Edge of End (18 page)

“
Be quiet, both of you,”
Malcolm shushed us. We stopped, completely still. We were so
conscious of not moving, we momentarily forgot to breathe. With
strained ears I glazed my eyes, trying to catch any sound coming
from that monstrosity of the house.

Malcolm surveyed it cautiously with
his single eye like a Cyclops. I had this really odd feeling that
his eye was magical and deftly pierced through those dark windows
and walls.

“
There is uneasiness in
the house,” Malcolm muttered in a low voice. “They’re moving, they
know.”

Could his eye really see
the unseen?

“
Know what?” Elizabeth
asked flustered.

“
Who are they?” I added
curiously.

Malcolm tore his eyes from the house,
“Let’s get out of here. Quickly!”

He spun around abruptly and hurried
away. With one more look at the dark, sprawling mansion, Elizabeth
and I quickly followed in his footsteps. As we gained more of a
distance, the sounds of the continual hissing in my head subsided,
but they didn’t stop entirely.

“
What did you see in there
Malcolm?” I demanded. Now we were walking faster than before.
Malcolm looked pensive, his eye dropped to the ground, and I had to
ask him again to get his attention.

“
As far as I know that
house is like…” he stuttered trying to find the right
word.

“
It’s connected to the
Lord of the town?” Elizabeth tried to guess.

Lord of the town? What the
fuck? Who was that supposed to be?

Her hand slid into mine and squeezed
it tightly. My eyes fell on her as she held onto me.

“
It’s like a police
station,” Malcolm resumed. “They control the houses, demons,
spirits and dogs, everything. Honestly, I don’t know what kind of
demons and monsters dwell there, Lord of the town, or whatever, but
they know something is amiss.”

His disapproving eye fell on me as if
he was asking me to leave Elizabeth. I refused his offer flatly
giving him a dirty look, and Malcolm’s mouth twitched wickedly.
“We’re extremely wrong here. We’ll eventually change the rules. I
doubt they’ll let us do that. The rules may be changed by them if
we move on.”

“
We’ll try,” I said
bravely and confidently, wrapping Elizabeth’s hand in mine. “You
don’t know all the rules of the town, do you? If nobody has ever
done what I intend to do, doesn’t mean it’s against the town
rules.”

Malcolm didn’t reply, and Elizabeth
also kept her mouth shut.

I wondered if I should have kept my
opinion to myself. I couldn’t help but wonder about Malcolm. I
didn’t know whether to trust him or not. The only thing I was sure
about was that we were moving in the right direction, the light was
ahead, and we were getting nearer.

Repeatedly knocks came from a
distance. As we approached the sound became clearer, and I saw a
middle-aged man dressed in a ripped shirt and dirty trousers. He
had wrapped his hands around a lamp column and was hitting his head
against it.

“
The visions make him
crazy,” Malcolm explained remotely. “As we get deeper into the town
we’ll see more insane people. Get used to them.”

“
Aren’t they dangerous?”
Elizabeth asked. I looked at the man’s bloody, nasty
face.

“
Everything is dangerous,
even a bag,” Malcolm answered her. “The deeper we get the more
danger awaits.”

We walked past the man carefully,
trying not to make much noise. He didn’t notice us, he was deeply
engrossed in his head-hitting business.

“
You must have a lot of
visions Malcolm,” with a last glance at the madman I turned to
Malcolm. He nodded in reply. “How did you get rid of them and why
haven’t you become mad?”

Malcolm chortled at my question.
“Instead of internalizing the agonizing pain that my visions
brought upon me, I let them out.”

“
How?”

“
By torturing the other
residents,” Malcolm said unfazed. “But then I quit. That monster in
Elizabeth house didn’t.”

“
Then the visions would
take control of you, wouldn’t they?” Elizabeth muttered.

“
I found another way.” As
he looked back at me, his eye gleamed. “That shit drink in the
café.”

Please, don’t remind me of
it.

“
That’s what that old
woman was doing to her…” she stammered looking for the words.
“Husband,” she added dubiously.

“
What did she look like?”
Malcolm asked without looking at her.

“
Always smiling,” I
teased.

“
Ah. That’s
Rosemary.”

“
Who?” Elizabeth shot him
a look out of the corner of her eye.

“
An old bitch,” Malcolm
waved. “You’re lucky she let you pass. She loves fresh
souls.”

“
I guess, she had already
found one,” I smirked.

“
Otherwise it’d be you
instead.”

In my mind’s eye I saw the old woman
kissing me. How was she supposed to do it without lips? A chill ran
over my whole body as her nasty smile appeared before my eyes. I
closed them, shaking the vision of her off.

“
Malcolm,” I began, “What
do your visions tell you? You should know why you’re locked in
here. What were you back in life?”

He grimaced and tightened his lips, “I
was a soldier, a commander in the war in Syria.”

“
You killed innocent
people?”

“
I did,” he sighed
ruefully. “My group of soldiers did a lot of bad things in that
country–we deserve such an afterlife. I did the dirty work for the
government by cleaning up their shit. The faces of women and
children I killed still haunt me in my dreams, laughing, smirking
at me, whereas I’m probably a hero in my country. But I don’t
deserve the name hero. Murdering and raping innocent people can’t
make you hero. So called heroes like me should rot in a place like
this town, Jonathan.”

If Malcolm was telling the truth, he
in life had protected his country, he might be a better person than
I was, or even Elizabeth, whose appearance stuck between life and
hell still remained a puzzle to me.

Why her? I didn’t believe she had
killed anybody in her life. I was pretty sure she hadn’t acted as
badly as Malcolm and I had. What had brought her here?

And then it hit me. I recalled the
bathtub filled with blood in Elizabeth’s house. The girl from the
album, her body had been floating helplessly in the
bathtub.

Elizabeth should have been there
instead. She had committed suicide, cut her veins and the question
was, why?

Malcolm had been right. The man and
the girl in the picture were Elizabeth’s husband and daughter. Her
daughter must have died, probably accidentally, and Elizabeth had,
as a result, ended her own life.

It is my belief that a person who
tries to take its own life is deemed a self-murderer, and is sent
to hell regardless of how he or she has lived life. Only Lord can
give or take lives.

Elizabeth was a decent person; she
just had chosen a very wrong way to die when she had sliced open
her veins.

Everything was falling into place, and
I was surer than ever that she deserved her passage out of here
more than anyone else. She should return and try to live her lost
life. She should try and appreciate the life delights, and in that
way she could change her final destination to heaven instead of
hell where, I believed, Elizabeth’s daughter would be waiting for
her.

I glanced over at her and looked into
her eyes and at her contemplative expression. I wondered if she
knew what I had realized. Should I bring it up in conversation?
Instead I held it back leaving my thoughts unspoken.

That eerie looking house with its
mystifying statues was far behind us now. Whatever had been
crawling inside it was long gone, or so I hoped. Hopefully, they
wouldn’t follow us, but Malcolm’s excited face bothered
me.

“
The street is
suspiciously empty,” Elizabeth said taking in the nearest houses.
“Do you think we can sneak through it unnoticed?”

I liked her idea, but I
didn’t share her optimism. The wind had quietened down, and the
hisses in my head had subsided. The
town
was wallowing in the calm
before the storm, or in our case the peace before the
war.

“
Let’s hope so,” I
replied. “Just keep close so I can protect you. You’re not as
strong as me.”

“
I believe, I can handle
some dirty dogs, though,” she smiled, apparently touched by my
consideration. “Now I understand you. I feel the rush of power in
me. I know it’s not as much as yours.”

“
You just stay close,
okay?” I insisted.

“
I’ve got nowhere else to
go,” she giggled.

“
What about your
house?”

“
I can feel it
call.”

“
Where is it?”

She pointed back. “Still
there.”

“
Fine,” I said
delighted.

Malcolm looked directly at us for a
brief moment and then became lost in his thoughts once
again.

Every time Elizabeth spoke
Malcolm arched his eyebrow showing his displeasure with her, but
she was there under my orders, and he’d have to deal with her
whether he liked it or not. During peaceful moments like we were
now experiencing, he wouldn’t dream of harming her, but in the back
of my mind, I did worry that he’d try to get rid of her at any
other moment. As well as all the demons and monsters that were
lurking about, I guessed I had to keep an eye on Malcolm
too.
As a matter of fact you ought to keep
an eye on everything around you
, I
reminded myself once again.

I smiled melancholically to myself,
shook my head, and we continued on our way.

Every so often Elizabeth glanced back
over her shoulder, probably to make sure the dark palace stood
behind and wasn’t hounding us.

Perhaps she had also been worried
about her own house. If Malcolm was right, and it would come and
overtake her, then my tries to save her would be of no use. But
luck was on her side, and we hadn’t seen it moving ahead of
us.

She was walking on my right. I watched
her just in case any peculiar or hideous creature emerged from any
of the yards. I would protect her. At that point I felt so mighty,
indestructible and in such a deep lust that I could save her,
easily.

Malcolm seemed anxious,
waiting for the
town
to show its strength, its true colors, its worst side, but
the
town
kept
quiet and let us pass through with ease. The great ease and the
emptiness of the street even began to worry me.

“
Not too much farther,” I
remarked as I looked forward at the light in hope.

“
The show's not over until
the fat lady sings,” Malcolm randomly blurted out.

“
Look!” Elizabeth’s
startled tone made me look at her first before whatever she was
pointing to.

She had lost all the color in her
face; she appeared drained and ghostly white. Her glassy eyes
widened as she stared dumbfounded at the light source. Without
asking her, I whirled around. What lay before us perplexed me,
too.

The three of us stood petrified in the
middle of the dirt road looking at a big misty cloud that lowered
itself down onto us from the gray sky. With whooshing movements
through the sky, the colossal fog moved at a surprisingly quick
speed. It hung in the air and mingled with the light of my
salvation, and within a moment it had enveloped the light, removing
it from our view. Like a huge tsunami the fog was coming towards
us. I had barely a moment to think–should we run and hide
somewhere?

“
What is it Jonathan?”
Elizabeth asked; her voice slightly hysterical. She held tightly
onto my arm; I think she thought that by doing that the foggy wind
couldn’t sweep her away.

“
Malcolm, what are we
supposed to do?” There was doubt in my voice, too.

“
The mist has never come
right after the storm,” Malcolm muttered without turning his eye
away from the oncoming white mass. “I told you the town would
change its rules if we try to skirt around them,” he answered back
knowingly.

“
But what is it?” I was
jabbing my finger ahead looking for answers.

“
That’s not what we should
be afraid of,” he warned, “The fog is just a cover. We should be
dread of the cruel things wandering in it.”

Before Malcolm could even finish off
his sentence, the mist had enveloped and overwhelmed us. With its
arrival came a dreadful cacophonous noise, an evil hissing sound
that pierced my eardrums lasting just for a second, and then it
disappeared.

My hair ruffled up in the wind, then,
in the same breath, it fell limply back down and rested on my
forehead.

The air froze and stopped.

We stood in the middle of the fogs
path in our complete ignorance amidst the dense cloud where our
normal human eyes could make out nothing.