Then he was gone from that place, and now he saw only a single dull light bulb illuminating a smoky stage. Mary was there in the circle of light. She started to move, to dance, undulating and gyrating like a cheap stripper. She removed her clothes. Her shirt fell to the ground, then her bra. He could see her breasts – sagged from childbirth, nipples rigid and calloused from breastfeeding, her stomach still fleshy and loose, but lovely all the same. Her underwear dropped to the stage, and she swayed and danced in all her human imperfection. Amid the sexual farce, she dug her fingernails into the skin of her forearm and pulled. Her skin peeled back and tore loose with a soft, rubbery snapping sound. Blood poured out, and she quietly and calmly dropped the strip of skin to the floor. Jonathan cried out like a drunken barker from the audience, but she kept stripping away her skin, slow and bloody, like the dance she performed beneath the dull spotlight, until her body was stripped bare, down to muscle and tendons. In the dim light he could see her face wet with tears, but she did not make a sound; she did not utter a word. She stood before him, open to the world.
Then he was back in Coombs’ Gulch. Michael and Conner were spread out in pieces across the spiked branches of the black spruce trees. They were alive and in agony, and he heard their cries and saw their anguished faces distort with pleas for an end, but no end came for them. They moved their heads and somehow moved their feet, even though their lower limbs were spread ten feet away on another tree. All the feeling was there, all the pain, every inch of their bodies ran with it like blood. A cold wind swept through, and the trees swayed back and forth and pulled their desiccated bodies in different directions. They screamed, but the sound was lost in the woods. He reached out to pull their bodies down, but he could not reach them.
Then Jonathan felt himself fall into nothingness, the silence deep and thick. He felt his eardrums would explode from the silence. He heard his breathing; he heard his heart beat, the rhythm louder and louder till it was all he could hear. Then he detected something else, another sound behind the beat of his heart – something deeper down within, so deep it seemed a million miles away.
Screaming. Fatal, terrified screaming.
He understood it then. Hell is not a place. It distorts all time and space and dimension. Hell is within – deep down, filled with the agonized screams of everyone we love.
Jonathan stood again in the center of the occult design in Coombs’ Gulch. All was silent and dark and cold but for the white stones, which glowed like lights on an airport runway. He could feel a terrible presence with him, and he turned to look. He saw the outline of a distorted and massive figure standing at the edge of the circle. Its wooden mask glowed in the moonlight, its arms and legs vaguely human, but with rootlike tendrils crawling up and over and changing the demon-god’s form.
It spoke with a deep, garbled and croaking attempt at human language.
Do you see?
Jonathan was silent – dead with fear, shaking and alone.
This time, its voice boomed over the mountains and rose up from the earth.
Do you see!
“I see!” Jonathan screamed out, but then the figure was gone and there was no one there to hear him.
Suddenly, he was in the light of day again. A sunlit afternoon in a quiet hamlet of forest at the edge of a school sports field. The day was warm but promised a cool night, the air sweet with moisture and decay. The sky was a deep, autumn blue. And Jonathan was there. He felt the light on his skin; he breathed the air and smelled the turning leaves and the grass giving up its life. He was walking, but not of his own volition. He was trapped behind a pair of eyes, an observer. He walked through a cheap football field toward the trees, which stretched along the field and then up a hill, spreading like a blanket over the land. He wore jeans and an old shirt. He carried a backpack, and his sneakers were old, a design from decades ago. His hands were small and light, unblemished by years. His hair was thick and shaggy, full of life. He found a path into the trees and started down into a patch of forest. The trees had not yet given up their leaves, and the short stretch of forest was darker and cooler. He could see the houses of a neighborhood up ahead, with the sound of cars rolling over pavement, and his eyes were set on that place. He moved with a lighthearted happiness.
On the ground near the edge of the path was a small clump of fur in the leaves. He stopped and wandered closer. He picked up a stick to poke the furry thing gently, to make it move, but it did not move. He pushed harder with the stick until it finally flopped over and showed its exposed and hollowed insides, crawling with maggots and other infestations. He dropped
