Hellbound Hearts (36 page)

The being underneath it wasn't a man, but he was clearly male. He was lean, with paper-white skin stretched snugly across bulging muscles. His only clothes were dark gray pants, stitches holding them to his lower torso in lieu of a belt. A map of scars delineating rivers and mountains and roads stood in stark relief against his skin. Three thick stitches pinned his upper lip to his nose; similar needlework held lower lip to chin. Beneath his eyes, eye-shaped holes had been cut, also held open with stitches, brass buttons sewn in place as extra eyeballs. The scent of vanilla reached Ron's nostrils. The sight
should have sickened him, but instead he felt a surprising stirring at his groin. What had Lenny called Hell's emissaries?

Cenobites
, that was it. Lenny had tried to tell Ron all about the Order of the Gash, but Ron, only half believing and probably half drunk, had only half listened.

“You're missing one piece,” the Cenobite said. He walked between Ron and Lenny and stood among the
santos
, his feet brushing two of them. “
Now
we are complete.”

The bell tolled one last time, deep and resonant. The gray sky roiled and darkened to near black.

And inside a glow that seemed to come from the Cenobite himself, the
santos
moved together, their pieces swiveling and interlocking, sliding into place with satisfyingly final clicks. Pudentia linked to Agnes to Nestor to Rogatus to Faustina to Tiberius to the new one.

When they finished, the backdrop behind the hideous Cenobite had changed as well. The traditional New Mexican church was gone, and in its place was a vaguely phosphorescent passageway into infinity, with dark, indiscernible shapes darting about inside it.

“Told you we could do this,” Lenny said.

Ron's mouth was so dry it clicked when he spoke. “Y-yeah, you told me. But I don't see any women, or . . .”

“Guess I didn't tell you everything, though. See, I used to live here in Naciemento. I left—we all left—when Padre Escalante summoned this Cenobite—Buttons, we call him—and got himself flayed for his trouble. But I couldn't resist coming back this one time. See, you fucked my life, dude. You running out in the road like that, distracting me—whole deal always was
your
fault. I would have missed everyone and kept on going, but
you
ruined everything. Well, it's payback time, bitch. You with your hands all over those
santos
. . . you'll get your time in Hell. But it might not be exactly what you expected.”

A terrible certainty settled over Ron. Lenny had played him
from the start. If he'd been thinking clearly, he would have known the guy who killed your wife and child didn't just invite himself back into your life. His kindness had been anything but. It was too late to kick himself now. He had been stupid, and the price would be high.

“You handled the
santos
, too, Leonardo,” Buttons said.

“Sure, but . . . he had 'em last!”

“But I knew
you
first.”

Ron's heart lifted. Was he getting a reprieve? Did the Cenobite hold a grudge against Lenny?

“You didn't know me!”

“Do you think I wasn't aware of you? After Escalante brought me here . . . when you all ran like frightened rabbits . . . I swore none of you would escape if I could lure you back.”

Lenny backed away from the Cenobite, lips quivering, a line of drool running down his chin. When Buttons fixed Lenny with a burning, four-eyed gaze, Ron caught a rank ammonia scent. A stain spread down the front of Lenny's pants.

A chain darted out—from the Cenobite? From behind him?—with a hook on the end, catching Lenny under the chin. The hook sliced up under his jaw and the barbed point thrust out his open mouth, glistening red. It reeled him in like a recalcitrant fish, Lenny stiff-legged and blubbering and weeping until he disappeared into the softly glowing blue corridor.

His screams seemed to echo for a long time.

Ron's legs felt like celery stalks days past their prime. He realized that he was ready to follow. He knew now that cruelty was as lasting as kindness, hate as powerful as love, pain was infinite and loneliness ultimately unbearable. There was nothing left for him in the world. “My turn?” he asked, his voice a pathetic whimper.

Buttons turned his full attention to Ron. His natural eyes glowed with an inner fire, and even his button eyes danced like they were alive. “Did I somehow give you that impression?” With that horrible, pinned-open mouth, he seemed to smile. “I must have been
joking. One day, you'll beg to be let in.” He tapped a fingernail against a button eye. “And then, we'll see.”

He stepped into the blue glow and vanished, leaving Ron alone.

Another moment, another new beginning.

And once again, the emptiness he faced was beyond measure.

Nancy Kilpatrick

You stare in disbelief at the e-mail from Ritz, unnerved by the undercurrent of what you are reading. “Goth reunion,” she euphemistically calls it. The old crowd will meet at the cemetery, the usual place. The place where every August 30 for five summers of your youth you spent the night in a graveyard with your friends. Is she insane? Can't she remember what happened? But she is just keeping a promise.

If you close your eyes and don't look, maybe when you open them, this e-mail will have disappeared into the vapors. Your heart slams against your chest wall in fear; anything can happen, like last time.

You peruse the excuses flitting across your closed eyelids like the digital numbers you scan all day long. But despite wanting to run fast and far, you will be there because no one can ever move fast or far enough to escape the past. And you also made a promise.

You'll be there, as you were the last time the group picnicked like the Victorians, although it's unlikely anyone from the 1800s spent the night in a crypt. Briefly you wonder if Jeremy will be at the “reunion.” But of course he will; he promised, too. You have to
confess, the idea of Jeremy at the cemetery is intriguing. So many possibilities. And impossibilities . . .

It is Saturday, seven in the evening, warm, the sun has not yet set, the grass is end-of-summer green, and you admit to yourself that this close-of-day is beautiful, reminiscent of twenty years ago, the last time you set foot in this garden of the dead. Time has changed little here. Eighty seasons have passed, toppling and shattering tombstones that caretakers have cemented back together, like the lovely distressed filigreed cross for which you still feel an affinity. Other stones, victims of recent violent weather, quietly await repair. One decapitated angel, the head beside the feet, eyes turned heavenward, clearly mourns its missing hands which some collector of necroabilia has walked off with.

The climb uphill isn't as easy as it once was; two decades makes a difference. You know you're out of shape from sitting for eightplus hours a day and microwaving frozen supermarket meals on too regular a basis. By the time you reach the first plateau, you're winded.

To the left, farther up, mostly hidden by old-growth trees and lilac bushes long past the flowering stage, is a row of enormous mausoleums belonging to wealthy families. You quickly calculate an estimate of what crypts like these would cost to build today.

The economics of crypt building leads to thoughts of death. Your own. Once so easy to digest, such musings now send a deep shudder like an earthquake in the making through your body as horror builds, and you turn away trembling, the past intersecting the present. Death has become the least of your worries. Coming here was a bad idea. A
very
bad idea. The past can't be undone. The future is set. What's the point of this? On shaky legs you turn to head back down the hill and get away from here while you still can, consequences be damned!

“Shadow!”

The sound startles you, and your bad knee locks. Jeremy has appeared out of nowhere, it seems. He was always good at that. “I
call myself Karen now,” you say, eyeing this Dorian Gray who, on first glance, has not aged.

Jeremy laughs, the sound as familiar as his skin and the muscles of his body once were, bringing you some calmness, although that doesn't make sense, just as it made no sense in the past.

Now that your tremors have subsided, you notice he has a cute, petite blonde attached to his arm, her cerulean eyes intelligent in a direct-marketing kind of way, her hair matching the white-gold color of his; maybe they patronize the same salon. Both are lean, healthy-looking, probably vegetarians into working out regularly. You bet they drive a BMW or Volvo and she's got some kind of high-powered, high-paying secure job with the government. The gold rings on the third fingers of their left hands speak of union in the biblical sense, and you imagine these DINKS live in a reno'ed town house featured in some glossy interior-design magazine, a property worth three times the market value of your small condo.

Suddenly you are shocked by your own cynicism. When did you become so petty? Bitter. Unhappy. You know when. And why. And who is to blame.

“This is Candy,” Jeremy says, and you're startled by the name. “Karen. Once Shadow.” He laughs, introducing you.

“I've heard a lot about you guys and your goth days,” Candy says, as if teasing a child.

You're not sure what she knows but you're certain that Jeremy hasn't told all. How could he explain it? How could anyone?

“Yeah, well, that was quite a while ago,” you mutter. “When we were young and wild and Jeremy was known as Midnight.”

“You were?” Candy turns to him and laughs, a sparkling sound, full of vitality, and you wonder why she's here, in this cemetery, destined to head up the hill and greet the darkness. There can't be anything in this for her. For you, as there must be for Jeremy, there are the searing memories. And the promises made. Despite the warm air you shiver as if it is January.

You have donned a bare-bones version of a goth outfit, black tights, black minidress with an asymmetrical hem. You found a pair
of Fluevog Angels you haven't worn in a while that might not be Doc Martens, but they work. An old Alchemy silver bat at your throat and seven PVC “barbed wire” bracelets you hung onto over the years around your wrist. You have nothing else left from the past. You had to get rid of everything, hoping to exorcise the memories. As if . . .

Jeremy and Candy are both clad in black designer jeans, stylish Western boots for him, Jimmy Choo ankle cuts for her, wearing complimentary black T-shirts, hers a babydoll with a picture of Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein silk-screened on the front, his bearing the image of Karloff as the monster. Too cute. Back in the day, when you and Jeremy were an item, before reality fractured, he would never have worn anything vaguely matching your outfit. Or anything as commercial as this shirt, which is brand-new, or so the folds suggest. Your favorite mental photograph of Jeremy is him wearing two long, studded armbands and that faded Cure T-shirt, his raven hair
à la
Robert Smith.

“So, Karen,” Jeremy says casually, “are you married?”

The question you've been dreading. How can you explain that what happened here so long ago has tainted your life, left you waking from increasingly terrifying nightmares sweaty and trembling, your dream-screams ringing in your ears? You are filled with distrust of anyone and everyone. No, not relationship material anymore. Clearly, Jeremy has not been adversely affected.

“Not yet,” you say, as if you are not forty-five years old and you have all the time in the world. “One day, when I meet the right industrial-music man.”

Jeremy chuckles. The sound annoys you not only because he can see through you. You resent that he has continued on with his life as if nothing happened, as if four hundred and forty months ago life did not change forever? Suddenly you are angry, for his callousness, for what appears to be his easy and perfect life, for your own childish capitulation to be here, and your fantasy about grasping some sort of “closure,” all the while knowing there is no such entity available to you. Fury like hot lava builds and you are about to pivot
and head back down to the real world,
sans
excuses, promise broken, despite what will be the result of that.

“Oh my God!” A shriek that rings more of terror than excitement comes from Ritz. “Shadow! Midnight!”

“Vampira!” Jeremy says in a large and inclusive way. The edgy nicknames you went by back then sound banal on lips now. You could write it off to youthful folly but really, in retrospect, the names have a profound meaning.

Your little group of four, Ritz orchestrating a group hug, faces uphill. Mired in shadow, nearly obscured by trees and shrubs, not fifty meters away stands the brooding Lemarchand crypt. Suddenly you realize that it is too late to run. You are doomed.

Others come up the hill and you are surrounded by friends from the past. They all have wrinkles, gray hair, some more than others, and no one is cadaver thin anymore.

This crowd is not full of laughter and teasing. As more join the group, a somber mood descends, until the twelve—thirteen if you count Candy—have all arrived. The emotional texture is reluctance, duty being carried out, obligations being filled with a clear understanding that this is not in anyone's best interest and yet cannot be avoided.

As the sun sets you all trudge up the second shorter hill, circling around the Lemarchand crypt, and return to the spot where you used to meet, a small clearing sheltered by trees, hidden by the crypt itself, a realm disconnected from the rest of the cemetery, and the world.

You sit in a circle, by instinct. Frightened eyes lock, then look away. There is silence until Stan—who used to go by Morpheus—asks, “Anybody have that Bauhaus final tour CD?”

People nod or shake their heads. “Not the old Bauhaus, are they?” Mari Ann says.

“Nothing's like it was,” Mitch adds quietly.