The last time the flash of ambulance lights had lit up the academic halls of College Avenue in Arkham, Massachusetts, it had been 1912, when a tenured Miskatonic University professor of archaeology had bludgeoned the head of the anthropology department to death with an obscure green statuette before consuming half the department head’s face. To all his peers and contemporaries, the archaeology professor had been a pleasant and soft-spoken man, and no one could quite come to a logical explanation for his sudden bloodlust and cannibalistic crime. Even over drinks at the EOD, the local bar, the professor’s close friends and associates could not cope with the inexplicable slaughter. He had been taken into custody by police, but the sheer brutality of his sudden madness forced the court’s hand, and the professor spent the rest of his days behind the walls of Arkham Asylum. On his last day on earth, the professor was recorded to have spent the entirety of the afternoon staring up at the sky through his window. When an orderly came to fetch him for dinner at dusk, the professor allegedly turned to the young orderly, licked his lips, and said, “those eyes must close. No sleep. No dreams” before immediately dropping dead from no apparent cause.
But on this oddly temperate morning in early December, Arkham, Massachusetts, got its next fill of a madness spreading from the epicenter of Miskatonic University. The EMT’s were incredibly respectful of the victim’s wishes to avoid the prying eyes of the public, and gladly shielded his weakened form atop the stretcher by pulling the baby blue sheet over his head. Before the leeches of the media could even step foot on the green outside Kingsley Hall, the back doors of the ambulance had been shut. The patient half-opened his dying eyes to observe the shadows of people in the window as they passed by and their penumbras were cast like a projection across the surface of the glass. Even as the crowd began to subside and move away to allow the ambulance to screech away, there remained one shade, standing still in the calm of the chaos – a half-heighted shadow, probably a young woman who attended the university. The silhouette watched with invisible eyes, unshaken by the madness of a man’s sickness, and the man strapped to the gurney let his head fall back onto the flat plastic board beneath him, forgetting all about the shadow that just would not look away. Sabastian Andrews was being carried away from his place of employment by who he believed were angels. But he was quite mistaken.
Lying face-up on the gurney in the back half of the ambulance, Sabastian lingered somewhere between agony and bliss as the box of metal on wheels zoomed around corners at speed, lights flashing and siren blaring out a swan song all the way. In the moment, he was rather at peace with the idea of dying back here in the ambulance’s belly. At least he could pass knowing they had tried so desperately to save him – him, such a respected professor of the English language, basking in the warm glow of knowledge, tapping into secret sectors of the brain no one before had ever –
Wait.
Sebastian’s eyes fluttered open from behind his hipster style prescription glasses to the sight of the creamy beige ceiling of the ambulance’s interior, and the pain in his lower abdomen suddenly struck him like a laser-guided missile filled with used syringes. His body reacted instinctually, attempting to curl into a fetal position to provide pressure against what he was sure was his large intestine trying to forcefully rip its way out of the prison of his abdominal wall. But as he went to move not at all of his own accord, he found himself restrained by the stretcher’s thick, dark gray straps, which wrapped around him like pythons in a pit of an orgy. He groaned, evoking the purest of all human states: pain.
“Try to relax, Mr. Andrews,” came a feminine voice from the driver’s seat. “It will certainly make this whole process a lot smoother.”
Sebastian, face contorted from the strange spasms still rippling across his lanky frame, turned his head to look upward and to the left in an attempt to view the source of this disturbingly cool, collected tenor. But when the muscles in his neck contracted to move his spine sideways, he was met with another jolt of electric sting. Flinching reflexively, Sabastian nevertheless kept his eyes locked on the dull brown leather back of the front driver’s seat.
Framed against the shifting background of the street zooming forward like a movie screen, a slender, mocha skinned hand reached up and adjusted the rear-view mirror, revealing a pair of bleak, almond coloured eyes. To Sebastian, the eyes felt like the eyes of the shadow from moments before, peering beneath his clothes, beneath his skin, and through the swelling of his entrails into the very core of him, examining his soul for the chips and scars left there by harsher hearts. The browline above the almond eyes furrowed inquisitively, and the scholar in the ambulance knew from that subtle scrunch of flesh just above the eye sockets that the driver was smiling at him. It was a wicked, yet almost sad smile, as though the owner of those pure white caps pitied him. Helpless.
He began to squirm more intensely, but the shooting pain that rippled through his muscular system kept him bound to the gurney with each shove of will, creating an almost rhythmic wave of movements back and forth. The gurney itself would not budge, however, as the wheels had been firmly locked in place. What resulted was a cacophony of grunts of effort followed by groans of anguish as Sebastian Andrews fought for his life. He didn’t even know this strange young woman piloting the ambulance, but in the heat of the moment, he feared the vehicle would instead become his hearse. From the front of the ambulance, the driver began to become, more than anything, rather annoyed with Sebastian’s strange floundering for his life.
“Bring it down, you pretentious cockbite,” she ordered, shooting him a glare in the rear-view mirror, her eyes narrowing to craft snake-like slits out of her pupils. “The more you struggle, the faster the venom works its way through your system.”
As though he had just been turned to stone by her icy Gorgon stare, Sebastian froze in place. He now lay like a corpse atop the gurney, eyes locked on the blank ambulance ceiling. Venom? Jesus Christ. Not wanting to aggravate his already weakened veins, Sebastian chose the opossum method: freeze, copycat the state of the dead, and pray for a miracle. Unfortunately for Sebastian Andrews, it didn’t seem that God was answering his phone today.
Suddenly, as quickly as Sebastian had ceased his mad scramble for life, the ambulance screeched to a sudden halt, leaving the smell of burnt rubber in the air. To Sebastian, it smelled like the reaper – just burnt rubber and half-sterile medical supplies, which hung in bags and tubes and drawers all around his head. Wait. That was it. He’d have to be subtle, but quick. Silent, yet efficient in his close waltz with the devil in the front seat.
The driver nodded to the burly-looking bald paramedic in the passenger’s seat, and he opened the door of the ambulance without a further word. Using as little movement as possible to avoid the spread of the unnamed venom the driver claimed was seeping through his bloodstream, Sebastian arched his neck to peek up at the EMT. However, all Sebastian caught before the man slipped out the side of the car was a brief glimpse of a strange, perfectly illustrated tattoo emblazoned across the flesh of the man’s arm.
As the sound of the door slamming shut finally died away, the driver suddenly turned in her seat, finally revealing the entirety of her face to Sebastian. She was a rather pretty girl, with a refined smoothness to the edges of her heart-shaped face, which stood out against the grayscale backdrop of the cloudy day developing on the opposite side of the windshield like a great highlight of text in an edited draft of Sebastian’s last thesis. There was an almost ethereal glow about her, attributed to the dreary gloom of the early morning light bouncing off her biracial skin tone, reminding Sebastian of the colour of his morning tea, which threatened to come spewing forth from his stomach, still twisting and sloshing around as the venom worked its way past the blood-brain barrier. Her side-faced smile, thrown at him like a metal dart, hit him somewhere vulnerable. How he despised this moment; this sensation – of someone having total control over him.
“Good,” the girl said, pushing a lock of her pink-dyed, split-end hair out of her eyes. “Now we can be alone.”
He didn’t bother responding. This girl clearly knew what she was doing, and he was beginning to grow weaker by the moment – his eyes were drooping, threatening to close and never open again, becoming the doors to a tomb of lost knowledge with no epitaph to commemorate the loss. Fighting back, Sebastian could sense himself slipping. The edges of his vision began to become invaded by an inkling black, slowly creeping in, and fading back out every time he blinked. But it was growing stronger, and he was beginning to lose control of the feeling in his legs.
“Interesting thing, black widow venom,” the girl mused, folding her arms over the back of the seat as though casually chatting with an old, familiar friend. “It starts at the legs and just crawls up your body. Kind of like…well, a spider.”
Those brown orbs hiding behind another lock of rebellious pink-dyed, formerly brown hair suddenly narrowed back to their evil-eye snake slits as she gave him a quick glance up and down. Like a predator, she could smell it now. The venom moving into his chest. Soon, his heart would begin to fall out of rhythm, and then it was all over except for the crying. But no. That wasn’t the point. That wasn’t
the plan, then.
With a display of grace, the girl tumbled over the seat diving her and the now-limp form of Sebastian Andrews – the quivering shell that once was Sebastian Andrews. Quite satisfied with herself, she gave him a bit of a slap across the face. Just enough to hurt. His eyes, barely bearing the strength to open, fluttered slightly, and a death-like groan escaped from between his lips. It was the most vulnerable, desperate sound Zahra Nassar had ever heard in her life, but now, she felt no pity. This was her debt being repaid, one step at a time. And at the same time, this was the world paying her back the debts it owed her heart and soul. The bitterness had settled deep in her bones and bubbled up like a molten brew in a witch’s cauldron. The vile, black bile had only just begun to explode forth from her pressure chambers. What was one man’s death to her? What was one of many that were sure to come? Zahra’s pallid face contorted into a sneer, distorting itself into a bastardization of the theatre comedy mask. This was the greatest joke of them all.
“Tell me you were at least surprised by that needle stabbing you when you clicked the top of your pen,” she implored with authority, cradling Sebastian’s limp head between her palms, mangling the loose flesh on his head into her juxtaposed tragedy mask. Cry, cry for me, Pagliacci.
“N-no.”
“No? It was genius, you ingrateful—“
“Didn’t use pen. Coffee…tasted…weird.”
“What?”
But there came no answer. Zahra held his head in her hands for a moment longer, wanting to study the face of the man she was about to silence. Sebastian Andrews would be no threat to Mystica’s operation now. No witnesses, no evidence. Cut out the sheep’s tongue. She let his head slip out from between her delicate hands, and it plopped onto the stretcher’s hard plastic surface with a SMACK. He wasn’t dead. She hadn’t given him nearly a high enough dosage for that. With a sigh, she pushed open the rear doors of the ambulance and stepped out into the cool December morning’s air, which bit at the soft skin on her arms left unprotected by the EMT short-sleeve disguise. As she slammed the doors shut once more, Zahra exhaled in effort, and watched as the mist from her breath, the very essence of her continued existence, faded away into the frost of the coming winter. Put the period at the finale. The end.
With nary a thought to her head, Zahra walked back to the driver’s side door and pulled it open. Her small, girlish hand reached inside, twisted, and undid the parking brake. There was nothing left to say. Nothing left do to.
Except watch as the ambulance rolled away down the tallest hill in Arkham, and crashed into the dense copse of trees at the bottom of the incline. In the symphony of twisted metal flying across the cold aether, Zahra could swear she heard Mystica’s voice complimenting her on a job well done.
Endless. Back into that sleep beneath the waves.
But such questions, and no time to chase their answers into a dark tomorrow. Fires await.