Hellbound Hearts (37 page)

And then the silence takes over as you all wait for the darkness to wrap around you like a shroud.

Someone has brought a bottle of Chardonnay that is passed
around—the days of cheap red and homemade absinthe are over. After that a large bottle of Evian water appears. The ground is lumpy, and as hours grind away, your butt grows annoyed with sitting. Shadows deepen and there are moments when the silence feels like an invocation.

When there is no more light from the sky and faces have vanished in the gloom, you can still hear breathing, a bit of shifting, fruit bats flitting above, the rustling of nocturnal animals in the bushes, and the occasional snapping twig. The wait seems interminable, but wait you must, all of you, until midnight. Promises were made.

Finally, Jeremy lights a candle and gets to his feet. One by one you all stand and follow him as you did years ago to the door of the crypt.

As you approach, the coolness of the stones reaches out like tentacles to brush your bare arms, the back of your neck. It is as if this is fall air, not late summer; you notice the three steps leading to the crypt door are covered with dead leaves. A chill coils up your spine that has nothing to do with the air. You do
not
want to be here! You want to go home. You want safety. But there is none.

Jeremy finds the key in the bushes, just like before. The rusted keyhole accepts it readily.

Candy breaks the silence. “This isn't such a good idea, hon. This is private property and—”

The
thwack-thwack
of the key flipping the tumbler silences her. The door creaks as Jeremy pushes it open and leads us like lambs to the slaughter.

“I want to go home!” Ritz says, her high voice breaking. Blonde Mike puts an arm around her shoulders and Dark-haired Mike, no doubt distracted by his own terror, pats her head as if she is a rambunctious puppy. Jeremy stares blankly at her, his face aglow from the candle flame, which brings out the macabre highlights of his features.

Once everyone is inside the crypt, Stan closes the door and the sound is so final that your heart skips beats.

Jeremy sets the candle on the little stone altar of this claustrophobic chamber. Opposite the door are three white marble slabs, each three by three feet, engraved, the writing worn with time, the words indecipherable. Behind the marble are the dead. To the right of these, left of the altar, is a configuration of thirteen stones imbedded in the wall. Jeremy taps the stones in a particular order, as if this were a security system entry code. Suddenly, the stones move as one unit out of the wall and hover as a group in midair.

Someone gasps and another groans. Candy says, “What in hell . . . ? ” Your heart becomes arrhythmic and you feel there is not enough oxygen in the air. Every cell in your body screams: Escape!

You watch as if time has slowed. Jeremy grasps in both hands the stones, which do not appear attached to one another yet they form one unit. He turns them around and around. There are thirteen on all sides, a strange ancient puzzle concealed here with the dead. Your memory resurrects a similar moment twenty years ago and maps it onto today. You watch as Jeremy twists the stony puzzle pieces, gaining confidence as he goes, with only one glance in your direction, until the stones glow an eerie color that you cannot put a name to.

He replaces the reconfigured puzzle of stone back into the socket in the wall, his hand still touching it as if he is charging the puzzle in some way, or vice versa.

Time pauses. The group waits quietly, passively. You are struck by the fact that there is no resistance, no bravado shown. What occurred before has eroded all of you who were so enthusiastically attuned to the dark side, who were once rebellious, defending your individuality at all costs. Back then, Jeremy insisted on spending the night here. No one protested, but the mood was different. The fervor of that evening is overwhelmed by the pensive silence of this one. It was Jeremy who found the stones. Jeremy who opened the gate. Jeremy who cut a Faustian deal, one you and your friends were grateful to get at the time.

Only Candy, an outsider not privy to the history, with no idea of
the future, voices concern. “You know, it's cold in here, Jeremy. And dark. Why don't we take that outside so you can play with it?”

No one answers her because all attention is riveted on the three large marble squares. One by one they are sliding upward, revealing the darkness behind them. Candy says, “Oh . . . my . . . God . . . !”

Ritz sobs, her face pressed against Blonde Mike's chest. Everyone else stands alone. The sour sweat of fear permeates the crypt's close air. But not for long. Quickly the odor shifts to something worse, the rot of countless years, physical corruption that makes your olfactory nerves brush by everything rotten you have ever smelled, all of it balling together into the unbearable. You gag on the stink, and you are not the only one.

Dark-haired Mike and Martine bolt for the door, struggling to open it, but the door is sealed, as you knew it would be or you would have tried that yourself.

“What's happening?” Candy shrieks.

Ritz sobs loudly, the sounds of despair coming from her lips making your knees buckle and it's all you can do to stand upright and await your fate.

The rank air has a misty quality that blunts everything, which you only realize when suddenly that dissipates as if a wind has blown it away and now all is sharp-edged. Emerging from within the blackness, one by one, are three figures. Their faces, their bodies, everything about them is burned into your psyche. Now, in their presence once more, you can only hope and pray that you die, here, now, quickly, so that you will never, ever encounter them again.

The one on the left has no face. Scraps of putrid flesh cling to more breaks in bones than can be counted, shards jutting insanely in all directions. Next to him stands a woman, or so you believe. She is lean and naked, skinless, every muscle in her body sliced into precise strips that fan out from her skeleton, undulating like a demented extremophile existing in impossible conditions. The third, concentration-camp thin, is, on first glance, the least shocking. Until the eyelids flash open. These eyes are not human. Nothing like human. Within the black and red orbs you see all the torture and
death people have inflicted on one another over the millennia the human race has called this planet home. Those eyes distract from the clamps and staples and safety pins and surgical sutures and barbed wire clinging to his raw, swollen flesh and make the hardware and the fact that he is over seven feet tall seem insignificant. Those eyes are all that matter. They foretell the future.

Candy is screaming. Everyone else is pressed back against the door, even you, without being aware that you moved. Only Jeremy stands facing them, like some kind of confident, demonic peer. “We came back,” Jeremy says almost proudly, “as you asked.”

“As you promised. As we ordained,” the woman corrects him. “You could only obey.”

The broken-faced one says nothing at first. His eyes flash suddenly, emitting a light that speaks of Hell, or worse. And then he mutters in a low voice, barely audible: “No, they have not obeyed.”

You worry that he has directed this at you. Every part of your body feels locked into place, shackled to the cement floor beneath you. You are aware of taking shallow breaths, blood rushing through your head with the roar of a tidal wave. You listen and count the beats of your terrified heart to calm yourself. How did it come to this? What were you hoping for? Why you? “I . . . I have obeyed,” you hear yourself whisper, knowing you are struggling to please, to put off the inevitable.

“Let me out! Someone let me out!” Candy has pushed between us and is clawing at the door. No one aids her. No one is willing to go against the demonic figures. All but Candy know what they are capable of.

“Look, we came,” Jeremy says reasonably. “We obeyed.” The implication being: What's your problem? Wasn't the last time enough?

The one with the demon eyes turns those orbs onto Jeremy, who jerks and cringes as if he has been struck.

The last time you were all here, Andrew, sweet Andrew, who loved wearing PVC and piercing his nipples, and once hung with hooks in his flesh from a tree branch, Andrew was with you. The
thirteen of you gathered to drink cheap wine, laugh, listen to music, share psilocybin mushrooms, and commune with the dead. And see how many of your friends of either gender you'd end up fucking. And you had, all of you, ending up fucking each other, wildly, drunkenly, and then Jeremy found the stones. The stone puzzle that moved the marble, just like tonight. And when you and your intoxicated friends snatched the bones from the coffins and began dancing with them in a wild, ecstatic, orgiastic danse macabre, what you came to call Cenobites emerged from the land of severe darkness like religious flagellants from another time, tortured to the point of ecstasy. To the point of ultimate power. They came to tell you that when you choose death as a dance partner, death reciprocates.

They wanted Andrew. He was the sacrifice to save the rest of you and he went willingly. You watched him climb eagerly into the black hole in the wall that swallows everything. The relief you felt is shameful still.

It is his voice you hear now, calling from that darkness, not words, only sounds that crease reality and you do not know if Andrew is in pain or in pleasure. To avoid letting them touch you emotionally, you count the number of moans, thinking: he could not have lived behind the marble slabs for twenty years! And yet he has.

“You have brought another,” the female Cenobite says. Her mouth opens and she sticks out her tongue, which is also sliced into strips. She stares, impassive, at Candy.

Candy is hysterical. Ritz chokes out hopelessness. Everyone else is struck dumb by their terror, the rank stink of fear-laden sweat saturating the air. You cannot believe you are living this
déjà vu
. Living your nightmares.

Jeremy says nothing and in that moment you understand. The vow you twelve made back then—to return here tonight, when the Cenobites would take another from your number—Jeremy has altered things. He has brought Candy. He wants them to take her into the darkness instead of one of your group. Instead of him.

“She is not the offering, but we accept,” the one with the chilling eyes declares.

You cannot believe you are hearing this. No one can. Could salvation come to you through this vacuous woman as the new sacrifice? Has Jeremy tricked the Cenobites?

“We accept this offering, as well as one we choose.”

As a unit, the three Cenobites turn toward Jeremy. Now it is clear. They will take both of them.

Jeremy steps back. The look on his face is a mixture of betrayal and pure horror. “I brought you her!” he declares. “She's the one. Not me!”

“Jeremy, what are you talking about?” Candy screams. She knows but does not want to know.

But already the Cenobites are pulling Jeremy and Candy toward them with invisible strings. The female Cenobite opens her arms toward Candy like a dancer awaiting her partner. Candy's screams become ear piercing and bone chilling; you are certain those screams will reverberate within you until your dying day.

“You said one. Not two, one! Take
her
!” Jeremy yells, all the while closing the gap between him and the broken-faced one, who does not look at Jeremy and yet Jeremy is dragged relentlessly, his body bending in supplication toward the feet of the Cenobite.

The four of them, two human, two not, flow into the openings, the blackness seeming to suck at their bodies until they are obliterated. Bodies, but not voices. Candy is still shrieking. And Jeremy has joined her, protests about unfairness giving way to cries of terror. You can still hear Andrew moaning.

Only the tall Cenobite remains. His frightening otherworldly eyes seem to take in the eleven remaining all at once. Despite the terror, you sense relief in your friends. The promise was kept, this is finally over.

“Three thousand, six hundred and fifty-two days. That is when all of you will return. This time, keep your promise. Do you agree?”

There are gasps and cries of disbelief all around. Someone mutters, “Damn Jeremy, he fucked it up!” But one by one your friends
nod and whisper, “Yes,” and “I agree,” because they cannot do otherwise. They are traumatized. And trapped. They just want to leave here alive and will say or do anything. Like the last time.

You are the only one who has said nothing. The dangerous eyes zero in on you like lasers that burn hot, then sear cold, past your skin, through your muscles, into your bones and organs, rocking you with the excruciatingly exquisite pain of opposites. You burn and chill so rapidly your teeth begin to rattle and small sounds you did not know you were capable of making come from between your lips. The demand is that you comply.

But you have calculated the numbers, what you do best, and the Cenobite is aware of this. He blinks and whatever he has been doing to your body stops abruptly, leaving you limp and breathless, dizzy. A small movement occurs at his thin lips, not a smile exactly, and yet you cannot see it as anything but grim humor. “You're going to make us come back again and again, one less each time, half as much time, aren't you?” you gasp. “Ten years for eleven. Five years for ten. Two and a half for nine. Half as much time for eight, half again for seven. And by the end, when there is just one of us left, it will be only ninety hours before that one must return.”

You do not say it, but everyone here understands: as the years pass, hope will diminish.

The Cenobite stares at you for a moment. “Your skill with counting will be . . . interesting to explore.”

The being drifts backward, entering the darkness out of which still flow the haunted voices you recognize: screams, cries, shrieks. Pleadings.

The marble panels slide down and into place as though they had never moved. The crypt is filled with tense silence.

Someone pulls the handle and the crypt door crashes open. The light of day rushes in. Your friends flee, as if getting away quickly will erase the memory, stop the nightmares, block out the reality of returning, for you must all return. Each of you understands that if you do not come to them, the Cenobites will come to you.