What Hell May Come

by Rex Hurst

  “How—?”

  “It’s my job to know. I’m a psychic assassin.”

  Jon laughed. Michael’s breathing slowed down. In the corner of his ear, Jon heard the posers making their goodbyes.

  “You pay me money. I crawl into the victim’s head and destroy his life. Suicides often follow.”

  Jon found it hard to swallow. The lack of moisture was even worse. He worked his mouth to wrangle up saliva, but nothing came out. Had it all been sucked into this madman’s eyes? The thought grew stronger. He suddenly believed everything Brian Elder said.

  “Who—?”

  “The game was manufactured on a limited run. Only a few hundred were made. I’ve grabbed the stray copy over the years. Some guy named Gygax in Pervertsville, California got hold of one and made the knock-off, Dungeons and Dragons, but it just wasn’t as good.”

  “And who were these people that commissioned it?”

  “They called themselves The Order of the Bright Dawn. Operated out of New York City. Long gone after the crash of 1929. Most of them cannibalized each other during the Great Depression. The leader was a Limo Brightson, made a fortune in linseed oil. Lived well until he spontaneously combusted on the same day Pearl Harbor was attacked. Don’t know why, so don’t ask.”

  “So, if they’re all dead, who is producing them now?”

  “No one. It’s a relic from an old time.”

  “That box looked brand new. The pieces were all plastic, not something created in the 1920s. The papers were crisp and white, no age at all. Someone made it in modern times.”

  “Okay, a few more were run off by some rinky-dink outfit in Mexico. All the original sets were too damaged to be of much use. So, last year, one of the last disciples of the Order, a woman named Charlotte de Courrière had a few more manufactured. During the rush to get them distributed, I snagged a few. Michael here was the beneficiary of my larceny.”

  “Rush? Why a rush?”

  “I don’t know. Something big seems to be stirring up the occultists down south. It happens. It’s why I came back up here.”

  “How . . . ? What is the price for playing the game to its end? I mean, when dealing with the demon, or entity? How much does it cost a person?”

  “What you’re really asking beneath it all is, ‘Will I damn my soul to Hell for dealing with these creatures?’ You won’t.”

  “Because Hell doesn’t exist?”

  “Oh, it does, but making a few extra-curricular deals isn’t how you damn your soul. Especially if the other bastard really has it coming. Remember, you make it a demon in your mind. It doesn’t have to be one.”

  “Then what are we dealing with, if not demons.”

  “Kings of dead universes, crotchety spirits wanting to walk again, the leftovers of an alien race, the memories of physical beings cast aside, some zeitgeist aspect made real, ancient watchers frozen in stone, entities of pure spirit who have never known flesh. Take your pick. Though, I hazard the last is probably what you’ve been describing. What name did you give it?”

  “Calach.”

  “That’s a loser. Really fucking bush league. Go big or go home is what I say. You know some big demonic titles, use them. Or try an angelic name, that’ll give you some weird results.”

  “Are you saying Calach can’t do anything?”

  “Oh, no, sure it can,” Elder spat. “But not huge things, which is the most fun.”

  That suited Jon fine. He was just dipping his toe to test the waters in any case.

  “You lent Michael the van to go to the cemetery.”

  “I rented him my kick-ass van. He asked for it. Had no other way. Blah, blah, blah.”

  “There were others there watching us.”

  “Nothing to do with me. I don’t speak to other people much.”

  Sure he didn’t. The old bastard knew something, but how much was spin Jon couldn’t suss out. The conversation dried up with his body. While there might have been more to ask, his head was suddenly empty.

  “I think we’re done here.”

  “Good. I got a bottle of Mad Dog yowling for me at home. Time to mosey.”

  They rose. Michael snapped out of his torpor and shook Elder’s hand. Even though the three barrels still burned, they were the only ones left in Snakeland.

  Just as they were about to leave, a question popped into Jon’s head as if from nowhere. A stray thought that would not go away. He called to the departing figure of Brian Elder

  “Which saints were they? If you know.”

  The man stopped and yelled from the field.

  “What saints?”

  “The saints that Goody Smith had images of.”

  “Why, Saint Patrick, patron of Ireland. Saint Jude, patron of lost causes. And the last . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  A crooked smile. “Saint Fond, patron of falsely accused women.”

  ***

  He knew he was going to do it. Despite the hemming and hawing, despite all the leveraging with Michael and the odd man at Snakeland, Jon always knew he was going to make the deal with the demon.

  The prize was too sweet to pass up. The power, his first ever taste, was too addictive. He had to see. He had to know. Anything else was just procrastination. All roads led him back to the midget room.

  The only hesitation was the blood. Neither of the boys relished the idea, but they had to do it. After a long and exhausting debate, they went to the city pound and picked a cat slated to be put down the next day.

  It was an old, foul stray. A feral creature all its life, it had been finally trapped after it grew too sickly to run any more. It was too ill to groom itself properly, giving the feline a sickly sheen over matted hair. One eye was milked over. Half an ear had been chewed off. Numerous scars crisscrossed the body.

  They got weird looks from the pound people when they selected the near-dead cat, but no one objected. It was one less carcass for them to incinerate. The animal barely stirred in its crate as they navigated up the treacherous passages of the old grain elevator to the midget room.

  For the items related to the victims, school provided the best opportunity. They waited until school was out, hiding away in the science lab until after even the janitors had gone home. Jon took a crowbar and broke into their lockers. For Maria, they plucked stray hairs from a brush she stored there. For Gabbaducci, it was a pair of stiff and stinking gym shorts that hadn’t been washed since his freshman year. They broke open a few other lockers and threw the contents around just to cover their tracks.

  The instrument of death was a kitchen knife Jon smuggled from his home. Though he supplied the weapon, he couldn’t bring himself to use it. Thus, it was Michael who held the animal aloft, after they had re-established contact with Calach, and slit the cat’s throat.

  Its blood spilled over the center of the game, almost being absorbed by the plastic board. The hair and shorts were then thrown into the mix. A disturbing sound of pleasure, like a pedophile achieving orgasm, filled their heads.

  How? Jon thought. How did the blood benefit them? What did Calach really gain from this? The blood didn’t disappear. It just stained the floor. Or was leaving a stain on the world the actual point?

  “The pact is sealed,” the voice said.

  Both felt the entity break contact. Jon didn’t realize they could do that. He assumed the spirit was trapped until they let it go or lost concentration. None of that occurred to Michael. He was too giddy.

  “Now all we have to do is wait,” he said.

  CHAPTER 9

  Drowning the Ceremony of Innocence

  On the way out, Jon was subjected to all the nocturnal haunts exactly as what happened at Goodleburg Cemetery. With every blink, a new horror filled his sight. It was so ghastly he nearly fell through a hole in the floor. Michael needed to guide him down the treacherous stairs. He asked questions all the way about what Jon saw.

  As had happened at the cemetery, visions of evil clouded his senses. Up and down the structur
e, people from different times and fashions committed vile acts. Beatings, thefts, rapes, and murders viciously played out around him. Dark creatures with indistinct features floated all around. Dark tendrils, rippling with profane power, rubbed over the evil doers, transferring a joy of sin to the men.

  A spectral Brian Elder was on the bottom floor of the grain elevator, dressed in the style of the 1920s. He had pinned down one of the demonic things and was sucking power from it via a paper straw punctured into its skull. The magician’s shade somehow recognized Jon and waved to him before evaporating into the ether.

  Jon was pulled the last hundred feet as Michael’s mythical frontiersman appeared and shot a pregnant doe. How much of that was real? How much actually had happened in the past? They had the consistency of dreams or nightmares, yet there was a pungent earthiness to them. The visions weren’t just bits of nonsense.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Jon said, after he had laid in the dirt for half an hour. “Every time we contact—”

  “But that’s incorrect,” Michael interrupted. “This didn’t happen when we first contacted Calach.”

  True. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Jon stared up at the twisting stars. All the answers lay out there somewhere. All the evil, horrible truths. Perhaps he should start a policy of willful ignorance, then happiness would be his.

  Michael was still going on. “If what you say is accurate, then it seems you have a reaction whenever something changes as a result of contact. The world shifts or some muck at the bottom of the spiritual pool is stirred up, and you have a psychic allergic reaction.”

  Did they only occur at such times? He remembered the hallucinatory episodes at his house. They were wilder, but still vivid. One had definitely happened during some bizarre ceremony at his house, but Michael didn’t need to know about that.

  “Yeah well, it was all evil. Doesn’t anything nice ever happen? Why don’t I see that?”

  Michael had no answer, so he sidestepped it. “The point is that this is a good sign. It means the entity has done something in the world.”

  ***

  If Calach had affected a change, the results weren’t seen immediately. They expected Gabbaducci to spontaneously explode in horrific fashion across the school cafeteria, or die in an ironic way, but nothing.

  He and his cohort of greasy stooges still stomped around talking of their standard 3 Fs: fighting, football, and fucking. Maria still hung among them. Still attached to her man. Nothing had changed.

  Sitting through class became a contest in endurance. School and school work almost didn’t exist in Jon’s mind anymore. He took nothing in. All efforts to penetrate his brain was wasted. It was as if he had graduated to a world beyond the mundane.

  Through the school grapevine, Jon heard that Louis’s parents were at the school office. All of the football team were pissed off. They roamed the halls taking random shots at weaker males.

  “That dumb hick is gonna fuck everything up.”

  A bruiser dented his knuckles against a locker.

  “We had a shot, a real shot, this year.”

  What happened?

  “His inbred parents pulled him out. They’re filling out all this paperwork to home school him. Fucking weirdos.”

  Home school? Wasn’t that for religious nut jobs living on a hidden mountain compound or spastics too unstable to handle normal high school interactions—or for his older sister, supported by his parents for whatever reason?

  Over the following two weeks, while they waited for the curse to ferment, things became weirder at home. Jon’s parents swapped roles. Mother was gone most of the time on “business.” Snatches of eavesdropped conversation placed her in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Victoria, British Columbia, among some obscure others. The specific nature of her trips were unknown, but on her return Jon spotted some deep bruises on his mother’s arms and legs, which she tried to cover up with long pants and sleeves.

  While she was gone, Father took charge. He spent nearly all day at home, making phone calls in weirdly accented French and jotting shorthand notes in a beige leather notebook that he hid in the safe. Jon snuck in and read them, but it was unintelligible.

  Father didn’t like to cook, so most of the meals were takeout—burgers, wings, and pizza—the unhealthy trio of junk food that plagued the city, not that the kids complained.

  As much as he provided for their material needs, toys and pretty clothes for Catherine, booze and sundry drugs for Michelle, Father gave them nothing emotional. No support. No love. No hate. Simply a void. Even when he punished Jon or praised Catherine, there was no feeling behind the words. It stuck out more during this time. Catherine began to whine for her mommy and, for the first time in her life, no one rushed to solve the problem.

  During this time, two things happened which set Jon’s mind ablaze. He came home one day, very anxious and hopeful, to find his sister topless on the living room floor, yet again soiling the antique rug. Her floppy breasts slid off on either side, their lack of movement indicated the girl had stopped breathing. An annoyed Father was kneeling over her, filling up a large cardiac syringe with an orange liquid. He saw Jon and smirked.

  “These junkies just can’t help killing themselves.”

  He jammed the needle into her heart with a vicious thud. Michelle’s eyes shot open. Each orb was nearly filled with blood. They waggled about uncomprehending for a few seconds, then the lids slowly closed. Breathing resumed.

  “Have to call the doctor again,” Father sighed, then commanded Jon, “Give me a hand with her.”

  The pair hauled her thin, yet surprisingly heavy body, up the stairs. Michelle snored away, oblivious to ever having been in peril. Jon found himself voicing a question that had never occurred to him before.

  “Why do you encourage this?”

  “There’s a method to my madness, don’t you worry,” Father chuckled in his deep baritone. “Each step is taken with absolute purpose. How did Crowley put it? ‘Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ Actually, I think he stole that from Rabelias. However, most people think it means to become a beast like your sister here, but really—”

  They deposited Michelle into the attic drug den she called a bedroom. Through the dim light came all the horrid smells of pleasure gone sour. The natural debris of a wastrel life, where the enjoyment of “now” meant more than anything else. Father picked up the thought when they had crept down.

  “—but really he meant, make your will into the law. Make sure each step is done with precision and the depraved humans of this society will surrender to you at every turn.”

  “So, you turn her into a junkie for some power play?”

  “Are you that stupid?” Father’s yellow eyes turned Jon’s guts into a squirming bag of rats. Yet, he put his blank face on and stood his ground. “Do you know your tarot? The major arcana?”

  “What do you mean?” Jon asked.

  “Yes, you do. All the decisions and possibilities in the world are spread out in those cards. Do you know which one you are?”

  “Um . . . ”

  Slam. The door to little Catherine’s room shut. She had been privy to all of the ongoing actions but preferred the company of her imaginary friends and dolls. Now she was angry because real life had intruded into her domain. Both the males stared at her door for a second, then Father started right back up.

  “Zero. The Fool. You’re stumbling about blindly looking for answers, looking for purpose. That’s fine for a bit, but one cannot remain the fool forever or else you step off a cliff. You must make your next move or die.”

  There seemed little doubt now as to who slipped the Devil tarot into his journal before, but what was the purpose? These cryptic messages, these little taunts and odd discussion points indicated something deeper. What was underneath the words? There was something there, Jon could smell it. A formless lump of meaning without definition. A riddle that only time could unravel.

  “How do I do that?”

/>   “The fact that you ask means you’re heading in the wrong direction.”

  “And where are you? What number do you think you are?”

  A laugh, deep and sinister. “Wrong again. Who cares where I am, it’s where I’m going that’s important. Your sister up there has a very important part in my future. That’s all you get.”

  Jon was dismissed with a cologne-clogged wave of Father’s hand. Fine by him, Jon had something to do. First he biked over to a payphone next to a dilapidated convenience store. There was only a 30-70 shot the thing was working, as ripping out the receiver by the cord was a popular pastime of the local pre-teen potheads. He had little other choice, though. Jon didn’t trust the phones at home anymore. If there were hidden cameras everywhere, a tap on the lines was not out of the question.

  He dropped a quarter in and called Michael.

  “You still got that video tape?”

  “The one I’m not supposed to watch? Yeah, it’s here under my bed.”

  “Good. You haven’t looked at it, have you?

  “No.” A little defensiveness in his tone. “Why are you asking? Do you need it?”

  “Not right now. I’m just . . . just making sure.”

  “Okay. Let me know.”

  As he hung up, Jon noted an uncommon lack of curiosity by Michael about the tape. Well, either he’s seen it by now or not. As long as he kept quiet and the tape was safe, that’s all that matters.

  That idea flitted from his mind, as did everything else Father had said to him. It was the same thing that had been distracting him since school that had made him so anxious and filled with hope. By itself, the event was a little thing, but it filled Jon with wondrous and beautiful anticipation, and warmed every inch of him with love and lust.

  On his way out the door to unchain his still borrowed bike from its post, he had spotted a group of Italians all yelling at each other by the cars their parents had bought for them.

  The cause of the argument was lost in the furor of the two males butting into each other, and the others loudly cheering. Among the horde was Gabbaducci, who was thoroughly enjoying himself, screaming for blood to be spilt. He looked pale, tired. Maybe the beginning of something bad happening, Jon prayed.