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.
