Hell Within -- Chapter Four: The Children -- Scenes 8&9

-8-

The next morning, Ben located the library.

It was situated on the third floor more or less above the church auditorium. And like all the other levels of the house, the third floor was totally different than the others.

The main hallway ran the length of the exterior walls so that the arched windows at the front of the house bathed the rich maple walls in sunlight. And just in case there was no sunlight, single open-bulb light fixtures of the variety one might find in a house built minutes after Thomas Edison invented a successful light bulb, hung from the fat beams on the ceiling.

The design of the interior coupled with the brass compasses on the walls gave it a nautical 1890s look. Ben found this ambiance much easier to be in than the dark-and-dreary first floor, the come-to-Jesus second, and the coats-and-ties fifth.

He walked around the main hallway twice before turning down the dark middle hallway.

The library was a work of art. It was a square room capped off by a circular dome decorated in tiny blue tiles. Ben had never seen anything like it.

And the room was filled with rows upon rows of bookshelves full of anything from first edition classics to paperback romances.

The most interesting aspect of the library was the four easels set up just inside the double-door foyer. Ben studied drawings on each extensively starting on the right and working his way left.

The first was a charcoal rendering of what must have once been his house, but it looked nothing like a house at all. There were no windows on the front façade. It was just a solid wall of stone, and the bell towers had no bells in them. The cone shaped roofs capping them were nonexistent -- only embrasures lined the tops of the towers.

There was no fifth floor.

The four door entryway had no door at all. It looked like a thick,
wooden gate.

It was just a fort.

He stepped over to the next easel holding another charcoal drawing. The house still had no windows, but the towers were now bell towers instead of watch towers complete with the black, cone rooftops. The wooden gate on the front had been replaced with the four door entryway that Ben knew, and two new wings had been added each attached to the side of a bell tower. In the lower left hand corner of the drawing the artist had scrawled the numbers 1867.

The next easel held an oil painting. In this portrayal, the house had its arched windows in the front façade and four floors above a newly-built porch, but the fifth floor did not yet cover the embrasures at the top of the main body of the house. The date on the lower left-hand corner read 1893.

The final portrait was another oil painting of the house, and this depiction portrayed the house as Ben knew it. It had five floors with the fifth being the roof, and it also included a rather spectacular flower garden in the front lawn. The date on this portrait was 1924.

Ben stared completely engrossed. So taken aback was he by the long evolution of the house that had become his home that he did not notice when the lights in the room dimmed to a dark, guilded glow and the temperature dropped so sharply that his breath turned to vapor.

It was the smells.

The room became full of them.

A maddening bouquet of mingled fragrances all of them half-remembered and evoking empty memories, and then he caught movement from the corner of his eye.

He looked up sharply and gasped.

The shelves and books were all gone, and the room was filled
with scores of souls -- all bearing the marks of their final misfortune.

And their mouths all worked screaming silent warnings -- their voices lost like the memories of their lives.

His eyes first landed on the doctor he’d seen in the operating room. There was no color to his face his skin was gray and his eyes blue. The only color on him was that about the cuffs of his white lab coat -- brown. Dried blood resulting from the long, straight gashes in his wrists.

Next he saw the preacher who’d ripped the pornographic drawing from the hands of the child in the church auditorium. His palms were turned up to the sky, and he seemed to be screaming at Ben -- preaching. And in the center of each palm was a quarter of an inch bloody hole where the spikes had been nailed through his hands as he was crucified on the cross above the altar. And his entrails were held in his ruined abdomen by a thick rope.

The boy in the closet, now a man. His head flattened where a blunt object has collapsed his skull.

A wild-looking white man dressed like an Indian with a heavy spear sticking through him through his groin and out his neck.

Hundreds of them -- all with unique wounds.

"What is this?" Ben said.

The crowd parted, and the many scents in the room gave way to the smell of White Shoulders.

And his mother stepped between them, not as he’d seen her before, but half her face was missing. What was left of her hair whipped and cracked in the air as if full of static.

She stopped just short of him and eyed him with her own remaining eye.

Ben shrank from her.

"These are the children. We’re all trapped here in this house. The house is Him. It hates us."

"Who?" he said.

She half-smiled with her ruined mouth. "You know. He is the father, and he has trapped us here inside his insanity. Using us to grow his house around him -- built to repel heavy attack, but grown into this monster."

She motioned back toward the crowd behind her. "Look at them. Each of them have died untimely at His hand. You must break the chain or become one of them."

-9-

Ben’s mind still reeled with the images he’d seen in the library as he stepped off the staircase into the fifth floor.

But he noticed the uneasiness immediately. It was cold, so cold that he shivered, and he felt as though someone was watching him.

He looked left and right down the rose colored hallway.

Nothing.

Just as he was about to write it off as paranoia, a gentle breath of air swooshed past him from left to right. It was almost as if someone had run past him.

And in the icy wake of the breeze a scent lingered -- an aroma that caused his heart to skip a beat. White Shoulders, and its scent had aroused the same empty emotions.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood.

A few feet down the hallway and on the opposite wall a door swung open and slammed shut.

Ben stared at it for a long moment -- his heart pounding.

He crept toward it, rolling his steps so he wouldn’t be heard. When he reached the door, he stretched out his hand, touched the brass knob and recoiled.

The knob was so cold that the mere touch of it caused his hand to throb.

He un-tucked his shirt, covered his hand with it, turned the knob, and pushed it open, the hinges -- rusty from years of disuse -- protesting noisily.

The winter sun poured in through an undressed window casting a yellow glow on the parchment colored walls and adding to the dingy look of the dust sheets covering all the furniture in the room. And a musty smell clung to every crevice -- a smell that reminded Ben of old books exposed to low levels of moisture and then dried by sunlight.

He stepped inside. The age-dried wood of the floor cracked and creaked under him. He walked around a covered object that must have been a large, table, and stood before a veiled rectangle that stood directly before a window.

He slipped the sheet off. His mother's easel -- shrouded in cobwebs -- grinned back at him.

Exactly as it had been in his dream.

With a kind of ardor that an onlooker might have mistaken for fury, he ripped the rest of the dustsheets off the furniture, and when he finished, his mother's art studio was unveiled.

Naked.

And detail for detail exactly the same as his dream depicted.

And lying in the right corner of the room -- near some of the paintings stacked up against the wall, was a thick-bristled paintbrush with a paint-speckled green handle -- simply lying on the floor as if its displeased user had tossed it aside.

The same brush that his mother had pressed to her lips while examining the painting that still sat on the easel.

A painting of a pale baby lying in a cradle with a ghostly mist hovering above it.

Then all of the heat in the room evaporated. It was suddenly so cold that steam rose from Ben’s mouth as he breathed, and the smell of White Shoulders filled the room -- such a strong odor that his head throbbed.

And he felt eyes burning through the back of his neck.

He turned around.

His mother stared back at him as if confused.

He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came.

She stretched out her hand and pointed to the table in the center of the room -- a table cluttered with Gerber Jars full of dried paint and old tackle boxes full of brushes.

"Don’t look at the flame," she said.

Ben followed the aim of her finger to a drawer in the side of the table, and then he looked at her again.

"What?"

But before she could answer, she disintegrated.

Ben stared blankly at the empty space for a moment where his mother had been with his knees trembling.

"What the fuck is going on?"

Only silence answered, and after a moment, heat began to seep back in the room, and the smell of his mother’s perfume cleared. He stepped over to the table and yanked the drawer open.

And the only items within -- some age-yellowed stationary, an assortment of fountain pens, and an un-mailed, stamped envelope addressed to a Dr. Paul Ambrose.

Ben tore the corner off the envelope and pulled the pages of stationary out from within.

Dear Dr. Ambrose,

Why does everyone, including you, have to believe that I’m crazy? The things I see around this house are real. The rape that provided me with my son most certainly happened. There is nothing wrong with me.

Something terrible happened when this house was new -- a thing so awful that it bound its architect here for eternity. To stay here is to live inside his mind, and he was an abomination. He killed my father and my father’s father, and he grows more powerful with each day. I feel him swelling in the house -- growing in fear and hate. He wants to steal my body and eat my soul.

Every time I hold my son, I think of the evil that created him and the terror that will become him. I want to love him, but I know what he is.

I’ve stopped taking the cocktail of pills you prescribed. There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s this place -- this living darkness, and no one can see it but me. And unless you come to your senses and decide to address what’s really wrong, I’m going to stop seeing you as well.

Jamie Eaton.

(Coming Soon: Chapter Five: The Humanist)