The Devil's End

by D A Fowler

  Lana sighed. “Come on, Bruce, this is no time for jokes. Comas are serious; they can last for years.”

  “I’m sorry. I just thought if anything would bring him out of it, that would.”

  “Nice try, but I’d be guessin’ he’s high enough.”

  Lana took the chair vacated by Jay’s mother, and Bruce perched himself on the windowsill. They passed a few minutes in thoughtful silence. A nurse came in, mechanically took Jay’s temperature and checked his pulse and blood pressure, then left, an unsmiling robot. Bruce said sarcastically, “Some Florence Nightingale. Hope I never have to come in here.”

  Lana sighed. “I wish we could talk to him. I’d sure like t’know what’s goin’ on. If he knows anything.”

  “You know what they say about curiosity.”

  “My daddy says that sayin’ was invented by the Nixon administration.” Thinking of her father made Lana feel sad. She missed him terribly, and had secretly tried to call him on several occasions, but he was never at home. At his bimbo girlfriend’s, probably. Lana had never even learned her name; her mother refused to discuss the affair. Why didn’t he call? Did he really not care anymore?

  She couldn’t allow herself to dwell on that. She would end up crying, and she knew how much Bruce hated to see her depressed. No telling what he might do to try to snap her out of it—put the bedpan upside down on his head and pretend to be Paul Revere? This wasn’t the place or time for such frivolity. She returned her concentration to the problem at hand. “I wonder what’s goin’ on in his mind. Do people in comas dream?”

  Bruce shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I’ve never been in a—oh wow, look at his face.”

  Lana had already noticed, and her lips were pulled back in a grimace. “My God…what’s happenin’ to ’im? Should we call for a doctor?” Large red bumps were beginning to sprout all over Jay’s face and neck. Even as they watched, some of the pustules came to a head and broke open, oozing yellow-green pus.

  Bruce leaned forward on the sill in shocked fascination. “Talk about a zit attack. Yowza, I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  Lana shuddered. “I think we should go find a doctor. This isn’t right at all—”

  Jay’s eyes suddenly flew open. It so surprised Lana that she uttered a small shriek; Bruce jerked backward and hit his head on the window.

  “Bruce, Lana. How nice of you to come see me.” The patient smiled. Even his lips were covered with sores. His irises seemed to glow like rings of fluorescent blue paint under a black light. They held a slight sparkle of malevolence. His breath had a strange odor.

  Lana covered her mouth and pointed. “Jay, your face…I think I oughta go find your doctor.”

  “Ah, I’m fine, just fine, just the old acne flaring up,” he said hollowly. “It doesn’t hurt, except maybe to look at, eh?” His smile widened obscenely.

  Lana looked away; the sight of him was making her sick. “Well, if you’re sure…we, uh, we came to ask you about Nancy. If you know anything about her bein’ involved in witchcraft.”

  The boy on the bed spewed out deep, gurgling laughter. “Witchcraft? Oh my, that’s a good one, gooood one. Have you also heard that I’m a vampire? It’s true, you know. Come closer and let me bite your neck.”

  Lana grinned weakly; only Bruce was amused enough to chuckle. Lana pictured herself wearing a dunce hat; she could certainly run off the deep end on wild-haired ideas. “Okay, okay, it was a stupid question, and I got the answer I deserved. But I just had to make sure. Anyway, that’s the rumor goin’ around school. I thought we should check it out, just in case.”

  Jay’s body abruptly rose in a sitting position. “You’re very conscientious, aren’t you, dear girl? That took a lot of courage, I’m sure. But yes, it was a stupid question. Now if you two will excuse me, I’m going to get dressed and out of here before the old lady comes back.”

  By six-thirty Bertha Guenther had still not risen, and Spiro was getting hungry, although the thought of eating anything was revolting to him. He wondered why that was. He went back to his mother’s bedroom and called from the doorway, “Mama, will you fix me something to eat?”

  Her voice rang out from the darkness, “You can fix your own supper, Spiro. And you can eat whatever you want.”

  Grinning, he marched into the kitchen and painstakingly opened a can of fruit cocktail. He ate it right out of the can, sitting in his mother’s rocking chair in the living room. He had not cleaned up the vomit in the kitchen— his mother’s breakfast must not have agreed with her at all—and the room reeked of its unpleasant odor, so he hadn’t wanted to eat there. When he finished the fruit cocktail, he went back to the kitchen and took the white bread from the bread box, and after eating half the loaf plain, topped off his meal with an overripe banana. Actually, only the thought of eating meat made his stomach feel queasy.

  After the banana he was satisfied. Leaving the empty fruit can, banana peel, and bread bag on the floor beside his mother’s chair, he crossed the room and peered through the drapes. The hated pickup truck was parked in front of Lana’s house again. That meant she was with him, the boy with the nice face and straight body. The boy she kissed. Spiro wanted to be him more than anything else in the world.

  His mother was calling his name. Softly, softly.

  He went in to her and turned on the light. The dull eye looked at him with approval. “You can draw another picture of her if you want, boy,” she said through still, white lips.

  Spiro was overjoyed though not really surprised; he’d somehow known what she was going to say, just as she’d known what he wanted to do. He lumbered back to his bedroom for some paper and a pen. He could draw Lana really good now. He knew exactly what she looked like in the nude.

  Harold Mingee had come home early in a rage. They would be lucky, he angrily informed his daughter, damned lucky if this scandal didn’t ruin his law practice. She’d had no goddamn business going up to that cemetery in the first place, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Of course he was greatly exaggerating about being ruined. But he loathed social embarrassment.

  Marla had retreated deep into herself hours before, that being the only way she could cope with what had happened to her. She took the verbal lashing from her father calmly, then afterward went upstairs and locked herself in her bedroom, his voice booming after her, “And you can just stay there until I say you can come out!”

  Her urine-soaked skirt, panties, and panty hose still lay crumpled on the floor, where she’d dropped them before taking a scalding bath. She was too ashamed to put them in the laundry hamper and let her mother know what she had done. She picked them up and wrapped them in a plastic shopping bag, then stuffed the bag in a corner of her closet. After everyone else went to bed, she would sneak it outside to the trash can.

  He made me do it…

  Impossible! How? You’re nothing but slime. Rich slime…

  She flung herself down on the bed just as her phone rang. She wearily picked it up and sighed, “What?”

  The familiar voice on the other line was frantic. Marla gripped the phone, anger rising over her shame as she listened.

  “…to talk to you about something. My dad said Mr. Montgomery was here and he must have gone into my room—”

  “Looking for what, Nancy?” Marla cut in, her voice razor sharp. “Something else you found in the tomb, maybe? That you lied to me about having, like that witch’s spell book? What did you do to Montgomery anyway? He’s not a man anymore, he’s something that crawled out of Hell!”

  “Listen to me, Marla—”

  “You listen to me, Nancy Snell,” Marla hissed. “Right now my whole life is falling apart because of you. I’m falling apart. Besides, now I know what a liar you are, so why should I believe anything you say?”

  Now Nancy’s voice became heated. “Where do you get off calling me a liar? Can you prove it? Can you prove I put a
spell on Montgomery?”

  “I don’t have to, I know you did and that’s all that matters.”

  “Oh, are you psychic now?”

  Marla wished Nancy’s head would pop out of the mouthpiece so she could spit in her face. “As a matter of fact I am, and I’m going to give you a free prediction right now. You’re going to be sorry, you stupid bitch!”

  “Not as sorry as you, BITCH!”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Have you put a spell on me too?”

  “You’re the psychic,” Nancy quipped. “Answer your own questions.”

  Her voice shaking with rage, Marla ended the exchange by saying, “Last time you told me to fuck off, well now I’m telling you to fuck off. So FUCK OFF!” She slammed the receiver down, a resounding ring echoing in her ears. She muttered at the instrument, “Fucking bitch.”

  Then the cramps hit, as if someone had just rammed a bowling ball into her abdomen. Marla clutched herself, mouth opened in a silent scream. Something was inside her, something hot, and it was pushing its way up. Her spirit clung tenuously to its haven; whatever that thing was, forcing its way up from her—womb?—it obviously had both the intention and the power to squeeze her own spirit out. The thought suddenly hit her like a blow: Nancy sure as hell did cast some terrible spell on me, and I’m going to die. Right now, right here on this bed. In the next minute or two I’m going to be dead. Or something even worse.

  The ensuing tidal wave of panic triggered the simultaneous release of both bladder and bowels. She tried to scream for help but it was too late; she was no longer in control of anything. A tingly numbing sensation had begun at the top of her head; it was happening, she was passing through. A torrent of foreign images began to flood her mind, hundreds of them in the space of a few seconds, all of them so vile and depraved that she felt as though she were being raped, and all at once she realized that she was; her mind was being purposefully violated by another intelligence, a stupendously evil one. A physical attack by the most despicable man on earth would have been preferable to this. She saw naked men and women copulating with every inanimate object imaginable and every living beast, mothers and fathers abusing their own children, who screamed and cried and begged for more; she saw cooked infants on platters with fruits stuffed in their mouths, orgies in human excrement.

  Then abruptly the assault ceased and she was looking down at herself, at the face she had seen only in a mirror before. It was now a face upon which the stamp of horror was deeply engraved, but just before Marla’s spiraling journey through the black tunnel of death, she saw her brown eyes spark with blue flame, and the gaping mouth curve up in a fiendish smile.

  Twenty

  The phone rang at 7:35PM. Several moments later Luke’s voice rang through the house, “It’s Daddy, it’s Daddy!”

  Lana jumped up from the bed. “I’ve gotta talk to him. I’ll be right back.”

  Bruce waved her on. “Go on, and take your time. I’m not gonna disappear.”

  It seemed to Lana an eternity before her brother finally relinquished the telephone. Carol sat rigidly on the couch, silently seething.

  Lana listened to her father’s voice with a pounding heart. Her mind produced a one-dimensional image of him, an image that was miles and miles away, that couldn’t reach out to gather her in its arms, pull her onto its lap, as he had done so often when she was little. That was something, she thought, that a little girl should never have to outgrow. That original source of comfort and protection, of total security, should always be available.

  “How’s your new school, honey?”

  “Hard,” Lana replied despairingly. “I wish—”

  “I know, babe, I wish too. So are you all settled in the new town? Made any friends yet?”

  “A couple…I’ve got a new boyfriend, named Bruce. Oh, an’ we had a puppy, but he ran away…Daddy?”

  “Yes, angel.”

  “Do you still love us? Me and Luke?”

  Hugh Bremmers’s voice came back strained. “Course I do, sweetheart. More than anything else in the whole world, you know that. I said some things to your mother in anger, tryin’ to scare her out of movin’ away with you kids. But I didn’t mean…I’m still your dad, honey. I’ll always be your dad—” His voice cracked. Lana could hear muffled sobs, the sound tumbling down the dam keeping back her own tears. They flowed down her cheeks unchecked.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner,” he continued after a while. “I’ve had so many pans on the fire this past week, I’ve met myself comin’ and goin’. But don’t ever doubt that I love you, angel. You’ll always be my little girl.”

  Bursting into sobs, Lana croaked, “I love you too, Daddy,” and shoved the phone back at Luke, who was practically doing somersaults wanting to talk to his father again before the connection was terminated. Lana ran back to her bedroom. Bruce held and rocked her gently, for once not turning the situation into a farce. She clung to him tightly and moaned, “It’s not fair.”

  He nodded sadly. “Life’s a real bitch sometimes. Go ahead, babe, let it all out.” Her pain was seeping into him, oppressing him with its heavy weight. In the emotional atmosphere of the room, he was powerless to fight it. He was usually successful at keeping such darkness out of his system, holding it at bay with jokes and cynical wit, a plastered-on grin, a few tokes of marijuana. He knew he had to keep it away because he knew how deadly it was…that if allowed to get a good hold on him, it would probably destroy him within a few days. And he knew where his mother kept her sleeping pills. That scared him the most.

  He was the son of a man who had been convicted of armed robbery. Bruce had been only eighteen months old when it happened; three when his mother remarried. The twin girls she had by her new husband were treated like princesses by their father. Bruce, the son of the convict, the loser, was treated like a sack of shit. And he had been told often enough that he was JUST LIKE HIS FATHER and he would NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING, blah de blah blah, and Hell is just another word for being alive.

  His mother, as if attempting to escape the reality of her past mistake, withdrew from him and made no effort to stop the verbal—and oftentimes physical—abuse. Bruce wondered sometimes if she was even aware of it. But what the hey! Eat, drink, and be merry, for otherwise you might just get that bottle of pills out of your mother’s dresser drawer and eat every last motherfucking one of them.

  Something beyond Nancy’s control was happening. Something terrible. She knew it, could feel it. And Albert Montgomery was an integral part of it. She’d made him a part of it. If he had been the only other person in the house today, then he had taken the ledger; a simple deduction. But what did he plan to do with it—the same thing she had? She couldn’t let him!

  She remembered looking out her window the night before and thinking she’d seen him emerge from the house across the street. Now she was almost certain that it had been him. What had he been doing over there? Did he know the Chandler women? Were those two strange old ladies somehow involved in this too? If they were, maybe they would tell. Maybe they knew what to do. Nancy put on a light jacket and opened her window. The less she had to explain to her parents, the better.

  Tonight there were no candles burning on the other side of the lace curtain. Peering through the large window, all Nancy could see was her own black reflection. Apparently Eliza Chandler and her mother had already gone to bed. She almost turned around and went back home to call the church people instead. But no, those idiots couldn’t find their own asses with both hands and a flashlight; they wouldn’t know what to do about this. She had only taken a step when she heard a noise inside the Chandler house; a loud thump. Gathering her courage, she stepped up to the door and knocked. “Mrs. Chandler?”

  The door swung open on Nancy’s third knock. It hadn’t been closed all the way. She thought that was strange, because her previous snooping adventures had always found the door locked, even d
uring the daytime. She pushed on the door, opening it farther. The room beyond was a museum of dark shapes. “Miss Chandler?” Nancy’s voice bounced off the shadows, stirring the musky air. But there was no reply; only the rhythmic ticking of a clock.

  And the rocking of a chair.

  She called out again, softly, “Miss Chandler, are you there?”

  “Please, do come in,” a gravelly voice finally replied. “So sorry about the dark. The candles are all burned out, you see.”

  “Don’t you have any electricity?” Nancy fumbled along the wall for a light switch and found one, but when she flipped it, nothing happened.

  “It seems the bulbs are burned out,” the voice said apologetically. “But no matter. Your eyes will adjust. Come closer.”

  Nancy took a timid step forward. “Am I going to bump into anything?”

  She could barely see the shape of the chair several feet in front of her; the woman sitting in it was all shadow. Nancy wondered how she could stand to sit in the total dark like this with no television, unable to even read a book, just rock in a chair and think, think, think…

  “There is nothing between me and thee,” the voice cackled thinly, “except, perhaps, a little fear. But it’s not mine. Is it yours?”

  Nancy stopped dead in her tracks, gooseflesh charging over her body. “Yes, I’m afraid. I’ve lost something…important. I know you don’t know me or anything, but I have to talk to somebody. I thought you might know something because I…saw Albert Montgomery come out of your house last night? He was at my house earlier today, and now the ledger is gone…I made him sick, well actually he was supposed to die, but now…my boyfriend’s in the hospital, and I did it to my ex-best friend too, and I know something is wrong but I don’t know what, and I don’t know what to do…”

  “Why don’t you just relax, Nancy.”