Menage_a_20_-_Tales_with_a_Hook

by Twenty Goodreads Authors

  “Yes it must be,” she said. “He did seem quite excited about something he came across when he was doing his reading. Spent some time in the British Library and the Museum on Saturday mornings.”

  “Who’s Galton?” I said.

  “Peter and a couple of other dentists decided they wanted to—I don’t know—give something back to the community. They started doing a system of free clinics and free treatment with the homeless, those living in shelters.”

  She ran her hand through her hair, leaving it pleasingly tousled.

  Steady, I told myself. She’s only been a widow for a day and a half.

  “Cole and Galton were the other two dentists?” I persisted. She nodded. Then she gasped, putting a hand to her mouth.

  “Oh, God,” she breathed. “Cole was that dentist who was killed this afternoon, wasn’t he?”

  I nodded.

  “Is Galton in danger too?” she asked.

  I wondered that myself.

  “Where do I find him this time of night?” I asked, getting up and heading for the door.

  “He lives in Bexley Heath,” she said. “Wait, I can find his home address.”

  She rummaged through a roll top bureau in the lounge, giving me an address book. I ran through the G’s.

  Dennis Galton.

  I turned to leave.

  “Wait!” she demanded. “There’s this too.” She reached in the pocket of her housedress and pulled out a snub nosed revolver. “Peter had this hidden on the top shelf.”

  A Charter Arms Bulldog .44 calibre. I flipped it open. It was loaded with the special Teflon-filled bullets, the kind that, if you shoot someone in the chest, they take out half the spine as they exit.

  I promised to keep her informed.

  Running down the path, I tried the number for Galton.

  No answer. I hoped he was out in a pub somewhere, having a good time.

  Galton’s house was dark. The front door was open. Moving cautiously, I approached in a crouch, flattening myself by the side of the gaping doorway.

  Dean had rung me as I sped towards Bexley Heath. “I found the left luggage locker at Paddington,” she said. “Lots of stuff about three dentists treating the homeless. There was a really old book about demons, and how they prey on people with bad teeth. They need some compound produced by tooth decay to be able to enter a human host. That’s why Simms set up his little group to treat the homeless. He reckoned he’d force the demon back into Hell, or wherever.”

  “Yeah, right,” I muttered. “It’s well known that demons possess people with halitosis. Happens all the time.”

  “You need to kill them with silver bullets,” she insisted.

  “As it happens, I have a gun with silver bullets now. If it turns out to be a demon, shall I shoot it or exorcise it?”

  “I didn’t say I believed it, you prat,” she said. “But Simms, Cole and Galton did and two of them are dead. I’m on my way to Bexley Heath now.”

  “So am I,” I said, swerving past a slow moving lorry, horn blaring. “I’ll be there in two minutes.”

  “I’ll be there in five,” she said. “Be careful.”

  So, there I was, being careful.

  I peered round the door. Blue TV light seeped from a half open door down the hall. I could see that Galton was dead. He lay in the hall in that unmistakeable sprawl that only dead people had. Besides, I could see his chest had been ripped open.

  A shadow moved quickly. The back door slammed, and I was up and racing down the hall, heading for the kitchen.

  Wilkes hadn’t left by the back door. He waited, clinging to the kitchen ceiling.

  As I charged in, he dropped on me, swinging a tremendous punch to my mouth. I felt the acid flare of agony as teeth shattered. He gripped me by the throat but I wasn’t a dentist. I rammed a finger in his eye and head butted him on the nose. Blood sprayed in my face as if from a hose.

  Wilkes, or whatever was in Wilkes, howled, letting go of my throat and punching me in the ribs as I tried to wipe his blood from my eyes.

  I heard brittle snapping sounds as some ribs cracked. He charged, his eyes glowing red as if lit from within.

  I whipped up the pistol and fired.

  He evaded the bullet with blurring speed. It blew a headsized hole in the back door instead.

  Howling again, this time in anger, he launched himself through the kitchen window, shattering the glass.

  I wiped blood from my face till I could see properly. Kicking the back door open, I followed him, really cautious this time.

  A long alley ran behind the terraced houses, scattered dumpsters providing islands of shadow and shelter. Wilkes ran into the darkness to my left and vanished.

  I could hear the sound of a car engine racing in the distance. I called Dean.

  “You go to the far end of the road,” I said. “Wilkes will be between us.”

  “Wilkes?” she said in astonishment.

  “Yep. Complete with red eyes and super-human strength,” I assured her. “Watch yourself, DD.”

  “You too Jim,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  The wine bottle shattered on the wall and I charged. Wilkes charged to meet me, howling inhumanly, red flame shooting from his fingertips, licking out of his blazing eyes.

  In the narrow confines of the alley, he couldn’t dodge this time.

  I put three rounds into his chest. The thunderous booms of the revolver drowned his hellish shrieks. He was knocked back, hurled to the ground.

  Dean came sprinting up, Glock at the ready.

  She stopped and looked down at what remained of Wilkes, fire consuming him. She looked at me. “Are you alright?” she said. There was something more than concern in her voice.

  Back windows were lighting up all along the alley. I heard distant police sirens.

  She wiped blood from my face with a tissue. “Did any of his blood get in your mouth?” she demanded. “Did it?”

  “No,” I said, as I collapsed, the pain in my chest catching up with me, shock setting in. “No, it didn’t. Why?”

  She helped me to my feet, flashing her tin as Armed Response Units edged their way up the alley. “Suicide bomber,” she said, and “National Security.”

  She half dragged, half walked me to my car, getting in the driver’s seat.

  “I need a hospital,” I groaned.

  “No,” she said. “You need a dentist. You have about twentyfour hours max before you self-combust, if there’s any trace of tooth-decay toxin in your system. Meantime, gargle with this.”

  She passed over a half-pint of Jack Daniels. I rinsed and swallowed, hissing with pain as the raw spirit burned my exposed dental nerves.

  Hours of surgery later, I was pronounced free of all traces of tooth decay. My mouth hurt worse than ever.

  “Now I’m taking you home. My home,” said DD.

  Before starting the car, she leaned over and kissed me on the lips, gently, tongue probing the newly repaired edges of my teeth. I pulled away with great reluctance.

  “My mouth hurts like hell, DD.”

  We drove for a while, me half-dozing from shock and pain.

  Something nagged worse than my aching teeth though. Through swollen lips, I slurred a question.

  “What language was that old book in?”

  “It was a very poor translation of the Egyptian original, in what I estimate to be 6th century dog Latin,” she answered. Her eyes glowed red as she stroked my cheek.

  “Why?” I asked. “How?”

  “The book was obsolete,” she said. “I can infect anyone now. Like I infected you. A little bit of my saliva, a little bit of my soul and they’re mine: my slaves, my subjects, and my children. The dentists could have destroyed me using that book, if they’d ever found the secret. That’s why I had them killed.”

  We continued to drive through a night made festive by exploding addicts and Roman Candle vagrants.

  She parked the car. We’d stopped outside a disused church.


  “So I’m going to be your slave then?” I asked.

  She patted my cheek.

  “No, it’s different with you. I gave you part of my soul, and took part of yours into me. You’re mine and I’m yours. That’s why I had you get your teeth fixed. Bad teeth equals selfcombustion, and I want you with me for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “How does eternity sound?” she said, parking the car.

  “We’re home, darling,” said Debbie “Now, are you going to use that last bullet on me or are you mine forever?”

  I looked at her for what seemed an eternity, seeing her true form, seeing the love. I recognized her now, knew her true name.

  “I’m yours forever,” I said, “Lilith.”

  Vacant Possession

  Paul Mitton

  Copyright © Paul Mitton 2009 “So where are we going?” asked DD as I snarled at yet another bicycling lunatic with important pizza blocking my way.

  “To visit my grandmother,” I reminded her. “In the nursing home.” I swerved to avoid the spotty delivery idiot and made the roundabout just as the lights changed. Cursing, I jammed on the brakes. A stream of abuse came from pizza-face behind me.

  Deborah Dean (or DD, as I called her) turned in her seat, extending the finger that indicated he was number one. I disagreed. I gestured that he was number two. The lights changed and we continued, round the confusing and everchanging one-way system that was Swindon. A place where the old adage seemed to be true—you can’t get there from here.

  “I didn’t even know you had a Granny,” she said.

  I shot her a disbelieving look.

  “Everyone has a granny. Two usually,” I reminded her.

  “Alive, you idiot,” she said scathingly. “Sometimes, Phelps, I wonder what I see in you.”

  “Apart from the charm, charisma and profound intelligence?”

  “Well, yes, apart from that,” she admitted, stroking my leg. “But like I said, I didn’t know you had any living relatives.”

  “She isn’t really. Not in any meaningful sense. Senile dementia.”

  It was true. My grandmother had been a woman of sharp wit, scathing tongue, piercing insights; the outer shell remained, still recognisable, but the essential her had gone a couple of years ago. All that remained was a walking corpse, sometimes muttering scraps of old memory, still as vivid and fresh to her now as if they had happened this morning, instead of seventy or eighty years ago.

  Of course, she could seldom remember anything about this morning.

  I squinted at the map propped on the dashboard. Turn second left at the next roundabout, if I hadn’t lost count.

  I had.

  Twenty minutes later, we found the place. Sat-Nav things didn’t work too well around me or DD. Washing machines lost their programs. Radios played static. Even now, I could vaguely hear some politician preening his ego about some advance in the treatment of the elderly, heavily overlaid with white noise.

  Bit of a handicap in the electronic age, you might think.

  DD leaned over, switching off the radio with a snap of the forefinger.

  Oldborne Towers was one of those large Victorian relics that always seemed to end up as nursing homes or halfway houses. Once it had been a mid-sized hotel, but times were hard in the hospitality industry.

  DD climbed out of the car, stretching after the two-hour journey.

  “I really don’t know why you bother,” she said. “It’s not as if Granny Phelps will know who you are. Ten minutes after you’ve gone, she won’t remember you visited.”

  “That’s a bit callous, even for you,” I said. “Besides, it eases my conscience, knowing I’m doing the dutiful family bit.”

  Driveway gravel crunched under our feet as we approached the double doors. DD might have been going to add another caustic remark. Instead, she stopped, laying a hand on my arm.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Something’s wrong here, Jim,” she said quietly.

  I looked, senses questing, but I felt nothing out of the ordinary. Even from out here, I could smell the prevalent odour of boiled cabbage and piss that always seemed to cling to these places. It was quiet, but I could see the ghostly blue of television light in several windows.

  “It’s after six,” I said. “The residents, sorry, the guests, have probably all been fed and bathed by now. They’re just chilling to Weakest Link or X-Factor.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s more than that,” she said. “Can’t you feel it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Use your other senses,” she insisted.

  The world took on an eerie hue as I searched again. She was right. A lingering odour of something foul, something that shouldn’t have been in this world.

  I made sure the .44 Bulldog moved easily in the holster. DD was mirroring my actions.

  “Front door?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  Moving easily, like a couple with nothing more to concern them than a boring duty visit before beginning the weekend’s pleasures, we sauntered towards the doors.

  Inside the foyer, all seemed normal. A nursing assistant accosted us, all busy in blue uniform, carrying a plate of something that may once have been food.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Jim Phelps,” I said, “here to visit my grandmother.” She looked enquiring.

  “Brenda Mitchell,” I amplified. She brightened.

  “Oh yes, Mrs Mitchell’s in the main lounge,” she said,

  pointing the way deeper into the hallway. I nodded thanks. Together, DD and I moved towards one of the doors where ghost-light flickered from a muted TV.

  On the few occasions I’d been there, the scene had been similar. Nurses and assistants with forced cheeriness cajoling their charges to eat slop. Spooning stuff between their lips, wiping the dribbles from toothless mouths with tissues. The occasional shout or moan as a disturbing memory rose from the murky depths to disturb the shallow, sunlit emptiness of the present. The occasional belch or fart as natural processes continued without conscious supervision, and the occasional innocent voiding of bladder or bowel no longer restrained by ego.

  This scene was similar. Not the same. The nurses still spooned and wiped. The inmates still sat in hunched indifference.

  And total silence.

  The nurses looked strained, anxious, as if expecting the eruption of some monstrous plague.

  Granny Mitchell sat stolidly, still a stout figure. She had apparently finished her supper. An empty plate sat on the side table by her, gravy congealing on the spoon. She glanced at us with blank expression as we approached.

  “Hello, Gran,” I said cheerfully. Rheumy eyes gazed at me, swivelled to regard DD.

  “I told you not to bring that hussy here,” she spat. “And stop letting that dog sleep on your bed.”

  I thought she had probably mistaken me for my uncle, possibly my father, both dead a few years now.

  There was a muffled thud as one of the other residents rose, upsetting the tray in his lap, pushing the nurse aside with strength unexpected in one so old.

  “The time is at hand,” he bellowed, deep voiced and virile. “Our time!”

  Granny Mitchell let out a cackle that turned to a howl. I swivelled to face her again, seeing the hooked old fingers, which had been reaching for my throat, restrained in DD’s iron grip. Eyes that had been rheumy were now a feral yellow: predator’s eyes. They glared at me.

  “We’re here now,” she/it hissed. “There’s nothing in these shells to keep us out! You can’t stop us.”

  Screams fluttered round the room like trapped bats as the twenty or so residents rose, attacking their carers, plunging spoons into eyes, sinking remaining teeth into exposed flesh.

  “Think again, Granny,” DD snarled as she rose to her full height, extending metaphysical wings, driving a black and smoking talon through my last remaining relative’s temple, pulverising the malignant entity within.

/>   I emptied the Bulldog into advancing demonic figures, destroying brains, exploding heads.

  DD, now fully transformed, let loose a banshee howl that caused most of the possessed elderly to crumble, clutching their heads and howling in feeble imitation. Black, foul-smelling smoke rose from many, remnants of the destroyed demons within.

  A handful of the hardier ones advanced on me, talons thrusting through withered flesh, mouths stretching to accommodate fangs, paper-thin skin splitting across their cheeks. Their forked tongues flickered; eyes glowing.

  “A little help,” I suggested, backing away till there was nowhere left to retreat.

  DD/Lilith, her head now brushing the high ceiling, strode forward, tittering and phosphorescing. She clutched demon skulls in her talons, crushing them and tossing aside the husks effortlessly.

  “No-one harms my man!” she howled, literally incandescent with rage.

  The one survivor stood his ground.

  “This is not what was promised!” he growled.

  Lilith bent forward, her snout almost touching his.

  “Promised by who?” she asked with that deceptive sweetness of hers.

  “Moloch,” the demon said, gazing up at her in defiance. “He said this world would be ours.”

  “He lied,” said Lilith with contempt. “But tell me who he dealt with in this world and I’ll let you return to whatever hell you came from.”

  “I don’t know,” muttered the demon. “Some human, some politician. Said he was solving the problem of too many old people.”

  I flashed back to the static-laden egomaniac with his triumph of new care for the elderly. The Health Minister.

  Lilith seized the demon by the throat, squeezing.

  “You promised,” he whimpered.

  “I lied too,” she said, tossing his lifeless carcase aside. She turned on me, as angry as I had ever seen her.

  “You could have transformed, kept yourself safe,” she hissed.

  “I can’t afford a new wardrobe every time I go out,” I said.

  “Fool! I have enough money to buy you a thousand suits a day, if that’s what it takes,” she said. “Do you think I’ve fought you and loved you for millennia, crossed time and space to find you again, just to lose you because you’re too lazy to protect yourself?”