Crawl(9)

JXSAVES… I DO NOT

—and the red priest. Her asking for help. Him smiling.

After all that tragedy, someone had chained her to a post. Her hands had fallen asleep because they weren’t receiving circulation from the wrists. The cuffs were cutting off the supply of blood. They weren’t really cuffs, though, not really. More like shackles. The kind of things they used to use on witches before they burned them at the stake.

She smelled smoke.

Ten feet in front of her, a hunched figure worshipped at a campfire, his hands clasped together over the body of the teenager with the pushed-in kisser. He’s praying for him to make it, Juliet thought. She was well aware of how crazy that sounded.

A thick wood surrounded her, seemed to press in from all sides. To her left, a road. The boughs of the trees came together over the damp red clay, creating a corridor. At the end of that tunnel was a light so beautiful and welcoming that Juliet thought she would cry. If she weren’t already crying, that was. Deep sobs racked her body, and it was the weakness of her knees that told her she was standing. Her feet burned, though. They burned so badly it felt as if she stood over an open flame.

A witch set to burn over a bonfire repeated in her mind, and she glanced down. Her knees were bent and in her line of sight. She couldn’t see her feet. She tried to move them to the right, then the left, but they wouldn’t do as she told them. Finally, her knees parted, and she stared down between bare, milky thighs. She’d lost her pants, but that fact barely registered. At first the nails in her feet didn’t compute as such. The pain ebbed the more she gawked at the aluminum heads, ten in all, gazing back at her. She knew how many nail heads there were because she counted. Somehow, knowing how many had been driven into her feet helped ease her agony. The respite from the burning in her feet only lasted half a minute or so, before she remembered her aching shoulders and the shackles holding her arms above her head.

So many things to focus on, so little time.

“Why…” she blubbered, but her voice was barely audible, even to herself. The second time, she shrieked, “WHY?”

“Shhhh…” the red priest hissed. “I’m sssspeaking with the Lord about our fallen brother.”

“LET ME DOWN!” She sounded like a weak horror movie cliché, one of those useless bitches that tumble and fall on thin air with the killer right behind them. She hated the sound of that weakness. Hated herself for making it.

“You’ll be allowed to leave,” the red priest said. “Shortly.”

Juliet jerked her limp arms forward, expecting resistance but getting none, and began to tilt out over the ground below. Everything seemed to happen so slowly that she had time to think about the nails, those ten horrible nail heads and what they would do to her precious, fragile feet. She continued to drop, a scream vibrating her throat and painfully thrumming in her head. Then the nails caught. They tore, and she felt her feet coming apart, splitting, cleaving in two. The pain was transcendent. The pain was God. A fiery, torturous agony crippled every muscle in her body, and she slapped down, cheek first, onto the grassy clearing where she’d been trussed up like a biblical whore awaiting the first thrown stone. She lay there for some time, twitching and rolling feebly from side to side, bawling. Through her tears, she could see her hands out in front of her, the shackles still clasped around her wrists, the chain stretching out into the grass, a wooden peg impaling one link. Needing to take her mind off her cloven feet, she craned her neck and gazed up at the post. An empty notch, which had been drilled into the wood a foot below the top, stared down at her like some mocking cyclops. Two feet above the ground were the nails. Ten heads glistening with gore in the firelight, clumps of pink and purple flesh still clinging to the wood.

Is that a toe?

Juliet’s anguished cry exploded from her chest.

Without thought, she pushed herself to her knees then attempted to climb to her feet. Something spread beneath her, like toes with no webbing stretching too wide. A wave of white hot needles pressed into her calves, pierced her thigh muscles, and threw her screaming to the grass.

She flipped onto her back, howling her maladies to the canopy of gnarled tree branches overhead. She screeched, wailed, hollered, erupted, to anyone who’d listen. But, deep down, Juliet knew that the red priest was her only audience.

“That was foolish.” His voice was somber, so low that Juliet could barely hear him over her own echoing shrieks.

“FUCK YOU!”

“So unladylike. I’ll let this weakness go, but I doubt He will.”

Juliet didn’t care who He was, but could hear the inflection the priest put on the title, capitalized with emphasis. Her mind even highlighted the word and threw curses laced with middle fingers at it. If it were God the red priest spoke of, then God be damned. It’s not like God had helped her out. He’d let her pull that peg from the post and tear her feet all to shit. In regards to the titular He, God could take a flying fuck on a rolling doughnut in a field full of dandelions fertilized by baby tears for all the fucks given by her.

“I guess I’ll leave you two alone. Oh, and I suggest you crawl.”

Even over her pain-filled mumbling, Juliet heard the red priest’s soles squelching along as he left by way of the road domed by branches.

Now, it was only her. Well, her and a young man’s corpse. But he was dead, and dead men carry no conversations.