No Word in Death's Favor (Part I)
The Boy finally had enough of his misery and went looking for Satisfaction. Henceforth, he was no longer The Boy but became The Runaway. If only he knew what horrors lay ahead of him.
Sometimes, I manage to write stories even I - the writer - don’t fully understand. This is one of them. I sat down to write one day over a year ago at my in-laws’ lake house, and this is what came out. I could, if I were pressed, make some attempt at interpreting it, but the story is ultimately a mystery to me, as it was a mystery while I was writing it. Thus, I won’t say much more about it other than that I have written a handful of stories that can rightfully be categorized as ‘horror,’ and this one is the most horrific. You’ve been warned.
Like A Summer in Nowhere, this is a long one. That being said, I have decided to publish it in three parts as well, although, at this time, I will not make any of those parts exclusive to paid subscribers. It will be here for everyone to enjoy. So, enjoy it, if you dare to.
“Say not a word in death's favor; I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.”
- Achilles, Homer's ‘Odyssey’
Two weeks. Two weeks of illness, and the Boy finally had enough of the last sixteen years. Sixteen years of neglect and isolation, living on SPAM and Wonder Bread and Little Debbie’s, of dwelling in trailer parks and then the projects, and smelling like sour hair and armpits and the cigarettes his Poor Momma smoked in the evenings before her second shift. Sixteen years of humiliation and ridicule, not for his poverty (for just about everyone he ever knew was impoverished), but for his apparent stupidity and his hick accent and for being the only white boy in an inner-city school. Sixteen years of dissatisfaction, going on seventeen, and all culminating in a two-week-long fever that passed by like the reveries of a psychopath, paranoid nightmares of half-awake, half-asleep, bedridden restlessness, tossing and turning in his own filth and sweat and loose, tangled bedsheets strewn about a lumpy, twin mattress that smelled like feet and slightly of urine.
And, at the end of those two weeks, The Boy woke up and rolled out of bed with orange hairs on his chin, static in his wild hair, and dirt under his fingernails, and he decided he wanted something different for himself. He wanted no longer to live in perpetual dissatisfaction, but to (for once, just once) be satisfied. And so, The Boy left.
He did not have to lie or sneak, for his whereabouts mattered to no one, not even his Poor Momma, whose life was an endless struggle for survival, waiting tables and cleaning grimy gas-station toilets and constantly battling with herself for deciding to quit dancing half-naked for sad, degenerate, middle-aged men. Not even that Poor Momma, who had nothing and who never would, whose dwindling deposits of hope were continuously spent on new companions who never failed to leave her sadder than before she met them, just as The Boy's father had done when she was only eighteen. Not even her. The Boy, it seemed, was the only one aware of his own existence. All he had to do was get up and go. All he had to do was leave, wander out away from the projects and into the streets, alone as he had always been.
And thus, following his dreadful illness that had kept him idle for fourteen days straight, thinking not a single clear thought and wanting nothing but to experience what he knew others called joy, success, happiness, and satisfaction, The Boy left and, in that movement, ceased to be The Boy and became The Runaway.
Like before, he existed only to himself, had nothing: no friends, no skills, no possessions but the grease-stained cargo shorts around his waist and the XL Bassmaster t-shirt on his back, no money but the forty bucks his Poor Momma left on her dresser next to her ashtray, which The Runaway stole with no remorse as he walked out of the front door, not to be forgotten but having never been remembered, never known. Only now that he was no longer The Boy and had become The Runaway, he had a reason to live. No longer did he live simply because he'd been born against his will, dwelling exclusively in ambiguity as to avoid abstracting any question about the meaning of life. Now, he lived to have what he did not have, what he had never had: the experience of satisfaction. When he was The Boy, he had nothing and meant nothing and existed for the same. Now that he was The Runaway, he still had nothing and meant nothing, but existed for something. And that something is what drew him out of the door and into the old ruins of the New South, the steamy concrete urban Alabama inferno, dissected by six-lane overpasses and polluted by blight and painted over by rust and weeds and cracks and graffiti.
And it was this something, informed by a faint memory of an overheard conversation between two classmates, that led him to The Underground, where he'd heard (through words unintended for his ears) that the very Satisfaction which he desired could be bought at a price.
Thus, The Runaway, only hours after ceasing to become The Boy, entered The Underground through the mouth of the sewer system under the bypass and there found The Guide, Virgilio, a Mohawked Guatemalan with a teardrop tattoo, waiting in wet, rotten, broiling shadows behind the red eye of a cigarette and the dim yellowed glow of an old dying flashlight. Virgilio was waiting for The Runaway, for that's where runaways went. All of them, from all corners of that deteriorating city, once rich for its minerals, now dying from its divisions, and even from the monied suburbs over the mountain where rich runaways with hollow souls came wandering into the place abandoned by their father's fathers looking for the only thing they didn't have and could not have in their material paradise. Virgilio could not have waited for any Runaway in particular, and especially not this Runaway, for this Runaway was known to no one but himself and could not be anticipated, for he could not be remembered enough to anticipate.
But The Runaway, though unanticipated and uninvited, was a Runaway at last, and Virgilio saw The Runaway for what he was, even in the dim, flashlighted sewer. He looked through the darkness of that smelly concrete chasm and into the darkness of The Runaway's heart, which was as empty as his stomach. He saw him for what he was and knew immediately why he came and what he was looking for. And he saw his Poor Momma's forty dollars also as forty dollars, and knew what he must do, that he must do what he was in the underground to do, which was to lead Runaways away from where they were coming from and toward where they were going, to lead them to Satisfaction.
"What's Satisfaction like?" asked The Runaway in the same cockneyed Southern drawl he spoke in as The Boy, that same trailer-park dialect that made his "what" sound like "wut" and his "tion" sound like "shin" and his "ike" like "achk."
And Virgilio, silent until that moment, without turning to face the specimen of white trash that slugged behind him, uttered a small batch of English words (which he hardly understood). "I dunno. Never had. Only here for the money."
After that, The Runaway merely followed through the cloud of trash-scented cigarette smoke that Virgilio left behind him with every stride, walked through the smoke and the stench and the raw and unabated ugliness, deeper and deeper into the sewer, into The Underground. All to be seen was Virgilio's flashlight shining into an endless tunnel and all to be heard was the sound of feet splashing and the constant, ambient dripping of water leaking drop by drop from the ceiling and into the slow-moving stream running over the chasm floor like the River Styx carrying lost souls into Hades.
The deeper The Guide led and The Runaway wandered, the stench and the heat thickened, growing more and more suffocating as if the very air The Runaway pulled into his lungs condensed before him into dirty water. This was made worse by the shortness of breath still lingering from his illness, from which he was perhaps not fully recovered. And Virgilio seemed not to mind, as if he had no need to breathe because he was not really alive, and The Runaway had no choice but to endure as he had endured since the day he had exited The Poor Momma's womb, except now he was enduring not for nothing but for Something: for Satisfaction. And so, though he felt like he was drowning, he continued behind the Guide further into the depths.
At times, light beamed down into the chasms, sunlight letting through metal grates onto the streets above. Each time, the light caught the smoke left behind by The Guide and momentarily allowed The Runaway to lay eyes on Virgilio’s bare back. The Guide's back was decorated by an array of colorful tattoos, the most central and eye-catching being a red and contorted face with a horned forehead and screeching mouth full of sharpened teeth. And the light only served to show him the devil (or something similar: a demon, perhaps) staring back at him with iris-less eyes, tortured eternally by some unrevealed pain, pain unimaginable even to The Runaway, to whom pain was the only thing he'd ever known. The pain of poverty. The pain of humiliation. Worse, the pain of having nothing and wanting Something. This inked monster’s face showed a pain beyond that. It showed a pure and raw and perfect torture, untarnished by any morsel of bliss or even numbness as to permit the tortured soul to forget, even momentarily, about his torture. Thus, when he saw light descending in the distance, The Runaway tried not to look, but through the next light, he saw something he could not help but see.
What he saw was a figure, lean and tall. A figure dragging its big feet at the end of long twiglike legs through the sludge in the direction opposite to that of Virgilio and himself. As the figure emerged from the shadows and entered the light, The Runaway recognized him as a priest - The Priest - a priest with skin about as black as his shirt. The only white parts about him were his collar and his teeth and the whites of his eyes, from which tears seeped and poured down his cheeks and dripped into the little river underneath his feet. And his palms were facing up to the heavens, which were somewhere far away above the concrete and asphalt and earth. And his hands, palms included, were dripping with wet blood. Virgilio failed to acknowledge him as he passed as if The Priest was merely an apparition, an illusion seen and believed only by The Runaway. And The Priest, with his bloody hands, seized The Runaway by the shoulders when he passed him and shook him back and forth.
"Go home!" he cried. "Turn around and go home!"
The Runaway had seen The Priest before. But The Priest did not recognize The Runaway, for The Runaway was unrecognizable. This, however, was the same priest who visited his Poor Momma when The Runaway was The Boy and The Poor Momma's friend Calamida came to tell her that her second husband (the one who had brought them to the city) had overdosed in a motel room. And that same priest now shook him and cried, the light from above reflecting off his tear-dampened, mad black cheeks.
"You don't want this, son! You don't want it! It's not what you think!"
Virgilio continued walking unfazed, leaving The Runaway further and further behind.
"Look! Look!" The crying black priest stretched his long, blood-drenched index finger out in the direction from which The Runaway had come. "That way, there is light. It is far away, but it’s there. And you can still see it if you look closely." Then, pointing in the other direction, where Virgilio was disappearing into the shadows: "That way, there is only darkness. Darkness is all you will find. I'm warning you, son. Go home. Go home."
But The Runaway feared being left behind. He wriggled himself free from the grasp of The Priest, lubricated with blood, and sprinted after Virgilio until he could once again smell the lingering smoke and see the dim yellow flashlight shine on the dirty concrete walls of the sewer. He never looked back. He had nothing to look back to. His home was nothing. He was what he was: a Runaway, no longer a Boy, no longer a person, but a Runaway, running away from nothing and toward Something, toward Satisfaction, whatever that was. And that was the last time he saw The Priest, but it was not the last time The Priest saw The Runaway.
The Runaway caught up to The Guide as he passed abruptly through the next beam of light. He caught up, then slowed his jog to a steady walk and looked that Inked Devil - that tortured soul-torn spirit with contoured cheekbones and pointed fangs and veins protruding from its temple - in the face once more just before it descended into darkness again as it always did, passing through the light only in the small number of seconds it took for Virgilio to take two paces forward, two paces deeper into the darkness, into The Underground. The Runaway faced it each time for all six or seven seconds, then passed through the light himself and felt the dense, warm air on his back grow warmer.
L.W. Blakely is a writer in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of The Wayfarer, a newsletter where he publishes literary fiction, criticism, and musings. Learn more about L.W. and The Wayfarer on the About page, or (if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read) consider subscribing and sharing his work.