The restraints holding his arms in place were solid steel shackles that looked about a quarter of an inch thick and three or four inches long.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “How is it you can do so much through my body yet you can’t get out of those cuffs?”
“My body is weak here. It cannot sustain without flames. My mind, however, is strong. I can manipulate the feebleminded…or open-minded. Not Adler or Blake. Their minds are too sheltered and guarded for me to penetrate, but yours…we shared something. I made a sacrifice for you.” He glanced at the black blood-crusted mound between his legs. “I gave you power to heal, to have strength. All I ask in return is that you turn this room into a pyre. You can’t break these shackles and I doubt you have a key.”
“But—”
“But nothing. Only fire can set me free.”
I stood there staring at him for I don’t know how long, this monster before me lying helpless yet more powerful that any human being. I still couldn’t understand how it was he couldn’t help himself, though I’m sure if he’d been capable he would have escaped this hell (for lack of a better word) days a go.
“Quickly! Before Adler wakes.”
“Before I have to use my wiles.”
His voice was so gentle in my mind that I knew he would do me no harm. If it was a blazing inferno he wanted, it was a blazing inferno he would get. As absurd and distorted as it would have seemed to an outsider, it was perhaps the most compassionate thing I could do for the son of the Devil, a beast whom I had cared for and even developed a connection with. He’d been suffering in a world that was far too cold for his blood, a world he had been forced into like a bizarre curio for a collector of all things morbid and unique, a man who had dedicated his life to the Dark Arts yet did not understand what he was getting himself into.
I gathered the remaining wood from the hearth and placed it around Salpsan’s bed. I then ripped the curtains off of the windows in both of our rooms. I took anything and everything that was flammable and piled it atop and around him. I only paused as I scanned the neat and tidy array of medicines and medical devices on a foldout table. I pocketed the painkillers. Everything else was added to the pile. All of this was done in haste, quickly, sweat spilling off my face, but I didn’t hurt, and I was thankful for that, even if it was due to a demon’s phallic blood.
Using a small brass shovel hanging with a fire poker and a small duster near the hearth, I scooped up glowing embers and flaming bits of wood and tossed them onto the pile. With each shovel-full I cringed, expecting Salpsan to cry out as a red-hot coal singed his skin. I had nothing to fear. I could feel him within me, and he was finally at peace as if he knew this small blaze would set him free.
Once the fire grew I left the room and rushed down the hall. The room with the spiral staircase was quiet, but something was wrong. It took me a minute, but then I realized that the halves of book that had fallen to the floor were gone.
I took in a deep breath and walked through the kitchen. No one was in there, at least that I could see. Either Blake or Adler had grabbed the book, and I could do without confronting either of them. I wouldn’t have Salpsan to fight my battles for me. From here on out I was in it alone.
That’s why I’d grabbed the poker from the hearth.
As I ran through the kitchen, the dining hall, and another room before making my way to the huge front doors, I didn’t bother with being inconspicuous or even familiarizing myself with my surroundings. I couldn’t afford to be stalled with frights, small or large. They could be in there, waiting for me, but I had to keep my eye on the prize, which turned out to be a pair of arched doors that were rather beautiful were it not for my strenuous and terrifying predicament.
They had to be locked from the outside. They just had to be. That would be my luck.
But they weren’t.
The air outside was cool and refreshing, smelled of lake water and weeds. I wanted to collapse to the ground and lie there in the cold grass, but I couldn’t. I had to get as far away as I could.
In my burst of freedom I stumbled over a rock and all but crawled several yards before standing again. The wind whipped through the dilapidated outhouse-like buildings and then a sound cried out from behind me, the smashing of door against stone wall.
Adler came running after me, his broken hand flopping grotesquely, his good hand wielding something between a large knife and a sword, a menacing weapon with my name etched into the tip of the blade. He screamed and yelled. I couldn’t be sure whether he was cursing me or attempting to call forth whatever it was he’d attempted to bring through the portal.
In my fear I made the mistake of running into one of the outbuildings. Immediately I regretted my action, but all I could do was hope that there was a backdoor and that Adler wouldn’t be there, anticipating my next move.
An overwhelming odor of death hit me, almost causing a gag reflex. If it was an animal, it must have been a horse or cow. The small building was dark, but there were windows, some of them broken, that allowed the brilliance of a harvest moon to illuminate my new surroundings. Cobwebs adorned the walls, thick with dust and vacant of spiders. I stood still, adjusting to my surroundings and listening, but couldn’t hear if Adler was moving around the building. The windows were all too high to see out of.
Careful of my steps, I walked into the next room. I wasn’t looking forward to discovering the source of the fetid stench, and when I did I had to place my hand in my mouth to prevent screaming. Even in my horror and disgust I couldn’t allow Adler to have any more of the upper hand than he already had.
In a heap in the middle of the room were bodies that couldn’t be mistaken for animal, though they were so mangled and intertwined that I couldn’t make out any one person individually. Shocked, I stared, tracing the contours of an arm and a leg, a back that had turned green from decay and then I realized that I wasn’t looking at human beings, but creatures like Salpsan. Their skin was rotten, yet wielded similar spike-like protrusions. I could see an agonized death grimace, flies buzzing the cataract eyes, horns erupting from the forehead. An image from so many conceptual visions of Hell.
The reasonable part of me thought of demons and associated them with evil; however, the sensible part, the compassionate part that felt something for Salpsan and his treatment, that part had me reeling for these unfortunates. To be plucked from your native land, whether that be another country or another dimension, and tortured and killed was inhumane, unacceptable, and deeply disturbing.
Knowing there was a maniac waiting for me outside was as unsettling as the pile of carcasses lying on the floor ahead of me. All I could do was stand in the opening between the two rooms the outbuilding consisted of and wait until Adler made the first move.
I didn’t have to wait long. A roar came from outside, followed by a scuffle of sorts and the unmistakable sound of fire whooshing.
I chose to exit through the rear door, opposite of the source of the sounds. Maneuvering my way past the pile of death, I slipped on a small pool of decomposition sludge that had accumulated from the rotting bodies. Unable to grab onto something, I fell face-first into the mass of soft, decaying flesh. I had thought the smell to be unpleasant when I stepped into the building, but I couldn’t begin to describe the putrescence that erupted as I negotiated my way through the sticky bodies to the door. I couldn’t stop myself from screaming and leaping about as I pushed the door open and flung myself outside. Had Adler been waiting for me at that moment I would have been a sitting duck I was so disgusted and mortified by what I had just been through.
All I could think to do was roll on the ground and hope to get as much gooey rotten flesh off of me, particularly my face, as I could. I spit in the grass until there was no saliva left in my mouth, and then I stood, suddenly brought back to a reality that was no better than dancing on the floor with the dead.
Turning the corner of the Outbuilding of Death, I saw something on fire, moving. It wasn’t the house, for it wa
s built of stone and wouldn’t burn, but I had no doubt that the fire was, in some way, connected to Salpsan.
Adler waved the large knife at the ball of flame in a defensive manner, backing up as the flame closed in on him. Reluctant to be seen, I watched from the shadows of a tree. They came closer and I could see that within the fire was Salpsan, and he appeared to be grinning. He was finally in his element, burning as if in Hell, and finally he was allowed to even the score with Adler.
I couldn’t blame him.
Adler became engulfed, the ball of flame increased by one.
Salpsan saw me, or maybe he sensed me, for a part of him was still inside of me, I could tell because I felt no pain in a body that, for good reason, should be crippled with it.
As he approached, I feared nothing. He wasn’t going to do me harm. I wondered what he was going to do with himself, if he knew a way back to where he’d come from.
He stopped at a safe distance, his body but a deep orange silhouette within flickering, crackling flame. He said, within my mind, “You’re free to go.”
I hated having to give him the news that I was about to deliver, certain that the bodies I’d just seen were his brethren, but I wasn’t about to allow him to leave without having an opportunity to give them a proper burial, or whatever ritual his kind had reserved for death.
Unsure whether he would be able to hear me through the whipping flames, I responded telepathically. “You weren’t the first. He brought others through. They’re piled in this building.”
We stared at one another. I could feel the heat radiating form a fire that seemed as if it would burn perpetually, a demonic force that could be grinning or glaring, pleased or saddened by what I’d told him. It was impossible to tell. I broke our stare and walked up the slope toward the dirt road. I told myself, convinced myself that I wasn’t afraid, but deep down I was petrified. The look on his face…pure evil.
The Devil’s son.
Yet he allowed me to go. I walked the dirt road in the direction I had come in on, desperate, exhausted, saddened. I had nothing and yet I had everything because I had my life. After so many years of dwelling in sorrow and feeling like a pariah, I realized that I had something because I was alive and I had nothing to lose. I could stay in Spain or return to the States and either way I would have to reinvent myself, but I could deal with that.
As I advanced down the road, I felt the old familiar aches and pains like barbed pins and needles being inserted and pulled from my tendons, my bones. In attempt to combat what was going to be a dilapidating flair-up, I dry-swallowed a handful of painkillers one at a time.
I turned and saw a large fire in the distance. The outbuilding.
I shed a tear for Salpsan and then another for myself, for the pain. I walked on, pain rising with every step as if every muscle was on fire. We both burned that night. In our own way.
I made it to the next farmhouse before I collapsed and was found in the morning, delivered to the hospital where I recovered from my wounds and was deported back to America.
As for Salpsan…
About the Author
Robert Essig is the author of In Black, People of the Ethereal Realm, and Through the In Between, Hell Awaits. In addition, he has published over seventy short stories, two novellas, and edited two small press anthologies. Robert lives with his family in Southern California. Visit him at robertessig.blogspot.com.
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