A Matter of Words

1. Brian Paone – Outside of Heaven-2

“I’m Cecil and this is my wife, Grace,” Cecil interjected, extending his hand, and deflecting the priest’s attention from Grace.

“Very nice to meet you. I’m Father Jackson.”

“Nice to meet you too,” Cecil said and touched the bandage around his hand.

“I hope you are on the mend?” Father Jackson asked.

“Yes, Father. It was a work accident. Fifteen stitches,” Cecil replied, holding up his wounded hand. “Nothing a little tender loving care won’t fix.”

“Ah, the joys of marriage,” Father Jackson said, smiling. “A very holy sacrament between a man and a woman. That’s the only way God ever wanted it, you know.”

Grace shot Cecil a look. She was certainly in no mood for a sermon about what defines a marriage in the eyes of God.

“It’s been a pleasure, Father. Try to stay dry,” Cecil said, hoping to cut short Father Jackson’s opinion.

Father Jackson nodded, and Alice returned from the back room with a basket of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash.

Cecil and Grace exited the lobby to find Room 18. As soon as Cecil unlocked the door, he took Grace into his arms to carry her over the threshold. She always looked the prettiest when she tossed her head back like that.

Maybe this really was a new beginning.

“Shh!” Grace commanded, waving her hand and giggling. “I think they’re all about to get it on.”

Cecil stood at the only window in the room—a gaudy strand of lights hung around the window frame—looking at the parking lot of the Blue Leaf Motel. The rain had stopped and left behind the sound of residual droplets of water falling into puddles from telephone lines and gutters.

Grace was more interested in the muffled conversations coming through the walls of the adjoining hotel room.

“It’s definitely two girls and one dude,” she said, cupping her ear to the wall.

Cecil inspected the new dressing Grace had wrapped around his wounded hand. It felt tight and secure. The stitches didn’t seem to bother him as much since she had changed out the bandages. The cut hadn’t reopened in the past few hours either.

“I told you. Seedy motels.”

“Oh, quit it,” Grace scoffed. “You said we would be next to a crack w***e or a serial killer. You should be aroused at the ménages à trois in the next room. I know I am!”

Cecil looked away from the window and his hand to stare sharply at his wife. Was that an obvious dig at what a typical man should be aroused by? Would Lucas What’s-His-Name be turned on by listening to a threesome in the next room?

Grace pressed her ear against the wall again, ignoring the glare from her husband.

“What do you think Father Jackson would say if he knew what was going on down the hall from him?” Cecil asked, trying to lighten the mood.

“You gotta hear this,” Grace said, ignoring Cecil’s rhetorical question. “They are going at it!”

“I’m all set here. Plus it’s an invasion of privacy.”

“They are f*****g in a hotel room! Three of them! And they are loud! What kind of privacy do you expect to retain in a setting like this?”

Cecil realized that she had made a good point, but that still didn’t justify going out of his way to eavesdrop on the activities in the next room. Instead of entertaining her voyeurism, he pulled down the bedspread and turned on the television, hoping to drown out some of the sounds coming from the adjoining room. Cecil flipped through the generic cable channels until he came to one of his favorites movies: Moby d**k.

The dialogue of Gregory Peck transported Cecil from the Blue Leaf Motel to a simpler time. A time before he had to worry about things such as bills and jobs and dating and finances and mortgages and vows and tactfulness and politics and ass-kissing, and mortality and, most of all, Lucas What’s-His-Name.

Cecil was dragged out of his happy place by Grace slithering toward him from the foot of the bed.

“Listening to them really did it for you, huh?” he asked.

She crawled closer to him, answering with a question. “Whose birthday is tomorrow?”

“Mine.”

“How about I give you your birthday present a little early?” she said seductively.

Cecil closed his eyes and tried to let the sounds of the television drown out the moans and screams getting increasingly louder from the next room as his wife unzipped his pants.

Cecil couldn’t help but think that she was only turned on by the debauchery in the next room and not because she wanted to please her husband on the eve of his birthday, when they were supposed to be reconciling a black stain that she had placed on their vows.

It made him feel dirty. But a “real man” would be selfish and wouldn’t care about such menial things as feelings.

Cecil was jarred awake by a violent crash, the hotel room shaking. He sat upright and held his breath. Confusion kept him frozen in place, but only for a moment. Everything in the room bounced. Badly drawn art vibrated, clinging to the hooks that barely kept them secured to the walls. Loose items on the dresser fell and danced when they hit the worn-out carpet.

Panic crept in, and Cecil gripped Grace’s arm harder than he had intended.

“Huh?” she asked sleepily, unaware of the room’s tremors.

“Wake up!” he said with urgency. “We’re in the middle of an earthquake.”

Cecil wasn’t completely sure though. He had never experienced an earthquake before.

“Earthquake? Are you kidding—” Grace’s eyes widened. She sat up in the bed. “Holy f*****g s**t! Quick, stand in a door frame.”

“A door frame?” Cecil replied, the volume of his voice rising. “Why not just go out to the parking lot?”

“I heard somewhere that a door frame is the safest place during an earthquake.”

The earth continued to rattle. The complementary shampoo bottles rolled off the bathroom counter and crashed onto the porcelain floor.

Cecil thought he could feel the floor ripple underneath him. He grabbed his pants and tried to steady himself with the room’s chair.

“Do earthquakes usually last this long?” Grace asked loudly as she hastily tied her sneakers.

“I don’t think so.”

Then another crash came. This time it sounded like a piece of the hotel itself had been destroyed. Cecil and Grace paused and stared at each other silently.

“What—”

Cecil quickly held up his hand to silence his wife’s dialogue. He needed to concentrate, but all he could hear was everything shaking and banging.

“I can’t imagine this is normal,” he whispered.

“Should we go outside?” Grace asked quietly.

Cecil pulled back the curtains. The rain assaulted the glass so ferociously that he couldn’t see past his own reflection in the pane. He was more nervous than he originally thought.

Then the hotel shook as if a bomb had exploded in their room. Cecil’s forehead bounced off the window, and Grace was thrown backward with so much force that she was struggling to catch her own breath.

Screams erupted from the room next to theirs.

“We gotta go,” Grace said matter-of-factly to Cecil, breathing easier now. “We gotta go now!”

The screaming from the next room became piercing, as if someone was being ripped apart.

“I’m right behind you.”

Cecil gripped the doorknob at the same time that the ceiling of their room caved in. He closed his eyes and instinctively covered his head with his hands. After a few seconds passed when all the debris stopped falling, he looked around to make sure Grace hadn’t been injured. She seemed okay, if still scared out of her mind.

A blanket of calmness consumed him when he decided that what he was seeing could in no way be possible or real.

The rain was falling through a hole in the ceiling of their hotel room. A large black insect leg, with the thickness of a tree trunk, stood planted in the middle of the room; the body that belonged to that leg was out of view, hovering somewhere over the hotel.

Cecil noticed the length of the hairs that randomly protruded from the massive leg, looking like obscene broom straws. The joint of the leg lined up just below the hole in the ceiling inside the hotel room. Whatever monstrosity was invading the hotel reminded him of something he would see in an old science fiction double feature, like Them! and Tarantula.

A second gargantuan insect leg crashed through the ceiling and impaled the middle of the bed—sending shards of wood spraying across the room. A piece of shrapnel struck Grace in the cheek, and Cecil lunged forward to grab his wife. He had to run around one of the spider legs to get to Grace. He noticed how the rain ran down the big insect legs and dripped from the long coarse pieces of hair that were as long as his arm. Just as he reached her, they heard a series of more crashes throughout the hotel that sounded like clumsy rudiments being played on a snare drum.

The room’s combination fan and light finally let go of the damaged ceiling and crashed to the floor right where Cecil had been standing a few seconds earlier.

“What the f**k is going on?” Grace screamed.

“The sky must be broken, just like you said. I think it’s the end of the world,” Cecil replied as rain doused the back of his neck. When he extended his arm toward his wife to help her get up off the floor, he noticed that the wound on his hand had opened up again. The bandage was turning red as it absorbed the blood.

Grace reached for his hand and then stopped abruptly. The sound of giant legs crashing through the roof of the hotel had stopped but had been replaced by frantic, bloodcurdling screams from different guests throughout the hotel instead.

“We gotta get to the car and go. I don’t even want to see what is—”

Cecil was thrown backward as a third leg crashed through the ceiling directly above his head and impaled Grace right through the chest. She lifted her head slightly; her eyeballs appeared as if they would pop out of her skull. A gurgling moan escaped her lips as blood splattered from her mouth and the gaping hole in her torso.

Cecil screamed with such force that his vocal cords quit working almost immediately. He lunged forward to grab his wife, even though he didn’t know what he was going to do to help her. He wrapped his hands around the big hairy insect leg and tried to pull it upward. It didn’t budge.

He let go of the leg and looked down at Grace. She was already dead. Her eyes were frozen open, and she was limp with the leg through her middle like a stake.

In a moment of panic and adrenaline, Cecil reached for the insect leg again. This time, just before his fingers could get a grip, the leg rocketed upward through the hole in the ceiling, taking Grace with it. Cecil stumbled backward as the body of his wife struck him on her upward journey through the hole.

Cecil watched his wife rise as lifeless as a rag doll. The insect leg had completely skewered her body. Then the leg and his wife were gone, disappearing through the hole.

The other two legs that had been motionless in the room also retracted through the holes they had created.

It must be walking, Cecil thought.

He bolted for the door and spilled out into the parking lot. He turned around and looked into the sky above the roof.

Walking on long legs that looked more like stilts were three colossal spiders.

With each step they took, another one of their eight legs crashed through the roof of the hotel. Even though their legs were black, their bodies were pale. Cecil noticed they were walking as a group—the church was the next building in their path.