Highway To Hell (16 page)

“Oh, I like to take my time. I’m gonna suck you dry, baby,” she said with a smile, and this time when her face changed it stayed that way. Thick, pulsing, purple veins marked her back like an atlas. Her mouth devoured him and with each abrasive stroke she made Richard could feel another layer of skin being stripped away.

The blood flowed, leaking from the corners of her mouth, but her tempo never changed. With an assured rhythm, the demon known in her section of the underworld simply as Margeth worked Richard’s penis like a lollypop. She could feel it getting smaller and smaller in her mouth. It didn’t soften but shrank. His blood tasted strong; different to anything she had ever tasted. She knew it was wrong; there would be repercussions for sampling him, but sometimes, even in the pit – not that this was the pit, not even a suburb, more like a satellite town – the rules sometimes had to be broken.

“Stop, please,” Richard groaned through gritted teeth. His brain exploded as white hot flames lit up the darkness behind his closed eyes.

Margeth looked at him, her eyes black. In the centre of each was a red dot. The spots grew and grew until they consumed her eyes. They flickered, as if something was on fire deep inside her demon shell. Margeth jumped away from the bed, her hands clawing at her throat, choking and coughing in wet gargled gasps for air. Her eyes were wide and a pink foam began to leak from her eyes, her nose, her mouth; every orifice had developed a leak. Margeth fell to the floor and Richard could hear her sizzling like meat placed on a barbeque. Smoke drifted from her nostrils and ears in delicate white tendrils.

“You… You don’t ev-e-even know, do you?” Margeth stared at Richard, although he could tell she was blind. Her eyes were swollen. The jelly within each ball bubbled and boiled before they exploded, showering Richard with warm jelly.

Margeth leapt towards him, her claws elongated, slimy lips pulled back to reveal sharp needle teeth eager to take one last bite, and it was then that Richard felt the invisible forces that held him to the bed disappear. Richard sat up, his reactions quicker and more fluid that he had expected them to be. His crotch burnt but he knew, or at least hoped with a vague sense of certainty, that it would heal. The bleeding had already stopped. Richard stood. His body felt strange, like a sailor setting his feet back on dry land after months at sea.

Richard walked towards Margeth, who lay on the floor, curled double in pain, her skin red and flushed as the fire Richard had seen ignite behind her eyes devoured the rest of her. She looked scared. Out of all of the emotions he had expected to consume him should escape ever been an option, Richard had never once run through the scenario using pity as the driving force. Yet standing there Richard realized there was no other emotion that could be more fittingly used to describe what he felt.

Behind him, Richard felt a cool breeze blowing, as if a door or window had been opened. He began to turn when the voice spoke.

“Come; we have little time.” It was a tired, scratchy voice and before Richard could answer he felt a hand fall on his shoulder. He was engulfed with light. Richard lost all sense of direction and purpose and so allowed the light to envelope him. “The poison won’t slow her for long,” the voice said.

Richard had no idea for how long they travelled, but as they rose he passed through several levels of screams, each one separated by a few moments of silence. Richard could not bring himself to open his eyes, not even the smallest of cracks lest it all was a dream and he was still tied to a bed, held by the ropes of hell. After a while the sounds disappeared, replaced instead by silence: a warm, airless silence.

Finally they stopped. Richard felt solid ground beneath him; he felt his legs tense up as his fully body weight was lowered back onto them. It was hot and there was an abrasive wind that scratched at his face and irritated his sensitive new skin.

His crotch continued to throb.

“You can open your eyes now. It’s quite safe.” The voice speaking to him was one of kindness. Richard opened his eyes and felt his body tense in preparation for what awaited him.

Pain; bright flaring pain seared his eyeballs and he clamped them shut again.

Richard raised his hands to his face and then tried again, peering through his fingers, first his left eye, then his right, and then finally both of them. After a few seconds he lowered his hands and stood squinting, looking out from a great height across an endless desert.

“Where am I now? What’s waiting for me here?” he questioned, not fully trusting anything anymore. It hadn’t taken Richard long to accept that he was dead, and he was strangely okay with that fact. What had hit him was the punishment he received; not from Margeth but from himself. Not a day went by that he didn’t recall some moment or incident from his past that he regretted. Emotions felt stronger: grief felt like despair to him, sadness felt like a black heavy depression, seconds felt like hours, and each moment saw Richard slip farther and deeper into his own mental hell until it reached the point where he would almost look forward to the physical pain.

“You are safe,” the man said. Richard turned to face him. He had to squint in order to focus. The light and fresh air seemed to overload his mind. The man was short, much shorter than Richard, and old, at least sixty if he was a day; but then again time seemed to have a strange way of drawing across life’s sky and so the man could well have been older than the earth itself. He was as good as bald and his skin so tanned and weathered by the elements that it looked as if it were made of leather. He wore a long, brown robe like a monk, and in one hand he held a long, thick, wooden staff. The image that came to Richard’s mind was the love child between Friar Tuck and one of the Buddhist monks whose orange robes were famous across the globe.

“How long have I been dead?” he asked, his voice shaking. Did he really want to know the answer?

“In the time of this world it has been ten years. A lot less back in the world you occupied previously, but still ten years remains a decade,” the man answered.

“Ten years. Fuck no. That’s not possible.” Richard opened his mouth to continue when he realized that the time for such a limited way of thinking was past. “I’m in Hell,” Richard said under his breath.

“Well, not exactly. I cannot take you to where you want to go, but only where you need. Your righteousness must be tested, and you must not be found wanting in order to move on.” The stranger remained standing. One arm held the staff, the other hung by his side. Another gust of warm air wrapped around them, howling a sad, lonely cry, and it made the hairs on the back of Richards’s neck stand on end.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Why did you save me?” The question needed to be asked. Richard wasn’t a saint; he didn’t deserve to be rescued, or so he himself believed.

“I am Jizo, a wanderer of the spirit world. Now you must begin. I cannot be here when you do; the challenge of righteousness must be undertaken alone,” he said, moving his head to one side. It made him look inquisitive and was the first sign of any real life inside his leathered exterior. He looked at Richard. His eyes seemed to burn a hole through his skin; he wasn’t looking at him, or through him, but in him.

“What am I supposed to do? We’re stuck on a mountaintop in the middle of the fucking desert, and what you want me to just take a walk. Some Indian spirit quest or something like that. How am I even supposed to get down from here?” Richard asked, throwing his arms out wide in a sign of his exasperation and growing frustration.

“I cannot help you. Your test is your own; only you can decide its course. I am sorry it must be this way.” He paused for a moment, and looked at Richard before beginning again, adding a second statement: “We will meet again at the end, and then I can take you where you need to go.”

With his words spoken Jizo raised his staff and was gone, and with nothing more than a rush of wind Richard found himself alone.

~

IV

Helen: It’s the Quiet Ones You Have to Watch

The sound of water running – a small stream or a brook – roused Helen from sleep. It was a peaceful, serene sound, one promoting a quiet, restful place, bordering on idyllic. A cool breeze brushed her skin, her auburn hair, longer now that it was when she had first died, wafted, submitting itself to the will of the wind. She didn’t want to open her eyes, but once she was awake there was little choice left in the matter. The pain would begin and then there was no choice but to open, to see what clever way of torturing her he had come up with this time.

“Good morning, beautiful. How are we feeling today?” a sneering snarl of a voice asked. It was always him. Deep inside, beneath the disguises he wore, it was always him. Luther was the name he had used when he introduced himself.

“Bite me,” Helen answered, spitting the words like a feral cat. Cornered and out of options, she would fight until she had nothing left to give.

“Ooh, now there’s an idea,” he sneered once more. Even with her eyes closed she knew he would be leaning in close to her, his thick lips pulled back, exposing his yellowed teeth. She felt his rancid breath heat her skin.

Helen shuddered. Her mind struggled to keep hold of the sound of the brook running its course through wherever she was. Then, without thinking any longer, she opened her eyes. Luther stepped back, allowing her to look around her. He liked to take things slow – but Helen knew that.

The light hurt her eyes. She was outside for the first time in many sessions. She saw the stream. It was crystal clear and babbled like the picture perfect brook it was. Wildflowers grew on the shallow banks: yellows, purples, reds, their flowers all facing her, watching. They were in a wood, not quite a forest but approaching it. She could hear insects buzzing all around her and the floor beneath her bare feet was carpeted by pine needles, yet the trees were all green. None of it fully matched. All four seasons seemed to be represented as if that somehow made the whole scenario more real. It was the only thing she ever looked for now. The small conflict of details that told her it was just a trick; another one of Luther’s games that would end with her blood being spilt regardless of how she played.

At first Helen fell for his tricks, believing she had been let go, allowed to escape and return to her normal life, but then after a while, just has she began to relax, let her guard down, the hooks would come. Now she expected them: she would wander through the various colourful worlds he created for her, looking for flaws in it. The sun moving in the wrong direction across the sky, a tree with no leaves in the height of summer, anything she could see that seemed out of the ordinary became her earth wire. Once she noticed the mistakes, flaws in his design, it meant that the hooks were not far behind, and she would brace herself.

It had all happened in the blink of an eye. Helen remembered working in the salon, and then there had been silence, a painful silence and then she fell, not to the floor, but through it.

When she had woken up Helen was tied to a chair with ropes that smelt of urine and sweat. She was alone. In that first small room her tears had been enough. The visions she was sent, the places she was taken, places from her past that reminded her of how ungrateful she had been. She had seen the arguments that she had had with her in-laws, only petty things for the most part, but almost every time they got together a fight would ensue, and more often than not it would continue long after they had left. Helen and her husband would argue about them for days. Her father-in-law Herbert would start drinking, and this in turn would make her mother-in-law Jocelyn cry. Helen was shown over and over again not just the arguments but their consequences, the continued fights between the two as they drove home and often long after they locked their front door.

Helen finally broke when she was shown a fight over the middle name of a child that hadn’t even been discussed, let alone conceived.

Helen’s hands instinctively touched her own stomach; she hadn’t even been able to tell Mark that she was pregnant before she died.

The argument had ended and her in-laws drove home and, once behind their own front door – in a quaint suburban area where their age was the perfect median for the neighborhood – Herbert had turned on his wife. He beat her with an open hand, then when Jocelyn still didn’t accept the blame Herbert used his fist. Helen couldn’t believe what she saw, and she called out her apologies to them, begging them to stop.

No sooner had she called out and the images were gone.

“You have been judged,” a figureless voice had said, and then he had arrived: Luther and all of his toys. He had wasted no time in sharing his ideas of fun with Helen.

Above her, the trees had all linked together forming a sort of canopy, although the clear blue sky of the day was visible through the smaller less supportive branches. It was hot; it was always hot. Every day the oppressive heat would play an equal role in her torture. Helen would be drenched in sweat before Luther had even begun to apply his trade to her flesh, which somehow managed to regenerate each night.

“Do you want to take a walk with me, my dear?” Luther asked. He was always polite. His manners were impeccable: that was part of his charm. That was what made him so dangerous. He would attack her body with the feral power of a serial killer in the height of his spree, and yet the next day he would arrive and whisk Helen away to a romantic candlelit dinner. Oh, how charming he would be. Walks were his favourite; he would often come and invite her to walk with him. They would wander through the woods, hand in hand like young lovers. The touch of his cold, slimy skin against her own warm flesh made Helen want to vomit, but she was powerless to resist him. As they walked, they shared intimate secrets and memories with one another. Luther would talk to Helen about his conquests, the people he had brought to and from the rack – as he liked to call his place of work. His tales were not special; they held no hidden meaning: they were simply a glimpse of all the things that he planned to do with her.