Demon Jack

by Patrick Donovan

  A girl sat on the bed. She was early twenties at best. I felt a stirring as soon as my eyes fell on her, something far away and distinct. For a moment, all I could do was stare. Maggie was pretty. This girl was almost painfully beautiful. There was something almost unreal about her. She was above average height, her build athletic enough to be considered healthy, but with curves enough to be feminine. Her skin had a healthy bronzing, the sort of tan someone gets au natural, from the beach or long summers outside as opposed to a spray on or one of those microwave beds. She had hair that was cut short and followed her jaw line. It was the same color as a crashing wave. Deep blues mixed with white and light green highlights. On most it would have looked punkish, or maybe even extreme. It fit her, like it was her natural color as opposed to a bottled hue.

  She looked between us, her eyes slightly on the large side, almost too big for her face but perfectly offset with a tiny nose and lips the color of cherries. She watched us for a long moment, before one thin, delicate brow rose slightly.

  “Do I know you?” she asked.

  Maggie seated herself in a chair beside the bed. I propped against the wall and tried to look as non-threatening as possible. Lucy stared back and forth between us, eyes wide, glassy. She had a distant look, as if she was seeing something beyond what either Maggie or myself could. It was disconcerting when she turned them on you, like she was seeing under your skin, to your core.

  “‘Ello poppet. My name’s Maggie. This dour looking motherfucker ‘ere,” she said, motioning towards me, “is Jack. We wanted to talk to you about what ‘appened.”

  Lucy slid back on the bed trying to put as much distance between her and us as possible. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, hugging herself. She watched us warily, like a mouse that’s just seen a cat waiting on the other side of the mouse hole.

  “I don’t wanna talk about that,” she whispered.

  “I don’t blame ya, but ya need to. We’re the only ‘ope you ‘ave of whatever it is getting a little come-uppance on your behalf.”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” she said.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Maggie said, her tone soft and comforting.

  Lucy tilted her head to the side. Her eyes slid out of focus and became distant. She looked like she heard something far off, a whisper or a song, and was putting the majority of her focus there and ignoring our presence.

  “You believe me?” she asked.

  “We do,” I said quietly.

  I could see the gears in her head turning things over and weighing options. I could also see that she was terrified. Something had invaded her, raped her from the inside of her head out and caused her to do things that were a direct contrast to her nature. It had used her as a murder weapon, a sentient tool that got to see everything it was doing without any control what so ever to stop it from happening.

  “Tell us what ‘appened,” Maggie said gently, reaching out to put her hand over Lucy’s. The girl seemed to settle at the touch, her eyes snapping over to Maggie and then settling on her with a distant stare. I smelled Maggie's perfume again, washing over me in a thick cloud.

  “I left home, a... a few weeks ago. I lived in Missouri.”

  Maggie nodded.

  “Go on.”

  “I... I didn’t get along with my parents,” Lucy turned her head, staring out the window. “They always wanted me to be this, I always wanted to be that, and we argued. That wasn’t why I left though. I mean really it wasn’t, it was for something different. They liked to lock me away in hospitals. All the time. Ever since I was a little girl. Just lock me away and forget me because I was strange or stoned. Usually stoned, at least when I was older. I guess I didn’t make their cocktail parties too much fun.”

  Maggie kept her attention on Lucy, encouraging her with a nod.

  “I heard things. Lots of things. Voices.”

  “And you couldn’t help it,” Maggie said quietly. “So you got stoned.”

  She shook her head. I could see the glistening trails the tears cut down her cheek. I lowered my head. I couldn’t look at it.

  “No. I couldn’t and it made me sad because I... I didn’t want to hear them. I didn’t want them to shut me away. I wanted to play outside, and run around... and not hear all the words these dead things said.”

  “Dead things?” Maggie asked.

  “Yes. Yes. Dead things. Dead people mostly. I even heard a cat once. There was never anything there but the words. It was like a noise I couldn’t get rid of.”

  For a long moment I said nothing, letting silence hang in the air.

  “What happened when you killed the man?” Lucy asked, looking towards me. “In prison I mean?”

  I lifted my head, startled. Maggie was staring at me. Lucy looked at my face, her eyes going back to that glassy, distant stare. She was looking beneath the hood, directly into my face, her jaw hanging slightly open. She didn’t seem scared so much as entranced.

  “Oh my God. Your face is burning,” she said quietly, her voice barely a whisper. “All the pictures on your face are on fire... but they aren’t.”

  I reached up, touching the scars along my cheek. They felt the same as they always did, slightly raised lines in my skin, each one another crossed T or a dotted I in the deal that left me without a soul.

  “You’re so empty,” she said, standing slowly. The act itself was almost poetic in its simplicity. The motion of her body rising, a normally simple act, was like a sonnet, rolling and gliding. I shook my head, fighting to ignore it, to dismiss the weird wash of sensation that ran over me. Pretty girl and no love life to speak of, that’s all it was.

  She walked towards me, and with gentle hands pushed the hood back from my face. Her touch was cool and light as she traced the demonic characters with her fingertips. Her eyes seemed to focus on me and something in my stomach did an excited backflip.

  “You’re... you’re... you’ve touched them, the things that touched me. Why are you here?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, gently taking her hands, pushing them away. Despite her looks and the effects they were having on my anatomy, her touch bothered me. I couldn’t explain why, just that it made me feel different and nervous.

  “You smell like it, you...” She let her voice trail off. As quickly as she had stood, she turned around and went back to her seat on the bed. “When... when it happened. I got angry. Really angry and mad. I wanted to smoke one, that’s what I do, it keeps the voices quiet for me to get stoned... but I couldn’t. Everything started going red. I wasn’t even mad when it happened but then I was... and then...” Once more the tears started to fall, slowly. She didn’t sob, the tears just nestled against her eyes until they became too heavy and trailed downwards.

  So it was a demon. It had latched onto her rage, twisted and amplified it, made it its own. That just opened up a world of questions that I didn't have answers for.

  I slid the hood back over my head, taking my spot against the wall once more and listening. Maggie had watched the entire thing without saying a word. Now that Lucy was talking again, her attention was solely focused on the girl, leaving me to my thoughts. She had seen the contract in essence. I had no soul. It was there, but it wasn’t mine. It was bonded with Alice, completely. We were in a lot of senses the same being. My life fed hers, as her essence fed mine. Lucy had seen that for what it was, past the physical. If she had been possessed, it could have something to do with that. Maybe it was the result of some sort of demonic echo that had stained her.

  “Then I heard all these voices, all of ‘em, all at once, and they were screaming and laughing and evil. All at the same time. They echoed with each other, and they made funny warbly noises like... I don’t know. After that I woke up. And I was in a police car and bloody and they brought me there and then there and then here.”

  More tears came, real tears. She shook with heavy, body racking sobs that rattled her to her very core. Maggie didn’t say anything, just held the girl as
she cried, one hand gently stroking her hair. She cut a look back to me over Lucy’s shoulder. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. The message was clear.

  The thing that did this was going to hurt. A lot.

  It happened almost on cue. I felt the rush of power gathering somewhere close, noxious and disgusting. The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood up. Maggie and Lucy felt it to. Maggie’s eyes were narrowed, scanning the room. She had one hand in her messenger bag. The other was intertwined with Lucy’s. Lucy, in the meantime, looked like she wanted to crawl under the bed with a teddy bear and hide. She tried to look everywhere at once, her eyes wide and frightened.

  When the door opened, we all jumped. I took a step back turning my body towards the door, just in case. A nurse stepped in. He had a tray in one hand, little cups of medication covering its surface. He was a few inches taller than me with a slight build. Blond hair hung just into his eyes. He paused in mid-step, just inside the door, and blinked twice. When he looked up at us, his eyes were an almost radioactive, glowing green.

  Chapter 6

  I stepped in front of the nurse, putting myself between him, Lucy and Maggie. He wore generic teal scrubs and his nameplate read “Chad”, written in black letters on a little gold strip. Maggie shot to her feet behind me. I could hear Lucy let out a weak, strangled whine birthed from pure fear. It struck a chord in me, and I felt a surging wave of anger rising up into my chest, wrapping itself around my heart and kicking its steady rhythm up into double time.

  Chad stared at me, eyes burning a molten green. There was something different in the glow radiating from those eyes now. They were more aware, more directed. The feral rage it had displayed when it had taken Essie was gone and had been replaced with a malicious intelligence. Chad’s lip quivered, a thin string of saliva running down his chin. He sneered at me and I could see the trembling of tensing muscles beneath the standard issue hospital scrubs.

  “You,” it said in a voice that rang louder and stronger than it had when I heard it speak through Essie earlier. There had been maybe ten voices then, all intermingled and rolling over each other. There were at least a hundred now. I almost felt dizzy under the weight of the dissonance of tones in that single word.

  “Hi,” I said. “Long time, no see.”

  I took a slow, deep breath forcing my body to relax. I started at my feet and visualized each breath carrying the tension out of my body on the exhale and bringing in renewed energy on the inhale. It was something I had been doing for so long, I was able to settle into an almost Zen-like state after about two seconds. I made sure I kept myself in front of Chad, taking the bulk of his attention.

  “That’s it. That’s it,” I heard Lucy whimper behind me. She was repeating it over and over to herself like a mantra. I didn’t turn around, despite how much the fear in her voice was pulling at me to do just that. I squared my shoulders, lifted my chin and met Chad’s stare head on. A feverish heat resonated from the light pouring from his eyes. It made my stomach roll.

  “If you let us take her, we will leave you be,” it said after a long moment of quiet.

  I looked back towards Lucy. Maggie had put herself at my back, in between Lucy and me. She had a windproof butane lighter in her hand, the kind that sounds like a jet engine when you light it. She clicked the top open and shut with quick, nervous motions. Lucy had backed into the corner and stood absolutely frozen, her eyes wide with fright. Fat, heavy tears rolled down her cheeks.

  I turned back towards the nurse.

  “And if I say no?”

  “Then we will go through you. Literally,” it said, its lips stretching back into a grin. “And we will take back what is ours.”

  So it was the same thing that had taken Lucy. Interesting. It was also giving me a way out. If I let it go for Lucy, just walked away, Maggie would try to stop it. She might be able to kill it, she might not. If she wasn’t able to put it down, she'd be able to take enough fight out of it that I could finish the job easy enough myself. Granted, I’d have to make sure Maggie didn’t come out of it whole either, give myself a head start from the Ordo. The hospital wasn’t heavy on security and any surveillance videos would just show a guy with a hood accompanying Maggie on the way in. I could make this work to my advantage.

  “So let me make sure I understand this. I let you take her, I walk?” I asked, looking over my shoulder again at Maggie and Lucy. Maggie’s face contorted in sheer shock and outrage as she tried to comprehend the fact that I was about to sell them both out. Lucy said nothing. I could almost see the remnants of hope, a hope we had instilled moments ago, drain from her features.

  “What about the limey?”

  “We will find uses for her. She is old. Strong,” it said, licking its lips as its eyes turned to Maggie.

  I nodded slowly, thinking the options over. I could hear Maggie calling me about fifteen different variations on a son of a bitch under her breath. A sob, little more than a squeak, slipped past Lucy’s lips.

  “Answer me this, why do you want her? You've got your fair choice of bodies, obviously.”

  “She is strong, God touched,” Chad growled.

  I had absolutely no idea what that meant.

  “Decide now. Our patience wears thin.”

  For a long moment I stood there without answering. I just stared, my eyes locked on Chad’s face.

  “Take ‘em,” I said finally.

  “You motherfucker!” Maggie screamed.

  “Excellent. You are dismissed,” Chad said, moving to step past me.

  Even without Alice, I had always been strong. My father had been a fan of hard work, when he wasn’t drinking that was. I’d had muscle beaten into me with manual labor when I was a kid. With Alice’s bonus oomph, I could easily flip a compact car end over end. I hit him the second his first step forward hit the floor. There was a loud, wet, crunching impact as teeth shattered and Chad was lifted from his feet and propelled backwards with the force of a ballistic missile. He still had the medicine tray in his hands when I hit him, and the pills spilled to the floor in a multi-colored cascade. He hit the wall with a resounding crack and crumpled to the floor, chips of mortar falling around him.

  He was back up in an instant. He let out a screech that sounded like layers of feedback looped over itself, a hundred enraged voices all competing for prominence in a single cry. He hit me at the waist in a full-blown football tackle. If I hadn't known how to fall and roll with it the sheer whip crack force from getting hit like that would have been enough to snap my spine. Still, while this may have been the same thing that had taken both Lucy and Essie, it had moved past the mostly feral animal that I’d dealt with before. Chad went with the roll, letting the momentum of my motion carry him off of me and back to his feet. I was up less than a second later, already moving to intercept his path to Maggie and Lucy.

  “What the fuck are you two waiting for? Go!” I yelled.

  “Oy, c’mon poppet,” Maggie said and brushed by me. She had Lucy by the wrist and the two of them bolted towards the door, going up and over the bed. Chad lunged for them. I put myself in between him and them, sending him staggering back with a hard shove. I didn’t watch them go, just kept them in my peripheral.

  I heard the door open and shut a second after the first klaxon call of the alarm went up. Despite the noise, which was damn disorienting, I could hear the electric snap of the door’s lock slamming shut. I focused on Chad, letting Maggie and Lucy fall from my mind. I couldn’t afford to worry about them at the moment. They’d have to find a way out of the hospital on their own.

  “You should have given them to us,” Chad snarled.

  “Yeah probably,” I admitted.

  “You’ll die for them,” it said.

  “Not today.”

  I slapped his next punch away, sending it out wide, throwing him off balance. My foot connected with the side of his knee in a hard, stomping kick and I was rewarded with a dry cracking sound. He staggered, the joint twisted to a
sickening, unnatural angle. He dropped to his knees, his leg unable to hold his weight. I grabbed a handful of hair, driving another knee into his temple. His head snapped to the side and I could feel the tearing in my fingertips as the hair in my hand ripped free of his scalp. He hit the floor and rolled in a tangle of limbs, coming to rest at the base of the wall.

  I took a step back, breathing heavily, and shook the hair from my fingers. I could taste adrenaline, heavy and coppery on my tongue. It felt like minutes had passed, but it had been maybe thirty seconds tops since Maggie and Lucy had made a break for it.

  Chad barely gave me a chance to brace myself before he lunged, pushing off with his still working leg and hitting me with the entirety of his mass, slamming me back into the wall with just the force of his body. He hit me twice, two shattering sledgehammer like blows that connected with my ribs. I heard a crack and lances of pain shot through my chest and shoulder, making each breath an exercise in pure white-hot agony.

  Shoving him away from me, I sucked in a deep, gulping breath of air and was rewarded with another sharp stab of agony from my ribs. The entire side of my chest where he had hit me felt tight, like a massive rubber band hand been stretched around my chest and was compressing my lungs. Each inhalation was like being hit, just as hard, all over again. We stood there for a half a second, each of us watching for a tell, something that would show a weakness or give an opening. Despite his injured leg, Chad seemed to be moving just fine now. The only sound came from the malignant call of the alarm and my wheezing breath.

  I saw the door open over Chad’s shoulder. Another nurse was doing room checks, using one of those key cards to open the doors and taking stock of the patients, ensuring they were still in their assigned rooms. The alarm got louder with the door open, becoming a literal grinding of sheer volume against my eardrums. Chad heard it too, his head snapping around and leveling her with a green-eyed gaze. I think she screamed, I couldn't be sure though. The alarm was just so damned loud.