NightWhere

Chapter Fifty-One

Field of Flesh

The door closed and Mark was alone in NightWhere. All hints of the old wooden barn vanished with the closing of the door…he stood in a cool, dark room that seemed old, but in a classical crypt way, not of the farm. The floor was stone, not wood, and on the far end he could see the orange flicker of flame from a wall sconce. He walked towards the light, his steps echoing faintly.

The room seemed extraordinarily quiet. But as he walked across its length he began to hear something in the distance. It was almost like the moan of the wind through a faraway attic, or the whisper of a conversation behind closed doors. Mark guessed it was the sound of NightWhere, somewhere ahead beyond the walls.

But as he reached the wall the sconce was on and followed it a few yards, it abruptly turned. He followed it to the left and saw more sconces guttering with low flames. He stood in a small hallway that opened to a vast room. There were trees inside, he thought, or corn stalks. Something repetitive and vertical. He could just make out rows and rows of something, reaching up from the floor and disappearing into shadow.

He stepped into the room and the susurration grew. Then he understood where it came from. The stalks stretched out ahead of him like a cornfield-only, the field wasn’t growing corn.

It grew bodies. He would have said corpses, from the looks of most of them. They were all stripped and standing. He couldn’t see what held them upright, but he assumed they were all tied to posts or something. Many were missing limbs, and all visibly bled from numerous gashes and cuts. Their skin was greyish and drawn, as if they’d been dead and hanging for days. Mark stared at one man whose empty eye socket cried crimson. He was sure from the wound and the man’s limp limbs that the man was a corpse. But then, the head tilted slightly, moving to stare with its one good eye at Mark. The lips opened slowly and whispered just one word:

“Run.”

Mark instinctively looked behind him at the warning, but there was nothing there but darkness.

The whispers grew as he stood there. He heard other faint warnings like “Run” and “Go” but also the occasional plea, “Help me, please,” or worse, “Kill me.”

Mark stared and the bodies stretched to his left and right for as far as his eyes could see. It was truly a field of flesh.

“Are you the harvest or the harvester?” a voice growled from his left.

“I’m only passing through,” Mark answered. The whispers suddenly turned to laughter.

“Nobody passes through,” a woman in the front row said. Her head hung at a broken angle, and blood streamed from a long gash in her belly. Mark saw the glisten of intestine through the gash and forced himself to look away.

“I’m going to NightWhere,” he said. “I’ve been there before.”

“You’re in NightWhere,” someone said with a laugh that ended in a scream of sudden pain.

“The real NightWhere,” another voice continued. “This is the field that feeds the evil. We bleed for you.”

Mark noticed then that there were gutters in the stone floor on either side of each row of bodies. He stepped closer. The troughs were about six inches deep and maybe three inches wide. At the front of the human garden, he could see the grey of the stone at the bottom of the gutters. But by the third body down the line, the bottom stone was obscured by the dark flow of crimson that rained down the chests and thighs and feet of each ravaged body. From some, the flow was thick, especially from those missing whole limbs, but lacking any tourniquets or bandages to staunch the blood.

From others who simply were cut, the blood flowed slower…but all contributed some flow of pain to the drains that leached their lives away. Mark guessed that this was the reservoir that fed the steady stream of crimson down the walls in The Red.

“We bleed for you,” several of the bodies echoed. The whisper of that phrase spread across the Field of Flesh like a slow wind, and soon Mark could hear hundreds of echoes.

“Not for me,” he said. “I don’t want your blood.”

“Then you will join us,” an old woman in the second row said. She had raw circles of meat where her breasts had once been, and her belly had been flayed open. The skin hung in wrinkled flaps and clung wetly to her thighs.

Mark shook his head and decided to waste no more time. He stepped forward, walking with tentative strides between the rows of bodies. He was careful not to step in the troughs, but he couldn’t help but walk through the crimson on the path. It was covered in blood that was slowly, steadily draining across it into the gutters. The whispers grew in volume as he passed-voices calling out in laughter and pain alike, “We bleed for you.”

Hands grasped at him as he passed, but most seemed to barely have the strength to move, and he brushed them off easily.

Mark began counting the rows, but after he had reached fifty-seven and still couldn’t see the end, he gave up. There were thousands of people in this room; now that he was in the middle of the field, he couldn’t see anything but bloody, staked-up bodies in every direction. Most of them didn’t move as he passed. Those were the best ones. It was the ones who had intestines trailing out of their midsections, or who had eyeballs hanging from strings of gore across their cheeks, that really freaked him out when they moved slightly and reached for him.

The pleas of “kill me” grew more frequent as he walked.

Soon the fear that he would never reach the other side began to gnaw at him. He’d been walking for ten minutes, and still he saw no end to the path. The rows seemed to stretch on forever as the bloodied fingers grasped at his shirt, staining his clothes with their pain as he passed.

Mark walked faster, willing down the panic that was beginning to grow in his gut. He was trapped here…lost in a field of death. Or near death.

The heavy stench of iron hung strong in the air; he could taste it on his tongue. It reminded him of the heavy, palpable air of the Everglades. It was like he was walking through the swamp of death.

Mark ran.

Laughter rang out behind him and rippled through the bodies like a breeze. “You can run…” one ghastly woman cackled, reaching out a hand with no fingers to brush him as he passed.

“But you can’t hide,” a man with no lips finished.

Mark didn’t slow down. Until he fell down. His foot hit a heavy slick of blood, and he tried to catch his balance, but instead he overcorrected and pitched forward, landing with his face inches above the canal of dark blood flowing away from the Field of Flesh. The smell was ripe-rich and thick and metallic, but also somehow sweet-to the edge of rot. Mark pushed away from the wet, slick stones and stifled the urge to gag. His arms were wet, and he tried to wipe them off on his jeans before moving forward again, this time at a slower but still-urgent pace.

The whispers now quieted, and as he looked around, he realized that the bodies here were thinner. Paler. Closer to death?

Their skin all shared a similar parchment-like texture; in some, he could literally see the emaciated muscles beneath. These must be the oldest ones, he surmised. Many of them were missing lips and eyelids; their faces looked like clotted clay over bones, their eyes rheumy, blue pools of jelly. Many of the women still had full, prominent breasts-the badge of youth,-yet their lined, faded faces suggested an age difficult to mesh with the fading youth of their bodies.

He stopped at one woman who lacked both an arm and a leg; blood flowed in a steady trickle from her stumps, but her stomach, though almost translucent, still had the form of a twenty-year-old. The nipples of her breasts protruded in an apparent constant state of excitement. Her cheeks were high, and her lips tight; but the hair had fallen from her eyelids and lashes. Her eyes had the milky sheen of the blind.

“How long have you been here?” Mark asked.

She was slow to speak, lips moving in obvious pain. “How old is the earth?” she answered in a voice like sand.

Her eyes moved to stare in his direction, but he could tell she did not see him. “There is no beginning and no end. Only this moment forever.”

“How did you get here?” Mark asked, his voice almost a whisper.

“The same as you,” she said. Her voice barely whispered above the faint whispers from elsewhere in the field. “I accepted the invitation.”

“But when…” he began to ask, but she cut him off.

“You have very little time,” she said. “Use what you have before you are planted here with us.”

Mark nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

The girl laughed, her voice growing stronger. “You would be,” she hissed, “If I still had my arm…”

Her eyes seemed to focus finally then, and Mark saw a hunger that decades, maybe centuries, of racking pain had never stilled.

Behind him, a flurry of voices suddenly let out a series of cries and screams. Mark turned and saw a disturbance in the field, many rows back. The bodies looked as if they were swaying in a heavy wind.

“Are you the harvester or the harvest?” a shrill voice called from his left.

Mark had a sudden chill in his stomach, as he considered the prospect of joining the field.

He began to run once more, and after a few more rows of faded flesh, he turned to look behind him. The screams and cries from the field were closer now. Just a few rows away. He could see something moving now in the field. Something black.

A Watcher?

Mark swore and turned to run down the path as fast as he could. From the sounds behind him, the Watcher was closing in.

Finally he saw the end. The pale corpse-like bodies gave way to a darkness. He couldn’t tell what that darkness really was, but Mark breathed a sigh of relief for it. He wasn’t lost. The end was in sight. Really…it was the beginning. Somewhere in that black, the rest of NightWhere lay.

And Rae.

Somewhere ahead, was his wife.

He broke through the last row of bodies and stopped, doubled over, trying to catch his breath. Behind him, the bodies shivered and moved. Whispers turned to cries. A black figure moved just a couple rows inside the field, coming towards him.

Mark turned back to look ahead. The stone path stretched out in front of him for several yards, interrupted in the middle by a dark canal. Mark took a deep breath and straightened up. Then he sprinted forward to stare down into the channel. He could see the small gutters all along the path that exited the field and emptied into the channel.

He stared down into the shadow and could see a faint but clear motion below. He could see the runoff from the gutter that had cut through the rows of bodies he’d just exited, streaming red and thick down the wall of the large channel. It splashed as it joined the moving tide below.

A moat of human blood.

It was a good six feet wide. He couldn’t tell how deep.

Behind him the Watcher cleared the field.

Mark swallowed hard. It was no ordinary Watcher. This one wore a black hood and carried a long scythe.

It was the Grim Reaper come to life.

Mark stepped back and then took a quick running leap across the moat. When he landed, he turned and looked back at the Field of Flesh. The Reaper stood there on the edge of the moat, but did not follow. The arms and legs of some of the bodies behind him moved and shifted, and a faint sound still whispered from them, though Mark could no longer make out any distinct words. It was truly like a farmer’s field, shifting and moving in the breeze. If the breeze was the fetid, torturous breath of hell. And the harvester was the Grim Reaper.

Mark kept his eyes on the black figure and backed away from the moat. He moved slowly towards the dark wall ahead, searching for an exit. Or perhaps…an entrance.

There was an alcove to his left, and Mark walked towards it. Set two feet within its arched top was the wood of a door. He put his hand on an oval iron ring in the center. He held it there for a minute, afraid to pull. What was on the other side? Would the Watchers leap out and capture him instantly?

The only way to find out was to open the door.

He did. It creaked towards him with a horrible sound. Mark was sure the noise had given him away, but the hallway ahead remained empty. He could see the faint glow of crimson reflecting from the surface of the walls, thanks to the tongues of flame that guttered from wall sconces set every few yards amid the red stone. It glistened and moved-a waterfall of blood that kept the hallway moist and humid. It was like a rain forest, only instead of the air being ripe with life, it was cloying and thick with the irrigation of death.

Mark knew this hall. It was the passageway that led to the various rooms of torture and defilement that made up The Red.

He took one last look back, and the Reaper had disappeared. The field of bodies looked still. Mark didn’t want to hang around to find out where the harvester had gone. He stepped through the doorway and pulled it tight behind him. He stood there a moment, catching his breath. Then he headed to the right, unsure of where exactly he was in the labyrinth of NightWhere. But when he reached the end of the hall after a couple of turns, he knew right where he was.

He’d found the antechamber of The Red, which received visitors from the Blue Room. Its walls were aglow with the light of scores of candles, all set in small arched alcoves in the walls.

He pushed one of the heavy oaken entry doors open slightly and peered into the crowd of bacchanalian fornicators beyond. He saw men in leather chaps and women dressed only in silver chains dancing to the heavy somnolent strains of the live band. He didn’t recognize the song, but it sounded like a dirge, despite the drums and electric guitars. The dance floor shifted and swayed to the music, while a handful of the NightWhere denizens took a time-out at Sin-D’s bar. Beyond them all, he saw the bartendress mixing drinks and laughing. She wore next to nothing; he could see the X of black tape covering the free-hanging globe of one breast. He thought he recognized the thick shoulders of Kendrick on the far end, tilting back a glass on his usual stool.

Already there was a line at the front door of people exiting the club. The night was almost over. At least for those who thought of NightWhere as a club.

For those who knew that it was more than that…the darkness never ended.

Mark pulled the door shut.

Rae was not out there. That was the room of dabblers and their keepers. Rae was serious. More than serious.

He feared she was already damned.

Mark turned and headed back the way he had come.

Two men waited for him in the hallway, smiling.

This was not going to be easy.

They were large men. Both. One looked to be Asian, and the other looked as redneck as any boy in a middle-of-Indiana bar on a Tuesday night.

Either way, Mark knew he was in trouble.

“You do not have an invitation,” the Asian man said. He was bare-chested and wore a white sarong around his middle. In his hands, he held a flogger tipped in steel hooks.

“I don’t want to be invited,” Mark said. “I just want to take my wife home.”

The Caucasian man-dressed simply in a pair of grey shorts-laughed. “Nobody comes or leaves here without permission,” he said.

He stepped forward and Mark stepped back. This didn’t look like things were going to go well.

The Asian man advanced with his flogger and cracked it once in the air. Mark ducked back, narrowly missing the metal tips.

At the same time, the white man grinned and pulled a steel pole out of a small pocket in his shorts.

He lifted it to hammer down on Mark’s head.

Mark was not inclined to accept the steel and leapt backwards again.

He also wasn’t inclined to keep stepping backwards.

“Wait,” he said.

The Asian man grinned. His teeth were shockingly white against the brown of his skin. “There is no stopping,” he said. “Only movement towards the goal.”

“And the goal is…” Mark asked.

“Pain.”

Mark knew there was no dodging this. He nodded, as if acknowledging his understanding of the situation, but at the same time, he was slipping his fingers in the back pocket of his jeans.

“I can only answer that with this,” Mark said.

He pulled the gun from his pants, aimed at the Asian man’s chest, and fired. A bloom of red appeared as the man fell backwards, away from the gun. But Mark didn’t wait to watch. He turned the gun on the other man who was already in motion. He pulled the trigger again and a spray of warm crimson splattered across his face as the bullet stabbed through the man’s gut and his face registered the pain.

His face said…damn…but before he could actually utter a word he had fallen to the ground.

Mark began to step around the two, but hesitated, as he looked at their bodies on the floor.

He’d killed them. Two men. He had shot them and stolen their lives. They lay there on the floor of the stone hallway, blood streaming from their chests to the floor. And as he watched, that blood seemed to be pulled away from the corpses…the streams curved and altered to move towards the wall and its cascade of crimson. In seconds, their blood was leaching from their bodies in a straight stream to the steady, bloody waterfall on either side of the corridor.

Mark shook his head. It was all too much.

He looked at the Asian man, whose sarong had loosened as he had fallen to the ground. His genitals were now exposed.

Mark could see clearly that he was only half a man.

Someone had cut his balls off.

A eunuch.

Mark stepped forward and pulled on the shorts of the heavyset white man until they slipped halfway down his thighs.

Damn.

He, too, had been unmanned. Mark felt worse, somehow, for killing them.

But he also knew that he needed to move. Mark shrugged and stepped past the half men towards the hallway that had held so much pain for him. He was moving into the thick of The Red.

The gloomy red hall wound around, past the torture rooms, and then at last he reached the end.

The room that he’d escaped from.

The entrance to The Black.