textfiles/magazines/HOE/hoe-1062.txt

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     $$     .d""b. .d""b.                  HOE E'ZINE #1062
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     $$  $$ $$  $$ $$ss$$                    "Bloody Rag"
     $$  $$ $$  $$ $$                          by Kreid
     $$  $$ $$  $$ $$  $$                      04/18/00
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     $$  $$ "TssT" "TssT"

	Somebody handed me a bloody rag.

	I was walking along the sidewalk at night, minding my own
 business, and some guy handed me a bloody rag and was gone before I even
 noticed.  A grizzly voice struck me as if it were whispered right in my
 ear: "Leave town or you're next."

	I jumped up in fright and looked around, feeling as if I had just
 woken up from a trance.  Police sirens were howling in my ears.  I would
 have panicked, had I not been as drunk as I was.  The first thing that
 came to my mind, slowly as it did, was "wrong place, wrong time," but to
 my dismay, I soon found that my plight was more than an unhappy
 coincidence.

	I raised my eyes up and saw my little sister, an angel of only
 nine years, in a heap on the street.  Her eyes seemed to plead to me for
 life; but her body, wrapped around a tangled spine, told me that her life
 had already left her.  I wanted to scream, but something inside me decided
 that it would be a better idea to just pass out…

	When I awoke, I staggered to a row of prison bars and stared out.  
 A smiling policeman handed me a cup of coffee, unlocked my cell, and
 escorted me out, all the while doing his best not to smell me.

	"You've had quite a shock, sir," he joked.  "Maybe from now on you
 should take a cab home."

	I was shocked, but pleased to know that apparently, the cops
 weren't holding me on a murder charge.  Naturally, the first words out of
 my rotten mouth that morning were, "So what's the charge?"

	"We're going to let you go with a warning this time, buddy."

	That was all I needed to hear.  Having a natural aversion to
 police officers, I hastily left the station.  All the contraband I had
 been carrying the night before was still on me, including the bloody rag.  
 I took it out and saw my poor sister's pleading, sunken eyes in the red
 blotches.  Her memory was insufferable.  I dropped the rag in the next
 garbage can I passed.

	As the memories of my sister's life passed through my head, I
 struggled to find a solution to all that had happened to me since I
 received that rag.  Of course, there was none.  I didn't have a friend in
 the world that cared enough to help me.  The cops considered drunken
 street orphans like my sister and I an irrelevant and irreparable problem;
 our lives were beyond the law, as long as we didn't kill or steal from
 anyone that mattered to the world. The innumerable population of orphans
 in the city of Detroit was a result of the simultaneous bombing of all the
 city's car factories and department stores on the day after Thanksgiving
 four years ago.  Most of the orphans' houses were promptly repossessed by
 the city and replaced with car factories and department stores.

	The desire to leave town crossed my mind briefly, but I dismissed
 it.  I did not know the face of my hunter, so I assumed by some logic that
 he didn't know mine either.  Orphan-killers were no new phenomenon to me
 or my sister; their type had plagued the orphan "community"  for years.  
 I would just have to do what my sister and I had always done when the
 killing came around: lay low and stay off the streets until the killing
 stopped.

	There was an abandoned block on the outskirts of town, in which a
 dormant sanitarium lay next to an equally dormant church.  They didn't
 look too much unlike each other, but any desperate homeless person in
 Detroit knows the difference.  They know to take their desperate refuge in
 the church, and avoid the desolation of the sanitarium.  The two buildings
 were frequented forty years ago by a plague of tuberculosis victims, and
 their vicinity had been abandoned ever since.  People in that town, I
 think, had an inherent need to either be part of a plague or live in fear
 of one.

	When I entered it, the church was empty as usual.  I took this to
 mean that I was the only one in town whose little sister had been murdered
 last night.  I was happy to find myself alone that afternoon.  It was
 appropriate for the occasion; from then on, I would be completely alone in
 the world.  That night, I thought, would be my first opportunity to savor
 this solitude.

	But when I saw the sun setting through the plain, dusty windows of
 that old church, I wasn't savoring anything.  I was sitting in my favorite
 of the plain, dusty wooden pews, watching the sunlight disappear from my
 favorite graffiti, I dreaded each coming moment.  The dusk-lit graffiti
 was a poem etched in the wood of the pew I sat in:

 Is this your church?

 Silent and buried by fear,
 These pews are desecrated
 By men who will never escape them.
 Do you dare worship here,
 While breathing air thick with souls
 Who choke and spit their fouled blood
 Upon the pages of each bible, and the limbs of every cross?
 This church is blessed by no martyr's blood.
 It is stained with the blood of the damned
 Who come here to die.

	That poem used to amaze me.  On many past nights, I had read that
 poem and felt as if there was some grace to my descent; and as if I was
 not alone after all.  The poem did again remind me that I wasn't alone,
 but I felt nothing of the confident grace that used to guide me through
 nights like this.  In the dark church, I felt only a choking sadness, with
 no spark of hope buried inside.  And instead of hope, or alcohol, or
 heroin, or a woman, I had only fear to intoxicate me.
	And intoxicate me, it did!  As I often had before in that old
 church, I heard the coughing, hacking, wheezing, and wailing of plagued
 souls inside my head.  My fingers felt the shadows of thoracic blood upon
 the pew that I used as my bed.  No doubt that I was haunted, just as I had
 always been in that church.  But that was merely imaginary fear; I knew
 better than to let it get to me.
	After I drove the coughing, hacking, wheezing, and wailing sounds
 out of my ears, and heard silence, my mind became occupied with memories,
 particularly my most recent ones.  The smell of my sister's expired blood
 filled my nostrils, and I once again saw her horrible, pleading, lifeless
 face in the memory of that cursed rag.  My mind was once again bombarded
 with horrors, accompanied by the horrible orchestra of police sirens, and
 then, that terrible voice – the voice of my hunter!
	"Your time is up, orphan."

	When I heard it, I neither knew nor questioned whether it was
 reality or imagination; I only screamed and ran through the black air of
 the church.  I did not breathe a single breath of that cursed air, until I
 dashed through its wooden doors and into the abandoned, moonlit streets.  
 Distraught, I sat down on the sidewalk with my back to the church doors,
 gasping to recover my breath.  For a moment, I wished that my hunter would
 quietly approach me from behind and execute me.  I clenched my eyes,
 teeth, and fists, expecting death, but death did not come. I stood up and
 faced the church, but I was too afraid to re-enter.  I opted instead for
 the colder, brighter air of the sanitarium.

 	I walked through the doorless entrance of the sanitarium and
 scanned its insides.  It was much brighter than the church, and much
 colder, for almost all the windows had been shattered long ago.  The
 sanitarium did not seem an appropriate place to sleep; I imagined that it
 probably never had been.  But sleep was no longer a concern to me: I
 sought to sleep in the church in order to escape life, now I only sought
 to keep my life, and why?  No matter.  My weathered skin would rest there,
 on the brightest and coldest possible landing: the fourth floor. I climbed
 the rickety stairs and found a room on the top floor with a beat-up
 mattress and a toilet; it was a nicer bedroom for me than I could possibly
 have imagined.  And, even better, part of the roof and one of the walls
 had crumbled away, allowing a flood of moonlight into my room.  I slid the
 mattress away from the shadowy corner of the room and into the moonlight
 underneath where the roof had perished.  Finally, I could rest again.

	My body lay horizontally on the mattress, and I stared restlessly
 out of the building, through the gaping hole which my bed rested beside.  
 Just below where I lay was the brittle roof of that stout church which I
 had just fled.  My eyes locked upon that building, I know not for how
 long, and memories of the horror I felt in that church plagued my restless
 mind.  And then once again, my ears were stricken with the terrible sound
 of the voice I had heard there: "You cannot escape me now!"

	And then, to my absolute terror, I felt the cold hand of my hunter
 upon my neck!  Again, I let out a terrible scream, and with muscles nearly
 paralyzed by fear, clumsily flung myself off the side of the sanitarium.

	As I fell to the roof of the church, I did not brace myself –
 instead, I held my arms out wide and tried to catch myself upon the wooden
 beams below.  The beams, however, did little to stop my falling.  The old
 wood yielded under my falling, clawing figure, and cast me onto the hard,
 unyielding wood of the pew on which I had once sought sleep.

	I became drowsy, very happily drowsy, at the end of my fall, and
 smiled with relief as I prepared to be lulled to sleep by the final
 beating of my heart.  Once again, I knew the grace of my descent as I
 looked down upon my favorite poem, now glowing with silver moonlight.  
 The church air had lost its cursed thickness, it was cooled by the draft
 from above… or was it the chilling of my own blood?  No matter.

	Blood flowed out of my nose and the corners of my mouth, obscuring
 the poem, which I no longer had the strength to read.  But in my final
 moments, all relief was dashed from my soul when I gazed at the moonlit
 reflection of my hunter, in the pool of blood beneath my face: it was the
 grinning mask of death!

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 [ (c) HOE E'ZINE -- http://www.hoe.nu       HOE #1062, BY KREID - 4/18/00 ]