Climbing up to the Moon

Climbing up to the Moon

By: Chase L. Currie

Edited By: Amber N. Funderburck

(This is really old...but enjoy.)

The key is forced into the lock, slowly turns and the door opens to the lonely apartment. The icy wind of autumn rushes into the darkness of the room and around Beth, like an unwanted blanket. The tired girl stands in the doorway, not really wanting to enter the blackness of the apartment. The full moon watches her fade into the emptiness as the door shuts. The moon followed her home, watching her every footstep and copying every facial expression she made, while thinking about the long day. She takes off her brown coat, throwing it somewhere in room. She removes her shoes, dropping her tight jeans to the ground. She removes her clothes like weights to relax her tired body.

Beth moves more freely as she walks an unseen path into the small bathroom never cutting a light on. She opens a bottle on the counter and drops two blue and clear pills into her hand. She holds the white plastic bottle in front of her face and her dark brown eyes read:Sleep Aid, Maximum Strength. “God, I sure hope so,” she says, throwing the pills to the back of her throat.

She lays down on the cold floor of the bathroom, puts her arms under her head, and looks out the window to the moon looking back at her. It almost seems to be smiling at her round, doleful face. The only friend she seems to have in all the world and he or she is a thousand miles away. The words of a sad song run through her mind.

Got a sky that looks like Heaven,

Got an earth that looks like shit.

“Climbing up to the moon” by the Eels is playing in her head. She thinks back to all the times she heard that song in the car with an old high school friend, years ago. They don't every talk anymore but she still remembers that song. She almost smiles at the thought of days long gone in high school and how easy they seem to be, but the smile never comes. And the past always seems easier than the present,she thinks to herself.

The friend in the car has long moved on and their lives have gone down different paths. She can't seem to remember his name and she is sure he forgets her as well. She beats her head against the floor just a little. Hoping to force a name out of her past but the only thing that comes to mind is a face. High school just seems like a far off dream and the face that held some kind of joy during that time seems to be only fuzzy photographs now. College life is so much more different then she thought it would be. Her life is so much more different then she planned. “But isn't that how it goes?” she tells the moon.

Her mind falls to wondering what the world looks like from the moon. How peaceful it must seem to be. How perfect it must look. She knows from that far away you can't see the pain. You can't feel all the fucked up emotions and everyone just looks like ants. That's how God must see the world.

Her thin body moves around an invisible ball at the center of her stomach and her hands cover her face. The tears flood out and all the pain of the day lays down beside her. Playing the events over and over in her mind that lead up to this point. Walking in on her boyfriend with some girl, naked, on top of him. The blonde whore with the perfect body, screaming his name. Then telling her boss to fuck off and getting fired. That long lonely walk home without her best friend beside her. Telling her that she deserves someone better and that the job was shitty any ways. No, her friend is tied to a bed, in some hospital throwing up everything in her stomach. One too many pills put her there.

The crying, the yelling, and the moaning should bring her cat running to calm her down. But the cute little feline died yesterday. Somehow, the animal hung itself chasing the rope tied to the ceiling fan. Beth's mind couldn't help but run to the idea the cat killed itself. She was gone all day and all the cat had to do was count the bumps on the ceiling.

Right before the pills kick in, before the crying would fade; A sharp knock comes ringing form the bathroom window. She looks up to see a ladder heading up into the sky and person's foot climbing up it. She jumps to her feet and looks up the long wooden ladder that reaches up to the moon. Stepping back, she tells her self she took the wrong pills. That this is not happening. She closed her eyes, breathes and whispers, “Just a dream.” She opens her eyes to see a body kneeling in the window.

The man as dark as the night sky, his body showing the stars behind him and his face covered by a mask. A dark red mask that looks like it's made from some kind of bronze metal; The eyes of the mask cold and empty, the mouth opening in a scream, but not fully stretched in a scream just yet. She has seen the face before in some art history book on some Greek statue. The air she took in a second ago quickly finds its way back out of her mouth. She has no words to says, mostly because she doesn't know what to say to this person in her window.

The man cocks his head to the side and whispers beside her ears, “Like what you did to her hair.” She forgot. She dyed it dark red for her, now, ex-boyfriend a day ago. “Beth, I need your help. Will you come with me?” The voice asks and the man holds out his hand. Almost as if the voice and the person in front of her are two different things.

“To where?”

“To the moon, to see the world as being perfect,” he says. She steps closer to the man, and he pulls his arm away. Before she can reach him, he has already started climbing up the ladder. Without thinking about it, she does the same. Half way up the wooden ladder, she looks back down at the world; miles and miles above the ground, the city she lives in and the world she knows looks more like a beautiful painting of heaven. Pulling her body close to the ladder, she tries not to freak out and fall to her death. Beth looks up, looking for the starry man but he has already made it to the top of the ladder. The man looks back down at Beth as she pulls herself up to the next steps.

She steps on the light gray ground of the moon, looking around for the man, but can’t find him. She turns back to the ladder but it has disappeared. The world does look perfect from this high. The earth looks like a marble snipping in a sea of stars. Nothing seems out of place in the world. Everything is as perfect as she imagined and the smile from before finds its way across her face.

Beth steps back and spins to see the quiet landscape of the moon, trying to figure out what to do next. An arrow is drawn into the ground in front of her and with the words “that way”, show which direction to walk in. She does as the words tell her and climbs over a small hill to see a mansion sitting on the other side.

There seems to be no real plan to the mansions. Doors, towers, windows, and walls just seem to be randomly placed together to create the building. Statues of every culture lay against the walls and inside the arc ways. A statue of a demon killing a women angel sits above the only door that someone can enter. All the other doors are either too far underground or too high to reach.

She knocks on the door and waits. No one comes to the door, no sound is made from the other side. So she knocks again and waits. A few moments later, Beth tries to open the door. She turns the door handle and with easy pushes, opens it. As the door opens, a blinding light pulls her in and she then finds herself standing in a room, alone.

The room is giant, almost three times the size of her apartment and as bright as the sun. She looks around, seeing a king size bed against one wall and on the other side of the room is a tall mirror. The walls of the room are a gold-orange color with gold breaches spread throughout the room. The breaches wrap around the bed and the mirror. Beth runs her hands down the poles of the bed, feeling the warmth of gold.

She slowly walks over to the mirror and touches the glass. It is warm as well. She steps back and looks at her long smooth legs in reflecting glass. She starts to run her hands up her long curves, the feeling sending hot aches through her blood. As her finger tips get closer to the edge of her blue underwear, her cheeks start to blush and she stops herself. She let’s go of her underwear and shakes her head, not believing the rush of dopamine being caused by her finger tips against her smooth skin. Beth steps back and rubs her head trying to get a grasp on to reality. “What the hell am I doing?”

She looks back at the mirror and starts to run her hands up under her black t-shirt. Her hands move against her will as if someone else is controlling them. Watching them pull up her shirt in the mirror she starts to see the outline of someone else's hands and feels a warm body against her. She turns to face the white marble chest of a man.

Looking up to see his perfect face and down to see his perfect, naked body. She gasps for air. A feeling like never before rushes to every end of her body; A hundred times more power than any touch from a lover, a billion times more electrifying then being wooed by any man. The man smiles and breathes heavily. She starts to touch his stone body and flesh forms under her hands. The flesh quickly turns back into stone as she feels the curves of his body.

“Who are you?” she tries to ask, holding back the sounds of a moan.

“A god---” he says, moving his hands up and down her back and around her body. “And a god that wants to worship you.” His lips touch her and fire rages in her blood. She kisses him back hard, then the stone his body is made of. She starts to kiss him on the neck.

“I want to make love to a goddess like you. I want you to show me what perfect ecstasy is.” The man cries in joy as she slowly moves further down his body and finally stops when her knees hit the ground. She looks up at him as he smiles down at her.

But something is not right. The feeling in her heart is wrong. Something is yelling in the back of her head; Telling her to run; Run far, far away from this man. Before she can agree or react to the yelling, his hard cock is deep in her mouth; The moans from her and the man almost deafen the yelling in her head. The words of caution are just light whispers somewhere deep in her mind.

The man moves one of his hands to the back of Beth's head. And a sick feeling rushes up from her stomach. A flashback to all those times her boyfriend used her for his little sex toy, the dreadful feeling of being nothing more than a piece of meat for anyone to use. The images of all the girls faces frozen in ecstasy by the love of her life. She tries to stop and it almost works but the man pushes down on her even more. She tries to cry but the tears are nowhere to be found.

Suddenly the feeling of a tongue between her legs makes her stop for a moment and open her eyes. The man's body has turn from a snow white to a dark, ash color. The stones start to break and fall off of his body. Black oil, like flesh, is dripping from the creaks. The man pushes deeper and harder down on Beth's head. Her eyes grow with fear and she tries to breathe, but his thick, oily penis is keeping the air from her lungs. She fights back, pushes against him. Her hands are sinking within his body and he is not letting go. Out of fear and rage, she bites down on him trying to cause effective pain for him to let go of her, but the monster just moans louder. She's trapped and death is soon to follow.

The air is coming thin in her lungs. She knows, seconds from now, she will pass out. “Death by sucking dick,” is the last thought entering her mind and right before the air runs out - the monster screams in pain and lets go of Beth’s head. He throws her back against the mirror, cracking the glass. She watches a long, sliver blade cut up through the monster, killing the beast. And as the body splits, Beth sees the man in the mask from before. The person she followed up to this hell.

The masked man steps between the pools of the monster body and pulls Beth to her feet. She starts to cry and buries her face into his chest. “I'm sorry,” he whispers. “I didn't mean for that to happen.”

~

“Who are you?” Beth asks, following the masked man down some hallways. She feels safer with him. He did save her from a horrible death so there is no reason to not trust him. She is also in a place she knows nothing about and he seems to know where he is going.

“My name is Thus,” he says to her, his voice still whispering beside her ears.

“Where are we?”

“The moon.”

Beth stops and so does he. He faces her and she asks him, “You said you needed my help, what did you mean by that?” She knows she should ask how they are on the moon but with what just happened, she doesn’t question it.

Thus starts to walk back down the hall. “I need you to help me find something, but what that is will have to wait. Everything will be understood in due time. Right now, we have to find the room.”

“The room?” Beth questions as she starts to follow him again.

~

The room was small and cold. There were no lights in the room and no way of seeing in the darkness around them. Thus has lead them into the wrong room and he is trying to figure a way out. They can see the door, somehow, and unknown to them. As if the door was giving off some kind of light in the darkness, but never changing the blackness around them. Thus studies the door. There was no door handle and there was no way out. While Beth just sat at his feet looking out into the room. She wonders what is behind the vale of shadow. She wonders but did not know how to ask Thus about it. Then again he may not know what's inside this room either.

Beth stands up and steps into the darkness. Hoping there was an edge there. Hoping she would fall to her death. And her foot hits the floor under it. There was something in the darkness, so she starts walking around the room. Maybe she can find the way out.

She stops walking. She didn't know why, nothing told her to do so. She had not hit anything. In fact she hasn't found one wall yet. She looks back and Thus was gone and so was the door. She looks down. Right in front of her are three pills sitting on top of an unseen table, with a different word written on each one. One said, “To make you dumb.” The other reads, “To make you numb.” And the last one told her, “To make you anybody else.” They were all the same color, little and yellow. Beth was sure they were all the same kind of pill.

“Can I have one?” A girl asked from the darkness. The voice carried a deep sadness within it. Beth looked for the person who said it but there was only blackness. “I need one, I hurt so badly.”

“Who’s there?” Beth asks, or she thinks she asks.

“Just one, whichever one you want, Beth. Just give me one. There’s too much pain.”

“Where are you?”

“I feel it inside me; the rattling of something wrong with me, I just want one pill to make it all better, Beth. I beg you, just one.”

No, no, it can't be! The voice is her friend. The friend dying from the pills she gave her; the pills to stop the pain of something that would fade with time, if only she would have let time heal the wounds.

“It can't be you!” Beth cries falling to the ground. “You can’t be here.”

“Just one pill...”

“NO!” she yells throwing her hands over her eyes. “I can't do it again. I can't be the reason why you die!”

“Beth, I need it,” the voice cries. She moves her hands to find the pill sitting in them. Beth looks around in the darkness and tells herself, “It’s just one. One pill. It can't hurt her that bad, can it? All she needs is one, just one.”

“Which one?” Beth asks.

“It doesn’t matter, I just need one.”

She looks at the pills as her tears fall on to the little yellow drug. She read them again and again, “to make you dumb, to make you numb, and to make you anybody else.” Which one would she want to swallow? Which one would she give to her friend? She closed her eyes and just randomly sticks her arms out in the air. “Take one, hurry up and do it,” Opening her hands to show the pills sitting in her palms, “Just do it.”

A hand from the darkness reaches out and takes all three. Beth yells, “No!” and tries to reclaim the pills but falls too short. “You said just one.”

“But I need them...” Darkness says silently. Then it quickly picks Beth up by the hair. She scrams in pain and fights back. She can't see anything in the darkness and has no idea where to fight at. She swings randomly in the dark, hoping to hit something but her fists never make contact with anything.

“And now it's time to take your pain away,” the voice says changing from a female tone to a growling man's voice. A sharp pain comes from Beth's hands and feet, and then all feeling quickly flees from her limps. Little needle-like lines push up from under her skin. They head quickly for her heart to end her life. She cries louder and louder as they push her skin from her muscles.

Thus runs from behind Beth and throws his body into the darkness, pushing the blackness away from the crying, terrified girl. She falls to the ground bawling and crying from the pain. She can hear the fight that the darkness is putting up against Thus, but he seems to be winning.

Moments later, maybe seconds or hours, Thus falls to Beth’s side. The battle is over and he defeated the monster in the darkness. He looks at the girl and starts to pet her hair to hopefully calm her down. “I killed whatever was attacking you.” He says to her breathing heavily, tired from the long fight.

“I hate this place and I want to go home.” Beth says.

“After we find the room,” Thus replies laying his sword to his side, “You will able to go home.”

“What is so important about this room?”

“If we do not find it---” He stops petting her. She looks at him as his empty eyes study her beautiful face. She pulls his hand back to her head and makes him continue to pet her. “I'll die.”

“Why?”

“Just how life is. You know how that is, but we should get going soon.”

“You know, it's my fault my friend is dying.” Beth confesses. “I have given her the pills.” The words fall from her mouth as weights are lifted from her soul. The guilt quickly fades from her heart. The fact is horrible but being able to say it and say it without crying, makes Beth feel a little lighter. “She is lying in a bed right now because of me.”

“That’s bullshit,” Thus says, standing up. Beth just looks into the darkness around them, not following him. She doesn't want to hear the words he is about to say. Mostly because she knows whatever is about to come out of his mouth will be the truth. “You didn't make her swallow those pills. You didn't force them down her throat. Blaming yourself does nothing for anyone but make you feel better. Your blame is just a sad, pathetic way of punishing yourself. You need to get the hell over it.” Thus says walking away.

Is he right? Beth stands up and starts to follow him again. She has been blaming herself all night, all week for everything. If only she was a better friend, a better lover, and most of all, a better person. If only she was all those things. Beth would be able to fix it all and make her life perfect. If only she was someone else.

~

Beth follows Thus back down the hall, a few feet behind him, and just looks at the ground. Thus checks a door every now and then to see if it is the right room. He opens the doors and then quickly closes it. Beth is thankful they don't enter any more rooms, not knowing what horror lays on the other side. She would rather just stand in the mix-matched hall and go nowhere, than to enter another room.

Thus lays the side of this head against the door to see if he can hear anything. Just the sounds of a loud cry coming from the other side and he decides not to open that door. As he starts to move to the next door, he asks, “Why did your friend take those pills?”

“Her life was going to Hell.” Beth tells him.

“And how was that happening?”

“Her boyfriend left her and her grandfather died, all in the same week,” Beth says.

“So did you fuck him? Her boyfriend - is that why he left?” Thus questions.

“What?! Hell no. He just didn’t love her anymore,” Beth says.

“Oh, I see. Well did you cut her grandfather's throat?” Thus asks, never looking back at the shock on Beth's face about the weird questions coming from him.

“What the fuck is wrong with you? No, I didn't! He died of old age.” She tells him.

“So let me get this straight: Your friend’s life was falling apart and it had nothing to do with you.” Thus says, turning to face Beth and leaning against the wall. “And the only things you did were give her some pills. That she took out of her own freewill. Am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“Food for thought,” he says starting to walk back down the hall way, “Just food for thought.”

~

They both enter a small room with nothing in it but a camp fire in the middle. There is no smoke coming from the burning wood, just the flames around it. On the other side of the room is a blue door with a round window at the top of it. Thus slowly walks around the room, falling behind Beth as she makes her away over to the door. She looks at the fire thinking about questioning the fact there is no smoke but is quickly reminded that she on the moon. The fire is the least freaky thing she has seen all night. She makes it to the door and looks through the window to see the ladder heading back down to the earth. She tries to open the door but it is locked. She looks back at Thus and he is just leaning against the wall. The mask turns from the little scream to a dark smile.

“I can get home now, Thus? The ladder is on the other side.” Beth tells him.

“I know,” he says, walking close to her and then smacking her to the ground. Beth just looks up at him with tears in her eyes. He kneels to her side and says, “I said that I needed you, but I kind of lied. I just need your heart.”

Beth says nothing. “I know, I know,” Thus starts to tell her walking around the room again. “I'm an asshole. I'm a bad guy. But, hmmm, isn't that the point? You should've seen this coming Beth. That all you can pick is---bad guys. And you want to know why?” Thus asks looking dead into her eyes. “Of course you do. They all want to know why their lives were so shitty before they die. But I'm the bad guy,” He says pulling his sword out. “And that is why I will not tell you.”

Beth stands to her feet and says nothing. Thus just pull his sword apart and throws her a long blade. She catches the sword and it pulls her arm to the ground. The weight is too heavy for her weak arm and she never held a sword before in her life. Beth looks at the clean sliver killing tool, and back at Thus.

He cocks his head to the side and says, “You're not going to win, but the taste of fear is nothing more than ecstasy to me. And,” he says moving his body like a snake. “It's just so much fun letting you think that you can fight back.”

Before Beth can open her mouth to tell the man to eat shit and die, he is already in front of her; his cold blade resting against her leg. He smells her hair and kisses the side of her cheek. Thus whispers, “I think I will do this slowly. Take my time, show you how much death can make you moan. What do you think?”

She looks into his eyes, the endless blackness looking back at her. Then she lifts his hand holding the blade, and slips it into her belly. The pain shoots up her flesh as the blood floods out. She holds back the scream and the tears, and just grins. Thus shakes his head. This is not what he wanted. He wanted to take his time. He wanted to enjoy every scream, every tear, and every last little moment of Beth's life. As the blade enters deeper into her body she pulls him closer and closer to her. Until his chest is resting against her chest.

“I think you are going to burn,” Beth whispers into his ear and kisses him on the cheek and then flies backs until the sword is out of her body. Thus just watches the quick action as Beth kicks him into the fire sitting behind him. He falls laughing at her and lands right into the fire. The flames devour his body before he touches the wood under it. As if the fire has be waiting all this time, to eat him. Thus just starts to yell, “You did it, you did it!”

Beth just watches his body turn to ashes and she hold her hands against the wound as blood flows around her fingers. The door behind her unlocks and she opens it. And before stepping down the ladder, she just looks back into the room; following the line of blood to the spot where she faced her monster. Then to the flames that saved her and over to the door. Knowing that tonight showed her more of herself then any person, drug or moment her life has before. She smiles, then steps down the ladder.

The End…