THE VOID

CHAPTER ONE:

He crept into her mind. In her blue-water dream, his dark ether seeped like spilt oil, blackening her chimerical sea of mermen with their emerald flesh and crystal grins, poisoning her vision with his inhuman, skull-like face which floated before her own. A scream of bubbles erupted from her gaping mouth as he gripped her dreaming self, her soul, and dragged her through a chasmal cave, through the darkest channel into another world. A place of phantoms, the underworld called Xibalba.

Beyond the passage, a desiccated stretch of land lay before them. Towers of barren rock walled against the ghostly-silver horizon, and twin peaks, in the form of monstrous talons, rose on each side of the pass. Dry winds rushed and snaked through the pass, whispering his secret name.

"Coatl, Coatl" came the airy slitherings, and the ground rumbled beneath their feet as the clawed hand of rock reacted to his presence and curled into Mictlan's fist. Mictlan, the God of the Dead, wanted to take his offering in his hand.

His offering cowered with her ivory arms draped over her head of golden tresses, and her cherub mouth opened wide with silent screams as rocks fell upon her. With edges like glass shards, the rocks cut into her shoulders and arms. Black gashes, death tears in her incorporeal flesh, appeared, and Coatl's own black-death wounds along his astral body spread wider as if they were hollow mouths grinning.

The tzitzimime demons of this dead abode slunk from behind boulders, shadows casting shadows, murmuring foul hunger. Capacious mouths snapped open and shut, their razor rows clicking sharply, and Coatl clamped his jaws in greeting, for they were his chosen brethren.

"Give her to us," they spat.

Hands tight upon her bony shoulders, he pushed her toward the tzitzimime, and she fell on her knees before them, supplicating with tears and screams as they grappled her with razor claws and stripped off ribbons of her flesh. Inch by agonizing inch of creamy skin came off wet and pink. The demons wrapped the fleshy bows around their tongues, and her blood dripped from their cavernous mouths like corpuscular spit. Slathering, slithering tongues slurped in the stringy noodles of her flesh until her body lay on the sands, fleshless and gleaming bright red. The pulp of her still screaming.

Coatl gripped her beneath her arms, arms of warm mucky, sticky muscles and grisly tendons, and dragged her down the pass. Her raw heels left sanguine trails.

“Oh god, oh god, oh god...” she muttered in shock and pain, her eyes rolling in their bony sockets, looking almost as if they'd roll out without their lids to hold them in.

With his ebon-boned fingers, he held her chin and whispered in her ear, “Meet my goddess.”

Her eyes focused before her, on the terrible sight of a leviathan serpent. It rose upon cobalt coils, reaching ten feet into the bright, dead-gray sky, and exposed its massive hood, its sapphire scales gored with carmine mouths, infantile snakes hissing out like vomited curses. In minutes, hundreds of blue cobras surrounded them.

Seductive songs of sibilant sounds seethed into his soul.

The air was alive with hisses, as if the very wind could strike with invisible fangs, and Coatl swayed to the snake-cadence. He learned long ago, during his first visit to Xibalba, the sinuous dance of the serpent. Appeasing the snake-goddess this way was better than the other...

...wound tight within the springs of her oily scales, ribs spearing cris-cross through flesh and bulbous organs, sternums cracking into the pulpy hearts, bodies pressed and squeezed like olives, red plasmic oils and ruddy pits of innards extracted through both opened ends.

Arched downward, the serpent pressed a cold nose against him, tongue flickering out of a lipless mouth, tasting him. Obsidian-mirrored pupils reflected his face–-a cobra himself, his cowl hid most of his skull-face, and he grinned striking fangs. He razed his tongue along those points and spat upon the venom-slippery forks, his blood communion for the belly-crawling goddess. Breathing his name, Coatl the Aztecan word for serpent, he prayed for her gifts. The leviathan stretched open its mouth, fangs of curved swords pierced from the pink cottons of the gums, sphincter-hose at its throat quivering like a cock in the throes of orgasm, spraying venomous ocher jism. Venom splashed onto his face, burning into the marrow of his bones, and Coatl licked the acid-bitter reptilian juice off his lips. His tongue bubbled and exploded inside his mouth. Exaltation.

His victim whimpered in his arms though as the neonatal serpents wriggled up her legs and dangled from her waist, fangs in her guts, tails whipping like silky strands of a blue skirt upon her. Only one thing missing from her new image. Coatl unsheathed a stone knife and cut off her hands. Her severed hands dropped to her feet, and blood splayed out from her wrists in long red fingers.

There, she stood like Coatlicue, mother of the War-God, Devourer of Filth, with her skirt of serpents and disembodied hands.

The snake-goddess approved and settled upon coils again, and Coatl ushered his sacrifice toward the shore of the blood river. Clumps of rotting flesh floated by, and Xochitonal lifted her snout from beneath the current and snatched bits of carrion, sharp jaws crushing the waste as easily as squeezing mud through a fist. Even the bones crumbled into dust in her steal maw.

Xochitonal was a fast and fierce alligator, but she paid no interest to them as she crawled to the shore, her belly bloated with yowling souls. Coatl shuddered to think of the infinite agony, those souls, churning in sulphurous acids, eternally digested in the pit of her stomach.

Waiting by the shore, he watched seminal suns drip onto the horizon and sink into the infertile womb of Hell, and the night sky birthed itself in howling darkness. He hoisted her skinless bag of bones over his shoulders and walked onward then, skulking in the dark.

He was the roadrunner in the eight deserts. He was the panther in the eight mountains. Invisible, he walked through the whirlwind sharp as swords toward the gates of the Lord of Hell, gates fashioned from the ferrous ribs of a monolithic beast, chains formed from the petrified links of its intestines.

Mictlan dwelled within, as well as all the other dreaded lords. Inside the gates, a myriad of structures patterned the ground, fallen ruins it seemed even the palatial temple of Mictlan. Ivy and moss clung to the sandstone blocks and marble columns, but, as Coatl drew closer, he noticed it wasn't plant but another organic material winding up the columns and stretching across the stone. Decay spread across the outside of the temple: sacrificial skins, yellow and thinned into the finest parchments by the arid winds, had been glued to the walls with gangrenous pus; entrails roped around the columns, and moldy growths sprouted along the pink-rot slickness, releasing feculent spores into the air; and thousands upon thousands of putrid tongues were nailed into the stone, slurring hideous arcanum in the wind.

His own tongue curled in his mouth, as though to swallow those mysteries, mysteries he yearned for, mysteries he would kill for. His sacrifice to the gods weighted his shoulders.

“The God of the Dead awaits you in his dead temple,” he told the girl. Mictlan waited for the dawn of the eternal night–-the god's wishes revealed in Coatl's dreams, of darkness devouring the light, of chaos in their reigns, a certain salvation from evolution toward extinction. Because didn't everything die out eventually, even gods? Worse to be forgotten than destroyed. But Coatl wouldn't forget the dark deities, nor their commands. “Or would you rather meet doom in the Houses of Ordeals?”

The House of Bats loomed in the courtyard, windowless, foreboding with its leathery walls and gothic spires raised like the Bat-God's hooks. Camazotz, the ruler of the bats, would swoop down upon any visitor, his leathern wings whirring, his claws hooking under chins and taking off heads. He syphoned the blood from the stumps of the necks. Coatl remembered the sounds within that house, the horrible sucking and gurgling bodies.

“Nightmare,” she croaked out.

Indeed, the nightmare of a god strolled through the temple's doors, surrounded by the tzitzimimes. Snails, slugs, and leeches covered his monstrous skull like mucinous skin, and worms of every kind squirmed upon his limbs. Little gods, little devourers of death and filth.

“Mictlan,” Coatl replied in a hushed tone.

"I know you," she said, struggling in his arms. He dropped her to the ground, offering her to Mictlan, and the sands crusted upon her seeping body like new gritty skin. She grimaced as she tried to find his human face within the rough contours of malformed bone. "Your voice, your eyes..."

"Yes, you do, Charlotte. You always complained that I never took you to any nice places. Didn't I prove you wrong?" He smirked and put his hand over her mouth and nose, silencing her for eternity. “Time to prove to the rest how wrong they've been about me.”

Once more, he used his knife on her as he sliced her tongue from her slack mouth and added it to the temple's walls. Her shrieks were carried away by the awful winds. Kowtowed before the God of the Dead, Coatl allowed the god to brush his cuneiform hand upon him and barely trembled when the godly squirms wiggled into every orifice.

The demons regurgitated the pieces of Charlotte's flayed skins onto the ground, and the sodden ribbons of flesh swirled in the muck with disgusting vigor. Heads of hookworms had grown on the ends, their hooks and suckers opening and clenching the air, searching for a soft hold.

“Feast with the god,” they snarled to him.

Instead, Coatl vomited the worms which had burrowed inside of him, adding more to the half-digested larval brew, and stole away through the darkest tunnels with a stolen prize from the wall tucked in his palm.

* * * *

He was angry with himself. Rejecting the food of the gods. Before he opened his eyes, he inhaled deeply, trying to cleanse the negativity from him. Sweet sage burned into his nostrils, smooting his membranes with its blackish smoke. He always lit a bowl of sage leaves for his trances. The scent invigorated and calmed him.

In a haze, the bare room came into view. Plaster dusted the pine floor, and mildew stains speckled the yellowing walls. Timber and leaves cluttered before the stairwell, which had collapsed long before he came, and he was surprised the second floor hadn't come crashing down yet either. The hundred year old home had weathered at least one fire, its burnt roof opened up for the night sky and like a mouth caught the rain and snow and swallowed them into the rotting beams. He'd broken into the abandoned farmhouse years ago to practice his trances and his faith without fear of prying eyes; although, if the eyes could peer as his do, then he wouldn't be safe anywhere.

He lifted the loose floorboard and retrieved a hardbound Owen County High School yearbook. A red ribbon saved the place he visited most often, page thirteen, Leslie Starr's senior picture. Tracing the curve of her face, he marveled at how simple her beauty was. Soft brown curls framed her delicate, oval face, and he could still remember how it felt like stroking velvet when he touched her hair, how it smelled like apple blossoms when the wind blew through it. Though her face was plain by most men's standards, he adored her big bright hazel eyes, sparks of spirit fire glinting around her dark pupils, and longed to kiss her cherry-pop colored mouth. His lips tingled whenever he was around her.

His anger returned.

"What do the gods want with you? What makes you special in their eyes?" He asked the smiling portrait.

She was once inseparable from Charlotte Schneider, the vain creature beaming next to her in the book. From his pocket, he withdrew a knife, flipped its blade up, and carved out her eyes with its tip.

Staring at Charlotte's picture, he projected his sight to where she lay dead.

Darkness shrouded her body. Her sprawled outline on the bed reminded him of a doll tossed carelessly, limbs askew. A Barbie he'd grown tired of playing with.

An approaching car filled the room with shifting caramel light, illuminating Charlotte's prone body. Necrosis in her tissue, she resembled an unwrapped mummy, still fresh from the embalming and not quite dry. Unnatural decay peppered her skin, and, by psychic-mutilation, her eye sockets were empty, little voids staring at the ceiling. It was strange how the body changed when the soul never returned, the rapid chemical degradation which made him suspect the soul contained chemical or physical elements that scientists had yet to discover, almost as if the soul was the acid for the battery. Corrosion happened when the acid went bad or completely used. In Charlotte's case, he emptied her soul. Sip-sip, gone.

Goodbye, he whispered in his mind, knowing it was the first of many goodbyes. He'd broken the eternal circle around Leslie and planned to strip away her old support one by one until no one was left. Trisha Watkins, Robin Merle, Bonnie Johnson. Flipping through the pages, he watched their pictures disappear as quickly as their ghosts would exit their bodies.

Words and images blurred on the pages, bringing to mind other books with words and images of death, the Mayan Popul Voh and the Mexican Book Of The Dead. Ancient tomes filled with sweet poetry, sweet like the scent of rot. Once in his possession, he ravaged the pages with great interest, learning more than he had ever hoped about the gods of his dreams and the worlds he visited in spirit, if not in some other body. Learned things like the ritual of Xipe-Toltec, Tezcatlipoca to the Yopi, the red god, the god of human sacrifice who wore the skins of the flayed man.

Thinking of the ritual, he went in search of Leslie, his eyes closed, his vision turned inward, and tumbled through astral space, allowing the beacon of her soul's chrome-black pulsing light to guide him. He stepped into her reality, unseen and unformed, a smudge upon the wall. A smudge as small as a fly.

Her eyelids fluttered in dreaming sleep, and he remembered the first shock of his mind melding into hers, into her dreams. It was strange because she dreamed in black and white.

Dreams as achromatic as her soul.

Her cat arched its back, raising hackles and hisses with his presence, but she didn't stir from her dream, and he slipped into her mind as if he were her very breath inhaled.

She dreamed about climbing a mountain, snow capped peaks brilliant white against the dark slate of the stone beneath it. Jagged holds cut through her gloves, and her fingers bled raw. Still, her face beamed with the blush of sunshine joy.

An eagle screeched in the distance, silhouette against the clouds, almost menacing like a demon trying to sneak into the heavens. His shadow passed over Leslie. She lost her footing as if the shadow had pushed her.

Beware the shadows, her mind-voice said, as she struggled to steady herself. Her foot only kicked loose pebbles free.

Coatl appeared to her then, dressed in a black cloak, his white face hidden beneath the dark flowing folds. He reached for her hand.

Leslie shook her head, resisting him, fear-etched frown furrowed on her brow.

Beware the shadows, she mouthed again. She released her hold and fell from the face of the mountain, and her dream shifted into a nightmarish gape as her mind stretched and yawned black.

Its darkened edges flowed upon him. Celestial blackness, empty spaces, yet he was suffocated by its unfathomable density, and soon its cold, vapid stench of eternal death broke upon him, waves of horror within him. Gripped by primal fear of the ultimate unknown, Coatl fled from her mind. Fled from what was inside of her.

CHAPTER TWO:

Into a darkness unlike the night, more of a deep cavern-pitch, but without the wind hushing through its vast spaces, without the echoic drip of water or settling sigh of rock, into a black, absolute stillness, Leslie went terrified.

This place muffled her heart. Slow to dreaded stop, her life was stifled and suspended into nothing, in this place of nothing. No sight, no sound, no thoughts, no breath. Empty as death.

The Dark Man had vanished from her mind, but then she did as well, and everything was void.

No, not quite so, spoke the subtle thought which formed somewhere else than here.

In the darkness beyond dark, things stirred, and the ancient enemies of all worlds seeped along side of her, touching her obscene with unseen hands, whispering to her with unheard voices. Rot tainted their seething laughter as they dragged her deeper within the Void.

####

Leslie woke, gasping for breath because her vise-thumping heart seemed lodged in her throat. Sweat and chills drenched her dream-fevered body, and the way the room shifted in surreal angles made her believe she still dreamed. She knew though she had escaped the dream, the vision of that cosmic crypt, and had ventured back into real time with real space and matter. Away from the domain which left physics behind.

Sucking on her lower lip, listening to her breath hitch and quaver through her slitted mouth, she understood the Frankenstein Monster's disorientation when he came alive--of being brought back from the nothing he'd become. Every cell in her body shook. Live-wire flesh strapped down and electrified, she felt trapped in limbo between living and dead, and, as shadows converged in the corners, she wasn't sure which side was worse.

The shadows formed faces against the stark wall, of deformity and inhuman features, of death masks and carnival-leers, of hideous, loathing eyes. Parading, circling the room, they taunted her.

She clasped her hands over her eyes, pretending it was her own mind projecting these lurid images, but the viscid hissing surrounding her denied her that comfort.

Even behind closed lids, she saw them dancing with the flitting light as they crawled the walls, slipped into the air, and stole through her skull. Dancing, dancing, singing abrasive, "Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, you'll fall down!"

Down she felt their hands pull her.

Mouth opened to scream, Leslie tasted the grave-dust on her tongue and choked on the dry, ashen, human-salt sapor.

"Ring around the corpses, pocket full of kisses, ashes, ashes, dead on your lips."

Wind generated within the room. A maelstrom of droning voices and swirling ice hailed upon her, tiny nips into her skin, icy shivers in her hot blood, and she jerked her hands away from her eyes when she recognized her father's voice within the torment.

"Beware the shadows," he said in a tone pierced with sadness and pain. "Beware the shadows." Then the winds died, and her father disappeared within a mass of hungry darkness once again.

In an unsettled quietude, Leslie sat upon her bed and allowed the tears to flow down her face. Strange how her suffering felt warm on her cheek when it was so damn cold in her heart. She trembled as she wept, feeling those raw wounds of her father's death ooze and sting as much as if it happened a moment ago. Scabs of old terrors broke off, and she pulled the blankets to her mouth, muffling her wails with them. It was happening again, and she knew it wouldn't stop until her ghost joined her father's.

The glittery dawn did little to dispel the darkening fear within her. Rather, its golden touch upon the floor and walls creeped her out because she knew where there was light, there were shadows.

###

Wandering into the gallery with vapid stare and dragging steps, Leslie ignored the greetings and headed for Bruce's office. She entered without knocking and unceremoniously dropped the package onto his desk.

"Leslie, you make a wretched prima donna. So, I'm gathering the photos didn't turn out?" he asked as he tore into the envelope. Proof sheets slid out onto his desk, and he scanned the pictures with unchecked enthusiasm. "God, they're incredible. Why the glum face then?"

"Bad night," she said. Words flat, quick, devoid of the sick quivering memory of the night's events.

"No sex, huh? Understandable, sounds like my life," he sighed comically, glancing up from the pictures, catching her eyes, telling her without words he understood more than she wanted.

Leslie stared at the twenty-by-twenty photograph above his desk in order to ignore his imploring eyes. Eyes the color of a stormy sea, with the intensity of one as well. Eyes which could peer behind her tough exterior, beyond the steel wall around her soul, and into the secret, soft, vulnerable parts of herself. His gaze unnerved her as much as her photograph disturbed viewers.

"Cross Dresser In Rapture" had hung behind his desk for over a year, after he purchased it at her first art show and signed her on to his gallery. The photo depicted a man being crucified to a wooden cross. It was Easter, and Leslie had traveled to Central America to witness the religious fanatics' re-enactment of Christ's crucifixion. Just as Mary Magdalene washed and kissed the feet of Jesus, a young boy of about seventeen, a beautiful specimen to Leslie with his brown curls dipping over his long-lashed eyes, sucked on the toes of the condemned. The man's body responded. If not for the nails being positioned above his wrists, Leslie would've joked it was the erection and not the resurrection.

She felt the pull of this scene and started snapping the pictures. The one that struck her the most when she developed them was the first one she took--as the hammers drove in the long iron nails, the man arched his back, shut his eyes, and opened his mouth to scream. The image however portrayed him in near ecstasy. Whether the boy or the hammer caused the erection, it was unclear.

The crown of thorns added vivid contrast, spikes blooming in his temples, red rose buds of blood opening on his face. She remembered his scarlet perfume on that humid day. It overpowered the stench of unwashed bodies and open sewers, even though it was the most delicate of scents upon the sweating breeze. Golgotha visions swooned within her, and she had gotten swept into the act before her, almost believing as that young boy did that nameless saviors truly died over and over in this remote town for their sins. Such an aching, desperate need for salvation.

When she looked at the picture for an extended period of time, it seemed the head of the penis glistened and glowed with the setting sun in the background. Glorious blasphemy as a song played in her mind, its phantom singing, "I am the God of Fuck."

"You'll shock Cincinnati more at your second show, judging by these proofs. That trip to the London fetish club paid off in terms of creativity." Bruce tapped the center image. "She/he has won my heart--love the serpent tattoos twining around the breasts, and the bulge beneath the vinyl speedo, well, I'm jealous. But, I have to ask, are the metal spikes real?"

Leslie cringed as she nodded, and Bruce shuddered with a mixture of disgust and joyful-greed upon his expression.

"To even portray this stuff as beauty makes you a freak, you know that, don't you?" he asked, continuing his oohing and aahing down through the frames.

Her lips twitched into a little grin, knowing his way of complimenting her was hidden within the chiding. Beauty, not how many would find her work, but, if she stepped back and took an objective look at her prints, then she would agree she found a unexplainable allure in the grotesque. Masochistic torture, self-mutilation, haunting agony, repetitive themes developed throughout the copies for sale. Denial subdued, she saw bits of herself in every photo, scars no longer veiled but made plain to the world in rich images.

She was the girl with midnight-blue hair, black tear drawn beneath her eye. Of black sorrow, Leslie held inside and refused to shed, for fear it would drown her and the world.

She was the cross dresser in rapture, with burdens upon her.

She was all her images, freakish by nature, pained, caught in a still frame of disturbing details.

Upon the glass which covered the Rapture print, her face reflected in distortion, rainbow and sunlight as her flesh, and she smiled at herself, finding it a better likeness than the mirror, until she noticed another image beside her own.

Waxen-faced and hooded, the Dark Man stared at her.

Leslie gasped and shrank back from the desk, pinning her back against the wall. His image disappeared, but she sensed his presence in the room, his oxen-blood eyes watching invisible from the recesses.

"Roach?" Bruce asked as he leaned forward against the desk, scanning the ground for the nasty bug. "Damn things actually like the insecticide, I think. Might as well call the stuff steroids for city roaches."

"Roaches. Right."

"Saw one the other night scramble out from beneath a box--thought it was a mouse at first. Did you know the things chirp when they run toward you? Must be the meal bell."

"Scary." Pound, pound, her heart agreed as a faint chattering erupted within the wall.

"Yeah, well, until they get bigger than my shoe, I'm okay."

Sounds like water and air flushing through a tank, a gurgling, a grumbling, hushed conversations of demons it seemed went on behind the wall. Then the sounds vibrated through the plaster into her skin. As if music thrummed and throbbed from loud speakers, palpable sound waves upon the air, the rhythmic muttering pushed against her, crossing the barrier of flesh into her veins, pulsing. Blood fluttered instead of flowed, and her heart beat arrhythmic, discord of her terror.

In her ears, her pulse turned hellish symphonic. Pipe-organ veins filled with long drawn sanguine notes, and the phantasm opera played, chorus of demon song in her mind, blaring curses and warnings. Her body resonated with it all.

Leslie slapped her hands over her ears and screamed.

Bruce was shaking her, his mouth moving without sound, his fear-fury eyes blinking away from her sight as darkness bordered her mind. She fled into the fade, to the place of no sounds.

####

Delirium-tinged awareness, Leslie found herself in a hospital bed. Blood pressure cuff pumped by a serious looking nurse, her severe cropped hair tinted with gray, heavy glasses perched on a sharp nose, thin lips pinched hard enough to drain away their color. In the corner of the egg-white room, Bruce had tucked himself into the chair, accounting ledger open on his lap, pen stuck between his lips.

She searched for the fan, for the comforting hum that had awaken her. Nowhere to be seen but heard, its plastic blades rotating in a quiet whir, and she longed to feel its artificial wind upon her.

The hum reminded her of her father. Every night, he would turn on his fan, positioned beside the bed, because he said it would help blow the nightmares into the dream catcher hung above the headboard. Sometimes, after her own bad dreams, she would slink out of her bed, sneak into her parent's room, and stand in front of the fan, listening to it shush her scares, feeling the air hit her, pretending it was her father blowing kisses to make the hurt go-away.

Where was the fan? She needed the bad things to go away.

"Welcome back," the nurse said in the softest of tones.

"Where was I? What happened?" Where's the fan? Noise of a high speed motor running, faster, faster until it began to echo like wails.

"Fainting spell as far as we can figure, but we'd like to keep you overnight for observation."

Shred-rip of the Velcro strap, and Leslie jerked as the cuff came off her arm. For a split second, she thought it was the seams of reality tearing apart.

"Your blood pressure is very low, and you've had a series of heart palpitations which concern us," the nurse continued. "I'll bring the doctor in..."

"No, no need. I won't be staying." Leslie turned the stiff white sheets down and wobbled to a standing position.

"I wouldn't advice..."

And the screams cut her off.

Down the hall, a woman shattered the hospital-tomb quiet, and her siren charged the nurse into calm efficiency. She rushed out the room, her rubber soles padding away as silent as shadows. Leslie feared for the woman down the hall.

"Will you take me home?" she asked Bruce, who only nodded in confusion. She found her stashed clothes and dressed in haste, not caring if Bruce saw her pale nakedness.

Hanging on to his arm, Leslie left the room and headed down the Death-stalked corridors to the exit, where she finally breathed in relief. She hated hospitals with their antiseptic care and sterile cold. Only once her parents brought her in for tests--needles, tubes, radioactive serum injected in what blood they'd left inside of her, a trip into the CAT scan machine and the breathless panic it set upon her--, but once was all it took to poison her against hospitals. She hadn't felt safe as the tray, its tongue, slid back, swallowed her, and held her motionless inside its churning hollow, belly. Like the Void, the machine was a vacuum of nothing, sucking away her very breath and everything else but her fear.

Winter night air filled her lungs.

She stopped in mid-stride, checked her watch, and shuddered at the lapse of time--the longest black spell yet. Five hours out of her mind.

"You really should've stayed," Bruce said.

"No, no, I can't...no, no," she stammered, staggering under a dizzy whirl. Fast revolving world of moonlight streaks and wintry trees reaching around and around and around for her. Parking lot on turbo-spin. Her mind flashed round to the memory of CAT scans, her body stationary, everything else moving making her sick.

Light-headed, she allowed Bruce to lead her on to his Mazda Miata. He drove her home without speaking, but, every once in awhile, she caught him glancing her way, assessing her.

Would he believe her if she told him it was the brewing storm which wrecked her equilibrium? Far away, a storm gathered, atmospheric pressure intensifying, its long reach winding within her. Her childhood doctor had refused to accept her ability to sense the storms, even though, one clear day she had announced it would snow any moment, and the doctor had shaken her head, lecturing her on how stress was to blame for her headaches and spells. Children of alcoholics went the sober talk. But the snow had begun to fall as soon they had stepped out of the door. Leslie had worn the doctor's haughty grin the rest of the afternoon, knowing she, a hick-town child, was right and the doctor with all her advanced degrees was wrong.

Another reason for her to quit the doctors and the tests and the science of something they probably could never explain.

Seemed she'd run away from everything.

"Here you go, ma'am. Twenty dollar fare, please" Bruce announced.

Leslie couldn't help chuckling. Bruce, a wise-crack, but the dearest friend who honored her reclusive life, never probing too deep, always keeping an open mind.

"Up for another favor?" she asked. Her Mount Adam's apartment loomed on the slope, stone facade for the stony heart which beat within there. She couldn't face the apartment yet, not with the shaded windows leering down upon her and waiting for her to come inside.

"Name it, it's your dollar." Bruce grinned wide and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel to the radio's tune--Bruce's favorite, Celtic folk music. In his car, it was always a May Fair festival.

"I've changed my mind about the party. Want to escort me and Moon?"

"Do you have to bring the cat?" Bruce groaned, eyes glassing over even before the cat had the chance to spread its allergenic dandruff.

"Oh, he'll make a great accessory in the photos. What graveyard is complete without a black cat?"

"You're taking pictures? Oh, hell, bring the cat, bring his fur balls, bring his fleas!"

Giggling, she held her finger up for him to wait while she went into her place and gathered her things.

"Don't forget," he called from the car as she inserted her key. "It's a celebration of the night. Put on a gothic costume. Time to learn to fit into a crowd, sweetheart." And he laughed because he had no intention of dressing for the party. Bruce wouldn't be caught dead in anything but his jeans and white oxford.

"Right," she said as the door swung open, and the sallow-lit stairwell greeted her.

Heels clicking on the wooden steps, she made her way to her fourth floor apartment. Her neighbor's dinner wafted into the hall, ginger and onion spice making Leslie's stomach grumble with hunger. As she slipped into her apartment, the walls groaned with their own hunger.

Leslie flipped on the lights, quelling the dark but not her unease, and she jumped when Moon rubbed his welcome against her legs. Bending, she scooped him into her arms and nuzzled the silver-white crescent fur between his eyes, the moon upon his midnight face for which he was named.

"We're going to a party, Moon," she said, carrying him into her bedroom, judging him for the slightest reaction to something amiss. Ears perked, golden eyes alert, drool-drop on his lips, Moon showed little sign of danger.

She trusted Moon to perceive the watcher in the empty spaces, as he had proved over and over that he could, the flattened ears, the hissing, the corner attacks with his paws thwacking fast and furious every time she felt spooked from invisible prying eyes. Did pets share their owners madness? she wondered.

Dressed in black leather pants, red boustier, and her snazzy leather jacket, she was ready to go. Off she went with camera and Moon in hand, leaving the lights on behind her in hopes dark things wouldn't encroach upon her when she returned.

Bruce whistled his approval as she slid into the car and handed her a mask, its feathers fanned like scarlet flames.

"It's a masque ball, Leslie. The game is to decide which is the true face." Bruce slipped a baboon mask over his face. His eyes were bestial behind the mask, and Leslie's heart gave a start at his feral-sharp gaze because she never would've expected so perfect a transformation. Eyes intent on attack.

The tiny hairs on her arm stood at attention, little soldiers waiting for the battle. His breath snorted from the air holes, and she couldn't help but think of the jungle--twilight hunters swinging down from the trees, screeching; gray blurs roaming in the darkness with eyes aglow; crimson and corpse-blue faces snarling, long teeth exposed. The true face behind the wild mask.

She brushed the chills from her arm and turned her mask in her hand, finding it bland in comparison to his extraordinary-real image.

"And you give me a simple feather mask?"

He answered with a deep growling voice, "You need no elaborate display. You hide your face in the shadows well enough."

Something other than his own voice resonated in his tone. Something more ancient and mysterious than the seas. Something she'd wished she'd never heard again.

Camera-flash quick and blinding, he grinned at her, mask beneath the mask, of long white teeth and evil.

Moon yowled in her lap, and his sleek body trembled in fear.

"What's wrong with your cat?" Bruce asked, all signs of the other intruding face gone, only a fake, vinyl beast.

Warped reality, a phenomenon she dreaded. A slip through the cracks, and she feared she might never come back.

"Spooked by your mask, I think," Leslie said, settling Moon with gentle strokes. Moon's starry eyes blinked at her, pupils shrinking as he relaxed, but she noted his eyes' wariness and the way they accused her of lying.

"Ha! Serves him right. Payback for the time he freaked the shit out me by clawing my arm, just because it dangled over the side of the couch." Bruce pulled the mask off and snarled at Moon.

Moon yawned.

"Coward," Bruce said as he shifted the car into gear and sped off toward the Cemetery Masque.

Leslie watched the houses blur by, windows dotted with lights. She thought about how life went on inside the houses, of families gathering for dinner, of mothers reading bedtime stories to children, of friends laughing and playing cards, of lonely hearts dating their televisions, and how she was always on the outside, looking in. She was a ghost even before her body rotted in a grave, flitting through life without any ties to the lives around her.

Life passing her by, and the tires whooshed upon the black road like the revolving doors of birth and death. Someone enters the world; someone leaves the world; someone enters the world; someone leaves the world. Endless comings and goings. Turning away from the window, she bit her lips as fears repeated, as she felt trapped between the living and the dead.

A string of cars lined up outside Spring Grove's Cemetery and Arboretum. Perfect haunt for one of Trixie's parties. Writer, painter, goth-grrl, Trixie held a party for each season, celebrating some aspect of the dark side. Last autumn, on Old Hallow's Eve, she rented a river boat, an old-fashioned steam queen, and had the invitees wear period clothes. It was a strange night of gambling, drinking, and seances to call the Delta Queen's ghost aboard.

It wasn't until after Leslie developed her film did she realized the steam captain's ghost had appeared, a shimmery form with silver flowing clothes and hair, anguish on her pallid face as wispy hands failed to steer the paddle ship. "Wraith At The Wheel" sold for fifteen hundred dollars, bought by Trixie herself.

At the gate, a security guard asked for their invitation, took their embossed flyer, and directed them toward the century-old chapel.

Impressive, yet simple and medieval in design, the chapel sat gloomy on the snowy ground. Did grief mortar the castled stones of the walls? Narrow, arched windows and doorways cut dark slits into the coarse walls, and the tripled-arched main entrance opened into a large vaulted area. Candlelight flickered within the chapel, though still dim from the mass of mingling bodies blocking the glow. Along the red velvet aisle, masked celebrants danced together, goth-rhythm grind to a Covenant song. "Turn your gaze towards the moon, even further if you dare. Turn your face towards the sun and be grateful that it's there."

Upon the granite altar, a woman wearing an antique-white, tattered lace gown and pale feline mask swayed between two vampire-clad men. Black capes opened and embraced the woman, and the men ravished her with their raven-faces. A ghastly smile spread across her face, with ebon lips of the long dead, with fangs of the panther.

Trixie. Her skin-art showing upon her exposed back--the cat-headed Goddess Bast, the lover of pleasure and dance.

Leslie snapped several shots of the grim scene, catching each twisted expression, each seductive coil of arms and tongues as they groped one another like adders mating. The titled of the series formed in her mind as she clicked the shutter: "Night Shall Overtake."

Phantoms and every form of the risen dead surrounded Leslie--one man in black tuxedo, formal top hat, and alabaster mask, sulking in the corner; a group of women with their colorful taffeta and peacock-faces putting razor-kisses upon their pallid skins; "Blue Boy" reclining on a wooden pew, blue suede shoes propped up, dull eyes staring from behind his drowned-flesh vizard.

The Cemetery Masque offered her Mardi Gras decadence without a trip to New Orleans. There, it's voodoo zombie princess in the arms of a Victorian Count. Gold-dusted breasts exposed and bitten. Bloody milk at her nipple. Her hand upon his leprous cock.

The camera chattered on and on until the end of the roll. As Leslie changed the film, the euphony of laughter altered, replaced by hacking and chortled songs, and she glanced up from the camera. Cigarette smoke swirled in the chapel like graveyard mist. Affected by whippet fumes and cloves, her vision swooned. False faces leered, and beasts within beasts strolled toward her, malignancy in the pithy eyes, silent secrets on their grinning lips.

Dragging Moon on his leash, she bolted from the chapel and raced across the slippery ground, across the bridge, and into the maze of gravestones. The brisk air stung her tight throat. Moon panted as she slowed her pace, and she released him from his leash, feeling guilty.

He bounded up the hill, stopping before a crypt, meowing loudly. A figure rested against the door of the mausoleum. On either side of the door stood a marble angel, lengthy sword in arms, guarding the entrance. They frowned upon the man on the steps. He wore a dusty Union's uniform, its gold piping dull with age against the navy, and his cap had slipped over his eyes. If he wore a mask, it was the second-skin of misery.

"Everything okay?" Leslie asked, figuring him for drunk.

With a slow movement, he tipped his cap back, eyeing her briefly before casting his grey steel gaze downward. "Ayee, everything's as it should be."

"Mind if I take your picture?" The image had hit her when he looked at her--broken soldier placed between two armed angels like some kind of prisoner of God. Heaven was a concentration camp.

"I'd rather you take my tale." Lifting up from the steps, he walked toward her and extended his hand as if he meant to introduce himself.

His hand clasped hers, his fingers, palm, wrist sliding through her hand. Her flesh a glove over his spirit.

And his tale was told with every breath she took...

...Red brick buildings lined the shore of the green Chaplin River, and the prosperous merchants greeted him as he walked by, waving him inside to sell their wares. Perryville was a quiet, pretty town before their enemy fought at its doors.

Canon blasts echoed through the cobblestone streets. Merchants closed shops. His troop readied for war and headed toward the smoky clouds which rose from beyond the hill.

By the time they reached the valley, the battlefield was strewn with fallen soldiers. Their feet sloshed through the blood-sodden ground, and they recognized their comrades in the charred faces. Unblinking eyes saw no Heaven in the haze.

Winds brutalized them with the stenches of acrid gunpowder and slaughtered flesh, and, before they recovered from their shock, gunfire sounded.

Bullets zinged into their bodies. Blood spurted from fresh wounds, and his troop dropped dead within a few hours.

As he lay dying, a little girl, an eerie glowing spectral in the bright sunlight, whispered in his ear.

"James Harberson failed to return to the caves one night.

"Like you, he had disappeared over the hills after hearing the whoops of the raiding Indians. He never returned. Though Mrs. Harberson found his severed head a mile from the fort, beside a tree craved with their initials. She kept his head in a complete state of preservation for many years.

"On certain nights, the people swore they saw him dancing with Mrs. Harberson beneath that tree."

The little girl with freckles splattered across her cheeks took a knife to his hand and cut off his pinky.

"For your wife," she said.

With the same knife, she cut off his thumb.

"For our guardian of spirits," she said and skipped away with her fleshly trinkets.

The man stepped away from Leslie, and she shuddered as though long needles had been withdrawn from her fingers.

"Avoid acoustic shadows, my dear. By the time you hear the battle, you're already walking amongst the dead," he said, vanishing into the stone structure.

Beware the shadows echoed in her head, and she was afraid, afraid of not standing alone in the cemetery.

A bronze plaque adorned the door of the family sepulchre, reading:

Charles Beaumont Somner, born 18 July 1830, died
10 October 1862 during the battle of Perryville.
"From the valley of death comes the shadows of life."

Winding back along the paths, she carried Moon, who had his claws dug into her leather jacket, but she didn't care about the tiny holes, only about her wretched past puncturing into the shell of her new life.

The snow crumpled under her steps. Her breath steamed into the frigid air. Within a few numbing minutes, she made her way back to the party and borrowed Bruce's cell phone to call a taxi service.

Exhausted. Easy enough excuse to give and one-hundred-percent the truth. She was tired of the nightmarish chaos and of trying to escape it. As the cab pulled out of Spring Grove, as headstones dwindled from her sight, she doubted anymore that she would find peace in the grave.

Lights extinguished in the homes, it was a dark way home.

Whiskers twitching, ears flicking, Moon slept in her lap during the ride and chased his dream-mice. No stalker in his mind, and she envied him. Envied even the warmth of his body as she shivered with a cold deeper than the winter.

Her apartment looked no different than when she left, but still she stood outside, holding cat and camera, unable to move inside.

Her head throbbed with images not her own.

She has no eyes, only shadowy pits, but she is not blind to Hell.

Pulled by macabre strings, she entered her apartment building. Moon's tail bushed in fear-electrified response.

The Dark Man has his hands upon her.

The key unlocked the door, hollow click, empty as her apartment. Or maybe not as she stepped through the open door and found words scripted upon her wall in wet burgundy.

Gasping for breath, she clutched her chest and pushed on the knife-pressure within.

Words screaming in blood, Come back to me or die.

Her mouth filled with the copper taste of those words. Growling, Moon leapt from her arms and scurried away with clicking nails under the bed.

Blood on his hands.

The phone rang, jarring her.

For whom the bell tolls, something whispered.

"Hello?" Inaudible word on crackling line.

"Leslie? It's Mom." Echoes of nightmares in the familiar voice, of pain, of betrayal.

He holds the blade.

"How did you get my number?" Leslie blinked as the words dried and crumbled to the floor like brick dust.

"I saw an article about your up-coming photography exhibit in the Cincinnati Enquirer. I called your agent's office, told them it was an emergency, and got your number."

Silence, save her ragged breath. One minute, two, breathless waiting now for the news...

...He cut her eyes for him to see.

"Charlotte's dead," her mother said. "Funeral in two days. You need to come home."

Grief wrenched her heart. Terrible wails formed in the pit of her stomach, and her whole body tightened, depressing, squeezing out the immense feeling, and a strangled cry was released. Her best friend dead. Like losing a sister.

"Sam needs your help."

"Why?" Leslie sobbed.

"Because they suspect him for Charlotte's murder."

The line went dead, and, in the static, his laughter cackled. Slamming the receiver into the cradle, when the wind blows, the cradle will rock, she dropped to the floor and hugged her knees. She had to return to Elk Lake. To reconnect with the horrors of her past and face the new ones of the future, but she wouldn't let Sam fall prey to the legions of Shadows.

Madness drove her away, and madness would bring her home.

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.

Exactly where he wanted her.

Down will fall baby, cradle and all.