Chapter 31

Natalie was more comfortable in the sedan than on the mud-caked, steel-floor of the van and for that she was grateful. She glanced at the dashboard clock. If it was accurate, the time was 10:32 p.m. It had been just over an hour since they had passed through Raymond, Washington, and more than two and a half since they crossed the river on the long bridge.

After Tony stole the sedan, he had forced Rudy at gunpoint to transfer everything including Hank to the new car. He tied Rudy’s hands to the frame under the front of the passenger seat so tight, Rudy sat hunched over with his hands stretched to the floor between his feet. From where Natalie sat behind him, she could not see for sure but, from the complaints Rudy voiced at the time, it seemed an unnecessarily uncomfortable position. Tony seemed oblivious to everyone else’s pain. He continued to drive and lit one cigarette off the end of the last.

Where there had been times of chatter between Rudy and Tony throughout the day—mostly Rudy trying to get Tony to let him drive or making casual, mostly one-sided, conversation—the silence that ruled the car since the sun set outside of Lincoln City had become more sinister and oppressive. It was as tangible as the glass in the door next to her. Even though she could see right through it, she didn’t have to put her fingers on it to prove it was there.

She had asked Tony just after she helped the older couple escape in their Jeep, “What do you want from me?” He avoided the question with a brusque “… shut the hell up and get back in the van.” With plenty of time to think, she had begun to believe her abduction was more than just Tony’s psychosis. He was on a rampage for certain, two, if not three, people had died as a direct result of her captivity. Was it her confinement that got the people killed or was Tony acting without conscience or regret for another reason?

From her seat behind Rudy, she turned her eyes up from Hank and found the rearview mirror. Tony drew on his smoke. In the mirror, his eyes were illumined. She felt them search for her in the darkness of the backseat. They looked just as cold and frozen as the eyes she met in the studio parking lot. Now, there was something else. In the motel room, as they were about to run out the door, he had looked away from her as if something needed to be hidden. Now he didn’t flinch and in the seconds their eyes engaged, he showed her a resolve she hadn’t seen before; as if in the silent darkness of the sedan, he had come to a decision. What determination he had arrived at she could only guess but, with the way things had gone since the screen test, it couldn’t be good for her.

This time she broke the stare and looked back into the face of the still figure in her lap. In the lights of a passing vehicle, she saw the glimmer of Hank’s eyes again.

*

Like a dreamless sleep, over the last day, Hank had no connection with the life ebbing from him one heartbeat at a time. No day nor night, no sunrise nor sunset, no past nor present, and the future a concept yet unborn. Comatose, the lost day started like the last breath before anesthesia rips all thought away and ended at the same moment—no sense of time’s ceaseless movement. No reality—no dark nor light, no sound nor sight, no scent nor touch—just nothing. Until there was something most terrifying.

Hank felt his body pummel through a density like that of the earth’s crust. Whether pushed or pulled, a power greater than he drove him like a relentless missile deeper in his descent and bored a path through the solid mass. The solidity compressed behind him as he pierced through and left no evidence of his passing. As he descended further through the compaction, his flesh ripped away from his muscles and then the muscles split open with excruciating gashes. He couldn’t move a limb by his own will and he dared not open his eyes as he knew that against the onslaught of the mass they’d be shred to ribbons.

Then, in the terror, hands, disembodied hands, millions of hands grabbed and pulled at him as he passed through. They slashed at his lacerated flesh and exposed muscles, and worked their razor-edged fingers into the wounds to tear them deeper and deeper until the bone was bare. How they came out from this density he couldn’t imagine. No one could. And then he heard them, the voices that once belonged to the hands. They screamed and shrieked, not from the horror of their eternal damnation but for the pain, the searing torment of the endless millennia of their punishment.

He broke through the dense crust and began to free-fall. At first, relief to be released from the agony of his flesh being ripped away brought calm to his mind. But then he felt them. They floated around him. Some were solid and slashed into him like a whip of vengeance. Some writhed over his body like a swarm of vipers. Others piercing through him and left a freezing chill and something like shattered icicles in their tunneled path. He opened his eyes only to be confronted with the shifting faces of the screaming horde. Their mouths were wide black holes that morphed in grotesque shapes and their eyes were orange flashing balls of flame. They never took a breath so the shattering timbre of their anguish never ceased.

As he tried without success to avoid the inevitable and continuous collisions, dread-filled his soul with a darkness blacker than the densest ink in a writer’s well, and knowledge beyond imagination witnessed that these were the fortunate ones. Dread engulfed him as he realized his doom would yet be revealed.

As he continued to plummet and the voice’s crescendo penetrated every fiber of his being, the most acrid, sulfuric scent he could imagine filled his nostrils. Something from his past described it as brimstone. It came from the smoke that rose to meet him. It filled his lungs until he could no longer cough it out or breathe it in, and, as it passed over his tongue, it filled his mouth with a polluted bitterness. The pace of his plunge escalated and the smoke, so dense he could feel it against his body, thrashed, whipped, and snarled. But he couldn’t see its source.

Then, a new sensation—warmth—washed over him but not a warm comfort like a blanket on a chilly Boston night—heat. The heat of a thousand suns intensified by millions of magnifying glasses focused their pinpoints of light on every cell of his ravaged skin. The further he fell, the more intense it became until it was intolerable but, even then, it increased. The smell of his burning flesh began to fill the already noxious air and he saw what remained of his skin had begun to blister, blacken, smolder, and melt. Next, his bones began to burn and boil from the inside out. His marrow turned into something like smelting steel.

The source of the heat now revealed itself. Orange, green, blue, and black flames leaped from some vast unknown body through the smoke and seared his flesh even more. He opened his mouth to scream but, when no air filled his lungs, no sound escaped.

And then silence.

A silence so deafening he thought he’d lose his mind. A silence so dark, so sinister, he feared whatever may lie before him, would be so much worse than what he had passed through. He recognized his mind functioned fully but his body was paralyzed as if it had turned to stone. His face began to contort beyond his will into the shape of a demonic scream. The fall stopped and he was suspended over the raging cauldron below. The flames lapped up and engulfed him, burned him, charred him, but did not consume him.

A distinct voice screeched from out of the din and mayhem.

“Welcome, Henry Plancrest-Rogers.” The deep haunting voice resonated from a place within his skull.

Laughter from the host of the tormented erupted uncontrolled and then it twisted into contempt, sneers, and derision as they gave sardonic jeers at his arrival.

“Where am I? Who are you? What is this place?” Hank screamed and was surprised that he had found breath and that his voice had begun to work again.

”Welcome to Hell!” came the voice again and it echoed unrestrained in his mind. “This is the place of the damned, the place of the unrepentant.”

“Unrepentant?” he screamed and, if his arms had worked, he would’ve thrown his hands over his ears to stifle the cavernous voice bellowing inside his head.

“Yes, without repentance this is your home and, once you’re here, you can never be anywhere else.”

“But I was an acolyte, I went to mass, I said my prayers, and I confessed to the priest. I shouldn’t be here.”

The chiding voices grew louder. They no longer resonated just from the mass, the smoke, and the fire, but they came from inside his body. He felt their presence. He was petrified.

“Was! Went! Confessed!” the voice screeched and it no longer just resounded inside his head but filled the place where he and the host were suspended. “All in the past. When, my child, was your last confession?”

“Oh my God, help me.”

“Too late for Him,” the voice resounded.

“I don’t want to be here,” Hank shouted.

“Do you think my host does? They want out but they made their choice. I won’t allow it.”

“But what about me, have I had my last chance? Is there no way back?”

“No one has ever found it.”

“Not being found means there must be a way. Show it to me!” he pleaded.

The silence returned but not as before. It wasn’t maddening but felt bearable. The flames and smoke, the voice. and the faces dissolved. He became aware of a throb and recognized his own heartbeat hard against something foreign, something hostile in his body. Then, a new voice with a softer more feminine timbre called to him.

*

“Hank! Hank!” Natalie shouted and shook the man in her lap with her bound hands. She looked into eyes fixed and growing dim. His face bore a mask of horror as if he wanted to scream but his muscles had frozen in an exacting twisted cramp. “Wake up Hank. I think he’s dying! Do something, he’s not breathing.”

“What the hell?” Tony shouted and swerved the car to the side of the road.

Hank’s gasp for air, like a man taking one final breath at the end of a hangman’s noose, startled Natalie. Like the hum of a forceful wind through a dense forest, combined with a wheezing, raspy rattle, the sound filled her ears. She looked into the eyes of someone returning from the dead.

“Hank!” she screamed.

His eyes came to life. He searched the darkness like one desperate to find the one who knew his name. When his jaundiced orbs fell on Natalie’s face, he whispered, “Forgive me, please.”

Unexpectedly, she heard herself say “I do” before she realized what had happened. How could she forgive this man who raped her once with nothing less than forceful brutality and was only stopped from doing it again by the bullet she put in him? How could she forgive this man when she still bore the bruises and bite marks from his assault? How could she ever forgive this man who denigrated her with his urine? How could she forgive this man when the last look he gave her before he succumbed to unconsciousness, screamed that he blamed her for his plight? How could she forgive this man whose flesh and blood she still wore under her fingernails to remind her of how much she hated this man? But she said it again “I do,” and knew it was true.

Tony had stopped the car and forced the driver’s door open. In the light of the dome lamp, she watched Hank’s eyes become fixed and the blood drain away from his face. His cheeks, marred by the scratches she put there and scars from his life of abuse were left a sallow hue. She knew he was gone and a lone tear coursed down her swollen, blackened cheek.

Not only had she taken a life but her fate was now sealed.