by J. R. Rain
“Space doesn’t matter to demons, bro. You should know that. You write horror stories. We’ve all heard about those Dungeons & Dragons book burnings where people supposedly hear demons screeching from the flames.”
“Urban legends,” I said.
But my brother wasn’t listening. He was staring oddly at the book. “We’ve got to burn that book, bro. We’ve got to burn that book to keep them out.”
“Who?” I snorted. “The demons?”
“Damn straight the demons!”
“I think you need to go to bed and sleep this off.”
“If only I could, bro. But you brought evil into our house.”
“Do you hear yourself? If the sun was out and you weren’t buzzed and stoned you most certainly wouldn’t be talking about a book being possessed.”
“Except that it’s not,” said H.T. “It’s the middle of the night, you’re holding a devil book, and I’m scared shitless.”
“You’re just being paranoid.”
“Be that as it may, we’re burning that book. And we’re doing it now.”
* * *
“And what if a cop sees us?” I asked. We were standing in the middle of the street, directly beneath a streetlight. A light rain had begun falling minutes earlier. The drops glittered like confetti in the yellow streetlight. I looked at my watch. It was exactly 2:00 a.m. I had read somewhere once that 2:00 a.m. was the hour of the vampire. Now, in the middle of the night with a sprinkle of rain falling and planning to burn a legendary grimoire (that is, a magic book), well, it was easy to believe that this was the hour of the vampire.
Or of the Devil.
“Well,” said my brother, “if the cops came, then I imagine we would get busted, wouldn’t we?”
“Great.” I could just see me trying to explain this to a cop, or to our parents, both of whom were devout Baptists. “But officer, we were just trying to burn a book that could allegedly summon the Old Gods.”
I shivered in the rain. Even though it was the middle of winter, in the middle of the night, I was in a flannel shirt and surfer shorts. Orange County winter nights didn’t require much more than that, even in the rain.
I knew I looked like a fool standing there in the street, holding a lighter and staring down at a book that I was about to burn, a book I had just spent seven bucks of my hard-earned money on.
I looked like a fool...and felt like a fool.
Wearing a USC sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his head, his face hidden in shadows, my brother looked like a cult member about to sacrifice a chicken or a virgin.
We stood two houses down from our house. Our residential street opened onto Dale street, which was a bigger street, one that a cop was much more likely to be cruising down.
“Let’s just get this over with,” I said.
“Give me the lighter,” he said. “I still can’t believe you brought this shit into our house.”
“Since when are you so religious?”
“It’s got nothing to do with religion, bro. There’s dark and there’s light. This is dark. Very, very dark.”
“It’s just a book. Most people think it’s made up.”
“Does it feel made up?” he asked.
Actually, it didn’t. There was something decidedly creepy about the book. In fact, so creepy that it hadn’t taken much to convince me to burn it.
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s just hurry this up. I’ve got to pee.”
And so, with a misty rain falling all around, H.T. bent down and set the book on fire. Or, at least, tried to.
“It’s kinda wet,” he said.
But I came prepared. I doused the book with lighter fluid and my little brother tried again. As it caught fire in a burst, he yelped, jumping back, singing his knuckle hair. I pulled him next to me and we stood together and watched the book burn.
I think we were also waiting.
Waiting for what, I wasn’t exactly sure. Screeching, perhaps. Or the screaming of something ancient and evil. Perhaps even a face in the fire, twisted in agony as it sinks back into hell. Something, anything to indicate that I hadn’t wasted seven bucks.
But none of that happened. Not even a whimper.
We continued to watch the book until it was nothing more than a small pile of smoldering ashes. And with the light rain, it soon turned into a wet pile of ashes.
No cops came by. No neighbors came out to see what we were up to. No one cared that two brothers had just rid the world of one evil book.
“It is done,” my brother intoned.
“Oh, give it a rest,” I said.
H.T. pulled back his hood. “Kind of anti-climatic,” he said. “I was expecting something, anything. Even a moan or two would have been nice.”
I was about to tell him to be careful what you wish for when I saw the creature standing directly behind him. It was taller than my brother by at least two feet, and it was more shadow than anything. There were no details to its face other than two bright red eyes, which seemed to stare into my soul. I opened my mouth to speak, to scream, to do something, but before I could react, or force myself to react, the creature dissipated into swirling black smoke. And in that moment, the wind picked up and the wispy black tendrils were gone in a blink.
“What’s wrong?” asked my brother. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
But I couldn’t speak. Not even close.
My brother shrugged and kicked the ashes. “I imagine the rain and wind will scatter the rest of this, don’t you think?”
But I still couldn’t speak; hell, I couldn’t even think.
“Cat got your tongue?” he asked.
I opened my mouth but nothing came out.
“Never mind,” said H.T. “Let’s get something to eat. Nothing like a little book burning to give a guy an appetite!”
I eventually found my voice but I never did speak about the shadow. Maybe I hadn’t really seen it. Maybe it was all in my imagination.
After all, it was just a book, right?
The End
Return to the Table of Contents
The Silo
It was the middle of a long, four-year drought when a city-slicker and his too-thin wife moved to Wheatopia, NE.
They were the first such people to do so in eight years, and when these city-slickers arrived from New York City and moved into the Smith’s abandoned farmhouse, well, it caused quite a stir in the small town and the gossip began immediately, especially in Earl’s Cantina which sat on the edge of town.
“He’s on the run from the law,” said Al Thorton.
“They’re a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde,” said Willis McGee.
“Hey, I always liked Bonnie and Clyde,” said Earl the owner.
“They were killers, Earl,” said Willis. “Killers. We don’t want that sort of riffraff here.”
“Hell, no!”
One by one, each of Wheatopia’s thirty-eight residents visited the young couple with gifts of fruits and baked goods and casseroles. The city-slicker’s too-thin wife didn’t seem to know what to do with all of the food. In fact, she even admitted to not knowing what a casserole was.
The town inhaled a collective gasp.
And each night of that first week, the town folk gathered at Earl’s Cantina to share what they had discovered that day. So far, this is what they had learned: the city-slicker’s name was Joseph Harper and he was some sort of real estate magnate. No, Earl, no magnet. Magnate! The young man apparently made lotsa money. No kids. They had lived in Manhattan. He was a graduate of Brown University. She was an attorney. There was no obvious reason for the drastic move to Wheatopia, although Mr. Harper had stated to Al, somewhat lamely and unconvincingly (everyone agreed), that he wanted some “fresh air and peaceful streets.”
The town’s general assessment: something was fishy.
Suspicion escalated a few weeks later when Eddie the mailman discovered that Mr. Harper was spending all of his time fixing up the grain silo on his farm. That night in Earl’s, Max Belfry,
a retired commercial pilot, remarked: “I think we can all agree that the Smith place needs lots of repair, true, but I’d think the silo could wait. After all, what’s he need it for? He’s not a farmer. He has no grain to store.”
No one had any good answers, of course. Or, rather, no one tried to find any good answers. The town’s suspicion deepened.
Then Joseph Harper did something strange, really strange. This was reported by Biff, the town’s retired handyman:
“You know that point on top of all silos that give ’em dignity and makes ’em true to the land...well, Mr. Harper hired us to cut through that pointy tip. Saw it right off! But that ain’t the worst of it, nosiree! He had us use chicken wire and plaster to turn that dignified point into a...a dome of some sort.” The others gasped. Biff continued: “Sure, he paid us good, ’cause it was somewhat risky way up there, but it was a dern travesty to go a-ruinin’ that monument of grain storage.”
And so for the next few days the town folk somehow found their way past the Smith’s old farmhouse to catch sight of the rarest of all things: a domed silo. Or, as Gerrod Blake (the Harper’s closest and only neighbor in that desolate section of Wheatopia) put it: “The eyesore!”
During the weeks that followed, Mr. Harper continued to baffle and agitate these good retired people who really preferred to mind their own business. Again he hired Biff the retired handyman, but this time it was to unload a huge vat—a vat capable of storing hundreds of gallons of liquid. “And guess where he has me unload this vat? You guessed it. Inside the silo.”
“He’s making drugs,” proclaimed Lucille the retired school teacher. Back in ’77, she once caught a student smoking marijuana behind a backstop, and has been convinced there was a town drug problem ever since. “He’s going to poison our streets with drugs and hooliganism.”
“There’s no one left on the streets to poison,” said Grandma Haymaker.
“Still,” sniffed a slightly put-off Lucille, “I don’t want to live next to a drug lord.”
But it was what happened the next day—which marked precisely the fifth week since the city-slicker’s sudden appearance—that the town finally cried “Enough!”
So what had Mr. Harper the city-slicker done that so outraged the town? Simple. The damn Yankee had marched into Fred’s Dairy and proceeded to buy-up all the milk in Wheatopia.
“Yes, all the milk,” reported Fred the milkman. “Fifty-four gallons in all. And I’ve ordered a lot more for him, too. No, didn’t tell me the why of it.”
“What am I going to eat my oatmeal with?” moaned Al.
“Or my grits?” groaned Lucille.
Enough was enough. Just what in tarnation did this Yankee need all that milk for anyway? No one knew, but they elected Gerrod Blake to find out, on the merits that he was the closest neighbor and therefore the most likely to covertly gather information through friendly and neighborly means. Gerrod wasn’t so sure. Lately, he had been pretty damn distracted with the fire woman—and doing his best to conceal his newly awakened erections by wearing his flannel shirts untucked.
Perhaps an explanation is in order here: during that same five-week period—the exact period that the city-slicker and his too-thin wife had moved to Wheatopia—Gerrod Blake had begun to experience the most erotic dreams of his life, and that was saying something since he was nearly eighty years old and had always had a penchant for erotic dreams.
Gerrod assumed the dreams were the result of living in such close proximity to the city slicker’s too-thin (but quite pretty) wife. After all, Gerrod hadn’t seen the likes of such a woman in quite a long time.
With that said, Gerrod knew in his heart that the woman in his dreams was most certainly not the city-slicker’s too-thin wife. In fact, the woman in his dreams was on fire. Literally. She was just a burning, fiery image that somehow caused a burning in his own groin, as well, a burning that sometimes lasted clear throughout the next day. Gerrod, an old man who hadn’t experienced much burning of any kind, was at a loss for his sudden erotic dreams, and he was most certainly at a loss for the appearance of the fire woman.
But one thing was certain. Oh, yes. Gerrod liked the dreams. So much so that he went to bed earlier and earlier, just to be with the fire woman, even if it was in his dreams. Of course, Gerrod felt a little guilty about his dreamland trysts. He was, after all, a happily married man. But since he had no control over his dreams, well, that was hardly cheating. Right?
And so, later during that fifth week, Gerrod and his quiet Latino wife, Isabel, knocked dutifully on the city-slicker’s front door. A worn-out looking Mrs. Harper answered it immediately, and even Gerrod, a man who had ignored his own emotions all his life, let alone those of others, was quite certain that something was morbidly wrong. Mrs. Harper, his pretty, albeit too-thin, new neighbor, looked downright upset and sad and maybe even a little depressed.
Mrs. Blake noticed it, too. And with her heavy Spanish accent, she asked Mrs. Harper if there was anything the matter. But the young gal just shook her head, and Gerrod noted that there were tears in her eyes. Gerrod felt uncomfortable seeing such emotion, and so he immediately asked if he could speak to her husband. The too-thin wife simply gestured toward the silo. Of course. The silo.
But before he went off, Gerrod found himself analyzing the pretty face of the too-thin wife. Was she the fire woman of his dreams? It was hard for Gerrod to say since, technically, the fire woman didn’t have a face. Just a body. A beautiful, luscious, burning body. Gerrod grew hard all over again.
Lord, what had gotten into him?
Despite himself, he said, “Well, you’d better lie your pretty little head down, ma’am. You might be coming down with something, and we couldn’t have that.”
Gerrod, to say the least, was feeling a bit frisky these days.
Isabel cast her husband of fifty-two years a sidelong glance. What has gotten into him of late? she wondered. She didn’t know, but it was all she could do to keep him off her. Just this morning he had woken up as stiff as a board, and to her shock and horror he had proceeded to poke her with it! The nerve! He hadn’t poked her with that thing in decades! Well, he wasn’t going to start now, at least not like that. He wasn’t going to just roll her over and treat her like some back alley whore. Nosiree, Bob. If he wanted to poke her with that thing, well, he was just going to have to do it the right way. An evening out in the big city, maybe a play, dinner, wine and romance. Yes, indeed, that’s the kind of woman Isabel was. A true lady. Not some loose floozy!
Additionally, another source of Isabel’s irritation was that she was certain she knew why her husband was suddenly as randy as a schoolboy. It’s the too-thin wife, she thought. After all, Isabel had just witnessed how the old doofus was looking at the girl, ogling her like a piece of meat. Gerrod should be ashamed! Well, she was going to give him the what-for tonight!
Gerrod, however, was grinning from ear to ear, pleased with himself and his first attempt at flirtation in nearly ten years. He stepped off the creaking porch and led Isabel to the silo. And as he went there was a familiar throbbing in his loins. Familiar of late, that is. The throbbing felt good. Damn good.
At the silo, Gerrod and his silently fuming Latino wife found a very focused Joseph Harper hunched over the now infamous vat. The Yankee was stirring something with slow, even strokes. Upon close inspection, the bespectacled Joseph was a small man with small hands. Gerrod suspected the Yankee might be of Jewish decent, but Gerrod didn’t know much about Jews. An overpowering stench emitted from the vat. Overpowering and overwhelming.
When the smell hit him, Gerrod nearly gagged. Willing his food down, the horny old man cleared his throat. Harper, startled, nearly fell into the vat.
Gerrod said, “I’m sorry to bother you Mr. Harper, but, um, we just wanted to know if your stay in Wheatopia’s been a pleasant one.”
Harper frowned and pushed his glasses up. His face was glistening with sweat, which dripped steadily from his pointed nose. “Very pleasant indeed
. Thank you.”
But the young man wasn’t looking as if his stay in Wheatopia was pleasant; indeed, the young man looked harried and confused and agitated. Gerrod also noted that the young man also looked almighty exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept much during the past few days, or weeks. Which didn’t surprise Gerrod, since he had watched the young man working tirelessly on the silo. Gerrod didn’t much care what the Yankee did with the silo. Gerrod, you see, was much too busy daydreaming about his fire woman to give a rat’s ass about anyone or anything.
So, willing himself to give a damn, Gerrod asked half-heartedly, “So, um, whaddya stirring in there?”
Harper shrugged. “Milk, fish parts, oysters, chum, parsley, oregano, pennies and barley.”
Gerrod wrinkled his nose. “Did you say pennies?”
“Yes, that’s what she wants.”
“She?”
“Really, Mr. Blake, you wouldn’t understand.”
Gerrod was sure he wouldn’t. He just wanted to get the hell out of there and away from the stench. He also wanted to curl up in bed and daydream some more about his fire woman.
“Mr. Harper, is your wife ill?” asked Isabel suddenly.
The city-slicker shook his head. “She’s just homesick. I keep telling her we won’t be here long, but she doesn’t know what to think anymore. Hell, I don’t know what to think anymore.”
Despite himself, Gerrod’s interest was piqued. Resisting an urge to cover his mouth and nose, he said, “And what, exactly, are you doing here, Mr. Harper?”
“I-I don’t know.”
“What the devil does that mean?”
“It’s her. She’s making me.”
“Who?” asked Isabel. “Your wife?”
And that’s when the city-slicker lost it. “The fire woman! She’s constantly telling me what to do. Always giving me instructions! Where to move, what to buy, what to build. I don’t know anything anymore! I don’t understand anything! The only solace I can get from her is that it will be over soon.”
Something froze deep within Gerrod. He hoped it wasn’t his heart.
