Chapter 4: A Glimpse of Hell

A light rain drizzled down on us as the Constable led me into the station with my hands cuffed behind me. At some point, she had put her gun away and tucked it back into her holster. It was only a matter of time before she ran out of nostrils to shove it in, so I guess she was saving the other one for a special occasion.

    She led me to the back of the station, which was white and clean and generally horrible. Nobody asked her any questions, only stopping to crane their heads at the new prisoner and wonder what The British Fellow had done to deserve a night behind bars. My brain was sending messages across its different parts, trying to piece together the flayed, volatile puzzle that haunted Abraboca and, admittedly by my own doing, now my life.

     Imagine what it would have been like. When that thought crossed my mind, it was Bernie’s voice I heard, whispering through that crooked, boyish grin. Visiting your daughter’s grave and finding only a hole and an empty coffin? The horror. The agony. The feeling in your heart, your soul, your spine. Poor little Fishers. Poor little people in this big, messed up world. Who would want that corpse? Who would want a charred, blackened body? Not exactly good decoration.  Put it together, Swansea. Only a matter of time before it starts again. You let me burn. You let little Naomi burn. Who’s next? 

     In my mind’s eye, I saw the graveyard. Saw the little black hand rising out of the earth followed by a seared scalp and hollow eyes peering through the darkness. I saw Naomi Fisher pull herself out of the soil and shamble out into the night. I saw all these things and none of them. I saw very, very little.

     Richard Parish had been confined to the last holding cell on the left. The murder had more or less become an object of public note, so I figured his days in the local penthouse were numbered if not spent. Sooner rather than later, they’d move him to a federal facility, mostly for his own safety. But still, there he sat: hunched in the corner, rocking back and forth like a baby pining for its mum. His eyes were wild and his lips were chapped and his skin was so leathery you’d mistake him for a bleached boot. An animal, caged and scared.

     “You said it was a puzzle.” Constable Matthews eyed me warily. “You said that I held half and you held half. Here’s mine. You need to put this together right here, right now.”

     For the first time, I saw her for what she was. She was scared. Terrified, even. I could hear it in her voice, see it in her eyes. This wasn’t adding up. Not ten minutes ago she was screaming at me and shoving firearms into my nasal cavities. Now she was, in not so many words, asking for my help. Something was clicking inside my head, though I hadn’t figured out exactly what it was yet.

     Still, here I was. Richard Parish sat before me, a book waiting to be opened. A raw feeling stirred in my gut. He was disgusting to look at, all things considered. But the smell. That was the worst part, I think. It wasn’t raw or disgusting. It was just off. Wrong. Like eating after brushing your teeth.

     “Hello,” I said, leaning against the bar. My hands were handcuffed, so I decided to forget the formality of shaking the murderer’s hand. “My name is John Swansea. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

     Parish didn’t look up and when he spoke, his voice was low and squeaky. “We don’t know who we are anymore, but it’s a pleasure to see John Swansea again. It’s a pleasure to see the way his hair’s gone grey and his eyes gone hollow. Nice to see he remembers. It’s fun to be remembered. My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin. I work in a lumber yard there. Everyone that I meet when I walk down the street says, ‘Hello! What's your name?’ And I say: My name is Yon Yonson. I come from Wisconsin. I work in a lumber yard there. Everyone that I meet is so fun to eat, they scream ‘Ahh! Ahh! Please God Jesus Christ noooooooo!’ And I say: My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin…”

     “Pleasure to meet you, too.” That was a lie. There was nothing particularly pleasant about him, but I figured he could use an injection of self-esteem judging by the state of his skin. “If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to inquire as to your confession this morning.”

     “We confessed, we did.” Every word was like a lyric, every sentence a song. “The little girl got burnt and we watched them do it, too. We watched them eat her up, we watched them sink their teeth into her necky parts. We even watched them dump the little body off the pier. She danced before she hit the water. It was a long fall, so she had time to dance. And she had time for fire, too. She was like a shooting star. It was pretty.”

     Constable Matthews had her hand on her pistol, and I thought she had half a mind to shoot him dead right then and there. Looking back, it’s quite clear that she barely lacked the whole. But not me. I was calm, levelheaded. There are certain perks with being a sociopath whose emotional well began and ended with the bucket dangling over the abyss. Richard Parish would get nothing in the way of outrage out of me.

     “You watched?” Now we were getting somewhere. “Who? Who’d you watch? My friend, this information can save your life. If you’ve been threatened or -”

     “No, no, no,” sang skinny Richard Parish. “They can’t. They won’t. We’re part of them now. Part of the hive. Part of the pack. Embers flickering in the flame. They love me and we love us. We swim in the same light. Dance under the same moon. F**k in the same flesh.” He looked up at the ceiling with a wistful look in his eyes. “There’s not much to f**k with anymore. We scare most people. Dogs, too. Even they think we smell bad.”

     “One bloke to another: give some thought to your mental state before you tackle the task of reinvigorating your sex life.” Part of the hive, he said, embers flickering in the flame. “You keep saying They and talking about Them. Care to explain?”

     “Oh, if we talked then they would walk. Here. And burn you. They don’t like it when we talk so you shouldn’t us to.” For the first time, he turned to me and looked me dead in the eye. It wasn’t something I wanted, I realized. There were so many things I would rather look at. “We’ve seen your soul. We have, we have. Cowardice. Fear. And then, at the end, silence. We see your silence, John Swansea. And we don’t liiiiiiike iiiiiiiit!”

     Just like that, he was howling. Parish kicked and screamed and banged his fist against the side of his cell. His cries were so loud that it was a wonder he didn’t wake up half of Abraboca. Who knows? Maybe he did.

     I turned to Constable Mattthews. “Is he always this friendly?”

     “If this is a joke to you…”

   “It’s not. But the man’s clearly insane. Look at him.” She followed my gaze, and there he was: Richard Parish was a pitiful sight even by my standards. All my life I’d heard of “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” never truly understanding what those words meant. Looking at that rotting, soiled man crying in the corner, I knew what Hell looked like. There was no fire or brimstone or devil with a pitchfork. Just a tortured mind screaming in pain. “If all you have to go by is his testimony, it won’t hold up in a court of law. At least not a decent one. And even if it does, I get the feeling you don’t want to see the wrong man frying in the electric chair while the real monster gets carte blanche and a ticket to the magical land of Anywhere He Bloody Well Likes.”

     “Just because he’s crazy doesn’t make him any less guilty.” She tore her eyes away from Parish and met mine. She was scared, but she was doing her best not to show it. “If your point is that -”

     “My point is that the real killer is still out there and you’re ‘bout to lock up some loon in his place. Your conscious sleeps well at night, but nothing’s different. Nothing’s changed.”

     “And why should I trust you?” Her words were ice. “What makes you so certain? What makes you such a f****n’ expert?”

     “Oh, he’s an expert all right.”  Parish sat up, grinning his mad grinning and weeping all the while. “He’s seen us. You remember it, don’t you? Don’t say you haven’t. We’ve met you before, down beside the river in France. You were funnier then, and your hair wasn’t so grey and your eyes not so old.”

     I shot the constable a look that, to my shame, can only be verbalized as I told you so. All I got in return was the same look of distrust I’d been getting all night.

    “Mr. Swansea saw us all those years ago,” Parish went on, relishing every word. He stood up on wobbly legs, balancing himself against the wall of his cell. A dry cough escaped his lips, then another, and another. “Oh, it hurts. It hurts so bad. We knew it would hurt. We did. We knew that it was coming. Sometimes it takes longer than others. Sometimes you’re on fire and you don’t know what hit you. But we’ll know. We’ll know. Bernie says hi, by the way.”

     A cold anchor moored itself in the deepest pit of my stomach and turned my blood to rivers of ice. And the way he said it - just standing there, grinning that stupid grin as he hobbled towards us.

     “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the coward who dared call himself Swansea. His father would be ashamed, and his father before him. “You’re mad. Your brain is bleeding into itself and you don’t even know what -”

     “Oh, shame, shame, shame, Johnny Joe Johnson John-John. Oh, poor Bernie. He remembers every moment. How we sank our teeth into his throat. How he flailed and screamed. How you just stood there and watched.”

     Even then, it was still happening. On the banks of the Scarpe, I watched the boy burn and turn black in the light of the moon. And here I stood, facing my accuser. Parish spat up what looked like tar, the black goo staining his crooked grin.

     “Why?” It was the only word that rang in my head, the only word that mattered.

     “Why anything?” Parish stumbled forward and gripped his hands around the bars. His stench was horrific and his skin even more raggedy up close. Any other circumstances would have seen him at a hospital. “Why why why? Oh, we needed him, yes we did.” He laughed and snapped his teeth, grinding them against the iron bars. “Baby Bernie Lutz was special. And you? No. Not even close. Just meat. Stinking, putrid, meat.” And then, in a fraction of a moment, his eyes had turned to ecstasy. He shivered, moaning. “Oh, but her. Oh, she was good, wasn’t she? She screamed and she cried. But we sank our teeth in, anyway, didn’t we? Oh, it was like candy. She was so special. So close. We’re close now we can taste it, just like her. Just like Naomi. Just like Bernie. Lights inside like Christmas, like so many wonderful things and oh, God, we remember how she scre-”

     Parish’s head snapped back even as the sound screeched its way into my ears and shook everything. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut, Parish crumpled to the floor with a hole in his head and a grin on his face. The black goo drizzled down his chin while a stream of blood ran down his forehead. Constable Matthews stood there, smoke trailing from the barrel of her gun and a tear trailing down her cheek. She looked so small in that moment. So very, very small.

     “Ma’am,” I said, taking a step back and remembering the cuffs that bound me. “Maybe you should put that away.”

     But she wouldn’t tear her eyes off Parish. The grin was still stretched across his face, mocking us even in death. The three of us (relatively speaking) were alone in the cell block, but already I heard voices shouting down the hall, feet shuffling and guns cocking.

       Parish started twitching.

     And then, like it was the easiest thing in the world, the dead man clambered to his feet and finished his sentence.

     “She screamed so loud, poor Naomi.” He giggled, like a girl caught in a lie so white. There was a hole in his head, but he didn’t seem to care very much at the moment. “You have been very, very bad, Jennifer. So very bad. And He won’t forgive you. No, he won’t. Not for hurting us. Not for killing one of his precious little children.” He coughed again, spitting up a mouthful of black, tarry goo.

     And then I was back on the Scarpe.

    My soul turned cold and heart screamed as I watched Bernie (no not Bernie this is Parish his name is Parish) turned to cinders before my eyes, watched the flames creep across the pale flesh, watched the blaze turn him black as a starless night. There was no creature to stand over him this time, no menace lurking in the dark. And in that flame I saw only a smile wreathed in the fires of hell.

     “Oh, how He loves us.” Parish’s voice was a whisper among whispers, his voice only one of so, so many. “Would you hear us sing? Would you hear us praise His name? Oh, how wonderful He is. How awesome is His might. Can you hear them singing? Can you hear our songs? Can you hear the sonnet of your doom riding upon the wind? By morning the world will be ours again. By morning, all will be made well. My master rises where even the great Cthulhu lay prone. One more. Just one more and the night will fall and the stars will sink into the sea and oh, how we’ll sing. Hear our hymn, John Swansea: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Fthaggua Ktynga wgah’nagl fhtan!” He choked out his words in a flurry of ash and blood. “Ia! Ia! Fthaggua fhtagn! Ia! Ia! Fthaggua fhtagn! IA! IA! FTHAGGUA FHTAGN!”