Mr. Spindle spoke this time, the pitch of his voice so high in comparison to Ghastly that he sounded like he’d taken a hit of helium. “It’s impossible to describe. You fool the soul into thinking you are its cell. It invades your body and you see what it sees. You see the final thoughts of a dead man as well as a lifetime of experience in a matter of moments like random flashes of memory. Fool the soul long enough and you can see things human eyes were never meant to see.”
“You won’t be disappointed,” said the woman.
Ghastly grabbed the latex suit. “Here, I have had one of the Gorehounds create a whole body suit replica of this man from head to toe. It’s absolutely perfect. His soul will have no trouble entering your body once it leaves his. If you’ll allow, I’ll put it on you. This will take an hour or so, but it’s well worth it. When you’re finished with the experience, you will have a new appreciation for life and death, and you will be a Gorehound.”
Calvin drew in a deep breath. He looked to the sacrificial lamb, bound much like the man in Mr. Ghastly’s story. The eyes were laden with fear and dread reminiscent of Dead Danny after he realized Hazel had tricked him.
“Do I have to… kill him?” asked Calvin.
“Only if you want to,” said Mr. Ghastly.
Calvin nodded, eyes never breaking from the deadpan stare he held with the man on the gurney. “Okay, let’s do this.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Calvin elected not to do the killing. He was uncomfortable enough just being there in the presence of what would become another senseless murder, not to mention layered with pounds of latex applications, makeup and spirit gum. Perhaps if Hazel was there he would have thought twice about killing the man himself.
Where was Hazel? Had she already gone through the tests? He figured she would pretty much pass with flying colors. The rotten corpse test might be challenging, but he wouldn’t put it past Hazel to enjoy something that depraved. She was certainly more mentally equipped for this, or perhaps mentally disturbed.
It was around two in the morning when Calvin was ready to ride the dead, and he really wasn’t ready at all. He had been pushed into it, afraid that were he to decline their invitation he would find himself on the other end of the blade. It would be easy for any one of them to kill him and ride his soul, if what they told him about riding souls was in fact true. They’d probably do something worse. They’d probably lock him into some kind of perpetual state of dying and ride his soul over and over like a roller coaster.
As Calvin stepped up to the gurney, the man lying there became agitated. His eyes grew in his sweaty face as he looked upon himself standing over him. The replica was flawless. The man could very well have been looking into a mirror or at an identical twin.
Mr. Ghastly saddled up beside Calvin, nine-inch blade in hand. His face was a grimace of pure delight causing him to look like a waxen replica of an undisturbed corpse. At that point Calvin wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that Ghastly was indeed a reanimated corpse.
“Don’t move, Calvin,” said Mr. Ghastly. “Just stare into his eyes as he dies. The soul will find you. You won’t be able to see it, so don’t look for it. You will feel it when it enters. Ride it. Enjoy the fruits of this man’s death. It will be the most intense and enigmatic experience you will ever have in your life.”
Calvin wanted to protest, and yet he couldn’t help but stare into the man’s eyes. There was something there, recognition, for the man was looking into eyes covered in contacts to look just as his own, embedded in a face of latex and makeup to look like his doppelganger. Calvin considered calling the whole thing off and saving this man’s life in a last minute revelation that he was disgusted with the Gorehounds and wanted nothing to do with them, but that particular emotion mingled with the fear that they would torture him into eternity. The Wall of Suicide flashed in Calvin’s mind.
He would suffer one way or the other.
Mr. Ghastly jabbed the knife into the man’s gut, pulling it upward, disemboweling him.
Calvin flinched. He wanted to turn away, but felt connected with the man in some way. He stared into the shifting, horrified eyes, tears streaming with sweat until the man passed out of consciousness.
Mr. Ghastly took several steps backward to stand in line with Spindle and the woman. They all wore grins with eyes like memories, as if desperately wishing they could relive that very first time.
Calvin felt the warmth of the man’s guts piled at his feet and soaking into the cuffs of his pants. If he looked down he would surely puke, and perhaps that would be a good thing. Perhaps if he…
Yes! The soul hadn’t found him yet, and perhaps it couldn’t if he turned and fled. What could they do to him? At this point death would be a small blessing.
What about eternal suffering? What about the Wall of Suicide?
Calvin turned. The look of gleeful faces drawn into confusion was priceless. They knew something was wrong. Him daring to refuse to ride the dead was more shocking to them than the most heinous acts of murderous depravity.
“I can’t—” said Calvin before his eyes rolled into the back of his head as something ethereal entered his body.
He saw images like a manic set of slides passing him by at a rate that hardly allowed him to grasp any one picture. Certain faces appeared over and over again: A woman, two children—a family.
There was something like pain as the soul began to realize that it was indeed in the wrong body, however Calvin was grasping onto the images projected into his mind, scanning the faces of a dead man’s life, a dead man’s family. Images of a mundane workplace, fishing at the bay, birthday parties, driving in rush hour traffic, laughing, crying, showering. They were the mentally photographed images of everyday life. Not the important memories, not the things that mattered, but the mundane, the daily routines that were perhaps more etched in a dying mind than those amazing moments in life like wedding proposals, award ceremonies, childbirth, great achievements, or buying a house.
Sensations flowed through Calvin, causing his body to melt. He fell to his knees as the sensations began to blot out his vision. He began to see the ethereal realms where the soul needed to escape to, yet he held onto the soul’s power, its memories of a dead man.
Ghastly said that you could hold on and ride the soul to see things that were never meant to be seen. Calvin wasn’t sure he wanted to see those things, but the idea of letting go frightened him. He couldn’t put the soul back into the dead man’s body, and even if he could the brain will have begun to die. The man would be left in a vegetative state.
And still Calvin didn’t want to let go. He crouched with his hands pressed tight on the sides of his head, as if that would help hold the man’s soul inside. The foreign memories faded and then his mind went black. Frighteningly black. For a terrifying moment he thought he had died and that this was what the end looked like. Just a great big nothing. A vast, cold void.
Calvin came to with Spindle hovering over him. The lanky stickman wore a stupid grin that accentuated his big white teeth. If ever there was a sinister grin, this man owned it.
“That was a hell of a ride,” Spindle said.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Ronnie had been listening in terror to the commotion on the other side of the partition. She had no idea what was going on, but she could make out several voices she wasn’t familiar with. Even stranger and perhaps more alarming was Lance feverishly applying makeup to a woman across the room from her. He’d told Ronnie to keep quiet and she had obliged him. Whatever was going on, this is what he had brought her and Vince here for, and she pretty much figured Vince was dead. People didn’t scream the way he did unless they were enduring momentous amounts of pain. When screams like those he was crying suddenly stopped… that was a bad sign.