The Bleeding Season (45 page)

Against the rear wall of the mill, draped in shadow, a huddled figure watched me from the darkness.  Its head was shiny—slick and wet—and it wasn’t until I stepped a bit closer that I realized it was covered in blood.  His head was bald, like it had been completely shaved—the wig gone—but I recognized the face even before the eyes opened, two white orbs emerging from crimson.  They looked at me as if I were some sort of anomaly, as if
I
 were the one out of place in the universe.  And maybe I was.

My emotions became too great, and even attempting to control them seemed inane.  Laughing, crying and choking all at once, I was certain I had slipped off the precipice into complete madness, because that which stood before me was not possible,
could not be possible
, and yet, there it was.  But with this awareness also came an odd clarity, a release and an acceptance of the inevitable—whatever it might be—and at the moment of this epiphany my fear tapered off, my tears stopped and I became surprisingly composed.  I had come to this house of horrors to find the evil, to stop it or to die trying.  And now, I had found it.

He cocked his head as if he had heard my thoughts.  For a fleeting moment something in his eyes spoke to me, and I glimpsed who he had once been so very long ago.

“Bernard,” I said.

“Come closer, Alan.”  His voice was a bit deeper than normal, and gurgled and reverberated like his lungs were full of fluid, or like he was gargling while attempting to speak.    

I did as he asked, and the closer I got the wider and more intense the flashlight beam became.  He was nude and covered in shining blood to his shoulders so thick and bright it looked almost like paint.  The fireworks finale continued, one explosion on top of the next as colors rained through the mill and slinked across our faces and bodies.  I followed one moving shaft of blue light to his lower extremities.  He was crouched there in the dark like a suddenly discovered and cornered animal.  Around his feet the floor was covered in a kind of jellylike mass of quivering flesh, blood and bone, a great deal of which was also on the wall behind him, as if violently thrown there.  It looked to be gradually passing through the floor and wall to somewhere else, like little by little, it was being absorbed.

Not all spirits cross peacefully
, Claudia had said.
Some hang on.

He seemed to have a normal range of motion but moved groggily, and at a snail’s pace.  He reached a blood-soaked hand to his face, wiped a space clear around his eyes then looked away to indicate brooding, contemplative thought.  As he exhaled each breath through his nose, more blood ran free of his nostrils and joined the sheen already coating him.  Eventually he began to breathe loudly through his mouth.

Movement to my left distracted me.  The shadowy figures from our nightmare stood several feet away, barely visible in the dark corner and just beyond the reach of both my flashlight and the illumination of the now constant barrage of fireworks.

But I knew who they were.  I had seen them before.

“And you know why they’re here,” Bernard gurgled.

“You’re not real,” I told him.  “None of you are real.”

“Are your dreams real?  Your nightmares?”

“You’re ghosts in my mind.”

“Close.”  He exhaled through his mouth with a loud hiss that sounded like air escaping a pipe, and his bloody lips peeled back into a grin.  He no longer had teeth, only slick pink gums.  “There are no ghosts, Alan.  Only memories…echoes…residue.”

“Why did you do this?”

The eyes shifted, and a black tongue slowly traced his lips.  “It’s my nature.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.  “You were my friend.”

“A friend, a relative,” he gurgled.  “Someone you trust, someone you believe in.  I have no unique characteristics; there are no giveaways.  Don’t you realize that by now?  I’m everywhere, Alan.  I’m everyone.
Anyone
.”  His mouth opened wide as a gush of dark blood spilled from his mouth and poured over his chin.  “The inconsolable, the weak, the lonely and the lost, the faithless and the unclean.  The damned.  The lovely damned.”

The fireworks stopped, and both silence and darkness returned to the mill.  Only my flashlight remained, along with the sounds of the nearby ocean.  I tightened my grip on the scuba knife.

“You came here to kill me, is that it?”  The wet white eyes dropped to my hands.  “With your ridiculous toys?”

I stared at the monstrosity before me, my chest heaving.

“Well I have
darker
 toys,” he said.

“Why are you tormenting us?”

Wet crimson fingers caressed his bloody chin.  After a moment, those fingers reached out for me, the tips dripping.  “Come together, Alan.  I’ll show you the beauty of torment.”  He grinned as I stepped a bit closer.  “Did I mention your mother’s down here with us?”

“My mother’s nowhere near you.”

“Can you be sure of anything anymore?  Ever again?”

I forced a swallow.  “I’m sure of that.”

“You had such nightmares then,” he said, using my mother’s voice now.  “When you were a little boy.  Do you remember, sweetheart?”

*   *   *

I’m afraid—so frightened I can barely breath.  I’m crying violently, choking, and my entire body trembles.  But then I realize my mother is there—so loving and patient, with the most beautiful deep brown eyes I have ever seen.  She is holding me, sitting with me there on my bed, rocking me in her arms and whispering to me.  She smells fresh and clean and warm, and I feel safe.  “It’s OK,” she tells me.  “Just bad dreams, little one, only bad dreams.”  She gently wipes away my tears with her fingers, and the blur I had seen her through previously vanishes.  “What were you dreaming about that frightened you so?”
 

“Something in the dark was chasing me,” I tell her.  “I was running and it was behind me and it was growling and biting me, biting me on my feet and on my legs.”

She kisses my forehead.  “There’s nothing in the dark but the dark.”

“There’s monsters in the dark,” I tell her.

“No such things as monsters, kiddo.”

Even though I know different, I also know she will never fully understand, so I focus on her face, and the perpetual sadness in her eyes.  I am afraid and she is sad.  These are our markings, burned into our flesh and mind and as much a part of us as spots to a leopard.

“Why are you always so sad?” I ask.  “Is it because Daddy died?”

“I’m not always sad, my love.”  She’s lying, but smiles and kisses me again.  “Think you can try to go back to sleep now like a big boy?”
   

I look over her shoulder at the darkness from the hallway leaking in under the door…or maybe escaping beneath it.  There is nothing to see, nothing hiding behind the curtains or beneath my bed.  But we’re not alone.  I can feel it.  Inside me, I can feel it.

“Sweetie, it was only a dream,” she says, sensing my uncertainty.  “Are you still afraid?”

I shake my head.  This time it is my turn to lie.  “No.”

*   *   *

“Leave her out of this,” I said.  “Leave her alone.”

“But I gave her to you, Alan.  I gave you your perfect mother.”

“You don’t frighten me.”

“Everything frightens you,” it replied, again using Bernard’s distorted, gargling voice.  “You’re still a terrified little boy whistling in the dark, Alan.  And I see you.  I’ve always seen you.  Now, you see me.”

“And what do I see?”

He hunched over a bit, turned, looked down at the floor and back at the wall as if he too were dissolving into it.  “The beginning.  The end.  The old.  The new.  The past.  The future.  Different faces, different names, different lives, but you’re always with me and I’m always with you, feeding on you, on your fears and weaknesses.”

“A parasite,” I said.  “A bleeder of innocent women and children.”

“No one is innocent.”  More blood poured from his nose and mouth but he seemed not to notice.  “I set those silly cunts free.  I let them see their useless gods.”  The thing grinned again with its gums.  “I’m on the threshold of something wonderful, Alan.  You’re the lost one, lost in your own self-righteousness just like the rest of them.  The world doesn’t want to stop me, not really, it gave birth to me—created me—and made me whole.  The truth is in the dark, Alan.  Here, with me.”

“You’re a disease.”

“No, only a symptom.  I’m the open sore festering and blistering across their flesh, eating them from the inside out and laughing at their arrogant attempts to ignore me.  They don’t try to stop me, they only pretend I’m not there.  Nero fiddled, Alan.”  He sighed, ran a bloody hand across his equally bloody dome.  “And Rome burns.”  He looked around like he had momentarily forgotten where he was.  “I set those women free of their hypocrisy and meaningless lives.  I gave them purpose.  No one cares about some low-rent single mothers and their bastard children.  No one cares if they live or die, if they suffer or bleed.  The world won’t miss them.  The world misses nothing, no one.  But I made them immortal.  I brought importance to their useless existences.  In death, they matter, don’t you see?  They have purpose.  And now, like all of you, they belong to me.  In my darkness, they belong to me.
I’m
their God.
I’m
 their messiah.”

The figures in the corner stepped forward, their forms crossing into the pool of light, their eyes black as a shark’s, just like in the dream.

I squared off between them, doing my best to keep both in my line of sight.  The bloody atrocity against the wall straightened, and a cage of ribs rose then fell within its slimy skin.  Unseen things scurried beneath its flesh, scuttling about like spasmodically stirring insects.  He caught my eye and grinned at me again, slurping blood from his gums.

It was no longer possible to find any semblance of Bernard in this creature.  Gone were any traces of the little boy I had grown up with, played baseball with, rode bikes with, laughed with and experienced so much with.  Gone was the young man I had become a teenager with, experienced the loss of our friend with and graduated high school with.  Gone was the grown man who attended my wedding, who had been my lifelong friend.  Yet even in the midst of this madness I couldn’t help but remember him as a young boy, as it was perhaps the only time he had truly been who and what I believed him to be.  For that little boy, for what happened to him, my heart broke, because the innocent small town boy Bernard had once been was long dead.  And simple death had apparently not been sufficient.  He’d been completely annihilated.

Bernard nodded.  He had heard me thinking again.  “You and I, we know quiet little towns are never what people think they are,” he said.  “Quiet little towns hide quiet little secrets … quiet little screams.  Listen to the screams, the whispers in your mind.  Obey them.  The voices are mine, don’t you see?  In this world, and the next.”

“You’re no prophet, no dark messiah,” I said, spitting the words at him.  “You’re no sorcerer.  It’s all lies.  Fucking
lies
 meant to frighten and intimidate.  You’re a lie.”

“Not me, Alan—you.  You’re only real because I made you real.  I fucking
made
 you, all of you.  My rituals made you real, and they made me a god.”

The world is not always what you think it is.
 

“You’re just a sad and pathetic little man,” I said.  “A loser full of rage and violence with delusions of grandeur.  A deeply disturbed
man
, nothing more.”

He smiled at those awaiting us in shadow, then at me.  “There’s no need to be anything else.  Our capacity for evil, mindless brutality and destruction is unequalled.  We’re never free of it, Alan.  We pretend to be, but we’re never free of it.  Those black places in our souls never let us go.  Never.”

The real world is the one underneath, and that world is different.  It’s shadows
.  

I ignored the ringing in my ears and motioned to the others.  “I know why they’re here.  Just like in the dream, they’re here for you.”

“They’re not here to take me to Hell, Alan.”  He blinked blood drops from his eyes.  “They’re here to take you.”

My blood turned cold.  “No.”

“Come together, Alan,” he said.  “Wash with me in their blood, feel it running over you while it pumps free of their slowly dying bodies.  Let it run in their filthy fucking streets.  Bleed them with me, Alan.  We’re gods.”

I held the knife down by my thigh, gripping it tightly.  “I’m sorry for what happened to you as a child, Bernard.  I’m sorry for what your mother did to you—to all of us.  For that little boy, I’m sorry.  But for what that little boy became, I’m not sorry.  For that sorry excuse of a human being I feel no compassion whatsoever.  You’re the same now as you were then, the same as you allowed yourself to become.  You’re nothing.  Powerless.  Alone.  And you need to die.”

Bernard laughed, his voice bellowing and echoing through the empty space.  Blood again gushed from his lips.  “What happened to me as a child made you possible, you fucking fool.  My rituals allowed you to stay behind, made you real.  You should have paid more attention to what the whore told you.  I’m already dead and buried.  It isn’t me you’re dreaming of.  It isn’t me you see.  It’s you.  It’s yourselves you see, the part of me that lives in you, in
all
 of you.”

Screams cut the night, screams of unimaginable terror.  Rick’s screams.

“We’re all one.  We’re all the same.  Come home to me, Alan.”

Rick’s screams grew worse. “Stop it.” I said.

“Everything you have, I gave you.  It all started with me.”

“Stop it!”

“Such beauty,” he hissed.  “Such
beauty
.”

I pitched forward and lumbered toward him.  Bernard rose from his crouch but made no attempt to defend himself.  With a primal scream of my own, I slashed the blade down across his face then back across his throat.  Swinging my arm in a violent repeating arc, I slashed again and again across the crimson mass, spraying us both with blood and bile.  Bernard staggered back, still grinning, and finally fell back against the wall.