The Hike (15 page)

T
hrough the double patio doors, across the lobby, past the desk, and into the elevator bank Ben went. Alone. The clerk didn't follow this time. In this confined part of the lobby, he could hear a tinkling of Muzak coming from the speakers embedded in the hotel ceiling: the darkest of jokes.

The elevator opened and Ben consulted his key card packet, which was festooned with stock photos of smiling children and young couples holding hands on the stone patio.
906.
His room was on the ninth floor.

He pressed the 9 button and watched the doors seal shut behind him. When they reopened, he found himself in a standard hotel hallway, with generic framed photographs lining the walls and cheap sconce lights mounted between them. The whole hallway smelled like wallpaper glue. He came to room 906 and dug out his key card. The black sensor under the door handle flashed red when he placed the card against it. He tried again. Red. He tried a third time, turning the handle. Red. Then he kicked the door.

When he turned to walk back to the elevator, there was a Mouth Demon right in front of him.

All mouths. Its eyes were mouths. Its nose was a mouth. Its long, stringy hair was interrupted by bare patches with mouths where scalp should be. All the mouths were open and drooling green fluid and babbling incoherently. Its breath was a cloud of horrors. The voices coming from the Mouth Demon suddenly filled the hall, sounding like a throng of the damned.

It reached out for Ben, and he could see two hungry mouths embedded in its palms, and more mouths lining its forearms. He backed up so quickly that he fell to the ground and the Mouth Demon pounced on him. Ben screamed in terror as the demon grabbed his hand and bit him on the arm with its hand-mouth, its rotting teeth plunging in, eating away at him like a living tumor.

Ben jerked away from the demon as it ripped a chunk of him free and feasted on it. He got up to run to the end of the hallway and the demon followed, slowly but with purpose. Ben's arm was festering now, the wound bleeding and widening. He saw teeth growing along the outside of the wound, and a pit forming down into his arm. Soon, there was a tongue. His arm began babbling.

The demon approached. There was a door marked STAIRS but when Ben tried to push it open, it held fast. The demon grabbed him again and bit into his clothing, and he could see more mouths lining its neck, open and waiting to be fed.

The gun.
He needed the gun. Why hadn't he just kept the gun out the whole time? He reached into his bag with his uninfected hand and felt the grip of a weapon, but when he pulled it out, it turned out to be the paintball gun he'd filched from Fermona's cave. Then he remembered: the faded tome said you had to fill the mouths to beat the demon.

Paint fills things.

He aimed the paintball gun at the monster and blasted a tiny
orb of orange latex into its face. One quick shot was enough to make the demon recoil. Ben fired again and again, hitting every possible open orifice at the base of its neck and across its chest. It fell to the ground in pain, covered in nightmarish bursts of Technicolor. Ben watched as the demon tried frantically to spit the latex out, making strange noises and writhing about as the mouths sealed shut.

He rolled the demon over and found more mouths lining its back and legs. He filled those mouths as well, and then filled the hungry wound blabbering on his own arm. Once filled with paint, the maw on his arm closed and the lips sealed shut, fading back into his skin, leaving a lively orange polka dot. When he wiped the paint off, he uncovered a faint white line on his skin that would not go away.

On the ground, he now saw a human corpse. Male. Sunny paint blots all over him. Ben slid down to the floor, resting against the wall, shaking uncontrollably, rubbing the new scar on his arm. He tore off his shirt, checking for new mouths, listening to see if he could hear any more unholy gibberish coming from inside him. But there was nothing.

He ran back to room 906 and frantically tried the key card again. And this time—by God—the light turned green. He turned the handle, hurried into the room, and slammed the door shut, bolting every bolt and sliding every chain.
The mouths . . . Oh, God, the mouths.
He kept seeing the mouths, smelling their toxic breath. No one would hear him in this generic hotel room. It would be okay. He screamed and banged his head against the door. He took the real gun out of his bag and held it fast to his heart.

After his fifth violent head-butt of the door, he remembered . . .

. . . the tissue of another undead being . . .

There was an ingredient for Voris's glowing poison right outside that door. Who knew if it would be there for much longer? Perhaps
some ghoulish maid service swept through the hotel every hour to pick up remains of the undead. He was gonna need that poison.

He took out the pickle jar and unbolted the door. The man lay dead in the hallway. His nose and eyes had been restored. He looked like any other man. Ben knelt beside him and felt his cheek, which was now cold and hard.

He unfurled the napkin roll from the hotel lounge. The steak knife was serrated and razor sharp.

“I'm sorry,” Ben told the corpse, as he dug into its arm and carved out a small hunk of flesh where a mouth once was. The man's blood was already coagulated and crumbly. Not a drop of liquid came out of him. Ben dropped the hunk of flesh into the pickle jar and ran back into 906. Again, the bolts and chains.

He wanted to sleep. Needed to, really. But how? He looked at the steak knife. It had cut through the man's flesh so easily, like digging into a fresh jar of peanut butter. It would be a cinch to draw the knife across his own neck and watch the blood come running out, a quick moment of pain in exchange for eternal slumber. The knife could free him. No more mouths. No more giants. No more mountains to climb or bridges to cross. And no more uncertainty.

No.

He wiped the knife on the cloth napkin and rolled it back up neatly with the fork and the spoon, leaving it ready for room service.

The room itself was a suite, nicer than any hotel room he'd ever been in. He didn't even know hotel rooms could
be
this open and spacious. There was a kitchen, and a vast master bath with whirlpool jets, and two king beds in the main bedroom, each turned down and adorned with a single chocolate wrapped in silver foil. On the desk in the corner of the room, there was a vase of fresh flowers, along with a cheese-and-fruit plate and a bottle of champagne chilling in a pewter
bucket. There was a small envelope tucked under the plate. Ben set his bag on one of the beds and walked over to the desk, grabbing the envelope and tearing it open, reading the tiny note card inside:

Compliments of the Producer.

Behind the desk was a set of French doors that led to a balcony. He opened the door and saw the outline of the picturesque hills in the darkness and smelled the olive trees perfuming the fresh air. This Producer, whoever he may be, was abusing Ben in the most classic sense. There was trauma, and then there was a gift, and then more trauma, and then another gift. The pattern was unmistakable.

There was no sign of the path beyond the hotel. Whether it had abandoned him, or whether he had to figure out some mindfuck puzzle to conjure its return, he was too tired and frazzled to care.

Just then, a crow flew by and dropped a scroll of red construction paper onto the balcony. He bent over and unrolled it. There were two small handprints on the paper, made with white finger paint, and a poem cut out and pasted beneath it:

Sometimes you get discouraged

Because I am so small

And always leave fingerprints

On furniture and walls

But every day I'm growing up

And soon I'll be so tall

That all those little handprints

Will be hard to recall

So here's a special handprint

Just so you can say

This is how my fingers looked

When I placed them here today.

At the bottom, there was the name “RUDY,” written by a kindergarten teacher in black Sharpie.

“God damn you,” Ben whispered softly. “Thank you, but God damn you.”

He placed the paper on one of the king beds, and put Flora's stuffed fox next to it. There were a great many kiddie board books that Ben could recite from memory. So, on this night, he recited them aloud to the fox and the handprint. He asked the fox, which acted as proxy for Flora, how her day had been. He told a joke to the handprints. He tucked the objects in for twenty minutes before finally kissing them goodnight and covering them with the sheet and blanket. After a quick shower and change into clean boxers and a white T-shirt, he fell into the opposite bed, staring at the door, waiting for something to start banging on it.

Nothing did. He fell into a deep sleep with the balcony doors open.

 • • • 

When he woke up, he was a tenth grader. In school. The principal's office, to be exact. He was sitting in front of a stern woman.

Oh, that's Principal Blackwell. That was her name. Hey, wait a second. . . .

The principal had called Ben into her office and worse, she phoned Ben's mom at the hospital and made her come in as well. Apparently, Ben's teacher had read through his journal and was horrified by its contents. Now Principal Blackwell laid the open journal out on her desk for Ben and his mom to see: Severed heads. Pools of blood. Angry missives and threats to kill other students. Hideous creatures covered in frothing mouths.
You drew those. You probably don't remember that, do you? Depression has a way of vaporizing big parts of your memory. Important parts.

“Is this your journal?” she asked Ben.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Why would you put these things in your journal?”

“I don't know. Sometimes I get angry.”

“Are you planning to hurt anyone, Ben?”

“No! No, I swear!”

He wasn't lying.
It's just a journal. You're free to empty out your mind in there and sort through the trash, aren't you? That's what the teachers said to do, man.
He was a depressed, only child. The
only-est
child. The fuck did they think they'd find in that journal: unicorns? He never wanted to really hurt anyone, except for perhaps himself. Wasn't that obvious?
You don't see me walking around kicking cats, do you?

The principal gave Ben a kind pat on the shoulder.

“If you ever need to talk to anyone,” she told Ben, “my door is open anytime. Or you can visit the guidance counselor, Mrs. Fazio. Okay? We know how hard it is for you, Ben. We're here to help.”

But that's not what really happened now, was it? No, not at all. The principal said nothing of the kind. When they see death threats in a kid's journal and that kid has an honorary prison scar running down the side of his face, along with a record for public vandalism . . . yeah, no, they aren't cutting that kid any slack. You were suspended for two days. Other kids found out why. Barely anyone at school spoke to you again. The rest of the football team froze you out. That's what happened. That was the real world for you. Always ready to assume the worst.

 • • • 

When Ben woke up, Voris was hanging over him. He could tell it was Voris right away: the black eyes, the pupils bright like headlights in the dark, black wings with a span of twelve feet sprouting out of his back. His face was white. Sallow. Black gloves sheathed his seemingly endless fingers.

Ben rolled out from underneath Voris and grabbed the fox and handprint paper from the other bed, tucking them into his backpack. Voris turned his head and gazed at Ben with curiosity. The light in his pupils felt like its own distinct, separate creature. There was no need for him to explain that Ben would soon be under his complete and utter control. The pupils owned him. Voris could not be beaten.

“What do you want?” Ben asked.

Voris floated out from the bed, tucked in his wings, and came to a standing rest on the hotel suite floor. Still staring. Still curious. Ben reached over to his nightstand for the gun. By the time he had a hold of it, it was too late. Voris wrapped his praying mantis fingers around Ben and lifted him up off the ground, his lethal skin radiating through the black gloves. Ben shrieked in pain and dropped the pistol. Soon, Voris would melt through his skin and char his ribs.

Then Voris spread his wings wide and flew out the French doors and over the balcony, up into the sky, carrying Ben in his claws as easily as a crow would a slip of paper.

D
awn was breaking, and the cold air whipped Ben's face and body as Voris carried him in his burning talons between two white jet trails in the sky: the path. They were flying over the bucolic foothills now, and beyond that Californian mirage lay a red, cracked desert that stretched out in every direction. Ben's cheeks and jowls were flapping as the wind roared against him, drowning out all other sound. After an hour, he felt the cartilage between his ribs searing off, and he gasped in agony as Voris descended lower and lower into the rolling sands, gently resting him on the ground in front of a small section of the rusty desert that had been cordoned off with a thin yellow rope.

It was a square lot, covering roughly an acre of land. To the left of the square were thirty pallets, each piled high with a pyramid formation of hard white stones. Hovering above the square were two small black cloud forms, each with bright eyes, white like Voris's pupils. No mouths. These were the Smokes.

No one said anything as Ben clutched at his rib cage and groaned on the desert floor. The pain coursed through him like a steady electrical current. The sand remained cool from the night wind, but the
sun was intensifying now. Soon, the desert would bake and burn. There wasn't a single living thing or piece of vegetation in sight: no cacti, no shrubs, no scorpions or rattlesnakes. It was all just one big griddle, except . . .

The path. Beyond this plot of desert, Ben saw two parallel lines in the sand, just like back in Courtshire. That wasn't all: There was a truck. A marvelous red pickup truck with a high cab and tires thick like rib eyes. Its bed was stacked with dozens of bags of dry concrete mix, pressing down on the truck and nearly making it pop a standing wheelie. The truck and the path were right there, ready for Ben.

But not quite yet.

Black, foggy pseudopods extended out from the Smokes' bodies, allowing them to grasp tangible objects. They dumped a pickax and shovel at Ben's feet, along with a pair of work boots. Ben stood up, dropped his backpack, picked up the shovel, and swung it at Voris, who dodged it nonchalantly.

“Rot in hell,” Ben screamed.

Voris tilted his head and stared at Ben, yet again curious, like a doctor performing a biopsy. Voris didn't speak. He invaded Ben with his pupils, locking into his eyes, hijacking his optic nerves, and sending missives directly to his brain.

How do you know this
isn't
hell?

That was the thought Voris left inside him. Then he took off one of his black gloves and revealed a pale hand with grotesquely long fingers, the tips glowing red like steel coming out of a forge. Voris pointed at the square, and then at the tools provided for Ben.

“What do you want me to do?” Ben asked.

Voris pointed back to where he had carried Ben through the sky, and then raised his ghoulish hand upward in a majestic swoop.

“You want me to build you a castle?”

Voris nodded.

“Here? By myself? It can't be done. Where would I even start? It would take me years.”

Voris shrugged.

“Please, no. I can't.”

But Voris ignored him and pointed to the Smokes. They were to be his guards. They would supervise the project. Ben would not be leaving this worksite until the castle was finished, even with the truck and the path right there to tempt him.

“If I build this for you, do I get the truck?” Ben asked.

Voris said nothing. Instead, he spread his wings and flew off, although not back to the castle. Instead, he flew in a straight line directly over the pickup truck and the path, disappearing into the west, or whatever direction it was.

The Smokes continued to hover. Ben unpacked his tent and staked it at the eastern edge of the worksite. The Smokes made no move to confiscate it, or to take his bag. He ducked into the tent library with his backpack and drank a bottle of water, ripping up a white T-shirt and wrapping it around his aching rib cage. He gazed at the bag. The pickle jar full of poison for Voris was still there. And his seed bag. He needed to hide them, but not here.

The Smokes poked through the flap. One Smoke was holding the shovel and pickax, the other a pair of canvas pants and a plain white shirt.

“You want me to start now?” Ben asked them. They advanced forward, the tools and clothing outstretched. He brushed the apparitions off.

“Gimme a moment,” he said, “and I'll think about it.”

That wasn't what the Smokes wanted to hear. They dropped the equipment and descended upon Ben, holding him down and burning his retinas with their halogen eyes. One of them raised a cumulus fist
and plunged it into Ben's face. The ash filled his nose and mouth and flooded the back of his throat with hot bile. He couldn't breathe. His sinuses began to burn away, as if he had snorted pure fire.

“Okay! Okay!” he cried. “I'll do it!”

The Smokes backed off him. He gulped the fresh tent air and hacked out the ash, coughing in berserk fits as if flu-stricken on a winter morning. He was ready to cough out all of his innards. The Smokes seemed unconcerned. They dumped the clothes on top of him and watched him dress.

Outside the tent, Ben took his shovel and dug into the loose sand. For hours, he piled it high off to the side of the rope, and then watched with great discouragement as a stiff wind came in and blew some of it back down into the tiny hole. There was a whole acre of this to go, and no telling how far down he had to dig before hitting bedrock. Mrs. Blackwell's garden seemed much more appealing by comparison.

The next day, he dug a bit more. A skinless hand reached out of the ground, swiping at his ankles. Another ghoulish hand popped out, and soon a full-on skinless zombie rose out of the desert: a grotesque piece of walking meat. Its eyes bugged out as it stalked Ben, sending him scurrying back to the tent for a bag of salt. It came within ten feet of the flap—dripping hot mucus and reaching for Ben with its veiny, swollen hands—when he threw a handful of salt at it and heard it moan in agony. Its muscles shriveled and its veins hardened. The white cartilage of its nose turned to stone and its ghastly exposed jaw locked shut. Within minutes, it was a lifeless piece of jerky on the ground.

The Smokes carried it away.

It would not be the last Skinless he would have to deal with. They rose up and attacked every few days or so, a plasticine anatomy exhibit
come to life, stripped of all dermatological tissue and displaying only the monstrousness of the human framework beneath.

Weeks passed. Every morning, the Smokes barged into Ben's tent at dawn with the tools and sent him out into the searing hot desert skillet. He would wrap a shirt around his head for sun protection and go to work immediately, stopping only for a blip of a lunch break. The Smokes would hand him a metal tray of gray meat and lukewarm potato cubes and then prod him back into hard labor the moment he was finished. If he took too much time between spoonfuls, he got a fistful of black ash.

His progress was glacial. Every so often, he would come across a boulder and have to break it up with the pickax. His back ached. His arms became saddle leather. Massive sun blisters formed on his neck and shoulders: brown spheroids filled with burning hot plasma. The sweat would collect in the folds of his brow and then drip down and sting his eyes to the point where, by the afternoon, he was digging through a blind haze. The red sand burned like coal in the sun. When the wind kicked up, it would shower Ben in a fiery squall.

Every three days, Voris would pass directly over the site, never landing. Instead, he would fly from the western horizon back toward the hotel/castle, and then back again three days later. Ben made note of it. Every time Voris flew by, Ben hurled curse words and invectives at him from the ground, fuming at him like a disgruntled employee.

The Smokes let him keep his tent, and so he spent every night in the fluffy white bed, sleepwalking through corrected versions of his past: lost football games that were now triumphs, a car wreck he was once in that now never came to pass, bad dates that now went right.

He never saw his family, though. They were kept away from him, even when he prayed to the sky above for one more glimpse. The fluffy fox and handprint paper remained on the other side of his bed and he tucked them in every night.

One day, in the pit, he found a stray rock and slipped it into his pocket, then went into the tent and stared at it. If he stared at it hard enough, he could see eyes.

“Peter.”

After that, he tucked the rock into bed at night as well. He would kiss the rock, and stroke the top of it. When he closed his eyes, he could feel his fingers running through the dense thatch of hair on Peter's ample skull.

 • • • 

The weeks turned into months. Ben marked so many days on his pad that he was running out of pages, and the paper was too precious to waste on counting. He laid the marked sheets of paper on the floor and began making notches into the hardwood to continue the tally. There were hundreds of notches. Perhaps more. But he had his routine to keep him sane. And he knew there was something after this. Crab. Meeting up with the Younger Ben. There was a
next
to this. That was important.

The truck and the path were so achingly close, but Ben shut out the idea of hijacking the truck for now because the Smokes seemed impossible to distract. They never slept. Ever. Sometimes at night, he would wake up and they would be in the tent with him, staring. Silent. Hovering in place even when Ben threw a shoe at them.

His hands grew thick with calluses and his skin red with sun damage. His fingernails became hard as quartz, with months of crimson sand and dirt built up underneath the cuticles. And soon he found that his entire temperament had grown calloused. Nothing surprised him much anymore. Nothing bothered him, not even fighting off the Skinless. He didn't curl up and cry thinking about the dogfaces and rabid Mouth Demons. A hard shell was forming over him.

The Smokes would bring him more food and water as he needed it. His shoulders grew broad. You could have parked a car on top of them. Despite being enslaved, he didn't mind the physical transformation. He felt stronger, more confident in his ability to withstand misery. In time, he excavated six feet down into the pit. He could see the results of his work, and it pleased him.

He consumed almost the entirety of the library inside his tent. There was an ingredient missing from his recipe: a final component for his pickle jar. He read Mrs. Blackwell's reference book over and over, and scoured the library for related materials. He kept hoping he'd find another book written by her somewhere in the stacks—some companion volume that gave him the secret to the poison and a way of defeating the Smokes. But there was nothing. Many of the books were unfathomably dull: long treatises on peat moss, encyclopedias printed in Armenian, turgid histories of Olde England. A select few kept him rapt: old works by Chaucer and Ovid, the occasional Bible passage. Every book was a door; every page a new place to hide. He read Dante and began to wonder if he was truly in hell, and what he had done to deserve it. He used to curse and yell at his kids. One time he left a scratch on another car in a parking lot and drove off instead of leaving a note. He pleasured himself a lot. He had sex with an old flame in a time warp.

But those seemed like minor offenses. Mostly, his sins were within him, terrifying impulses that he had quashed at every turn over the course of his youth. His depression would lead to rage, and his rage would lead to fantasies of . . . well, Mrs. Blackwell had seen all of it in his journal now, hadn't she? The violence. The blood. What if God had seen all that as well? What if God
knew
? One night, the thought of it made Ben weep uncontrollably, and he sat up in his bed, with the Smokes' eyes on him, and began to apologize:

“I'm sorry, God. I'm so, so sorry for the things I've thought. I'm
sorry for the things I've done. I'm sorry for the hurt I've caused that I don't know I've caused. I'm sorry, Mom. I'm sorry, Teresa. I'm sorry, children. Please, please know that I'm sorry. Please forgive me.”

There was no reply from above.

“I SAID I WAS SORRY. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME? Didn't you hear me? Can't you see how sorry I am? What is WRONG with you? Get me out of here. GET ME OUT OF . . .”

The Smokes rushed over and snuffed his cries out. He passed out that night in a fog of soot.

Like any other prisoner, he found rituals and small moments to make the intolerable tolerable. He got better at drawing, remembering everything Teresa had mentioned to him about light and shadow. Contours and perspective. Every day he gazed out at the dead plain and took note of how the shadows crept along. He scratched drawings on the library floor. He took out many of the leather-bound volumes lining the stacks, and if the books bored him, he would draw right over the text. He summoned the picture of his family from his phone in his mind and painstakingly drew it again and again, the same image a hundred times over until it began to roughly resemble the real thing. He talked to the drawings and felt along the faces.

Sometimes at night, he would walk out into the serene desert breeze and even the presence of the Smokes couldn't ruin his view of the stars. They weren't normal stars at all. There was no Orion's Belt. There was no Big Dipper. He could make out all kinds of bizarre constellations that had nothing to do with basic astronomy: ampersands, topsails, a human foot. Someone had shaken the heavens and let the universe resettle above him. And of course, there were the two moons. Equal in size. Always full. Never waxing. Never waning.

One day, he finally struck bedrock and knew his foundation would soon be complete. He had unearthed ten feet of hard desert
spanning the acre, a gradual slope at the front allowing him to climb in and out of the hole. He celebrated with a sip of peach schnapps in the tent. A few days later, Voris flew above him and he saw the Smokes look skyward. Just for a minute or so.