419 Churchill Lane

“As soon as I turned into the neighborhood, I saw it. I saw the horrendous sight of 419 Churchill Lane surrounded by blaring sirens and dense gray smoke that lit up red and blue with each flash of the siren and blanketed the surrounding area with ash and ember. I was stricken with shock, almost constricting my body, then a rush of adrenaline hit me once I recalled that my wife and twins were in there. I sped the car up to arrive as fast as possible and instantly jumped out of the car once there, forgetting– and frankly, not caring in that moment of time– to remove my key from the ignition and close the door behind me. I blazed towards the door as aggressively as the fire was blazing before I was stopped by a fireman who told me ‘Sir, this fire is too intense for…’ That was all I heard before I shoved him out of my way and sped towards the door. The fire was not nearly as intense as my fear that my family was still in there and my foolish impulse to rush in and save them, even though I was totally unprepared to enter the fire that seemed to reach the heavens and that burned as hot as hell. And that’s when I saw a sight so… so… so grim I wouldn’t even wish it upon the lunatic who killed my father.

“I saw a body removed from the house, not just a regular body though. This body looked like something out of a science experiment gone wrong. It was charred, with melted flesh dripping off the left side of its head like it was fresh out of a shower– only instead of water, it was melting skin that came out of the showerhead– patches of unnatural bright red skin practically glowing in comparison to the charcoal black skin that most of the body now had, a jaw that hung on by on one joint, a tongue that was black and leaking from its mouth like an oil spill, and teeth that were either charred and black like the majority of the body or completely disintegrated like the right ear; the left ear was disintegrated as well except for the lobe in which an almost unrecognizable piece of jewelry hung. A piece of debris flew into the left side of the body’s head knocking the jaw, the left earlobe, and the piece of jewelry attached to it to the ground. The ground they landed on was about a foot away from my feet. I stood there for a few seconds frozen in shock, fear, disgust; there are about a thousand more adjectives to describe the feelings that rushed through me when that happened, and about ten thousand more to describe the events that arose due to this.

“That almost unrecognizable piece of jewelry quickly became one of the most precious pieces of jewelry that I could ever recall having laid my hands on. I noticed initials at the bottom of the diamond and melted-flesh studded jewelry that turned out to be earrings. I gave my wife a pair of earrings with our initials. I thought to myself ‘that can’t be my wife, it’s not possible.’ I couldn’t make out the initials on the earrings, or the shape of the earring due to the putrid rotting flesh that it bore like a bubble coat, but I had to be sure that this wasn’t my wife. I wiped the flesh off only to be revealed a terrible truth. A+A, with rubies in the shape of a heart surrounding them. The sirens made the diamond initials glimmer: red then blue then red then blue then red. I glimmered red and blue as well, physically and emotionally: angry then sad then angry then sad then angry. Then angry. I had just wiped my newly late wife’s flesh away from the earrings I gave her on our fifth anniversary. I should’ve been frozen with grief, with pain, with something, but I wasn’t, I thought ‘no, this has to be one of those kids of mine doing one of their crazy internet pranks right?’ I laughed and the hopeful, unrealistic thought that everything is actually okay and this sick joke would be over soon and that I’d have to have a very serious talk with Rain and Rose, my twins, appeared in my mind. This thought was quickly shut down with almost comedic timing when two firemen each carried another body out with similar ghastly features to my late wife. Those identically sized bodies with identically sized– and now visible– skeletons with near-identical damage, were carried out in the same manner as my wife was, like trash bags, slung over the firemens’ shoulders. I still had a sliver of hope that this wasn’t real. That hope was quickly crushed though, as was my heart when the red and blue glint of a diamond caught my eye. The glint came from the first body’s ring finger… and then…”

He’s never able to fully finish telling his story. That was not all that happened though. How could he retell the rest of the story when he could barely wrap his head around what happened next? It was so long ago and so bizarre that it now seemed like a movie you’ve replayed so many times that you remember every detail of it, not reality.

It started as an almost unnoticeable tingling sensation in his chest, right where the heart can be found. This sensation festered, and it soon became a subtle ache. That subtle ache soon became a not-so-subtle ache, which then became a throbbing ache. And with each torturous throb– a throb that felt like a thousand sledgehammers swiftly slamming into his chest– pain flowed throughout him, as blood would flow from the beat of the heart. The amount of pain produced with each throb was, however, incomparable to the amount of blood produced with the beat of the heart. The average human heart produces five liters of blood each minute, but the amount of pain being produced each minute felt like at least five thousand liters. This pain did not stem from any external wounds, however. This kind of pain is the kind that cannot be inflicted onto the matter, the kind of pain that cannot be caused with any type of physical wound or torture, but the kind of pain that can only be inflicted onto the mind, onto the heart. This was the kind of pain that permanently wounded and indefinitely tortured the heart, pain so powerful it felt like the heart was being torn out, even though you have no physical wounds. Pain so powerful that the word “pain” could no longer accurately describe this sinister sensation, this pain was ineffable. Pain so powerful that it took on its own form, begging for release. And release is what it got. A scream was let out which sounded anything but natural. This was a scream full of immeasurable pain paramount to any other seemingly potent pain. This was a scream that carried a thousand others within each audio wave of the seemingly infinitely long ear-piercing howl, which each carried a thousand more within them. If it was one minute or one year before the screaming stopped is unknown, but what is known is that the sinister sensation no longer fitting of the word “pain” was a shining beacon of anguish which summoned the gods to this languished land which they had for the most part forsaken an eternity ago. And then he pulled out his .45 revolver, spun the chamber, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger.

…

He woke up in an unfamiliar location; this was not 419 Churchill Lane. Had he died? Was any of what just happened real? He questioned the reality of previous events until he peered down at his jeans to see rotten flesh spewed across the front of them, presumably from pieces of his wife flying through the air and landing in front of him. That wasn’t all he saw when he peered down though: directly in front of his feet was a tan scroll. This scroll piqued his curiosity: he thought maybe it might hold the answers to some of his questions. He picked up and opened the scroll which read:

“We are your sun,

Your moon,

Your stars,

Your land,

And your life,

We are the ones who allow the survival of humanity

And here is all we ask in order for you all to remain:

We ask for perfectly symmetrical twins,

Taken at a perfectly symmetrical age,

At the time of each century’s end;

We leave the “who” up to fate.

You are not the first,

Nor will be the last

To have your family gone in a flash.

However, we sense your great pain.

You may send us an offering in their place,

Which will undo their untimely fate.

Twins in year eleven, identical

Or eleven sets of twins, identical.

Their deaths must be identical.”

As if the words engraved onto the scroll were some sort of magic sleep spell, he fell unconscious once more instantly upon reading the last word. “Identical.” These words would be forever etched into his mind.

He woke up again, feeling hungover, on the front lawn of 419 Churchill Lane. For a moment he couldn’t hear; he was stomach-down on the lawn and his face was buried in the grass so he couldn’t see either. Despite his faulty senses, his lawn had a distinctly overpowering smell of lilies, larkspurs, and long island iced tea, his favorite beverage, so he knew he was home. He thought to himself, “damn, I always have the most insane nightmares when I drink, that was a whole new level though. How the fuck do I always end up in the front yard when I drink?? I oughta quit soon,” before letting out a hearty, relieved laugh. If the grass could speak it would say his expression looked glamorously glad, but that it soon morphed into a distorted grim expression when his hearing started to return. The sound of sirens and shouting was equivalent to someone walking up to him and saying “hey, your wife and kids are dead,” and then showing him a picture as detailed as a renaissance painting as proof. He was quite sore, but managed to push himself off the ground and looked up, and the sight he saw confirmed his most horrendous inkling of a thought: that his family had died and he wasn’t dreaming. That ineffable pain began to set its way back in, and then he recalled the last moments before he fell unconscious. The memory was quite blurry, but he vaguely remembers him trying to no longer be of this world. He also remembers the vague but clear words from the scroll. “I am alive for a purpose,” he mutters under his breath aquiver with a fervorous determination, “I will bring you back, all of you. No matter how long it takes, no matter how many sacrifices it has to take, I’ll make it happen.”

It was those words on the scroll that burned brightly in the back of his mind that allowed him to live with what happened. His family was his life: he worked to feed his family, he cracked jokes so he could make his family smile, he came home every single night so his family wouldn’t have to wonder where daddy was at, he lived for his family. He would’ve died for them. When he no longer had his family, he couldn’t live with himself and decided to not live with himself. He was given another chance though, and this chance, this quest, became his way of living for his family. Besides his family he had nothing in life, nothing worth living for, he was nothing. Just another alcoholic artist. As he lived for his family, he would live for this scroll’s word. He would let nothing get in the way of doing what the scroll tasked him to do.

He never retrieved the body of his wife, or the body of his twins, or attended their funerals, closed-casket of course, which were held by the twins’ godmother. He never saw a need to. The words “You may send us an offering in their place, which will undo their untimely fate,” echoed in his mind, the volume increasing by magnitudes every time he thought of his family. The scroll made it so his family was still alive to him. They were just on a vacation in Oblivion, where his wife believed you to go upon greeting the Grim Reaper. Those three gruesomely mutated corpses that had once been his family, which the fire had defiled, were now just three gruesomely mutated corpses that the fire had defiled. To him, there was no point in grieving: soon his livelihood would be returned to this plane of existence. He did miss his wife and his twins, but all he felt was determination: determination to “undo their untimely fate.”

And so he commenced upon this perilous sacrificial journey. Up until now he never knew how rare identical twins were: only 0.3% of the global population to be exact. It took him a week of perpetual searching to locate his first set of young identical twins. He couldn’t be sure of their age, but he recalled the words of the scroll “Twins in year eleven, identical Or eleven sets of twins, identical.” He thought that either they’d be eleven and this would work instantly, or he’d eventually sacrifice eleven sets of identical twins. So he stalked the family for days, like a predator watching its prey waiting for the perfect moment to pounce; the perfect moment to make the perfect attack. And that moment was what he got. One night the parents got wildly drunk. They put the children to sleep then shared eleven long island iced teas. He laughed as he recalled all the crazy times he had with those. Like that time he woke up naked in his neighbor’s yard after drinking five; he then also recalled the death– or “vacation” as he imagined– of his family, as the smell now reminded him of their deaths. With this remembrance, his enflamed fervor was fed fresh oxygen. He knew they wouldn’t put up much of a fight now, however, he waited for them to inevitably blackout. They blacked out shortly after his brief hushed laugh. He gracefully floated down from the tree he was perched in. He looked like a shadow, the color of nighttime perfectly matching his all-black attire. He inserted a key into the door, wiggled it a little bit, and then he was granted access. The twins slept on the first floor: enter the first hallway, make a right, and then it’s the second door on the left. This hadn’t been his first time inside; he had a master key made and could come and go as he pleased. He learned which floorboards to step on and which ones not to step on in order to make as little noise as possible. However, with the parents blacked out like this he could’ve brought an elephant in the house and they still would’ve been fast asleep; he of all people would know. He followed his carefully curated path into the twins’ bedroom and opened the door in a sloth-like manner. The following actions all took upon the same manner. He crept towards the bunk bed before stopping at the edge closest towards their heads where he could easily reach each twin. He saw a picture of the family on their nightstand; the twins had the same eyes as his twins, which strangely provided him solace. The eyes reminded him that this was all for a reason, that after this, or ten more of these moments, he would have his love and happiness back. Then he pulled out his 3” karambits, made especially for slicing through skin, and in one fluid motion carried out with brevity and without dither, he sliced through both of their throats. They made no sounds, except for the blood gushing from their throats. He looked at the picture on the nightstand and took comfort in knowing that another would feel something similar to the same ineffable pain he felt, though it could never be the same. He felt not a liter of remorse for their deaths, because it meant his family lived, or soon would. With that realization, he felt a five-hundred-pound barbell lifted from his chest.

He returned to 419 Churchill Lane and awaited his family, but they never came. That five-hundred-pound barbell was slowly lowered onto his chest again over the week he waited. He didn’t let this get his spirits down though. He knew that all that this meant was that the sacrificial lambs weren’t eleven.

He then repeated this process ten more times: prey, pounce, persist. He returned home every single time, but his family never followed along. This didn’t discourage him. It simply perplexed him. It should’ve worked. He thought back to the last line of the scroll: “Their deaths must be identical.” At first, he interpreted this as “their deaths must be identical to each other,” but since that didn’t work he re-evaluated the line and interpreted it as “their deaths must be identical to the deaths of your twins.” So he preyed, which he had become quite the prodigy at doing, and he found another set of victims. “These sacrifices will be different than the others, it’ll work this time around,” he optimistically thought to himself. He meticulously stalked and observed the victims as he did with the first set of victims, like he was a scientist and they were lab rats, before finally pouncing on them. When he pounced, he brought kerosene and Molotov in order to carry out the sacrifice in the same manner his family had been taken. He puts his tools to artful use, painting the canvas, which was the basement, with a simple pattern he once painted for his wife using kerosene and then using the Molotov to add texture. The family had been sacrificed in the same manner as his. Ten more families to go.

So those ten more families went. He still returned to 419 Churchill Lane after every sacrifice in hopes that one of the sacrifices would be eleven years old, but his family never greeted him on the porch how they used to. Or in the kitchen with the scent of long island iced tea and lamb. Or in the living room. Or anywhere. They never greeted him. Even after those ten more families had been sacrificed, they never greeted him. And so the cycle continued: prey, pounce, re-evaluate, persist. This cycle went on and on, and he sporadically gallivanted across states, eventually countries, in order to fulfill his sacrificial requirements without being hindered by law enforcement. And this cycle would continue on for years until one fateful day.

Sacrifice had become blasé to him by this point. Time had caused his scientist-like caution, observation, and due diligence to wane. He got sloppy. The bedroom was right next to the parent’s bedroom. He hadn’t entered the house previously and was sure that he could save time and energy by just going in right away, this way he could make more sacrifices more efficiently. This way he would get his family back sooner. Or maybe he had just wanted this all to end, as he once attempted to make happen, and got sloppy on purpose. He entered the house, artistic mediums in hand ready to be splayed across the canvas, and crept up to the twins’ room. Apparently, he hadn’t crept though: someone must have heard him because footsteps quickly protruded from the parent’s bedroom, and a .45 bullet pierced the left side of his head. This shot caused him to drop his artistic mediums, first the texturing tool called Molotov, then the first layer of paint he used in his painting to make the design, kerosene. Less than a second after he fell to the ground, the texturing tool did as well. The texturing tool being in close proximity to the paint, caused a violent orange-reddish flame to splay across the canvas and completely engulf it. The father, mother, and twins all died in the same gruesome manner as his last fifty-seven victims, and as his family: charred, rotten, mutated, and disfigured.

He had never stopped returning to 419 Churchill Lane after each sacrifice. He never was greeted by his family, but little did he know, the sacrifice worked on the thirteenth attempt. His family had indeed been brought back to life, they lived out the rest of their days in the bodies that had been desecrated by fire before they eventually, and finally, died of dehydration.

He never knew if the universe was deceiving him and whether or not the scroll spoke the truth, but he never lost faith. He eventually lost his optimism, but never his faith: he never stopped sacrificing. He knew the scroll could simply be a figment of his imagination, but it was better to have faith and go on living for a reason, to go on believing in something bigger than himself, than to go on living—surviving, rather—with the harsh truth of reality: his family, his happiness, joy, and love, the only thing he lived for, was never to be reunited with him again. His faith in the words of the scroll was the only thing that allowed him to live with his ineffable pain, grief, and suffering.