Devil's Creek

by Todd Keisling

  Jack lifted one of the propane tanks again and carried it outside.

  Stephanie followed him out. “Jack, you’ve got that look on your face. What are you plannin’ to do?”

  He set down the tank with a heavy thump and shook off the sting from his fingers.

  “Come on,” Chuck said. “Out with it. What’s on your mind?”

  Jack nodded, grinning. “Let’s blow it up.” He didn’t wait for them to protest. “I don’t know about you guys, but this place has haunted me for as long as I can remember. Every bad thing I can remember started in the temple below that hill over there.” He pointed toward the clearing up ahead. “Whatever god our father prays to is down inside that place. I say we cut off the head of the snake now, while we have a chance to do it.”

  “This is insane. All of you are insane,” Chuck said, sighing. “But we don’t have much else to lose, do we?”

  Stephanie smiled. She turned back and pointed her flashlight inside the shack at the other propane tanks. “Do you think this will be enough?”

  “I have no idea,” Jack said. “But it’s worth trying with the flares in Chuck’s duffel bag. At the very least, it’ll make me feel better.” He looked down at his nephew, nudged the boy’s shoulder and grinned. “Come on. Let’s go blow up this motherfucker.”

  6

  Jack grimaced as he lugged the propane tank up the hill, following the remains of a footpath reclaimed by nature. The hill itself was steeper than he remembered, but he was also much older, much heavier than he’d been the last time he climbed to the summit. The tank in his hands didn’t help matters.

  When he reached the pinnacle, Jack dropped the tank and looked back at the three white beams bobbing up the hillside. Satisfied, he trained his flashlight along the ground, searching for the tear in the earth. He hadn’t thought much further ahead than blowing up the temple; after climbing the hill, he wondered if a dozen propane tanks would be enough to destroy the masonry entombed within. Doubt crept in, voiced by his late mother.

  You dumb little shit, always thinking with your heart and never thinking things through. What possessed you to think you could blow up something as ancient as this place? Your daddy’s god is eternal, child.

  Jack shook his head. “Nothing is eternal. Everything burns.” He thought back to his grandmother’s home, felt a pang of regret in his gut. Maybe the tanks wouldn’t be enough, but they had to try. Whoever built the temple managed to keep the nameless thing contained for centuries. There had to be a way, and he wouldn’t give up until he found it—or until he was dead.

  He followed the perimeter of the church’s crumbled foundation, searching for the entrance to the temple below. The last thing he wanted was to fall in and break his neck. He followed the cracked stones, stepping over patches of weeds and charred timbers. A sound caught his attention as he neared the far end, a churning hum feeding into itself, rising and falling in pitch.

  “Jack, did you find it yet?”

  Chuck dropped the propane tank at his feet with a huff. Jack turned, shone his flashlight on his brother’s reddened face. “Not yet.”

  Something lit up in the corner of his eye. A faint light seeping from the earth, rising and falling in time with the cyclical hum rumbling within. He pointed his flashlight toward the rift. Thick clumps of earth surrounded the opening, sprouting weeds that crisscrossed one another in a pale green weave.

  “Hey,” Jack called out. “It’s over here but be careful.” He knelt near the hole and planted his flashlight into the silt of ashen earth, its beam splitting the night. “Don’t go past that light.”

  “That’s fine.” Chuck was doubled over, heaving for breath. “I’m gonna wait here a minute.” Stephanie and Riley joined him a moment later, adding to the cluster of tanks at the opposite end of the foundation.

  The humming ceased, and a voice echoed from the dark below. The sound woke every hair on his neck and covered his arms in gooseflesh.

  Singing. Someone was singing down there about the walls of Jericho. A dozen memories flashed before him, each one of his grandmother on her riding lawnmower, singing at the top of her lungs while grass clippings flew in all directions, “And the walls came tumbling down.”

  Mamaw?

  Even with all the impossible horror he’d witnessed in the last 24 hours, the mere thought his dead grandmother was down there tested his sanity.

  “Jack, are you coming?”

  He turned back, saw the trio of shadows at the far end of the hill. Stephanie placed her hands on her hips, waiting impatiently.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll be there in a minute.” He hesitated. I’m going to climb down and check something out, he wanted to say, but thought better of it. He heard mutterings between them, certain Chuck was voicing his complaints. They would try to stop him, and none of them had time for another debate. Somewhere out there beyond the forest, he was certain his father was on his way back here to finish what he’d started. If the bastard’s communion with the god below their feet granted him any kind of omniscience, then he was most certainly on his way to stop them now.

  He reached out, fingertips poised for the ladder, when the supports shuddered and creaked—and a pale face appeared in the opening. Jack fell back into the weeds with a shrill cry, his breath stuck in his throat behind the beating of his racing heart.

  “Jack?” Stephanie now, her soft footfalls racing across the hillside toward him. Chuck and Riley joined her, and they watched in terror as a figure emerged from the pit below. Jack scuttled backward, desperately trying to crawl away from whatever was climbing out of the temple.

  Together, the quartet watched the lone figure emerge, dust itself off, and turn toward them. Shaking, Riley trained the flashlight beam on the figure’s face. One of her eyes was milky white, the other a bright piercing blue, and her silver hair shimmered in the light. She looked at them all and smiled.

  “My babies,” Imogene said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  1

  Oh, Genie, you couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?

  Jacob felt her presence as they neared the turnoff for Devil’s Creek Road, felt it like a needle driven into the back of his skull. They’d both given themselves over to the grave following the rites drafted by the nameless gods of the void, and through their pact they were bound on opposite ends of the same cosmic string. He hadn’t thought much of her in the beginning, when they were still tainted by the words of a false god, but as the years progressed, Jacob found himself continually surprised by Martha Imogene Tremly. She’d proven herself resourceful if nothing else, and in a grim sort of way, he admired her.

  Reversing the binding ritual was a clever gambit on her part. He’d gone to the grave with the satisfaction of knowing his time there was temporary. That Imogene would be the last of the six did not surprise him; that she’d divined her own way of cheating death by bargaining with the void, however, not only surprised him, but impressed the hell out of him.

  I didn’t think you had it in you, darlin’.

  Imogene was the consummate Christian lady. She always sat on the front pew, never missed a Sunday sermon, was the first to lead the choir in song. After his revelation, she’d followed Jacob’s teachings to the letter, never batting an eye when he asked for her daughter to conceive a child, and later, always looking away when he had his way with her grandson in the bowels of the temple. No, Imogene was nothing more than another mindless sheep in his flock, a follower through and through.

  Up ahead, the car’s headlights lit up the front of the old barn. Jacob smiled, tracing his gnarled fingers along the contours of the idol on his lap. He turned to Zeke, who sat behind the wheel, and then to Bobby and Susan in the backseat. They met him with smiles of their own, eyes alight. Soon, they would return home, and he would lead his family back into the belly of their living god.

  2

  Jack climbed to his feet, unable to look away. He thought he was ready to face the possibility she’d returned
to life, but now that she was standing before him, he found he could barely keep his composure. Tears crept in from the corners of his eyes, the hot sting forcing him to wipe them away with an errant hand.

  “Jackie,” Imogene said. She shuffled around the rift, the cuffs of her baggy jeans dragging the dirt, and her loose shirt slipped down one shoulder. She held out her hands, and Jack took them without hesitation.

  “Mamaw,” he croaked. His jaw quivered as he fought back the surge of tears. She put her hand on his cheek.

  “No tears, Jackie. We ain’t got time. But, my goodness, I missed you somethin’ awful. Let me give you a squish.”

  She pulled him close, wrapped her arms around him, and he was assaulted by the stench of the grave, but he did not care. He didn’t get to say goodbye when it mattered. Now, even by the cruelest of fates, he had the chance once more and would not let it go. Jack put his arms around her, held on tight, and finally freed the tears from his eyes. The world around them disappeared, his brother and sister and nephew gone for only a moment, and he was ten years old again, holding on desperately to the only mother he’d ever loved.

  “I told you not to cry,” she said softly. “I can’t cry with you. This body ain’t what it used to be.”

  Imogene stepped back, wiped the tears from his face, and smiled. “You’ve done good for yourself, Jackie. I knew you’d make your mamaw proud.” She turned to Stephanie and Chuck, and then down to Riley. “You’ve all done good.”

  The three of them stood there in cautious awe, afraid to accept what they were seeing, afraid not to. Chuck reached out and pressed his finger against the old woman’s shoulder, recoiling when he felt the cold tightness of dead flesh.

  Imogene grinned. “Ever the Doubting Thomas. Yes, it’s really me, Chuckie. I never did thank you for helpin’ me with my affairs. I trust you followed my instructions to the letter.”

  He nodded, hesitant to speak. Jack took the burden from him. “He did, and your friend Tyler helped, too.”

  “So he did. How is the old man?”

  “Mamaw, he…he didn’t make it.”

  A cool breeze swept past them, stirring the weeds into a hushed whisper, the whole hillside alive with conspiracy. Imogene studied his face. “How?”

  Jack told her what happened, about Laura, the fire, the idol. When he told her about how Tyler died, a sharp cracking sound erupted from her mouth, her molars shattering as she clenched her jaw in anger. Imogene turned away from them, contemplating the encroaching darkness.

  “That old fool,” she whispered, and turned back to them all. “You shouldn’t have come back here. None of you. If Jacob has the idol—”

  Her head cocked to one side, listening to a slow murmuring coming from within the earth. At first, Jack heard nothing but the whisper of the wind through the weeds and leaves, the groan of old limbs rattled loose in the trees. But as he trained his ears, he did hear something else—a chorus of voices singing a language he didn’t know but found so familiar. They were children’s voices, cherubic and innocent, speaking in tongues with sing-song cadence. Angels within the earth, he thought, wondering if the phrase was culled from a childhood memory. When he turned to the others, he saw they heard it, too.

  The ground trembled beneath them. A pale light erupted from the opening, piercing the night like a beacon, the old temple calling its people home. Imogene met their stares, frowning.

  “Your father is near. We don’t have much time.”

  3

  Imogene’s dead heart ached, knowing no amount of time with her grandson would ever be enough. She was here by the grace of a contract with the universe, and her time was fleeting. There was so much she wanted to tell them, so much knowledge of the cosmos to share from her brief time in the grave, but her adversary’s presence interrupted the little time they had together.

  When panic fell across their weary faces, Imogene saw them not as adults, but as the doe-eyed children she remembered fondly. She found herself torn between the bargain she’d made during the cleansing ritual and the maternal desire to shield her babies from the onslaught of their dreadful father.

  Jacob was near. So near the idol’s presence opened the rift down below. She’d thought her communion with the dark being entombed within would be enough to open it on her own, but the hours of meditation and incantation left her feeling drained, and she’d needed to collect her thoughts, think of another way. Finding her grandson and his siblings at the surface was a shock, albeit a welcome one.

  But her true purpose called to her from below. Her time outside the grave was limited and not without cause, a deal struck for the sake of shared interest.

  The enemy of my enemy, she thought, casting a side-eyed glance toward the stars above. Jack was talking to her now, his words spilling over one another. Something about a plan to blow up the hill, something involving the tanks of gas they’d found in the old village in the woods, but Imogene wasn’t really listening. Her ear was tuned to the subtle murmurings echoing from within the temple, the hypnotic inhalations of the thing sleeping in the safety of its own reality.

  She’d hoped to keep the idol as far away from here as possible, but now this setback could prove to be a boon after all. In the moments between her warning and Jack’s explanation of his plan, Imogene made up her mind on what to do. She waited, and when Jack finished telling her about his intentions, she nodded in agreement. “While y’all are getting those tanks, I’ll head back down to get things ready.”

  Jack looked at her for a moment, puzzled by her reply, but she didn’t give him a chance to question her. Instead, she wrapped her arms around him, pulled him close, and pressed her dry lips to his cheek.

  “I’m proud of you,” she whispered, “and I love you more ‘n anything, kiddo. Don’t you ever forget that.”

  He returned her embrace, and while he was reciprocating his love, she slipped the folded piece of paper into his pocket. A moment later, they were on their way back down the hill to gather the rest of their arsenal. Imogene waited until they were gone before returning to the ladder. A vacuous hum erupted from within. One way or another, she’d end this for good. A greater purpose was at stake here, and she prayed Jackie would forgive her when it was all said and done.

  4

  Chuck’s second trip carrying a propane tank up the hill was far worse than the first, and by the time he was on his third go-round, a stitch opened in his gut. Years of sitting behind a desk every day and having dinner every night at Devlin’s—washed down with a beer or three—took their toll on the burgeoning attorney. He held an image of his treadmill in his mind with every aching step, its usage falling behind on the trail of good intentions.

  Compounding the aches and pains was an anxiety building in his head and chest. A list of questions rattled off in his mind as he trudged across the clearing toward the forest once again, following Riley’s flashlight trail into the dark.

  Were they sure all these gas tanks would be enough to level the temple inside the hill? No.

  Had Jack ever done this before? No.

  Had any of them, for that matter? No.

  Could they trust the reanimated corpse of Martha Imogene Tremly? To be determined.

  Chuck stood at the bank of weeds near a poplar tree. He looked back, watching Jack and Stephanie’s silhouettes hobbling up the hillside, their propane tanks in tow. Their flashlight beams bobbed like errant spirits, darting across the landscape, and for a moment Chuck wondered if he’d lost his mind.

  You let them talk you into this, he thought. You should’ve left when you had the chance. If he’d had his way, they would be well on their way to Landon by now—hell, maybe even Richmond or Lexington, checking off the miles along I-75. They could’ve made an anonymous call to the state police barracks in Landon. They could’ve, maybe they should’ve, but none of that mattered now. Here he was in the middle of nowhere, wandering around in the dark. Charles Tiptree had clearly lost his mind.

  You have, a voice said, but it’s
not too late, Charles. You can turn back. You can slip away into the dark when they aren’t looking. Leave them to their fool’s errand.

  “Yeah,” he muttered to himself, clutching his side as he walked slowly beneath the forest canopy and into absolute darkness. His flashlight cut a slim wedge from the void before him.

  What makes you think you can trust the old crone on the hill? Didn’t she confide in you? Didn’t she help the other grandparents steal the church’s money? How could you trust a thief like that? And besides, didn’t those rumors of her being a witch turn out to be true, Charles?

  “Well, yeah,” he mumbled, straining as he lifted his leg and stepped sideways over a rotten log. “But it’s Genie, though. She’d never—”

  She defied your god, Charles. She’s led you astray. Let your father guide you home and fulfill your purpose.

  He stopped, suddenly aware of a cold spike driven deep into his gut. No one called him Charles, only his grandfather, and Gage Tiptree had been dead for a decade.

  Charles.

  He twisted in place, shakily moving the flashlight beam around the forest. Countless trees lit up before him, their trunks buried in the overgrowth, ferns and twigs and poison ivy, clusters of bushes and weeds, a handful of deadfalls, and the trail leading to the village. Chuck was alone except for his nephew, and Riley was much farther along, his light a bulbous white eye hanging in the dark.

  “Hey, Riley?”

  The boy didn’t answer, but the forest spoke for him, the breeze through the leaves filling the night with a low hiss of judgment. A bead of sweat rolled down Chuck’s forehead and across the bridge of his nose. He turned back toward the clearing, questioning if he should wait for Stephanie and Jack before venturing off into the dark, but a nagging voice—his own this time—chipped away at his resolve.