by Peter Nealen
She raised her eyebrows. When she spoke again, she sounded…tentative. “You don’t think something…well…weird is going on, do you?”
Something about her question made me ask, “How long have you lived here?”
“All my life,” she replied, “except the years I was gone to get my RN certificate.” She looked at me warily, uncertain if I was going to make fun of her. “I’ve lived here long enough to have seen some weird things happen. It’s almost like ‘weird’ and this town go together.”
That wasn’t far off the mark. “What kind of weird things?” I asked innocently.
She was now watching me through narrowed eyes. I don’t think she bought my innocent routine for a minute. “Weird things,” she repeated. “Stuff that can’t readily be explained. They say the old Booker place up by the mill is haunted, and I’ve seen and heard some things around it that have made me wonder.” She wasn’t far off. The Booker house had been where the nightmare had begun fifty years ago. That place was still halfway in the Otherworld. “Just last year, right after I’d come back from nursing school, my little brother started having the worst nightmares. He was hurting himself during the night. Father Pat came and blessed his room, prayed over him, and did some kind of exorcism, and the nightmares stopped.” She folded her arms and stared at me as though daring me to laugh at her. “That kind of weird stuff.”
Interesting. I looked around the room again. I was still catching a whiff of that weird odor, but if there was something here, it was staying out of sight. “Well, Eryn, I will tell you that yes, I do think something weird is going on here.” I was watching my peripheral vision, but nothing moved. “I just don’t know what yet.”
She sat down on the single chair next to the bed. “You said you’ve got a lot of experience,” she said cautiously. She still wasn’t sure what to make of me yet. “Does that experience include weird stuff?”
I nodded vaguely. “Yeah, you could say that.”
Her eyes hardened. “You’re not one of these ‘ghost hunter’ hacks just here to make a quick buck and capitalize on the backwoods hicks, are you? Because if you are, you can get out right now. I won’t have you disrespecting Father Pat like that.”
I met her gaze evenly. “First of all, I are a backwoods hick myself,” I told her. “And secondly, no I’m not a ghost hunter. You don’t see the collection of cameras and ‘sensors’ they tote around, do you? I’m not here for curiosity’s sake; I’m not here for sensationalism, or anything else. Hell, I live in my truck most of the time.” In fact, I’d had some experience with ghost hunters. It hadn’t been a good one. Talk about poking around in things you oughtn’t.
“Father Pat and Reverend Bob are both friends of mine. This isn’t my first visit to Silverton; that’s why Weiss and Sam know me, too. I come to help out when things get weird, and I’ve got a history of doing a pretty good job of it.”
I looked away, sniffing the air again. That smell…it was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “You smell that?”
She sniffed briefly. “Yeah, I think there’s something wrong with the plumbing, but nobody’s been able to find a leak.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s a leak. I think it’s a clue to what’s going on here.” I grimaced. “I just don’t know what to make of it yet.”
“Do smells usually feature in the ‘weird stuff’ you help deal with?” she asked.
“They can,” I replied, as I walked to the head of the bed and looked down at Father Pat. His face looked gray, and he seemed tense, not like a man sleeping. “It just depends. These things can manifest in all sorts of different ways.”
“Like what?” she asked. She was still suspicious, but seemed genuinely curious, not just humoring the crazy person standing in her pastor’s bedroom.
“Smells, flickers of motion, unexplained marks,” I said. “Violence, death, destruction, and shredded sanity, among other things.” I watched her turn a little pale. “Sometimes the violence manifests between people, sometimes it’s external, from something you might or might not see.” I met her eyes. “Frankly, until you’ve actually been exposed to it, this is just me talking. You may have heard and seen some strange things, and you may sort of believe in it on some intellectual level, but you won’t really accept it until you’ve seen it.” I sighed. “Hope and pray you never do.”
“Can you tell me about it?” she asked.
I shook my head. “This isn’t the time, or the place,” I said. “If there is something Otherworldly at work here, we don’t want to be discussing it in this house. Maybe the church, but I’d be uncomfortable trying to give you a rundown of the Otherworld anywhere else. Besides, I’m a lousy lecturer.”
“Why shouldn’t you discuss it?” she asked.
I looked at her levelly. “Because talking about some of these things draws them to you. That’s not a good idea.”
She turned a little pale. “Really?”
I nodded. I wasn’t seeing anything else to point at aside from the odor, which was so faint it almost wasn’t there. I was pretty sure there was something very, very bad going on, though. “Really. This is dangerous stuff.” I turned to go. “I’ve got to get some stuff from my truck. I’ll be right back.”
Chapter 4
When I came back in, I had an old canvas rucksack over one shoulder and my Winchester in my hand. I didn’t know what I was dealing with, and if something decided to pop out of the Otherworld to try to bite my head off once I started trying to secure the parish house, I wanted to be ready to blow a hole in it that I could drive a freight train through. While the .45-70 might not be too great shakes at long range, at short to medium range, it’s a cannon. Adding the silver jackets tended to help against some Otherworlders; steel was better for others. I had a mix in the cartridge belt that was now slung around my shoulders.
Eryn’s eyes widened as I walked into Father Pat’s bedroom. “Umm…I thought you said this was…otherworldly,” she said hesitantly.
“It probably is,” I replied. “That’s not necessarily the same as noncorporeal.” At her expression of vague unbelief, I shrugged. “You don’t have to stick around if you don’t believe me. Although…if you don’t believe me, that probably just means you’re more likely to stick around, in case I’m some kind of dangerous nut. Am I right?”
She brought her hand up from beside the chair and set a nickel Smith & Wesson Model 29 in her lap. “Yeah, that’s pretty much right.”
I just looked at her and grinned. “You’re starting to grow on me, Eryn,” I said, as I propped the rifle against Father Pat’s dresser and unslung the backpack. She didn’t smile back, but there was some uncertainty in her eyes.
Pulling open the pack, I started rummaging in it. I came out with a silver crucifix, an ancient Book of Prayer, and a small steel hip flask full of holy water. Hey, the made-to-purpose plastic holy water bottles don’t hold enough and aren’t nearly as sturdy.
I placed the crucifix under Father Pat’s hands, on his chest, splashed some holy water on it and his forehead, opened the book, and started to pray.
The lights flickered. The odor got stronger. So, it was going to be a fight. Eryn looked at the flickering lights with alarm. One of the bulbs popped. I was really starting to suspect that this wasn’t an Otherworlder, though some of them could do some freaky stuff. But for a demon to get its claws this deep? There was some serious bad juju going on here if that was the case.
I finished the prayer, took the flask of holy water in one hand and the Winchester in the other, stood up, and bellowed, “Now get out of here! Scram! You’re not welcome here, and the power of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost drives you out!”
The whole house rattled, and two more light bulbs popped. There was a shriek, and then something was tearing through the door at me. I whirled, dropping the flask on the bed, and brought the Winchester to my shoulder as the thing smashed splinters off the doorjamb.
It was short, only about four and a half feet tall, but
almost as wide. It was hard to look at; it seemed to shift like smoke when you tried to focus on it. I couldn’t tell if it had two, three, or four arms. It looked hairy, but then the hair turned to smoke, then scales, before turning into coarse hair again. Its head was tucked, but it had too many eyes, and two mouths.
I took this in in a split second. You get observant in this business. The next heartbeat later, I was hammering 300 grain slugs into it.
The boom of the rifle was actually painful as it slapped the walls of the room and reverberated out the door. The first shot didn’t even slow the thing down. The second doubled it over and dropped it to the floor. I had the tube loaded with alternating silver and steel jacketed slugs. The silver had hurt it. I levered the next steel jacketed round out and shot the thing again with another silver jacket.
That did it. It collapsed limply onto the floor. That wasn’t the end of it, though.
There was another ear-piercing shriek that hurt even through the ringing in my ears from the gunshots. Something like smoke, only much denser, swirled around the eye-searing wrongness of the corpse, then with another noise which I can’t quite describe, except that it put a spike of pain straight through my skull, the mass of oily, smoky stuff poured itself down through the floor and was gone.
“Oh, hell,” I said.
“What?” Eryn said. She was covering her ears—I realized she’d slapped her hands over them as soon as I’d brought the rifle up. “What was that?”
I walked over and kicked the corpse. It now had only two legs, two arms, two eyes, and one mouth. It was also covered in hair, its head was an elongated muzzle, and it had horns. In place of feet it had hooves.
I frowned. “It was a goathead,” I replied, crouching down to look more closely at it, “at least partly.” Its limbs were shrunken and twisted, while seemingly stretched a little too long. There were coarse, oily black hairs poking out of its own coat, which seemed singed. “There was something else attached to it.” I didn’t say what, but I’d seen that kind of thing before, and it didn’t portend anything good. There was something rotten in Silverton, again.
I was interrupted by a groan from the bed. We both whirled to look as Father Pat achingly levered himself into a sitting position. He looked down at the crucifix in his hand, then up at me, showing no surprise whatsoever at seeing me. “Thanks, Jed,” he said, holding out the crucifix. “Nice shooting.”
“You saw that?” Eryn asked incredulously.
“Yes and no,” Father Pat said. “It’s not easy to explain.” He peered up at me. His face still looked lined and tired, but he was getting some of his color back. “You had to use a silver one on it, didn’t you?” he asked.
I nodded. “Shouldn’t have been necessary for a goathead,” I said. I wasn’t worried about mentioning goatheads; they’re smarter than skinnies, but not by all that much, and in general, while they can be plenty mean, they aren’t that dangerous. They’re the menial labor of the Otherworld, for lack of a better description.
“The goathead was just the puppet,” he said, levering his legs out of bed, and sitting on the edge for a minute. “The other thing was what put me down. And I’m pretty sure we haven’t seen the last of it, either.”
“Do you know what it was?” I asked.
“No idea,” he replied. If he had, he’d just have said yes until we could get to the sanctuary. Father Pat knew a lot about my line of work. “I didn’t get a name. The attack was…overwhelming.” He put a hand to his head, as if to ward off a headache. “How long was I out?”
“Since Thursday,” Eryn said. She still looked a little shell-shocked. Father Pat looked over at her with some surprise.
“Eryn, my dear, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m still a little woozy. When did you get here?”
“I’ve been taking care of you since you collapsed on Thursday,” she said. She was looking between us with that same look of shock on her face. “I guess you weren’t lying when you said that you and Father Pat knew each other,” she finally said to me.
“No, he certainly wasn’t,” Father Pat replied. He looked over at me. “What brings you up here, Jed?”
I filled him in on Lars’ warning, and finding out about the disappearances. “Bob’s missing, too?” he asked. “Crap. This is bad.”
I nodded my agreement, as I shoved the holy water and the Book of Prayer back into my pack. “We’ll need to shore up your defenses around here,” I said.
Just as I said that, there was a siren and flashing red and blue lights outside. “Heeeere’s Johnny,” I said sardonically. I had known the shots were going to attract attention.
Johnny’s footsteps clumped on the small porch, and he knocked heavily on the door. At Father Pat’s nod, Eryn went to go answer it.
“What the hell?!” Johnny exclaimed from the doorway, as he saw the goathead’s corpse on the floor. Then he looked up and saw me. “Oh, hey, Jed. Sam told me you were in town.” He took his hat off and scratched his balding scalp. I was hoping he’d mistaken you for some other fella.”
“Well, that’s kind of unfriendly,” Eryn said. “Jed just saved both our lives.”
“I’m sure he did,” Johnny said, looking back at the dead goathead. “But every time Jed comes to town, I get farther and farther from that nice, quiet, Andy Griffith existence I keep hoping for.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off the corpse. “Obviously, this time isn’t going to be any different…just what the hell is that thing?”
“I call ‘em goatheads,” I explained. “They’re all over the Otherworld. Not particularly malicious, generally, just dumb, tough, and occasionally mean. But it wasn’t the goathead that was the problem here.” I told him about what we had seen.
Johnny was shaking his head, whether in disbelief, shock, or a combination of the two I couldn’t tell. He’d never quite gotten used to the weird stuff going on around his town, though he’d gotten as far as to accept that it happened occasionally. “What do we do?” he asked helplessly.
“Stay out of my way, and try to tell your people they need to stay indoors at night,” I said. “This is big, bad medicine, Johnny. A Shadowman’s bad, really bad, and whatever that thing was that was piggybacking on the goathead is almost as bad, if not worse. I’ve got to look into Mayhew first; he’s the closest I’ve got to a connection.”
A half hour later, the four of us were gathered in the sacristy. Johnny had gotten things calmed down, and assured the neighbors that the gunshots were nothing to be concerned about. Eryn had gotten some food and drink into Father Pat, and I’d prowled around looking for signs of more nasties. I hadn’t found any, but then again, that didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t there.
“Do we know anything solid about this Mayhew character?” I asked.
Johnny shook his head. “He’s got money, we know that much. Other than that? He keeps to himself when he’s not having his little sessions, and he doesn’t talk about himself much when he does, at least not that anybody will say.”
“Have you ever been to one of these sessions?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Nah, I don’t go in for that stuff, especially all the hippy-dippy ‘nature-spirit’ stuff he talks about in his flyers. I may not go to church often enough, but I know that stuff’s a little off.” He ran a hand over his face. “I just figured I’d ignore him when he first set up. I never thought something like this would happen.”
“Most people don’t,” I said. “Everybody just accepts some of this ‘alternative’ stuff without questioning it anymore.” I sighed. “I guess I’m going to have to go in and get a look at one of these sessions.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Eryn asked.
“It could be extremely dangerous,” Father Pat replied. “Especially not knowing what this Mayhew might be working with.”
“It could be that all we’re seeing here is some idiot screwing around with the occult, who managed to open a portal to the Abyss and let something through without realizing it,” I said. “That’s n
ot to make light of the situation; who knows what could have come through. Even the most minor demon is incredibly dangerous.”
One of my earliest mentors, Father O’Neal, had impressed that upon me. “Even the lowest of the Fallen," he'd said, "are to be considered more dangerous than plutonium. They may be friendly, reasonable, helpful even. Believe none of it. If one speaks, do not listen. Unlike in fiction, they cannot be bargained with, and can never, ever be trusted. They are not bound by promises or deals. Only the name of God binds them, and then you must only bind them to silence or banishment. For all they may seem to be just another person with greater power, never forget that these are impossibly ancient, powerful beings, with bottomless wells of malice and a deep-seated hatred for mankind. They wish to see our physical and spiritual destruction, and they will stop at nothing to accomplish it.”
“My point is,” I continued, “Mayhew might not be actively evil, but just foolish, and being used as a pawn by something indescribably nastier. On the other hand, he might have full knowledge of what he’s doing, in which case the sooner he’s put down the better.” I’m not gentle or forgiving with those who willingly consort with demons. I’ll leave that to God. I’m here to stop them destroying as many people as possible, and that usually requires a substantial injection of high-velocity lead. Hopefully before that lead needs a silver jacket.
“This seems a lot more serious than just the backlash of some would-be wizard messing around with things he shouldn’t,” Father Pat pointed out. “Three disappearances in a week?”
“Not to mention the attack on you,” I replied. “Making the Baptist minister disappear and then going after the Catholic priest’s mind? That’s some heavy doings right there. It’s strategic. Take out the Faithful’s leadership to weaken the flock for the follow-on blow. That said, it isn’t something that a demon isn’t capable of on its own.”
