Fox Hunt

The Man from Mars

Wharton remembered the cold air and the pouring rain. The freezing water hit his bare skin and ran from his fingertips. He was moving in and out of consciousness, but he felt light like he was floating over water.

He was a child again, running through the rain back to the lodge in the highlands. Cold was all he knew back then too. It was like the world was never touched with sun when he was residing in those halls. His mother was a quiet woman, some might've said she was distant, but Wharton spent the most time with her in his seemingly short childhood. While she was married to Wharton's father, she would often return to the lodge in the north for reasons young Wharton didn't recall. Wharton enjoyed the long train ride then when he was a small child, wearing knickerbockers with a bow around his neck and running his wood horse against the window. Eventually, his enjoyment of the trains would sour.

The lodge was a dark place, secret and drafty like a castle. Wharton would find spots in the dark and hide, often seeing things he shouldn't. He'd confusedly catch his mother pressed up against the keeper there, and with a child's sense, never understood the implications of that level of intimacy.

The keeper himself was a wind-swept, stormy-eyed gentleman, who showered Wharton with attention when no one was around but would later act coldly to him when the halls were occupied by other visitors. There was something shadowy about the man. Melancholy seemed to tail after him like a wounded dog. Perhaps this was why after a night of loud voices echoing through the tapestried corridors, a six-year-old Wharton found the keeper hanging from the rafters in the morning. Dead and cold, his hollow eyes focused on young Wharton as he began to scream.

Wharton didn't understand death then. He didn't understand what forbidden love was either, but if he had lived a little longer, maybe he would have learned.

A shame, really.

As for death, he was, unfortunately, getting more familiar with it. It surprisingly felt like being in a bath that had been recently filled with boiling water from the kitchen hearth. This wasn't what Wharton expected, but maybe this sensation was the choir of heavenly angels shepherding him back into the arms of God.

He smiled softly to himself and wiggled into the warmth. Ripples lapped at his buoyed limbs.

However, wasn't his last moments on Earth allowing some heathen to ravage him senseless? Surely, without a priest to oversee his final rites, this depraved act would send him somewhere that was uncomfortably warm?

Wharton jerked awake expecting hellfire and brimstone but finding only brightness. He winced into it and threw up a hand to shield his struggling pupils. Water dripped off his bare arm. As his sight adjusted, he found himself drifting in a square bathing pool similar to the London public baths. Steps led down from the edge into the depths. He scrambled over to them in a panic because the room around him glowed red from the ground. The red light grew brighter and brighter until the ceiling which shone with such radiant purity, Wharton was certain he was in a room made metaphor of the divine battle between good and evil.

To convince him further, smudged over the room's odd glow were hectic, savage patterns in dark paint. He flopped up the pool's stairs like a flounder escaping a net. His frantic eyes darted around the space from one hellish, demon design to another, but he found not a single door. This was to be his permanent, infinite cell! Oh! His torment was only beginning and he was ready to beg it to end!

Prostrated on the ground, naked, he was ready for any demon to strike, but after minutes and minutes passed, he peeked between his sheltering arms. Nothing changed between his initial panic and now. The pool's water steamed. The lighting beamed down threateningly. Wharton sat up. If this was Hell, he supposed Satan had found that isolation and time was the simplest and most effective torture. Wharton really wished he paid more attention in seminary school.