by J. Thorn
Sage did as the officer said, as Mashoka had instructed.
***
The station at mile marker 719 was nothing more than a rectangular brick building that looked like it had been built during the Civil War. As the Virginia State Police car pulled into the narrow lot behind the off-ramp with Sage cuffed in the backseat, the glass door on the front of the building opened. Another officer, this one older and sporting a hefty paunch, held a cup of coffee in one hand and a clipboard in the other. The space smelled of burnt coffee, stale donuts, and slightly masked body odor. Sage stifled a giggle, hoping not to make the situation any worse than it already was. The police station looked nothing like the ones on television, and she was not sure why she thought it should have.
“What’s next?” she asked.
The officer got out of the driver’s side without answering her. He opened the door and guided her head down so it would not strike the door jamb as she got out. He grabbed Sage’s handcuffs and walked her toward the front door, where the other officer smiled, a glob of jelly filling hanging from his chin.
“What’s we got here?” he said in a southern drawl that was as thick as barbecue sauce.
“Stolen vehicle,” the officer replied.
“Grand theft auto? Damn!”
The officer looked at his fellow patrolman as if he had belched a liver and onions dinner. “Cell 2 open?”
“They’s all open, son.”
Sage could feel the contempt between the two men, one man a slave to protocol and the other a prisoner to time and ambivalence.
“Start processing the paperwork while I get ready to print and mug-shot her. Find the Statie nearest South Euclid and get them on the line.”
The officer nodded and looked at Sage from head to toe, giving her a smile that felt as greasy as the hair slicked back on his head. “How old are you, honey? Your folks know where you are?”
Sage closed her eyes and let the other officer walk her down the hallway to a row of cells that could have doubled as office cubicles. Same difference, she thought, vowing never to do white-collar work.
“This is our holding cell. I’m going to remove the cuffs. Should you try to—”
“I won’t,” replied Sage, interrupting the officer’s attempt at listing obvious consequences.
“I know,” he said, giving her a look that made the hair stand on the back of her neck.
I’m more afraid of him than Sergeant Jellyroll. There’s a flicker in those eyes that I don’t like. Something I recognize.
Sage sat on the stiff, thin mattress and leaned against the wall. She could see down the hallway and half of the station’s office space, which held four desks. Other than an occasional drunk driver or vandal, Sage couldn’t imagine these cops doing much more than crossword puzzles. She looked at the stainless-steel sink and toilet, and although she would have to go soon, there was no way she was going in front of them.
“What now, Master?” she asked, turning her head to the painted cement ceiling. “What am I supposed to do now?”
She waited, but Mashoka’s words did not come. He had told her not to resist for a reason, and she would honor that. The Hunt required persistence, strength, endurance, and it also required patience, as Sage was beginning to find out.
***
Doug quit worrying about what the nurses and hospital staff thought about his behavior. They were used to seeing him in the halls of the ICU ward, but he rarely went into a room and never spent any time in one. They surmised that it had something to do with the fireman’s code and becoming too emotionally attached to survivors that, more often than not, would not survive. When the nurse on call made her third check on 5467, she was surprised to see him sitting in the chair, facing the burn victim in the bed.
“Can I get you something, Doug?”
“I’m fine, thanks,” he replied, not bothering to look up.
“Okay,” said the nurse before leaving and pulling the door shut.
“Where were we?”
Other Hunters.
“Right. How am I going to know them? How will I find them?”
Ravna’s mind tossed and turned, trying its best to provide Doug the information he needed without squandering the vital, short time they had together. He paused and decided to approach the conversation as he had his writing. He would deliver Doug the most efficient explanation possible the same way he would review a new horror film for Slasher Dasher Magazine.
They will find you, but how many and when I do not know. One confrontation I had with Gaki was only me and Mashoka. Ravna paused. Really only Mashoka.
“How will I know they’re a Hunter?”
You’ll know. But before we get to that, we need to discuss something that Mashoka told me about Gaki.
Doug waited for Ravna’s voice to start again inside his head.
The East believes in the Grand Cycle, the Wheel of Incarnation. Once the soul is released from the body, it enters a place where Gaki can be tossed aside like an old rag. It is quite simple, really.
Doug shook his head at Ravna. “That doesn’t make sense. Even if you could get Gaki to come with a soul to the afterlife, it would require the forfeit of a human life. Someone has to give up their body.”
Hence, the sacrifice.
Doug sat back and exhaled. He rubbed his forehead with one hand and shook his head at Ravna. “Who would do that?”
It would have to be a Hunter, one who did not believe in St. Peter’s Gate and the nonsense of the Holy Trinity. It would have to be a soul whose body was nearing the end of its span, a frame that did not have much life left in it.
“I can’t let you do that.”
I wasn’t asking you for permission.
“But you’re a survivor. You’re going to make it out of here.”
How do you know what is taking place inside of me?
Doug shook his head. He stood up and paced the room before sitting back down at Ravna’s side.
“You would do that for a complete stranger? You’d give up your life to take Gaki off this plane and release it from another’s soul?”
My master did so many times, and now I will, too. It is what Hunters do.
Doug stood, understanding on an instinctual level but not an intellectual one. He believed Ravna was telling him that he would be the sacrifice used to dispel Gaki, but that seemed to raise more questions than it answered. “But Mashoka, his sacrifice, it didn’t work. Gaki is here and is stronger than he was before.”
Yeah, I know, and I’m not sure why. Gaki was gone, or at least contained in Drew’s body, for almost a year. By the time he escaped the mental hospital and scrawled my name in blood, Gaki had re-inhabited his body and broken free. Banishing the demon for good, sending him through a Portal, these are things you and I will need to figure out.
“Or what?”
There is no other option. If we cannot expel the demon from this place, it will continue to corrupt others until there is nothing but hordes of hideous creatures stalking the land. And this ain’t no B movie, Doug. This is for keeps.
“What about an exorcism, something like that?”
Mashoka was fairly certain that wouldn’t work. It could have been his disdain for organized religion, however. Do you know an exorcist?
“In Pine Valley? They barely believe in Halloween, let alone demons.”
Ravna laughed inside Doug’s head, both of them taking an opportunity to lighten the mood a bit. I’m not really sure it would work, anyways. At least there isn’t much in the Hunter history to confirm it. But at this point, we’re condensing your training into a matter of hours. We might have to take whatever help we can get.
“Do you think we can do it? Do you think I can do it?”
Banish Gaki?
“Yes.”
I think it’s very doubtful.
“Then what’s the point of all of this?”
How the hell should I know? I can’t tell you about my decades being a Hunter or my childhood experiences f
ighting the hungry ghost. The thing is here, and it’s amplifying its signal, drawing the worst from natural human tendencies toward desire and greed. Maybe that’s all the reason we need.
“To keep the disease from spreading.”
Yes. To keep it contained.
“I think more will die in this fight.”
They probably will.
Doug sat back, tired of probing Ravna for optimism only to find a dying realist in its place.
***
The birds began chirping at five o’clock in the morning, helping to dust the shallow sleep from Kelly’s eyes. Her wrists and arms ached, and her fingers tingled from the circulation pinched by the bonds. She yanked at the copper wire again, hoping that the night would have loosened it. She looked at Robert, a single fly buzzing around his head. It landed on his ear and then took off again.
“Things are going to get really rank in here, really fast,” she muttered. She looked at the empty doorway where the apparitions from the night before had stood. Kelly knew they had been real, yet the daylight tried to convince her that it had all been a dream. She sighed and turned her head, almost believing it until that name popped into her head again.
Gaki.
Kelly had read The Lord of the Rings as a kid, and had seen all three of Jackson’s films in the theater. She immediately recognized the visual interpretation of the creature as being fairly accurate, and that was the creature she had seen in the perverse visions. Wasn’t that what Tolkien had been using Gollum to symbolize, a physical manifestation of humanity’s inherent greed and selfishness? She sighed and became angry with herself, playing high school literature class while she sat naked and tethered to a wall with a rotting, bloated dead rapist in the middle of the room, not to mention the hauntings from the night before.
“Are you here?” she asked the empty house. “Can you hear me?”
There was no reply except for a branch pulsing back and forth on the far window, pushed against the house by the morning breeze.
“You came to me last night for a reason. If I was going to die here, what would be the point?” Kelly laughed and shook her head until the laughter turned into sobbing. She was now talking to spirits that had haunted her the night before.
She thought back to a story she had covered shortly after joining WPVD. A woman had abandoned her children and was reported missing by a family friend who had arrived to see the kids outside of the doublewide, naked and screaming at eleven o’clock at night. As it turned out, the woman was a tweaker and had slipped into a coma at a meth lab deep in the Virginia countryside, much like the moonshiners of another time. Kelly had been there when the police found the lab and dragged the woman out in handcuffs. She had followed the story for three days, eventually getting the mug shot of the woman with stringy hair and missing teeth. Although the station never asked for a follow-up, Kelly found out that the woman had died several years later after a heroin overdose and the Commonwealth had shipped her kids off to distant relatives in Connecticut.
“A coma would be nice,” she said. “Take a nap and slip on out of here. No pain, no drama.” Kelly sighed and looked up to where the peeling wallpaper was the only response. “It’s not like being found naked and with a co-worker you murdered on film would matter. Let them say what they want while you sleep. Let them eat cake. Let all the motherfuckers eat cake.”
She laughed and thrashed, pulling harder at the bungee cords. She turned a tear-stained face of running makeup to the hallway and began shouting at the top of her lungs. Her throat hurt, and she was more thirsty than she had been in her entire life. She tried not to think about the life-sustaining snacks in the van, the bottled water and sugary shit that Robert would have enjoyed ramming down his fat fucking face. Kelly tried to ignore the fact that her body was compensating for the lack of sustenance. She had not pissed in hours, and that was not a good sign. People had survived being trapped without food for a week, even two in some extreme cases. But for those without access to water, the situation was much more dire.
She thought again of cake and of birthday parties. She thought about reading on the couch next to a roaring fire. She thought about sipping coffee with a lover the morning after a night of passion. Kelly let her mind go. If the end was coming, why not let it enjoy all of that vicariously? When the pleasurable thoughts passed and reality came crashing back into Kelly’s existence, she decided again to plead with the forces she now believed kept her bound to the cursed house.
“Do you want me to join you? To join Gaki? Is that why you came to me?” She swore she felt the warped floorboards vibrate beneath her. “Is it?” she asked again, demanding an answer from beyond.
But the house fell silent once more. The sun began its climb up the far wall, and now three flies buzzed about Robert. The word was getting out that his meat was there for the taking, and Kelly hoped that someone would find her or that she would die before the flies gave way to larger, more menacing scavengers.
Chapter 10
“We haven’t talked about the how.”
Ravna blinked and sighed inside Doug’s head. I know. It’s not something I clearly understand, and Mashoka never had the time to explain it fully. I assume you’re asking how Gaki got here in the first place?
“That, and how he moves from one body to another. It seems random.”
It’s definitely not random, but I can’t necessarily find a pattern, either.
“Drew Green. Can we start there?”
The flesh has passed, but there are still residual energies, ones I can now pull through another Portal. They’re more like reflections from those other realities, and they won’t be entirely within context, but I can share with you part of a conversation Drew’s maternal grandfather shared with him before Gaki became all consuming.
“Go on.” Doug felt the temperature drop in the room, which brought a shiver to his skin and raised the hair on his arms. He waited, unsure how Ravna was going to “show” him the conversation that would help them both figure out the origins of Gaki and ultimately discover whether there was any chance of stopping it. Before Doug could ask another question, the words formed in his head like sound from a distant radio station. The conversation was slathered in static, and the volume pulsed like the worn motor of an old ceiling fan. He listened as carefully as he could. Doug recognized the spiritual imprint, the words spoken by Drew’s grandfather. Ravna channeled the energy.
“I know you felt him. Those nights, listening to the wind rattle the windows or the temperature tweaking the floorboards: that was Gaki. I know it. You know it. He’s coming for you, and you know what he wants. My greed ate me alive, but I think your vice is deeper, a red gash deep in the flesh that won’t stop bleeding no matter what you do.
“Now that I’m gone, I have a feeling that whatever being rules this plane will put me somewhere, with an emaciated body, tiny mouth, and the inability to satiate my lusts. I’m the new gaki, but not your gaki. You get your own, son. You get yer own.
“You’re about out of time with me. I did what I could, what I had to. You should know that I did like ya. Those times I took you golfing, we enjoyed ourselves. Getting a burger at the clubhouse and sneaking you a sip of my beer, that was good times. But it’s all about business now. Shit, you’ve known you’ve been infected for a while. All I’m doing is making it all official. A receding widow’s peak ain’t all you’re inheriting from me, Drew.
“Gaki got his eye on you. You’re the new ‘eater of shit.’ Do what you can to save your family, ’cause there sure as hell ain’t no hope for your soul.”
Doug waited for Ravna to speak until the Hunter gave him a mental nod, letting him know he had caught another piece of energy that needed to be shared.
Drew stood in the middle of a concrete room within a dream. There were no windows, and a single-file line of fluorescent shop lights stretched the length of the room. Pipes and ductwork wove across the ceiling, occasionally spiraling down a wall and disappearing through a hole cut in the
cinder block. Puddles on the floor reflected the light in shimmering waves. The air felt moist and cold, like that in the most sinister of caves. A single bulb dangled on the left wall over a folding chair. Chains lay coiled like snakes underneath it. A metallic taste touched his tongue, carried on a stale breeze pulled through the room by a spinning exhaust fan at the end. Drew heard a faint rumble that shook the puddles on the floor for several seconds before fading out again.
“Eater.”
Drew turned to his right. A voice came from the dark corner where the light from the fluorescents overhead would not extend. “What?” he asked.
“Eater. You’re now an eater.”
“Anything else?” Doug asked, feeling as though Ravna had finished delivering the message from his spirit.
That is all I can find.
“Gaki came down Drew’s mother’s line and the ‘case of the hungry ghost’ he got was more severe than his grandfather’s?”
That feels like an oversimplification, but it’s somewhat accurate.
Doug waited as Ravna thought about the situation.
The Gaki seems to be a blood curse, but it doesn’t limit itself to the paternal or maternal line. It can come down either, much like a genetic disorder or inherited trait. Likewise, it also seems as though Gaki can skip a generation, many generations if it so desires. It seeks weakness and a swelling of greed within the heart.
“Is there any record of crimes committed by Drew’s mother or father? Did you or Mashoka find any evidence of that?”
We did not, although we did not do much research. Mashoka was not fond of intellectual masturbation, and I simply did not have time. By the time I had my confrontation with Gaki and was able to get Drew into the Rader Facility for the Study of the Mind, I wanted to put as much of this behind me as possible. I met Karen shortly after that, which made me even less motivated to rip open old scars.
