Hellhound on My Trail

by D. J. Butler

  But burning insects hit Mike and stung him, on his legs and his back and his arms, and he couldn’t stop running. He smelled a terrible stink and realized it was his own hair and flesh burning, and he kicked and stumbled through the rubble of former pews, trying to get to the wall and a tapestry.

  Ahead of him he saw the small silver horse again, and the sight rang a bell in his brain that he was too panicked, and in too much pain, to listen to. A little skinny boy in ill-fitting jeans, white t-shirt and unlaced trainers clung to the back of the animal. He held onto its long silver mane as the horse reared, its hooves trampling a heap of large scrolls that spilled out of a hole in the wall.

  Beyond the unexpected horse and its mystery rider, Jim stood with his back to Mike, raising his sword, facing the synagogue door—through which swarmed a funnel cloud of Zvuvim.

  ***

  Chapter Five

  “Got you!” Eddie shouted as he tackled Mike.

  The guitarist hit him from behind and right on the shoulders and the back of his neck, where he was burning. It hurt and Mike screamed, but Eddie had his jacket in his hands, and as he dragged Mike to the floor he beat at his body, snuffing out flames.

  “Aaagh!” Mike screamed again. He pounded his fist on the floor in pain, grateful that at least he wasn’t totally sober. He wished he were a hell of a lot more drunk, though.

  Then Eddie was up again and shrugging into his jacket. “Incoming!” the guitar player shouted, and brought his twelve-gauge to bear on the swarming cloud of giant flies.

  Boom! Boom!

  Mike climbed to his feet, feeling fat and fried and chopped to pieces, like a roaster in a chicken rotisserie. The Zvuvim raged in through the front door of the synagogue in a chittering cloud, and the rabbi’s burning corpse-flies buzzed forth from the depths of the hall to meet them, a swarm of glittering candle-points that sparkled and winked from within the black mass.

  Jim stood in the doorway, heaving the flattened door off the ground with one hand while he slashed at attacking Zvuvim with the sword in his other. He moved like a matador, avoiding flies by throwing every other part of his body out of the way but holding his hand, and the door it pushed up, fixed in place. Eddie charged in his direction, shotgun up and firing, blasting flies out of the air with each squeeze of the trigger. They swarmed so thick now that it was impossible to miss, and the challenge was to hit the one you were aiming at, and not a different Zavuv that got in the way.

  Bang!

  Mike squeezed the trigger of the pistol, not remembering when he’d pulled it from his belt, and shattered a dive-bombing Zavuv into stringy black fragments.

  The silver horse took off at a gallop with the boy on its back, away from the Zvuvim and around the wall of the synagogue.

  The kid, Mike thought. It was the kid who had made the noise he’d heard, not rats. Rats would have been less weird, though, than a kid hiding in a … what had Eddie said? A cabinet full of old books no one could read anymore?

  “Get over here!” Eddie yelled.

  Boom!

  Mike blasted another Zavuv and raced to join Jim and Eddie. Jim had shoved the fallen door back into place and Eddie now held it up with his back, shoving shells into the twelve-gauge and ducking fly attacks. Jim squatted to try to muscle the hanging door up as well, but two Zvuvim clinging to the hardwood slashed and bit at his hands. He bled and grunted and swatted at them with the hilt of his sword, but he made no progress with the door.

  Bang!

  Mike blew one of the Zvuvim to bits and the other jerked away into the air, chittering. Jim got his shoulder under it and slammed the door into place.

  “We need wards of sealing here,” Eddie said, and Jim nodded.

  “It’s no good,” Mike panted, pointing up at the shattered windows of the second story. The windows were narrow, but only narrow enough that they forced the Zvuvim to crawl through, rather than flying at top speed. “They can get in up there.” He fired three more shots, exploding two Zvuvim in the air and a third that crawled rasping along the ceiling beneath the floor of the mezzanine.

  “You’re forgetting the Baal,” Eddie said. “And the Hound. Adrian!” he shouted. “Show me some love!”

  Adrian stumbled to the door, batting away burning flies with his left hand. In his right, he held the machine pistol that Mike had first seen back in Butcher’s roadhouse. “What’s Twitch up to?” the wizard grumbled. “We must all hang together, et cetera.”

  “Twitch is looking for the way out!” Eddie barked. “Your job is to cork up the way in!” He took aim at a Zavuv winging in low behind Adrian’s back and blew it to kingdom come. The shotgun reports sounded louder under the mezzanine, with an instant slapback echo like a guitar running through a pedal set to one hundred milliseconds of delay.

  Mike shook the distracting thought out of his head.

  ROAR!

  The sound came from outside the synagogue, but it was as loud as the crashing of Niagara Falls.

  “Will it help if I tell you we’re at a picnic?” Mike offered tentatively.

  “Piss off!” Adrian snapped, pushing his pistol into a shoulder holster under his scorched suit jacket and digging two pieces of chalk from his pocket. “And get out of the way.”

  Mike shrugged. He only wanted to help.

  Then he and Eddie peeled aside and stood guard—Jim stepped away from the door but kept one hand up against both panels, pinning them in place as Adrian began to draw pictures on the panels with chalk in two colors, blue and red. Mike took potshots at any Zavuv that got too close to him, but the big black flies seemed to be swarming a little mindlessly. The little flies, at least, burned to extinction one by one and dropped to the floor, leaving the room lit by dim bulbs here and there and the funeral pyre of Rabbi Feldman.

  The white horse continued its gallop around the perimeter of the synagogue, plunging under the mezzanine and getting closer to them.

  “Don’t fall asleep!” Eddie snapped, and threw an elbow into Adrian’s ribs.

  “Unnh, huh? Hell!” Adrian stumbled and hastily wiped away a long red scrawl down the wood that he had made in the moment of nodding off.

  Jim began to hum. Mike couldn’t think of the name of the tune, but he would have sworn he knew it from somewhere. It was like one of those songs that you learn as a kid in school, and you never hear again, until you’re an old man and you hear some other little kid singing it, and you don’t know why you know the tune but you know it.

  Adrian nodded and resumed drawing. “Okay, yeah,” he muttered. “Wards of sealing. That’ll hold them shut for a while.”

  Mike looked over his shoulder to get a better look at the drawing. It was ornate and in two colors and it covered both doors roughly in a design that looked part spider web, part clock interior, all gears and radiating spokes and here and there a character Mike recognized as being Greek or Hebrew, or didn’t recognize at all.

  Jim stepped away from the doors, and they stayed standing.

  “Now listen to me, my son,” Mike heard Twitch say in a gentle, extremely feminine voice, “I need you to show mama your hiding place. The secret one. The secret way out that your father showed you.”

  Mike was surprised to find Twitch at his elbow again, kneeling and cradling the little boy in his arms. And then he realized that he shouldn’t have been surprised, that there was a perfectly logical explanation for Twitch’s appearances and disappearances … only the logic in question was the logic of madness.

  The kid didn’t look like he could be named Feldman—he looked Chicano, like he could have fit in perfectly with Mike and Chuy and all their cousins when they were kids, even wearing the same cheap clothes that were always a little too big because it was cheaper to buy them that way—a skinny little kid under a mop of thick black hair. He looked calm, even blissful in Twitch’s arms, like he really thought she was his mama.

  “I don’t know my father,” the boy said.

  “Not your dad,” Mike said. “Rabbi Feldman.”
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  The kid looked at Mike, his face suddenly contorting into a mask of terror.

  Boom!

  “Hurry it up,” Eddie grumped, pumping the shotgun to chamber another round.

  “Hush, baby,” Twitch purred, and Mike thought he saw the tail on her rump swish back and forth. The boy calmed right down. Mike wondered whether the kid was scared of him, or he had just broken the spell of Twitch’s voice. Obviously, there was something more than just simple soothing words going on, since Mike had seen it work on the wizard and the little boy both. “I meant the rabbi.”

  The walls of the synagogue shook and the sealed doors bowed slightly inward as something outside hammered into them, hard. Something really, really big and strong. Grains of chalk shook off the door and drifted down toward the ground.

  The little kid didn’t seem to notice. “Yes, mama,” he said, and he started walking back toward the burning corpse of Rabbi Feldman, pulling Twitch by the hand.

  “The wards of sealing will hold, right?” Eddie demanded as they all followed.

  “They’ll keep the door shut,” Adrian said. “They can’t stop it from getting pounded into smithereens.”

  Eddie coughed out a bitter laugh. “Remind me to get a competent wizard next time.”

  “You don’t want a wizard,” Adrian snorted. “You want a Jedi Knight.”

  “Damn straight,” Eddie agreed. “Or a Company of United States Marines.” He fired several shells at a knot of approaching fly-demons, bursting some and scattering the rest of them in agitated buzzing circles.

  “You …” Mike whispered to Twitch as he followed. “You’re the horse.”

  “Well,” she smiled softly and whispered back, “I’ve never had any complaints from the ladies.”

  Mike’s jaw worked of its own accord for a few long moments, opening and shutting his mouth wordlessly.

  “I …” he finally said.

  “Yes, Mikey,” she (he?) answered. “It’s a big world, full of crazier stuff than you can ever possibly guess. I think your Shakespeare said that.”

  “He did?” Mike was too astonished to object to being called Mikey, and he didn’t know what to make of the Shakespeare reference. He had dropped out of school long before they ever got around to William Shakespeare. “I mean, he isn’t my Shakespeare. He wasn’t one of my people.”

  “Oh, sure he was,” Twitch said. “People guess all kinds of mysterious things about that poor young man, but I knew him … well … and I can assure you that he was very definitely human.”

  “And you’re a horse,” Mike repeated himself, feeling stupid.

  “No, silly,” she said. “Not all of the time.”

  The little kid stopped, and Twitch and Mike stopped with him. Adrian cleared Zvuvim off to one side of them with long rat-tat-tat-tat-tat sweeps of his machine pistol, and Eddie guarded the other flank with his shotgun. “There it is.” The boy pointed at the flaming wreck of the chest, with Rabbi Feldman’s charred corpse smoldering over wood that had collapsed into glowing coals.

  The doors resounded to the sound of another mighty blow, and Mike looked back over his shoulder, through the cloud of swarming demonic flies. Chalk sifted down from Adrian’s designs, but the doors held.

  “Poor kid,” Mike muttered, turning back to look at the kid pointing earnestly at the toasted rabbi. “He’s got a death wish.”

  “What do you mean, darling?” Twitch asked the boy. “Show me.”

  “Under,” the boy told her. His voice was a little dazed, like he might be in shock. “Under the ark.”

  “Poor dumb kid,” Mike groaned, and couldn’t help but think of Chuy. Chuy had only been a kid too, really, a criminal many times over but not yet eighteen, when Mike had led him to his death. He hadn’t meant to, but he’d done it. “He thinks we’re on a boat.”

  But as soon as the kid spoke, Jim dropped his sword to the floor. The singer grabbed both halves of the broken table beside the pyre, shoving one into Mike’s hands and turning to the fire himself.

  “Huh?” Mike fumbled.

  “Shovel!” Eddie shouted. Boom! “Shovel like your life depended on it!”

  “It does,” Adrian affirmed. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

  The Hellhound bellowed again, so loud Mike thought he felt his own spine tremble with the sound. The Zvuvim seemed to be getting smarter, and they swarmed in closer, diving and clacking their steel mandibles together greedily. Eddie and Adrian kept them off with a ceaseless chatter of gunfire.

  Jim pressed his half-table to the floor like a squeegee and Mike followed him clumsily, feeling fat and slow next to the lean, broad-shouldered giant of a singer. He grunted with effort and proximity to the hot coals, and Jim snorted air through his nostrils, and they fell forward and the weight of their bodies brushed away the stinking inferno—

  and Mike saw the outline of a trap door, made of scorched hardwood, with an iron ring bolted into it.

  CRASH!

  Mike stumbled to his feet and whirled to see the Baal Zavuv, tall and gray-black as it charged forward through the splintered remains of the synagogue door, its cloak of flies buzzing frenetically to keep up. At the demon’s heels came the Hellhound, adding blue and black tints to the weird, patchy light inside the building.

  “Adrian!” Eddie shouted. “I need daylight!”

  “Oh yeah?” Adrian shouted back, blasting a Zavuv away from Eddie’s back and slapping a new clip into his gun. “Shall I just set the gun down, then?” Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. “Between the devil and all that jazz!”

  Twitch dropped the little boy’s hand and jumped to Adrian’s side, flailing with a wooden club in each hand and knocking demon-flies away like so many low-hanging apples in an orchard.

  Jim grabbed the iron ring and heaved. A groan escaped his lips and Mike saw smoke curl up from around his fingers. The ring, he realized, had to be hot, and the thought of the pain that Jim must be feeling made Mike’s back and shoulders and the back of his head ache. He dreaded looking in a mirror.

  “Mike!” Eddie yelled, and he realized he was standing in the middle of the action and doing nothing. He drew a bead on the Zvuvim over Adrian’s head and started shooting.

  In the meantime, Jim had lifted the trapdoor to a vertical position. Stone steps, rough-hewn and worn down really deep in the center of each step, descended into darkness. Jim grabbed the little kid and tossed him down the stairs over a short yelp of objection.

  The Hellhound bellowed behind Mike, and with the bellow came a slobbery chittering squeal that he recognized as the Baal’s. He spun and fired without aiming, bang! bang! bang!

  He thought he could smell the Baal’s meat-stink from across the synagogue.

  “Per Isidem lux!” Adrian shouted, and light exploded from behind Mike and flashed onto the charging Baal Zavuv and Hellhound. It was a palpable wave, like a flashbulb’s glare, and when it hit the Baal, the great gray demon lord shrieked in pain and crashed to the ground, flailing and dragging the Hound with it. Zvuvim fell from the sky like volcanic ash, stunned and writhing in surprise.

  But the light died in a single flash and Mike knew that the soft thump he heard immediately after was the sound of Adrian’s body hitting the floor.

  “Down the hole!” Eddie shouted. Mike fired off the rest of his clip for good measure, spraying fire all over the tangled knot of demon-flesh without inflicting any damage he could see, then stuck the gun in his belt, grabbed one of Adrian’s arms and, with Twitch pulling on the other side, dragged the unconscious wizard through the trapdoor.

  The first descent was insane, a sightless stumbling down steps that were irregular in every dimension, and several times Mike stubbed his toes or smacked his head or skinned his knuckles against the walls and ceiling of the passage, or landed bad enough that he thought he had twisted an ankle.

  When he was halfway down, the trapdoor above slammed shut with a clang! and Mike plunged into womb-blind darkness.

  Then he hit a smooth patch, a leveling out of the passage, an
d he and Twitch and Adrian fell together in a heap.

  “Are you alright, son?” he heard Twitch say in the dark. He thought she smelled a little horsey, this close.

  Adrian groaned, lying under Mike.

  “You can see?” Mike asked.

  Then a light snapped on above Mike, and after he blinked away the sting of it he realized it was a flashlight beam. The beam jogged down the stairs to Mike’s level as he stood up, and then a second beam snapped on near the first, and Eddie materialized in the white beams of illumination, pressing a crosshatch-gripped Maglite into Mike’s hands.

  “I don’t know how far we have to go,” Eddie muttered, “but I know that dawn ain’t nowhere near close enough to save us.”

  “What is that, just a bit of random encouragement?” Mike touched the back of his neck—the skin there felt crisp like cooked pastry dough, and stung fiercely at the contact of his fingers. “Just want to make sure my hopes are set at the right level?”

  “Exactly,” Eddie agreed. “I’ve got the back, Jim will carry Adrian and Twitch can lead the boy.”

  “The boy?” Mike swiveled around with his flashlight and found the kid, staring with big brown eyes at the rock band of freaks and lunatics from out of town that had burned down his synagogue.

  “We’re not leaving the boy,” Eddie explained. “Jim wouldn’t have it.”

  “The boy’s got the Left Hand on him?” Mike gulped, wondering what the kid could have done to be in such bad spiritual shape.

  But Jim shook his head no before he turned and bent over to pick Adrian up and sling the organist over his shoulders. Now that the reek of Rabbi Feldman’s pyre and the stench of the Baal Zavuv were gone, Mike could smell the scorched flesh of Jim’s hands. Or his own back and neck, he realized.

  “Nah,” Eddie chewed out the words while stretching his shoulders and neck. “Jim just likes pissing off anything and anyone associated with the Infernal powers.”

  “You mean Hell?”

  “I mean Hell,” Eddie agreed. “You take point.”

  The sound of something thudding against the trapdoor echoed down the stairs and kicked Mike into action, sending him shuffling ahead of Jim and Twitch and into the lead. The ceiling of the passageway was mostly over his head, so he gripped the Maglite in his teeth and thumbed shells into the pistol’s clips as he walked. The sound of loud clicks behind him suggested that Eddie might be performing a similar action with his twelve-gauge. Mike felt better when the pistol had a fully loaded clip in it.