Afterlife (29 page)
Authors: Douglas Clegg
“Christ,” Julie said. She had lost the nervous feeling, knowing she had a purpose here that was not about herself. That was not about weakness. But she saw her daughter’s hair, from under the covers, and the lump of her body under the covers.
The blond man’s face betrayed nothing but caution. He had half risen up in the chair, and then, seeing Hut, sat back down.
Eleanor’s voice behind her. “Now, Julie, you must be exhausted. Why don’t you just…”
“I’m not your patient anymore,” Julie said. “Talk to your Great God Hut.”
“He’s not a—” the blond man began, and then silenced himself.
Julie said to herself:
don’t be afraid. You don’t matter anymore. They don’t matter. All that matters is Livy. All that matters is my little girl.
“You’re ghouls, aren’t you?” Julie whispered. “I’m not even sure if you’re human.”
“Good grief,” Eleanor said. “Julie, this isn’t mysticism. It’s pure science. It’s just a science we didn’t know about.”
“I don’t need to hear about this death cult anymore,” Julie said. She had that one thing left in her. She had hope. Maybe Livy was alive. They’d only had her one day, after all. Not even a full day.
“It’s reality. Objective reality,” Eleanor said. “It’s not a cult.”
“It’s not therapy, either,” Julie spat back. She pointed the gun at the teenaged girl. “Get away from my daughter.”
If you just ignore them, they’ll feel your will. Will is everything. They’re weak people who believe in nonsense. They think Hut is a God.
“Julie,” Hut began, but silenced himself.
If you’re psychic, guess what I’m thinking. Guess what my plan is. Guess.
She fought to keep her eyes from welling with tears. She moved to the bed, and sat at the edge of it.
“Livy,” she whispered softly. “Livy.”
“She can’t hear you,” Eleanor said, nearly as softly. “The auditory nerve is—”
“Shut up, Eleanor,” Julie said. “Just shut up.”
Julie felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Eleanor.
Old friend. Comforter. Therapist. Monster.
Julie shrugged her away.
“My God.” Julie barely was able to get the words out.
Minutes seemed to pass, as she turned the words over in her mind.
She’s dead. They did it. They killed her.
They tested her.
The way they killed Matty. They used her for their test.
Her own father…
She hadn’t really believed it would happen. She hadn’t believed in her heart that it wasn’t all fantasy. That it wasn’t all mumbo-jumbo.
PSI. Ability X. Resurrection. Death Cult. Project Daylight.
Then, her voice returned. “My God. She’s dead. She’s dead. You already killed her, you really killed…” Julie murmured, covering her face, the tears breaking from within her, a dam burst, and she could not see when she had brought her hands away from her eyes, for the tears had nearly blinded her. “Monsters! Monsters!”
Hut’s voice, “She’s not dead. I know she’s not. Death is a state of consciousness. It’s not what you think.”
“You sick perverted bastard,” Julie thought she said, but wasn’t sure, because she felt knocked out, wiped clean, somehow destroyed by the knowledge of her daughter’s death.
“Three days,” her husband said. “You can’t believe the lies Diamant told. You can’t, Julie. Matty wasn’t right. Mandy and I were too much to produce a child that worked. Two Ability X’s don’t work right in bringing children into the world. Livy will work, because in you, like most people, the gene’s recessive. I know it will work.”
“I don’t listen to dead people,” Julie said. “I don’t listen to mumbo-jumbo.”
She reached out to touch the edge of Livy’s hand.
“It’s not some religion,” Eleanor said. But it was as if she were off in some fog at the edge of the room. “It’s not something as silly as faith.”
“It’s science,” the blond man said. “Pure and simple. It’s a truth that’s been locked away.”
“Locked away by crap mysticism and Christian hogwash,” Eleanor added. “And just plain ignorance. There is no God. There’s no Devil. No heaven. No hell. There is nothing but animal life. We are animals. But we have developed the ability to take this beyond our lifetimes, Julie. Our single lifetimes. To wipe away thousands of years of ignorant mysticism, of this ridiculous Christian magical thinking about life and death.”
“Can’t blame Christianity alone,” the blond man said. “You just can’t. Other religions, too. They just…”
But their voices receded into the dark background of her mind. They babbled on, she knew, but she leaned forward toward her daughter, her beautiful Livy, and remembered the first moment she had known Livy was in her body, and the first moment Livy had cried out at birth, and how, as a baby, Hut had helped change diapers, and how Julie had somehow believed that her family was wonderful and that she and Hut were a team, and that Livy was going to grow up to be a doctor like her daddy or a nurse like mommy or to be an actress like Livy wanted to, or grow into a teenager who would go to her prom, fall in love, go to college, experience the world, travel, and she, her mother, would have all those years with her, would watch her as she grew and changed and became the wonder that Julie knew she would become.
Julie lay down on the bed, cradling her daughter’s lifeless body.
Around her, she saw others draw together in the shadows. She ignored them. All that mattered was Livy.
She is all that remains.
Let them burn away, let the world burn away for all I care, she thought.
She kissed the edge of her daughter’s fragrant hair: chrysanthemums and lilacs, musky and sweet mixed together. She didn’t want to think about how they’d killed her. About how they needed to create fear before death to make their ritual work right. She didn’t want to think about her baby crying out for her Mommy while they did something awful and monstrous to her in her last minutes of life.
Julie closed her eyes, blocked out the others in the room, and held her child tightly.
Perhaps minutes had passed, or hours. Perhaps she drank the chai they brought her, and perhaps she nibbled on some cheddar crackers that Eleanor set down on a plate with some cream cheese. Perhaps it was a day that passed. She slept, she woke, she clutched the gun, but no one bothered her. No one tried to move her or take her weapon away. She got up once or twice to use the bathroom in the hall, and when she did, she felt them watching her but she refused to look them in the eyes. She had blocked the others out, and only knew her child’s body, pressed against her own. She lay on the bed, slept, woke, tried to feel that inside feeling with her daughter that she’d felt with Michael Diamond.
Then, she felt life stirring in Livy’s body.
Eleanor’s voice, beyond the darkness of Julie’s mind, “Look. Look.”
It’s not real. It’s not real.
Julie felt the warmth and the pulsing heartbeat along her daughter’s side, and even the smell of life emanated from her.
The slight heat of her daughter’s breath against her cheek. Had she imagined it? The warmth? The trickle of air?
Eleanor whispered something that almost sounded like a prayer.
Julie opened her eyes and gazed at her daughter’s face.
Remembering what Michael Diamond had told her.
“There’s always hope,” he said. “That’s the last thing to go in life. It’s a blessing and a curse. But sometimes, it’s all we have. Yet, when faced with this, there is no hope. There can be no hope. Do not let hope cloud your resolve.”
“But what hope?” she wanted to ask him now. “What hope?”
And then, his voice was in her head again. Not imagined. Real. Inside her. His connection to her remained, somehow, even among these monsters.
“The human soul is inviolate, Julie. There is always hope because of that. The human soul is inviolate.”
She tried not to think of Matt. Of how Diamond had said he’d died. Maybe it wasn’t completely true. Maybe there was truth on both sides.
I must put those things out of my mind. Only Livy matters. Only Livy.
The human soul is inviolate.
Her soul was somewhere in her body. It could not die. There was no death except for the flesh. But the soul had its journey. Michael Diamond had moved elsewhere when he was burned at Project Daylight. Opened another door. Passed into a passageway that had remained unseen. And then, came back. And he wasn’t dead, was he? Not even now? Maybe they’d done something to him. Maybe they’d buried him alive. Or subdued him in some way, but if she could somehow get him to help again… But even as she thought this, she felt that she was doing the kind of magical thinking that had never gotten her anywhere.
But Livy did not have to go through that passage. Not yet.
She may not even come back bad. She may not be spoiled, the way Diamond had told her. She might be the same. She might even be better. Michael Diamond had been better, after all. Maybe Hut wasn’t. Maybe Matt had come back with slight problems. But it didn’t mean they all did. She believed it. She believed it with a ferocity of emotion. There was no more reason in her life. She had to cling to belief. She had to remember that the world was not all murky darkness. It had benevolence. It had love. It had stronger elements than this Death Cult imagined.
It had hope.
Even in this murderous circle, there could be good rising from it. A hand could be uplifted. It could be raised in prayer. A hand could be held. They weren’t alone. Livy would not be alone. I’ll be there for you, Liv. I will. I will not abandon you. I’ll help you find your soul. I promise.
The human soul, inviolate.
She clung to this idea, as she felt her daughter’s small fingers clutch at her arm and heard the faint growl of a child’s voice.
Douglas Clegg is the award-winning author of several novels and collections, including the bestselling novel,
The Priest of Blood
, as well as
Isis
,
Neverland
,
Purity
and many others.
Clegg is currently at work on a novel about murder, madness and family set on the New England coast, where he also happens to live. Look for the fully-illustrated trade hardcover of
Isis
, a tale of the supernatural, in bookstores everywhere September 29, 2009.
Also on Kindle from Douglas Clegg:
The Vampyricon Trilogy:
The Priest of Blood
The Lady of Serpents
The Queen of Wolves
_________________
Purity, a novella
The Words, a novella
Wild Things: Four Tales
Never speak them.
Never whisper them.
The Words.
The Words is a novella of otherworldly terror and madness from Douglas Clegg, the award-winning author of The Priest of Blood, Isis, Purity, The Hour Before Dark and many others.
The two teenagers invoke the words -- the names of those who walk beyond the veil, in the dark of the Nowhere...
When Mark befriends outsider Dash, he believes his new friend to be an outcast rebel. But a dark mystery unfolds as Dash leads Mark into dangerous games and rituals involving stories of the occult and a strange drug that allows Dash to see into another world -- a world of absolute darkness and terror.
“Your flesh will remember the words even if your mind forgets."
One summer night, on their way with friends to a party, they make a fateful detour to a place where the words of Dash's secret ceremonies will bring a new terror into the world...and where Mark will face unspeakable horror as it comes to monstrous life.
A tale of teen alienation at the crossroads of darkness and absolute brotherhood, The Words will get under your skin...and stay with you long after the lights go out.
"Clegg's stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby." -- Dean Koontz.
"Clegg delivers!" -- John Saul
"Douglas Clegg is one of the best!"-- Richard Laymon
"Clegg is the best horror writer of the post-Stephen King generation!" -- Bentley Little
"Clegg is the future of dark fantasy!" -- Sherrilyn Kenyon
“What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being…”
- M.R. James, from “Casting the Runes”
One: The End Is Like This
The end is like this:
After the last match goes out, he mouths the words to the Our Father, but it brings him no comfort. He remembers The Veil. He remembers the way things moved, and how the sky looked under its influence. He doubts now that a prayer could be answered. He doubts everything he has come to believe about the world.
The echo of the last scream. He can hear it, even though the room is silent. It seems to be in his head now: the final cry.
Hope it’s final.
The scream is too seductive, he knows. He understands what’s out there. It’s attracted to noise, because it doesn’t see with its eyes anymore. It sees by smell and sound and vibration. He has begun to think of it by its new name, only he doesn’t want to ever say that name out loud. Again.
Your flesh won’t forget.
Prickly feeling along the backs of his hands, along his calves. In his mind, he goes through the alphabet, trying to latch onto something he can work around. Something that will give him a jump into remembering the words.
He presses himself against the wall as if it will hide him. Rough stone. No light. Need light. Damn. He thinks he must be delirious because the goofiest things go through his mind: Michelle’s phrase, Unfrigginlikely, Spaceman Mark. Those aren’t the words. Spaceman Mark. Hey, Space! What planet you on today? Planet Dark, that’s what I’m on. Planet Midnight.
And out of matches.
The wind dies, momentarily, beyond the cracked window.
The damn ticking of the watch. Someone’s heartbeat. The sensation of freezing and burning alternately – a fever. The sticky feeling under his armpits. The rough feeling of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The interminable waiting. Seconds that become hours in his mind. In those seconds, he is running through sounds in his head – the words? What are they? Laiya-oauwraii…no. That’s the beginning of the name. Don’t say it again. It might call it right to you. You might make it stronger. For all you know. What the hell are the words?
He clutches the carved bone in his left hand. It’s smooth in his fist. Like ivory, a tusk from some fallen beast. Slight ridges where the words are carved. Like trying to read Braille, only he’s never studied. If only I could read them. Need to get light. Some light.
Distracted by the smell.
That would be the first one it got.
Over in the corner, something moves. Darkness against darkness.
Someone he can’t see in the dark is over there.
Eyesight is failure, Dash once told him. Perception is failure. All that there is, all that there ever will be, cannot be perceived in the light of day. At night, the only perceptions turn inward.
The words? he thinks. The words. Maybe if you remember them, you can stop it. Maybe it reverses. Or maybe if you just say them…
Moves his lips, trying to form vowel sounds.
The dry taste. Humid and weather-scorned all around.
In his throat, a desert.
Every word he has ever heard in his life spins through his mind. But not the words he needs. Not the ones he wants to remember tonight.
A beautiful night. Dark. No light whatsoever but for the ambient light of the world itself. Summer. Humid. Post-storm. One of those rich storms that sweeps the sky with crackling blue and white lightning, and the roars of lions. But the storm has passed – and that curious wet silence remains. Taste of brine in the air from the water, a few miles away.
He remembers summer storms like this – their majesty as they wash the June sky clean, bringing a gloom on their caped shoulders, but leaving behind not a trace of it. The smell of oak and beech and cedar and salt and the murky stink of the ponds and bogs. Their years together, all in those smells. All in the dark.
The night, summer, perhaps just a few hours before the sun might rise.
Might.
He wonders if he’ll ever see another storm. Another summer.
Another dawn.
Those damn words.
“Your flesh will remember the name even if your mind forgets,” Dash had told him, and he had still thought it was a game when Dash had said it. “The name gets in your bones and in your heart. Just by hearing it once. But the words are harder to remember. They don’t want you to know the words because it binds them. So, listen very carefully. Listen. Each time I say them, repeat them exactly back to me.”
He’s shivering. Sweating. Nausea and dizziness both within him, the pit of his stomach. Something’s scratchy around his balls – feels like a mosquito buzzing all along the inside of his legs. Twitching in his fingers. Tensing his entire body. Afraid to take another breath.
A conversation replays in his head:
“It’s not that hard. Watch.”
“I can’t. I just…”
“All you do is take the thing and bring it down like this. Think of it as a game.”
“I can’t do it.”
“Don’t think of it like that. Pretend it’s a game. It doesn’t mean what it looks like. You’ve been trained to think this is bad by church and school and your parents. And the world outside. But it is not real. It is just a game, only nobody else knows this. They’re stupid. Nobody’s going to get hurt. Least of all one of us. Least of all you or me. I would never let it happen. You’re like my brother.”
“I know. But I can’t.”
“All right. I’ll do it. I’ll just do it. Just remember what you’re supposed to do. As soon as it happens. As soon as my eyes close. Promise? Okay?”
“Okay, okay.”
“And the words. After. If it’s too much. You know what to say. You remember?”
“Yes.”
“You know how to pronounce them? You have to know. If this gets out of hand, you can stop it. The name for me, and the words to stop it. If it’s too awful.”
“I know, I know.”
“’Cause it might get too awful. I don’t know.”
“Sure. Of course. I remember how to say them.”
“And the name?”
He has no problem remembering the name. He’d like to blot it out of his mind. The name is on the tip of his tongue, and he can’t seem to forget how to say it, how to pronounce it perfectly. The words have somehow vanished from his mind.
He tries to remember the words, now. How they sound. The language was foreign, but he couldn’t read them off the bone. Especially with no light. But even if he had some light, he knew the letters looked like scribbles and symbols. They didn’t look like sounds. All he can remember is the name, and he doesn’t want to remember that.
A name like that shouldn’t be said in a church.
A New England church. Saint Something. Old Something Church. Older than old, perhaps. Nearly a crypt. Made of slate and stone. Puritanical and lovely and a bit like a prison, now. Church of punishment. Rocky churchyard behind it. He remembers the graves with the mud and the high grasses and the smell of wild onion and lavender, as if it were years ago rather than the past hour. Smell of summer, wet grass, and that fertile, splendid odor of new leaves, new blossoms.
The smell of life.
He is inside the church. In a room. The altar is at the opposite end.
Danny had the lighter, he thinks. If I get it, maybe I can at least save her.
He wasn’t sure if the shape in the doorway was Danny, or the thing that he didn’t even want to name. Not Dash. Not anyone he had ever met or known. An ‘It’. A Thing. A Creature. Something without a Name.
But it has a name. He knows the name, but he does not intend to ever say it again. He knows the name too well, but it’s the words he keeps trying to remember. The ones that are on the bone. The words that might stop it from continuing.
He tries to lick his lips, but it’s no use. His mouth is dry.
Dry from too much screaming.
Nearby, there’s a very slight noise. A sliver of a noise. He is sensitive to sound.
In the Nowhere.
Someone might’ve just died outside. He doesn’t know for sure. Who? He just heard the last of someone’s life in a slight moaning sound. The open window. No breeze. Just that sound. A soft but unpleasant ohhhhhh.
The puppy is whimpering. Somewhere nearby.
Other sounds, barely audible, seem huge.
Branches against the rooftop. Scraping lightly.
His heartbeat. A rapping hammer.
In the dark, the ticking of his watch is too loud. He slowly draws it from his wrist. Carefully, he presses it down into the left-hand pocket of his jeans. The watch clinks slightly against his keys. He holds his breath.
Needs to cough.
Fight it. Fight it. Swallow the cough. Don’t let it out.
Closes his eyes, against the darkness. Closes his eyes to block it out. To make it go away.
Holds his breath for another count. The cough is gone.
Brief sound.
Someone’s breathing. Over there. Across the room. Small room. More than closet, less than room.
Her? Thank god. Thank god. He licks his lips. Mouth, dry.
After a few minutes, he can just make out her shape.
He’s staring at her, and she’s staring at him, but they can’t really see each other. Just forms in the dark. Michelle? Ambient light from beneath cracks in the walls creates a barely visible aura around her as he stares.
Dead of night. Dread of night.
The dread comes after the knowledge. He remembers the line from the book. That awful book that he thought was fiction.
But the words do not come to him. The sounds of them, just beyond his memory.
Breathing hard, but as quietly as he can.
Smells his own breath. The stink of his underarms. Glaze of sweat covering his body. Shirt plastered to him. Hair wet and greasy against his scalp.
The chill that hasn’t left him, not since he came up out of the earth. Burning chill.
She’s going to do it.
Or I am.
One of them is going to scream again. He knows it. He wasn’t even sure if he had stopped screaming a half hour before.
Problem is, when the screaming starts, it happens.
And neither of them wants it to happen.
But the puppy is okay.
It doesn’t want the puppy.
That’s what someone said before. How many minutes ago? Did he say it? Had he said it and just not remembered it? “It doesn’t want the puppy.”
She whispers something. Or else he imagines she whispers.
Or it’s the sound of the leaves on the trees, brushing the rooftop.
If it’s her, it’s wrong for her to whisper. Neither of them knows what decibel level it needs to find them, but she whispers anyway, “Please say it’s a game. Please god, say it’s a game.”
He’s not close enough, but he wants to hold her. Hold her tight. Rewind the night back to day, back a year or more, so he can undo it all. He wants everything to turn out okay, but he knows it won’t.
Most of all, he wants her to shut her mouth up. He wants to hold her and press his lips or his hand against her mouth and keep in whatever she’s trying to let out.
Silence. Come on, silence. Don’t…
Even her whisper is too loud.
And it hears her.
And it wants to make her scream.
If she screams, it’s all over.
Not just the game. The game will never be over.
If we can just hold out ‘til daylight, he thinks.
But the noise begins. From her throat. He wants to shut her up, but he can’t. He can’t. She’s over there in the dark, and he’s on the other side of the room from her.
The scream is coming up from her lungs in a staccato gurgle. A hiccupping gurgle.
She can’t hold it in.
That’s when he hears the sound.
Not her scream.
Dear Sweet Jesus, do not let that noise out of your mouth. Do not scream. It is inside here. With us.
He hears the sound it makes as it moves. Wet, popping sounds, like bones springing free of joints, and then that stink of over ripeness. Rotten. Steaming. Then that awful thumping begins again.
And the steady hissing, as if dozens of snakes trail behind it.
He leans back against the wall, wanting to press himself into the wood as far as he can go. Wanting his molecules to change and move through the wood so he can just escape. He’s praying so hard he feels like his skull is going to crack open, only the prayers are all messed up and he’s sure they don’t work if you get them wrong. Dear God, Dear Jesus, please help this poor sinner, Hail Mary, full of grace, Hail Mary, full of grace and the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Then, it whispers something in the darkness.
He begins shivering when he hears the words.
The girl in the corner finally begins to scream as if she already knows the game is up.
It sweeps toward her. Sweeps.
He can’t stop it. He’s too scared. He’s so scared he’s afraid he’s going to pee his pants and start giggling because something inside his head is going a little haywire.
And then, he feels the wet fingers –he hopes they’re fingers – along his ankles.
He tries to remain perfectly still.
Perfectly still.
Like a statue.
Like I’m not alive.
Like I’m not even here.
Remember. Come on. Remember. Remember.
Damn it, the words.
Two: Before the Night
1
All that screaming and darkness happened one night when they were eighteen, but the truth was, it started long before, at least for Mark.
The longest day of the year; the shortest night of the year. But they didn’t take off for the party until the dark had fallen. No one in his right mind went to a party early.
But that was the end of it.
The beginning was a game. A game within a game.
The game was about darkness....
Be sure and get THE WORDS, a novella of horror by Douglas Clegg. Visit DouglasClegg.com to find out more about his novels, novellas, and stories.
