Charlie's Pal

“Just so we’re clear, saying sorry isn’t going to get me out of this?” Charlie asked wryly as his captors dragged his shackled body down a lightless, stone hall and roughly shoved him through a thick, steel door. Landing face-first, it took him a moment to writhe around and he caught sight of the men who’d brought him in just as one of them tossed a loop of jangling metal at him and slammed the door shut. The sound of heavy locks falling into place drowned out Charlie’s indignant surprise.

He was more surprised to find that the metal projectile had been the keys to his chains. With the nervous haste of someone who’s sure a mistake has been made and is damned sure going to take advantage of it before somebody notices, Charlie fumbled with the keys until his weighty manacles rolled off and onto the filthy, broken tile of the floor.

Rubbing his wrists, Charlie slowly rose to his feet. “Whoof,” he exclaimed, wave his hand in front of his face. “What died in here?” He glanced around and found his answer in the decrepit old man, skin shriveled to a blotchy leather and bare ribs standing out against a sunken chest and swollen belly. “Good to see I’ll be well taken care of,” he mumbled.

A cursory inspection of his surroundings placed Charlie in a long corridor of yellowing tile and pale, white-blue lights that washed out the colors around him. Stains and filth covered the floors, but the right wall was surprisingly clean and hosted a number of stainless steel doors that reminded Charlie first of a meat freezer, then of a prison cell. The door behind him had been secured to an almost embarrassing degree, as if Charlie was going to show some hitherto unseen feat of strength that he’d just decided to hold back while they were beating him. The door at the end of the corridor…

Charlie rubbed his eyes and squinted in the flickering neon light. The tile and concrete looked like it gave way to rough-hewn stone and a crude, wooden door, but that couldn’t be right. “Something written on it,” Charlie wondered, trying to decipher the large, irregular letters that had been smeared on the rotten wood with a dark brown, greasy filth.

“Wendigo’s a comin’!” a voice next to Charlie shouted, startling him. With an indignant cry, he swung around to find the corpse of the old man grinning up at him with sparse, foul teeth in a stained and rancid mouth.

“What the fuck, guy. What the fuck,” Charlie panted, his heart in his lungs. “You couldn’t say something when I got dropped off? No ‘Hello, I am not dead’ or anything?”

The old man chuckled but did not respond except to point at the rotting door at the end of the hall with claw-like fingers. His first two digits had been fused together as if by some great heat, the skin joining them no more than warped scar tissue. He bobbed his head and repeated, “Wendigo’s a comin’,” Glee splayed across his ruined face.

“What’s a fuckin’ Wendigo?”

The wooden door creaked open.

The Wendigo, as it turned out, was-or at least in part resembled- a man. A hulking, morbidly corpulent, fetid man, whose foul, fleshy body was tinted green with mold and filth that grew between rolls of coarsely-haired fat. His torso nearly swallowed his head, which was bald and scarred but no less obscene than the rest of his form. His eyes were sunken, shadowed, and unfocused while his vein-pocked mouth nearly bisected his head with its wide, moist lips.

Charlie gaped. “What,” he mustered. “It’s so much worse than I thought it’d be,” he added to himself. “Hey, old man,” he asked nervously, “how many people walk away from this guy?”

The old man glanced upwards, then back at Charlie. He held up his fused fingers as if to say ‘one’ or perhaps ‘two,’ then thought better of it and tucked his warped digit back into his fist. “Nobodys walk,” he explained. “Some times, no bodies neither.” He laughed violently, his voice cracking and phlegm spewing in ropey tendrils from his gums.

When the Wendigo moved, Charlie expected a ground-shaking tromp. He did not expect the berserker speed that the fleshy colossus descended upon him, leaving him wholly unprepared when the behemoth’s thick-fingered hands wrapped around his torso like a child clutching a toy. Charlie gasped as the clenching fingers tightened into a paralyzing vice and the Wendigo lifted him from his feet to stare eye to eye. Gradually, by inches, the barbarous man’s mouth spread open, growing, widening, lifting like a curtain to reveal his broad, jagged, thick teeth that were washed in a brownish stain and riddled with blackened craters. And yet still, his grin widened, mouth stretching larger than any human’s has a reason to. His maw fixed open in its horrible gape, the Wendigo slowly carried Charlie to one of the stainless steel doors. It opened before them.

“Help me, you filthy bastard! Fucking DO something!” Charlie screamed at the old man, trying to avoid the Wendigo’s glassy stare without looking at the yawning pit of his mouth.

The old man turned his head and raised his eyebrows. In an almost apologetic tone he said, “day’s what’s bad is also days what’s sad.”

The door swung shut and the old man cackled as loudly as he could, gasping for breath but never ceasing, to muffle the sounds that leaked through the door.

Forgotten Mazes

When she awoke, the smell was what struck her first. The air had all the chill crispness of an enduring rain, a stuffy, dust-filled must that gave it the character of long-abandonment. The space smelled ancient and lacked the organic reek of the recently occupied, cold and empty neglect filling the chamber in place of the vitality of life. It smelt dead.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she tried to take in her surroundings as best she could. Furniture lay stacked in disjointed piles at the corners of the room, which proved to be smaller than she’d have expected, no more than perhaps twelve feet in any direction. The furnishings were largely wooden, their flesh blanched with the peculiar white of time-dried mold that gave them a bone-like appearance, sending a thrill of fear down her spine. The rest of the furniture was draped with thick, rough canvas that hid the pieces from sight and merely suggested the shapes of the things within. Doors stood in mute promise on two opposite walls, though, she realized with a grimace and a groan, she could not tell if they were north, south, or even if they led deeper into wherever she’d awoken. Her head thrummed and she had to blink back tears of pain as she glanced down.

Still in my wheelchair, she noted. I suppose that’s good. Her fingers and arms were free and in no pain, which was as surprising as it was welcome. Just as soon as the room stops pulsing, she decided, trying to shake away the nausea and foreboding dread that had planted a blinding ache behind her eyes and a tight knot in her lungs.

Carefully, slowly, she brought her arms down and wheeled herself forward, wincing at the slight squeak of the chair’s wheels in the soundlessness of her surroundings. The ground proved to be uneven planks that had warped under some intense moisture of a previous generation. She made her way through the dusty interior, almost afraid to disturb whatever force of desolation had caused the room to be forgotten by the world at large.

With a shiver, she grasped the old door knob- rusted, corroded brass rough to her soft palm- and turned it with a breathy gasp. The door opened effortlessly, its greased hinges wholly defying the neglect of the room. It swung open quietly and she wheeled quickly into the next room.

Unlike the previous chamber, the new space was wholly bare, lacking any sign of habitation except the trail of footprints in the dust of the floor. She followed it through the long room and through another door until it terminated against the far wall. Feeling her hands along the cold brick, she could just make out the thin wood of a door frame. Her hand passed beyond it, suggesting the passage was open. But when she tried to wheel through, her chair heavily hit a wooden surface. Feeling again, her expression became one of disbelief.

But, I must’ve come in through this way, she thought. I can feel the breeze of fresh air. How did…?

“Help!” she cried into the darkness. “Is anybody there? Please, help me!”

She pounded her fists uselessly on the doorframe. The exit lay before her, but the gap to pass through was barely six inches wide and shrinking, until it, like a lid slowly coming down, shut with a crisp, final snap.

Psalms to Space

Midnight sparkles like the ebony of a tomb, etched with the final testaments of a thousand nameless, dead stars, their final light a mere speck in the suffocating void.

The light of the city, Man’s modern torch that so brilliantly defies the impossible with its frenzied, half-mad vigor, glows enough to forefend insignificant catastrophes and enough to lock away the unfathomable denizens of the night’s sky.

Still, it is a comfort to me- the electric luminance- for it gives me endless hours to consider the engulfing majesty of natural phenomena so wondrous that it blinds us with a disguise of normality.

Can it be so simple, the impulse to erase our wonderment and submit to the numbing routine of everyday outrages and the perpetual fires that devour our priorities? It is a constant and obscene indulgence that verges on blasphemous, this complacent mind-death that lets us look into the polluted, blackened sky and not see the roiling abyss of matter and force that lurks, omnipresent, beneath the obscurities the throw before them.

… and it does not forgive us.