The Birth of Bane (31 page)

The notion
lightened my heart.
Good
thoughts, Jerry! Keep up with the good th -.”

I
tripped.

Something hard
and unyielding caught the edge of my toe and I went down on all
fours, my feet still hidden. I was about to push off with my hands
when I felt something new. Whatever was below the textiles, no more
than a quarter of an inch from the skin of my palms, it was warm.
No, it was hot. I could feel the heat being transferred from
it
to my hands, then my arms. It was an incredible amount of
heat. Maybe that’s why the garments were so dry. Whatever was
beneath them was searing.

Faster than I
can recall, I bolted upright and sprinted for the concrete. I
didn’t care how many times I fell or rolled or summersaulted, I was
going to get off this uncanny mountain of fibers.

I scrambled,
scurrying like a rodent across the uppermost regions, using every
available part of my body. Clawing when I had to, scratching when
it was necessary, and kicking when I was sure there was something
unnatural beneath me. I came toward the edge. I was no more than
six feet away, the height of your average man, when I struck
something hardness with the back of my right hand. My wrist
crumpled painfully, and suddenly I felt myself overbalance. Where
my fingers should’ve given support, they were no longer capable. I
lurched forward, shoulder first, hitting the clothing, and then
unceremoniously flopped onto my back.

I had no more
than a second’s respite when something long, very hot and round
roiled below the entire length of my body.

I recoiled like
a spring, repulsed, using
its’
own firmness to attain
my feet. Within moments, I was off the garments and on the
concrete, cradling my wrist, which was throbbing now. Unsure why, I
continued to stare at the pile and felt my jaw become unhinged when
I saw the entire expanse of clothing was moving now. It wasn’t the
movement of a solitary
thing
. It couldn’t be.
There was nothing coordinated, nothing congruent. All along the
pile writhed what had to be hundreds of long, ropey
structures.
Things
I couldn’t describe, but
things
all the same.

Whoever had
written the sign had been correct after all. It was time for me to
leave. It was the wrong time to be in this place.

I swung toward
the double doors, then thought better of it and placed myself
perpendicular to both the exit and the pile, which allowed for me
to see what was coming from either direction. I wasn’t about to be
surprised again. I wasn’t going to be one of those idiots in a
Hollywood horror movie who turned away right before they got
mauled. No, that wasn’t going to be me. I was smarter than
that.

I got to the
doors, scuttling through them with my proverbial tail between my
legs, and made to close them. From without the vast chamber, I
could see the
things
beneath the pile were still moving. No
faster or slower than before, but moving all the same. They were
worms, huge, or maybe tentacles or both. I was too far away and
they were too well covered to make an adequate
assessment.

I slammed the
doors shut and replaced the sign written my some very smart little
kid and stepped back into the middle of the alley.

I probably
would’ve left then. I most likely would’ve decided enough was
enough, that Lenny wasn’t worth it and made my way for the door
leading back to the basement. I know I should’ve, but I
didn’t.

It was the
blood-curling scream of Leonard G. Favor that stopped me - stopped
me cold like I’d been frozen in place.

Further into the
alley, “a few doors down” like Dolly Parton would’ve sung, on the
opposite side, were two more doors much like the one’s I’d just
shut. Only, they were wide open. From within, Lenny was wailing. It
sounded like he was being flayed alive.

~~~~~~~<<<
ᴥ
>>>~~~~~~~

Chapter
Nineteen: Frenzy

Thoughts of
self-preservation forgotten, I ran for the doorway. It didn’t even
cross my mind that I’d been accosted by something I couldn’t easily
explain less than a minute before. There was fear clutching my
heart, nearly paralyzing my chest, making it difficult for me to
breathe. Cognitive thought was beyond me as well. I was caught up
in the present, devoid of processing thought. I was reacting,
though a small part of me wanted to run away and hide, wanted to do
no more than that. But, a larger portion of me was in control. Not
my brain, not my ability to rationalize, not even my sense of
survival. It was pure impetus, stimulus. I was compelled against my
better judgment. I ran forth. I ran
toward
the screams. I
couldn’t help myself. I was frenzied.

I came up to
them so fast; I nearly tripped over my own feet. I wracked my
shoulder purposefully against the steel frame of the doorway unable
to use my hand. My sprained wrist would’ve made it impossible to
halt my forward progress. I winced in pain, and not only from the
jolt racing through the upper portion of my body.

The light from
within was nothing short of brilliant. I squinted, placing my left
hand over my brow, shielding my eyes, trying to gaze through the
multitude of color assaulting my retinas.

“
What the fuck?”
I breathed, astonishment painted upon my tone. The hues were so
thick I could almost smell them.

I hiked myself
into more of a standing position, hoisting myself along the edge of
the doorframe. Before me was a junkyard’s worth of broken bottles.
Colored glass laid everywhere, chipped and shattered, piles and
piles, stretching as far as I could see.

This chamber was
even bigger than the first one!

The walls -
furthest from me – the ceiling, were both so far away I could
barely make them out. It was as though some type of low hanging
mist was obscuring the view. The room was large enough to make its’
own weather. It could only be a morning mist I was seeing. There
was no more apt description. I was peering into an overarching
haze, thicker toward the center of the chamber, almost cloud-like,
but it couldn’t quite form. Every time it tried to coalesce, it
could do so for no more than a short duration before it dissolved
into mist once again.

I could just
make out the steel struts and tresses supporting the farthest
reaches of the structure. They had to be incredibly large to
support such an immense roof. Only steel of the highest tensile
strength had the capability of sustaining weight that
tremendous.

Where came the
blinding light, I could not tell.

I became aware
of an odd sound. A tinkling, a scraping of a comingled sort,
resonating, pulling my attention from the far corners of the room,
making me focus on the more immediate area about me. Almost at
once, my eyebrows shot up. All thoughts of Lenny had suddenly
vanished as I tried to understand what I was seeing.

Before me, far
into the chamber, the shards and splinters and chunks of glass were
tumbling toward one another, forming jagged clumps and boulder-like
constructs. They moved slowly at first, but with an ever-increasing
rate of speed. The pieces rolled individually, then began to group,
forming a tricked of movement flowing in the same direction. Within
seconds those trickles became streams, which became brooks, which
turned into rivers in miniature. The jumbles, where these
watercourses of glass converged, melded into large lumps, then even
larger accumulations that seemed to loom before me with every
passing beat of my heart.

Some mysterious
force was at work that science had yet to discover. It was like
magnetism only this affected melted and colored sand, not metal. I
could almost imagine someone turning up the intensity of the
attraction, but I couldn’t ascertain what sort of machine or magic
could make glass come together like that. It seemed to go against
nature itself, frightening, made my skin crawl.
What could do this? What could make broken bottle
form into huge lumps?

The tinkling
became a roar. I winced at it. The sound was immense.

Whatever scream
I had heard before, whether it was my one-time father or not, it
was gone now. There was no sign of Lenny anywhere in the
room.

I eased away
from the doorframe, upon my own two feet, watching as the lumps
became hulking masses, then hill-sized, and still they continue to
grow, form, take shape. Something inside was howling at me,
shouting what I was staring at wasn’t supposed to be happening,
wasn’t of this world. It was begging me to retreat from the
doorway.

Close the
fucking door, you idiot!

But I couldn’t.
I wouldn’t. Seeing the shards of glass coming together was
something I’d never even dreamed about, and yet…

…
I should’ve
turned away. But how?

Suddenly, the
roar had a voice, issued from a ghastly throat. I heard a
low-level,
AaaaaooooooOoooooo!
echo
throughout the chamber.

My orbs sought
out the source of the sound. I had no trouble finding it. I caught
sight of it within moments.

It was the mouth
I saw first, surrounded by a set of crumbling, shattering lips that
reformed as fast as they seemed to decay. Actually, it wasn’t
decay. It was more of a falling apart and then a remaking by more
glass pushing outward from within. I froze. I felt my lower abdomen
clench. I am certain if I’d been any younger, I would’ve peed in my
pants.

It was massive,
nearly twice the mass of the aggregate blobs of glass closest to
me. It had a face about those ever-melting lips, and a head about
the face. I could barely believe what I was seeing. Maybe I was
going mad. Maybe the excitement of the early morning had pushed me
over the edge. Maybe I was things that weren’t there.
Maybe…

But, it was
there. I know, to this day, the giant beast made of glass that
howled and screeched upon its’ birth was there.

When it took
its’ first step and I felt the resounding
thud!
of its’ foot
crashing upon the ground, I knew the right of it. It was evidence
enough. When its’ head came around and it peered at me from the
incredible distance separating our two forms, I was fucking
convinced.

Yet, it was the
voice, at my side, so close I could feel the hot breath in my ear,
confirming what I was seeing was real.

“
She’s making them all come to life,”
were the words, so raspy and distorted it was impossible
to tell if it had come from a woman or a man.

I felt every
hair on my body go rigid. The muscles in my jaw went taut, making
me look as though I was writhing in pain.

“
She’s bringing us
all
back…”
A slow chuckle followed as if speaking
took a tremendous effort.

I
turned.

I saw
horror.

I squealed with
revulsion.

She merely
smiled as though my reaction were the most normal thing in the
world. Maybe she’d been expecting it, which was a distinct
possibility. Her smile was simply terrifying. When her visage
moved, the muscles and tendons were only partially in evidence. In
places, where her cheeks or her teeth should’ve been, there was
nothing. Her skin was desiccated, worn away here, thickly wrinkled
and bunched there. Her nose seemed to have been snapped off or
eaten away with time. Her hair was a wispy, inconsistent growth
upon the top of her head as if she’d suffered from years of mange.
She wore some kind of gown, though it was so rotted and addled. It
clung to her form rather than covered it. I could see one of her
sagging breasts and nearly all of her pelvic area, though I forced
myself to keep my vision from wandering too far down. After months
of seeing Myra’s youthful pubis, I couldn’t bring myself to see
what one over a hundred years old might look like, especially one
that had been buried for nearly three decades.

“
Did She bring you back as well?”
said the specter that was my grandmother. She was a woman
I had never known, a woman from the countless black and white
images floating here and there about the various homes of her
children, my aunts and uncles from Lenny’s side of the
family.
“You look quite
scrumptious for one of us…”

I lurched away
from her, my mouth agape. I was incapable of making
words.

She shuffled
toward me as I backed out of the threshold.
“Let me taste you, young man. I have always enjoyed
the feel of a strapping boy upon my lips.”
Her leer was anything but innocent. Her eyes were twin
shards of the blackest coal. Though I couldn’t discern iris from
pupil, I knew she was intent upon me. The intensity of her gaze was
too great to think otherwise.
“…both sets of them…”
Her
cackle was horrendous.

I backed away
further.

She reached for
me.

She was slow and
her movements were jerky and lacked coordination. It was easy to
avoid her grasp.