After Eden

by Daniel Beauregard

You wait in line for over an hour in front of the red brick wall that wraps around the Museo Vaticano, the shadow of Santa Pietro’s Cupola just a stone’s throw away. Today, everything seems hyperreal; you feel the heat off the rusted skeleton of an old scooter attached to the lamppost where you momentarily lean, smoking. A tour guide with a small Danish flag attached to his pack guides a group to the end of the line. It’s only 9 a.m., but dry and hot as ever. September is too much. You feel the sweat carving lines down the small of your back, soaking into your silk shirt. Dust rises from an old Renault bobbling along the cobblestones. A few meters ahead, you notice a trio, two older women hold up a man between them who’s obviously on his last legs. A notch off the bucket list you suppose. The man’s hair is falling away in patches. You wonder what his face looks like as you make your way closer to the brick wall to battle for the only niche of dwindling shade. Then the line begins to move. 

As you reach the entrance to the museum your mind is elsewhere and you walk through the metal detector, place your thumb on the small post on the left, which quickly scans your fingerprint and painlessly pricks your finger. It glows green and you quickly make your way through the lobby and squeeze into the throng of people waiting to enter the Museo Chiaramonte. You’re able to linger to the side of the main crowd to admire the different friezes and portraits, but you’re never as taken with them as you feel you should be⎯the vast variety of portraits and stone tablets always leaves you feeling nonplussed due to your lack of knowledge of Roman and Etruscan history, so you rejoin the throng and let yourself be herded toward the Pio Clementino, the museum’s largest part. 

The bottleneck of people funnel out into the greater space and the hallway extends before you and you imagine what it might look like empty, expanding slowly out like the lung of a bandolín. You admire many of the rooms that you pass through but the three best are the Sala de los Animales, Gabinete de los Mascaras, and the Galería de los Candelabros. After visiting them you rejoin the forever forward-moving crowd and make your way toward the steps to the second floor of the museum that houses the Galleria delle Carte Geografiche, your favorite place to visit. Since moving to Tuscany after the outbreak of violence in Rome, you visit the museum every chance you get when in Vatican City on business. 

Once reaching The Map Room, as it’s often called, you again make your way to the side of the throng of people to admire the different paintings of the old world. Back then maps were measured by the hour when the sun fell in certain areas, the Earth serving as a giant sundial. On one map, you grin at the spot that says ‘Here thar be dragons.’ Halfway through, you stop to look at your watch. No updates worth mentioning⎯a few more manifestations isolated in small neighborhoods that were easily contained⎯however, it’s then that you realize you’re strapped for time and your meeting is in less than an hour, and Bishops don’t wait no matter how much money is involved. So, you rush to push your way through the crowd and head directly to the Capela Sistina. As you approach it becomes more difficult to move without being jostled every few seconds. Here is always where you feel like cattle mindlessly being run through a chute, like the rush after leaving a baseball game or the opera. 

In the chapel you notice the man from earlier, now in a wheelchair, being led along by two women. It seems odd to you for a moment, and then you realize that of course, the museum would have wheelchairs for the disabled. You finally see his face⎯if you didn’t know for a fact it’d been eradicated, you’d have sworn he had leprosy. It’s hard not to gasp out loud. You look immediately away, staring at the ceiling and trying to get the image out of your head. On a raised dais, a priest stands speaking softly into the microphone, saying every so often, ‘This is a holy place. This is a peaceful place. Please be quiet and respectful,’ then reciting The Lord's Prayer. Although the crowd is mostly respectful, there still arises that faint susurration of suppressed whispers and gasps of awe like how an audience at the philharmonic acts when the conductor comes out onto the stage⎯after the clapping and the bow⎯the moment when he taps his baton and raises his arms and pauses, then the music begins.  

Suddenly, you see the man from earlier being dumped onto the ground and lifted by the two women then thrown onto the dais where the priest stands, still praying and unaware. In a matter of seconds the sick man stands and tackles the priest off the dais into the crowd below, knocking over the microphone. There’s an unbearable screech of static and you throw your hands over your ears. It fades away and leaves them ringing and once they stop their ringing, there’s silence as hundreds of people hold their breath. The priest stands up, his hand around his neck; he removes it, momentarily holds it up pleading for help. As he does so, his neck releases a swath of blood, painting the small stage behind him. The other man stands up. A woman screams. Then, another. The crowd erupts into mayhem. You’re pushed left and right as they rush for the various exits and the stairs. But all you can do is watch as the priest grabs the man closest to him by the shoulders and then the back of his neck. They fall to the ground. You briefly look up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and when you look down again at the scene around you, everything is a shade of pink mist. In front of you, a man without arms runs toward a group of people huddled in a corner with their backpacks and water bottles held in front of them. The man⎯foaming at the mouth and snapping his jaws like a rabid dog⎯plows into the group like a battering ram and they scatter. You swear you hear the tearing of flesh above the tumult, then it dissipates into the sound of general pandemonium. The sound of breaking wood causes you to turn. Several people are tearing away the balustrades guarding the sole window of the chapel, which if you’re being honest, looks only large enough for one person to fit through at a time. A man struggles with the iron grate that bars the window, but he’s pulled away before getting it off. The people have flooded toward the entryways at the front and back of the chapel in a mad crush. There are several people like you standing motionless⎯speechlessly watching the pandemonium⎯frozen in either fright or fascination. Glass breaks. Someone shimmies into the space left by the small window⎯now without glass⎯kicking their legs feverishly and cutting themselves on the way out. They make it though, legs disappearing from view, bodies rushing toward the hot cobblestones lining the plaza below. It’s a long drop. You’re pushed forcefully from behind and go sprawling onto the floor, face-first, the breath knocked out of your lungs. You push yourself shakily up onto two legs and suck the air back into your lungs. The small of your back aches and you place your hand there and wince. There’s blood, but not much; just a scrape. You’re elbowed back down onto the ground and struggle to get up, as people run on top of you, crushing your hands, legs, and fingers. Thrashing violently, you soon are able to rise again and this time you do so with your shoulders positioned like a linebacker to face the oncoming rush of people. But they’re no longer people but demons with faces falling apart in bits of tattered flesh⎯some armless and legless⎯pulling themselves along leaving trails of blood upon the shiny parquet floor. A loud commotion erupts to your right. Spinning around there’s just enough time to see a woman frantically rushing toward you. You have no time to move out of the way and she slams into you hard. You fall into each other’s arms. The impact makes your vision blur and you struggle to speak, but you manage to ask her if she’s alright. A stupid question, more out of habit than anything else. Both of the exits are still overflowing with people trying to get out or mounting their attack. 

In a desperate moment of inspiration, you wonder if you could scramble through the rush undetected on your hands and knees, so you rush toward the exit. You’re stepped on and nearly crushed by the rest of the crowd, and your palms slip in the blood coating the floor. Someone steps on your head, but you find a way out intact and run as fast as your legs can take you. Feverishly you make your way out of the museum and into the hot sun and look around at the pandemonium. Groups of people are clustered all over the place and you rush toward the center of the plaza where there seems to be less people. At this point you’re covered in blood. Unwittingly you wipe at your face and mouth to try and get some of it off you. You check to see if you’ve been bitten but everything appears to be intact. The pain in your back is simply a scrape from when you fell on the parquet inside the chapel. The sun beats down on you and it seems as if for a moment you’re on fire, but all the areas of shade are occupied by growing crowds so you remain there standing, half dazed, your vision blurred. The ringing in your ears from earlier comes back and for a moment it seems excruciating, then it stops. Everything slows, moving forward a frame at a time, reminding you of a traumatic scene depicted in a war movie just after the bomb goes off. The ringing returns but less dramatically. Beneath it all you can hear a woman screaming, “My baby, my baby.” You see her walking slowly toward you, holding what looks like a bag of meat wrapped in a shawl. She’s frantically walking around the plaza, screaming for help, but passes without noticing you standing there. You struggle to see and are unsure if it’s the dust from the old cobblestones or your eyes are blocked with tears. You wipe your face and only then realize they’re tears of blood. The crowds are blurred and all of the objects around you become unrecognizable shapes. With all your strength you try to remain standing, but your balance is skewed. You hear the woman still screaming from behind above the constant ringing in your ears like a record skipping, and then, you turn.

Daniel Beauregard lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in tragickal, the Action Books Blog, ergot, Alwayscrashing, and elsewhere. He’s the author of numerous chapbooks of poetry and his full-length collection, You Alive Home Yet? is available from Schism Neuronics. Daniel’s existential horror novel Lord of Chaos is available from Erratum Press. He can be reached @666ICECREAM.