A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous (9 page)

It’s a dream,
he thought.
This is a dream smell.
But when the sound of shuffling footsteps followed the stench into their prison, he opened his eyes and prayed to be awakened.

The figure striding into the room was easily seven feet tall. He limped towards Lawrence with an unsteady gait, his legs teetering and seeming to threaten collapse with each step, like a toddler learning to walk but too inexperienced to trust his limbs. A gown of thick brown fabric covered his thin frame to where his knees should’ve been, and a hooded cowl capped his head, rendering shadows over his face.

Brooke lunged against her chains.
“Who the fuck you think you are the fuck did you do to—”
She stopped as the towering figure turned in the middle of a rickety step and strode towards her.

“No!”
Lawrence screamed.
“Me! Come to me!”

The figure drew his right hand from his robes. A mound of black dirt lay in its palm. Brooke had backed away as far as her binds would allow, and Lawrence saw blood ringing her thin ankles where the chains bit. The man—
that’s no man you know that’s no man—
stopped in front of her, dark crumbs falling from his upturned hands. With a crack that stained Lawrence’s jeans with a spurt of urine, each of the figure’s legs bent at the middle and snapped, creating a pair of splintered, jagged knees. Brooke screamed, covered her ears as if preparing for the next explosion of breaking joints.

The thing knelt before her, its face cloaked in the darkness of its hood. Its left arm emerged from its sleeves, as straight and unwavering as its legs had been before the deafening crack. Lawrence envisioned a snake slithering from its den as the arm grew longer, longer, knotty yet smooth. Lawrence lunged, fingers curled and eager for the thing’s neck, but his chains locked tight and he pitched forward, his face slamming into the earthen floor. He raised his head into blindness, tried to scrape the grime out of his eyes. His ears, however, were ruthlessly keen, and pain riddled his chest as he heard his wife’s shrieks collapse into retching, choking sobs.

The thing was on him before he could regain his sight. A hand as hard as granite grabbed the back of his skull and wrenched his head back. Lawrence screamed. A ball of dirt smashed into his mouth. He shook his head, tried to dislodge the filth, to see his attacker. Blinking away enough for a hint of blurred sight, he saw only the hooded figure’s arm, directly in front of his face and shoving the soil down his throat. He gagged, spit, shrieked behind the wall of dirt filling his mouth, and finally, he swallowed. The dirt, now muddy with his saliva, slid down his esophagus like a ribbon of slime. He coughed, exaggerated the action in an effort to expel the dirt from his mouth, his stomach, his lungs, but the thing pressed harder. Lawrence could taste its fist in his mouth, and it tasted like timber.

He raised his teary gaze to the thing’s face. Shadows still embraced its details, but a creak sounded from within the darkness like a door opening upon a haunted room.
It’s smiling,
he thought, and closed his eyes again, praying he’d never have to see that grin. He thrashed against the thing’s pressing arm, its shoving and choking and suffocating arm…

Bark,
he thought.
Its arm looks like bark.

It spoke then, its voice a log dragged across bones. “The trees did more than move. They screamed.” It lowered its face to within inches of Lawrence’s own. It reeked of oak and summer. “Remember your greatest sin, murderer.”

It rose and backed away. Lawrence heard its irregular footsteps retreating, heard the moaning and spitting of his wife across the room. He shoved his fingers into his mouth, digging for loose dirt, spitting and spitting and screaming when nothing but flecks came out.

HE DIDN’T REMEMBER PASSING out, but when he awoke, the stench of vomit dominated any lingering odor of wood or mud. A crusty film of dried puke coated his face, and he wiped the gunk with his shirt, managing only to smear sweat-saturated dirt into the mess.

Brooke moaned from behind him. He sat up, reached for his wife, his fingers just able to brush her outstretched arm, her face fuzzy in the thin moonlight. She gave him a mockery of a smile.

The bravado was gone, all the spunk and grit and attitude he had fallen in love with, gone. Her eyes shook off her smile with disdain and broadcast the truth: she was terrified and lost. Lawrence had never seen this expression in her eyes before, didn’t think defeat had ever been wired into her genes. But even the effort of smiling, her attempt to placate the fear that must be plastered across his own face, spoke of the fight in her bones, the strength of her soul.

He didn’t blame his wife for her fear. He was mortified, beyond the capacity to control his terror. Every cell in his being shrieked for release, begged to awaken from the nightmare. Raw courage in the midst of insane violence, brashness in the face of murderous psychosis, spitting into the grin of your kidnapper while chained to the ground and blinded by his blade, none of those responses to the world’s basest evil held true outside of the clichéd heroes of Hollywood. In the real world, terror bit with monstrous jaws and didn’t let go after a hail of curses and a few clever one-liners. It scoffed at your defiance and giggled at your anger.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too, Lawrence.”

“We’re gonna get out of this.” Her smile returned, even less convincing than the first.

“You were throwing up in your sleep,” she said. “I was afraid you’d choke.”

“I wouldn’t call it sleep. I think I passed out.”

“He said something to you, didn’t he?”

He let her call the hooded beast a “he,” figured to correct her by saying “it” would only add to her anguish. “He told me the trees laughed. And to remember my greatest sin.”

“Your…what the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” Lawrence lowered his head, closed his eyes against the barrage of remembered mistakes that suddenly assaulted him. But they were
mistakes,
not sins against his fellow man—fights by his middle school flagpole that he should’ve ended before throwing that final, nose-crunching punch; lies to college bedmates when they pressed him for his phone number the morning after; an extra few lines on his resume here, a few too many intoxicated drives home there, but nothing,
nothing,
that justified this hell.

“I’m a good man, right, honey?”

“The best man.”

“I never hurt you, did I? Never hurt anyone on purpose when I could help it, right?”

“No, Lawrence, you never hurt me. You’re a good man. I don’t know what this is all about either. Maybe we hurt his family or something. Caused an accident we didn’t know about? A car wreck or something?”

“So he makes us eat
dirt?
I feel like I could throw up for anoth—” He looked at the vomit puddled on the ground beside him. The mess was thick, putrid, but free of soil. “Brooke, where’s the dirt?
How could I not have thrown up the dirt?”

Tears cleared a path through the mud on her cheeks, and her soft sniffles watered his eyes. He touched his belly, imagined his stomach absorbing a mountain of mud, making it as one with himself as his blood and bone.
God, I want a smoke.

“I’m gonna get you out of here. Look at me. I’m gonna get you out of this.”

Brooke answered with a scream. Lawrence followed her eyes. The hooded lunatic stood in the crude doorway. A saw dangled from his hands.

The mind bends, stretches, conforms to its surroundings with elastic resiliency and rabid stubbornness. It takes the mysteries of the universe, all the darkness and wonder, the wicked and the miraculous, the unknown and the unknowable, and molds itself into a state of either comprehension or ignorance. Only the purest experiences, the Grand Truths of the world, unhindered and unbound by any attempt at understanding, immune to man’s feeble pokes and prods, can transform the human mind into the babbling mass of jelly it is at its core. And as the towering demon strode into the room and lowered its saw to Brooke’s feet, Lawrence’s mind imploded.

He heard her sanity dissolving with her screams—gurgling, inhuman shrieks that warped his reality into a cacophony of drivel. He was aware of thrashing, screeching his own mad song. Brooke kicked, over and over like a crazed cyclist, but the thing grabbed one of her legs and jerked it straight, wrenching it into stillness. Lawrence could only see its cloaked back, but with an echoing crack its arm bent, descended, and began to pump back and forth in rhythm with the crunching of blade on bone. Blood soaked into the dirt at Brooke’s feet, pooling as the ground swallowed its fill. A toe dropped to the floor, plopped into the puddle of blood, followed by another, another, one more. Brooke’s shrieks faded into nothing, her eyes rolled back, her beautiful brown eyes, and as the creature raised its saw to her fingers, it spoke.

“Eventually everyone sins against my bride.”

As the first finger fell to the floor, Lawrence joined his wife in blackness.

HE CUT OFF HER fingers, he cut off her toes, and soon he’ll be coming to cut off my nose.

The words rolled through his conscience, high and singsong like a child jumping rope. They giggled and kicked and nudged him awake.

“You’re a rude man, Mr. Lawrence.”

Brooke.
But no. She had never called him Mr. Lawrence, or rude for that matter. And her voice didn’t slice through his flesh like a rusty blade. He kept his eyes closed.

“I haven’t even touched you, yet you faint while I am speaking to you. And rest assured, I have no plans for your…nose.”

He opened his eyes, meant to tell the giant to go to Hell, leave them alone, fuck off, but his voice dribbled from his mouth as incoherent nonsense. The thing in the robes stood over him. Brooke’s leg, gray and bare and severed at the hip, hung from its hand.

The thing followed Lawrence’s gaze, then tossed the leg into the dirt. “Unnecessary,” it said. “Unaesthetic.”

Rage engulfed him, obliterated any desire for self-preservation. He saw only Brooke, his still and forever Brooke, and prayed for death’s reunion. He growled as he lunged; his fingers found his kidnapper’s neck and squeezed. It felt like squeezing lumber. The thing laughed, like gravel crunching underfoot.

“Let’s stop the charade, Mr. Lawrence. Do you remember your sins?”

“I didn’t do anything to you!”
He abandoned the fruitless attempt at choking his enemy and, realizing that his feet were unchained, leapt towards its face and groped for the hood. If he was to die, he would see the face of his killer.

The thing grabbed Lawrence’s arm. It twisted its wrist, and Lawrence’s forearm snapped in the middle and burst through his skin like a baby elephant’s trunk. He wailed, clutched the break. His vision blurred as if challenging the reality of his arm’s new angles.

“Your attacks were becoming tiresome,” the thing said. It grabbed Lawrence by the hair and strode towards the door of the mud room. Lawrence’s healthy hand left the wreckage of the fracture and grabbed the beast’s wrist, trying to alleviate the agony in his scalp. Like a parent dragging an irate child in the midst of a tantrum, the giant took Lawrence from his prison and showed him a glimpse of Hell.

“This is the price for your sins,” it said, and raised Lawrence by the hair until his feet dangled from the ground. Lawrence thrashed in terror, the pain in his head forgotten before the scene in front of him.

They stood in a forest. The moon shone full and heavy, illuminating every ghastly detail. Trees dotted the landscape, and they screamed in silent agony. Faces blended into the bark, blemishes in each trunk describing mouths full of soundless shrieks, eyes of the blackest fear. Hundreds of trees, hundreds of bodies, still but alive, flesh made wood, begging yet reverent to their master as it carried Lawrence into their midst. A maple the size of a teenage girl wept sap as they passed. An oak with a linebacker’s girth glared with crooked knotholes and offered unheard prayers with a furry mouth. A cone of fungus hung from a conifer and fit its grimacing face like a beard. Lawrence went slack, dangled, his protruding radius bouncing painlessly off his captor’s robes, his fight lost among the human dead and the thriving flora.

“Your kind sins against my bride with never a moment to consider her love for you, never a thought for the grace of her soul.” The beast lowered Lawrence to the ground, still grasping a clawful of hair, and dragged him deeper into the human forest. “You set up camps to praise the gift of her vastness, to cheer your own courage for daring to sleep without electricity and shelter. Yet you continue to cut, and hack, and saw at her bones. Your garbage sinks into her flesh and poisons her veins. You rob her waters of their creations, and litter her air in toxins and smoke.”

The thing picked Lawrence up once more and turned him to within inches of its obscure face. An earthy odor emanated from the shadows, a green and blooming smell that nearly dragged a mirthless laugh from Lawrence. The wind groaned through the bodies as if dreading the moments to come.

“And you burn her limbs with smoldering embers.”

With a snap and a crack, its free arm broke, bent, and pulled back its hood. Lawrence cackled with lunatic terror.

Eyes as black and deep as wormholes glared, gauged, judged. Its flesh was cracked and rough, a mosaic of grays and browns and reds. Leaf-clad branches the size of fingers jutted from its cheeks, its chin, its brows. Speaking through a distorted fissure in its bark the width of a snake hole, it said, “Do you remember your embers, Mr. Lawrence?”

And he did. He tasted the last drag off his cigarette, recalled his pride as he watched the muscles in Brooke’s legs when she stooped to roll up the tent. He felt his fingers flick the cigarette into the dry brush lining their campsite, watched its glowing orange tip somersault and fall. Banished details returned, the gathering smoke where the cigarette still burned, the scent of flaming kindling, the thickness in the air as it prepared to sear. He saw Brooke’s forgotten look of horror as a shadow grew behind him, heard a now familiar crack, then pain and the dark.