Please Don't Go (27 page)

“
No, thank you.”

“
Your loss,” he said, lighting the musty smelling vice. “The name’s Vance.”

“
Zephyr.”

“
Pleased to meet you.” They shook hands and the man’s rugged grimy mitts felt comforting to him, which was unexpected. There was a hidden attribute to the earthy men of Maine that soothed the senses when they spoke, and Vance possessed some of that invisible aura. Being a
flatlander
(which Maine-born people called out-of-state transplants) himself, these types of fellows were all for going the extra yard, willing to lend a helping hand even to total strangers.

The truck rumbled in the dips and grooves of the potholed road and Vance furrowed his brow followed by a rattling cough. “You mind if we take a shortcut? This road’s all tore up to hell, and I know a side road that’ll get us back to Old Country Road just fine. It’s not so much a shortcut. More like a safe-cut. I just got new tires and shocks, trying to keep them puppies fresh. Holyoke looks like it got hit by a goddamned meteor shower.”

“
Fine by me. I’m the goon that’s hitchhiking here,” Zephyr said, happy to be increasing the distance between he and the spider-webbed Rattup residence. When he thought of that festering squealing place, which he had at one time adored, he felt his skin crawl... as though he hadn’t showered in days, which was true.

Slowing down his pace to less than two miles per hour, Vance spun his wheel and sliced into a desolate side road, one even grittier and less civilized than Holyoke had been. “And off we go,” said the man, sucking in on his cigarillo with a greedy pull. The overhanging trees of this new road gave the roof of the cabin screeching high fives as they maneuvered the terrain. Vance appeared unfazed, but Zephyr gripped the handle of his door. “It gets a little smoother in a few,” the man said.

It did not get smoother. In fact, it became less forgiving, and with deeper divots.

A darkness overtook them as they dug deeper into the fold of pine and oak trees. Zephyr began to wonder if they were even on a registered public road anymore. “You sure about this?” he asked. The Yellow Brick Road had been swallowed up into a vector of mystery, void of light and sound. This was the path that he had always come across in adventure video games or cartoons, where twisty knotted trees and eyeballs blinking in the black maw warned the pixelated adventurer of a precarious future.

“
Oh, I’m sure. This is a sweet little shortcut home.” He looked ahead with a blank expression, clutching at the wheel with a tight grip, engorged in a deep absence of brain waves. Lost, exhausted, confused.

“
I thought we were going to Old Country Road. Not
home
. You live all the way out here?” Zephyr asked, puzzled. He coughed at the heavy gray smoke that filled the cabin and claustrophobia overtook his immediate sensory needs. A growing shard of dread peaked its head into the base of his stomach, a worm that possessed razor sharp teeth and a jaw that locked in place when it became agitated or threatened.

“
I don’t live out here. But
you do.
” Still, Vance stared straight ahead. He was no longer dodging the potholes, riding head-on into them with an abandon of the worries that pestered a conscious motorist. The truck rumbled in pain with every frost heave and ditch that it traversed. Zephyr could practically hear the bolts coming undone beneath.

Zephyr placed his hand on the plastic latch of the door, insisting to Vance, “Stop the car. I’ll walk the rest of the way.” Vance reached to his own door’s console and toggled a button without looking. In unison, all the locks in the truck clicked back into position, for he had no intention of allowing Zephyr to walk home. Not over his dead body. “Let me out!” Zephyr shouted, running short on breath as his heart started to race. That swimming feeling of entrapment that he had felt in his dreams when
she
had overtaken his life, had returned. It tugged at his ventricles and giggled inside of his intestines.

Vance lunged across the seat, gripping at Zephyr’s upper arm with inhuman strength. “You stay still,
lover
. If you jump out of this goddamned truck, I’ll run you down like an animal. You really think you can get away from me, then go ahead and try it. Take to those woods and I’ll pull this dummy’s shotgun from the back seat. I’ll blow your fucking head off before I let you leave
me
behind—you’ve made a commitment and you’ll keep it like a proper man. Men don’t leave. Not without permission.” The hot breath of Vance’s rotting gums and putrid teeth filled Zephyr’s immediate proximity and he bit back the compulsion to vomit on the dashboard. The man’s retinas had turned to a pure white color with red veins protruding from the wet glistening surface, something he could have pictured on a zombie or other form of undead. Zephyr could not be be certain as to when the transformation had occurred.

There was no Vance. There was only
she
.

“
You bitch.” Zephyr could feel his pulse racing and his vision blurring, that his escape had been fouled up by something beyond his control, that he was in actuality more trapped than he could have ever imagined, a fetus in an iron womb. She had threatened him with this, that he would not be allowed any liberties without her permission, and she had held fast to that unflinching promise.
Transference.
That was the word that kept bouncing around Zephyr’s brain as he struggled to free himself of the Vance Pod’s powerful grip, emboldened by the bitch-hound that Zephyr had come to label as
Emily
in his innermost thoughts.
Transference
was the word Charles Rattup had used in the greenhouse when all had gone to hell with the glass. The movement of a spirit or other-dimensional demon from one physical manifestation to another. Zephyr had looked into the term that evening, after what he now referred to as the “greenhouse incident.” There was even a theory, according to the great and wonderful oracle named Google, that transference could happen with inanimate objects. Throughout history there had been reports of a demon jumping from a dog to a human to a feline to a horse to anything living and breathing. But several of these accounts even went so far as to say that demons were theorized to have been housed itself inside of trinkets, antiques, jewelry, or idols. One story told of a man who had eaten a hot dog and had become possessed. It was theorized by the priest who oversaw his exorcism that the hot dog had contained the eight thousand year old soul of a dead heretic.

“
We’ll be home in a moment,” said the thing inside of Vance with a voice that reminded Zephyr of gravel being shoveled into a deep hole. “You keep your seat belt on and we’ll be back in two shakes, sweetness. I think you may need a nap after this travellin’ man routine. It must be exhausting to be so free, but that won’t be a problem any longer.” Vance’s body cleared its throat. “What must I do to keep you in place, where you belong? I’ll be thinking about that one. Chains? Leather straps? I’ve done worse before, and you wouldn’t be the first that caused such problems.”

Why had she let him leave in the first place, if this was her planned end game?

Was she toying with him? Testing his gut reaction? Testing his
love
?

Zephyr started to scream, hoping that somebody in the darkened silent woods that surrounded them would hear his cry. “That won’t help much. My lover has such lungs on him,” Vance said with a snicker, his white eyes radiating and his lips curling back into a hideous smile that reminded Zephyr of a cartoon hyena. He made a kissing gesture with his lips, smacking them together in a softly blown kiss. “You need to calm your nerves. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.” Vance winked his wrinkled eyelid and it sent shudders of uneasiness through Zephyr’s body.

Zephyr cocked back his arm to deliver a punch towards the current vessel of his transparent abductor, but found that his upper body was restricted by those invisible shackles that he was becoming accustomed to. “I’ll break the fight out of you. Just give it time. Time makes it easier,” Emily-slash-Aleesha-slash-Vance-slash-who-knows-what advised.

***

The shadowy road that Vance had pulled his vehicle on to spilled into the back of Rattup’s property, which did not surprise Zephyr in the very least. He should have known that there were pre-formulated contingencies for all aspects of her abduction. She was craftier than he would have guessed at the beginning, and he would likewise need to up his ante and adapt to her foresight. Though he could not beat her with physical prowess, perhaps he could outsmart her- a battle for another day.

“
Look at this. Home again,” Zephyr said with dribbling sarcasm, a tint of sadness to his failure. He wondered to himself if beings from the other sides of the universe could detect sarcasm. He raised his brow at the pupil-less eyes of Vance, who showed his teeth again, as if to remind Zephyr how ugly the world was when you mussed about with an agitated demon. “So what happens next?” Zephyr asked, putting as much bravery into his throat as was possible within his trembling exhausted chest.

“
You’re gonna get your ass back in that house,” the thing inside of Vance said, looking straight ahead at the clearing of trees on the edge of Rattup’s property. “I’ll be down the road with Vance, taking care of your car. Charles told me you named your car Kiki? Well, me and Kiki have a date, and I’ll cut the bitch in half when I’m done with her. Thinks she’s going to fuss about with
my
man... no, no, no. She’s going for a swim in the pond off Harlow Road. I’ll be back in no time, so don’t think about squirming out of your cage again.”

“
And if I do?” he challenged. Vance’s vessel did not respond this time.

A voice whispered in his ear,
I’ll find you. I’ll always find you.
The invisible force of her shoved Zephyr in the shoulder, goading him to exit the vehicle.
Go to sleep
, she insisted in his mind.

Zephyr’s eyes grew muddled with the sensibilities of a blanket being draped over the top of his skull, heavy and wet and dark as night. Maybe, he reasoned as he drifted one more time into a realm of unready sleep, she had no need for drugs. In Rattup’s story, the hellion child by the name of Emily had drugged the narrator. But maybe the “drugs” were of a deeper psychological level, a sort of mesmerism that could be flipped like a switch. He dreamed of nothing at first, as the thing incorporating Vance’s body dragged Zephyr’s limp being into the house, tying him down with long shreds of bedsheet to Charles Rattup’s dusty, unmade bed.

***

Later, as the possessed Vance pushed Kiki into a nearby pond, hidden at the back of a wooded glen, Zephyr dreamed once again. When he had first dreamed, it was of Emily and Aleesha. This new dream, though, was of a world where Hell was unleashed for the planet to bear the burden of.

Dogs ran through the streets of a nameless city, howling and rolling in the dirty garbage strewn all about. There were no humans to be seen, only the wild, dirty canines. Buildings around them jutted into the sky, where the moon exposed itself like a frozen-in-motion football between goal posts. The stone of these buildings had never failed, and the dogs of the world were happy for that. They enjoyed the unparalleled heights of their city, left behind with the man-made mountains of glass, concrete, and stone. It gave them a sense of smallness, of being simplistic in a world that no longer domesticated them.

They tore at the meat of a felled deer, these unowned toothy beasts. The blood became matted in the fur about their mouths, dribbling and hardening like plaster. Sometimes the dogs ate each other, and that was acceptable in this new universe of sociable beasts, sans man. A human may have scoffed at such uncivilized cannibalistic behavior, but that reaction was lost in the swallows of wordless eternity.

The dogs moved in packs, like their ancestral wolves may have done thousands of years earlier. And among these rabid mongrels emerged Rattup, sauntering in the shadows, the lone human among an army of frothing beasts. He whistled in a cheerful staccato, and the dogs seemed to appreciate the comforts of that alien sound. Their growls became whimpers at the sight of him. They followed with unspoken obedience. “The beasts will be here long after you and I,” Rattup whispered, looking to Zephyr in the lightless urban streets. “We are puppets for the beasts, and so we do as they command. You and I only live because they have allowed it to be. We only live because they have not yet murdered us in their secret ploys and hidden agendas. Man is a device of the beast. A device of the Devil’s womb.”

Rattup walked past Zephyr in this nightmare, his pack of dogs following at his heels, each looking at Zephyr in passing, sneering with big white teeth. “Older than God himself, my boy.”

3.

Zephyr awoke with a groggy head, that particular scenario starting to feel like a broken record, squirming and hissing as a needle dragged across the ruined black grooves of his former serene consciousness. He tried to enunciate that frustration, but found his tongue swollen so much that his verbs and nouns tripped over it like a bunched-up throw rug.

The room was dark, a single candle flickering on the bedside table, the shadow of his body casting upon the back wall in a docile dance. He was quite sure that he was in a room that he had never inhabited during his visits to the vile Mister Charles Rattup. He knew of the kitchen, the den, and the greenhouse, including those hallways that connected those locations. But this room felt colder than the rest, a place of meditative silence and infinite sadness. There was a mattress, covered only with a sheet, with no pillows or blankets of any kind. It was not stationed upon a frame as one might have expected, only dropped on to the floor like a heap of druggie flophouse cushioning. He wondered if this “bed” had once belonged to Rattup. The thought of the snaky bastard sprawled out on the same bed as he sent a cringe up his backside.