“If there’s one thing you can say about mankind,
There’s nothing kind about man;
You can drive out nature with a pitchfork
But it always comes roaring back again…”
-Tom Waits, ‘Misery Is The River Of The World’

WHERE THE WILD ROSES GROW

By Meriades Rai

October 31st – The Last Day

Viewers should be warned that the following report contains themes and images of a disturbing nature.

You must have heard those words or their equivalent a hundred times, right? I know I have. It started off as a simple disclaimer as television executives sweated over the legal implications of anything they wanted to broadcast – after all, one couldn’t have Hayseed Joe Public settling down to dinner in his trailer only to find himself watching baby seals being illegally slaughtered for their fur, causing him to choke to death on his varmint and sweetcorn. Much easier to ignore these things when one isn’t presented with the gruesome truth, after all.

These days, no-one is really shocked by anything any more. You still get that same legal stipulation, but now it’s designed to stoke up some interest in what would otherwise be just another dull sensation-fest in a schedule already clogged to the brim with lowest-common-denominator trash. I’m not talking important news, of course, like fur-trappers or civil wars in Rwanda, I’m talking monosyllabic crudwits swearing and drinking and voting each other out on the latest reality show. Can I raise my hand and suggest that what most offends me here is the way television networks are spending billions of dollars in an attempt to turn my brain to soup? Can I?

The thing is, people have become desensitised. We all have. You can blame it on computer games or movies or warmongering politicians and their blatant disregard for international conventions of decency, or whatever you want. The fact is, violence and degradation is more acceptable – and therefore more commonplace in the public domain – than it ever used to be.

It doesn’t make it right. You’d be surprised how many people don’t realise that. But it also doesn’t mean that the pain and suffering hasn’t always been there. It’s just that it used to be practised in secret, hidden away from prying eyes. Once, when people were warned about what was to come, they simply switched sides and pretended it wasn’t happening. Now they turn up the sound and settle back with a carton of popcorn and a beer. Same difference. I’m hard-pressed to decide what’s worse.

The young girl, Eve – the girl from the House of Roses, the girl from my dreams – had spent a lifetime waiting for someone like me to come along and rescue her. She believed that I wasn’t someone who was simply going to turn away, or indulge in her misery. She believed that I would act. And she was right.

That day at the hospital, I let the Ghost Rider loose…

…but I wasn’t prepared for the Hell that would follow.

October 23rd – The Fourth Day

I shouldn’t be able to walk. I’m broken. I need medical attention. How incongruous, then, that I should be dragging my shattered body out of the hospital where I was attacked. You just have to love life and all its little ironies.

The sky over Franklin, Virginia is an easy blue daubed with cotton clouds. It could be summer, but it’s not. There’s a chill in the air, and the trees that line the hospital car lot are shedding a lake of gold and crimson. All it will take for winter to rouse itself is a harsher wind and a stain of slate grey overhead, and it’ll set in quicker than anyone expects. I pass a scarecrow in the foyer, a crooked figure in a nurse’s smock with a pumpkin for a head. The effigy’s hair is a thatch of straw and wool. Its eyes and mouth have been carved deep into rubbery orange flesh, and someone has used a child’s red sock for a tongue. It’s the most malevolent scarecrow I’ve ever seen. You know winter’s coming when Hallowe’en draws close, and you know you’re in a town like Franklin when the festival scarecrows grin and loom and stare into your eyes like they’re hungry.

I half-crawl, half-stumble towards the midnight and chrome motorcycle parked up in the corner of the lot. The pain in my chest and head is excruciating, and I’m leaving a thin trail of blood behind me. If it wasn’t for the creature inside, working my limbs like a marionette, I couldn’t have made it this far. Even so, as his voice urges me to run my trembling hands over metal that feels icy to the touch, and to slot home the arcane key of whittled bone that will trigger what is to come, I hesitate.

“YOU ARE STRONG, GIRL,” the voice of Zarathos echoes in my brain. “FEW CAN RESIST ME IN SUCH POOR PHYSICAL CONDITION, AS YOU NOW ATTEMPT TO DO.”

I grit my teeth against the pain, and breathe deep. “I still want answers. Johnny’s in no state to give them to me. That leaves you.”

“NOW IS NOT THE TIME.”

“Yeah, no kidding. But I want you to know something.” I narrow my eyes to slits. “After this is done – after we’ve saved Eve from whoever it is who’s taken her – you will tell me what I want to know. Everything. Else I’ll ride us straight over the edge of the sheerest ravine I can find, and we’ll fall so far that no-one will ever find us. Understand?”

The voice laughs softly, the scraping of rusted nails on bone. “I HAVE FALLEN FURTHER THAN YOU COULD EVER IMAGINE, GIRL. BUT, FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH… I SHALL ACCEDE TO YOUR REQUEST.”

I grimace. Well, that was easy enough. Maybe I should have asked for money and a pony. Not that I trust a parasitic demon to be telling the truth, of course.

I push the key into the ignition, and I’m immediately consumed by the flames of Hell.

The House of Roses is located eight miles southwest of Franklin, up in the woodland hills. It’s a solitary place, seemingly unconnected to any town. It’s situated at the end of a winding side-road, three junctions distant from the nearest highway, and a mile past a sign that designates everything beyond as private property. It’s somewhere you couldn’t just stumble across by accident. The trees on either side of the road are thick and tall, with an overhanging canopy that casts a tunnel of hazy shadow. The ground is covered in dead leaves. These burst into flame as we – I – pass through on wheels of fire, the roar of an unholy engine and a trail of crackling smoke in my wake.

I am the Ghost Rider now. We share this body, he and I – my body still, in a sense, although transformed now into something other. I’m clad in black leathers, as tight as a second skin, beaded with metal studs and loops of scorched chains; my legs are sheathed in heavy boots to the knee, my hands enclosed in black gauntlets with a crest of silver spikes across the knuckle. And the flesh on my face, and my hair and lips and eyes, have all melted away to leave a gleaming skull, consumed by a whorl of gold and crimson Hellfire. I have endured my second metamorphosis. It hurt every bit as much as the first.

I’m able to track Eve by her spiritual essence, known to me because I touched her skin – and experienced the turmoil of her soul – back in the hospital. Yeah, you heard. Spiritual essence. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a pragmatist who’s always scorned anyone who believes in auras or mysticism. You can’t imagine how much it galls me that I currently have no choice but to embrace this garbage. But there you go. Life’s a bitch, right? A big, ghostly, hippy bitch with an Ouija board and wildflowers in her hair. The fact that this supernatural mumbo-jumbo leads me straight to a pair of fifteen-foot high, wrought iron gates secured with chains and padlocks just makes it all the more annoying.

I climb slowly from the bike and step clear of its wheels of raging flame. I stare through the gates at what lies beyond – a mansion, huge and black and daunting against an innocuous, blue sky, flanked by two wide expanses of lawn trimmed with rose bushes. There must be close to a hundred such bushes, all devoid of flowers this late in the year and now merely a tangle of briar. A pale sun glitters on clusters of thorns as it would on spools of barbed wire.

No birds sing in the garden. There is silence all about me.

“THIS EDIFICE IS A FOUNT OF EVIL.”

Yeah, you think? I’d roll my eyes, if I had any. I can feel Zarathos pushing at the limits of my brain in frustration, urging me forward. He can speak through me, but my movements are largely my own. It’s a bizarre sensation. Suddenly I have a whole lot more sympathy for those suffering from multiple personality disorders.

I close my gloved fists about the lengths of chain looped through the bars of the gate and pull. The links strain, but hold firm. At first. I exert more pressure, channelling a ripple of Hellfire through my fingers, then twisting the heated metal until it cracks and splinters. I’m strong. Strong enough to break steel. Damn. I wonder what else I can do?

“YOU’LL FIND OUT SOON ENOUGH.”

I flinch. I really wish he wouldn’t intrude on my thoughts like that.

I discard the shattered threads of chain and push back the gates. I have no idea how long I was drifting in and out of consciousness on the floor of Eve’s hospital room, but the thugs who brutalised me – and who then stole Eve away as I was lying there in my own blood – can’t have been that far ahead. They would have passed through these gates themselves just a short while ago. I can taste the residue of petrol fumes in the air, edged with Eve’s fear. Her misery. Without doubt, I’ll find her somewhere in the mansion. I climb back onto the bike, ready to ride on, but almost immediately I hear the sound of danger approaching.

Dogs, barking. Snarling. Teeth bared. Dobermans, six of them, black as pitch and eyes glowing a luminescent red where they reflect the halo of flame about my head. They come from nowhere and they’re on me before I can react. Powerful jaws lock about my forearm, my lower leg. Eager fangs sink into my hip, ripping through the leather and gouging at the bone beneath. There’s no flesh to tear, no blood to spill. Just leather, bone… and Hellfire.

The animals shriek and rear back, one after another, sulphuric black smoke curling from their snapping muzzles. Their eyes blaze as they shake their heads from side to side. One is badly injured, whimpering pitifully, its face smouldering. The others regard me with fear and hate, and ready themselves for another assault. They won’t get the chance.

I reluctantly unsheathe my Desert Eagle from the holster about my waist and take aim. I love animals, a lot more than people. It appals me that I have no choice but to do this. I pull the trigger and a gout of Hellfire erupts from the barrel of the gun, consuming the nearest hound. It staggers back with a hideous, unholy shriek, back arching and legs spasming. The air all around me is suddenly rich with the broiling of flesh and fur. The dog falls. I’m sickened. But I turn my attentions to the next one and fire again, and again. Over and over, until they’re all dead. Then I pivot on the rear wheel of the motorcycle and propel myself forward, in the direction of the mansion, lost in a mist of rage. I leave six smoking corpses behind me. Their sorrowful screams still ring inside my head, like the peal of plague bells. Someone will pay for this atrocity.

The Houses of Roses stands silent and forbidding beneath a bright afternoon sky, its dark wood façade untouched by the gentle sunlight. A battered blue van is parked up outside what appears to be the main entrance, a pair of double doors at the cusp of a wide flight of stone steps. The doors are polished oak. The knockers are brass. It’s obvious to me that the van, now abandoned, was the vehicle used to ferry Eve here from the hospital in Franklin. Her essence is powerful here.

This is a grand old building, but I’m not inclined to stand on ceremony. I also don’t have the time or patience to case my surroundings and execute a strategic entry as I would as plain Rebecca Lockwood – the Ghost Rider is more inclined to charge right in. Which is exactly what I do. I’ll admit, a straightforward approach can sometimes be immensely satisfying.

I aim the Desert Eagle and fire a volley of five shots into the breadth of the double doors. Each bolt of Hellfire erupts like red lightning, and the entrance is consumed in a conflagration. I then rocket forward on the bike, into the inferno and out the other side, with the flames momentarily swirling about me as I pass, as if recognising me as the source of their power. The late autumn sunshine is immediately replaced by a stygian gloom, and I steal a second to catch my bearings. In the space of that single heartbeat, the eight men and women aligned before me open fire with double-barrelled shotguns, at point blank range.

The roar is deafening, the flare blinding. The impact bludgeons me from my seat, hurling me backwards into the flames through which I just rode. The effect is similar to lobbing a canister of paraffin onto a campfire; there is an explosion, followed by a cacophony of splintering glass as a series of high, narrow windows that stretch away to either side of me shatter in the blast. Wood bows and buckles beneath a tide of searing heat. The air is filled with screams. Once again, I smell roasting flesh – but, on this occasion, it isn’t the flesh of dogs.

I rise slowly to my feet and stride from the flames, cruel and black and fierce. My leathers are blistered, ragged in places. My boots echo sharply on a marble floor. In my head, I can hear Zarathos chuckling softly. I realise that he finds this carnage exquisite. I’m not so impressed. All I can concentrate on is the need… for vengeance.

I’m in a vast reception hall, dominated by a central staircase with flamboyant railings and a plush, red carpet, flanked by ornamental statues of angels. Of the eight who ambushed me, five remain standing. The other three are writhing on the floor, devoured by Hellfire from the recent backdraft. They are all dressed in unadorned black, and their heads are shaved. Each is white-skinned. I’d suspected that I was dealing with a cult, and this confirms it. They were lying in wait for me, which means there must have been camera surveillance back at the gates. It doesn’t matter. They have no idea what they’re dealing with. I guess I’d better educate them.

I raise the Magnum and fire. The nearest cultist, a burly man, says farewell to three quarters of his head. It explodes like a fruit, the air misting momentarily with his blood before he is swallowed by flames. A woman to my right wails and rushes forward, brandishing her shotgun like a club. I whip out a fist and strike her across the face, dislocating her jaw and all but snapping her neck with one blow. She falls at my feet, twitching, her hands clawing uselessly at her throat. Without a second thought, I step down on her neck, hard. The resulting crack is sharp and satisfying. Like squashing a cockroach.

That makes me the exterminator. The thought thrills me. It shouldn’t do, but it does. This is what I’ve become.

“YOU WILL BE PUNISHED,” I hiss, unthreading a length of scorched chain that is looped about my shoulders. “YOU WILL ALL BE PUNISHED FOR YOUR SINS.”

I take a shotgun blast to the stomach, and falter. At the same time, someone attacks me from behind. I turn, growling, and flail with the chain. The man who was attempting to jam the barrels of his gun into the back of my skull flies backwards, ribbons of flesh trailing from his face. He shrieks, scrabbling at the marble floor as I loom towards him. I reach down and prise open his mouth with the business end of the Desert Eagle. He stares at me in abject terror, a wraith in flame in leather. As I pull the trigger, I wonder how Hellfire tastes.

I take another shell to the backs of my knees, and this sends me crashing to the ground. I lose my grip on the Magnum, and watch it go skipping away. I don’t need it. The two remaining cultists rush in, and I see that they both have knives. They stab at me furiously – at my back, my arms, my skull. Both of them are screaming obscenities at me. As I turn to try and shrug them off, one of the slashing blades imbeds in my hollow eye socket – and, I have to admit, that hurts. I shriek, and sag momentarily. The woman with the knife howls in triumph and attempts to plunge the blade in a second time. I snatch at her wrist at the last moment and yank her sideways. I then roll free, wrenching the woman’s arm from its shoulder in a fit of rage. The violent separation of flesh and muscle and bone is accompanied by a wet shuk and a spray of blood. And, obviously, her screams of agony.

I rise to my feet, wrapping my chain about the last cultist’s neck and looping one end about the other. I then pull the knot tight, cutting off his air. He scrabbles desperately at his throat, his face turned red, then purple. I force him to look at me, the last thing he’ll ever see. I then discard his body, abandoning him to his threshing death whilst I turn my attention back to the woman who speared me in the eye. She’s awash with her own blood, pale and trembling. I pick up her knife and angle the point of the blade towards one of her dilated pupils. Then, slowly, I begin to push it in, kneeling on her chest as she spasms.

“AN EYE FOR AN EYE,” I whisper, gently twisting the blade. I don’t know if this is Zarathos speaking or me. Does it matter any more? Is there even a distinction? Oh, Johnny – what have you done to me?

I skewer the knife in to the hilt then stand back, blood dripping from my fist. I’m wasting time here. I need to find Eve. My instincts tell me that she’s somewhere above me, so I turn in the direction of the stairs…

…and it’s only then that I see the creature leaning against one of the angel statues, his head cocked as regards me with lazily narrowed eyes.

“Well,” the beast breathes. “Someone’s been working out their frustrations, haven’t they?”

There’s something about him that reminds me of Edrebus, but this is no seraph standing before me – this is a fiend. He is tall, eight feet, and critically thin; his hair is long and black and whispers like a tangle of spiders; his skin is blood red because it is covered in blood, relentlessly oozing from thousands of tiny puncture wounds all over his naked upper torso. He wears a sash about his waist that I instinctively know is stitched from ribbons of flayed, human flesh. His nails are long and tapered to a serrated edge. His eyes are black wounds, leaking rot. He reeks of death and pain, and he radiates a heat far greater than my own.

He smiles at me, and his lips crack and bleed. Zarathos speaks a name in my mind – a name Rebecca Lockwood wouldn’t recognise, but which makes me shiver all the same.

“Welcome, my dear,” the fiend murmurs. “Welcome to the House of Mephisto. How pleasant it is to receive guests…”