Gun Work

If he closed his eyes, they would weld shut and he would never see anything again. His pupils dilated to microdots, overwhelmed.

The puppet droned away, unseen now. Whatever it was talking about sounded very bad.

Stupid puppet.

Barney was inside the Bleeding Room again.

Not the same as before; this was a madhouse where he was restrained, sliced up, tortured with needles. Bound down, hurling up his own guts. Beaten and stretched and bound again. Force-fed vile fluids and tormented by an army of imps who poked and prodded, cut away his flesh and seeded it with salt.

In his mind, he retreated even deeper, hauling ass down a cobwebbed corridor — man, he had never been in this room! — and slamming a door, then finding another artery, moving swiftly, slamming another door until he was lost in the catacomb-pit of his own brain.

Outside, they continued to raze his flesh. Whatever they wanted, Barney did not have it.

Down deep in the catacombs, Barney confronted one of his worst personal fears — that he was really in an asylum, irretrievably insane, violent and bound down in max-lock, trapped and screaming inside his own ruptured head, unable to get a message to the outside world.

Lunacy, coma.

The second Bleeding Room made the first seem like a high-roller suite in Vegas, the kind you get comped when the hotel wants to clean out your bank.

Not food, but cuisine; hookers on-call, all the amenities. No Sucio. No betrayers at all, in fact.

In the second Bleeding Room all the inquisitioners were completely faceless. There was no crime, no clue as to your sin, and zero appeal. It was pretty much an atheist’s perfect picture of Hell.

Barney fled, slammed another door, locked it, went deeper.

Found another door, leading downward.

It was very dark at the end of the corridor.

The dead thing was clad in a moldering priest’s outfit, and had patches of moss on its head instead of hair. Its head was a skull glistening with gelid rot. It hectored Barney in a voice that had the sound of withered dry reeds, clicking. It extended skeletal fingers over his supine form and tried to touch him. Unable to move, Barney tried to will away physical contact. A squirming grub fell out of the creature’s eye socket and landed on Barney’s chest, where it vanished in a corkscrew twist down one of the bullet holes there. The holy-collared gravewalker tried to smear stale blood on Barney’s head and its reach broke the mantilla of cobwebs in which it was shrouded.

Get away from me. Take your superstitions and get away. Sell your lies somewhere else.

Like a pestersome insect, the damned thing continued to hover and natter, its off-center jawbone waggling nonsense and dislodging tomb dust, which sifted down through baleful light to coat Barney’s open eyes. Apparently this annoying specter was going to yammer on until its script was done, and Barney briefly wondered if he could grab the tarnished bone crucifix that depended from its jackstraw neck and turn it to use as a stabbing weapon; anything to stem the tide of gibberish.

Oh, for a firearm to blast this apparition into crypt dirt.

The third Bleeding Room came as a total surprise.

Barney saw low beamed ceilings and roof of thatch. The predominant odors were cooking food, incense, and something akin to ground stone. An unseen clock ticked ponderously.

He tried to sit up on the narrow bed and was slammed down by nausea and his body’s inability to do what he told it. His muscles did not obey.

The clock became maddening — an actual, undeniable measure of time, unless he was merely making all this up in his shell-shocked mind.

“I see you dream,” said a voice. “Las pesdillas. The movement of the eyes.”

“REM,” Barney said. His voice had been taken. All that was left was a dry tumbleweed whisper.

His consciousness was a treacherous ascent over booby-trapped ice with a thousand hidden traps. One foothold wrong, and he would tumble. Funny that he saw an ice field; he had expected sand dunes to the horizon.

“Ariem?” echoed the brittle voice. “That is not your name; how you are called — ¿como se llama?”

The horrible puppet from the nightmare fiesta hovered over him, and Barney blacked out.

When he awoke again, he was still in the third Bleeding Room, with the infernal clock ticking away.

The puppet moved toward him with a disjointed gait, as though inexpertly manipulated, its feet several inches from the ground.

“Ah, amigo,” it said.

It was not a marionette, but a man. A small, wizened man whose face was a map of desert sun-wrinkles, who smiled with gapped teeth that nonetheless lit up his mahogany countenance. An older man in the back third of a life that looked as if it had been equally rich in regret and joy.

“You are back with us,” the man said. “The saints, if there are such things, love you.”

Yeah, that idea was a laff riot.

Barney struggled to say who, to ask where.