The Cage

By Joseph Moore

Silence floated over the airwaves for a moment; respectful, mournful. "Thank you Andrew. That was ~Flood~ by The Sisters of Mercy, and if you didn't know that then you shouldn't be listening. This is ~The Eternal Hour~ on 107.5 FM; gloomy music for these harsh, unsettling times. Broadcasting over and under the San Fernando Valley, I, Claudia, am in control. You will now bow down, listen and pray... or be prey. I have spoken."

Switching the microphone off, Claudia's black-nailed hand continued, gesturing to the engineer in the control booth. Its short trip ended by swiftly removing a set of earphones. Her midnight black hair swirled about as dirge by Fields of the Nephlim started: mechanical sounds, drum beats, powerful screaming, tools, instruments; songs of despair crafted by dark artisans. She rose from the panel and walked, passing softly through the control booth and out the front door of the radio station.

The evening sky, faintly lit but slowly bleeding away into night, comforted her. It reminded her of skin flushed by exertion, full of life, full of hope. The steady breeze off the ocean cooled her own skin; its salty taste quickly coating her nostrils, the back of her throat. She reached into a pocket of her black jeans and pulled out a pack of Harley-Davidson cigarettes. The glow from her silver lighter, burning the tobacco, gleamed across her pale face, glassy stare.

From the slight plateau the station was built upon, she could see down onto the neighborhood beach. Several groups of people remained, playing volleyball, romping around, frolicking about in that typical California way. Their light laughs, screams of happiness and startled shrieks from cooling water splashing upon warm skin drifted up through the cigarette smoke. Claudia emotionlessly watched, absorbing the evidence of joy, the proof of life. Her vantage point morbidly resembled that of a vulture circling over a dying body, waiting for the blood to stop, the lungs to deflate, the living to give up; waiting for the feeding to begin.

Time passed. Behind her, pounding from the speakers nailed to the outside of the station, the harsh electric sounds and guttural screaming that constituted the music of Leaetherstrip began; it also signaled the end of her break. The cigarette dropped from her fingers, spiraling like a rotating firework. Her black booted foot stomped down, forever extinguishing the fire.

Claudia turned from the beach, taking in a final glance of the remaining sun worshippers. Her last view before entering the cold plastic and steel interior of the station was of the beach's small exercising area. Only the city's professional body builders used the facilities. Most of the equipment was bought by the weightlifters themselves as a gift to the city, supposedly for use by all. What they obviously knew was that their sheer presence would deter anyone but themselves from using the equipment. In the two years Claudia had been smoking outside the station during her shift, watching, she had never seen anyone within the chain linked area with a neck size less than 20 inches.
This evening she registered the usual assortment of men and women, pressing and pulling, standing and squatting themselves into larger and more defined forms. One day she expected to see a bodybuilder so defined, so like an illustration from an anatomy textbook, that when they bent, a fleshy explosion would occur. The sound of the burst, she thought as she sat down to the microphone, would be hot, thick, attacking her nightmares by trying to drown them. A shower of warm blood and healthy muscle, surging through the air, splashing into the ocean, the bright red mixing with the darkly blue water; the red wave streaking in, covering her mouth, falling down her throat, boiling her stomach, cooking her dreaming body, as her nightmares would splash on the surface, striving to stay afloat in the boiling red ocean, making their demise worse by their own refusal to submit to the inevitable.

The blood of a man blending with the blood of the world...
Her thoughts melted under the harsh insistence of the music. She flipped the microphone's kill switch back on and continued her show.

A few hours later, her shift over by early night, Claudia left the station. Her black Fiesta, not beautiful or swift but economical and paid for, waited under a 30 foot palm tree recently transplanted to the parking lot. She reached into her leather backpack for her car keys. Her hand passed several containers of pale foundation makeup, a few tubes of deep red lipstick, a CD from Rosetta Stone, a white T-shirt, and an emergency tampon. Her keychain had, as usual, crawled down to the bottom. Pulling it out, she heard the muffled rattle of the keys and felt something sharp with multiple points stab her hand repeatedly. Raising the keys, a pair of vampire fangs released their desperate bite, leaving several tinny pointed indentations in the back of her hand. The teeth, complete with inch-long eyeteeth, twirled in the light from a nearby street lamp, striking the black asphalt with a series of clacks. They were custom designed like a retainer to fit her mouth perfectly. She wore them when she hosted a live radio remote from a local gothic industrial club. They were a part of her image as Claudia, the doom DJ, the mistress of death and the messiah of despair. She bent over, picked up the teeth, and absently placed them back within the confines of her leather purse.

Returning to her keys, she juggled them around until the door key was within her fingers. As she inserted the key into the lock, a muffled ~clang~, all metal, followed by a powerfully human scream, deep, the kind of voice that rumbled, loudly yelled up from the beach. A flash of memory, of a cheap hack-and-slash warrior movie featuring a thick-necked man in a loincloth swinging a sword around and yelling in victory, filled her mind. She imagined the warrior's sword, stained with the blood of the weak, falling to the hard ground, the warrior realizing his futility and foolishness as an armada, thousands, more, rode over the hill, horses clad in black and nostrils steaming, riders painted in the dry blood of virgins and swinging sharper swords dripping heated poison and gore, all screaming the name of the warrior and of the terrors they would inflict upon his body.

The shame of the warrior, the surrender of hope, was the scream she heard.
She had to go to its source, see who it came from.
Turning from her car, leaving the keys still imbedded in the door, she ran toward the beach.

Claudia bounded down the hill, dressed darker than a shadow and just as swift, and saw a dozen people standing around the bodybuilding pit. She headed towards them, it.
The groans of a man weakly floated up from the rubber-matted floor. When she reached the fence, looking through, panting softly, she saw several veined men helping another to sit up. The one on the mat grimaced in deep pain. On his right side, under his ribs, blood faithfully trickled. It had splashed onto the floor, mixing with the sand covering the mat, forming red mud. Next to the stain, a round 45 pound plate rested. The wounded man, large, defined, but not as vast as his assistants, made no move to cover the injury as if it was not the true cause of his pain; the shame, the failure, the weakness of his flesh seemed to be the true source. Claudia kept watching, her breath slowing to normal, as the wounded man started to stand, bleeding freely, wearing his blood as a symbol of his shame. One of the other men handed him a damp white towel. The injured man, standing fully, took the towel and, hesitating a moment, looked at the watchers.

Strong eyes, dark, veinless, scanned the crowd. His face was creased in pain, but his eyes showed no signs of ailment or disgrace. They radiated out strongly, observing everyone.
And settling on Claudia.

She saw his face, the steady eyes, thick features, his large body, the muscles deeply creased at their edges, and the bright blood running down his side and across his right thigh. Her eyes moved back to his face; his eyes had remained on her like an absolute of nature.
He then pressed the towel to his side, stopping the blood.
~the blood of a man...~

The man turned towards the others and rumbled he would be fine. Claudia heard the deep voice, certain that this was the man with the warrior's death scream. The other people who had come over to gawk at the misfortune of another started leaving, the show over. Claudia remained.
The wounded man walked out of the cage towards a bench. Claudia thought of a wounded animal limping away, its intact pride radiating out of its shattered body. No one went to him. He sat, his frame keeping its defined stature as he removed the towel and examined his wound. He wiped the drying blood away and poked at his own flesh. Claudia saw a short rip, an inch long, that oozed blood like it was crying. On either side of the wound the skin was scarred two inches on either side. The skin puckered around it and was as pale as a corpse in a Sam Rammi movie.

The man then looked up and saw Claudia staring at him. He did not smile or gesture. He just sat, looking at her again, and held his hand softly against his side. A rivulet of blood stained his fingers, seeping between them, seemingly seeking escape.

Claudia did not look away either. She walked toward him.
"Hello." The rumble from the depths...
"Hello." Her detached tone oddly similar. "Are you ok?"
He replaced the towel, not bothering to wipe his blood from his fingers. "Yes. It's not bad. This has happened before. I have this old scar, and sometimes it accidentally rips open."

"Then maybe you should stop bodybuilding. The skin is weak. Especially if overly abused." She felt, after studying his eyes closely, as if she were being hunted by a cautious predator. His sight and voice were pure, strong, innocent yet wisely cunning. She reached into her pocket for her cigarettes, her gaze never leaving his eyes.

He did not register any emotion. "I'm not abusing myself. I just had an accident when I was young. I needed surgery on my liver. The scar from the operation has never fully healed. And as for stopping my bodybuilding, I could not do that. It is because of the operation that I do this. My own mistake forced this upon me," he said, pointing at the wound with a red finger. The bleeding had slowed, Claudia peripherally saw.

"It is not a choice I wanted to make; it just happened and now I must deal with it. You understand that, don't you, things being for their own reasons, no matter how much we hate them?" His face, stoic.

She lit her cigarette during his short speech, recognizing the tones of the over zealous and instantly dismissing it. Yet when he mentioned being, Claudia paused, a breathful of smoke halted halfway. Thoughts of the warrior, fighting because he could do nothing else, yet finding the futility of it when the fight coming was his largest, greatest, bloodiest ever, returned. Dropping his sword, surrendering, screaming to frighten the fight away and cursing it for infecting himself with its suicidal disease, as the army thundered closer, their own desire for the fight outweighing everything, existing as its own, being its own being; Claudia saw the fight pulse within her mind as strong, as thick, as the red mud on the mat. Her thoughts floated over the battle scene, taking in the thousands striking the warrior, as the warrior thought only of his own self, his own being, and acknowledged, when his death smote his life, that living for the fight, being the fight, was not enough.
She exhaled. "I do understand. There are realities in our world that are real for themselves only, yet we have to deal with them. They are also dangerous..." Claudia let her voice drop away, fading like the trail of smoke from her cigarette.

"Sometimes danger is the only reality that we can live with. That is why I exercise so, to force my heart to beat, and to push my flesh to its extreme." He paused, wiping the blood off his fingers, then staring at the stained cloth. With just the faint lights from the beach shops behind them and the dark glow from the ocean, the bloody towel was as black as her shirt. He looked up at her and broke into a smile.
"Care to join me in the other dangers the world has waiting?" He reached out with his right hand, blood coated under his fingernails.

She reached out without thinking.
"You are listening to ~The Eternal Hour~, and this is Claudia, your master. I have chosen to have tonight's show be in tribute to Dwayne Goetelle, former member of Skinny Puppy. His death is one year old tonight, and so in tribute, I will subject all of you to his music. You will listen and you will mourn his death as you enjoy his life's work."
She flipped the microphone switch and glanced at the engineer. A moment later, the strains of ~Candle~, guitars and keyboards both fighting each other for musical supremacy, began. Claudia rose from the microphone and walked out the station, heading toward the beach. Jason was there, exercising, waiting. Her steps were controlled, almost plodding across the sand, making the softest of steps, the quietest of sounds.

A week since Jason ripped open his flesh and Claudia had not tired of him. This fact amazed her almost as much as his total embodying obsession with health did not surprise her. Seeing the cage looming, and him within, waiting, thoughts of previous men streaked by. Dozens of faces, all similar in their own gothic appearance- pale faces, prominent cheekbones, black hair- so drastically different from Jason's. None of the living ghost-men were as devoted to their worship of death as Jason was for his lust for living. Every night after her radio show, she and Jason had sat upon the nearby bench and talked of life.

And every night she inwardly prayed would never end
This night, her show would not need her until its ending. Leaving her with 2 hours to kill, she came to the cage, to watch Jason work.

Claudia came to the fence and smiled. Jason was finishing a set on the bench press, the bar bowed by the huge amount of weight upon it. His face was twisted, almost unrecognizable, as the bar smoothly went up and down. Waiting silently, she watched.

He continued to press and press until she lost count. The bar began to slow as the work became more difficult, as he began to weaken. Her own brow creased as she began to wonder when he would stop. His own face, red and sweat-lathered, looked exhausted, well beyond tired. Yet his eyes, barely open, stonily staring between the cracks his eyelids made, took her wonder and crushed it. ~He's not going to stop~, she thought. ~He is going to keep pushing and pushing, pushing that bar, pushing himself.
Why are you working so hard? ~

The bar went up again, wavered, and went backward slightly, catching on the rack behind the bench. It clanged into place, and Jason's hands detached from it. He held his arms up for a second, his face visibly relaxed. His eyes, though, stayed open, staring up at the bar. Claudia stared at his eyes.

They were red, fully blood red, with two black pupils floating on top.
His arms fell;
His eyes were normal, dark.
She understood his desire. The bar, the weight, it called to him like his scream had called to her. He would go to it forever, always pushing it away and pulling it toward. Always. But there would never be enough weight. He would pile up more and more iron plates until they filled the night sky, blocking out the stars. He would push them and pull them, but there would always be more.
~the blood of the world...~

Forever doing what he must do, what he loathes, what gives him life, what brings his death.
His death scream would only call more warriors. And it would call her.

Jason sat up and saw her. He smiled, rose, and came over.
"Hello, Claudia. I didn't expect to see you until later." His voice, deeply breathless yet gaining strength.
"Leave me alone," she said, terrified. She turned on one black booted heal and walked away. Thoughts of his strength, pressing the bar eternally, never stopping, as his arms burst, shredding the skin, muscle fibers exploding into the air, and the blood, so much blood, raining from his destroyed body like a bomb had gone off in his chest.
And still his skeletal arms, a few pieces of flesh precariously dangling and swaying about, continued to push the bar.

Such complete devotion, a desire greater then the strength of life, scared her. Nothing was as strong as Jason. Not even her. She would follow the scream, find the slain warrior, his skin cut by a thousand swords, his eyes gouged out and chewed by the manic warriors, his heart trampled, and helplessly watch as her arm grabbed his fallen sword and swing.

She loved him. She loathed him.
Her boots stomped down on the sand. No sound followed her.
Approaching her car, she reached into her purse for her keys. When they came out, the vampire teeth came too, falling upon the ground. She watched them spiral toward the ground, the bluish light from a nearby street lamp making the false ivory glow. They seemed to be filled with a cold light, radiating outward, spreading their disease. The landed next to her foot, clacking, seemingly speaking a language she could not consciously hear.

Claudia kept looking at the teeth, dwelling over their symbolism. The promise of eternal life lived within the folklore of the fangs, like the glow they seemed to have. The power to never die, to never feel the crippling and degrading effects of Time upon the body. The power to control anyone, to have strength greater than the world, then Life, then Death. It was this power that she had craved like many she knew. All of the years she had been involved in the Gothic scene she had wished for this power. It was a dream constantly thought of, yet never seriously imagined. A dream of being the world, being the greatest soul within it, and deciding the fate of those without the power to stop her.

It was this, the glow from the fangs, that the life of a Goth was all about.
The haunting tones of ~Worlock~, a Skinny Puppy classic, swirled about the parking lot.
She bent down. Her shadow covered the fangs, dimming their bluish glow.

Claudia grabbed them, desperately, standing just a quick.
"Can you tell me what is wrong?" The rumble from behind her. Jason stood, chest still glistening.
Without turning around, she said, "Nothing is wrong. I... I was just worried there for a moment. You were exercising, and I was afraid you were going to fail.
"You didn't fail. I did."

Claudia turned around fast, her black hair fanning out like a blade. Dressed as black as the darkness that had never seen the light, she stood before Jason. He saw her pale complexion and smiled. Drawing in a deep breath, "Good. Come to me," he said.
She stepped next to him, her left hand resting lightly upon his scar. Smiling, she breathed, "Yes. With you, I won't fail ever again."

Jason saw the fangs in her mouth, fitting perfectly, looking as natural as the fangs of a beast. Looking up to her eyes, he could see her determination, her desire, and it was strangely familiar, almost comforting, as her head violently swung to his right side, just below his ribs, and the teeth punctured his flesh, biting around his scar and ripping away, exposing his blood for her to drink: bleeding his life away into her.

He screamed his warrior scream. It did not remind her of anything but her own desire, greater then Life, stronger then Death, more powerful then herself.
The music continued to pound as Jason's heart stopped.