Hell's Mirror

A Midnight Vault Story

The Midnight Vault

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When I arrived, everyone I’d killed was waiting for me. I don’t mean all of them in a knot like an intervention, but over time I saw all of them, and each one greeted me as though she had been expecting me. Crazy, yeah? They weren’t even angry with me, not one of them, although they weren’t exactly happy to see me.

This place, it’s not what I expected. Nothing like I was ever told it would be, and believe me, I had plenty of folks telling me I’d end up right here and what I could look forward to. It’s not so bad as all that. Here’s what I think; it’s a reflection, right? A reflection of my life that flickers up in spurts before it fades to black again, and in between it ain’t here at all. I mean, when the light goes out on a scene, and before it flares up again, there’s nothing. The bad part of that is the nothing can last for lifetimes.

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So, the dead girls … I think they’re supposed to show me my evil deeds, like the ghosts in A Christmas Carol. Then, like Scrooge, I’m supposed to repent or something. Except, I’m dead and I’m here. So, I really don’t see any value in repentance. To be honest, I’m not sorry. I’m so not sorry that when I first got here, all confused and kind of wigged out, I tried to kill Delia Overholt again.

I grabbed at her like a drowning man, which is sort of hilarious—maybe I’ll tell you about that later. But I couldn’t catch her. She was just never where I grabbed, and I wore myself out with chasing and cussing. I wonder if she was even real. Kind of embarrassing, but it would make a humorous story if I had anyone to tell. I know you’re not really here, right? Right? Jesus, I’m just whispering in the dark …

Let’s take a peek into the great abyss, the hellmouth, the portal to damnation. As our guide, Mr. David Tanner, a killer with neither empathy nor conscience. If anything, he may be pleased with both his foul deeds and with what he perceives as his escape from eternal torment. His monstrous refusal of human feeling is about to be mirrored for his edification, presenting a chilling lesson in understanding.

Ms. Overholt. Delia. Man, she was something. Still is, I guess, if she has a mind to be. She was a nurse at Camp Banner Lake, where I spent part of every summer from the ages of ten to seventeen. Delia was only there the one year, the year I was sixteen, a refreshing change from old Nurse Allen who had a nicer moustache than most of the older boys. Delia was nineteen, and she wasn’t an actual nurse yet, but she was enrolled in a nursing program at the community college. She worked that summer at Camp Banner Lake under the supervision of Nurse Campbell from the local high school, a middle-aged frump shaped like a couple of bushel baskets of bread dough.

Delia was small and wiry, athletic. She had glossy hair, the color of sun tea, that swung to her shoulders. The first time I saw her, she was wearing a navy-blue one-piece swimsuit with a white stripe down each side, dipping in at her waist and curving out again over her slim hips. She wasn’t beautiful exactly; she was arresting, like a rare moth begging for collection. I’d never done it before, but I knew the minute I saw her that she’d be my first. I knew I was going to kill her.

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Funny, how I fix on Delia. I’ve done something like twelve people. I can’t be exact on account of having to drop the last of them and run from the cops. Don’t know if she lived, although I haven’t seen her here, so I guess that’s my answer. Another one I buried alive. With clues! Hey, I always played fair. They might have found her, but I was already on to stalking the next one. I was always on the move, like a sour wind. I liked that constant movement, eating miles of road, just me and the radio. It’s what makes this so fucking hard. Can’t go anywhere. Nothing happens until the dead glimmer up on the black all around me, and then I got no control over what they show me.

Anyway, I was telling you about Delia. She was … hey, did you hear that?

There’s something skulking around in all this dark. I hear it sometimes, a sort of slither, dry and weighty like a big snake. I’m not afraid of it or anything. I mean, what’s it gonna do to a dead guy, right? Right? Yeah, well, sometimes it seems kinda close, is all. I never did like snakes.

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So, Delia. I tried to put the charm on her, of course I did. Me and every other red-blooded guy at camp. I can admit now that at sixteen that charm was pretty crude. I got better, I can assure you. Delia wasn’t having any of it. She was just enough older than us that she’d experienced what we might, if we were lucky, grow into.

It’s Ms. Overholt, she’d say when I called her by her first name. And she’d give me the same stern look I used to get from old Nurse Allen, but Delia didn’t have the jowls or moustache to pull it off, you know. She’d put her hands on her hips and say things like, It’s inappropriate to talk to women like that, David Tanner. Or, You’re just being a creep. She was right on the money with that last one.

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Whoa! I was gone for a while, did you notice? The flickers started up again. You might call them memories, but they aren’t mine. Seems I can’t just call up delicious replays, things I might actually want to watch—I have to sit here with nothing but the empty moment in front of me. Talking to you … myself. And then, some of my collection might come to visit me, showing me the things I’ve done, but it’s not like I remember it. Feels like someone else’s memory, bitter and ashy. Fear, thick and coppery like I never tasted it. The collection has its own dry-mouthed, panicky take on things.

That’s what I call them, my collection. Because I kept them for a while after I caught them. I kept them real tight, but sometimes I’d give them just a little hope. That’s the meanest poison there is, hope. They’d gulp it whole, smiles trembling, a kind of terrified peace radiating out of them. And when it became obvious it was just a dangling carrot, they’d scream something beautiful.

I used to love that screaming, just letting it roll over me like a wave. The pitiful cries for help that nobody was ever going to hear. I kept them down in the dark, in basement graves if they’d only known. I think they knew. I liked to touch them in the dark, sneak in and touch them before they realized they weren’t alone. Please, they shrieked. Yeah, always, please. I thought that was so polite.

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I know how it was, but I can’t feel it anymore. If I try to think about it, all I feel is their stunted perspective—small, fearful, dwindling. Like a scared animal kind of perspective, I guess. It gives me a sick feeling, like a hole has opened inside me and I’m falling into it. All the satisfaction I’m sure I once felt is turned to rot.

I guess, now that I’m forced to think about it, it couldn’t have been easy for them, being collected. Couldn’t have been easy crouching in their dark cells until the idea of daylight or the turning of those days on the calendar became a foreign language. They were outside of time or place, torn right out of the world like pictures from a magazine. But, like I said, nobody seems pissed about it now, so it’s kind of pointless to harp on it. Pointless for me to even be here, wherever this is. You hear me? Pointless!

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Okay, I might be going a little, I don’t know, stir crazy. How long have I been here? I’m built for action, man, not this nothingness—

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Sorry, lost my train of thought there. That damn slithery thing scuffed by, and I swear I could feel the void bulge. Like, you know the dark in a deep cave, so dense you could scoop it with a spoon? Now, imagine that heavy black just kind of … squeezes up against you. What the hell is it? What does it want? I stare out into the black for days, but I can’t see a thing. Can’t even see my own hand in front of my face. I can hear it out there, though. Sometimes a low tickle in the back of my head. Ssss, rasp, ssss, rasp. Sometimes, the bad times, it’s close by. Then it almost sounds like words—hell-dark promises.

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Delia was there, with the others. She showed me her dead face, shimmery and purple under the water at the edge of Banner Lake. Yeah, I drowned her. I didn’t really have anything but my own hands for that first one, hadn’t made a plan, didn’t have my kill box yet. It was a complete riff, happened fast.

Man, I want so bad to remember the thrill of it. I worked for it. I earned it! Her body bucking and twisting under me (like an enraged snake), her hands slapping and scratching at me, her tongue coming out of her mouth like a fat slug (stretching out to taste my soul).

I’m sure it was everything I’d hoped it would be. Probably, it never got any better than that afterward, even if I did have a fancier set-up. Your first gets under your skin, you know. But that’s all erased now, just flat and lifeless. I can only feel the suffocating, disbelieving panic of the animal. This awful, twisting-in-the-snare panic. And then it’s dark again, crushing in on me, whispering.

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I think I’ve been here a long time. Those kinds of calculations, though, they don’t apply anymore. Time has no meaning. Does it? I still feel its passage, like a habit I can’t break. Like there will be a point when something will happen. Like maybe the dark will let me go. What do you think? Hello? Helloooo!!

You’re not real. I’m alone, and nobody’s coming, no matter how much I howl. How much of this do I have to endure? All of it, I guess. Forever? I’d rather be in some fiery pit with a bunch of devils jabbing my ass with their pitchforks. I’d die again to get out of here. Dying was the easy part. Are you … are you there?

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I don’t want to talk about those things anymore. Killing, dying, living, it’s all moot. There’s just this, the big empty. And me. And me. And me … the souls or whatever they were don’t come around anymore. It’s been eons. Where did they go? I’d follow if I knew. I feel spread out, like a pool of oil on water, stretching bigger and thinner with the currents. Maybe I’ll merge with the dark, just slip away. Please …

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Jesus, that thing’s back. I felt it shush past like a rattler in hot sand, only gigantic. I shrank back together fast and now there’s no question of drifting away on the void. I’m a hard little nugget of ice, vibrating with shock. Oh, don’t get too comfortable, Dave. Don’t gnaw on that dried up old bone of hope.

There’s a smell where it passed by. A fragrance I recognize. Delia Overholt used to wear that perfume. And there are flickers again. Not scenes anymore. Just flashes like heat lightning—Delia’s dead, blank-eyed face, her scaled lips pressed forward and open in that little notch where a snake’s black tongue darts out, tasting the air.

I know I said I wasn’t afraid of it, that immense, snaky-sounding thing. I lied, okay? I flat out lied like a rug. It’s something real bad, I know it. It’s playing with me. What more can happen to me, though? I’m afraid to find out. The worst of it is … I almost wish it would just end this.

Please, if you can hear me, please help me. Please!

Hell is what you make it, as Mr. Tanner has found to his dismay. One size may not fit all, but the fit will nevertheless be perfect and inescapable.