by J. Thorn
The driver spun his baseball cap visor from the left side of his head to the right. He chuckled and rubbed the tattoo on his left arm with his right hand, covered in heavy rings. “Uh-huh,” the kid replied. “You and what fucking army, old man?”
Frank spread his feet shoulder-width apart and brought his free hand out of his pocket. His fingers gripped the flashlight as his eyes took note of where each boy stood. “If I want to taste Kelly, I gotta bring you to him.”
The boys behind Frank looked at each other, shrugging and kicking at the loose gravel. “You done lost yer mind, old-timer. We don’t know shit about no Kelly. I do know we’re about to put a beat-down on yer ass for all that stupid shit you did out there on Skyline.”
Frank smiled, his eyes never leaving the driver’s.
“Let’s do this,” the kid who had come from the passenger side said to the driver.
Before anyone could say another word, Frank cocked his arm back and brought the handle of the flashlight down on the jaw of the driver. His faux-gold chain shook, and his baseball cap with the price tag still attached flew backwards with the blow. Frank stepped through the strike and spun to backhand the kid from the passenger seat before the driver could hit the ground. Within a span of two seconds, two of the four teenagers were crawling through the gravel looking for their teeth. The two kids who had dropped their drawers and shoved their asses at Frank through the rear window took two steps backward, neither wanting to be the next one to bleed.
“Cut off the head of the beast,” Frank said, his chest rising as he sucked more oxygen from the air, “and the rest will scatter, or somethin’ like that.”
“Get the fuck out of here ’fore we call the cops and have you arrested for beating a minor,” one of the boys said.
Frank laughed out loud at the empty threat and stepped toward the sedan as all four boys angled toward it. “Oh, so now you’re minors? Lemme tell y’all something. I know the fucking police in Pine Valley, and they know your goddamn parents. I’ll have your asses sitting in the station in a matter of minutes. I’ll be there watching your old man take the belt to your ass.”
The fight was clearly over, and the boys looked to the driver for their cue.
“Or what?” the driver asked, spitting blood as he leaned against the rear bumper of his car. “You call the cops or what?”
“Or you get in the truck and take a ride with me. I could use some young muscle like y’all got, even if you don’t have the brains to go along with it.”
The two boys from the backseat looked at the other two, shaking their heads. “Sounds weird,” one of them said. “You some pervert homo or something?”
“I got work that needs done, and if you don’t do it, I’ll have your license revoked,” Frank said to the driver, “and the rest of y’all will never see a driver’s permit.”
The boys had clustered until they stood shoulder to shoulder against the back of the car, facing Frank. Two wiped blood from their faces, and the other two waited to hear how it might play out.
“I ain’t doin’ no dick-sucking or touching. I’m serious, you old fucker,” the driver said.
“Get in the back of the truck unless you want me to call Pine Valley PD.” Frank dropped his hands and stepped to the side. The driver looked at his buddies, straightened his ball cap, and walked around to the back of Frank’s Dakota. He hopped over the tailgate and tapped the side of the truck twice. The other three followed, leaving the car parked in the middle of the lot.
“Fine. Let’s do this. We got forties to pound tonight.”
Frank nodded and slid into his seat. He put the truck in first gear and pulled out of the lot. “On my way, boss,” he said as the night grew darker at the top of the mountain.
Chapter 8
Officer Jones thought the leather seat had turned to stone. He had spent the last ten hours riding his Harley through the back roads of Caroling County. He pushed the motorcycle across smooth, even pavement as the autumn wind tore at his face. Peter smiled, his fingers aching from his grip on the handlebars. He glided off the road and up to the pumps at Jasper’s service station. The single streetlight flickered to life, but the rest of the garage sat in darkness. He killed the engine and listened to the cool air pinging the hot pistons. He took off his helmet and swung a leg backwards off the bike.
That fucking Jasper was a waste, a goddamn pimple on society’s ass,Peter thought.
He looked around, detecting the occasional hum of traffic coming from Skyline Drive, most of it drowned out by the crickets coming to life within the woods. There were no other cars around and no sign of activity. The pumps were off, but the office door was open. Peter had to urinate, and he couldn’t bring himself to do so in the parking lot while wearing his official blues. He stepped to the side of the building and toward the restroom. He pushed the door open and hit the light switch, and one of the two fluorescent bulbs flickered to life. Mosquitoes danced on the surface of the sink, and the garbage can was upside down and sitting in a corner. Peter unzipped his pants and flipped the lid up on the toilet. He closed his eyes and pissed, instinctively reaching for the faucet to wash his hands before realizing only the cold water worked, and barely, at that.
What the hell am I doing here?
Peter didn’t bother flushing. He looked around, and his years on the force told him something was not right with the room. Something was off kilter. “Fuck if I care,” he said to himself. “Jasper is fucking dead. Burned like a piece of garbage.”
Jones turned and walked out, slamming the door behind him. He walked around the building and to the main office. He pushed the door open and was greeted with the heady aroma of smokeless tobacco and human body odor. He pulled the string on an overhead light bulb, which illuminated what used to be a desk. An old rotary phone sat atop a stack of porno magazines, one of them lying on the floor and open to the centerfold. Peter flipped through the pages, tossing each rag to the top of an overflowing garbage can.
This was his life. It’s what you’re here for, isn’t? You want one last interaction with Jasper? Well, here it is, Officer Jones. Here is where your loser son spent his time doing God knows what even after you bought the garage for him. Satisfied?
Peter shook and put his hands to head, trying to silence his own thoughts. He sat in Jasper’s chair and began to cry silent tears into his open hands.
“I tried, goddammit. I tried.”
The phone rang, jolting Jones from his self-pity. He waited as it rang a second time. He looked at the grease-covered phone and then followed the wire out the back to where the end lay on the floor, cut and frayed.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
The phone rang a third time. Jones watched his hand moving toward the receiver in slow motion while his mind screamed in protest. He picked it up and put it to his right ear.
Static.
“Hello?” Peter whispered into the receiver.
“This is taking longer than I had anticipated. I thought we had cleared things up inside the crypt.”
“What crypt?” Peter asked.
“Where we spoke over Jasper’s body,” replied Gaki.
Officer Jones bit his bottom lip, placing a hand over the receiver as if he could hide his emotions from the demon.
“Have you thought about what will happen once they discover what you were doing?” Gaki asked. “The money and drugs from evidence, that will lead to Jasper and then to you. It’s not like Pine Valley has stacks of cash locked up in evidence. What little passes through there will have your fingerprints all over it.”
“This feels like blackmail,” replied Peter with all the mental fortitude he could muster.
“That’s because it is,” said Gaki. “I thought we struck a deal back there in the basement. I thought you’d help avenge your son’s death at the hands of those responsible. I thought you’d want to . . . do your fucking job.”
“You have no right to speak to me that way. You have no right to say that about my son.”
“Your son was a stupid son of a bitch, and I took care of the whore that squeezed him out.”
Peter thought about what Gaki had said and shook his head. “You killed Candy?” he asked.
“No. She did it to herself. I just helped things along. Don’t pretend you didn’t see the signs, Peter. Don’t act like you didn’t notice her missing teeth, her thinning hair, the whispers about town. She was a fucking tweaker, and I gave her one last ride, a hell of a ride. I should’ve blown up the entire meth lab, but there will be time for the rest of Pine Valley’s trailer trash once you help me.”
“Help you what? What the hell do you want from me?”
“I’m going to ask the same question I asked you back at the scene. Are you hungry?”
Peter looked out of the dirt-smeared window of Jasper’s station at a car driving past, the headlights swallowed by the full darkness now encapsulating the mountain.
“For what?” Peter asked, more out of frustration than ignorance. “I’m tired. I’m just so tired.”
“Desire and fatigue are brothers,” replied Gaki. “I can give you a rest. I can make the pain end and satiate your need for peace.”
Jones rubbed his forehead and sat back in the chair. He exhaled.
“You’ve spent your entire life taking care of others,” Gaki said. “You put the welfare of strangers before your own, and what has it gotten you? A pitiful family life, a dead illegitimate child, and a dead crackhead whore with your credit card number stowed in a shoebox under her bed.”
“What did you say?”
“Candy was my insurance for this exact scenario. What will the department say if it turns out one of their officers was buying ephedrine in bulk for an old girlfriend who ended up dead from crystal meth?”
“This isn’t real,” Peter replied. “This is not happening. I’ve lost my mind and now I’m having a conversation on a phone that has been cut in my dead son’s service station.” Officer Jones hung up the phone and rocked back in the chair, eyes glistening in the light of the single light bulb.
The phone rang again, but this time Peter knocked it from the desk and into the wall.
Gaki would not be deterred. Money from evidence. Your credit card number at Candy’s double-wide. It is your call, Officer Jones.
Peter squeezed his head as if to drive Gaki’s voice from it. “So? My life is finished anyway.”
Yes, that old life is over. But you have a chance to join me in a new existence, one where you always get what you want.
Peter sighed and closed his eyes.
Very soon, Frank will come through this lot in his truck with four teenagers in the back. They will drive through and take the trail into the woods, toward the cave.
“Why are you telling me this?”
If you prohibit this in any way, well, let’s just say it would not be wise for you to return to the station or to Pine Valley.
Peter glanced out the front window, through which he could see another pair of headlights coming toward the station, silhouettes shuffling about in the bed of the truck.
***
It wasn’t the howling wolves or the phantom noises that frightened Kelly. It was the silence. The still, thick, dead silence. It came without warning from the deepest recesses of the night, and she tried closing her eyes in hopes that it would help, but it didn’t. Robert’s corpse had not moved, yet she knew a force had awakened inside his rotting flesh. She could feel it.
The moon had risen above the ridge, and the diffused light made the room glow as if filled with an iridescent fog. The shreds of fabric that used to be curtains swayed in the silent breeze that chilled Kelly’s naked body. The room took on a bluish tint, and it smelled like the fresh earth of a newly dug grave.
“Please leave me alone,” she pleaded. “Please.”
As soon as she said it, Kelly laughed. She had no idea what had materialized within the house, yet she was speaking to the entity. The suffocating silence returned as soon as her own voice left her ears. She felt a slight touch on her cheek. It was cold and forced a shiver down her spine. She sighed and pulled back, her head tight against the wall.
Floyd will find you irresistible.
Kelly bit her lip and looked back and forth, unsure whether the words had come from inside the house or from inside her head. She turned to look through the doorway, where she believed the light had flickered and the air had moved ever so slightly. “Who’s there?” she asked.
You will serve the New Forest coven well. Men shall find your body most delectable.
Kelly saw it for the first time, and her heart hitched inside her chest. The form floated through the doorway and toward the room, a gray shroud covering the shape of a woman. Kelly could see dark hair beneath the thin fabric and the thinness of its form. She looked at Robert’s corpse again and wondered if what she felt was relief or fear. The air became charged like the moment before a summer thunderstorm, and it smelled like overheated electronics. The form came toward her, absorbing all other sounds both inside and outside the house.
Do you wear the mark? The apparition spoke to Kelly inside of her head. The words felt raw, intrusive.
“What mark?”
The master’s mark. The dark one.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please get me out of here. I don’t want to die next to him.”
They would have stripped you and searched for the mark. They would have bound your wrists and ankles and tossed you into moving water. They would have force-fed you cakes made with dog piss.
Kelly shook her head, unsure whether the conversation taking place inside her head was meant for her or not. “I have not signed his book,” Kelly said, surprised by the words as they left her mouth.
Then you will. It is the only way.
The ghostly form now stood directly in front of Kelly, its arms outstretched. She could see the woman’s feet, her toes scraped and bruised, the skin gray and mottled beneath the fabric. The woman smelled of rotten flesh.
“The succubus serves the dark master.”
Kelly shook as the apparition spoke out loud for the first time. The timbre of the voice was ancient, tired. The accent was from another time and place. “I don’t serve anyone,” Kelly replied. “I just want to go home.”
“But you are home, my dear. This is your home now. We are here to serve Him, and now you will, as well.”
Kelly looked past the specter as several more hovered on the threshold of the house, keeping the wolves at bay.
***
Sage jumped from the car without a weapon, knowing that only her hands and her training would protect her from the demon. It was time to put up or shut up, as her father used to say. Her studies and the training now came down to this. The rituals and the rites meant nothing in the face of the hidden evil, the malevolent force approaching her in this very moment.
“From birth to death, it’s just like this,” Sage said, putting her own spin on an old Buddhist koan.
Mashoka had gone silent in her head, and she guessed it was because this was her crucible and he needed to make sure she could handle it without assistance of any kind. After all, if she could not dispense with one of Gaki’s minions, how could she possibly survive within Preta’s Realm?
The creature continued toward her, picking up speed the closer it came. Gaki and his subordinates were not bound to the laws of physics. They did not abide by nature’s confines. It was the face of the approaching creature that gave Sage pause. She had studied them and was not surprised to see blood and feces on its face, but what surprised her was how she felt witnessing it. No matter how vividly someone describes the scene of an accident, nothing can ever be as visceral as seeing it for oneself. Sage realized that all of the descriptions from other Hunters throughout time could not come close to the guttural feeling of revulsion she was experiencing.
Sage’s stomach crawled as if it were filled with cold, bitter coffee. Her hands shook, and sweat broke out on her forehead. The creature
was rapidly closing the gap, five or six feet per stride. Sage looked both ways on Interstate 81, and the absence of all other vehicles brought a surge of panic into her chest that tightened her throat. The creature was now only two or three strides from her, and she was paralyzed. Sage saw not just its slimy bluish-white skin, which was translucent and seemed to eat light, but also the mouth of the demon, which was incredibly small but filled with more sharpened teeth than could possibly fit within the orifice. She could smell it now, fetid and filthy like rotting seaweed after low tide. Sage shook and had to forcibly keep her bladder from emptying.
Move.
The single world shook Sage from the demon’s intoxicating haze just as its spindly arm was reaching for her throat.
She dropped and spun clockwise, extending her right leg out and using it to whip around and take the feet out from underneath the demon. The creature made no noise, but it screamed within her head. It scrambled back up to its feet and came at her again. Sage had already popped back up and was facing it in a defensive position, no longer immobilized by the sight or smell of Gaki’s subordinate.
“C’mon, bitch,” she said, her jet-black hair tousled, with pink strands escaping her ponytail like miniature snakes.
The thing stopped for a moment, its hideous mouth opening and closing but not saying a word. Sage saw that the creature had placed its hands on top of a distended, bulbous stomach.
“I’m a Hunter. I will banish you back to the realm from which you came.” The declaration came out sounding stilted and childish, the words remembered from her training.
The demon stood still, cocking its head sideways as if processing her words.
She paused, blowing a wisp of hair from her face. Sage had the moment of realization that Mashoka had talked about so often, the understanding that the creature before her was born of man. It was once human, had loved and lost like all do. The physical presence was nothing more than a shell, but the soul remained. Her job was not to save it but set it free. Destroying the physical form would save the spiritual one.
