And neither was a soulless place on a wall of shame and torment.
Deciding that it was better to go with the program and maybe figure out a way to get out at a later date, Calvin took another swig of water and then walked through the door Ghastly had used.
On the other side he saw a setup similar to the one he had come from, only this time there was a woman on the gurney. He scanned the room. Hazel was in there somewhere. She would be made up to look like the woman on the gurney.
Spindle and Miss Butcher stood together next to the man who had done Calvin’s makeup. Next to the woman on the gurney stood Mr. Ghastly and his infamous knife. Calvin wondered how many lives were ended at the blade of that knife. The woman on the gurney was obstructed by Ghastly’s looming form.
Hazel, back to Calvin, turned around. Calvin’s world shattered.
“Ronnie?” he said.
All heads swiveled at the sound of Calvin’s voice.
Lance said, “You know her?”
“I…” Calvin stammered. He stared at Hazel. Her makeup was so perfect that he could hardly believe that it wasn’t Ronnie. He expected to smell her perfume, to hear her voice, only the voice that came from that face of perfection was not Ronnie’s at all.
“You made it,” said Hazel-Ronnie.
The trance Calvin had found himself in fractured when she spoke. It was the wrong voice for the face. He now understood what was going on.
He knew who was on the gurney.
Mr. Ghastly moved out of the way. Calvin’s eyes dropped to the woman lying on the gurney, a woman he knew intimately. Her eyes were wide and terror-stricken, following the people hovering over her. Her gaze followed that of Mr. Ghastly and landed on Calvin. She gasped.
“Calvin?”
So many things appeared to be registering in Ronnie’s mind. For the first time since the experience, Calvin wondered if it was Ronnie who found Celia’s body in his apartment. She was probably making all kinds of connections and who knew what these freaks told her about him. They might have dirtied him up real good.
The atmosphere in the room had changed considerably. Ronnie spoke, but Calvin couldn’t hear her words. Mr. Ghastly spoke and then Ronnie’s impossible voice came out of a second Ronnie. They weren’t arguing, but their voices murmured and mixed together like random chitter chatter in an elevator.
Calvin suddenly jerked upright, his head thrown back, eyes slammed shut. He clenched his teeth tight in a grimace and made a twisting sound of agony.
Mr. Ghastly’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked. Calvin heard this through the din that abruptly quieted. It sounded as if there was but the faintest ringing of fear in Ghastly’s booming bravado.
Calvin’s eyes closed but bounced back and forth behind the lids like REM sleep. In his mind he traveled the avenues of life the dead man had lived. The dead man’s soul had somehow become trapped within Calvin’s earthly husk. Calvin traveled years in mere seconds and soon he transcended far beyond one dead man’s life. He was in the past, living memories of a warrior, a soldier, what became of the men the soul breathed life into once upon a time. He saw images that enraged him—violence, blood, gunfire, war—yet within the flashes of memory, the last memories of each life the soul lived far more vibrant than the previous ones, he remembered the family that would be without a father and husband. He realized how selfish he had always been relishing in the final moments of people’s lives, glorifying the images of their stinking corpses as if they were nothing at all but something invented for his entertainment.
Mr. Ghastly raised the knife, a damn threatening knife, but not threatening to the memory of the soldier, and not to Calvin who had seen enough death to last him a lifetime.
Calvin’s eyes opened. They were cataracts, milked over like a dead man’s. The soul could now see Mr. Ghastly wielding the knife, his cautious approach like that of a skilled hunter. Behind him Hazel covered her open mouth. Her eyes popped wide. Spindle, Lance and the woman expressed a general sense of confusion, as if they had never before had to deal with the potential negative repercussions of what they were involved in.
“It’s not right,” said Miss Butcher. Her voice was faint, but Calvin heard her and he agreed. No, this wasn’t goddamned right at all. None of this was.
“There’s something wrong with his eyes,” said Mr. Spindle.
Within Calvin the soul became enraged for it read his thoughts and knew what had gone on in this place not once, but many times. It began to understand the deviant souls in its presence. Three of them were the proprietors of so much senseless violence and murder and worse, the kind of sickos who defiled and treated the dead as mere playthings for their amusement.
Humans are sacred to the soul, a vessel that allows them to release their power by creating life, though short-lived in the scheme of their existence. The soul is allowed to inhabit hundreds of lives, the memories of said lives living with them until they eventually fade away into the ethers of the universe.
Not all souls are good. Some have been tainted by years of negative past human experience. Sometimes those souls influence their husk with the taint, breeding a new, stronger human of hatred and violence.
To treat the dead the way these three had was a reprehensible use of a soul’s power. Even Calvin was at fault, not only due to his acts over the past few hours, but his lengthy obsession with death. Hazel and Lance weren’t saints either.
Within Calvin’s body the dead man’s soul touched base with Calvin’s soul. Though souls can no better communicate with one another than they can with the human whose very life they fuel, the invading soul stopped Calvin’s heart from beating, releasing his soul to the ethereal realm. Before Calvin’s body could fall to the ground, the soul imploded, which, in turn, created an explosion that disintegrated the body, shooting rays of intense, molten light that diced Mr. Ghastly and his counterparts before engulfing them in searing ethereal flames.
The extinguished soul left the burning remains of a little known group of macabre individuals who called themselves the Gorehounds. His blood now mingling with theirs, Calvin had indeed become one of them.
Epilogue
Ronnie’s head felt about as big as a watermelon and as sore as an exposed thatch of raw flesh. She tried to feel the contours of her throbbing head, but her arms were restrained. That’s when her eyes popped open.
And she remembered where she was.
The smell hit her, so heavy in the air that she could taste the butcher shop odor, the mingling of singed meats and melted hair, and Ronnie couldn’t hold back the rise in her gut. She turned her head to the side and vomited onto her left shoulder.
“Hello?” she said, voice cracking. “Is anybody there?”
But there was no answer.
As Ronnie’s eyes adjusted through the bloody haze, the thin veil of singed flesh, she could see clearly where the source of the meat locker odor came from. She realized, too, that she could taste it because her body was covered in a thick frosting of minced human like a slathering of homo sapien tartar.
A whimper escaped her throat and an indistinguishable chunk of gore dropped into her mouth. She spit it out and squirmed and tried to flail, but she couldn’t move. Ronnie screamed, but there was no one there to hear her pleas.
Blood dripped from the ceiling, ran down the walls, dragged by ornery chunks bent on reaching the floor.