Awake in the Mausoleum

Edith had fallen asleep. Was she really resting, he wondered. Could she in her own mind? He envied her if she was really asleep, the way she looked, so peaceful.

“You poor thing.”

He listened. The silence was reassuring. He stared at his hands. The blood crusted on his skin was now like orange rust. This was his baby’s blood. Katie’s blood. They were both gone. That would never change. Only here in this horrible place could they exist, and even then, it was tainted. It would be a beautiful thing if it was used for good. It started off that way, he recalled, with his moment in bed with Katie. He made love to Susan. He retaliated against his father who belittled his mother. He showed Janna and her friends in the parking lot what revenge was all about. He visited Alice, though she was still viable to him in real life. She could be reached again if he could escape his mind.

He could start fresh.

Craig was then attacked by a pain of self-loathing so strong he forced every thought from his mind to escape the reality of his regrets.

Edith’s talk of fighting back interested him more. He tried to focus on Katie and home. He pictured taking a warm bath with her, perhaps a bottle of White Zinfandel to drink as they soaked. The idea was so pleasurable, but it wasn’t possible. He held his eyes shut and thought hard. He strained so much he coughed and forced himself to breathe normally again. Maybe Edith did something else to accomplish the feat. Again, he tried. A sharp stab shot throughout his skull as he held his breath, focused, strained, clenched his fists, imagined it, and he still came up empty.

“Damn it.”

He decided to let Edith sleep longer. She deserved a respite from this nightmare. He spent his time eyeing the inscriptions on the markers, names, and dates, and final commiserations. It messed with his mind to spend so long in a place of mourning.

Craig suddenly laughed, escaping the sense of impending doom with levity. I guess I’m not missing work since I’m unemployed. I don’t have to call in sick either.

Someone would look for him soon. One person being his mother. She would call after his doctor’s visit and ask how it went. Surely, she’d left a message and was concerned when he didn’t call back. She was taking a sudden interest in his life after the court hearing, after Willis’s assault. And his rent was due in two days. Carl Kenning would batter down his door for those five hundred dollars. He didn’t attend his appointment with Dr. Richard Herbert either. The police would be dragged into it, and thank God, he thought, they would get to the bottom of his disappearance.

But how would they find him? He had no clue as to where he’d been kidnapped, so how would they? He had no real concept of where in the city he could be. The machine required electricity, so he couldn’t be in the woods—or could he? There were abandoned buildings downtown, namely the burnt-out warehouses and the Carlton Hotel that went out of business. The property was two-years’ condemned and unused. Or Dr. Krone could own private property under a false name. All of it was speculation. But why would Dr. Krone bury his father in someone else’s grave? That would indicate the man was being sought, and if that was true, so was Dr. Krone. The victims were from the sanitarium. The Krones were murderers. But being in hiding and on the run, how could they invent such a bizarre machine?

Edith was still asleep. The sleeping-child expression made him jealous. He needed rest. No, I can’t. It’s not safe for both of us to let our guards down.

He rested his head against the wall, the cold marble soothing. He looked for the pack of cigarettes, but they had vanished.

They must’ve gone poof when she conked out.

Were the cigarettes they smoked a figment of their imagination? He could tear apart his brain to discover the answer, and he’d still be confused.

Slow steps sounded from outside, faded and from afar.

Edith shot up from her sleep, triggered awake. “Uh!—where is he?”

“It’s okay, he’s still outside.”

“Final warning, come out and visit with me, or you’ll be sorry.”

They huddled close together, depending on each other for comfort, and he was surprised and relieved when Edith hugged him. “Forgive me for earlier. I didn’t mean to freak out at you. He really scares me.”

“Ditto.”

“I guess I have to draw you out then. But first, let’s have some fun.”

Nothing happened. Five minutes passed, and his promises weren’t delivered.

“He’s full of shit,” Edith muttered, throwing the corridor a middle finger. “He won’t come in.”

Uproarious laughter, a mad scientist’s cackling, pierced the halls. “Now it’s time!”

The bending of rails, the crack of marble, the splitting of concrete, the shifting of dust, a crunching noise, breaking wood, the twisting and removal of screws reverberated from all sides of them. The bronze markers rattled, shifting against concrete.

“What is he doing?” Edith unleashed the question in a shout. “You’re not supposed to come in here. You’re not supposed to come in here!”

“He’s playing with us,” Craig said, raising his voice above the strange cacophony. “If you have a magic trick up your sleeve to make yourself go somewhere else, now’s the time to do it.”

“And what about you?”

“I’ll stand my ground.”

“Big man,” she scoffed. “I wish you the best with that.”

The grave markers dropped onto the floor with a broong sound. Steel caskets fired out of their slots as if spring ejected, dozens at once. Edith clung to him, her nails digging into his body.

Coffins littered the ground, the wood splintering down their length from the impact, dust rising into a brown smog, causing them to choke, and cough, and be blind.

Edith called out between fits of choking, “Do you see him coming?”

He squinted and covered his eyes with his hands. “I don’t know. It hurts to look.”

He stepped around the coffins, haphazardly tripping over them, struggling to form an escape route. Both of them going rigid, the columns of lights above them burnt out in a collective blackout, explosions of the fixtures repeating about the entirety of the mausoleum. Light by light, the way went dark. Crashes, the smashing and rendering of wood, the muffled punch and splinter of grain, their time to escape was now. A stench followed the ruckus—embalming fluid, putrefying organs, gangrene flesh, the wet leather smell of death, and the odd scent of mildew and coffin padding. Sheets and planks of wood and pieces rattled against the floor. The labored breathing surrounding them was a collective song—coughs from collapsed windpipes, whistles from throats riddled with holes, and pained moans issued with eerie acoustics.

Craig couldn’t see anything except their profiles rise from their broken coffins. Then he heard the plop of feet against the floor, the click of exposed metatarsals and fancy shoes increasing in numbers.

He’s brought the dead back to life.

Jesus Christ.

“What do we do now?” he cried out when he lost his grip on Edith’s arm. She slipped free from his protective hold. “Where are you? Goddamn it, where are you?”

An arc of blue-and-white flames climbed upwards and spread into the shape of a corpse. The flesh was pure black, the skeleton caramelized beneath. The clothing had fossilized into the flesh. The rest of the hallway was lit up by the light of the burning corpse. Easily a hundred corpses stood in place, clogging up any avenue of escape.

They were trapped.

Craig grabbed Edith, finally spotting her, and they backed into the wall. Edith gasped, “I imagined a lighter in my hand, and I lit one on fire.”

They faced the horde, and the horde acted accordingly. Arms outstretched—the very act tearing sinew, and muscle, and breaking bone—and the ripe malodorous death stench corroded the air. Drips pounded the floor. Jellies splashed. Organs slithered from their cavities or hung in place. Bodies whose legs failed, the corpses crawled on the floor, their teeth clacking, their flesh slipping, and breaking, and contorting to express their eagerness to attack them.

Edith belted out a war cry, her voice cracking under the stress, “Stay the hell away from us!”

The corpse stood in place, burning. It couldn’t understand what was happening to its body, so it stood confused and immobilized. Craig urged her to think of a plan, anything to survive. “We don’t have much time. You have to think of something.”

Edith squeezed her eyes, grunted, and thought so hard a stream of blood flowed out her nose. She couldn’t pull it off. She was stunned, shaking off the pain in her head. Edith touched the blood that crossed her lips in abhorrence. “This is it. My tricks are used up.”

Craig breathed in and thought hard. He suddenly calmed down. Focused. A hand of bone clutched his collar. Craig choked on what smelled like sunbaked raw meat. Blood stained and seeped through his shirt, fetid juices touching his skin. He thought harder. Focused again. Pictured it in his hands. Imagined every detail. Two more hands, this time newer dead flesh, choked him. Tighter still, he couldn’t breathe. Hands clutched his legs. Then his ankles. His right hand. One tore the buttons from his shirt one by one. Plick, plick, plick.

Edith’s next scream was muffled by a smothering hand, “Naw—gaack!”

Craig’s hair was pulled.

He focused even harder.

Teeth clamped on his shoulder and bit in.

And then it happened.

His father’s Browning pump-action shotgun materialized in his hands. He swung the stock into the dead man’s jaw, breaking the porcelain-like bone into many shards.

“Help me, Craig!”

A group was dragging Edith into one of the wall slots. She kicked and thrashed, but she was viciously outnumbered. She’d been clawed and chewed up, her flesh glazed in red, the muscle tissue beneath raw and gleaming against the firelight. The meat of her arms was concave hollows in the shape of bites. White bone protruded where her wrists connected to the hands. Her ear-grinding fits and screeches faded, and she was gone.

“Let her go!”

Ba-boom!

Two of the corpses split in half, the bullets tearing through their soft, dead flesh, their torsos and legs landing in separate piles. He turned to the left, sizing up the threat, and pulled the trigger. Ba-boom! Ba-boom!

This is impossible.

He cleared a short path, shoving and kicking to where Edith had been taken, but he was thrown backwards, seized by the shoulders and legs, and brought down. He crashed against the marble. Craig fired upwards and regretted it. Blood and flesh splattered him in loads of macabre flotsam and jetsam, their fluids ice cold.

Craig refused to allow the dead to overtake him. Crawling to his feet, battering through them, he shoved himself through them to another hall. Three more shots, his ears ringing—the actual firing of a gun was three times louder than what one heard in movies—Craig arrived at a new hall. His clothes were in shreds, the skin beneath clawed and parted in sections. The pain kept his instincts finely tuned. He fired randomly and three heads went up filled to the brim with loose gray matter. Craig accidentally planted a foot into the stomach cavity of a woman in a purple dress, and it sank ankle-deep inside her belly. He tipped forward but didn’t fall. He was unable to free his foot, somehow losing his weapon. The gun was kicked down the hall, useless to him, as more of the dead advanced closer to him.

Craig kicked upwards with all his force, and the foot was driven up into the corpse woman’s sternum, and ripped through the skin and breaking marrow-less bones, he uprooted his foot. He vaulted into the crowd. He used his shoulder as a battering ram. His elbow cracked faces, mere hollow bones breaking up into pottery pieces. His fists were soaked in black blood after punching a mandible loose with a solid blow. A nose was shattered and revealed maggots embedded in the sinus cavity.

The line wouldn’t end. He couldn’t fight them all. The hundreds had changed into thousands and gaining new numbers.

But that’s impossible. There weren’t that many coffins!

He raised his voice above the din of the dead to demand, “Dr. Krone, what do you want from me? What’s the point of this fucked-up shit?”

The doorway out of the mausoleum was wide open. The dead filed in from the cemetery for miles out, their outlines dominating the horizon. The sky was thick with the lingering cloud of human decay, the night sky being impossibly black. There was no escape. Edith was lucky to be finished off so soon.

Three lunged on top of him from behind. Tackled, he was pinned to the floor by new hands. A blackened hand covered his mouth. The taste of soil and blood sullied his tongue. He couldn’t breathe. So much rotten flesh surrounded and consumed him. His shirt was torn from his body in all directions, and next, it would be his flesh. Teeth clicked to render strips of flesh, small in bites, but many were feeding at once. Blood spilled from fresh wounds. He was paralyzed. He’d be a pile of bones soon enough. The mastication of a city pounded throughout the corridor.

Just when he thought he understood something about Dr. Krone’s work, everything changed. There was no way to hide like Edith had believed. No code existed to break the lock of his mind. Only death and suffering existed here, and his torment was overdue.

He closed his eyes in a last-ditch effort, and Craig imagined he was somewhere else.