Hellwalkers

by Alexander Gordon Smith

  “In return for…” prodded Herc.

  “The man had to build it an engine,” said Marlow. “The Engine. It took him ages, trapped in time just like Meridiana. But he did it, he built it.”

  “But what was it for?” asked Pan.

  “To keep it alive,” Marlow said. “It was so old, and it needed a way to stay alive. Its heart—that thing.” Marlow tapped the canister and the reverberations from inside seemed to double in volume for a moment before settling again. “It’s what powers it, it’s like, I don’t know, Iron Man’s Arc Reactor or something, like its energy source. Only really, really evil. The Devil’s body was giving out, so it gave this man a blueprint for a life-support machine, helped him build it in return for bringing the man’s kids back. Only they weren’t really his kids, they were … I don’t even know. They were something bad.”

  Pan thought of the way Ostheim had become a monster, the way that she’d barely been able to look at Mammon, the way Meridiana kept murdering her clones. Yeah, they were bad all right.

  “They had the Devil’s blood in them, they were his children, really, not the guy’s. Anyway, he knew he’d been tricked. So he changed the design of the Engine. He took the Devil’s heart and he hid it, he turned the Engine into a prison. I think.”

  “His heart,” said Herc. The mechanism sat there, pulsing away. Every now and again the lump of meat and gristle inside seemed to squelch from one side to the other, like it was trying to study them. “This?”

  “I guess,” said Marlow.

  “But what does it do?” Charlie asked.

  “Makes him whole,” said Marlow. “The man—he was a watchmaker—said that without the heart, the Devil is just a devil, but with it, it becomes a god. So maybe if we destroy it, then the Devil dies, too.” He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Herc shook his head. “You mean all this time we’re sitting here with this thing and we’re supposed to be destroying it? Marlow, pull it together.”

  The old guy bent down, fiddling with the brass ends of the canister, grunting with frustration. Then he stood, lifting the heart over his head and slamming it down on the floor. It landed with a thump that seemed too loud for its size, leaving a crater in the tiles. Herc stamped on the glass but it didn’t crack. He sat down, wiping his brow.

  “We’ll find something,” he said. “Just give me a sec.”

  “So yeah,” said Marlow, continuing. “The watchmaker turned the Engine into a prison. The Devil was in hell, the heart was here, and so long as they were separated it was powerless.”

  “Whoever holds the Devil, hold him well,” muttered Herc.

  “Huh?” said Pan.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just a quote. So this man hid the heart, trapped the Devil, but where?”

  Marlow chewed his knuckle for a moment, lost in thought, then said, “I think he might have trapped him in the future, I think that’s how he did it.”

  “The future?” said Pan. He nodded.

  “Yeah, you know how the Engine does that, can mess with time. I think the man, this watchmaker, changed something so that the Engine ended up thousands of years from now.”

  “What good would that do?” asked Charlie.

  “Well, no good, if you live in the future,” said Marlow. “But if you lived back then, in the past, then it would have saved you. The Devil can’t hurt you if he’s moved to another millennium, can he?”

  “That would explain the city,” said Pan. “The world.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” said Marlow. “All those dead. Millions, billions of them. He killed them all.”

  “Hold on,” said Herc. “This doesn’t make sense. Because if he used the Engine as a prison, holding the Devil until the future, then why does the Engine grant wishes?”

  “Because it’s powered by the Devil’s blood,” said Pan.

  “Yeah,” said Marlow. “Its blood runs through it, and it’s powerful, it can give you, I don’t know, superpowers and stuff. It’s black, it’s got these weird sparkly things in it.”

  “Like the Black Pool,” said Charlie.

  “Yeah, like the pool. I’m not sure, but I think that’s where the power comes from. The blood flows through the Engine, through every part of it, then it ends up in the Black Pool. The Engine, it kind of filters it, customizes it to what you’ve asked for. What was it Seth always said? It cracks the code of this little pocket of reality. Then, when you go into the pool, I guess the blood gets inside you, you drink it, and you change, too.”

  Pan took a sip of Herc’s coffee and felt it churn in her stomach. The food, which had tasted so good, was sitting there like a lead brick.

  “This is all good, but what was that thing? I mean, was it actually the Devil?”

  Marlow shook his head, drawing a pattern in a pile of salt on the table.

  “I’m not sure. The man said it wasn’t the Devil. I think it was something worse. He called it a Stranger.”

  Pan didn’t know how, but she knew he’d given it a capital S.

  “Stranger,” said Herc, chewing on the word. “What did it look like?”

  “You’ve seen it,” he said. “You all have. It’s that thing in the pool.”

  Herc was scratching his head, his frown lines like surgical scars.

  “Okay,” he said. “So there’s the Devil, Stranger, who is evil. Then a man who made a deal with the Devil, who managed to keep it prisoner. And he’s good. And the five kids?”

  “He loved them,” said Marlow. “The Devil made them look like real children but they weren’t, they were monsters. But … I think the watchmaker’s love kind of changed them back.” He looked at Pan. “Love can do that, right?”

  She blushed, but she nodded. Yeah, love could do that.

  “But the Devil turned one of them against him, one called Mephistopheles.”

  “Who’s that?” said Charlie. “I know that name.”

  “Think about it,” said Marlow. Pan did, working the word around her head, seeing something there and then losing it. Herc slammed a fist on the table, making her jump.

  “Mephistopheles,” he growled. “Sheppel Ostheim. It’s an anagram. I’m so goddamned stupid!”

  “Nobody saw it, Herc,” said Marlow. “Nobody.”

  For a moment there was quiet, just the bustle of the city outside their window, oblivious, the sound of traffic and a distant siren—the lullaby of home. Pan waved her hand through a shaft of sunlight, scattering dust.

  “And the demons?” asked Herc. “Why do they come for you? How do they know when your contract has ended?”

  Marlow popped his lips. “He sends them, I think, the Stranger. The deal is with him, ultimately, through the Engine, so he knows when your time is up. He controls the demons, he makes them, right? We saw people, they were drinking his blood, turning into demons. They can breach the divide, but because the Engines aren’t united only their energy makes it through.”

  “Sure,” said Herc. “It’s why they possess walls and stuff.”

  “Yeah, so he sends them, and they take your … your soul, I guess. The bit of you that’s you.”

  “But why?” said Herc. “I’ve been doing this most of my miserable life and I understand less now than ever. Why would this thing want to possess your soul?”

  Pan looked at Marlow, and he looked back, and when their eyes met she suddenly knew.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” she asked him. “You said it yourself, Marlow, that we were there because we had something to give him.”

  He didn’t answer, just turned his attention back to that mess of salt.

  “This,” she said, gesturing at the heart that pumped inside its cage. “We could give him this. We could make a deal to open up the gates and bring him back, reunite him with his heart.”

  “But somebody would have done it already,” Marlow said. “Right? I can’t have been the first person to have reached the Devil. It was nothing to do with me.”

  Pan slapped her forehead. �
�I’d almost forgotten. He was living in your house, Marlow.”

  “What?” barked Herc.

  “Yeah, his house. You wanna explain that one?”

  “I don’t know,” Marlow said, and when she started to push it he swiped a hand over the table, scattering salt and condiments. “Yeah, it was my house. The Devil was in my kitchen. The watchmaker told me only I had the power to change everything. What does that mean, Herc?”

  Nothing, just silence, punctuated by the same siren. Marlow grated his chair back, walking to the wall and resting his head there. Herc cleared his throat, studying his fingernails like there might be answers written in the dirt. That siren was definitely louder, and Pan could hear the gunning of an engine. She squinted through the dirty window, seeing the street outside, a couple of customers, and Petal, too, phone in her hand, looking impatient.

  “I think she screwed us,” she said.

  Herc looked at her, then out the window, then he pushed up so hard his chair flew backward.

  “Goddammit, Petal!” he roared, pointing at her through the glass. “That was eight hundred bucks! Come on.”

  But even as they were getting to their feet the squad car screeched to a halt, bumping up onto the curb. Charlie swore, leaping the counter and disappearing through the staff door. He emerged a second later, shaking his head. Herc sighed, his fist flexing.

  “Just let me do the talking, yeah?”

  He lifted the canister with the heart and they filed from the shop one by one. By the time they were out the cops were scrambling from the car. One of them had his hand on his sidearm, the other actually pulling her gun from its holster when she saw Marlow and Pan.

  “Take it easy,” said Herc, thumping the canister onto the sidewalk. “There’s nothing to see here.”

  “Yeah,” said the second cop, looking at Pan’s blood-marbled shorts, at Marlow’s face, at the canister, which kind of looked a little like a nuclear weapon. The woman pressed the fingers of her free hand to her forehead as she sensed that awful pulse. “Sure.”

  “They said they were in a play,” said Petal. “But I don’t—”

  “Shut it, Petal,” growled Herc, and the other cop slid his gun free, too.

  “I’m going to need you to get on the ground,” he said to Herc. “Hands where I can see them. That a problem?”

  “With these knees,” Herc said. “Yeah.”

  The cops glanced at each other, the guy stepping wide, pistol clamped in both hands. He was twitching his head like he was trying to shake water from his ear.

  “Look, everything’s fine,” said Pan. “It’s not what it looks like.”

  “Wanna tell me what it looks like?” said the woman.

  “No,” she said, but at the same time Marlow started blurting.

  “We were in hell, me and her. That’s why our clothes look weird. That’s where the blood came from. We just got out, these guys are our friends, Herc here is mission commander. We’re like a Special Forces outfit, but for supernatural stuff. Because there’s an Engine, which can kind of give you powers, only we found out it wasn’t the Engine, it was this thing, like the Devil only not the Devil, something else, and its blood is what gives you powers, and I might have accidentally left the door open after we got out of hell and it might be, you know, coming. Like, now. For this. That’s its heart, in there, it’s sorta still beating and if he gets it back everything will be over. So yeah, that’s what happened. And there are no shoes in hell, just so you know. We couldn’t see any shoes.”

  Herc slapped a hand to his forehead and Charlie actually burst out laughing for a second or two until the cop glared at him.

  “You think this is funny?” she said. She pressed her collar radio, never taking the gun off Herc. “Yeah, Dispatch, we got a 10–33 at 162 Industrial, four suspects being detained so we need a bus, over.”

  Her radio fizzed, then made a sound like a screeching cat. She flinched, trying again.

  “Ten-33 at 162 Industrial, send a bus, over.”

  The radio screeched again, and this time something fizzed out of it—a spark that lashed up and struck a streetlight. The bulb exploded, raining glass, and the cop panicked, pulling the trigger. Her gun barked, the bullet skimming Herc’s head and punching a hole through the café window.

  “Hey!” yelled Herc and Petal together.

  The woman’s radio was still sparking and she ripped it away, tossing it to the street. The other cop was shouting something into his own radio—“Shots fired! Shots fired!”—but the only answer was that cat screech again. It wasn’t just coming from them, Pan realized, it was being blasted from the car radio, too, from every car radio, the sound of it filling the street.

  “Stay where you are!” the woman yelled, her gun hand shaking. “Do not move.”

  The air hummed, every light on the street, every headlight, suddenly blazing even though the day burned brightly. Something was raging inside Pan’s head, too—panic, pure and terrible.

  “No,” she said.

  Farther down, the way they’d walked up from the Red Door, the street bucked like a rodeo bull, the force of it bumping cars into the air, shattering the windows in the apartment buildings. That generator hum grew in volume until, as one, the lights on the street exploded. Pan ducked, breathing in a stench that made her want to vomit. There was no denying what it was, that rotten egg smell she knew so well.

  Sulfur.

  “What—” the cop started, and the ground thumped up again, pieces of asphalt popping like corn. She toppled back into the squad car, spinning to the ground. Her gun clattered halfway across the street. The other cop had no idea what to do, swinging his weapon wildly left and right. Everyone else was fleeing the scene.

  “Hey,” said Herc, both hands raised as he addressed the man. “Listen to me. Something bad is coming. Something really bad. If I was you, I’d get in that car, go find your family, and get the hell out of Dodge. You hear me?”

  The ground lurched up again and Pan could almost see it, a shape of darkness bouldering against the Red Door, demanding to be released.

  “What is it?” the cop asked, his weapon finally dropping to his side.

  “Hell,” said Pan. “Hell is coming.”

  And he must have seen something in her worth believing because he holstered his weapon and dived into the squad car, screeching away. The other officer was scampering into the road, an SUV skidding past her, horn honking.

  “You, too,” said Herc. “Nothing you can do here.”

  He turned to Pan, to Marlow.

  “So, this is it. The thing we’ve been working to prevent since all of this began. We’ve somehow made it happen.”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” said Marlow, when Herc threw him a look.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ve been outplayed.” He looked down to where the canister sat like a vat of toxic waste. “I’m guessing the Devil is going to be gunning for that, so we’d better—”

  Another explosion beneath them, a sonic boom that almost reduced Pan’s brain to mush. She could hear another sound, woven around the first, an echoing thunder of laughter. The cop obviously heard it too, because she turned and ran, her weapon abandoned.

  “Dibs,” said Charlie, waiting for a semi to hiss past before running out and claiming it.

  It wouldn’t do him any good, Pan thought. There was no weapon here capable of defending against the thing that pounded at the door. This was a world made of straw, not bricks, and the Devil would blow it over with a single breath.

  Unless they destroyed the heart before he could find it.

  Herc had obviously thought the same thing because he’d taken the gun from Charlie. He aimed it at the canister, flicked off the safety, fired off a shot. Pan flinched, her ears ringing. She heard Herc fire three more times, then swear. When she looked back the canister was unchanged, the glass not even scuffed. The heart beat inside, the sound of it almost mocking them.

  And the Devil answered its call, roaring.
>
  “What do we do?” she asked Herc.

  He stood there, muttering something so quietly that she couldn’t hear it over the growing storm. She moved closer, trying to make sense of his words, finally catching them.

  “Whoever holds the Devil, hold him well,” he said, turning to her. He was trying to look strong, but Pan saw the way his lip trembled, saw the watery fear in his eyes. “Because he will not be caught a second time.”

  And even as he said it, all hell broke loose.

  HELL ON EARTH

  It started with a scream.

  Marlow coughed the gunk from his lungs, turned to look past Pan, past Herc, past Charlie, past the cop car, past the traffic—which was like a demolition derby now, as the chaos set in.

  Somebody was on fire down the street, their entire body engulfed in flame. They made it three or four feet, loosing another shriek into the day, then they exploded.

  Literally exploded.

  The flames were doused by the force of it, the figure blooming into a flower of dark ash, which drifted outward. A second woman ran through it, oblivious, then she, too, became a screaming immolation, flailing, collapsing, detonating into silence.

  “Move,” said Herc, grabbing the canister, struggling up the street with it.

  Marlow couldn’t seem to remember how, his body made of stone. The air was poisonous, that reek of sulfur clawing into his lungs, dissolving them. In the distance, two more people erupted, the fire burning through them like they were paper soaked in kerosene. They both exploded together, the sound of it arriving at Marlow a second or two after the visual. He still couldn’t move, watching the ash—ash that had just been skin and bone, smiles and laughter—catch hold of the wind, riding it up the street.

  “Yo!” Charlie shouted. “Marlow, come on!”

  He concentrated, found first gear and floored it—turning and running after the others. The awful trinity of sounds chased him, shrieks, and whumps of ignition, then the gunshot pop that ended it all. Traffic streamed past, the cars in the other lane crunching into one another as they tried to turn. Marlow heard a metallic prang, looked over his shoulder to see a dry cleaning van mount the curb behind him, closing fast. The windshield was blackened, an inferno raging inside.