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I awoke.
The numbing wind shrieked through the darkening valley. Pouring in
from the Valley of Shadows, the evil wind battered dead windowless
concrete structures that rose into the gray air of the city. Shivering
slightly, teeth chattering, soul torn, I was seated at Barney?s, an
outdoor futuristic Las Vegas restaurant encased in pink and purple neon
and located on the thirty-second floor of the Old Babylon Hotel. Trying
to bring heat into my body, I drank coffee like water. Straight black.
Five floors above me, on the roof of the Old Babylon, stood the oldest
roller coaster in Nevada. The empty purple cars rumbled aimlessly
overhead on freezing tracks; beneath and parallel to the tracks ran red
neon tubing resembling a line of fire. Towering above the ride and
overlooking the City was a fading, flashing blue neon sign reading
"Last Ride to Hell."
It was evening, late November. I couldn?t remember how long I?d been at
Barney?s. I couldn?t remember how I got here. I wasn?t even sure of my
name. Bob Smith, or something like that will do. Anyway, no one knew me
here. No one came up to he, patted me on the back, shook my hand, and
exclaimed, "Why, if it isn?t good old Bob Smith!" In fact, save for the
waiter and one old bearded, balding man seated at a table two over, no
one was here. It was dead.
For the past hour or more?it seemed like months, even years--the sun
had inched towards the huge purple western mountains; to suffocate
gnawing fears devouring my soul like hungry rats, I had forced myself to
study the man. At first, I thought he was my father; but my father had
been dead for a millennium. Anyway, unlike my father, this old man
never drank his coffee black, but always with cream and sugar, and
picked at an open-faced hot roast beef sandwich smothered in brown
gravy.
This fellow had been seated in the same purple chair forever, it
seemed, slightly stooped over his plate, fork in his right hand,
mouth slightly open as if to receive some food or to speak a word.
Occasionally, he looked up at me, nodded and smiled a toothless grin,
almost as if he recognized me, but when I glowered back, my red-bat eyes
flashing at him, he always lowered his head, mumbling to himself,
studying his plate. I think he was silently singing. My father used
to sing at his meals.
Fears diminished as my sense of power increased. I watched the man. A
hungry hawk, I was the predator in this game, circling overhead as
the balding mouse ran through thick black mud threatening to suck
him under. I enjoyed making this man squirm, as he struggled to
nibble away his sandwich. In time to the Beethovian beat that ran
through my head during fierce wind storms, I smoked and stared,
smoked and stared, smoked and stared, my fears diminishing. My ash tray
was three inches high with cigarette butts.
Confident now of my ability to kill, I glared hatefully at the
toothless specimen, vividly imagining torturing him to death. The
torture would be a pay-back for those evenings my father?a millenium
ago?-- had locked me in the downstairs bathroom of our huge two story
gray stone house in the wet mountains of the Pacific Northwest. (Before
he locked me in, my father removed the overhead bathroom light to ensure
I suffered in darkness. It was there, shuddering in darkness, that I
began turning my mind to death.)
Thus, at Barneys?, in my imagination, I pictured the balding,
toothless specimen chained naked to a dungeon wall, hundreds of feet
below the earth?s surface, huge purple rats nibbling bloodied
chewed-up feet. Maybe they had already chewed away a foot. In the
dungeon, there was no window, the only light from a flickering candle
on a wooden chair five feet to his left. The wall behind him was rough
gritty sandstone, and whenever the old man moved against it his back
would cut and bleed. The floor was solid concrete, stained with urine
and scattered with bread crumbs, and the keep had no ceiling, only
darkness rising upward, inversion of the abyss.
When I saw that the old man sitting at Barney?s was trembling almost
uncontrollably, I knew his mind was glued to my nightmare; he must
have wondered about the source of the image of himself chained to a
wall. When I heard him cry out and jump as he was trying to eat (had
a purple rat bitten him?), I knew his weakness; my twisted image had
become his twisted image, and like a demon I could possess him.
For an instant, I looked at the roller coaster that ceaselessly shot
around the frozen tracks, noticed that the cars seemed to be running in
reverse, shaking windows and tables, and I glanced at the seemingly
changeless dark gray desert sky. Desert wind shrieked overhead,
spirits of the dead drifting through eternal darkness. Phobias
shot forth from the dark holes of my soul like frantic spiders.
Suddenly, the sky containing the wind terrified me; the night
shot into an endless black void (darker than basement blackness), so
that looking up was looking down, into Hell?s dark pit, no ceiling, no
floor, symbol of our final fall into annihilation. I allowed
myself a few seconds of the dark terror that started to send me
spinning into a labyrinth of nightmares. I shrieked "Stop!" and the
spinning stopped. Quickly, I fixed my eyes on the old man, thankful for
purple and pink neon. Like spiders sensing an intruder, my phobias
hastily retreated into the holes of my soul, and strength began to
return like a shrieking desert wind gathering momentum.
The more I watched him, the steadier I became and the more I hated
this specimen, an aging rat nibbling cheese. Crazy rage pushed up
inside of me, like molten lava forcing its way to the mouth of a
volcano, as an image of my father whipping me with a switch in front of
my mother and sisters suddenly crowded my thoughts. Trembling with a
death-chilling rage, I brought my just-filled coffee cup to my lips and
drank eagerly, trying to ignore the burning pain of scalding hot
coffee.
"Christ!" I screamed, pulling the flaming liquid from my lips, banging
it onto the table, shattering the cup. The old man jumped. "Christ,
that?s hot!!" I shrieked again. Timid as a church mouse, stupid as a
spider, he barely looked my way, partially turning his head and moving
his eyes sideways so he could watch me.
I paused, suspended, studying the old man study me out the side of his
eye. We hung there, like a painting, two black bats caught in a storm,
he glancing at me sideways, unblinking, and I looking at him coldly.
Finally, I lit another cigarette, inhaled, attempting to suck in warmth,
blew smoke in his direction?the buildings surrounding us formed a
vacuum, keeping out the wind storm?and waited for a response.
The old man did nothing, the smoke curling in wisps around his head.
Motionless, he stared out of the corner of his eye, probably guarding
against any false move I might make.(In this, he resembled my father,
who came to distrust me [rightfully so] in his final years as I
carefully, methodically plotted the old man?s painful death.)
This old man didn?t cough, clear his throat, move, or say
anything. I could feel fury surfacing, and I knew I would have to fight
to avoid snapping him like a dry twig.
When the trembling old man stood, it was time to act. No more
fucking around. I stood too, and as he shuffled towards the stairway
exit, I followed. He reached the bottom step and headed for the
elevator to take him the rest of the way down when I jumped to his side,
interlocking his arm with mine, and hissed, "You?re gonna come with me,
you old fuck, or I?ll snap your fuckin? neck right here." As I dragged
him into the elevator, he never looked up, eyes fixed on some invisible
point on the ground, never said a word, and put up no resistance. As we
rode to the bottom floor, he made no attempts to extricate his arm from
mine, and we two stood there, facing forward and waiting for the
door to open. I had my prey for the night, and soon the dark fears that
nightly shredded my soul, once to the point of sending me to the
emergency ward at four in the morning, would cease completely for a
time.
When the elevator door opened, I tightened my grip, holding his thin
bony arm like a vice. He allowed me to guide him, a limp piece of
luggage, across the casino floor, past the twenty-one tables, the
roulette wheel, the poker games, and the slot machines. The Babylon
casino was full tonight, packed with rainbow-shirted Southern
Californians, the sound of slot machines and twenty-one dealers a
continuous din clinging to the ceiling like a black mass. We moved
through the crowds, occasionally bumping people, beneath the dark
massive din that threatened to crush us, and walked out the door.
I always valet park my car, so I gave the attendant my ticket and
waited for him to bring my car around. The old man said nothing; in
fact, he seemed to have thrown his weight on me, and I have no doubt
that had I let go of his arm he would have crumpled to the ground. I was
literally sustaining him.
When my car pulled up in front of us, I opened the passenger door and
shoved the old man into the seat. Then, I placed my face two inches
away from his; we were eyeball to eyeball. It was then, looking as it
were into the old fucker?s soul, that I read some anger, some animosity,
some hatred. The old man?s eyes seemed to flame out at me and, jumping
back without thinking, I rasped, "You don?t go anywhere, pops."
The old man?s look had unnerved me, almost drawing something out of
me. I had expected nothing except cold passive compliance. Now, as I
opened my door and got behind the wheel, I realized that there was a
person inside that old body and that person likely hated me.
I put the car in gear, edged away from the hotel?s front doors,
stopped at the exit, and, when the traffic cleared a bit, shoved the
accelerator to the floor. The car took off with a shriek. In seconds,
after one quick block, the speedometer jumped to eighty miles per
hour. Feeling the rush of speed, I looked at the bag of bones sitting
next to me, hoping for a response. The old man slowly turned his head,
looked me in the eyes to tell me that I couldn?t frighten him. Part of
him sucked me in, a spiritual vacuum, of sorts.
I fled down Charleston Avenue, flew on to the I-15 turnoff, and
gunned it north. My destination was a small sandstone canyon just
beyond Moapa, a reservation town north of Las Vegas; it?s where I took
all my victims. I stayed at around eighty so if the old man tried to
jump from the car he would be killed upon impact with the hard pavement.
The drive was a journey into hell, the dark swirling chaos of
twisted thoughts. The shrieking wind grew strong and, willfully it
seemed, battered my purple Toyota Corona, nearly pushing it off the
road. The two moons in the night sky--one just rising in the east, the
other one directly over head?bathed the desert landscape in frightening,
unearthly splendor. Sweating profusely, panic oozing into my soul like
dirtied kitchen grease, I fought for control of the car and myself.
Suddenly, the old man spoke. "Where are we going?" he asked, his
voice subterranean, like an echo from a deep dark pit. I could feel
the flames of hell in his voice, chilling me to the quick.
"To a place, old man. To a favorite place where I take all my guests,"
I said, voice trembling, now forcing boldness into my words, staring
straight at the endless black road in front of me, a line pointing me in
the direction of the black void that eternally threatened to engulf
every living soul. I refused to make eye contact. "We?ll be there
soon."
"What we gonna do, son, once we?re there?" In response to his voice,
which resembled my own father?s, I felt myself shriveling inside.
Forcing as much rage and darkness as I could grasp into my voice and
thoughts, I responded quickly, "You?re gonna die, ole man. It?s gotta be
that way. Fuckin? wind. Spirits of the dead. Anyhow, you gotta die."
"Anybody?s dead, it?s you son," came the calm, sepulchral answer. This
old man?s voice went into me and through me, touching my backbone,
rattling my soul. I felt sick at heart, like Hamlet facing his father?s
ghost. I took the car up to one hundred. In five minutes, I?d reached
the turn-off.
We sped along the deserted black road in silence. I sensed a black
suffocating cloud wrapping around me, terror gushing from my soul like
muddy spring waters. My face and hands felt numb. My ears rang loudly.
No one said a word.
On a thin two lane highway headed west towards the huge desert
mountains, in flight from something black, I pushed the car up to one
hundred and twenty. I couldn?t control myself. In a minute, we?d be in
the canyon, a place I called the Valley of Shadows.
The road meandered through the Valley, barren desert mountains
endlessly soaring on both sides like walls of an imaginary dungeon. I
had been coming to this place since I was twelve. It seemed then, and
seemed now, the gateway to the evil dimension that lay on the other
side of my mind. The huge sandstone mountains were filled with caves,
some going so far back or down that you could never reach the end. The
caves were eternally dark and, at least according to my mother,
harbored slithering demonic beasts. Everything evil used these caves
as an entrance into this life; and I had learned that the only way to
keep the evil from me, from my sisters, was to bring a victim, a
sacrifice to slice apart, the pieces buried in front of the caves in
order to ward off darkness.
We came into the canyon, I hit the brakes and we skidded to a strop. I
sat there, listening to my heart pound wildly in my brain, ready to
crawl out of my skin. This wasn?t right. Cautiously, I turned my head
and looked over at the old man.
Malicious red, then green eyes greeted my glance, sucking my soul
through the top of my head, it seemed, and I felt the warming fires of
hell whipping around me. I fought for an instant, my soul seeming to
slither out of my body like a black snake moving through oil. The
struggle ceased, and I thought I was all right. "Get out," he commanded,
opening his door. "Get our of your car now."
Without question, I obeyed, opening my door and stepping outside into
the cold blustery wind that stung my cheeks and eyes. Somewhere from the
Babylon to this remote desert place, I had lost control; I felt like one
possessed. I wanted to run like a mouse but felt held in place by the
old man?s power. My legs were frozen. So I waited, the wind battering
and chilling me, until he came around to my side of the car.
I turned to look at the old man; now a mirror image of myself, he
wasn?t decrepit anymore. My head spun; I nearly vomited. Somehow, he was
me, and I had become him. He had indeed sucked my soul out of my body
and put it into his; he?it?now occupied my body.
The man before me stood about six feet six inches tall, had long black
hair that blew in the wind, and piercing red Satanic eyes. He wore a
white shirt and black slacks. A pentagram dangled around his neck. I
studied the face, which I thought I knew. The face was long, pointed,
nearly assuming reptilian features: its eyes barely slits, its mouth
without lips. Additionally, each hand held a bull-whip. I had
learned all about whips from my father when I was growing up. I could
see that his arms became whips.
I was engulfed in black terror. The lights from the two moons were
suddenly extinguished and the night air froze. Giving way, trying to
suck me down, the ground beneath me felt like quicksand. I wanted to
run, feebly turned, when I heard the whip crack and felt the jagged iron
ball of its lash gash my neck. I felt warm liquid running down my
neck. Using both arms, the man?myself??-- whipped me again and again
and again, until I lay there bloodied, tangled, moaning,
semi-conscious
Abandoned by God (Does God exist? I wondered), I felt I was being
crucified and wanted to step down from this cross. I can think of no
reason for my pain and suffering. Pushing myself to my feet, freeing
myself from the living sand that tried to suck me under, I unsteadily
began to run through the desert sand and sagebrush, a aging field mouse
looking for refuge from the soaring young hunting hawk. Of course,
escape was impossible. I hadn?t gone ten feet when I again heard the
crack, like a bolt of lightening shredding my conscious mind. Bull
whips were not supposed to reach ten feet, but this one did. Pain
coursed through my chest and mouth from the blow across my shoulder
blades, and looking back, stumbling, I sensed the huge dark figure
towering over me, smiling sardonically, pentagram flashing in the
darkness, whips raised in the air, striking my clothes, rending my
flesh.
I thought the punishment would never stop as the whips cut and tore my
bleeding flesh. Remembering my attempts to escape the father who
followed my imprisonment in the bathroom with a caning, I tried to
balance myself on all fours, crawl through the desert sand, and I
wondered how anything on four legs?a dog, a cat, a coyote?could move
fast. I collapsed. I whined. I prayed. I wept. I told my tormentor
that I would worship Satan until the end to time. Now a balding and
toothless old man, I had no strength. I was as good as dead.
The whipping was unendurable, sharp, dull bloody pains driving all
the way to the base of my skull, my backbone, my testicles, and I felt a
black sickness wash over me. I heaved and heaved, expelling the food
from my guts, and in the brief interval between episodes I realized that
I had completely lost control of my most elementary functions. I had
shit and pissed in my pants.
The sound of the crack was terrifying. It never stopped, lightening
searing the black sky of my consciousness. Wind and darkness, dirt and
sand swirled about me, and trying to right myself again I pitched
forward into a large sage bush. I lay there, hoping it was over,
waiting for my torturer to begin again, reeking of shit, piss and
blood. I wished myself dead; I tried to will myself out of existence. I
strained for all I was worth, my brain seeming to burst within my skull,
my teeth clenched, when all was darkness.
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I awoke again. The dungeon nightmare having fled, the desert whipping
behind me, I knew I was again seated at Barneys, the glow of the
purple and pink neon providing ample light to help me hide me from
shrieking wind, despair, fear, and darkness. My heart was still beating
a hundred miles an hour, my hands trembled, and my mouth was open. I
realized that I was singing to myself. I looked down at plate with a
hot roast beef sandwich covered with brown gravy. My mouth, drooling,
was inches from the plate. I reached for my coffee, diluted with cream
and sugar, and drank deeply nonetheless. Something was wrong. (I feared
pappa may have locked me in the bathroom again.)
Reviving, I slowly pulled my head up, feeling fifty years older, and
looked around. The waiter stood at the door, bored, smoking a
cigarette, glancing every once in a while at the empty purple roller
coaster cars rumbling backwards over head. I looked up at the great
faded blue neon sign which read "Last ride to hell." I looked at the
man seated two tables down from me, a large man, with long dark flowing
hair, eyes glowing a menacing red. Red-bat eyes, I used to call them. A
pentagram dangled from his neck. He was smoking furiously, a stack of
cigarette butts in his ash tray at least three inches high. He drank
coffee like water. Straight black. The man stood, smiled, and walked
over to me. He towered over me, a good six and a half feet tall. I saw
the same malice in his eyes that I had seen in the old man, the same
rebuke.
He leaned down, put his face two inches from mine, and brought forth a
low, guttural laugh, an echo from the pit. "Welcome to Hell, toothless
old rat, " he hissed, almost a song. "Where you are is the Abyss, the
final destination of created time, the end of your worthless life, the
dark cozy and crazy chaos preceding time, the portal of your gnawing
fears which steadily creep into your conscious mind like slithering,
slugs. Eternally isolated from every living thing. This is the cave at
the end of time, the door to all evil things, where you took your
victims to satiate the evil that wormed its way into your ugly life.
This is your last stop, sweetheart. Forever."
With this, the man stood upright, gave me a cruel wink, and headed from
the stairs. Then he was gone. I never saw him again. I never saw anyone
again. That must have been a thousand years ago if it was a day.
The bull-whipping, possibly a nightmare, had been no dream.
Truthfully, I had changed places with my prey, that sorry fucking old
man, a great cosmic surprise. This was a nightmare within a nightmare
within a nightmare, a twisted labyrinth of dreams from which I could
never escape. It was the gigantic ice maze of The Shining. Like the cars
moving endlessly on the track overhead, I keep drifting through the
labyrinth, returning to my origin only to begin the journey through the
dream maze again.
With effort, I stood. Determined to escape this pit, named after the
purple dinosaur, I shuffled to the stairs. I felt one thousand years
old. I had barely the strength to walk the fifteen feet from my table
to the stairs.
Grabbing the rail, I eased my right foot down onto the first step. When
my foot touched concrete, trembling, still holding the rail, I brought
my other foot down. An eternity passed. Still, I moved forward, down
each and every step, all sixty-six of them until I reached the bottom.
The large gray metallic elevator stood just across the hall.
After resting one hour, perhaps two, feeling as if I were aging ten
years a minute, I began to inch toward the elevator. Finally, after
two days, exhausted but still on my feet, I hit the elevator call
button.
When the elevator door opened, I looked inside? to see the endless
swirling darkness, a negation of all being. I stood on the edge, looked
out into massive void, realized there was no up, no down, no
beginning, no end, no space. Just endless darkness, liked being trapped
in a lightless bathroom or an endless dungeon.
Panicked, I watched the elevator door shut and turned. I had to walk
back across the hall, inch my way up the steps, and months later return
to Barney?s.
Thus, standing at the top of the stairs, looking out over the tables at
Barney?s restaurant, I felt myself encased by pink and purple neon
tubing, a damned rat damned eternally to the cage. I looked for my table
and spotted it, a place with a plate holding a warm open-faced roast
beef sandwich, brown gravy poured over the sandwich. No one else was
there.
The waiter had gone, the kitchen was dark, and I was alone, shivering
slightly. I looked up at the empty roller coaster, endlessly, aimlessly
running the tracks, sometimes backwards and sometimes forward,
thundering over head every two minutes of so, at the huge windowless
buildings buffeted by the angry wind and standing expressionless at
time?s end. I studied the ride. There was no owner to the ride, but
the ride had been there forever, like the universe around me, like the
void awaiting me.
I slowly looked up and saw the familiar blue neon sign, "Last ride to
hell." Beyond the sign, I could hear the wind screaming, shrieking,
sense the angry but lonely spirits in the death wind; looking straight
up, I saw the eternal lake of night, a dark fire which burned forever,
and I felt myself falling upwards towards it, and I knew I had died some
time ago?.
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