Eyes of the dead, p.11
Eyes of the Dead, page 11
part #4 of Corpse Fauna Series
The Red Man seized the backpack from Vale. She offered no resistance.
Tears cascaded down her face.
“I know, I know,” the Red Man said. “I cry too when my bombs don’t explode.”
He handed the pack to the dead. They passed it among themselves down the tunnel and out of our sight. I can’t say I was sorry to see it go. Can’t even say I was entirely sorry that it had failed because I was grateful to be alive. The Red Man daubed Vale’s tears with a cloth napkin from the table.
“This power of mine lets me do all sorts of things, allows me to control the world around me,” he said. “I give you credit for getting that package so close to me, but you had no chance of setting it off. Maybe if you hadn’t shown it before you flipped the switch. Who knows?”
Groups of the dead approached.
“Enough talking for today,” the Red Man said. “Go where the dead take you. We’ll get together again, real soon, I promise.”
“Fuck that,” I said.
“Excuse me, Cornell, you say something?” the Red Man said.
“What are you going to do if we refuse? Kill us?”
Hate radiated off the Red Man. For me. For the living. For whatever corrupt and evil core thrived inside him and had led him to this point in his existence. That insight changed everything for me in the span of a single breath. The Red Man hated his dead self as much as he had hated his living self. Here stood a man who’d gotten what he truly desired and now despised what it made of him. Yet he couldn’t turn his back on it, couldn’t let go, couldn’t walk away, and risk sinking back into a useless, pointless existence. Like all of us pushing onward through a dead world to survive, human maggots on a rotting corpse, he needed to keep moving toward a future, a new life, a new existence. He wanted to remake himself as one of the living and damn the world if he wasted it in the effort.
“Oh, I’ll do much, much worse than kill you,” he said. “Then I’ll find that pretty nurse of yours and that dumb little orphan boy you took under your wing, and I’ll do worse to them than I did to you.”
I stood to go with the dead, not because of the Red Man’s threats, but because now that I better understood his nature, I wanted time to make sense of it.
He nodded at me. “Good. Let’s do this like we mean it. I used to guide the lost to higher levels of consciousness, to surpass their physical limitations. I’ll do that for you. I can open the door to the universe’s pure fuel and help you plug your soul right into it. When all our work here ends, and you ride high in the new world, you’ll shower gratitude upon me.”
He ascended his throne, pretending to ignore us as wormfeeders guided us to the outgoing tunnel. From outside the castle, another explosion came. Vale’s backup bomb. He had let go, released control. Either it had moved out of range, or he could force his will upon it only for a short time, nothing permanent. Another hint. More evidence that the Red Man couldn’t be all he seemed or wished to seem.
Ain’t that always the way with the high and mighty, the ones who seek power, control, and authority, the ones telling everyone else how to live, how to think, how to view the world through the same compressed, myopic, and homogenous perspective. Bullies at heart, every last one of them, in search of socially acceptable ways to impose their will, to apply threat of force or social exile to alter our behavior. The Red Man simply killed the world to do it.
True leaders accept power rather than dedicate their lives to gaining it.
They manage it; they don’t cling to it like mother’s milk.
They don’t see the world in the worst terms of us and them.
In that light, the Red Man seemed no different to me than an overzealous prison warden, or a ham-fisted sheriff, or a murderous saint, or any of the endless chain of people who’d tried to force me to live their way from childhood until the world ended.
Despite all his power and fearsomeness, he seemed small.
The dead brought us to underground cells for park visitors who broke the law at Acme Wonderland. Cushiest damn cell I ever occupied. Plush chairs. Cartoon murals painted on the walls. Even a bathroom stall with a door that closed. Probably intended to stave off lawsuits from anyone security held there until the police arrived.
The wormfeeders locked us in separate cells then left.
I couldn’t see Birch or Vale, but I heard Vale crying. Birch started snoring, and I shook my head to think he could fall asleep under the circumstances. Of us all, though, he knew the Red Man, knew Darrell Philip Stradley, the best. Had known him in life and had spent those lost days of which I knew nothing with him after Deadtown. If our situation didn’t frighten him, I took that as a sign hope still persisted.
“Cornell,” Vale said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry I didn’t tell you about the bombs. I would’ve blown us all to smithereens if the detonator worked.”
“I understand,” I said. “I hate it, and I’m pissed you lied, but I understand. St. Bianco wasn’t wrong about keeping secrets from me and Birch to keep them from the Red Man.”
“What he said about me and you, I’m sorry for that too,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
A long pause preceded her answer. “I wish we’d met under different circumstances, in another world, maybe.”
“In a different world, we’d be different people,” I said.
No answer. Time passed. I lost track. The light never changed in our cells.
Fatigue overtook me, and I slept.
The dead did not bring us food or water. The Red Man did not visit, even in my dreams.
Right when I feared he’d decided to let us starve to death and fill our bodies with the souls of his followers, he appeared with an entourage of wormfeeders.
“Showtime,” he said.
The cells opened. The dead guided us out, all three of us moving slow and unsteady from hunger and thirst. They took us outdoors to Royal Square in the shadow of King Koala’s Castle, where a life-size cartoon horse figure sat, a prop for photographs. Despite their rotted-out limbs, their shriveled, caved-in faces, their bones poking through putrid flesh, their leathery muscles, tendons, and ligaments, the dead fulfilled the Red Man’s orders like well-drilled soldiers. They held me and Vale on our knees. They stripped Birch to the waist then tied him across the back of the horse. The statue’s oversized googly eyes glinted in the sunlight.
One of the dead handed a whip to the Red Man.
He lashed it across Birch’s back.
As best he could without a tongue, Birch screamed.
“Death of the flesh to free the spirit, death of the spirit to free the flesh,” the Red Man cried out. “Your preparation for my new world has begun.”
NINETEEN
We spent days in agony.
Birch’s torture kicked off a sequence of abuse and mortification at the Red Man’s hands that would’ve brought a blush to the most jaded sadist. Each of us in turn, strapped to the cartoon horse, or tied down spread-eagled to a picnic table outside Foxy Pinewoods’ Fish and Chips Hut, or chained to the back of a golf cart decorated like old Marvin Marmoset’s jalopy pick up and run around the park till we fell and shredded our knees on the blacktop. At Andy Eagle’s Aviary Adventure, he locked us in giant birdcages hung in the air from the steel and vinyl limbs of Elder the Oldest Oak and let us cook in the relentless sun, a feast for mosquitos thriving in the absence of the park’s pest control management. Cut with blades, lashed by the whip, pricked with needles, dusted with salt that seared our wounds. We bled. Sometimes the dead lapped our spilled blood. Always each in our turn, and the Red Man made us watch each other suffer.
All day. In the heat and humidity. Our skin reddened and peeled. Our lips cracked from dryness. At night, the dead dragged us back to our cells.
Cartoon murals decorated our walls, like those in a pediatrician’s office to make getting pricked for a vaccination or probed with a thermometer less horrifying to the five-year-old psyche. For us, it meant hours spent haunted by once-loveable characters transformed into harbingers of pain.
Always we found scraps of food and water waiting in our cells. No more than enough to sustain us until the next day. We only ate the prepackaged stuff, the bags of chips and sleeves of cookies, afraid of touching anything that might carry more than the taint of having spoiled.
On day four, I noticed the Red Man’s daily decay.
Each morning, the wormfeeders brought us to him, almost as healthy as a live man, even a touch of red in his cheeks. Although his multitude of eyes betrayed him, he could’ve passed for a living man with bad skin when he closed them all. By the end of each day, purple and gray blotches appeared. His skin flaked and tore along its dry folds. His scalp thinned, stretched tight against his skull, paled, grew more skeletal.
Every day by sunset, he looked dead.
Next morning, alive.
“That bastard’s restoring himself somehow,” I said to Vale that night.
I lay on my cot, my body too riddled with pain for sleep. The rasp in Vale’s voice told me she felt the same. Birch, on the other side of me, snored like an idling truck. I envied him that Zen center that allowed him to bear our tortures with so much equanimity. It simmered in the Red Man’s eyes how deeply it burned his ass that Birch didn’t beg for mercy and showed no fear after his first shocked scream on the back of the royal horse.
“What?” Vale said.
I explained what I’d observed; she’d noticed it too.
“I thought it was me, seeing things after all the shit he’s put us through,” she said.
“Nah, he’s fixing himself using the souls he’s gathered,” I said.
“You know how that sounds, right?”
“No weirder than anything else I’ve said or heard these past months.”
“You’ve got a point there.” Rustling sounds came from Vale’s cell as she shifted on her cot. Her voice trailed off, slurred, as she said, “How does that help us?” then fell asleep.
I didn’t have an answer, but the question kept me awake a long time.
In the morning, when the wormfeeders fetched us for another torture-filled day at Acme Wonderland, I roused with the spark of a plan. I spent all day fanning its flames, ideas filling my head to blot out what the Red Man and his dead puppets did to Birch, to Vale, to me. When the day ended, I studied his face before our decomposing chaperones marched us back to our cells. The decay looked worse than at first glance. Cracks behind his ears. Lips sliding sideways. Eyebrows crumbling. Black spots on teeth that had gleamed white in the morning air. Across his chest, faint lines of old scars returning. The eyes that mottled his flesh drooped. It strained him to make himself look alive. Would the darkness make his restoration permanent when it arrived? Did he need the three of us to make that happen? No other reason to keep us around, wearing us down. I didn’t plan to play along. If I couldn’t figure out a way to destroy him, another option lingered in the back of my mind. He needed us alive.
That night, I jammed the lock of my cell.
I’d studied it every night, recalling all the locks I’d picked or broken in my old life, and rigged it so the door would close without latching. Not that the wormfeeders noticed. They had little awareness of their own. If the Red Man watched through their many eyes, fatigue made him careless.
I crashed on my cot. Ate the meager food left for me. Waited several hours.
No one came. No one checked my door.
Cut off from the outside, I had little measure of time. Trusting my internal clock, I stepped out of my cell at what I figured for the middle of the night. Birch lay sound asleep. Vale, too, tempting me to wake them up, but I had no way to get them out.
I backtracked our usual route to the Royal Square with the cartoon horse.
No wormfeeders in the underground security space, none in the plaza.
Weird. They didn’t need to sleep. Night or day made no difference to them. Why not have them watch us 24/7?
In the western sprawl of the park, a red light glowed. I walked there, hidden in shadows. I knew my way around the park by heart, having run its full course so often while sucking exhaust fumes from Marvin Marmoset’s jalopy.
I passed listless wormfeeders on my way to the brightness, which burned atop Polly Platypus’s River Run. High up the ride, where the log flume shot out from a tight curve before plunging down a waterfall, a fire burned. No water ran along the artificial river. The chains and gears that pulled the flooms gleamed in the flickering illumination. Wormfeeders surrounded the base of the ride, hundreds thick, and so still I mistook them for part of the park until my eyes decoded their silhouettes. What I’d taken for fireflies were the flames reflected in their innumerable eyes, all open and staring at the top of the ride, beyond it at the sky, which possessed a darkness like spilled ink runneling among the stars. Some of the eyes watched the steel-and-resin hilltop. Others drank in that darkness.
The fire flared. Sparks and embers floated away into the night.
At the edge of the rail curve that arched into open air stood the Red Man.
Two wormfeeders brought him a body rotted beyond mobility. Its ragged flesh twitched. Its teeth and jawbone caught the light. From every part of it stared impossible eyes, each filled with dread and despair, apparent even across the distance between us.
The Red Man placed his hand upon the wormfeeder’s dented forehead.
The act took a second, maybe two.
The ruined corpse sagged, lifeless, in the arms of the wormfeeders.
All the eyes upon it blinked shut.
A burst of red light flashed and winked out so fast I felt it at the back of my eyes more than saw it. New eyes appeared on the Red Man’s body. His skin recovered a measure of its living luster; mottled patches of decay shrank.
As wormfeeders threw the wasted corpse over the side, another trio brought a fresh one. Something had sheared away half of this one’s torso and most of its right leg.
The Red Man welcomed it, caressed its putrescent face. The transfer occurred again.
Crimson brightness strobed. New eyes opened on the Red Man.
Wormfeeders discarded the exhausted corpse over the side.
The darkness caught my eye.
Had it spread?
Had it reached down toward earth, attracted by the Red Man’s acts?
Circles of blackness churned within it. Blind eyes whose gaze set my skin alive with a cold, electric discomfort. I felt seen and exposed.
I backed away from the River Run, retraced my steps, and returned to my cell.
Inside, unable to sleep, I wondered how to explain what I’d seen to Birch and Vale. When the wormfeeders came for another day of suffering, I still hadn’t figured it out—but I’d decided before another night passed, I’d see either the Red Man or myself destroyed.
TWENTY
The Red Man always tortured us one at a time. In the moments he focused on Birch or Vale, I shared what I knew with the other and instructed each on how to rig their cell locks to stay open. When the wormfeeders left us that night, we licked our wounds, ate our meager rations, then waited a spell before leaving our cells. Despite her fatigue, Vale looked nervous.
“You have another hidden bomb we should know about?” I said.
“I wish,” she said. “Just shaky from my daily beating.”
“Might as well smile, then, because they’ll continue until morale improves.”
We all hung just this side of the living dead after the Red Man’s torture. Indigo rings circled Vale’s eyes. Birch’s too. Pale and gaunt, they swayed on their feet. I knew I looked the same. We shared the weakness of suffering, part of the Red Man’s strategy to grind away at us until we either begged him to stop and agreed to anything he wanted, or lost ourselves so deeply we came to believe in him, brainwashed. We would last another day, maybe two or three at most, before we died from deprivation and the slow blood loss that came each day. I’d never break. I stared death in the face now and found it familiar and inevitable, my personal jackal waiting to laugh me along the path to oblivion. I hoped Birch and Vale would hold out to the end if it came to that, but you never knew how one might crack when their life lay on the line. As if to answer my unspoken question, Birch offered me a folded piece of notebook paper from his pocket.
I took it from his trembling hand, unfolded it, and read the words written there in wavery but legible penmanship.
Scenario 17
Death of the flesh to free the spirit = Releasing souls, life force, spiritual consciousness? Energy cannot be created or destroyed. The anima of life enters a void of their making, a pool of genesis energy, a vitality battery, a limbo-container that shields it from… what, from its return to the cosmic biofilm of matter and energy, its dispersion to stardust?
Death of the spirit to free the flesh = An exchange, a price, a sacrifice, the anima of the captured souls expended to “free the flesh.” From what can flesh be freed? Aging. Mortality. Decay. The spirits given over to it make the flesh eternal, incorruptible. Who/what accepts the payment and grants the boon? The Darkness.
I lifted my gaze from the paper. Birch regarded me with such hope and yearning for me to understand what he’d spent hours pondering and working through in his notebooks. As if the theft of his voice had been a blessing that allowed him to focus his brain entirely on decoding whatever Darrell Philip Stradley hoped to achieve. Vale read over my shoulder.
“What’s that? What’s this mean?” she said.
Birch gripped my arm, squeezed, implored me to comprehend.
“I think,” I said, “that the Red Man is trying to become fully alive again, that he needs to be alive for the darkness to make him… immortal?”
Birch nodded as he wept. Tears streaked his cheeks.
