“Your…what the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” Lawrence lowered his head, closed his eyes against the barrage of remembered mistakes that suddenly assaulted him. But they were mistakes, not sins against his fellow man—fights by his middle school flagpole that he should’ve ended before throwing that final, nose-crunching punch; lies to college bedmates when they pressed him for his phone number the morning after; an extra few lines on his resume here, a few too many intoxicated drives home there, but nothing, nothing, that justified this hell.
“I’m a good man, right, honey?”
“The best man.”
“I never hurt you, did I? Never hurt anyone on purpose when I could help it, right?”
“No, Lawrence, you never hurt me. You’re a good man. I don’t know what this is all about either. Maybe we hurt his family or something. Caused an accident we didn’t know about? A car wreck or something?”
“So he makes us eat dirt? I feel like I could throw up for anoth—” He looked at the vomit puddled on the ground beside him. The mess was thick, putrid, but free of soil. “Brooke, where’s the dirt? How could I not have thrown up the dirt?”
Tears cleared a path through the mud on her cheeks, and her soft sniffles watered his eyes. He touched his belly, imagined his stomach absorbing a mountain of mud, making it as one with himself as his blood and bone. God, I want a smoke.
“I’m gonna get you out of here. Look at me. I’m gonna get you out of this.”
Brooke answered with a scream. Lawrence followed her eyes. The hooded lunatic stood in the crude doorway. A saw dangled from his hands.
The mind bends, stretches, conforms to its surroundings with elastic resiliency and rabid stubbornness. It takes the mysteries of the universe, all the darkness and wonder, the wicked and the miraculous, the unknown and the unknowable, and molds itself into a state of either comprehension or ignorance. Only the purest experiences, the Grand Truths of the world, unhindered and unbound by any attempt at understanding, immune to man’s feeble pokes and prods, can transform the human mind into the babbling mass of jelly it is at its core. And as the towering demon strode into the room and lowered its saw to Brooke’s feet, Lawrence’s mind imploded.
He heard her sanity dissolving with her screams—gurgling, inhuman shrieks that warped his reality into a cacophony of drivel. He was aware of thrashing, screeching his own mad song. Brooke kicked, over and over like a crazed cyclist, but the thing grabbed one of her legs and jerked it straight, wrenching it into stillness. Lawrence could only see its cloaked back, but with an echoing crack its arm bent, descended, and began to pump back and forth in rhythm with the crunching of blade on bone. Blood soaked into the dirt at Brooke’s feet, pooling as the ground swallowed its fill. A toe dropped to the floor, plopped into the puddle of blood, followed by another, another, one more. Brooke’s shrieks faded into nothing, her eyes rolled back, her beautiful brown eyes, and as the creature raised its saw to her fingers, it spoke.
“Eventually everyone sins against my bride.”
As the first finger fell to the floor, Lawrence joined his wife in blackness.
HE CUT OFF HER fingers, he cut off her toes, and soon he’ll be coming to cut off my nose.
The words rolled through his conscience, high and singsong like a child jumping rope. They giggled and kicked and nudged him awake.
“You’re a rude man, Mr. Lawrence.”
Brooke. But no. She had never called him Mr. Lawrence, or rude for that matter. And her voice didn’t slice through his flesh like a rusty blade. He kept his eyes closed.
“I haven’t even touched you, yet you faint while I am speaking to you. And rest assured, I have no plans for your…nose.”
He opened his eyes, meant to tell the giant to go to Hell, leave them alone, fuck off, but his voice dribbled from his mouth as incoherent nonsense. The thing in the robes stood over him. Brooke’s leg, gray and bare and severed at the hip, hung from its hand.
The thing followed Lawrence’s gaze, then tossed the leg into the dirt. “Unnecessary,” it said. “Unaesthetic.”
Rage engulfed him, obliterated any desire for self-preservation. He saw only Brooke, his still and forever Brooke, and prayed for death’s reunion. He growled as he lunged; his fingers found his kidnapper’s neck and squeezed. It felt like squeezing lumber. The thing laughed, like gravel crunching underfoot.
“Let’s stop the charade, Mr. Lawrence. Do you remember your sins?”
“I didn’t do anything to you!” He abandoned the fruitless attempt at choking his enemy and, realizing that his feet were unchained, leapt towards its face and groped for the hood. If he was to die, he would see the face of his killer.
The thing grabbed Lawrence’s arm. It twisted its wrist, and Lawrence’s forearm snapped in the middle and burst through his skin like a baby elephant’s trunk. He wailed, clutched the break. His vision blurred as if challenging the reality of his arm’s new angles.
“Your attacks were becoming tiresome,” the thing said. It grabbed Lawrence by the hair and strode towards the door of the mud room. Lawrence’s healthy hand left the wreckage of the fracture and grabbed the beast’s wrist, trying to alleviate the agony in his scalp. Like a parent dragging an irate child in the midst of a tantrum, the giant took Lawrence from his prison and showed him a glimpse of Hell.
“This is the price for your sins,” it said, and raised Lawrence by the hair until his feet dangled from the ground. Lawrence thrashed in terror, the pain in his head forgotten before the scene in front of him.
They stood in a forest. The moon shone full and heavy, illuminating every ghastly detail. Trees dotted the landscape, and they screamed in silent agony. Faces blended into the bark, blemishes in each trunk describing mouths full of soundless shrieks, eyes of the blackest fear. Hundreds of trees, hundreds of bodies, still but alive, flesh made wood, begging yet reverent to their master as it carried Lawrence into their midst. A maple the size of a teenage girl wept sap as they passed. An oak with a linebacker’s girth glared with crooked knotholes and offered unheard prayers with a furry mouth. A cone of fungus hung from a conifer and fit its grimacing face like a beard. Lawrence went slack, dangled, his protruding radius bouncing painlessly off his captor’s robes, his fight lost among the human dead and the thriving flora.
“Your kind sins against my bride with never a moment to consider her love for you, never a thought for the grace of her soul.” The beast lowered Lawrence to the ground, still grasping a clawful of hair, and dragged him deeper into the human forest. “You set up camps to praise the gift of her vastness, to cheer your own courage for daring to sleep without electricity and shelter. Yet you continue to cut, and hack, and saw at her bones. Your garbage sinks into her flesh and poisons her veins. You rob her waters of their creations, and litter her air in toxins and smoke.”
The thing picked Lawrence up once more and turned him to within inches of its obscure face. An earthy odor emanated from the shadows, a green and blooming smell that nearly dragged a mirthless laugh from Lawrence. The wind groaned through the bodies as if dreading the moments to come.
“And you burn her limbs with smoldering embers.”
With a snap and a crack, its free arm broke, bent, and pulled back its hood. Lawrence cackled with lunatic terror.
Eyes as black and deep as wormholes glared, gauged, judged. Its flesh was cracked and rough, a mosaic of grays and browns and reds. Leaf-clad branches the size of fingers jutted from its cheeks, its chin, its brows. Speaking through a distorted fissure in its bark the width of a snake hole, it said, “Do you remember your embers, Mr. Lawrence?”