Gahenna, Texas

Gahenna, Texas Section 1

1

Lance watched out of a large and decorative window.  The trim was adorned with little hand carved cherubs carrying throws of material through the heavens.  This material was wrapped around some of their waists and around the hands of others, but it flowed equally from one to the next from left to right and from top to bottom.  The detail that had been used in the creation of these little chubby heavenly bodies made them seem life like and the fact that they had been painted a satin white made them appear ghastly and out of place.
         Lance glanced around the room that he was standing in and found it to be barren, the sheetrock had been painted a soft green and trimmed in the same satin finish white as the window trim before him, but it was completely devoid of any signs of life.  Everything from the carpets to the textured ceiling seemed as though a man had never touched it, as all new houses do.  For some reason, Lance knew that he recognized this house at some level, but he couldn’t remember ever being in it before.  It was as though he were visiting a past life or something because it was as though his soul recognized the house but his eyes and mind did not.  He tried as hard as he could to remember something, anything, but he came up blank.
Lance returned his empty gaze to the window and starred out across the expanse of town.  Off in the distance was a plume of pine trees that looked to stretch for miles, creating an emerald green backdrop behind the houses that lie across the street.  He watched as the sun slowly set behind them, making them appear as though they had been set ablaze.  The air around them was brilliant red and orange and quivered as the heat from the baked earth beneath them rose skyward and cooled.  Shadows danced across the pale green walls of the room around him as the last flickers of daylight bounced from every shiny surface outside.  He seemed to be in a trance, as no thoughts churned in his head, he was completely at peace and relaxed, but there was one part of him that wasn’t in this trance-like state.  There was a part of him that he had never felt before, and that was his most primal brain.  The part of the brain that allowed cavemen to hunt, before evolving enough to create fire, the part that could sense the slightest change in ones environment, the animalistic part.  That part of him screamed.  It screamed with a nagging that there was something amiss; something that wasn’t completely right and that he was waiting for something or someone. 
Lance naturally focused on those feelings and before he knew that time had past; everything that had been ablaze in the evening sun was now bathed in a pale blue light.  A nearly full moon had raised high into the heavens.  Lance shifted his gaze from the ground to the sky and gazed at the glowing orb that hung majestically in the heavens.  He could not see that it was moving and he knew it to not be alive, but he felt it.  He felt it pull at something deep inside him, his very existence perhaps, but it also knew him.  He could hear it whisper his name as it shown its light down on Earth.
Lance’s trance was soon broken as he felt a wave of urgency rush over him.  A feeling that moved him both inside and out and he knew that their was something that he needed to do, only he had no memory of what that might be.  He couldn’t recall anything from the past, no memories, no hopes, no dreams, nothing.  Still looking out the window, but completely internalized, he searched his mind for any plans that he may have made, but he still drew a blank.  It was as if he were simply a shell of a man who sole purpose was to act on feelings and senses and hope that he ended up where he was supposed to go, but what was he supposed to do?
Puzzled, Lance turned from the window and walked out of this room and into the next.  The floors of this room were done in a brushed Italian tile, the walls were crafted of a light golden wood and then sealed with a high gloss varnish and Lance could still smell it, as though it had just been done.  The ceilings were set very high and a massive crystal chandelier hung from a thick black chain in the center. 
The moonlight that was shining through the window, set atop the double front doors and stretching all the way up to the ceiling, glistened and glittered in the teardrop shaped crystals that hung so elegantly from the fixture and cast a million sparkles across the walls and floor of the room. 
Turning to the left Lance saw two sets of stairs, one on the left hand side of the room and one on the right.  Both had exquisite hand carved dark wood banisters that curved upward to the second floor balcony.  The steps of these staircases were done in a matching dark wood, but the lower part of each step had been painted eggshell, giving them the appearance of being larger than they actually were.
Lance knew this to be the entry hall or the foyer and that it was intended to be a warm and inviting room, but he found it rather intimidating.  In this room he felt small and weak and being driven by the animal part of the brain every nerve he had told him to run, and run is what he did.  He trotted to the staircase on the left side of the room and grabbed the banister.  It was silky smooth and cool under his hand.  This is where he paused. 
He eyed the steps for a few moments, and then he gently set his right foot atop the first and listened as it groaned as he increased the weight on that foot and slowly began ascending the steps.  Very slowly and gently he climbed the first three steps, and then he jogged the rest of the way until he was on the landing of the second floor balcony and at eye level with the massive chandelier that he had been looking up at only minutes ago. 
The railing of the balcony was done the same as the banister, but that is where the similarities stopped.  Instead of tile or wood, the floors were done in an airy off white carpet that was thick enough to allow him to sink a bit.  He felt as though he was stepping on a cloud as he rocked back and forth, shifting his weight from one leg to the other and back again.  He noticed that downstairs he could have crossed the foyer from one room and into another on the other side; however, up here there was only one direction for him to go and that was left down a long, seemingly endless hallway.
The entry into the hallway was fairly common, crafted of painted sheetrock set at right angles to form a simple doorway or entryway.  Lance tried to peer down the hallway through the darkness, but he wasn’t able to make out much.  Still trying to see what was down there he inched a little closer, but couldn’t see any better.  The hallway obviously had no windows and the doors to the rooms that branched off of it were closed thereby blocking any light that might come through their windows.  Knowing that he had to go down this hallway, yet unsure of why, he walked slowly into the opening and into the darkness.
He stopped just inside the hallway an allowed his eyes to adjust, it was then that he noticed just how odd everything was.  The walls were straight, perfectly set at 90 degree angles, but the doors were all askew.  Each door leaned either to the left or right and they appeared to bulge outward as if they were under tremendous pressure from the inside.  Lance took another step further into the hallway and was startled as he watched the walls around him ripple as the water in a pond after a stone breaches its surfaces.  He froze in his tracks and waited for the rippling to stop, and then he stepped again and watched as the ripples began again.  He didn’t stop this time; he simply strode a bit faster until he reached the third door on the left.  He instinctively gravitated to this door and wrapped his large hot hand around the cool metal door knob, feeling a slight shock as his skin made contact with it.  He slowly turned the knob and listened as the metal latch that held the door closed slid out of its home in the door jam and into the door with a series of clicks and pings, and then the door was snatched free of his grasp, slamming inward with a force that caused his heart to skip a beat and him to jump back a bit.
Lance stepped up to the doorway and peered inside, and then he stepped in and looked around.  The parts of the house that Lance had been in thus far had seemed relatively normal, unlike this room.  This room was filled with vibrant colors, colors so bright that seemed to pulse with a life-force of their own.  The colors were so intense that even the air appeared to have color in here, but as Lance looked around the colors began to fade, slipping through the open doorway and into the hallway.  Very quickly the colors had completely faded out and Lance got his first look at the room in its normal state.  He had not noticed it before, but now with everything in proportion he saw that he was standing in his own bedroom.  How he was suddenly standing in his bedroom puzzled him as the rest of the house was so alien to him, but it was his, no question.
Lance stood motionless as he looked around, inspecting the furnishings of the room, but as he stood he got a chill that made the hair on his arms and legs stand on in and covered his tan body with goose bumps.  He looked down at himself and for the first time noticed that he was wearing nothing other than a pair of old grey boxer shorts.
“Why didn’t I notice that before?  I could have sworn that I was wearing clothes.”  Lance thought to himself as he looked down at his bare chest and legs.
He found no true memory to prove to himself that he had been clothed, so he shrugged his shoulders and walked over to his closet.  Inside of the closet sat a small chest of drawers that his father had left him when he passed away seven years prior.  The drawers were dented and dinged, what his wife liked to call distressed, and there were several spots on the top where the wood stain and varnish had eroded away after the numerous moves and the millions of items that had been set upon it.  It was anything but pretty, which is why Erica, Lance’s wife, had insisted I be placed in the closet.
Lance stopped dead.  “How did I know that?  I haven’t been able to remember or recall anything, but I can remember that discussion between Erica and me perfectly!  What the hell is going on here?”  He could hear his own voice screaming inside his head, but as rapidly as the memory had dawned on him, it vanished and he was once again left to react to senses and feelings.
Lance strode over to the small chest of drawers and pulled open the top drawer.  He reached inside and came out with a pair of paint spattered shorts and a pair of worn out socks, then he moved on to the bottom drawer and removed a tattered sleeveless T-shirt, and then he reached next to the chest and grabbed a pair of grass stained low top tennis shoes.  He walked back out into the bedroom and slipped the clothes on, sitting on the firm mattress of the bed to put on his shoes.  He sat there for just a moment, and then he jumped to his feet.  An overwhelming sense of urgency and danger washed over him, forcing him out of the room and back down the hallway to the up stairs balcony.  He looked over the side, hearing a noise that he was unable to describe and wondering if it was coming from downstairs, but what he saw left him breathless.  Nothing.  The foyer was gone, it had vanished into a sea of darkness as thick and as black as tar.  He walked over to the top of the steps and saw that there were a few of them visible, and though he was terrified, he stepped down onto the first of them.  He slowly descended the stairs and watched curiously as the sea of darkness receded with each step, revealing more and more of the foyer and the rooms leading off of it. 
Had he been in his right mind, he would have run back to his room and hide, but he felt as though a hand was pushing him forward, not allowing him to turn and run, he was a life size puppet, but who was pulling the strings?  He continued, unable to stop and returned to the window that he had first awoken at.  As he looked out he could see a mob of people marching down the middle of the street.  Every one of them had a fixed stare and walked with a huge sense of purpose.  They moved briskly and in perfect unison just as a precision, military trained drill team might.
As they neared he broke out in a sweat and his adrenaline level skyrocketed, causing his heart to beat harder and faster and making his respiration fast and shallow.  Fear and excitement overtook him and he turned and ran to the front door as two of the men in the group broke away and made their way up the front walk way.  He met them on the front porch and he knew that they intended him to follow them.  Not a word was spoken, he just looked into their eyes and saw the burning hatred that swelled within them, and then he felt that same rage begin intruding on his own mind.  His muscles tensed and he marched with the two men out to the street and joined the marching mob.
They marched through the neighborhood, past all of the cracked sidewalks and manicured lawns of the suburbs, a few of them breaking off occasionally and going off to this house and that and returning with more people, both men and women alike and they all had the same glare in their eyes; a murderous violent stare that would have stopped even the cruelest of men cold in their tracks and forced them to tuck tail and run.
Lance wasn’t sure of their destination, but he did know that he had to go there.  He knew that there was a war of some type brewing off in the distance and he knew that these men and women around him were the warriors of that battle, but who were they to be fighting?  Why were they fighting?  Where were they fighting?  Lance was able to pull all of these questions up in his mind, but the answers escaped him, as did their present location.  Nothing looked familiar to him as he looked around.  The further they marched, the more dilapidated the houses became and finally there were no houses, just over grown fields of brush and trees that twisted and tangled on themselves into giant walls of leaves and twigs.
The mob marched onward until the came to an open expanse of a field that had been plowed down and was only starting to grow grasses again.  Off in the distance Lance could see a large line of trees that were backlit by an orange glow like one that would be put off by a large fire.  The air over here was thick and heavy and reeked of rotten flesh and shit.  The stench that wafted up with each step brought tears to his eyes and he could hear several of the members of the mob coughing as the breathed in the same noxious air.  The temperature had been almost cool as they marched from his house, but it was now warm and humid, no birds drifted through the air, no bugs were buzzing about their heads, there was just stagnant, dead air. 
The mob came to a stop.  Lance looked at the people that surrounded him and saw that while they had been empty handed when they arrived at his house, they now had weapons; shotguns, knives, clubs, and torches, as well as numerous other items that Lance wasn’t familiar with but knew to be weapons of some sort.  The determined and driven looks that had been in the faces of those around him had been replaced with rage and blood lust.  The tiny muscles that lie just beneath the skin of their reddening faces had tensed, causing their faces to contort, wrinkling their brows and giving them the appearance of beasts.  Lance knew that the battle was upon them, but who were they to fight and why?  He was certain that at some point he knew the answer to this question, but now he was drawing a blank.
After only a minute or two the mob was on the move again, only this time they did not march as they had before.  They had fanned out all over the field and had dropped their once tall stances to a crouch and some of them a crawling posture.  They moved slow and silent through the low lying brush that seemed to grow around them as the moved and those of them that had not worn long pants felt the sting of nature as the tiny limbs covered with merciless thorns tore their flesh allowing small trickles of thick crimson blood to roll down to their feet.  Soon they reached the outer most reaches of the mass of trees and they were forced to negotiate low lying limbs and heavier underbrush.  Waves of heat rolled through the stagnant air along with the faint smell of sulfur and a faint moaning sound became audible. 
The moaning sound forced a memory into Lance’s head.  He saw himself sitting in a church pew as a boy, next to his now late Father, and watching as alter boys carried candles and crosses to the front of the church.  From behind him he heard the low humdrum chanting of the priests and deacons that were holding Sunday mass as they walked ceremoniously down the isle. 
A pounding voice boomed in Lance’s head and he was yanked out of this all consuming memory and back to the tree line that the mob had stopped in.  They were all kneeling here and there, looking intently through the trees ahead of them.  Lance wasn’t sure what the other could see, but he wasn’t able to see anything except more trees and branches and thorny bushes that were waiting, hungry for more blood, for them to walk through their clutches.
The mob was on the move again, negotiating the limbs and bushes, careful to not make a sound and keeping themselves as low to the ground as possible.  As they neared the other side of the tree line Lance saw that the grasses and bushes stopped and that a sand bank began, leading to the babbling waters of a river.  The moonlight reflected off of its rippling surface in flashes of blue and silver, barely visible through the glow from the raging fire that burned to Lance’s left.  He looked in the direction of the glow and heat only to see that there was no fire.  The source of the orange glow and intense heat was nowhere to be found.  Lance stared in disbelief for what seemed to be hours, but then he was left temporarily blinded and deafened by a loud crack that shattered the silence of the night and a flash of light that could only be compared to a flash of lightening shooting up directly in front of you.
Slowly Lance’s hearing started coming back to him and he could hear the agonizing cries of men and women all around him along with the sounds of breaking bone and slicing flesh.  His nostrils were filled with the stench of death and he knew that though he was unable to see what was going around him that the people that he had come here with were being slaughtered.  But who was doing the slaughtering?  He closed his eyes tightly and clapped his hands over his ears in an attempt to block out the horrid symphony of death that played on the night air, but it didn’t help, he could still hear and when he opened his eyes his vision had returned to him.  What he saw was terrifying.  He found himself face to face with a figure built like a man, but not a man.  This beast’s eyes burned from within, glowing a horrifying red.  Its breath was rancid and hot as it washed over Lance’s face.  The beast’s skin was burnt and stretched and scarred leaving it darkened and shiny in the light of the moon and the glow of whatever.
Lance jumped backwards away from this hideous creature, but was stopped by something behind him.  He felt two steely hands wrap around his large biceps and he was then being drug from his hiding place in the trees and out into the open of the sand bank.  He fought ferociously against whatever had a hold of his arms, but it did no good, whatever had him was stronger than anything he had ever known and it didn’t budge or loosen its grip.  As Lance fought and flailed he saw the broken and dismembered bodies of the remainder of the mob lying on blood soaked earth all around him.  Some of the bodies were still oozing blood from their wounds and a few were still twitching in that awful rhythm created by the onset of painful a death and Lance winced at the sight.  For the first time since awakening in this strange place he was afraid.
As Lance struggled he felt something else lock onto his legs just above the ankle and he was quickly hoisted into the air, shifted to the left, and then slammed down on a cold hard surface.  His skull bounced off of it and his ears began ringing from the impact.  He had the breath knocked out of him and he twitched and wheezed as he struggled for the smallest gulp of stale air and slowly he felt it trickle into his lungs.  He heard a rustling behind where he was now laying as the beast that he had just been face to face with stepped closer and leaned over him.  He looked with horror at this hideous creature as he felt his shirt ripped open, leaving his heaving chest bare.  Off to his right he saw a faint silvery flash and when he whipped his head in that direction he was met with a slap that almost knocked him out.  His head was turned back to the sky and he lay there awaiting his fate.  He watched as the beast at his head raised a dagger the size of a kitchen knife high into the air, moonlight glancing off of the razor sharp edge of its blade and plunged it downward, hilt deep into Lance’s heaving chest.  He felt the coldness of the steel along with a searing pain as the blade sliced through his skin and bone like warm butter…
Lance sat bolt upright in bed dripping with sweat with Erica holding his arm shaking him violently.
“Lance!  Wake up!”  She hollered.  “Wake Up!”
Lance grabbed at his chest as he kicked the covers back and skated out of bed gasping for air.  “What the hell!”  He shouted as he moved back towards the bed.
“Jesus Lance.  What in the hell was that all about?”
“I don’t know, I had one hell of a nightmare though.”
“I guess so.  Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just a little shaken up, that’s all.” He said as he lay back down.
His hot skin touched the wet cold sheets of the bed where he had been thrashing about and sweating heavily during the nightmare and he sat back up.
“What’s wrong now?”  Erica asked.  She was clearly frustrated.
“The damn sheets are cold as ice.  I need to change them.”
“Uh-uh.  Not gonna happen.”  Erica answered.  “You just woke me up screaming and flipping around like a maniac and as much as I love you, I am not going to get up at two-thirty in the morning and wait while you change the sheets.  Sorry.”
“Well, how am I supposed to sleep on wet sheets?
“Throw a few towels down and lay on them.  We will change the sheets in the morning.”  She answered.
Lance went to the hallway closet and returned with a couple of large beach towels.  He spread them out over the wet sheets and climbed back into bed.  The feel of the rough towels against his skin made him itch a little, but he knew that was as good as it was going to get until morning.  He tried his best to get comfortable and his gaze fell upon his now slumbering wife, Erica.  He forgot all about his nightmare and the rough feeling of the towels as he allowed his mind to drift back in time.  He looked at Erica’s soft tan skin and the way that the pink satin nightgown she was wearing looked draped over her side.  She looked better to him now than she had the day that they had met.


Collin K. McKnight
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www.http://writing.com/authors/collinmcknight