The Darkest Lullaby

by Jonathan Janz

  And the only person who’d called her that since earliest childhood was the owner of the smell. Oh God, it was now so powerful it threatened to knock her unconscious, a corrosive ether that seemed to breathe from the very trees, which were reaching for her now, clawing branches and black eyes fringed by leafy faces.

  Ellie turned to run, but it was happening again, the undertow sucking her energy, the smell filling her head, blasting away thought, painting everything a dreary gray…now the color of old gravestones…

  Fight! Kat’s voice bellowed.

  As if doused with freezing water, Ellie jolted. Without waiting for the murky whispering to drag her under again, she bulleted for home as fast as her legs would go.

  But even when she stepped inside the house and stood panting in the foyer, she knew what she’d experienced. And the smell of Lillith’s perfume still clung to her nostrils like a pestilence.

  Chapter Eight

  The little white house with green shutters was easy to pick out even before Chris could read the address number on the mailbox. The yard was meticulously landscaped, the overflowing window boxes a riot of purple and yellow. The brick walkway curved a little as it wound toward the wooden front door.

  Norman Campbell’s place reminded Chris of an enchanted cottage.

  Chris knocked and waited. After a short pause, the door swung inward and the little man, his black hair parted neatly on the left side, regarded him with a look of open hostility.

  “Lost?” Campbell asked. Beyond him, Chris glimpsed a living room as stylish and neat as the façade. Campbell crossed his arms, waited.

  Chris said, “I need to talk to you.”

  “About?”

  “The caves.”

  Something changed in Campbell’s face, but the look was gone before Chris could identify it. Surprise? Fear?

  Campbell shrugged. “I don’t know of any caves.”

  “That’s not what Aaron Wolf said.”

  At mention of the name, Campbell donned a bitter smile. “You buddies now?”

  “You’re not very grateful,” Chris said. “I could’ve let his brother keep beating on you.”

  “I’ll send you a fruit basket.”

  “Listen,” Chris said, stepping closer, “I need to know some things, and you can help me. If you don’t get in my car, I’ll make what Daniel Wolf did to you seem gentle.”

  Norman Campbell held Chris’s eyes a long moment. Then the little man grunted, the flabby neck below the chinless face jiggling, and said, “Wait here.”

  Chris put a foot on the stoop. “How do I know you won’t sneak out the back door?”

  “I’m going to pee,” Campbell said. “You wanna watch?”

  Chapter Nine

  “How much did you spend?” Ellie asked.

  Chris lugged two gallons of milk from the counter to the fridge. “Quite a bit,” he said, “but at least we’re set for a while.”

  Ellie studied the piles of vegetables, the row of bread loaves lined up on the counter. “We’ll never be able to fit all this.”

  “Some’ll go to the basement. We can freeze most of the bread.”

  “You act like we’re in a bomb shelter.”

  Chris laughed. “We might as well be.” He started stacking cans in the unused bottom drawers. “The estimates on the bridge aren’t good.”

  Her chest tightened. “What were they?”

  “Thirty grand,” Chris said, without looking at her. “And that’s the low end. One guy said it’d be closer to fifty.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Wish I was.” He knelt, shoved several cans to the back of the cabinet. “So I figured since we couldn’t afford to fix the bridge, we might as well stock up.”

  Ellie spread her arms, dropped them. “How can you be so nonchalant about it? I can’t be stuck here.”

  “I’m stuck too,” he said, “or don’t I count?”

  Her lips thinned. “Did you call Dr. Stone?”

  “I did,” he said and shelved a can.

  “And?”

  “And he said he wouldn’t need to see you until November.”

  She hesitated, the words sinking in. “Honey, that can’t be right. He said I was a high-risk pregnancy. When Katherine had her first child she went to the doctor every couple weeks.”

  “Stone said the tests came out better than he anticipated. Said you were totally healthy.”

  Ellie stared at him. “What tests?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a doctor, how am I supposed to know what he meant?”

  “We need to find out.”

  “We did find out,” he said and finally turned to look at her.

  “Well,” she said and gestured feebly toward the lane. “Did you at least check to see if I had any messages?”

  “No messages for you,” he said. “Just one from my mom.” He gave her a sardonic glance. “Satisfied?”

  “No I’m not satisfied,” she said. “I can’t just wait around. I need to talk to my OB, ask him questions.”

  “So I’m a liar again,” he said, and as he did, she noticed a tiny muscle under his right eye twitch.

  “Chris, I didn’t—”

  She broke off when a small, pudgy man appeared in the doorway. He smiled at her apologetically.

  She glanced at Chris. “What’s going on?”

  He nodded at the small man. “This is Norman Campbell.”

  Campbell looked embarrassed. “I needed to use your bathroom. I’m sorry if I startled you.”

  She turned to Chris. “Honey?”

  He held her gaze a moment, then glanced at Campbell. Chris gave him an exasperated look—Women. What’re you gonna do?—that made her want to pick up one of the cans and brain him with it. He got up and went toward the door saying, “We’ll be back in a minute, Norman. My wife wants to discuss something.”

  When they were in the back yard, Ellie said, “I thought you were going to be nicer to me.”

  “I’m perfectly calm.”

  “You’re talking to me like I’m an idiot.”

  He sighed. “I spent the last three hours running errands to come home and have you snap at me.”

  “I wasn’t snapping.”

  “You’re acting like my kindergarten teacher. Campbell probably thinks I’m an abused husband.”

  “What, I embarrassed you in front of your new friend?”

  And for the briefest of moments, she saw the black rage flicker in his eyes. Then he seemed to deflate. “We’re not fighting, Ellie. Even if you want to.”

  She bit her bottom lip. “I’m sorry. I’m just scared.”

  “If we had the money, we’d get the bridge fixed today…”

  His voice was stilted, unnatural, like he was reading from a script.

  “But we are going to get it fixed, right? It’s either that or move.”

  He seemed about to argue, but before he could, he glanced up at the house and a change came over him. “Norman will give us some ideas.”

  “He knows how to fix a bridge?”

  “He got his degree in engineering. We’re going to troubleshoot, figure out what our options are.”

  Chris’s eyes flitted to the house, where Campbell was holding the back door open.

  “Am I okay to come out?” Campbell asked.

  “Of course,” Chris answered. “I was just saying we’re gonna take a look at the bridge.”

  “Yeah, I heard that,” Campbell said as he came down the steps.

  Ellie watched the little man, thinking, He knows how ludicrous it sounds too. He’s not even wasting the energy to participate in the lie.

  Chris clapped his hands together, said, “Well, better get going. It’s after four already.”

  And as Ellie watched the two set off down the lane, she passed a hand over her belly. It was too early, she knew. But whenever Norman Campbell spoke, she was sure her baby had stirred.

  As soon as they were out of sight of the house, they took a narrow path i
nto the forest, Campbell in the lead.

  “Your wife doesn’t like me,” Campbell said.

  “Neither do I.”

  “What’d I do wrong?”

  Chris watched the little man’s short strides, the khaki pants and leather shoes so incongruous with the forest. “You didn’t do anything, but you have this quality about you…it’s off-putting.”

  “I tend to be that way when I’m taken from my house by threat of violence.”

  “Relax.”

  Campbell stopped, hands on hips.

  “Let’s keep moving,” Chris said. When Campbell refused to budge, Chris heaved a weary sigh. “I’m sorry for the way I talked to you. But you weren’t exactly chummy with me at the library.”

  Campbell didn’t respond to that, but he started down the trail again.

  To his back, Chris said, “What’d you think of the house?”

  “It’s a work-in-progress.”

  “That another way of saying it’s ugly?”

  Campbell shrugged and stepped daintily over a puddle. Chris couldn’t imagine the man behaving the way Aaron Wolf had said he had. Guys like Campbell didn’t participate in gangbangs; they attended poetry readings.

  “That your dog?” Campbell asked.

  Ahead, Petey waited in the middle of the trail. The dog sat on his haunches, his eyes not on Chris, but on Norman Campbell. For the briefest moment Chris was worried Petey would attack the little man the way he had Doris Keller, but instead of lunging at him, the black lab sauntered over and began licking Campbell’s proffered hand. Watching them, Chris almost felt jealous.

  “So tell me about Destragis’s cabal,” Chris said when they’d set off again. Petey trotted along just behind Campbell.

  Campbell said, “Destragis believed that souls, like energy, couldn’t be destroyed.”

  “They go from solids to liquids, that kind of thing?”

  Campbell eyed him coldly. “You want to hear this or not?”

  Chris studied the path between them and did his best to hold back a grin.

  “Most souls,” Campbell went on, “leave their bodies and become like ether, just floating around in space. Aware of their condition but ignorant of how to proceed.”

  “That Destragis’s idea of damnation?”

  Campbell shrugged. “He never used that word, but yeah, being powerless, being directionless would be akin to being in hell.”

  “So what’s heaven?”

  “Purpose,” Campbell said. “And the only way to learn one’s purpose was to follow Destragis.”

  “So he set himself up as a messiah,” Chris said. “Sounds like every cult in the world.”

  A small smile began to form on Campbell’s goateed mouth. The effect was singularly unpleasant. “Maybe you won’t feel that way for long.”

  Chris made what he intended to be a scoffing sound, but it came out high and reedy.

  Campbell’s grin widened. “You’re right to be scared.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Chris said, and shouldered past him, “let’s move before it gets too dark to see.”

  But Campbell didn’t follow, only leaned against the oak and spoke in a meditative voice: “The more I think about it, Chris, the more I realize we’re a lot alike.”

  “We’re nothing alike.”

  “Sure we are,” Campbell said. “We both suspect there’s something to all this, but neither one of us has the courage to embrace it.”

  Chris blew out disgusted breath. “Ridiculous.”

  “I’m the only one left, you know.”

  “In Ravana?”

  “The others all took their lives shortly after Destragis died. It was what he told us to do.”

  “They drink Kool-Aid?”

  “Uh-uh,” Campbell said. “They dug themselves graves, climbed in and slit their own throats.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I couldn’t do it,” Campbell said, his voice suddenly miserable. “I meant to come out here with the rest…but when the time came I was too afraid of dying…” Campbell swallowed. “…too afraid of pain.”

  Chris did his best to hold back his growing dread. “I suppose they did all this here.”

  “In the little clearing.”

  A memory rose in Chris, and the words escaped him before he had time to reconsider. “I heard voices the last time I was there.”

  Campbell glanced at him sharply. “What sort of voices?”

  “It sounded like children,” Chris said. “Babies.”

  “New blood.”

  “It’s true then?”

  Campbell’s voice was barely audible. “I never killed.”

  Chris clenched his jaw, took a step toward the man, who stared at the ground as if in a trance. “You let them murder children?”

  “I wanted to believe him,” Campbell said, his voice breaking. “I wanted to believe we’d come back, the way he and Lillith did. He said they’d done it twice, that they’d lived nearly two centuries.”

  Chris shook his head in disgust. More wild theories, more madness.

  A question occurred to him. “Why were you watching me in the library?”

  Campbell glanced around as if afraid of being overheard. He stepped closer, peered up at him through the forest gloom. “You really want to know?”

  This close Chris could smell the man’s body odor, like old urine fermenting in a bedpan. Campbell uttered a nervous little laugh, licked his lips and looked around again.

  “I want some guarantee,” Campbell said, “that all the stuff we did will come to something.”

  “And you think I can help you? I don’t know anything.”

  “Not you, necessarily,” Campbell said and cast a furtive glance behind him. “But you’re involved in it somehow.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, but Campbell overrode him. “Destragis said we’d die and come back, but he didn’t say how long the interim would be. Some of the first ones who bought in have been dead going on thirty years.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Chris said, “see if I understand this demonic evolution thing.”

  Campbell watched him with wide eyes.

  Chris said, “After you die you’re supposed to come back as what, a vampire?”

  The man nodded eagerly. “The bestial form.”

  “And you want that?”

  Campbell’s face twisted. “Look at me, dammit. Fat, bald, high cholesterol. Anything’s better than this.”

  “Then you die again?”

  “The first realm is the human,” Campbell said. He counted on his fingers. “The second is the vampiric.”

  “You’re a fucking lunatic.”

  “The third life combines the two forms,” Campbell went on unperturbed. “That’s how you knew your aunt, though she never showed you the vampire side.”

  “Lucky me.”

  Campbell held up four fingers, eyes wild, rapturous. “You go through some kind of double-bodied stage—it’s what Destragis called the demonic. Then the final realm—the fifth—is the immortal. The perfect fusion of human, vampire, and demon.”

  “We should head back.”

  Chris started past him, but Campbell clutched his arm. “Do you hear it?”

  Chris jerked his arm away, but as he did he became aware of a rustling to their left, where the trees were thickest. The forest seemed to stretch and crackle as if the trees were straining to tear free of the ground that held them.

  “He’s been following me,” Campbell whispered.

  “Who?” Chris said, but he knew the answer already.

  “Daniel Wolf. He wants to kill me.” Campbell uttered a strained little laugh. “He considers himself some sort of guardian. Thinks he can contain the evil that resides here.”

  Chris peered into the thicket but could make out very little in the failing light. “Did you really steal Daniel’s wife?”

  Campbell’s face spread into a prurient leer. “Sarah didn’t require any stealing.”

  A branch cracked li
ke a gunshot. Both Chris and Campbell whirled and peered into the forest.

  Chris said, “Maybe it’s because of the storm.”

  He glanced at Campbell, who looked like he might be sick. “I don’t think so,” the man answered. “Someone’s here.”

  Chris gazed into the darkening woods. He took Campbell by the arm, compelled him down the path. “Come on. I wanna get this over with.”

  Chapter Ten

  At the bottom of a ravine, Campbell stopped and pointed. About twenty feet to their right and ten feet above them, Chris saw an opening just tall enough for a man to walk through without ducking.

  “You wanted to know where the caves were,” Campbell said. “There you go.”

  Chris maintained a level tone. “This the only one?”

  “There are others,” Campbell said, “but you said you wanted to be home by nightfall. Besides, it’s been a long time since I’ve been out here.”

  Chris started forward.

  But Campbell hung back. “You’re going in?”

  “I didn’t come all this way to chicken out.”

  “This isn’t some dare, Chris. We don’t know if it’s safe.”

  “Then wait out here.”

  Behind him, Chris heard the little man grumble, but when he glanced back, Campbell was following. As he neared the cave he became aware of a faint odor. The smell grew stronger, eye-watering and putrid. Campbell covered his nose with his shirt, and his fish-white belly drooped over his belt.

  Chris wrinkled his nose. “Something must’ve died in there.”

  His voice muffled by his shirt, Campbell said, “Let it stay dead.”

  Chris took a couple steps into the murk.

  From behind them, a powerful voice shouted, “Hands up.”

  Chris froze, and Campbell uttered a shocked gasp. Daniel Wolf stood behind them, blocking the entrance of the cave.

  Chris exhaled. “You scared the hell out of us,” he said and started forward.

  “Don’t move,” Wolf commanded.

  Chris’s stomach dropped. He realized with growing terror that the man was holding a shotgun.

  “What’s this about?” Chris forced himself to say.

  A beam of light splashed over him, and he brought up a hand to shield his eyes.