
“Tonight at nine pm. He’s boarding the plane at the city airport.”
The interrogator stood up and dropped the cover back over the idol. The subject sighed in relief and collapsed in shame. Other suits swept in from the corners, unbound him, and scooped him up by the arms. His feet dragged behind him. He never resisted again, as by day end the subject fell into a vegetative state and the only words he could possibly say to the doctors cleaning the drool from his chin was “the agent’s name is Gracious…. Petrescu...Tonight at 9pm...” over and over again. MRI’s found his brain signals matched that of an cathinones abuser- despite no substances detected in his bloodstream.
Ernest left the outpost in his civilian clothing driving his luxury truck through dark forest roads to wide open highway dividing the plains with a graveyard of road kill. The sun just broke over the east. Sea-blue light emerged from darkened space and revealed a fallen tree. The ancient layers of ringwork blocked the road with its weather scarred husk. The truck slowed and stopped. A scarf of roots dangled like braids. Within the axis of tangles hung a Bocote casket.
It can’t be… he thought.
He climbed from his car and climbed atop the trunk. Lightning slash burned down the middle. Ernest climbed on top and walked between the split to the nest of roots. The tangles wrapped around the casket, sealing it like chains.
Its no coffin, his blood chilled when his finger tips traced the eroded inscription. With a knife he he cut the roots, and the coffin fell, tumbled, and landed right side up. Ernest jumped down. The casket didn’t open for him no matter how hard he tried, and no matter what tool he used from his truck.
Ernest lifted one end of the casket and dragged it to the truck. He knew how to throw men three times his size but lifting the casket took considerable effort. He knew the sensation of pins pressing up from under his muscles. The same foul air arose from the cracks in the caskets as did the crater he recovered the idol from. The same fear beat along with his heart as when his grandfather showed him the Needles.
He saw the flashes from the trees but heard only the ringing punches once the casket lay in the bed of his truck. The echo of the bullets lingered like funeral bells. The interrogator circled his truck. Bullets struck his tires. Five shots fired, only one missed and shot through the fender above the tire. Fluid leaked and sunk beneath the gravel.
Headlights appeared from behind a cover of leaves, driving across the long grass from the trees. A camouflage netting dressed the truck, branches and foliage decorated the windows. The moisture in the morning air vaporized in the floodlights. The driver wore a leather mask. In the dim morning his eyes and mouth looked like moonlit basins.
The engine resounded with heavy combustions. The driver hollered to Ernest, a hunting rifle hung in the rear window.
“Where you taking that?”
“Home..”
“I need that coffin.”
“It’s evil.”
“You don’t know what evil is.” The driver leaned out the window into the revealing twilight. He wore no mask- his facial flesh the texture of plastic reconstruction, with bruised, asymmetrical, and mismatched lips and eyes blessing him with a somewhat human face. . “but if I don’t have it, than nothing makes a difference.”
The interrogator crossed his arms. The driver stepped from his truck. His body overweight and limping. He carried no weapons, but reached into his coat without looking away from Ernest. Ernest studied the stitch work around his nose and down the outerior of his eye sockets. He did the work himself.
“If you’re on the run, the Needles won’t help you.”
“No, no, Ernest. I am your brother. Your real brother. Broderick tried to kill me like the rest of us. I escaped. Oh, my brother! How it pleases me to see you once again. ”
“I’ve never met you.”
“No? But I remember you from watching in the tunnels beneath the house with our other brothers and sisters… I remember your first car was a 1979 Plymouth Barracuda. I remember where you buried your pet Conure, Peaches, beneath its birdhouse behind the greenhouse… I remember telling you about the casket. I remember...”
“You’re trying to bring the Matriarch back.”
“As her only living legitimate heir, it's my duty. Then we can replenish the world with our bloodline again.”
“Only?”
“Yes. Unlike I, our siblings did not develop working minds, and so they remained as feral animals until I took it upon myself to euthanize them. I studied how to all by myself you see. I am Dr. Ernest.”
“Well, brother- I intend to destroy it. Once and for all.”
“Then our Matriarch will die.”
“Good. Let her join the rest.”
“Come now, father would be ashamed to see us fight. Please, reconsider… for I will not offer a second time.”
The Dr limped back into his track. Ernest stood still and waited as vehicle crunched up the gravel against the bed of his truck. The Dr hopped out, and dragged the casket from one truck bed to the other. He opened the passenger door and gestured for Ernest to come along for a ride.
“Don’t forget the idol. The Matriarch gave it to you, so we better treat it like platinum gold.” The brother stopped Ernest, who returned with the idol wrapped in its cover.
When Ernest turned 12 the Patriarch if the clan took him to the far side of their mansion. He pointed out the window to the distance summits and the toiled fields. Ghosts of dust and fog blew over the expanse. A wide lake separated them from the other mansions. They glowed like orbs on the other side of the fog.
“The time is here now. We must talk.”
“You aren’t going to tell me about...”
“Your springtide juvenescence? In a way. But this is about our family. Where do you think our wealth came from?”
“Great-Grand pa Foster invented the-”
“I told you he invented the Thompson machine gun. Your father told you the jet engine. Your uncle told you he invented dog food! Know what it all means?”
“Great-grandpa was talented?”
“No, grandson. Eustace Foster was a pimp. Come. You’re going to see where the wealth really comes.” He took the eldest son by the shoulder bone and pulled him close- so near that he heard the purple veins rubbing against each other. “This stays private. You’re not even to tell your wife- but you will tell your first born son. And it will become his responsibility as this will become yours.”
He stepped back clutching Ernest's shoulder bone, his arms stretching and straightening, a space developing between them, unknotting of thread. Ernest looked up at his grandfather’s pox scars, but only with that space between them did he notice. He smelled smoke, and looked down to see a hole burning through the floor between them.
Ernest stepped away from his grandpa's clutch and ran from the room. The corridors loomed and spiraled before him. The drained paintings of nameless faces watching his shadow pass across the window ling on the floor. Wilting flowers in china vases tipped and poured brown fluid. The smoke lingered behind him like a pursuing minotaur. The maze of doorways and useless furniture covered in dusty sheets tore him in half as he did not know where to go. He knew of grandpa's mansion but never been there before. To left he saw a white door, and to his right an iron gate closing off another corridor. The patriarch stood in front of him, rubbing his hands together.
“Someone has already told you.” he deduced. “but you still must be the one.”
The eldest son hurled his ribs into the white door. The door swung open, but the room lead to a moaning pit with something like fluttering scarves of transparent fabric rising and falling like eventide longing.
“It’s a shame. You see, your grandmother is… sick. No medicine in the world can help her. Perhaps you should seek her wisdom, if she can still muster the life to tell you.”
The patriarch used a cane to stab into the wall. A rope pulled a wooden spindel. The iron gate lifted with rusty screeches. The eldest son covered his ears. A white hand rose from the pit and slammed the door shut. Old air wheezed down hollow vents and leaked from cracks in the walls. Firelight from his grandmother’s room shone a block of glowing color against the wall at the corner.
“Please no, I don’t want to see grandmother.”
“Now, your poor grandmother has been waiting to see you ever since you came home. Now I told her to wait until after I showed you the Needles, but now I see that you don’t understand.”
The eldest son carried down the corridor with quiet steps towards the warm, almost pink glow. A wetness warmed his chest. His fingers tingled. Once the gleam from the lamps glistened in hi eyes he paused and stood in the doorway. The netting over her bed obscured the women laying. Only a withered relic among the burning pink of the curtains. When he saw her outline lift, and a bony hand pressed against the netting. Light cut through the gaps of her metacarpals.
The eldest turned away, his heart freezing over.
“You may not like it,” the Patriarch said. “but you must...”
He guided the Ernest back to the library. Ernest took notice of the surd volumes. Some nameless but bound in goatskin among other titles like iniquitatem patrum in sinum veneficus, and venator esse maleficarum. The hole still burned in the floor. An escalade lowered from the ceiling. The Patriarch held on, and the Ernest followed him down. They climbed lower than the basement, lower than the sub basement, lower than the septic tank. There they stepped off the ladder into a chamber of both beauty and horror. Gold in the clutches of the decomposed. Glass eyes in the skulls of a naked skeletons sitting in sinking thrones.
A coffin sat on a tablet. Its open lid invited Ernest to peek inside. No velvet threadwork adorned the lips nor did shining fabric bedeck the bottom of the lid. Row after row of shining needles gleamed as keys on a strange piano. The points faced him and threatened him to look deeper. Needles ran along the interior walls. No cushion in the bed of the coffin, but tiny lines, fine as sphynx hairs, in the shape of the human circulatory system. A drain gaped where the heart would be.
“You’re great-grandfather found this on his travels to the Dark Continent. He tells me it appeared after a storm blew away the cattle of Harar Jugol. He found it among the ruins. He pricked his finger on one of the needles. The wound never healed.” The Patriarch ran his gloved fingers down the shaft. He peeled away the gloves to reveal gos wrapping. Vibrant red spots unfurled and revolved around his hand as he unwrapped the fabric, the spots widened with each winding motion until the gos dropped and his blood dripped to the floor. “And he told me- ‘Son, you will carry this on, or I will come back from the dead and open your veins, and still you will provide for the family.’ Then he told me to place my hands on the rim, and slammed the lid. By then we no longer had servants to employ. And after time I ran out of extended family. I found myself stalking the streets at night- but the blood works the same. But now I am too old. Your father will be so proud...”
“What happens if we stop?”
The Patriarch whipped him across the face. The old man’s blood stuck to the eldest son’s cheek.
“The time is coming. The hounds are hungry. Can't you feel it in the air? The end draws nigh, but even so we shall live on and outlive the ages.”
The Patriarch laid inside of the coffin. “Still cozy. Go ahead, close the casket.”
Ernest trembled.
“Now, now... go on, go ahead.”
Ernest stood still as his grandfather closed his eyes and made himself comfortable, laying back and looking almost asleep. The needles confined his body. His throat and eyelids looked to be made from the same soft, tender flesh. Patient, his cheeks rosy and his jaw relaxed. Ernest no longer doubted the Patriarch understood what he asked of his grandson.
A black cat leapt from the hole and landed on its feet. The creature darted around the room, under the eldest son’s feet, into the dark corner- where it sprang on the coffin lid and brought it down like nylon flooring.
The cat sat on top and licked its paw. The eldest son dropped to his knees and placed an ear to the coffin. He heard no screams, no agony, no wrestling, and no resistance. He rose and cat hissed. He scowled at the cat, and grabbed her by the scruff. The cat scratched his hand, but he pulled her away and the cat ran off.
He lifted the lid expecting to see a bath of gore, but instead he saw the lines filled with blood flowing into the drain. The needles shined like autumn polish. He closed the lid and climbed up the escalade back to the library followed by chilling revenants of suffocated wails.
Here a beautiful young woman lurched towards him in her night sheet, her spine and legs slender but curved like an apple about to drop from its branch. She walked without moving her feet, and talked without moving her mouth
“Grandson! How happy I am to see you. Come here. I have a present for you...”
The family mansion looked like a metal helmet laying lopsided in the rain. The wearer long since sunken into the earth. The rocks tumbled down the slopes into the narrow road. Branches and thorns scraped the netting. Ivy bounded the gate. A rusted chain kept it shut. Ernest stepped from the car, and used a key to unlock the chain and push open the gate.
The mansion faced them poised as a dark lord with deprived prayers in his fists. The columns cracked and bent, some like curled locks, others leaned into the house. Trash bags covered the windows. Birds flew in and out of the holes in the roof. The weather vane lay buried in the grass.
They went around the house to the cellar of the washhouse. The light chain did nothing when Ernest tested it. His brother murmured like a frightened child facing a walking sweater watching from the closet ajar.
Ernest rubbed his temples and felt around the walls until his fingers slid into a hole in the walls. Inside he felt a warm metal hook. He tried to pull it out, but his two fingers nearly broke trying to take hold of the trigger. The brother stepped forward, “let me try” he begged, reaching in and twisted the trigger. The wall clicked and a small square opened by their knees.
The brother said, “It seemed so much bigger back then.”
The brother lay on his gut and wriggled through the tunnel with Ernest following behind him. The tunnel scraped their elbows and knees. It sank and constricted before lifting again and broadening to a series of steps that took them to an empty closet. The clothing rail bare, and faded price tags laying on the floor. The brother gently opened the closet door and Ernest’s rose into the space. No light filled the house but for the glowing dust floating around the hallways. Spots of radiance followed along the walls. The brother stepped out- Ernest called to him
“You’re forgetting the Needles.”
“No, we need to see the Matriarch first...”
Ernest shivered at the idea, but followed as his brother entered the shadows.
The walls peeled and the rugs rotted. Doors lay on the floor, portraits lay face down to be crunched by their boots.
“This was all ours...” the brother revelled.
Ernest stopped at the familiar gate. He touched the cross joints of iron and listened to the wind howl from the gaps in the walls. A rat sat on the other side and watched him. The brother removed panels from the wall, and slid inside. The plaster cracked and crumbled as he pushed through, kicking free from wires and prying wood apart with his hands. Panels on the other side dropped, and the brother emerged with his hands raw. Ernest went into wall after his, coughing and watching his step for mouse tails.
On the other side, both watched the emergence of the Matriarch's chamber. They approached together, but the brother stopped.
“I... can’t. I can’t go in. I can’t face her. I’ll get the Needles. Tell me what she looks like. If you’d please.” He shuffled away into the dark, hurriedly.
Ernest stood in the hall familiar tensions igniting mortal coils against his intestines and through his body. Window light shined a pathway from the looming doorframe to the Matriarch’s canopy mattress. He stepped into the stream- a bridge of moonlight across an endless abyss. His boots let imprints in the dust. The soles pounded like anvils no matter how feathersome he placed his steps. His heart raced. Sweat dripped. Tiny eyes watched him from the ceiling.
Moths flew around the bed and clung to the outer netting. The smell of fireworks and burning leaves filled the room. He heard slow, distant breathes. The smacking of cheeks, the licking of lips with a dry tongue. He saw the dark outline on the other side laying on the mattress. He parted the veil, brushing it aside like hair to uncover a shy smile, and revealed the brown bones of the Matriarch laying in her white sheets. A footlong key lay in her hands. Ernest reached down to take it, stopping when her hand slid from the sheet and brushed against his arm. He took one more look. She didn’t move. So he took the key, and placed the idol where she held the key. He drew back to leave, then he heard the sound of crackling twigs.
Her hands rose and wrapped around the idol. The pink light glowed in her ribcage, and out the sockets of her skull.
The brother dragged the coffin up through the tunnel, back into the main floor where he sat after giving up. His wounds hurt more than he expected. He tore curtains from the windows and wrapped his hands, then went back to trying to pry open the casket. Nothing worked until fog lifted from the floor and rose to the ceiling. The brother lit a match to see. The coffin clicked, and the lid wrenched open as if invisible hands lifted it. The fog condensed, and smelled sweet like honey treated alcohol. He looked into the coffin- the needles gleaming and sharp, adjusting to a new size. A pink glow emerged from deep within the fog. It looked to be a mile away. The brother saw it, and heard the dragging of skeletal feet on hardwood. The glow broadened, and the pink red distinct, the source crept closer. He heard the Matriarch’s hot breath among the grinding syllables of a lost language. The Brother’s deformed tear ducts squirmed. He climbed into the coffin, lowering his body inside and keeping his legs and arms tight together as the needles shined in the pink glow. Bony hands took the rim of the lid, and with a slamming motion her white sheets fluttered as sinister air escaped from the coffin.
A young woman sat on the coffin with the idol in her hands. A black cat brushed against her ankles.
No comments:
Post a Comment