American Demon Hunters_An Urban Fantasy Supernatural Thriller

by J. Thorn

  Chapter 20

  “Thanks for coming, Martha,” Singleton said.

  “Thank him,” she said, nodding at Fred.

  George smirked and turned toward the main observatory room. A desk sat on one side of the entryway where a receptionist would sit during the day. The linoleum floor spread outward with the Case Western University insignia in the middle of it. The wall opposite of the main entrance held two doors, each leading to a different observation dome. Bookcases running from the floor to the ceiling held college textbooks with bundles of paper spilling from the shelves. The air smelled like gun oil and ozone. Fred recognized the odor from the labs on campus outfitted with the newest cathode ray tubes and circuit boards.

  Singleton opened the door to a spiral staircase. The silo went up two stories to the telescope apparatus installed in the dome. He turned to his right and pointed into a rectangular space no bigger than a bathroom.

  “That’s where I must draw the map.”

  Fred looked at Martha.

  “The death map initiates the summoning.”

  Singleton removed a hunk of chalk from his pocket. He scribbled on the knotty pine paneling, connecting constellations with straight lines between dots representing stars. Fred and Martha watched as his hand moved across the wall, reconstructing the heavens from that night as if he was standing beneath them.

  “January twenty-sixth.”

  Martha shrugged at Fred’s statement, not really understanding the significance.

  “The night she died,” he said, as if he understood her unspoken question. “George is sketching the sky from that night.”

  “When I’m finished,” Singleton said, “we’ll begin the summoning.”

  Fred pulled Martha close and could feel the bulge of her abdomen on his hip. She shivered despite the clacking radiators dispersing heat from the boiler below.

  George finished and put the chalk back in his pocket. He glared at the wall as if looking at a mathematical equation that didn’t add up.

  “Does time matter?” Fred asked.

  “Current or elapsed?” Singleton asked.

  “Current. Does it matter when we start?”

  “No. I’m ready right now.”

  Martha straightened her coat and fixed a loose strand of hair, as though she was about to meet an international dignitary.

  George pulled a tattered, crumbling book from his coat. The brown leather cover looked black in the low lights of the observatory. Dust fell from it as he turned the pages. Fred stared at the spine but was not able to identify the text. He decided it was better not to know.

  “When she returns she will be disoriented, as if waking from a terrible nightmare. I may need your help restraining her. Physically.”

  Martha looked at Fred and he bit his bottom lip.

  “We will stay here with her for the night until she has fully adjusted. Tomorrow will be a new day and I will have my love with me once again.”

  “And then what?” Martha asked. “The community buried her.”

  Fred looked at Singleton and he could see the man knew the answer but would not reveal it.

  “Yes,” Singleton said. “I’m aware of this.”

  When Singleton ignored the obvious complication, Fred tried a different approach to casting doubt on what Singleton thought would occur.

  “Some of the necromancers. They’ve had, uh, less than perfect results. I’ve read about them in the texts,” Fred said.

  “That is true. But I am not a foolish magician of antiquity. I studied the masters and I will successfully summon my love. She will come back to me and we’ll have the life we planned, the same as you and Martha will enjoy.”

  Fred didn’t like the way Singleton spoke of his marriage but he let it go. George was extremely bright and he studied the ancient texts every waking moment. Fred thought George knew the secrets of the dead better than case studies in law school.

  “Should we close our eyes and hold hands?” Martha asked.

  “That is nothing but foolish drama used by children trying to invoke spirits. All I need you to do is to open the dome and allow me to read the incantations. Over there.”

  Fred looked behind the spiral staircase where the manual crank was locked into a closed position with a steel pin. He saw the cogs and gears along with the steel cables running up into the dome. He would need to pull the pin and then spin the wheel to open the observation dome.

  Martha watched as Fred pumped the crank like he was churning butter. His upper body moved up and down at a rhythmic pace and she could feel the bite of cold air sinking to the floor from the expanding crevice. Singleton shut off the lights above, near the telescope. Their eyes adjusted. He handed Martha a candle and a book of matches. She lit it.

  Fred continued spinning the gear until the dome was fully open, the steel structure creaking at the top. It revealed a slice of the night sky and Fred recognized Orion’s belt. He felt better knowing the hunter was still there.

  Singleton read from the book, his voice steady and unwavering. Neither Fred nor Martha could recognize the language, but they felt a change in the air. The chill emanating from the opened dome met the manufactured heat from the radiators creating an unnatural air flow. It flicked the flame on Martha’s candle. The air pressure in the room changed and Fred felt it pressing into his ears and into his head. He could smell the book, the odor stronger now than when Singleton first removed it from his overcoat. Martha reached over and grabbed her husband's hand.

  “From the stars we come and hence we shall return. Unite the living with the dead and save us from an eternity in the urn.”

  Fred waited but felt nothing.

  “The chart inscribed the summoner.”

  The air flow changed again, blowing the candle out. Fred felt a vibration in the floor and the pressure in his ears grew. Singleton stood back from the wall where he was facing the death map and turned to look up into the dome. A gray haze appeared, looking like gauze spread wide and thin across the opening. Fred saw the haze pulse before taking a human form. He saw a head and limbs coalesce out of the darkness as if dropped from the constellations above. The mass descended until he recognized Mary standing beneath the telescope at the top of the spiral staircase.

  Singleton gasped and dropped his book to the floor. He walked toward the staircase and started to ascend when Fred stuck out his arm to keep him from going up.

  “Wait,” Fred said.

  Martha’s mouth hung open. Even though the lights were off and the candle extinguished, she saw Mary Kilton walking down the spiral staircase, one long arm on the railing to maintain her balance. She wore a white dress, the same burial garments they last saw when the casket was open. Her long, dark hair sat upon her shoulders and spilled down her back. It also covered her face. Mary glowed with a faint luminescence making her appear almost holographic.

  Singleton watched as Mary descended, each step bringing her closer to him and further removed from the cold grip of death. His mouth moved, but he was not speaking. A single tear dropped from his right eye. As Mary rounded the last spiral of the staircase, the glow dissipated and she stepped to the floor, barefoot and corporeal.

  Fred held George in place out of a primal urge to protect. They waited as Mary remained standing in front of them, her head down and her hair covering her face. Lines crisscrossed her arms, lacerations from when the car slammed into her.

  Fred heard Martha breathing and it felt as if time hitched and then stopped completely. He heard sobbing and looked at Singleton. The man was silently crying with the same confused expression on his face. Fred realized the sobbing was coming from Mary.

  The woman lifted her head and looked at George with a pasty face created by the funeral home’s cosmetics. The corners of her mouth came up as if to smile but they never quite made it.

  Instead, her black lips opened slightly and she spoke.

  “Why did you do this, George?”

  Chapter 21

  Hank felt a pressure
where the base of his skull met the top of his neck. His glass of iced tea was empty and his mouth was dry. He cracked the knuckles on his left hand and looked out of the front window, trying to will Martha and Corey home. At the same time, he knew he had to hear the conclusion to Fred’s story.

  “She could speak?”

  “Oh, yes. She certainly could,” Fred said. “At first, she seemed...normal. I mean, if you consider a walking, talking corpse normal. She knew us, could talk to George and she knew what happened. I think she did, anyways.”

  “A summoning?”

  “Yeah, that’s what we called it. Not very original, is it?”

  Hank looked at Fred and decided not to answer his question. He could tell Fred was stalling and Hank needed to hear the end of the story before Martha came home. Hank felt like he was getting a glimpse into something, a peak through a curtain that may not ever open again.

  “‘Why did you do this, George?’ Those words are burnt into my head forever. Mary was standing before us, summoned with a death map and incantation through a space/time portal. In that moment, she recognized the gravity of the situation, but I don’t think Singleton did. He ran up to her and they embraced, Mary’s thin arms wrapping around his neck. Her skin glowed but not in a healthy way. It had a tinge of light to it that was not from Earth. When Mary was in George’s arms, that’s when I began to feel the effect.”

  Hank leaned in closer.

  “I didn’t even realize Martha was sitting on the floor, her back to the wall. She was mumbling and giggling to herself and using her finger to draw phantom shapes in the air. She wasn’t injured or distraught. It was like she was drunk. And then there was an energy in the observation dome, one we brought here from some other place, and it was inside of us. I felt a distant thumping in my head and stumbled backward as I lost my balance. I thought maybe the place was collapsing or we were having an earthquake, but that wasn’t it at all. It was the power we brought through the portal now wafting through the room with a stench of rotten eggs.

  “George and Mary flickered. Their forms flashed before me. They looked like they were on an old black and white television that was losing reception. Interference, TV snow, layered over my vision. Time felt as though it stopped and a pit of tension blossomed in my stomach. The evening meal crawled back up my esophagus and I had to put a hand over my mouth in an attempt to keep myself from getting sick. I looked over my shoulder and back to the door and that’s when I first saw them.”

  “What?” Hank asked. He forced the question as a whisper between tight lips.

  “Gakis. They were crawling from the darkness, sneaking through the portal and into our world like an infestation of rats. I saw two or three right away. They looked alien with an oval head and tiny black eyes on a featureless face. They had sharp teeth crowded into a tight mouth. The Gakis’ long, thin limbs glowed with the same luminescence as Mary, which is how I knew they followed her here—they were summoned here. By us.”

  “Gakis?”

  “That’s right. Gakis. Pretas. Hungry Ghosts. These are spirits doomed to wander the afterlife. They’re never satiated, never content. They try to cram as much into their mouths as possible, but it's never enough. And it isn’t food they crave, Hank. It's the most hideous stuff you could imagine. Gakis feast on blood, flesh and feces. They’re found in many Eastern cultures but we don’t have a name for them here. Most of the time, they exist on a plane we don’t see. Although from time to time, you get a powerful one that comes through a terrestrial portal and wreaks havoc.”

  Hank’s head spun and he had to close his eyes. Fred was beginning to sound like a college professor and the talk of Gakis and portals was something Hank knew nothing about.

  Fred wouldn’t have time to explain how our world had been tainted with the Gakis and how secret societies existed to hunt them down, keep them in check and stop them from destroying everything. He would have to tell Hank about the hunters later.

  “Neither George nor I knew a summoning would bring minor Gakis through the same portal as the deceased, through the same door. Sometimes they came weeks in advance and it's quite possible they preceded Mary. We’ll never know. We might have let dozens of those demons into our world. But most of the time, they arrived with the summoned, weak immature Gakis easily tracked and destroyed. We knew none of this then, so I stood there in the room, slack-jawed as I watched them slither through the darkness and out of the observatory. We also had no clue the summoned would turn.”

  “Into a demon?” Hank asked.

  “Yes. Although Singleton could never say with one hundred percent accuracy, the dead person returns temporarily before they, uh... How do I say this? They devolve into a Gaki and the creature must be put down.”

  “You say you don’t know this is absolutely true. Does that mean it’s possible someone could be summoned and be perfectly fine?”

  Fred stared into Hank’s eyes. He looked at the picture of Michelle at her high school graduation hanging upon the wall.

  “Perfectly fine? Raising the dead, pulling them through a portal that opens in the Orion constellation. You think that’s ‘perfectly fine’?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Well, you don’t know what I mean, son. That little flicker in your heart? I felt it. I also felt it go up to your brain and start calculating the odds. You’re courting disaster. You’ll be endangering yourself, your son and everyone else on the planet. There’s a reason Orion’s Order exists.”

  Hank remained quiet, waiting for Fred to continue.

  “So like I was saying, Martha was out of her gourd on the floor and I was seeing the Gakis spread through the room. Singleton was in Mary’s embrace and they were talking. It was more like whispering and I couldn’t catch more than a word or two. To this day, he’s never told me what she said. Although it was hard to tell, I’m guessing they had ten or fifteen minutes together before it started.”

  “She turned.”

  “That’s right. She began to turn like every other spirit ever summoned at the observatory.”

  “It happened again?”

  “There’s a history in Cleveland Heights you won’t find in any book, a history that involves those foolish enough to think they can conduct a summoning and not make the same mistakes everyone else has. It’s happened many times and if people weren’t dumb enough to think they were the ones to beat the odds, we wouldn’t need seers, guardians or hunters.”

  “How did she turn?” Hank asked. He thought back to his conversation with the old man at the historical society.

  “I saw it in her face first. She stood back from George. He pushed the hair from her face. I saw her eyes changing and her skull distorted like a piece of taffy. The glow around her intensified and I felt a force in the room, like I was standing next to them big power lines stretched along the highway. When her hair began to fall to the floor and her dress slid from her body, I ran to George. I knew what was happening, but he was in a trance. If I had not been there, she would have devoured him. The summoning is exhausting and nobody has ever had the mental stamina to fight off the turn once it occurs. George would have been annihilated.

  “I grabbed him by the shoulder and he spun around to give me this evil scowl. He mumbled something I couldn’t quite understand about ‘eternal love’ and I ignored him. I grabbed him by the arm and threw him into the wall. He collapsed on the floor next to Martha. I feared I may have hurt him, but I was glad he was out of the way.

  “I turned to look at Mary and, I, well, I soiled myself. Honest to God, son. The only time in my life I’ve ever done that. Her face was in the middle of a violent change. Her eyes glowed red and her skin twisted and pulsed like there were insects trapped beneath it. The smell of rotten eggs became so strong, my eyes watered. The whole time she was mumbling or chanting, I can’t tell which. Her belly distended like a starving child and all of the hair fell from her skin. Her spine arched, forcing her to hunch over. The holes on her face that used to be her n
ostrils flared up and she spoke.

  “‘I want to eat your shit. I’m taking you all to Hell, where you belong.’

  “Mary laughed at me, although I’d say it was more of a cackle. She turned her head sideways and I could see whatever trace of humanity came through the portal was gone. This was not Mary. It was a Gaki. The demon waved a long finger at me and hissed.

  “‘You summoned me. You brought me here.’

  “‘You cannot stay,’ I said.”

  Hank saw the headlights of Martha’s car pull into the driveway. Fred wiped a tear from his face and followed Hank’s gaze.

  “You want to know if I killed that thing, put it down, don’t you? I did. To this day, I don’t think Singleton has forgiven me for it, even though he’s dedicated his life to keeping that portal closed. This is not to be trifled with, son, no matter how much grief you might have in your heart.”

  “Michelle was my wife.”

  “She was my daughter.”

  Shadows moved in front of the window as Corey led Martha to the front door.

  “God help you,” Fred said.

  Chapter 22

  One Week Later (October 3, 2014)

  The rust-colored light filtered through the blinds, keeping him awake in the middle of the night.

  Corey tried avoiding his father during the last weeks of September and into October. Even without the second sight or psychic abilities, Corey could tell something was off. His dad was not normally consumed by his career. He often worked on equations at home but did so at the kitchen table, scribbling in the corners of big sheets of paper while the family went about their business behind him. But Hank became more secretive and Corey sensed it had more to do with the anniversary of his mother’s death than the new teaching position at Case.

  Corey decided to keep the memories from his sessions with Dr. Singleton hidden because they felt too dangerous to share. Each time his dad came to pick him up, Corey waited for questions that never came. He asked his son about the day and if he felt he made progress, but he never asked Corey what they talked about or what the doctor said.