by N. P. Martin
"How much time?" I asked.
"I’m really not sure about that."
“You're not sure, or you don't want to tell me?” I asked rhetorically, my shoulders slumping under the weight of these realizations, and the further realization that I might never get my brother back, or at least, the brother I once knew.
"Hey," Frank said to me. "We don’t know anything for sure yet. There’s still a chance we can save Josh."
I snorted derisively at him and shook my head. "It’s been over a month, Frank."
"There’s always a way," he said.
"Don’t bullshit me," I snapped back. "You don’t know that."
"I think what Frank is trying to say," Lucas cut in, "is that—"
"Just don’t!" I said, cutting him off as I stood suddenly. Tears were stinging my eyes, but before they could fall, I walked away from the table and stormed out of the club. Then I ran to the car, got inside and sat crying as if I’d just learned my brother was dead.
21
Ten minutes later, Frank got into the car, sitting beside me. He didn’t say anything at first, but just sat there staring out the window for a few moments while I did the same. Most of my tears were dried up by then, and a numb sort of anger had settled in me, darkening my face as I stared at the people walking past the car, almost daring them to look at me so I could relieve the simmering anger by beating the shit out whoever stared back at me.
"I know you’re angry," Frank said after a while.
I snapped my head around to glare at him. "You think?"
Frank held his hands up in appeasement. "Look, we can still save Josh. Once we find him, we can work on reversing whatever Abigor has done to him."
"Once we find him?" I shook my head. "We don’t even know where he is, unless Lucas just told you. Did he?"
Frank shook his head. "He’s still working on it, but—"
"Great," I said, turning to stare out the window again.
"If you’d let me finish…"
I sighed. "What?"
"I was going to say, there’s something else we can try in the meantime."
I didn’t hold out much hope. "Like what?"
"Well, now that we know Abigor’s name, we can summon the son of a bitch."
"Summon him? How?"
"We do a summoning ritual. Being a demon, he has to come when summoned. It’s one of the universe’s rules."
"Okay. Then what?"
"Then we trap him, and get him to tell us where Josh and the rest of our kin are."
"You think that’ll work?"
Frank shrugged. "Well, we can summon the demon okay, but trapping him might be more difficult. From everything Lucas said about him, Abigor is a high-level demon. One of the highest, in fact. Demon’s with that much power…"
"You can’t trap them?"
"Not usually, no."
"So what do we do? Ask him nicely to tell us where Josh is?"
Frank made a face at me and shook his head. "I was thinking tea and biscuits actually."
"Tea and biscuits?" I couldn’t help laughing.
"Sure," Frank said, smiling slightly. "We summon him to afternoon tea. It’ll all be very civilized, during which Abigor will tell us all we need to know. Demons can’t resist a good scone, you know." He started laughing himself then.
I sat shaking my head at him, but smiling nonetheless. "You’re such an idiot, Frank."
"Hey, I’m just trying to lighten things up a bit." His brown eyes went serious. "Hope is all we have, Leia. Hope that things will work out, and that things will get better, even if a lot of the time, they never do. If we didn’t have hope, we couldn’t do this job."
"You had me right till the end there, then you went and fucked it up."
Frank laughed. "And this is why I’m not a motivational speaker."
"God forbid," I said, then did a mock deep voice. "Hi, my name is Frank. If you’re feeling down or lost, just drink some whiskey and then go kill something." I started laughing again, and so did he.
"That was a pretty good impression there. Summed me right up."
"Sorry. If I don’t laugh…" I trailed off and smiled plaintively at him.
"I know."
"Did you feel like this after my mom…was taken."
He seemed slightly taken aback by the question, but he answered nonetheless. "Well, I didn’t feel good about it. Still don’t."
"What did you do? How did you cope?"
"I coped with whiskey."
"Shocker."
"And by killing monsters."
"Even bigger shock."
He laughed slightly as he shook his head. "It’s the little things, right?"
"Right," I said, smiling, and then realized that I felt slightly better now. I was able to push my despair to one side at least, and hang onto hope instead. "Thanks Frank."
"What for?"
"For being here, and for helping me see the light in all this darkness." I put a hand on his arm. "My mom was right to trust you to train us…train me. She should’ve trusted you to raise us as well."
Frank mashed his lips together as he looked out the window, then back at me. "I appreciate you saying so, although I still fear she was right. I know one thing, though."
"What?"
"If your mom was here now, she’d be proud of you. I can guarantee you that. I’d say you turned out exactly how she would’ve wanted you to."
Tears threatened to spill from my eyes, but I wiped them away. "If she were here, we wouldn’t be in this mess at all."
Frank nodded. "I can’t argue with that, but that’s not to suggest that it wouldn’t have come to this anyway. Rachel was an amazing Watcher, just as someday you'll be her equal or better. But there are only ever so many of us, Leia, whereas our adversaries have an unending cannon fodder that they can put in the way of our efforts to stop their plans. That is a big part of why our numbers regularly decline. It may well be that sometime in the future, our numbers will decline faster than we can replace them, at which stage the human race will have a rude awakening over what truly goes on in the shadows of their world."
We sat in silence for a while, just looking out the window at the ever growing crowds of people outside, many of them tourists there to see the largest sex district in the country. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of those tourists would fall victim to a vampire or other bloodthirsty creature on the prowl. I also realized, at that moment, that Frank was right. The so-called war I was now a part of would never be won. Just like the wars between humans, the supernatural wars would be ongoing. I was now a part of some machine, a small cog that would eventually wear out and get replaced by another one, and the machine would just keep on rolling, at least until some apocalypse put an end to it. Even then, the war would likely continue, just in a different form.
"So what now?" I asked Frank. "Do we summon this Abigor?"
"Yeah," Frank said. "But there’s something I need to take care of first. You want to come with?"
I didn’t even need to ask what it was. "What do you think?"
Frank smiled as he started the car and drove off.
So it turns out, Frank has been hunting this demon serial killer for the past few months. The demon preys on young kids, teenagers mostly, skinning their bodies and hanging them from lampposts and buildings around town. When I asked Frank how he knew it was a demon, he told me he stumbled across it one night. Frank had been on his way back from another hunt, when he spotted the demon nailing a skinned body to the doors of St. Joseph’s Cathedral. Frank gave chase, but lost the demon, who according to Frank, had possessed the body of a teenage boy. Frank had been hunting the demon ever since. The local cops thought they were dealing with some twisted human serial killer, a killer the media had dubbed "The Skinner".
"The bastard has proven hard to track," Frank told me as we drove through town. "He knows I’m onto him, so he’s being careful."
"How do you know where he is then?" I asked.
"Lucas told me."
>
I nodded, my heart fluttering slightly at the mention of his name. "Lucas seems to know a lot."
"He does. He makes it his business to know everything."
"He seems…nice, for a demon, I mean. Why isn’t he like the others?"
"He is, when he needs to be, but Lucas has also learned that there are other ways of getting what you want, other ways of being."
"I can trust him then?"
Frank threw me a look. "Trust him? What do you mean by that?"
I shook my head. "Nothing."
"Listen, Leia," he said as he turned a corner. "Charm is Lucas’ thing, it’s like his gift. He’s had millennia to practice it, and he wields it like a weapon most of the time."
"Millennia? How old is he?"
"Well, he was born in Egypt, Ancient Egypt, that is."
I shook my head in near disbelief. "You’re kidding, right?"
"Nope. Going by what he told me once, he fucked around with dark magic a bit too much, and ended up in the Underworld. He accrued a lot of power there, so although he’s a demon, he’s more of a hybrid who doesn’t need a fleshsuit just to move around here."
"Fleshsuit?"
"Yeah, human bodies. The demons call them fleshsuits, or meatsuits."
"That’s…suitably derogative. Not that Lucas needs a fleshsuit."
Frank threw me another look. "You seem very interested in him."
"Interested?" I shook my head as if I didn’t know what he was talking about. "I’m just curious to know who we’re dealing with, that’s all."
"Curious, huh?"
I felt my face flush. "Are we nearly there yet?"
He shook his head as he focused on the road again. "Nearly."
He wasn’t wrong. Two minutes later, he pulled the car up outside a condemned apartment building in the New Grange neighborhood, just one of the many places in the city that was going to wrack and ruin. Since being with Frank in the mountains, I was developing a different perspective on the city now that I wasn’t living in the heart of it anymore. For the first time, I could clearly see the rot underlying most of it, and the decay that was slowly creeping through every crack and crevice. I had to wonder if that was something to do with the demons and all the other monsters that were running around. Although, in saying so, it'd be surprising to find out that any inner city sprawls weren't all suffering the same problem, likely nationwide.
As I looked out the window at the condemned building, I shook my head. "Sometimes it seems like all I do these days is hang around in abandoned buildings, when I’m not in strip clubs talking to demons that is."
"That’s the life," Frank said. "Glamorous as hell."
"I doubt Hell is this bad."
It occurred to me yet again that my mother was in Hell at that very moment, and would probably give anything to be back in the land of the living.
Sorry, Mom.
"So this creep has supposedly made his home in the basement of that building," Frank said.
"What’s the plan then?"
Frank looked at me. "We go in, we kill it."
"That simple, huh?"
He shrugged. "I guess we’ll see. How’s your night vision?"
"Okay, the last time I checked."
"Good. You’ll need both hands. I have a spare Glock in the trunk. You got your knife with you?"
I nodded. "Always."
"Good, but in future, that ‘always' should also include a Glock or any preferred handgun you want to regularly use, including spare clips and rounds. Don’t be afraid to use either, or both, if you have to."
"I won’t."
He nodded. "All right then, let’s go."
After getting the guns, we made our way up the steps of the building. The front door was boarded, but Frank easily pulled it off with one hand, tossing it away before pushing the unlocked door open. Inside, it was almost completely dark, as nearly all of the windows were boarded up. Still, thanks to our enhanced night vision, we were both able to see fairly well, even if everything was rendered in tones of grainy gray. As we stood in the hallway so as to let our eyes adjust to the darkness, I took the Glock Frank had given me out of my jacket and held it in my right hand.
"The smell is awful," Frank said in a quiet voice. "I guess we’re in the right place."
Adrenaline and grace began to circulate around my body. "This is going to be a fucking horror show, I know it is."
Frank held his bigger gun up with both hands. "It always is. Let’s move on."
We moved toward a door that took us to a stairwell. Slowly, we made our way down the stairs until we got to the long hallway that would lead us into the building’s basement.
The demon’s lair.
Despite hardly knowing what I was walking into, I started to feel a rush of excitement course through me that seemed to not only sharpen my vision, but also focus my other senses as well. Although I wished my sense of smell hadn’t improved so much, for all I could smell was the reeking stench of decaying flesh. After a few moments, I had to concentrate so I wouldn’t be sick.
We walked side by side down the long, narrow hallway, having little idea of what we were going to find once we reached the boiler room. As we drew nearer, my imagination began to fill in the gaps, and soon grizzly images of skinned, decaying bodies filled my mind. I swallowed hard as I noticed the faint glow of light for the first time, coming from the boiler room. It was barely enough light to have made it around the corner into the hallway, but it was there just the same. A few feet from the entrance, I strained my ears to try and hear any sounds that may have been coming from inside. At first, I heard only faint creaks, and loud drips. But as I strained harder, I thought I heard something else.
The sound of someone breathing.
Tapping Frank on the shoulder, I pointed toward the boiler room, and then at my ear. Frank nodded once.
We carried on into the boiler room, which was like walking into someone’s horrific nightmare. I had no idea what Hell was like, but I imagined it would look a lot like the scene I was struggling to take in now. The massive boiler room was like a macabre horror show, so much worse than what I was expecting. Everywhere I looked, I saw the remains of people hanging from the ceiling, or scattered on the floor like so much detritus. When I looked harder, I began to notice that many of the body parts had been stitched together to form grotesque sculptures of flesh and bone, and I couldn’t help but think of that movie, Human Centipede, which Kasey had forced me to watch with her one time. Several of these horrific sculptures were on the floor in different parts of the boiler room, and above each one, was a lantern. The lanterns hung from the pipes on the ceiling, illuminating each of the flesh sculptures as if they were art pieces in a gallery, which to a demon, I suppose they were. Every wall, every surface, had at some point been splashed with blood. Some of that blood still glistened in the lantern light. Worst of all was the skinned body of someone on a filthy gurney. Somehow, the person on the gurney was still alive, though just barely. But enough to stare at us silently with exposed eyeballs, their chest rising almost imperceptibly as they took the shallowest of breaths.
After a moment, it felt like my chest was on fire. Panic threatened to consume me until I realized I had been holding my breath, though I was afraid to release it in case the demon who created such carnage would’ve heard me.
Then I nearly screamed when I felt a hand on my shoulder, but it was only Frank. His eyes looked into mine to see if I was all right, and I nodded, even though I knew I'd never be able to forget what I was seeing in that room. Ditto the smell, which was turning my stomach bad.
Swallowing hard, I told myself to get it together. If there was one thing I was learning lately, it was that you couldn’t run from fear. Running only made the fear worse. The best course of action, I had discovered the hard way, was to move toward the fear. Easier said than done, of course, but at least I knew I had to try.
Frank aimed his gun out in front of him as he began to move forward, so I did the same, forcin
g myself to follow him. I decided then to try and focus on just finding the demon, even though I had no idea of what he looked like. Frank said he changed bodies all the time, which was why he was so hard to track. The demon could look like anyone. Although, it was a pretty safe bet that if someone was moving around in there, it was the demon. Everyone else was in pieces. Except the person on the gurney, whose eyes barely tracked us as we moved past. I wanted to go to the person, of course, but there was nothing to be done at that point, not until the demon was taken care of first.
As I focused on spotting our target, I found I was able to almost ignore the horror that filled my vision at every turn. I knew I had to detach myself from it, otherwise I would go insane through it all. The only problem I had now, was trying to spot a living being amongst all that dead flesh.
We had soon covered half the room, and still there was no sign of the demon. It was only when we stopped to look around that I heard the breathing sounds again. At first, I figured it must be the living victim on the gurney, but the breathing was too regular, and too deep.
Turning around, I focused on pinpointing the exact location of the breathing sound. Soon, my eyes fell upon a grotesquely arranged heap of bodies, or rather parts of bodies. With so many heads and limbs sticking out everywhere, it was difficult to know what the demon was trying to achieve in displaying them like that. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. But at that point, the meaning of all that senseless killing didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was getting the demon responsible.
I listened hard as I stared at the mound of bodies, certain now that the demon had to be amongst them somewhere. Cautiously, I moved forward with my gun aimed out as I tried to get a better look.
What happened next, happened so fast I barely had time to register it. As I was focusing on the now barely perceptible breathing sound, my eyes fell upon a blood-soaked head that was jammed under the arm of a disemboweled corpse. The head looked somehow different from the others around it, neither split or shrunken like the others. By the time I realized the head belonged to someone who was alive, the person’s eyes snapped open and two completely black orbs stared back at me. A smile spread across the bloody face, and then the crimson body of a naked man suddenly sprang with shocking speed out of the twisted stack of bodies and straight at me.
