The Shrine on Suicide Hill Read online

  ***

  “I saw her, Frankie. Georgia is alive!”

  Frankie grunted and nuzzled her head beneath Evelyn’s chin. “Do you really think that?”

  “No,” Evelyn sighed. “But I don’t know how else to explain it. When I saw her I ran like hell.”

  “Why did you run if you were lovers?” Frankie huffed, frustrated. “Didn’t you expect to see her?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why did you come to High Church?”

  Evelyn rolled over. Frankie dropped a limp arm on her naked back. “She …” Evelyn began but broke off to clamp her teeth down on her bottom lip. “She called to me.”

  “We all have calls to answer,” Frankie said in a flat sleepwalker’s voice.

  Evelyn tore Frankie off of her and shot up. “You knew her, didn’t you? You were lovers too? She must have told you something. Why did she hang herself? I can’t bear not knowing. Was it something I did? Was it something I said? I don’t care if she told you our secrets. About our games. Please just—“

  “I know Georgia now. I am her acolyte. I comfort only you, as she bids me.” Evelyn’s heart shrank. She drew up her knees and bundled the blanket around her shivering limbs.

  Drums thumped in the distance. Loud booming timpani backed by the rhythm of breakers at sea, beating a low cadence on Suicide Hill. Frankie stood, her body stiff for the first time all day, and marched to the window. Whatever she saw cast glittering orange reflections on her eyes. She closed the shutters. Latched them.

  “We all have a call to answer,” she moaned, turning to the door.

  Evelyn held her breath and listened to the drums, the sea, and the decrescendo of Frankie’s girlish footfalls on the stair. The door to the inn creaked open, bell jangling, and slammed shut. Someone downstairs switched on the television.

  The drums beat louder and Evelyn wondered just how many there were. She slipped into some clothes and threw open the shutters. Hundreds of flames on Suicide Hill licked the inky sky, the air rippling with dry heat. Frankie marched, still naked, up the path to the hill. Other girls scampered behind her, clasped hands, and began to march together in an undulating chain. A cluster of boys passed—hands clasped, mouths grinning and silent—beneath Evelyn’s window. The two chains never merged. These are the acolytes. All of them.

  Evelyn clambered downstairs, leaping from floor to landing. The ancient wood of the inn popped and groaned beneath her frantic weight. The two old men she had seen that morning sat at the bar, mulling over their greasy mugs of stout. A television behind the bar sparkled with the flashing lights of some quiz show or other. It blasted loud happy sounds that almost drowned out the sea and the drums. Almost.

  Evelyn unbolted the door and the old men sprang at her. They seized one of her arms and pried her away from the door. The bell above their heads clanged and tinkled. “When we die,” bushy eyebrows panted, “it’ll all be over. There are horrors on that hill. Stay clear of it, you silly bitch!” Evelyn jerked and squealed, her face a Halloween mask of fear and confusion. Wiry grey hairs brushed her cheek. Bitter stench of ale on his breath. She shoved one of the men against the wall, a pale sack of brittle bones and cracking joints. The other squeezed her tight, his flabby body throbbing, breath wheezing out. Drops of saliva trickled down his neck. Evelyn screamed, drove her heel into the old bastard’s shin, and ripped herself from his arms. She bolted outside and disappeared into a sea of night.

  She snagged her jeans only once on the thickets of thorn bushes lining the path. The drums above grew louder, pumping their heartbeat rhythm on her skin. The night flickered orange. Flaming torches marked each grave on the hill, and Evelyn flew the rest of the way up with her legs aching. She pushed her way through the fleshy wall of acolytes—boys kissing boys, girls kissing girls—and ran to Georgia’s grave. Frankie will be there lighting a flame to call upon Georgia.

  Heavy winds swatted at the top of Evelyn’s head. The clouds squirmed with deep black shadows. Drums beat louder. Evelyn lunged at Frankie, nearly doubling her over Georgia’s gravestone. Evelyn kissed the back of her ear and whispered and whispered “What’s going on love?”

  Frankie grunted in mild pleasure, but said nothing in reply.

  Evelyn surveyed the congregation of acolytes. The young bodies glistened in the firelight. Some knelt weeping over the graves they tended. Others kissed and frolicked in a circle around the shrine. Two girls made love under their torches. Evelyn almost asked Frankie if she wanted to join them. Several boys pranced about, waving their torches over their heads like cheeky air traffic controllers. No one’s beating a drum, Evelyn thought. And yet, the beat continued—the pulse and the rhythm of the night. Then the acolytes stopped playing, as if scolded by some unseen schoolmaster, and stalked off to their assigned graves. They each raised a torch to the air and began chanting in time with the drums and the breakers out to sea.

  The dead are not dead on Suicide Hill.

  They rise as his minions, his call in their ears.

  The flesh is not flesh on Suicide Hill.

  It holds no more weakness, it holds no more fear.

  The Bishop calls us to Suicide Hill.

  The Bishop calls and the acolytes hear!

  Evelyn nudged Frankie. “Who’s the bishop?” she asked. “Is it that boy’s father?” She poked a finger towards the boy who had smashed the toad. But Frankie was tuning out everything but the shrine and her song of praise.

  The clouds churned, a swirling mass of black vapor. The drums beat louder. Thwop thwop thwop. Evelyn cocked her head. An evil shape stirred behind the clouds. Wind and heavy drops of brine blasted down on her upturned face. Rain? she wondered. Shards of flesh dipped down from the growling sky. Red eyes shone through the darkness. And at last Evelyn realized that the beat and rhythm of the night had been the sound of leathery wings batting the air.

  She bit her fist. I mustn’t scream, she thought. Then they’ll know.

  Wings swatted. Red shafts of light beamed from its eyes and scoured the hill like search lights. Sticky sea brine oozed down Evelyn’s arms and dripped from her trembling fingertips as her thoughts swam in tight circles. It’s a demon. It comes from the sea where it sleeps in blackness.

  Some of the acolytes screamed gibberish, kicking up their legs and pulling at their hair. Evelyn wanted to leave. She imagined herself running back to the inn, hopping in her car, and driving until the tires rotted off the wheels. But she froze at the sight of the dead.

  Shades of nightmare crawled up from torch lit graves, their gory locks drenched with brine and matted with clots of earth. Each corpse jerked to attention and sang the litany, their tattered shrouds flapping in the wind. The red countenance of The Bishop shone down on their faces, chiseling deep black shadows onto their gaunt features. Don’t look at its eyes, Evelyn told herself. You’ll go mad. Yet she looked up. Great black wings beating. Red eyes. A thousand thread-like tentacles bristled and squirmed at the edge of its gaping maw.

  Evelyn threw back her head and squealed in horror.

  A cold hand pressed against Evelyn’s shoulder and squeezed gently. Her body still remembered Georgia’s touch. She whirled around.

  It was Georgia, alive and glowing her body young and supple. Her eyes sparkled, feline and yellow in the firelight. She sang out her verse of the litany, stroking Frankie’s hair with her free hand.

  “The dead are not dead on Suicide Hill,” Georgia chanted almost as an explanation. “We rise as his minions, his call in our ears.”

  The stink of mud and decay soured Evelyn’s stomach.

  Frankie arched her back and nearly purred at Georgia’s touch. Evelyn sucked in a deep breath and stepped closer to her undead lover. She poked a finger at her ribs.

  “You see,” Georgia said. “I’m real enough.”

  Evelyn untied the scarf around Georgia’s neck and slid her fingers over the blue groove beneath—deep imprints of rope fibers wrapped and gnarled over her cool skin. I can feel her breath on my face.

  “You can’t be Georgia,” Evelyn panted. “You’re dead.”

  Then their bodies lit up with a bloody glow. The Bishop is watching us. Frankie jumped up and down, clapped her hands, and wriggled her little behind. Frankie thinks she’s on a game show … and the host just pinched her on her bum. Evelyn tensed all of her muscles, blocking out everything. She felt The Bishop probing her mind. Feathery caresses at the base of her skull. She closed her eyes, blocking her thoughts with the lyrics to every annoying pop song she ever heard.

  But they all dissolved into that macabre hymn of Suicide Hill. She barely noticed the dead hands cupping her breasts, or sharing kisses with Frankie and Georgia. Membranes and feathers and kisses and brine swept furrows of gooseflesh into her body, onto her mind.

  “I never trust myself around you, Georgia,” Evelyn said—her voice in a bucket of water. “You and your games. You and your games. It’s like drowning in you. But I could never say no. So you’re back and I’ll play your game, Georgia. For you. Always for you.”

  “Do you remember how I showed you?” Georgia asked, petting Evelyn gently, gently.

  “Yes,” Evelyn said, her tongue and her mind at the bottom of a black, dreamlessly sleeping sea. The chanting, the hill, the legion of corpses, and even Frankie evaporated into the chilly currents. The Bishop looked on, its crimson gaze burning her, wings fluttering, its sly tentacles brushing her throat. But she didn’t care. Georgia’s come back for me. And she stroked Evelyn so gently, gently.

  ***

  Evelyn sat up in bed, her night clothes sticky with sweat and sea salt. Dawn crackled up from the horizon, an orange streak on
the sea’s glittering skin. Dewdrops raced down the window. Frankie lounged on the edge of the bed, zigzags of wet bangs pasted to her forehead. At that moment, Evelyn thought she might have loved her better than Georgia. In a different world, perhaps—where the dead sleep through the night.

  “Do you remember?” Frankie asked.

  Evelyn ran a quivering hand through her hair and nodded.

  “Georgia will be happy,” Frankie said with a brittle smile. “And I will comfort you. As I comfort her.”

  Evelyn stood on wobbly legs and tore down the clothes line. She wrapped it tight around her fingers, choking off the flow of blood. Fingers bulging. Red, then purple, then blue. She let the cord go slack and felt blood pumping again in an even course beneath her skin. She tied one end of the cord as Georgia had taught her … when they used to play the naughty game. Evelyn fastened that end around her neck, and tossed the other end over the naked beam. She climbed up on her nightstand. Its cracked wooden legs buckled and groaned. Then she tied the cord around the beam with a tight, carefully lashed knot. She slipped the skinny noose over her head.

  Frankie pulled the nightstand away, and Evelyn fell into another world.

  Outside, children played in the empty streets. Soot streaked their grinning faces and blackened their fingernails. Their laughter echoed against the crumbling walls of High Church. Downstairs in the Seaman’s Shanty, two old men—the only old men still living in that town by the sea—sat at the bar. A sparsely populated chess board stood between them. A news anchor discussed the day’s top stories with them through the television.

  “Scientists in Greenwich,” she announced, “have confirmed that two black holes, GS49-K and QP97-W, are on a collision course. Scientists predict the black holes could collide within the next six thousand years. The scientific community continues to debate the effect this event may have on our solar system …”

  Suicide Hill stood silent, with the sea lapping at its feet. A black veil of shadows clung to its face, even as sunlight broke over the ancient shrine.

  ### ### ###

  This concludes “The Shrine on Suicide Hill” by Jonathan Sweet. If you’ve enjoyed this story, please recommend it to your friends and write a review!

  Jonathan Sweet

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