FURNACE

by Muriel Gray

  And then Josh felt his blood freeze.

  He pulled himself to his feet slowly and peered at Griffin. She had stopped suddenly, more than a hundred feet from him, halted violently in her tracks as though she’d struck a wall.

  Josh blinked, his breath held in check as the stalled silhouette of Griffin McFarlane was temporarily granted sainthood, haloed and backlit by the first sliver of a spectacular sunrise. Josh had no idea what to anticipate, but the visual confusion that reigned in the next few moments would have been beyond his guesswork.

  At first it seemed as though she was increasing in size, that the dark outline of her slight body was being inflated like a balloon. Then widening with horror, Josh’s eyes differentiated between the indistinct silhouette of Griffin and the dark figure that was growing directly between her and the hills, expanding from nowhere like bacteria growing beneath a microscope, stealing the light from her outline as it drew its own.

  Its shape was humanoid, but only just. Massive limbs hung nearly to the ground; a small horned and misshapen head was held low, so low it was almost beneath the two massive shoulders that supported it.

  And undulating around those shoulders was the unspeakable suggestion of withered, flightless wings. It crouched, yet it towered at least three feet above its prey.

  On the tendrils of morning air, that shift of moisture-filled gas too weak to be called breeze, yet too restless to be called still, came the stirring of an odour. He knew it, knew how it would increase and sicken him even as its first nauseating particles brushed the sensors of his nostrils. Josh slapped a hand to his face, covering his nose and mouth, and, turning from the unholy sight in the field, leaned heavily against the rough wood of the building.

  The touch of something real, the coarse texture of the hardwood slats against his shoulder, the stabbing of pain from the wounded hand that he hugged to his breast: These sensations sobered him. He screwed his eyes shut, willing himself to wake from the nightmare, but already the stench had circumvented the crude protection of his hand and filled his nose and mouth. Josh struggled for breath, his mind bubbling with the broth of unholy images that accompanied the smell. And then came the first scream.

  He should have buried his head in his hands, should have tried the best he could to blank out the overture of fear and suffering that was to have been his.

  But Josh made a mistake. He looked back into the field.

  Asmodeanus worked silently, but his victim was less restrained. Griffin’s screaming had become deep and guttural, an expulsion of air which contained no pleading, no hope that its sound would bring aid. Instead, it was hollow and forlorn, the sound of an animal crazed by agony. Josh felt his gorge rise, and the panic in his throat that her wailing ignited threatened to make him run to her. He willed himself to remain static, an audience of one with a ringside seat.

  Smokeless flames were engulfing the complex shape made by the two figures. Pale, almost invisible licks of sickly brightness shimmered around their two bodies like a mirage, and Josh squinted against the confusion of light and dark until with narrowed eyes and almost against his will he gradually made sense of the image.

  The movements made by the huge black shape were almost sexual. It held Griffin’s writhing body around her arching back with one massive arm, as the other tore at her torso with the ease of a farmer plucking feathers.

  Her skin was blistering and blackening, boiling up into globes of heat-stretched membrane before bursting like dark fruit, as the limb of the demon that tore at her grew thick with the harvest it found amongst her flesh. Strings of gristle and intestine dangled from its thrashing claws as it rooted around its plaything.

  The arm that supported Griffin was now busying itself at her back, ripping great trenches from shoulder to hip, while the flesh it touched ignited and smouldered like melting plastic. She could scream no more. Whether the light of sentience had gone from her forever, or the mechanism for sound had merely been cut, Josh didn’t know. But his relief in its passing caused him little shame.

  Although noises remained on the stillness of the morning air—the popping of bursting skin, the slick lapping of evisceration—they were rendered bearable by the absence of Griffin’s agonized response. Josh swallowed back his bile, unable to stop looking, unable to run.

  And then it dropped her. The hollowed sack that was Griffin’s body crumpled to the ground and the monster paused for a moment, considering it.

  Gradually, the glass wall to Josh’s right lit with blue and red as an unseen assortment of emergency vehicles that had announced their coming only moments ago arrived in the parking lot. But despite the carnival of colour that danced on the earth beside him, Josh could not take his eyes from the form that defied the laws of physics, reason and faith.

  If it was aware of the arrival of more humans, then it gave no indication.

  It crouched forward, a hunched gargoyle, with knees bent to its ears, and started to tear at the smoking remains with its jaws. But even as Griffin’s body rose and fell with the choreography of its ripping, there was a change in the substance of the beast.

  It was no less real, its form casting a shadow before the orange rays of the risen sun. But there now seemed to be purposeful form in the thin flames that licked at it. It appeared that it was being consumed by its own fire, the edges of its misshapen body blurring like darkened, opaque glass. The ground around it was becoming indistinct also, becoming part of the beast and its prey, and yet more fluid and giving than dawn-hardened earth should be.

  It was departing. Being called back. Josh wanted to shout in triumph, to scream childish obscenities as it started to writhe in its own death throes. But before he could even form the words or make a fist, the head that was bloodied with sizzling human flesh turned slowly towards him and straightened on its impossibly thick neck.

  Two slits of red hate focused on Josh. The pupils were in glittering contrast to the dull black flesh, and the mind that reasoned behind them was naked through their ruby light. It narrowed those eyes and opened its mouth in a wide, lascivious leer, and as Josh’s heart made a decision whether to continue to beat again or not, one long, flesh-clogged claw came level with Asmodeanus’s eyes, and pointed at him.

  Josh slumped to the ground, pulled both his arms across his head and screamed from the back of his throat. The wail pierced the still morning air with a volume that was unearthly.

  In the parking lot, a cop drew his gun, motioned to his partner and backed slowly around the edge of the building. Their caution departed at the sight of the man slumped on the ground, to be replaced with a violence of action that literally took from him what little breath Josh had left. Two pairs of hands hauled him to his feet, pushed his face and hands against the rough wall, while two voices barked instructions, shouting like sailors over a storm.

  “Keep your fuckin’ hands up. Do it!”

  “You stay like that, mister. Hear me? You stay right where you are, nice and still. We ain’t goin’ any fuckin’ place but here. I said, you hearin’ me?”

  Blood from his hand trickled down the uneven surface of the wooden slats, and Josh’s face, pressed to the wall, was squeezed into a ludicrous shape, a silent comic-book approximation of a man shouting.

  His eyes moved from the grey texture of the wood to the vast reflective plane of the glass wall next to him, where shapes in the distance moved against the reflected circle of sun. And as he watched without wanting to, in truth aching to look away, the silhouetted shape diminished, began to recede, struggling as it did so, into the dark ground—the unimaginable violence, the ancient and inescapable horror rendered nothing more than a mound of writhing matter, masked from casual eyes by the brilliance of the risen sun.

  “Help her,” he whispered weakly into the wood, and his words were lost in a muffled croak.

  One of the men behind his head was already barking into a radio, the other pulling roughly at Josh’s arm to handcuff him.

  “Okay, now,” he said as he pulled down J
osh’s wounded hand and realized that no cuff would encircle such an obscenely swollen wrist.

  Hands frisked Josh’s body, and he muttered “clean” to his partner.

  Josh smiled at that. Clean. He would never be clean. He had saved himself. But the dark filth that had ripped and torn and seared and devoured had touched him and left its mark. The policeman stepped back.

  “There ain’t no place to run. You just come around real easy and you gonna keep breathin’. You make a move an’ you leave here in plastic. Got me?”

  Josh nodded, lowering his arms slowly and turning to face the men. He kept his eyes on the ground. He had no wish to look back out towards the sun, towards what he knew would now be an empty field with nothing to find. Instead he waited to be led away, the dirt beneath his feet the only thing he dared to see.

  “Move it slow now, mister. Real slow. It’s over.”

  “It’s over,” repeated the companion.

  No, thought Josh. Not over. But then, he could forgive them for thinking it.

  They, after all, never knew her mother.

  The light. The light had come and it was the light of birth. Asmodeanus had writhed in the dark pit of his gestation, alarmed but not bereft that his carrier had changed. There was still the birth to come. That was safe. That had not been cancelled. And as he grew and became as solid as the flesh he would consume, he raged at the growing knowledge that his birth would once again mean his death. A return to the dark place where the silence was an eternal scream and the heat and the pain had no texture.

  And he used that hate as he was born, wallowing in its power to grow and tear and burn and drink in the pain of this filth that was a human, that species of dung that dared to have flesh and life of its own and call him from the dark to do its bidding.

  So he came into the light, and he ripped, and he shredded, and he burned, and he screamed a silent scream of even greater agony than his prey as the human’s pathetic and cowardly death pulled him back towards the pit.

  There was no hate greater at that moment than its own hate, and he took it with him, howling back into the dark place he was bound to forever, believing with the low intellect he possessed that someday he would find a way to make his release into the light permanent.

  Eddie had gone by the time they bundled Josh into the police car. The kinder of the two cops said he might make it if they got him to Harrisonburg, said Josh had better pray he made it and could talk, if Josh’s mumbled story about a third assailant was true, and Josh had nodded, closing his eyes in a silent movement of thanks. Thanks both for the answer from a policeman who was softening to his prisoner’s obvious lack of violence, and for the fact that Eddie was still alive. Now, gliding out from the crowded parking lot, he held his roughly bandaged hand to his heart and gazed out the window at the forested ride of the Appalachians, radiating the sunlight erratically from its long and textured back.

  How long before she came after him? A month? A year? A lifetime?

  Josh Spiller took a breath through his nostrils and made a pact. There was life at home. New life that needed love and needed him. He had been given this life back and he wasn’t going to live it in fear. The sunlight filtered through the wire squares of the grille separating him from the two policemen, and Josh blinked through it, remembering. Last time he’d been in a police car he’d ridden up front. Riding shotgun with Sheriff John Pace instead of huddled in the back like a criminal. It seemed a lifetime ago. It was a lifetime ago.

  He closed his eyes again and the face of John Pace drew itself on the pinkness of his inner lids. It was laughing, distant and hazy, but unmistakably laughing. The effect the unremarkable vision had on him was suddenly and inexplicably comforting. This unheralded emotion washed over him like a cold wave, so external to his line of thought that it gave Josh a start. He flicked his eyes open, startled, but curiously toughened in his resolve. Josh looked at the necks of the two men up front, then turned to stare out the dirt-crusted window towards the mountains, taking a lungful of air in through his nostrils.

  “Won’t work, Nelly,” he whispered to the black hills. “I feel safe.”

  And even if it was merely the act of believing it as he said it, and nothing more, somehow it became true in his heart.

  There had been several stages to her fury, but the calm at the end was what surprised her. The first stage, when she knew for certain, had been a confusion of mad rage and disbelief. Then a sickening relief had crept in, warped comfort in the knowledge that she was safe from her daughter’s rapidly growing power.

  What followed as a direct response was the most sickening of all. Grief. A sadness so powerful had gripped her that it had made her lament for a hidden core of sorrows that had been entombed for half her life. Nelly McFarlane had wept and screamed and torn at her breast, crying for her children, her womanhood, the bonds that she had ripped at to feed her fire. But it was an emotion that was too expensive, and she blotted it quickly, regaining her composure to concentrate on its replacement. The delicious heat of revenge.

  It was the searing ire of that revenge which had made her stalk the room blindly, searching her mind for the thread of a plan to weave into a noose for the trucker. Then her eye had fallen on the man’s logbook, the souvenir brought to her by Pace, sitting in silent triumph beside her computer.

  McFarlane had trembled for a moment, then picked up the pad of cheap paper and thrown it violently across the room.

  It slapped into the wall and fluttered down to the floor, its torn and tattered pages like the wings of a careless bird smashed against a window.

  And then Nelly felt time stop.

  The whispering ceased in the lab. There was an abrupt end to the scuffling and shifting of the invisible entities that found solace in proximity with the machinations of her dark craft.

  McFarlane licked her lips and looked at the seven-inch strip on the floor. The one that had fluttered from the pages of Josh Spiller’s violated logbook. She stayed still for a very long time, then walked slowly across the room and bent to retrieve it.

  Griffin’s death had proved her eyes were capable of tears, and they came again, but she was smiling through them, not weeping. It was so perfect that she might have embraced him if her arms could defy the grave, but it was doubtful John Pace would have returned the gesture. He was safe in his oblivion, safe and certain that the runes spelling Nelly McFarlane’s ugly death could never be passed back.

  Never.

  Because she was the one who had taken a scalpel to her only hope.

  “Well, well, Sheriff,” she whispered. “Very good. Very good indeed.”

  She straightened up and smiled.

  Councillor McFarlane held the runes in her hands like a losing lottery ticket, then let them drop gently to the floor, fingers open, palms turned down. Her posture was straight and proud as she walked to the drawer beneath the computer, opened the box inside, took out its contents and stood for a moment. As she handled the gun, she was almost tempted by habit to make an adjustment to what she saw flickering on the screen. Then Nelly McFarlane laughed in a short staccato burst, and gently switched it off.

  She gave one brief glance at her baby’s remains glistening on the table, then raised the gun to her mouth.

  “Will I burn, John?”

  She arched an eyebrow in contempt, then closed her eyes.

  No one in Furnace heard the muffled shot and even if they had, they would have thought little of it. All over town, people carried on with their breakfasts and their plans for the day, little knowing that, for the moment at least, Furnace was on its own.

 

 

 
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