Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant (14 page)

As we near the summit of the ziggurat of skulls, I’m afraid, dear reader, that I have a confession to make. Earlier when I described the ruinous city that huddles around the base of the pyramid I used the word “abandoned,” an apt word for describing the city but not the temple itself. For you see, the descendants of the ziggurat’s slaves still dwell here. The breeding chambers deep inside the pyramid continue to spawn slaves. Whether or not these devolved specimens, albinos with shiny pink eyes, completely hairless bodies, and squishy cartilaginous bones actually qualify as human is not so clear, the shape of their soft jelly-like skulls appearing closer to those of
Homo floresiensis
than those of
Homo sapiens
.

Though traces of an unfinished fourteenth step, no more than a single rank of skulls high, can be found atop the temple, no new construction has taken place in eons. The devolved slave spawn have long since forgotten the techniques of osseous architecture given to their ancestors by that which built the lower levels of the ziggurat. Nor are their cartilaginous bones, soft gelatinous things prone to skull-rot, suitable for construction purposes.

Though construction has ground to a halt, the sacrificial altars atop the ziggurat of skulls are still in operation. The temple is essentially a giant machine that runs on blood. The blood of the slaves beheaded on the altars courses down through the raveled maze of blood gutters until it spills upon the immense wheel of bones in the exact center of the temple. As the blood wheel turns, it drives an elaborate system of gears (whose teeth are made from real teeth). These gears in turn power the automatons atop the temple, clockwork priests made of carved bone, whose rusty, heavily nicked blades lop the heads off the slaves and set the blood flowing down the gutters. What’s left of the bloodless bodies of the beheaded, after the carrion birds have claimed their due, drops down chutes lined with spinning blades that grind the remains up into a paste which provides nourishment for the inhabitants of the breeding pits. The severed heads that used to be collected, stripped of skin, and placed atop the ziggurat, now simply roll from the pyramid and splatter against the bones below to be feasted upon by carrion birds.

If the blood wheel were to cease turning the entire world would end, or so say those who kneel before the wheel. The universe’s entire existence is predicated on a thin trickle of blood spiraling down a pyramid of bones. And this flow of blood is dependent upon the blades of the automatons shearing the heads from the devolved slave spawn queued up before the altars patiently awaiting their deaths. The deteriorating blades that hold the world together are magnets for the lighting that lashes the top of the temple. These rusted, heavily nicked bits of steel sometimes require upwards of three strokes to slash the head from a sacrifice. If the bones of the devolved slave spawn were not so soft and pulpy the whole machine would have broke down long ago.

Although the devolved slave spawn have a primitive vocal apparatus and even a crude language, they retain no cultural memories of their forbears. They know nothing of the mysterious architect who constructed the lower steps of the ziggurat. Nor do they seem to know much at all about the priests or the blood wheel, nor why they queue up before the sacrificial altars to offer their heads to automatons that run on blood.

Some slave spawn escape from the breeding hives and wander the guts of the temple. These escaped slaves never dare leave the pyramid in which they were born, but they often linger at the edifice’s only opening gazing out with their pink albino eyes at the world beyond the ziggurat of skulls. All we know of the interior of the temple of bones derives from the strangulated whispers of escaped slaves. From these fugitive slaves, one capable of deciphering their primitive tongue hears whispered accounts of strange happenings inside the ziggurat of skulls.

Many of these accounts concern a vast black pit beneath the bottom of the ziggurat. A pit so deep as to be, for all intents and purposes, bottomless, into which the blood of the sacrifices trickles after the wheel has drunk its fill. The pit, the escaped slaves contend, is covered by a gate of bones which is bound to the blood wheel by a chain of gears.

Recently, if the reports of the escaped slaves are to be believed, the cyclopean gate of bones atop this bottomless pit has begun to slowly inch open.

APARTMENT B

Stinky Cat

I don’t expect you to believe a word of this.

In fact, I wish it weren’t true. Four years later, there are still nights I lie awake in bed, unable to escape the memories of the horror I encountered in Apartment B.

I wish I could tell you just what it was. Maybe identifying and understanding whatever it was could help me forget about it, but I have never been able to offer an even somewhat satisfying explanation for what I saw that night.

Consequently, I hold out little hope of you believing me when I say that every word of this is true.

It began when I rented a room in a dilapidated home with a couple of friends I’d met on Craigslist. I could hardly afford my share of the rent, as I was barely scraping by on my disability check. But the price was right, no background check needed, and, honestly, I had nowhere else to go.

It was a great place though, an imposing Victorian row house, tall and narrow with a turret rising three stories above the street. Just seeing the weathered brick façade, stained almost black by a century of Chicago pollution, gave me a chill. Even on the warmest day, that building seemed to have a cold wind blowing through it. For lack of a better word, there was a
heaviness
in the air – an oppressive atmosphere over the whole place.

Now, I’ve neglected to tell you the really unnerving part. Directly across the street was the old Resurrection Cemetery, infamous for its many reported hauntings – too numerous to recount here. Needless to say, I must have heard them all before I moved into the house, so whenever I looked through that rusty black iron fence through the forest of tombstones, I expected to see Resurrection Mary darting between the monuments. The thought of seeing her, even for a second, terrified me, but I couldn’t help looking. I’d find myself transfixed on that landscape for hours. Conveniently enough, our apartment overlooked it, and I came to memorize it from my worn-out chair in the living room, located on the second floor of that turret.

My roommate Meghan cleaned bedpans in a nearby nursing home, and my other roommate Dave stocked shelves in a bookstore. I really didn’t see much of them because they got up early and went to work before I got out of bed. Their alarm clocks were really loud and annoying. When you’re disabled, you really don’t have anywhere to be, so I’d stay up late writing and sleep until noon. This gave me plenty of time to work on my novel when they were either asleep or at work, but I have to admit I spent most of my days staring out that living room window, scanning the graves for any anomalous movement. 

Sometimes I’d waste so much time this way that I was barely able to post hate-filled rants on my blog or send death threats to idiots who one-star my books on Amazon. I knew they’d never even read my books before rating them because I hadn’t sold any yet. Between my reputation and my disability, you can understand why I still haven’t finished that novel.

Directly across the room from this window was the kitchenette, and between it and the living room was a small round table with a chandelier hanging over it in what passed for a dining room. A door in the kitchen area led to a hall, down which could be found the bedrooms and bathroom. Since my bedroom was in the very back, a windowless space barely big enough for my bed, I usually set up my laptop at the kitchen table.

I think it was a Monday night more or less like any other that Dave joined me at the table with a fish taco, a can of PBR, and a Ouija board.

“Hey, whatcha writing?” he asked.

“It’s a novel about a monster living in Lake Michigan.”

“Like the Creature from the Black Lagoon?”

“No, a big sea creature like the Loch Ness Monster.”

“That seems a little implausible, Ricky. Don’t you think it would be kind of hard for a monster that big to hide in such a busy lake with twelve million people living along its shores and all the commercial fishing, tourist steamers, and…”

“Trust me. It will terrify you.”

“I dunno. It sounds kinda stupid.”

“Shut up, you pile of baby batter that should have been aborted!”

Meghan sat next me, trying to calm me, “It’s okay, Ricky. He’s joking.”

By this time, Dave was having a good laugh at my expense. “Move that crap out of my way, so I can show you something that will really terrify.”

I closed my laptop and placed it under my chair as he unfolded his Ouija board and put the pointer on top.

“What the hell is that?” I asked.

“It’s our Ouija board. We use it to contact the dead,” said Meghan.

“I don’t mess with that sort of stuff. I’m a Christian,” I told her.

“You don’t go to church, and I’m pretty sure Jesus wouldn’t approve of you making death threats to people all day long,” Dave answered. “Have you read your blog? I’m pretty sure you’re not a Christian.”

“It’s okay, Ricky. It’s just for fun,” said Meghan.

Dave instructed us to put our fingers on the pointer and concentrate. He asked the board, “Is there a spirit with us?”

The pointer pointed to the word “YES” on the board.

Meghan asked, “Can you give us a sign?”

It was then one of the bulbs in the chandelier burned out, plunging the room into somewhat less brightness.

My body stiffened. I staggered backwards from my chair, tripping over my laptop and crashing to the floor. The collapse stunned me. Writhing on the linoleum, I whimpered uncontrollably, unable to rise, helpless to flee. Suffering as I was from a disabled pinky toe for which I got a monthly check, I was powerless to resist the dark force which had made its presence felt through that single light bulb.

I could see only blurry shapes through my tear-filled eyes. I could hear nothing over what sounded like a young girl sobbing.

How long I lay there I don’t know. Meghan and Dave were apparently so horrified they were unable to rise from their seats. They were frightened so senseless they even appeared to be laughing and pointing at me.

I have no idea how Meghan managed to summon the strength to walk to the kitchen cabinet and return to the table with a little light bulb. With Herculean fortitude, she twisted the dark light bulb while battling the invisible demons which were undoubtedly tormenting her. Then, as if by magic, she screwed the new bulb into the socket, flooding the room with light slightly brighter than the light had been before she replaced the bulb.

Having defeated the demonic entity, my savior laughed with joy and called out, “Get up, you pussy. It was just a burnt out light bulb.” She was obviously delirious, since we had no cat.

Trying to take his mind off the terrors we had just experienced, Dave bravely changed the subject to my writing. “How do you expect to be a horror writer when you’re afraid of your own shadow?”

Though his question puzzled me, I appreciated his attempt to distract us from the awful scene which had just unfolded.

Having survived this inexplicable and traumatic experience, we seldom spoke of it afterwards. In fact, my brave roommates usually pretended to have forgotten all about it. Unable to accept the true terror of what happened that night, Dave sometimes even pretended that I had scared myself and that the light bulb had somehow burned out just because it was old.

Though I have studied page after page of Wikipedia, I have never been able to explain what happened to that demon-possessed light bulb in Apartment B.