Highway To Hell (11 page)

“Get this off!” Marcus roared, not in fear or panic, but in anger.

“Now, now, baby. Play nice,” a voice said. It cut through the silence, bringing sounds of life and hope into his world of endless night. It was a slimy voice; the vocal chords sounded as though they were drowning – yet there was something familiar about it.

“Who’s there? Who said that?” Marcus called, trying to get a bearing on the sound. It wasn’t in front of him, no, off the side, his left.

“Just an old friend.”

Marcus moved his head so that he faced the direction from which he was sure the voice came.

“You’re no friend of mine. Take this thing off now. Let me see who you are,” he said with confidence, defiant to the end. The simple knowledge that there was someone there, good intentions or bad, gave him a focus and grounding point for his anger.

“I don’t think you’re ready for that yet,” the voice laughed.

“Take this off now. I’m a police officer. There will be people looking for me. Trust me. We look after our own, with an old fashioned view on justice,” Marcus threatened, hoping the slight wobble in his voice wouldn’t give him away. His stomach throbbed, but he felt calm.

“Poor baby, you still don’t have any idea, do you?” the voice said with kindness. “You adulterous cock whore, you’ll get what you deserve down here. Oh yes,” it snapped, spitting venom filled words that burnt Marcus’s chest.

His skin was on fire. Drops of something seared his flesh, something other than words. Marcus winced in pain but couldn’t move more than a few inches at most. “What the hell is going on?” Marcus called out to the darkness, when without warning the cloth was pulled from his face. It didn’t take long for Marcus’s eyes to adjust as the darkness was more dusk than midnight.

The first thing Marcus noticed was the discarded sack that had covered his face wasn’t a mere hemp sack, but rather a sack of a different nature. Scrotums. They had been split open then sewed together, creating what looked like a magnified version of what they were.

Unsure of how long his captors would give him before plunging his world back into darkness, Marcus looked around trying to gauge his location, absorbing as much information about his whereabouts as he could. He was in a small windowless room. Despite the lack of illumination the dusk never threatened to darken further. It was the walls; they seemed to cast such an eerie glow. They were red; a shade so deep that in places it looked black. Their surface seemed to be moving… flowing. The ground and roof were separated by a gap of about three meters, the latter of which had the same flowing appearance as the wall. The way they swirled was hypnotic, and after a while Marcus began to feel nauseous.

I’m in a cave, Marcus thought deductively. The way out would be up.

“No you’re not, lover boy.” The voice read his thoughts. It sent chill up Marcus’s spine; an avalanche in reverse. With it came a dawn of realization. The final pieces of the memory puzzle he had been working on during his time in the dark fell into place.

“I’m not dead,” he said under his breath – although, as he spoke, his mind showed him everything he needed to see. The churchyard, the mourners dressed in either black or formal police dress. He saw his wife and kids standing on the edge of the grave. He saw a coffin…
his
coffin, being lowered into the ground. He saw his wife sink to her knees, where she remained until his son picked her up and held her.

“Oh, poor baby. So confused. Sure, it may end with a box buried in the ground, a quiet neighborhood too, no troublemakers, no noise.” The voice paused.

Marcus had been looking at the floor in a trance of disbelief, struggling to make his way over to acceptance. As his captor talked, Marcus raised his head, determined to look them in the eye, whoever they were. He saw nothing: the cave (or whatever it was) was empty.

“That is merely the physical world,” the voice continued. “That body you had was little more than a transportation system. A shell; some outer husk you call a body. But, dear… dear, dear, dear, your soul, the life that filled that festering pile of cells you called your home for over forty years,
that
will live on forever.” The voice trailed off, but Marcus knew the owner was close. His captor was there with him, hiding.

“Who are you?” he asked. A standard question made even more pertinent given his recognition of the voice.

“Kiss me, my Knight and I will be yours forever,” the voice answered, and the small chamber was filled with wind, a hot acrid wind that felt abrasive against Marcus’s skin. With it came a wet, damp odor like a rotten log in the middle of the forest. As if appearing out of thin air (which it did) a figure appeared. Nothing but a shadow at first, it was large; that was all Marcus could fathom. It was at least nine feet tall, wider than a normal man and straight, no clear widening for appendages like arms of legs. It looked for all intents and purposes like a...

It’s a giant talking shit, Marcus thought, his mind conjuring up an image of a large brown turd holding a cane, top hat perched on its head and a monocle against one dark brown eye with long, feminine eyelashes.

Slowly, the thing revealed itself. It was covered by wet, glistening skin. No, not skin, but a shell.

It’s a roach. The answer dawned in Marcus’s mind long before the creature had fully appeared.

The creature had its back to him, and Marcus noticed that the walls around him were no longer wet but had become tacky. He turned around to look, and saw the walls were bleeding. He could taste it: a heavy coppery flavor like a mouthful of old pennies. Marcus gagged, yet at the same time it brought along a sweet undertone which made him want to swallow.

The giant body oozed a thick opaque slime, which fell to the floor and congealed instantly. The creature was shuddering, quivering, with a respiration rate faster than a dog in the heat of summer. The brown, scaled body was bald save for a thatch of thick, wavy, black hair, which flowed from what Marcus hoped was the creature’s head.

“What.... what the f-fuck,” Marcus stammered as his brain tried to get a grip on everything that had happened. “Let me go.” The simplicity and the meek sound of the request made him feel ashamed.

“I will, don’t worry, my dark champion. It’s no fun without the chase,” the voice said.

“Listen, I don’t know who you are, but if you think I’m gonna crack you’re wrong. I don’t know what you want and I wouldn’t tell you if I did so just get it over with.” Marcus’s voice was strong and defiant.

The creature laughed at him, a mocking, belittling laugh that made Marcus angry. The same sort of laugh generated in a classroom when a student stands up and says something he doesn’t mean. Marcus remembered a moment from his childhood where he stood up in a biology lesson to give a presentation and kept saying orgasm instead of organism. The reddening wave of heat that had washed over him then stroked his cheeks once more.

“You’re dead, Marcus, and I’m your judge, jury and executioner. It doesn’t matter what you say; none of it matters. Not down here.” The beast turned, revealing itself to Marcus, who felt his skin tighten as if it had shrunk two sizes.

When Marcus was twelve years old, his family had rented a cottage in the middle of the woods. They spent the vacation hiking, cycling, swimming and kayaking from sunrise until sunset, and had slept long and hard each night. However, one night towards the end, something wrenched Marcus from his sleep. A strange scuttling sound, as something scurried over the wooden floor. Marcus had ignored it as best he could; telling himself that,
bugs are a part of nature
, and
the strange itching feeling on my legs comes from the cheap blankets,
and the buzzing in his ears nothing more than the sound of mosquitoes, awake and thirsty for blood. The excuses kept him in a quasi-sleep for a while, but the excuses ran out around the time something crawled over his closed eyelids. They moved fast, like a sudden chill on a warm night. Something forced its way through Marcus’s semi-parted lips. It choked him. Legs probed his tongue, and antennae brushed the roof of his mouth, while a hard shell clacked against his teeth. Marcus sat upright, choked and unable to breath. He tried to call out. To scream for his parents, his sister, anybody, it didn’t matter. Marcus threw back the bed covers and that was when they descended on him.

Marcus retched from the memory, while the sight of the thousands of pairs of tiny legs that jutted from creature’s black pulsating underbelly was too much for him, and he vomited. The roach’s legs seemed to wave at him; they beckoned him towards them… hug me, they screamed.

Young Marcus felt the bug trying to crawl down his throat: his mouth was closed, so there was no other way for the creature to go. Coughing and spitting, Marcus tried to empty his mouth, but the roach held firm. Marcus threw the bedcovers aside. The bed was infested with roaches, ranging in size from that of a ladybug to the size of a grown man’s fist. They charged towards him like a flood, covering Marcus’s legs in a rolling sea of hazel brown bodies and black antennae. He thrashed with his legs, and while bugs fell to the floor, the covering never seemed to lessen; it was as though his lower body was in fact comprised of them. He began to hyperventilate, and in doing so he managed to suck four or five – he wasn’t sure of the exact number – roaches into his mouth before they were subsequently swallowed. Marcus had heard the stories of cockroaches being able to survive a nuclear blast, and for months afterwards he couldn’t help but wonder: had they died or merely found a warm place to sleep?

His screams had woken his parents, and they came running. His mother had fainted when she caught sight of all the bugs, while his father, ever the calm and deliberate man, had swept Marcus up and charged out of the house with him. They drove home that night and never went back to those woods again. The nightmares haunted Marcus the rest of his life. At least once a month he would wake up, his skin soaked with sweat, his legs and mouth itching from the delicate patter of their feet, acid burning in the pit of his stomach. A small part of him always believed those swallowed beasts had survived.

Marcus looked around, desperate to avoid any eye contact with the large cockroach beast, yet he was drawn to it like a moth to the flame. The beast seemed to recognize this and stood still. Even its legs seeming to have frozen, allowing Marcus to get a good look.

“Are you ready to be judged, maggot?” the creature asked. All the previous niceties – and it was a stretch to call the previous voice that – were gone.

Marcus’s eyes reached the head and he shut them just before the image you hit his brain. When he opened them, he didn’t see a hideous half-insect creature like something out of a David Cronenburg movie, but something much worse. The image developed like a Polaroid picture: it took a few seconds for Marcus’s brain to assemble everything to create the image. It wasn’t a bug’s face, but a human’s. A woman’s, with creamy white skin and long black hair, and eyes a sparkling emerald green, shielded by long eyelashes, with a delicate nose, albeit one refined by a surgeon’s hand rather than that of God.

“Melanie,” Marcus croaked, his voice a broken whisper.

“Oh, how sweet, you remember me. How are you, Marcus? It’s been a while,” the once athletic bodied college student said.

“What are you doing? Just let me go,” Marcus demanded, seeming to find his strength now that he knew his captor.

“You still don’t get it, do you? Still the same stubborn old Marcus. You’re dead, champ. Died on the streets, don’t you remember? You couldn’t save the girl either. Such a shame.” The roach creature shook its human head. With every flicked lock there was a whip-like crack followed by a bright orange flame which erupted from the tip.

Marcus looked down and saw blood flowing from his stomach. A wound glowed a bright orange like the embers of a dying fire. Everything then fell into place. The events appeared before his eyes, playing out in his head like a silent movie, only every line of text that came onto the screen was the same phonetically spelt cry. The words (Young Infant) in brackets each time told Marcus all he needed to know.

“So once again you are the Devil that comes into my life, hey, Mel?” He looked at the beast puzzlingly, eyes searching for something. He fought the rather absurd notion to smile and won.

“Don’t be foolish; I’m no Devil. I am what you want to see, what your soul has deemed to be your punisher. In actuality I am just a humble chamber guardian, here to ensure you see your past and are ready for judgment.”

The creature took a scuttling step to one side.

A hole appeared in the solid rock. Blood swirled in the opening. A whirling crimson vortex, suspended as if awaiting a command to move. It began to separate, beginning with a small circle in the center, which expanded, the blood not falling away or lessening, but merely pulling back like a curtain to reveal a play already in motion.

“You have sinned, my shadow warrior. You have known the carnal pleasures of a woman outside of your matrimonial bed. Sinners must face their punishment. Stand up for their crimes, face their victims and let them know the truth. Let them know exactly what has happened. Only then can you hope to avoid punishment.” The voice grew in volume and lowered in pitch until every trace of femininity was gone.

“I don’t understand,” Marcus said, his head beginning to spin. He felt woozy, as if someone had spiked his drink. His eyes were drawn to the opening; it held him in a trance with a silent promise of knowledge, of answers.

The roach continued to speak as if it hadn’t heard him. “Sinners will be punished, not before God, but before the Justice Courts of the Netherworld. The kings will decide your fate. So look upon your carnage. Look as the damage your loins have caused is brought forth. Your time is at hand. How much blood do you wish to shed to hide who you are?”

Beyond the creature, the doorway or portal, for that was how Marcus saw it, had opened completely. He looked through and into another time, another place, but one he remembered as if it was only yesterday. He had just finished training, a particularly grueling session that had seen him knock out two sparring partners in successive rounds.