Fear the Darkness

by Mitchel Scanlon

  Drawing on all his rage and pain and fury, Morris screamed into the darkness.

  In the darkness, something heard him and whispered back.

  ONE

  BEATING THE DEVIL

  Fifteen years later.

  As far as Psi-Judge Cass Anderson could see, her current situation had all the makings of a first-class nightmare. She was in the Undercity deep beneath Mega-City One, moving through the lightless, debris-strewn streets of a ruined subterranean city populated by mutants, cannibals and monsters. She was hunting a crazed group of devil-worshippers who had abducted a little boy and were no doubt even now preparing to sacrifice him to their unholy god. And just to add spice to the proceedings, her only backup was a young Street Judge named Whitby who had become as twitchy as a rookie since they had left the comforting neon brightness of the Big Meg behind. Still, all else considered, she had to admit things could have been worse.

  If this really had been a nightmare, and not just a particularly bad day at the office, she probably would have been naked as well.

  "Grud, but it's quiet down here," Whitby whispered from beside her, the telltale tremor in his voice loud enough for Anderson not to need her powers to tell her he was scared. "Too quiet. The whole damn place gives me the creeps."

  "Think of it as just another street," Anderson said. "No different from the streets topside. Remember, this is a hot pursuit. We need to stay sharp and keep it tight."

  "I hear you," Whitby said, the beam of his torch moving to reveal more of the shadow-haunted ruins around them. "Just like topside. Sharp and tight. Check."

  With that, he fell silent. Walking alongside him, Anderson could feel the fear coming off him in waves. It's the surroundings that do it, she thought. Tell a Judge like Whitby you want him to single-handedly put down a mass brawl in the roughest, most perp-ridden bar in the city and he won't bat an eyelid, but take him into the Undercity and he'll be as skittish as a newborn colt.

  Anderson had to admit Whitby's anxiety was not entirely misplaced. She had been in the Undercity before, on more occasions than she cared to count, but no matter how many times she saw the same desolate wasteland of empty crumbling buildings and cracked deserted streets, it remained an unsettling experience. The Undercity was all that was left of the pre-Atomic landscape that had preceded the mega-cities. They were the fossilised relics of the cities of a bygone age, plascreted over and left entombed and forgotten beneath the foundations of the world that had replaced it. It was easy to think of the whole place as a giant cemetery. The graveyard for an entire era. A city of the dead, and it looked as if some of the dead were moving.

  "Contact," Whitby said, the barrel of his Lawgiver following the torch's beam as it picked out shadowy, misshapen figures moving stealthily through the rubble. "I count four, maybe five. Holy Grud, they don't look human. What in the name of hell are they?"

  "Hold your fire," Anderson told him. "They're just troggies. Cannibals, descended from the people who got trapped down here when the Big Meg was built. The Undercity's full of them. Don't worry, they're only dangerous in large packs. The ones we can see are probably just a family group who heard us coming and got spooked into moving. Trust me, they're probably more scared of us than we are of them. Now, keep it down, I'm trying to concentrate."

  Coming to a halt as Whitby stood nervously watching the shadows, Anderson closed her eyes and tried to blot out the distractions of her physical surroundings. Instead, she went deep inside herself, calling on the talents that had been both blessing and curse to her ever since she was a child. She cleared her mind, slowly opening it up to the strange frequencies and uncertain modulations of the unseen world around her - the psi-flux, they called it. A shifting, endlessly fluctuating realm of pure, raw energy that existed within every corner of the physical universe, yet was paradoxically outside both space and time. From the telepath to the telekinetic to all the psi-shades in-between, it was the mysterious force that gave every psychic their powers. In her years in Psi Division, courtesy of the lectures of visiting physicists, philosophers and no small number of Tek-Judges, Anderson had heard dozens of theories as to the precise nature of the flux.

  Some said it was the accumulated psychic residue of all the sentient beings who had lived, were living now, or ever would live in the cosmos. Others called it the Source and Wellspring of All Creation: the vital force without which the universe could never have come into existence. To the more religiously minded, it was the Breath of the Divine.

  To Anderson, such theories were, at most, a matter of minor academic interest. All she knew was she had felt the presence of the psi-flux around her every moment of her life - long before she had ever heard it given a name. Whatever its mysteries, it was enough to her that she knew how to make use of it. Now, she needed to use it to help her find a missing child.

  "I can see more of them." Whitby's voice intruded into her thoughts, disrupting her concentration. "The troggies, I mean. There's at least ten or twelve now. How many do there have to be before you'd call it a 'large pack'?"

  "You see more than a hundred of them charging towards us, then you can get worried," she said. "Other than that, keep the headcount to yourself."

  Anderson went inside herself once more. Concentrating on her breathing, she became aware of the rhythmic movements of her ribcage, the measured contractions and expansions of her lungs. She let her mind go blank, allowing the shifting tides of the psi-flux to wash over her. For a moment she felt weightless, divorced from every feeling and sensation. Then, like a low murmur, she heard a drifting babble of dim and distant voices as she opened her mind to experience the thoughts and emotions of every creature around her. She felt Whitby, saw beneath the fragile façade of the typical iron-faced Street Judge to the mass of anxieties and insecurities churning within. She felt the troggies, dozens of them now, hidden in the darkness, fear and hunger warring within them as they gathered in ever greater numbers and tried to work up the courage to attack. She knew all these things already. If she wanted to find the boy she would need to narrow the search, focus her perceptions on what she knew of him and hope it would be enough.

  His name was Himmie Durand. In her mind's eye she could see the holo-pic his parents had shown her. Seven years old, blond hair, blue eyes, a gap-toothed smile. He had been abducted a little over three hours ago from the family's apartment in Billy Friedkin Block. Just an ordinary kid, but from the moment she'd first walked into the apartment, Anderson had known the case had "bad dream" written all over it - a feeling soon confirmed as a routine psi-scan of one of the Durand's neighbours established the kid had been abducted by a coven of would-be Satanists. Growing tired of the usual orgies, the coven had decided to sacrifice a child in the hope of summoning their dark lord to Earth. Following the coven's trail had led Anderson and Whitby down into the block basement, and from there through an underblock maintenance duct to a hole into the Undercity. Now, with the clock ticking down to midnight - the set time for the sacrifice - they had just fifteen minutes left to find Himmie Durand and save him.

  Fifteen minutes to find one little boy lost in all this darkness, she thought. Talk about banking on a miracle.

  If she was honest with herself, she knew it was not just the case itself that was giving her the heebies, it was the eerie similarities between this case and an old case she had worked on years ago. The way the abduction of Himmie Durand brought to mind another case involving a child that she only wished she could forget. A case that, even now, still haunted her nightmares.

  Hammy Blish.

  It had started as a case of demonic possession, a case that had gone bad in the worst possible way. Like Himmie Durand, Hammy Blish had been just a typical everyday kid, until a cult of warlocks and an other-dimensional demon had tried to use him to unlock a portal between Mega-City One and the demon's home dimension. From there, things had gone steadily downhill until, at last, Anderson was called upon to make one of the hardest decisions of her life. Unable to find any other way to
prevent a demonic invasion of Earth that would have claimed millions of lives, she had been forced to kill Hammy Blish. There had been no other choice. Yet still, in her dreams almost every night, she relived the moment over and over again. She remembered Hammy, his expression so trusting, so sure she had come to save him. She remembered the look of confusion turning to disbelief as the bullet struck him. Most of all, she remembered the final look he gave her. The look as he sank dying to his knees, staring at her in mute accusation, his eyes asking a last despairing question. But you're a Judge, they said. You were supposed to protect me. How could you kill me?

  Even after all these years, she did not have an answer.

  I won't let it happen again, she promised herself. Not this time. I won't let another boy die.

  She only hoped it was within her power to keep the promise.

  "Anderson?" It was Whitby, the tremor in his voice growing more pronounced. "That headcount's getting up into triple figures. And I can hear the troggies muttering between themselves. Something about 'good eatins' and 'finger-lickin'."

  "Shut up," she whispered. "I'm getting closer. The boy's near, I can feel it. A few more seconds and I'll have a location-"

  Anderson paused, her concentration broken once and for all by a distant sound. Before she knew what she was doing, she had opened her eyes and started to run, her Lawgiver in her hand and Whitby trailing dutifully after her. They scrambled across rubble-littered streets, breathless and heedless of danger, drawn by a single shrill sound from somewhere ahead of her. A sound she heard sometimes in her dreams. A sound she had hoped in the real world she would never hear again.

  The sound of a boy's voice. Screaming.

  The screaming stopped. Guided by her instincts and refusing to consider what the silence might mean, Anderson knew which way she was heading. Running to the end of the street, she vaulted the fallen brickwork of a collapsed wall, turned east to cross a vacant lot, then turned north once more and saw her destination ahead of her. It was an old church, dwarfed in the menacing shadows of the buildings on either side, with light spilling out from within it through the shattered sockets of what had once been stained-glass windows. Racing closer, Anderson heard chanting drift towards her from inside the church. The ritual was underway. She could only hope she wasn't too late.

  "Anderson," Whitby said breathlessly. "We don't know what we're up against here. We should call for backup."

  Ignoring him, Anderson charged towards the entrance of the church and kicked the splintering doors open. Pushing past them with Whitby just behind her, she smelt the cloying stench of burning incense and saw a dozen hooded men standing around a desecrated altar. She saw the assorted paraphernalia of occult sacrifice: jagged-bladed knives, a silver chalice, black candles, wands and staves, the outline of a chalk pentagram drawn on the floor. Standing at the head of the group, she saw the Coven Master step forward with a knife in his hands to loom over the small form of Himmie Durand, tied spread-eagled to the altar before him.

  "Lord Satan," the Coven Master screamed, raising the knife while the chanting of his followers reached a crescendo. "We call out to you across the dark abyss. Ari Nostrum Elophim! Accept this offering from your unworthy servants. Accept it, and let the great chasm be bridged."

  Firing two rounds in quick succession, Anderson saw the bullets take the Coven Master in the centre of the chest, his knife dropping noisily on the floor. Startled by the shots, the chant dying on their lips, for a moment the Coven Master's followers watched in stunned silence as their leader fell sprawling backwards to land in a crumpled heap in the middle of the pentagram. With a buzz of angry whispers that quickly became roars of rage, the coven members charged towards Anderson and Whitby, eager for blood.

  "Rapid Fire - Standard Execution," Anderson said, impressed at how calmly Whitby followed her lead now they were in combat. "Aim high. We don't want to hit the boy."

  Standing side-by-side, they fired in unison, Lawgivers blazing out a fusillade of shots to cut down the shrieking coven members in mid-stride. In a matter of seconds it was finished, leaving Anderson and Whitby framed in the church's doorway, looking towards the lifeless bodies of a dozen men strewn haphazardly across the floor.

  "Drokkers should've known better than to bring knives to a gunfight," Whitby said, the ruthless mask of the Street Judge restored as he reloaded his Lawgiver. "Probably figured they had nothing left to lose. Abduction. Attempted Murder. Conspiracy to Commit on both counts. Resisting Arrest. Celebrating Mass Without a Licence. They were looking at thirty years apiece, easy." He looked over his shoulder to glance out of the doorway. "Looks like the troggies didn't follow us. Either that, or all the gunfire scared them off. Guess we can pick up the kid and get back to the Meg. It's over."

  "Over?" Anderson said quietly, still looking towards the altar. "I only wish it were."

  Something was wrong. She could feel it. There was a tingling sensation at the back of her scalp, and she knew her instincts were trying to warn her. Reaching out to the psi-flux, she felt a dark current moving towards them. Something was coming. Something dark and powerful and ancient. Something bad. Anderson was confused. They had prevented the sacrifice and the coven members were dead. How could there be anything else for them to deal with here? Then she noticed something beside the altar and she had her answer.

  It was the Coven Master's body. He had fallen in the centre of the pentagram, the blood seeping out of the wounds in his chest seeming to move with a mind of its own towards the chalk lines of the symbol around it. Watching in silent horror, Anderson saw the oozing blood spread out to follow the exact lines of the pentagram like an artist inking over a pencil sketch. Soon, the chalk lines of the original symbol were no longer visible, leaving in its place a pentagram drawn in fresh sacrificial blood. Inadvertently perhaps, it seemed the Coven Master had ended up as the victim in his own ritual. The sacrifice had been completed. A doorway had been opened, and, through it, something wicked was coming their way.

  "Merciful Grud." Whitby's voice was a choked whisper. "The Coven Master's body is moving."

  It began with the smell of brimstone. The body swelled, the sound of tearing cloth as nothing compared to the awful sound of the tearing of shifting flesh. Before their horrified eyes, it tried to stand, splaying its newly-clawed hands on the ground before it as it pushed itself upright.

  "Rapid Fire - Standard Execution," Anderson yelled, already pulling the trigger of her Lawgiver. "We have to try to destroy the body before it can fully manifest itself."

  "What about incendiaries? Hi-ex?" Whitby said. "Can't we blow the thing to pieces?"

  "No, Himmie's too close. The blast would kill him." Anderson replied, as the thing in the pentagram cast aside the shreds of the Coven Master's robes and began to croon softly to them.

  "Childrrennn," it said, as though tasting the words and deciding whether it liked them or not. "Childrrrennnn... Childrennnn... Childrennnn."

  Whatever the hell it was, it didn't look like Satan. More like his ugly big brother. Raising itself to its full height, the thing was two and a half metres tall, its body skinless to better reveal the writhing wet musculature of its flesh. It had three long fingers on each hand, reverse-jointed ankles and a mouth full of sharp smiling teeth that looked too wide for its face. A second mouth, even wider, set in the middle of its abdomen, did the talking.

  "Childrennnn," it rasped. "Trying to hurt meee... Stuuupid childrennnn." For a moment, the creature paused, extending a claw towards Himmie. Anderson's heart skipped a beat. "Hnnn... Innocennnnts... Goood fooooodd." Then, drooling in hunger, it turned to look at Anderson with both mouths smiling. "Hnnn... But psi... Always betterrrr."

  It sprang forward with a lumbering, uncertain gait, thick ropy strands of drool dribbling from its mouths. Firing his Lawgiver, Whitby rushed forward to meet it, only for the demon to knock him flying with a backhanded blow. Quickening its pace, it strode towards Anderson, the twin smiles growing ever wider.

  "Psi... Goo
ood psi... Commme to mmmy mmmmouths."

  Standing her ground until the creature was right on top of her, Anderson leapt away at the last instant. She landed to the side and behind it, rolling to her feet and making a dash for the altar, all the time hoping that something she had seen there when she entered the church had not been lost in all the chaos since. She heard the demon turn and follow her, then she saw it: a glint of silver lying by the side of the altar.

  The chalice.

  As desperate last-ditch plans went, she figured it was right up there with the best of them. Having failed to kill the creature with normal bullets, and figuring incendiaries and hi-ex would be next to useless, she had decided her best chance was to use the one thing that always seemed to give other-dimensional creatures a headache. Silver. She had seen it work before. As a Psi-Judge, she was even equipped with a special issue silver boot knife for just such emergencies. But she no more wanted to go hand-to-hand with that thing than she would want to dance a tango with Judge Death. Besides, there wasn't enough silver in her knife for what she had in mind. She needed something bigger.

  Reaching the altar, Anderson grabbed the chalice and threw it toward the advancing demon. With surprising speed, the demon caught it. It held the chalice up as though to tease her.

  "Silverrr," it said. The fact its hand was smouldering slightly at the touch of the chalice seemed in no way to dampen its amusement. "Cleverrr psi... But yourrr silverrr is mine now... Herrre in my hand."