Anna was running out of patience, not that she had much to begin with.
“He can’t kill you if he’s already dead, and that thing is trying to kill him and everyone else in this town. Pretty soon, the population of Bloomtown is gonna rise from their nightmare-infested slumber and start slurping down more of this water. Who knows how many are on the brink of hurting themselves or someone else?”
Geneva’s brow furrowed causing sweat to pool in the crease in her forehead, a drop of which fell onto her tank top, disappearing in the tie-dye pattern. The guilt in Anna’s chest sat up and shook its finger. Anna took a softer tone.
“Whatever fear you’re feeling,” Anna said, “could be coming from this rotten egg we’re sitting on. We have to get down there and clear this water.”
Anna didn’t give Geneva a chance to respond. Gripping the mouth of the open hatch, she dropped down inside the tank and hung, legs swinging, over the wooden platform. She stretched one foot down, testing her weight on the planks. They didn’t budge. The platform was sturdy enough. She let go of the hatch and dropped onto the wooden planks. A tiny creak, a small crack. No big deal. She looked up. Geneva was framed by the circular opening, silhouetted by the faint shimmer of the aurora borealis in the near dawn sky.
You see, Anna was about to say, easy peasy! But then the darkness in the tank pressed in on her, squeezing the air from her lungs, and a panic squeezed her chest. This was a horrible mistake. The tank walls were a crypt, a trap that she’d stupidly fallen into.
No. She swallowed it back, steadying her breath. It wasn’t her fear she was feeling, Anna was almost certain. It was this place, dark and full of bad juju.
“You okay, hon?”
“What? Yeah, I’m good,” Anna said, hoping Geneva missed the hitch in her voice. “Gonna look around.”
She shuffled forward on the ledge using her flashlight to guide her. But the light cut a meager path through the stifling darkness, and all she could see was the wood at her feet. Afraid that she might slip over the unseen edge, Anna placed the flashlight between her teeth and got down on her stomach. She elbow-crawled forward on the wooden planks until she could wrap her fingers around the end of the platform.
A thud and then, even worse, a loud crack, sent Anna’s heart racing as Geneva dropped onto the ledge behind her. She shimmied on her stomach next to Anna, adding the glow of her flashlight to the crushing darkness. Anna wanted to hug her but was afraid to move that much. She gave Geneva’s hand a quick squeeze. The woman had guts.
Together they peered over the edge of the platform, but the glow of their flashlights was enveloped by the darkness below. Geneva removed her shoulder strap, took Emi out of its satchel, and brought the device to the edge of the platform. She pointed the machine down into the blackness and pushed the trigger. The tank filled with blue light.
Below them the water was a rolling black lava forming boils that sprayed dark sludge across the tank walls as they burst.
“What’s wrong?” Geneva asked. “You okay?”
“Yeah. It’s just so disgusting.”
“What is?”
Geneva couldn’t see what was in the water. She couldn’t see the large, oval portal on the back wall of the tank exhaling plumes of dark pain dust that fell into the water and collected on the walls in globs. If the electromagnetic portals were sucking in the pain of Bloomtown, then this was where it ended up. No doubt about it, the water tower was Bad Juju Central.
Instead of feeling victorious, cold despair settled over Anna and her headache took on a punishing rhythm. As the pounding intensified behind her eyes, so did her panic. The tank thrummed with malevolence, and it was squirming its way inside her. Next to her, Geneva was trembling, making Emi’s blue beam bounce around the tank, throwing shadows all over the walls.
“I don’t feel so good,” Geneva said. Her tie-dye was pasted to her chest with sweat. “Is the water…is it bad?”
Anna nodded and wriggled the backpack off her shoulders. She gripped the bottom and let the unzipped top fall forward over the platform’s edge. A soft hiss echoed through the tower as the salt hit the water.
She had the salt. She had the water. But for the life of her, Anna couldn’t remember what to do next. Who did she think she was, trying to create a ginormous friggin’ tankful of holy water?
No, she told herself. She could do this. Only hours ago she was out of body. She’d seen Penelope, had found her mother! Anna took a deep breath and remembered the words of her father—before the hoarding had consumed him, when he could still make holy water. The weight of the backpack diminished as the salt fell, taking with it some of her panic.
“Wherever this salt falls shall be free from the attacks of malicious entities!” Anna shouted, her voice wavering but strong. “Anyplace that it touches will be protected by the powers of Source.”
The salt met the water and a loud hiss rose from the depths of the tank. The sound bounced off the walls, surrounding them like applause.
“It’s working!” Geneva said.
Anna looked down. A foam was forming on the surface of the water; a dirty color that appeared dark blue under Emi’s light but was probably a murky brown. Please, let the water clear. But the foam quickly fizzled out and the churning, dark energy saturated the water once more.
“No,” Anna said. “It’s not.”
“Keep going,” Geneva said.
Anna opened her mouth and a fresh torture thundered in her head. Wincing, she accidentally let go of the backpack, snatching it with one hand before it fell into the water. Her heart thudded in her chest. Who was she kidding? She couldn’t make holy water. Her connection to Source was too weak to cleanse this concentrated cauldron of evil. Inside her the river rage crashed against its levee. She was a fool to think she had a chance.
There was a movement directly beneath them. The planks creaked and Geneva stiffened. Something was attached to the underside of the ledge. It dislodged with a wet squelch and fell into the water. Two floating rows of tiny lights moved in unison through the dark water below them, and then Anna’s eyes adjusted.
It was the demon, wearing its Saul costume, floating on its back and grinning up at them, its Chiclet teeth shining in the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Big Show
“You managed to squirm out of your bone-toilet and find me,” the demon said to Anna from the water below. “And now you’ve found me again. Impressive for your kind, maggot. I always knew you were special.”
Anna and Geneva scrambled to their feet, moving to a less vulnerable position on the platform, but now they couldn’t see the demon. They inched back to the edge, holding on to each other.
The demon’s arms spiraled, whistling a cloyingly familiar tune as it backstroked through the water toward a ladder on the side wall, a ladder that led up to the platform. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream.
“Let’s go,” Geneva said in a hoarse whisper.
Anna wanted to bolt for the hatch but couldn’t look away from the demon. Her knees clacked together like magnets. On the ladder now, its face twisted up at her.
“No hello for an old friend?” it said. “How rude.”
Its deceptively handsome features were still punctuated by a set of garish white choppers, but underneath the costume skin was the same whirling darkness that Anna saw while out of body. The darkness appeared fluid one moment, like an oil slick inside a waterspout, then coalesced into black scribbles that bent and writhed like electricity arcing.
“Come on,” Geneva said, pulling Anna’s arm. Her paralysis broke, and she briefly allowed Geneva to drag her toward the hatch before digging her heels into the planks.
Anna didn’t want to run. She wanted answers and then she wanted to kill it.
“What the hell are you?” Anna called out. Her voice was steady but seemed to be coming from somewhere else.
A part of her was eight years old and walking into her parent’s bedroom to find her mother
crouched atop the ceiling fan, her tongue flickering like a lizard. But Anna needed to be in the water tower, all of her. She bit down hard on her cheek, hoping the pain would ground her in the present. The demon was on the ladder, out of sight and climbing.
“You’ll have knowledge, child,” it hissed, “before your death.”
The taste of blood remained on her tongue, but Anna scattered again as if blown by a gust of cold wind. Death, yes, first death came and then a funeral. Then the clawing emptiness of the house. A house her father had never stopped filling even as it sat choked and bloated. The demon had ruined them, and it did so with glee.
Geneva screamed that they had to go, now, but her words were drowned out by the roar of fire engines and the smell of burning newspapers. The horrible shape of Penelope’s body on the lawn. Penelope, who suffered at the end.
No. Anna’s jaw clenched as the pounding thundered on in her skull. When she was eight she was powerless, but now, riding the drumming rage inside her, she was strong enough to kill. It was a righteous rage. Revenge. Anna was entitled to it.
But Penelope is okay now. You saw her. The small voice inside her was muted by the snickering of a classroom full of kids, by Frank’s voice spitting out of the TV in front of the blackboard. Can you make her kill herself like her mom?
“I can taste you, maggot,” it said. Its voice rose like fumes between the wooden planks. “Such a large capacity for hate and anger. Much juicier than sniveling Helen.”
Anna stepped toward the edge, dragging a protesting Geneva with her. Peering over the side, she saw where the top rung of the ladder met the platform.
“Don’t say her name!” Anna called out, her hands curled into fists. She didn’t have to wait for the demon. She could climb down and meet it.
Geneva gripped Anna’s shoulders, swiveling Anna to face her. “You have to fight the hatred inside you. You’re giving it what it wants.”
Anna pushed Geneva away and turned back to the ladder. The planks shook as Geneva ran toward the hatch. Emi was left on the platform, the trigger compressed, keeping the tank awash in blue light. A loud squeaking was followed by a thump as Geneva pushed the hatch open.
Good. Let her go.
Down below, boils burst from the mud-water, spewing up thick tendrils of concentrated pain that rose and fell around the platform like flames. Bloomtown’s misery saturated the air like thick humidity, seeping into Anna’s pores. Raw malevolence coursed through her undiluted, filling her with homicidal rage. Anna moaned.
The demon cackled, shooting up onto the platform. It landed on all fours then crawled toward Anna like a bug. Startled, Anna stumbled and fell hard on her butt, sending splinters deep into both palms.
Its button-down shirt and dress pants were impossibly pristine. Water ran off them in thin rivulets instead of absorbing into the fabric. The demon’s clothes weren’t real, Anna realized. They were as much a part of the Saul costume as its teeth and hair.
“I knew Helen much better than you did,” it said, turning the ends of its mouth down in mock sadness. “It was such a bore lying in bed all day inside her stinking bone-toilet. I planned to leave her anyway, the day she died. If you hadn’t been such a needy little maggot, she would have survived.”
It was all her fault. The suspicion that surfaced on quiet nights, when Anna’s worst secrets had nowhere to hide, finally spoken aloud. The pain in her skull was a butcher’s hammer now, merciless and blunt. Her vision swam as nausea twisted in her gut. She couldn’t take much more of the spongy, venomous air.
Anna placed her stinging hands on the platform, pushing herself to her feet. She had to keep it talking and think of a way to kill it, or at least wound it, so she could try the holy water blessing again.
“You said you’d give me knowledge before I died,” she said. “Tell me why you came back to Bloomtown.”
“Came back?” Its smug laughter ricocheted around the tank. “I never left you, maggot! I traveled a great distance for this feast, and I wasn’t about to leave before the main course.”
It ran a finger along the tank wall, collecting a clump of pain mud.
“Oh, the rare succulence of a food source unaccustomed to assaults on their magnetic field. Look at the density it yields.”
Its eyes stayed on Anna as it sucked greedily on a finger, relishing her disgust. She looked around, hoping to spot a piece of wood, anything that she could use as a weapon. There was only Emi, about five feet away on the platform. But that was her only light source. She needed to think of something else, to keep it talking.
“You came all the way here just to make the portals?”
It flickered its tongue. “I can make portals anywhere.”
“Then why here?”
It picked its teeth with a fingernail, consuming its find.
“My kind has evolved past the need for bone-toilets,” it said. “We are consciousness disembodied, so advanced that we can invade creatures of flesh and experience the tactile world through their senses. Any interference with lower life forms is strictly forbidden, but some of us are not satisfied to simply observe, we like to play. Some of us have even learned to replicate the flesh we inhabit. But to do that we need fuel. And there is no more potent a fuel than the hatred, fear and agony of sentient beings. Even without your star’s cooperation, the portal inflow provided enough sustenance for me to maintain poor Saul’s bone-toilet. His suffering was delicious, but he succumbed years ago. I slipped right into his shiny shoes, and from there the homes of my choosing.”
Your star’s cooperation. The pain in Anna’s hands distracted her from the hammering in her skull, keeping her present, helping her think. The solar flares. The worse the sun storms raged, the more Bloomtown was self-destructing. She had sensed the connection but hadn’t trusted her gut. It was there in the dream as well. The picnic table inferno, sparked by the blazing sun.
“The sun storms,” Anna said. “That’s why you’re here.”
It clapped its hands. “Bravo, maggot. Once the flares began, I drew upon their awesome power to supercharge the electric fields battering your primitive brains through the portals. The resulting abundance of human misery is funneled here for me to gorge upon, while the surplus is recycled back into the population through your drinking water. Very green of me, don’t you agree?”
“But the flares began a week ago. You killed my mother…” The rage again, cutting off her air. “Eight years ago,” she spit the words out. “There weren’t any flares.”
It grinned, sniffing the air, and took a step closer to her.
“Eight years is nothing, ignorant one. It took many more years of travel to make this pit stop. It can be difficult, even for me, to predict solar occurrences with perfect accuracy, so I had some time to kill.”
Anna felt the warm, sticky wetness of blood on her palms. The demon waited for her reaction, wanting her rage, but also, Anna realized, to impress her.
She peered around the tank, feigning confusion and fearful reverence, stalling for time. “Since the storms began, you’ve channeled pain energy here through the portals?”
The platform creaked as it took another step toward her.
“Do you still not understand? This water is an energetic sewer. One that you fill your doughy bellies with, increasing your suffering tenfold, which in turn further increases the potency of the portal in-flow. You are the power source.” It spread its arms over the dark water and puffed out its chest. “And this is the bomb. Hours from now the storms will end. But before that, I’ll have the pleasure of watching the vermin of this town rip each other apart like the feral beasts they are. It will be my long awaited dessert. I’ll leave this rock with more power than any of my kind has ever amassed and make those that exiled me suffer for all eternity.”
So it was a demon in one sense of the word. A fallen angel of sorts, ruled by its raging ego, banished after breaking the rules of its advanced community and now an exile seeking vengeance and power.
Jack taug
ht her that the best way to battle spirits was to tap into their belief systems. But the demon seemed to believe in nothing but itself. It took another step toward her, close enough that she could see dark wads of pain mud in between its teeth.
The demon was going to kill her, drown her in the hateful seas below, sucking in her fear as she died. But first it wanted her to know how superior it was. Her heart banging in her chest, Anna retreated another step and felt the tank wall on her back. Jack’s words from Izzy’s exorcism came back to her. If we get him to show off, it’ll wear him out.
“Sounds like your kind are very evolved. Where do you fit in with the gang?”
The demon’s eyes narrowed. “Make sense, maggot.”
“I mean, you chose to prey on us lowly amoebas for years? Where’s the victory in that? No wonder they got rid of you. You’re a coward, like a bully that picks on the youngest, smallest kids it can find.”
It closed the distance between them with one long stride. Inches from her face, it reeked of electrocuted flesh. It took everything Anna had not to bolt for the hatch.
“What you think you see,” it said, “is the quantum slice that I reduce myself to so your ape eyes can take me in. You have no idea what I can do.”
Anna waved her hand in front of her face, dispersing its foul breath.
“Let’s see you then.”
“You cannot see me.”
“So what, you’re an alien?”
“To you, I’m a god.”
“Prove it!” Her words ricocheted sharply off the tank walls.
It spat in Anna’s face. Cold clumps of pain mud slid down her cheeks. Glaring at her, it moved back to the center of the platform. The demon’s mouth dropped open and Anna braced herself for another pelting. But its mouth kept opening, stretching until the skin on its Saul face was reduced to a featureless band of flesh surrounding a gaping black hole. The hole emitted metallic scratching sounds that made Anna’s teeth hurt. She pressed her back into the tank wall, covering her ears. This was it. The Big Show.
The dark cavity of the demon’s face continued to stretch, curving back on itself, dissolving away its costume flesh from the inside out. What was left was a rolling, dark distortion made of slow moving waves—a rippling black river of energy hanging horizontal in the air. On the crest of one wave came a booming pulse of sound, thick with a thumping harmonic like a bass-heavy car radio, boom, boom, boom.
The Ghost Hunter's Daughter Page 21
