Dead Souls (32 page)

And then, fell still and silent, back to dead.

Mary stood frozen with misunderstood fear, staring at Ed's body and mentally trying to
will
him back to life again,
please, just for a moment
, to confirm that she had indeed heard him speak to her. It'd seemed only logical, at least to her current state of mind which she assumed had suppressed her fear, that he in fact
had
spoken to her—that the evil of Benjamin Conroy had found its way back into her life, via Johnny. Johnny, whom she knew, just
knew
, wouldn't be here—who was in fact in
Wellfield
now, unwittingly working Conroy's evil sin back into existence. Into her life. And here, into Ed.

Save my dying soul…

"I will, Ed," she answered, her slipping mentality uncertain of what it meant, or how she were to accomplish the task. Her mind however, in its newfound state, did maintain an inkling of what she needed to do next, and that was to return to
Wellfield
…

…go to the house…

…go to the house, save Johnny and…and save Ed's dying soul.

September 8
^th
, 2005

8:53 PM

J
ohnny awoke in darkness. It enveloped him,
grasped
him, much like a womb would a fetus. He struggled to his knees, eyes tearing, head thudding. A cold chill pervaded his body; his lungs rattled as they rejected hunks of dusty phlegm.

He looked up…

…and remembered the crosses he'd seen, dead human bodies crucified upon them. And then…something else there in the darkness, looking at him, something dark and shifting and definitely alive…

He grimaced in pain, and the memory drifted. His bruised back screamed as sharp aches attacked the length of his spine like hammer strikes. The chill faded and he realized suddenly how hot and stifling it was.

Staring into the darkness, he crept forward, arms outstretched and gesturing blindly. His hands came in contact with what felt like a wood wall, damp and pulpy beneath his seeking grasp.

He stood and began to grope along the length of the wall, gouged and grooved with decay. Some of the planks budged slightly. He kicked at one, gently at first because his legs hurt so damn much, and then a little harder as he managed to muster up a bit of strength. In the dark it seemed he was doing little damage, but for endless minutes he kicked and pushed anyway, and soon enough the rotted wood splintered outward.

He leaned down with his hands on his knees, breathing heavily, drained of his strength. Streaks of sweat dripped down his face and body like oil. A wave of oppressive heat assaulted him, and for a moment he was sure he was going to faint.
God helps those that help themselves
, his mother used to say, and he found it in himself to at long last heed Mary's godly counsel and maneuver himself through the jagged hole he made, back into the barn.
She also once said that those in pain who turn to God after a life of denial shall not find His guidance.

The stillness and foreignness of the structure's interior was wholly intimidating and menacing, and it triggered in him a fearful realization of the unexpected events that had lured him here.
 

Try not to be scared. You are going to step through those doors, and then you are going to run and run and you are never going to come back here ever again.

But I didn't come here
, his conscience answered.
I was lured here…lured into a trap.

Just as Andrew Judson was…

The front doors of the barn were still open. Silver moonlight seeped in and splayed across the hard soil in a single wide beam. He could see the ladder laying across the ground like a fallen soldier. Alongside it was a dark splotch of blood where the crazed psycho had fallen.

The dark splotch was the letter 'O' in the word 'Osiris', scrawled in lurching bloody letters on the ground. Instinctively, he felt out the plastic bag holding Ed's suicide note, still in his pocket.
Osiris…

"
Jesus Christ…"
he whispered, now seeing beyond the bloody word on the floor—beyond the initial dread it caused, towards an advanced level of terror.

The body was gone.

Every plausible scenario tore through Johnny's mind. Still, he was certain that the no-eyed psycho had indeed been killed, and at once imagined that someone must've come along and taken the body away.

But what if he's
not
dead?
 

He's dead. He had only one eye to start, and you took out the other one. His head exploded against the wall and he came crashing down into a crumpled heap. Johnny, he is definitely dead…

There was a sudden sound…a tuneless rustle of something sifting through the tall grass outside. He jerked his gaze to the doors. Waited. Then, limped toward the entrance. When he reached the doors, he pressed a tentative hand against the jamb, listening intently; cool air, like a gift from God, bathed his sweat-soaked body.

He took a deep breath. Then, stepped outside into the waist-high grass.

First he looked toward the driveway, where Judson's car sat like a fossil beneath the pale blue moonlight. He peered at the house, whose back door remained open like a open mouth.

The rustling continued. It was closer now…or maybe it was just the wind talking.

Slowly, Johnny looked to his right…

not the wind

…and not ten feet away, emerging from the black-and-white shadows of the waist-high grass, was the psycho. His appearance was so unexpected, so startling, that Johnny had only a moment to consider the inhuman nature of his presence: despite having no eyes, the psycho could, by some unnatural means,
see
Johnny, his gape unwavering, mangled arms outstretched in his direction.

Johnny screamed, looking not just at the psycho's vacant sockets, but at the rest of his face: his cheeks, stripped of their skin, wet and glistening beneath the moonlight; his nose, a running channel of gore joining a cleft of gnashing teeth.

The psycho widened its grin. Its teeth glowered sickly at Johnny. One mangled hand reached out, and it uttered in a harsh whisper: "Brother…"

Johnny lurched away. He tripped through the high grass, beating back the pain lancing through his guts. A gray cloud of terror filled his sights. His breaths came and went in speeding gasps. He could hear the psycho's sifting feet behind him, and he pleaded in a silent panic,
Oh God, help me
! He glimpsed Judson's car, fifteen feet away, its shattered window dimly aglow beneath the soft dome light, lit from the open door he'd fled though hours earlier.

He skidded on the driveway. A small cloud of dust rose up around him. Here he could see—or so his tortured mind told him—someone sitting in the backseat of the car.

He staggered along the length of the car, leaned down, glimpsed inside.

The figure in the back seat twisted toward him.

Johnny flinched back. There was a flash of recognition he had no choice at the moment but to dismiss…but then the figure lunged across the seat and thrust its face through the broken window.

No!
It was Andrew Judson…and yet, despite the ghastly similarities, there was no conceivable way this thing could actually be the friendly lawyer Johnny had met earlier in the day; in fact, there was no way it could be alive…or human for that matter. Its chest was an open cavity. Johnny could see the white gristle of its ribcage imprisoning its motionless heart. Its lungs, blue and
mucusy
, sagged lifelessly atop a bloated balloon of exposed intestines. Its face, mostly intact, was white and horribly bloated. Its lips were blood-coated, teeth jabbing out in a scathing grimace.

It fired its arms through the jagged window. Fragments of glass ripped into the pulpy skin of its forearms. Its hands, grasping and groping, were covered with deep lacerations.

Panting and wheezing, Johnny lurched backwards against the house. Pain riddled him like a blast from a gun. His breath was knocked out of him. He clutched his chest, his scar burning with pain as though a razor were tracing its shape. The Judson-thing peered at him with cloudy yellow-brown eyes. "Brother…" it groaned, reaching both hands out like a baby aiming to be picked up.

Johnny shambled along the length of the house, his heart a chugging locomotive in his chest. The Judson-thing was halfway out of the car's window now. Shards of glass ripped into its exposed guts—Johnny could see its blood, welling down the car door in dark, glistening stripes. Johnny backpedaled across the cracked walkway, watching with nightmare terror as the thing nose-dived out of the window onto the ground, a rope of small intestine caught on a fragment of glass in the window frame like a pull from a sweater. It gazed up at Johnny with its sunken eyes, arms and legs twisting and grasping for equilibrium as it tried to right itself. It opened its mouth. "Brother…"

Johnny reached the front of the house. He continued backing away on buckling legs, thinking,
this can't be happening, it just CAN'T.
For a moment he considered this to be a hallucination, a harsh symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder that would guarantee him a life-long stay in some cold cinder-walled institute—it seemed a better alternative than to accept all of this as real. But Judson, and now the psycho—once dead human beings now terribly alive—were very much
real
, moving crookedly in the weedy driveway with their clutching hands and gaping mouths and injuries still fresh and gleaming in the bright moonlight.

Johnny shrieked. The psycho-thing tottered after him. The Judson-thing fought with the intestinal rope still leashing him to the car.

Johnny spun and dashed away into the night, head down, arms pumping back and forth as he pushed himself past the pain trying to bring him down, past the imagined sensation of the psycho's rotting fingers grasping the back of his neck. The darkness of the country road welcomed him, and he embraced it as a wave of saving grace from the evils that shouted out in his wake:
"Brother…"

September 8
^th
, 2005

9:46 PM

"F
our-Seventy-Nine, East Eighty-Eighth Street. Apartment 3B. Yes, Ten PM. A van with wheelchair access. Yes, with an automatic lift. I'm also going to need the driver to assist me with my luggage, so please, tell him to double-park with his hazards on. There's an elevator in the building, so it'll only take a few minutes to come back down. Thank you."

Mary Petrie hung up the phone. She gazed at her wrinkled hand—
how peculiar it looks in the bright light
, she thought indifferently—then peered at the clock on the kitchen wall that read 9:47.

Go to the house.

While at the hospital, at the very moment she awoke from a fitful, sheet-twisting slumber, Mary had become overpowered with an unexplainable, abandoned awareness. Conscious thought as she knew it was gone, and in its place bloomed an unthinking physical responsiveness that had compelled her to get out of bed, get dressed, and leave the hospital. It'd consumed her like a wildfire, her brain feeling as though it'd been injected with a serum composed of shrewdness and intellect.

Now, this newfound awareness had her functioning with a degree of strength and concentration she'd never known in the past—suddenly she felt no anxiety, no depression, no weakness dragging her down. She had become a new woman, needing no medication, unknowing of her previously destabilized state, brimming with the rigid will to comply with her husband's post-humus demand.

Save my dying soul.

Upon leaving the hospital, she followed a straightforward path home where she packed a small bag and located the collapsible dust-coated wheelchair in the closet. The only thing that'd mattered was her furious, undying need to save Johnny from the hand of evil—the bird on the sill had convinced her of this,
Go to the house
, and she'd followed its generous lead with unwavering enthusiasm, gently stroking the feather in her pocket as a periodic reminder of her duty. She would go to the house, deliver Johnny from the hand of evil, and save Ed's dying soul. And then afterwards, she would bring them both home, alive and sound, where they would live out the remainder of their lives as the happy family unit she always imagined them to be.

She snapped open the wheelchair, locked up the safety arms, and rolled it over to Ed's hanging body. The leather belt he'd hung himself with had burrowed deeply into his neck, causing his deadweight to slump—the balls of his blackened feet now rested on the floor, his knees slightly buckled, head tilted at an owl-like angle, nearly upside down. She inched the chair forward and locked the wheels so it was positioned just below the rear of his blood-soaked jeans. The leather hammock brushed against his legs, and he swayed forward a few inches. The beam he hung from creaked like a rusty hinge.

She retrieved the tailor's scissors she kept in the top drawer of her bureau—big heavy-duty stainless steel ones, the best of their kind, good for the woman who does all her sewing at home—then stretched her right arm up over Ed's head and cut into the leather belt at a point halfway between the ceiling and his matted hair.