All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (35 page)

I didn’t
respond.

When the puking and
the bleeding began seconds later, en masse, I remembered my mother
standing behind me and decided to get her away from such a
spectacle.

What kind of son
am I?

I turned, intending
to take her arm and lead her away much the way she’d led me
here in the first place, but my fingers closed on empty air.

“
Mother?”

The word felt
foreign on my lips, an ill-tasting chunk of food ejected from my
tongue, but I let it go without querying why it tasted so bad. I
scanned the crowd around me, moved away from the Orlando Albert
buffet in search of the woman who birthed me. Lost souls pushed by
me, some moving to join the feeding frenzy, some milling in the
aimless manner of the damned. I snaked my way between them and
caught a glimpse of my mother heading for a door which hadn’t
been there before.

“
Mother!”

I spat the word as
loudly as possible but the tumult of damned feet shuffling in dirt
and Orlando’s screams as his tormentors got down to the good
stuff smothered it. I jogged after her, squeezing my way through the
crowd as she pulled the door open and stepped through. Halfway to
her, a squat, dense soul which bore more resemblance to a sumo
wrestler than to the others gathered here stepped in front of me. I
hit the man’s broad chest and bounced back a few steps. His
deportment immediately suggested he didn’t intend to let me
pass. I held my hands up, palms toward him in a gesture of
surrender.

“
I
don’t want any trouble. Just let me by.”

His lips pulled
back in a growl revealing teeth a few decades beyond their best
days. A ragged piece of meat hung between two of them. The way he
looked told me reasoning with him might not be an option, so I
didn’t bother.

I
deked right, then went left, but he didn’t bite—exactly
why I never played football. A massive arm shot out and caught me
across the throat with a text book clothesline move right out of
Wrestlemania.
I
hit the ground in a puff of dirt and felt the chance of catching up
with my mother disappear like the dust dissipating in the air.

For a second I saw
chaotic sky swirling overhead, but then the pseudo-sumo wrestler’s
figure moved over me, blocking it. The muscles in his arms and legs
tensed giving me a fraction of a second to panic. I’d seen
this move before: the Big Splash. Seasoned wrestlers didn’t
recover from a monster like this coming down on them.

He leapt impossibly
high in the air, arms waving like he wanted to swim. I gritted my
teeth, readying myself for the impact.

And then he
exploded.

Blood and goop
rained down, spattering me. I lay unmoving for a few seconds, not
sure what happened, then climbed to my feet cautiously—Hell
had proven unpredictable more than once. I took a few steps away and
looked back at a perfect outline of my body painted on the dirt in
blood.

Adds a whole new
meaning to the name ‘Big Splash’.

Under other
circumstances, I might have marveled at the cartoon-esque nature of
an exploding man, maybe laughed a little—or maybe lost my
lunch—but the need to find where my mother had gone tied my
intestines into a lasso. I wiped the sumo off my face and continued
along the path he’d blocked. Ten seconds later I arrived at
the door, threw it open and spilled through with no regard to what
might be on the other side.

My first sensation
was of heat, though my nerve endings and eyes quickly combined to
rectify that to reality: cold. A dusting of snow shrouded the
sidewalk at my feet and the parking lot stretching before me. I
looked down, confused.

Snow in Hell?

No, not snow in
Hell. And no footprints in the snow which wasn’t in Hell.
Wherever I’d ended up, it wasn’t where my mother went. I
pivoted on one heel, tore the door open and rushed through again.

And tripped over a
stack of patio chairs.

I righted myself
and looked around the dark warehouse which I’d now visited at
least one time too many.

“
No,”
I said aloud, the word dying against a plastic-wrapped stack of
cushions. “No.”

I went out the door
into the same parking lot, realizing where I was. Thirty yards away,
a couple strolled arm in arm through the pleasant winter night,
content with each other and with whatever beliefs they did or didn’t
have in the existence of Heaven and Hell.

“
No,”
I bellowed into the wintery night.

The man hugged his
lady close, shot me a baleful look and crossed the street to a
sidewalk safe from shouting lunatics. I wished I shared their
uncertain beliefs, but I’d been to Hell and back in the
realest sense of the cliché and, more disturbingly, my
turncoat guardian angel lost my son there.

And I didn’t
know how to get back.

Bruce
Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost

The boy was
Caucasian but of dark hair and complexion, as though another lineage
combined to give his skin a shade two steps darker than olive. Or
perhaps the unwashed nature of his face gave it its shade. In any
case, his skin looked taut and smooth like most any twelve year old,
and he stood a full head shorter than Trevor, but his demeanor made
him seem older, bigger.

“
Where’s
my father?” Trevor asked, the syrupy feeling in his head
slowing his words as they exited his mouth.

“
I’ll
show you, if you like.”

Trevor’s head
bobbed like a cork floating on a lake. The many-named boy with no
name gestured for him to follow as he strode across the room. Trevor
struggled to his feet, dragging his heavier-than-usual head with him
as he went, and followed the boy. Crossing the room, he noticed some
odd ornamentation he hadn’t seen during his first cursory
glance at his surroundings. An ornate cage with bars made of
intricately carved wood sat on a table, its bottom covered with
fine-grained sand, a volcanic rock formation in one corner; a long,
leafless branch extended the length of the cage. The skeleton of the
gecko one might have expected to find in such a cage sat in the
middle. Trevor stared at it as he passed the table; the
skeleton-lizard snapped its jaws at him and shuffled to the bars to
watch him go by.

On the wall behind
the table hung a grisly rendition of the comedy and tragedy masks,
each of them broad, stretched, as if peeled directly off someone’s
face. Trevor thought if he examined them close enough, he’d
likely find them actually made of flesh and chose to direct his eyes
ahead, fixing them on the boy’s back.

The boy had reached
the other side of the room and stood facing a tapestry, his back to
Trevor blocking his view of the depiction upon the cloth. Something
fluttered in the corner Trevor’s vision, but he kept his on
the boy.

“
Hmm.
This is interesting,” the boy said. “Perhaps you should
hurry.”

He wiggled his
fingers and the rubber cement which had filled the gaps in Trevor’s
brain evaporated, freeing his thoughts and movements. He made his
legs go faster and propelled himself to the boy’s side to see
the scene woven in the tapestry.

The hanging showed
a partial bird’s-eye view, to the right of which was a
complicated pattern, like the mazes Trevor used to do in the puzzle
books his mother bought him in his youth. He’d never been good
at them, and the one embroidered on the cloth looked like it might
be the most complicated he’d ever seen, its complexity
heightened by the fact its walls seemed to shift every time Trevor
moved his eyes. He blinked rapidly to dispel what he thought must be
an optical illusion and found it changed with each flutter of his
eyelids.

“
Look
here,” the boy prompted and Trevor shifted his gaze away from
the labyrinth.

At the end of the
maze was an open space in which hundreds of stick people milled
about. No doubt about the movement of the depictions this time; tiny
people walked back and forth aimlessly, bumping into each other,
wandering to the wall bounding their holding area then turning
around and walking back like scores of miniature zombies.

In one spot, the
scene differed. A group of slightly more fleshed out stick men
gathered around another who kicked and struggled on the ground
amidst them.

They appeared to be
eating him.

Trevor’s lip
curled in disgust. His eyes wandered back toward the labyrinth but
the boy’s hand on his arm diverted his attention back.

“
Did
you see this?”

He pointed at the
two figures on the tapestry directly in front of him, one
considerably thicker than the other, a detailed rendering of a man
who, in life, would be well muscled and stocky. The second figure
stood a bit taller, not as broad, but equally as well detailed.

“
Dad?”

“
That’s
him.”

Trevor leaned in,
squinted at the figures as Icarus gestured, held up his hands. The
other man flexed in menace, his muscles visible even in the
tapestry’s thread.

“
What’s
going on? Where is he?”

“
Right
there.” The boy pointed at the hanging.

Trevor extended his
finger, intending to stroke the lines of thread depicting his
father, but the boy grabbed his hand, stopping him less than an inch
from touching the cloth.

“
Not
a good idea,” he said.

His grip was strong
enough to keep Trevor from moving his hand forward or pulling it
away. The boy held it in place as the stocky figure clothes-lined
the miniature, embroidered Icarus to the ground. Trevor gasped. He
didn’t know exactly what he was seeing—an illusion? A
portrayal of events happening now, past or future?—but he felt
his father was in danger.

The stocky man
bunched, crouched, then jumped into the air over the Icarus figure.

“
Okay.
Touch him.”

The boy guided
Trevor’s finger forward and pressed it against the thread-man.
It didn’t feel of soft cloth, instead Trevor felt something
alive squirm beneath the fleshy tip of his finger, like he’d
trapped a bug. It wriggled momentarily then burst like he’d
pressed too hard on a grape. He jerked his hand away and the boy
released his grip.

Trevor stared at
the tapestry. A red smudge tainted the cloth where the stocky figure
was a moment before, the smear obscuring the miniature Icarus.
Trevor’s heart jumped. He leaned forward, breath held,
examining the threads to see if both figures had been destroyed.
When the tiny version of his father separated from the stain,
leaving behind an outline of itself, Trevor stumbled back from the
wall.

“
What
the Hell was that?”

The boy chuckled a
laugh which didn’t belong in the throat of a twelve-year-old.

“
You
just saved your father’s life.”