The Most Horrible Place on Earth

Cold air hung stagnant in the lonely hospital room. The experience was nothing like in the movies. There was no exaggerated goodbye, no kneeling beside the bed and telling her mother just how much she meant throughout the years while tears streamed down both of their faces, and no team of doctors rushing through the door with paddles to shock Marie back to life. For Gina Lund, watching her mother die was more like watching an angry hornet try to free itself from a foamy bath of insect spray.

Marie glared at Gina through the blackness that now clouded her once blue eyes. The blackness made her look like a demon. Her skin looked like thin, fleshy spandex against her bones and blood streamed from her nose and the corners of her mouth. Gina glanced at the call button, but only for a second. It was better to let nature take its course, or as Gina thought, it's better to just let Satan take the bitch.

Once Marie passed, the hospital staff cleared her room. All of her belongings were packed in a little white duffle bag with the hospital's red, glossy crest ironed onto its side. Her body, just as she'd asked while she was alive, was cremated and its ashes dumped into an urn. The urn was to be taken to her favorite place, the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, and her ashes scattered across the mountaintop. This was the way Marie wanted it, but Gina had other plans.

Nothing but contempt for Gina had ever spouted from Marie's pursed, wrinkled lips. As her illness worsened the contempt spiraled into death threats. Gina could vividly remember walking into Marie's kitchen one night and having the long steel blade of a bread knife pointed at her. Marie stood at the far end of the room with the knife trembling in her grasp, her bony old hands barely clutching its cold handle. She called Gina "the devil" and stabbed the blade into the air, threatening Gina not to move any closer.

It was all down hill from there. The mysterious illness ate away at Marie's brain like termites boring through aged wood. Her body grew frail and pallid; she began to resemble a skeleton draped in a thin sheet of skin rather than a woman of flesh and bone. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes dark. She was frightening to look at and (due to her psychosis) worse to be around. The life support machine in the hospital had worked for a while but Marie's condition rapidly degraded. There was nothing more that could've been done.

The urn lay carelessly on the floor behind the driver seat of Gina's car, rolling from left to right with each sharp turn of the wheel. Gina kept her eyes on the road and her mind on the ash corpse behind her. If her mother only knew where her ashes were being taken she'd have used that bread knife on Gina for sure, she'd have cut her into little pieces just like she threatened to do on several occasions.

A woman so vile and loathsome should never be granted a single thing in life, even if it was her dying wish.

"I hate to break it to you, mother," Gina began to speak as if Marie were in the passenger seat behind her, as if the ashes had ears and could hear through the walls of the urn. "I would sooner deliver your ashes to hell myself than scatter them over the Catskills."

She shook her head in disgust and glanced in the rear-view mirror, almost expecting to see her sickly mother glaring at her from the back seat. Those black eyes and sunken cheeks reflecting in the mirror like some kind of malnourished alien. "You don't deserve anything so beautiful. Christ, you don't even deserve that fucking urn they put you in. Fucking bitch."

Something cold brushed against the bare skin of Gina's neck, forcing her body to flinch and her eyes to dart to the mirror again. It was the unmistakable feeling of a cold finger drawing a line across her throat. A feeling that was most likely imagined.

The most horrible place on earth, that's what Marie called it, the place where Gina was taking the ashes. It was a small cabin in the woods where Marie had grown up and (at the age of 16) watched her father beat her mother to death with the claw of a hammer. Gina recalled Marie explaining how she watched her mother lay helpless on the floor, her brains oozing from her cracked skull.

"That place is evil." Marie would say, "It's the most horrible place on earth."

When Marie's illness showed no sign of mercy on her withering body, Gina made up her mind about scattering the ashes throughout the cabin, the last place in the world Marie would want her remains and (for that very reason) the first place Gina wanted them.

Gina parked the car and peered through her windshield at the old, rickety structure. The sight of its large, black windows watching her like dark eyes was enough to make Gina second-guess her decision and just scatter the ashes outside. Who in their right mind would want to go inside such a condemned place?

Her spine tingled as she briefly turned her back to the wooden demon and grabbed the urn from her car. Then she whispered to herself, and her voice trembled with uncertainty. "This is the closest I can take you to hell, you crazy old bitch."

The front door creaked open and dust fell from its rusty hinges. Gina stepped onto the dusty film that covered the wooden floorboards. Dark beams of orange light fell through the grimy windows, hardly providing enough light for Gina to see across the room. The floor groaned beneath her every step as she walked further inside, cautious of her surroundings and what evil may lurk inside of the cabin's dark walls.

The main room was vacant except for a hanging light that resembled a circle of candles inside hourglass tubes. The smell of mold was overpowering, infused with the scent of aged wood. The thought of her grandmother being beaten to death with a hammer, right where Gina now stood, knotted her stomach and sent gooseflesh rippling across her skin.

She thought she saw a figure poke part of its head around one of the doorways. Half of a white, wrinkled face with a narrow eye as black as midnight spied on Gina for a moment. A pale, boney hand crawled around the side of the doorway like a large spider. Then, in the blink of an eye, the figure was gone. Gina's heart pounded and the urn began to tremble in her grasp. It was most likely her imagination again, but that didn't get rid of the throbbing in her chest or the lump in her throat. The figure looked like her mother and Gina was certain that there were no such thing as ghosts, but she was also certain that she was now standing in a very evil place. A place better left to rot along with its grisly history.

Gina fought with the lid of the urn, trying desperately to open it so that she could begin dumping the ashes. It was almost as if Marie were sending her a message, this is not where I want to be scattered.

"Come on." Gina knelt down and smacked the top of the urn against the floor and a loud, hollow thud echoed throughout the cabin walls. It sounded like someone literally knocking on death's door. The goddamn urn was sealed too tight and there was nothing around to bust it open with. "Open, goddamn it!" She smacked it against the floor again, this time loosening the lid and denting the wooden floorboard.

Gina shook the urn and could feel the lid wobbling like a loose cork in a wine bottle. As she reached down to pull the lid free the urn slipped from her grasp and fell to the floor with a thud. A thick, black mass spilled from the urn like blood and then began to crawl, quickly spreading across the room. It was a legion of black ants.

Dark rows scuttled across the floor in all directions, surrounding Gina in the center of the room. She could feel the thousands of little eyes staring at her and could hear them chomping at the air with their pinchers. Some of the ants began to crawl up the walls as they continued to pour out of the seemingly bottomless urn.

The entire room, aside from the floor beneath Gina, was nothing more than a black, crawling mass. They even crawled across the ceiling above her and began to fall onto her head. She wriggled her body and slapped at them, screaming like a little girl who'd seen a large spider but didn't want to squash it.

The clicking of their pinchers grew louder, and Gina could feel her pulse accelerating. A set of little legs ran across the back of her neck, tickling her skin. She slapped and let out a cry. She could feel them in her hair, crawling from her back and riding the long, blond locks toward her scalp. More ants fell onto her back and arms, raising goose bumps throughout her body.

Gina swatted her arms, legs, and the back of her neck, trying to stop the tickling that was now beginning to cover her body as the hoard of ants scampered across her skin. She ran her fingers vigorously across her scalp and the ants felt like a hundred little knots in her hair. She could feel them poking into her ears, their little legs clinging to her lips as they fought to burrow into her mouth.

They began to pinch, first on the back of her arms and then around her eyes, lips, and neck. Her entire body stung as if thousands of little pins were being poked into her at once. She could hear the clicking of their pinchers and blood began to seep from the wriggling ant-flesh that covered her like a swarm of angry bees. She watched as they pinched the bridge of her nose, and for a moment she thought they were looking into her eyes.

She opened her mouth to scream, but before she could make a sound the ants scampered down the back of her tongue. She could feel them in her throat, wriggling and pinching. Her legs throbbed and stung, and she dropped to her knees, succumbing to the mounting hoard. Then, paralyzed with pain, she saw the figure peering around the doorway again; it was her mother.

Gina watched as her mother's pale body began to darken and crawl as if the ants were growing from her skin. Then, like a black avalanche, the mass that looked like Marie a moment ago fell into a large pile of ants. The ants ran across the room and began crawling up the wall opposite of Gina. They formed lines along the wall, lines that slowly became letters, and those letters became words. The words read, isn't it horrible?

The room began to fade as did the sound of the pinchers and the tingling feeling throughout her body, and Gina knew what the message on the wall meant. Yes, mother, she thought, it is the most horrible place on earth.