"Ok. I'm really sorry for your...for Talitha being so sick," she called out, but William didn't think she was sorry at all, unless she was sorry not to have heard some juicy gossip. His anger doused the lighter mood that he'd been in and it hung about him like a cloud as they walked the short distance to their front porch. The anger did take a back seat to his caution, however, as he carefully mounted the brick steps and went to the front door.
"Be careful of that knob, Dad," Will advised. "It was so cold yesterday, the skin of my hand stuck to it."
William gave it a test feel through his shirt, but the knob was as warm as the day, and it turned easily.
"Step back," he ordered his son. Cautiously he opened the front door. It drifted back soundlessly and the blast of frigid air that he was expecting did not materialize.
The house seemed, for the first time, normal.
William felt a good deal of puzzlement over this and stood in the doorway for over a minute sniffing the air and listening to the quiet of the place. There was no sign of the demon and the house seemed completely deserted, which was a disappointment. He had been hoping that some of the investigators were still about the place, but there was no one around. The only indication that anyone but the Jerns had been there, was a fine coating of what William took to be finger print dust.
Grabbing a large potted plant from the front of the porch, he wedged it in the doorway and then stepped boldly into the foyer. He paused, listening intently. Nothing.
William took three steps in and paused again—still nothing. Only then did he begin to relax, but just a little. With a small nod he motioned Will to step across the threshold and then went up the great stairs, stopping halfway up. This pause was a short one and he was moving upwards again in a matter of seconds. At the top William turned and looked at his son. They shared matching grins of sheepish embarrassment and he could see his son relax a little as well.
With the warmth of the house William figured that the demon was indeed a creature of the night, but he still wasn't taking any chances and he motioned for Will to stand guard at the top of the stairs.
Since it was the closest, he went first to Katie's room and recoiled in surprise at the bloody scene. There were trails and pools of dried blood everywhere; he wondered briefly how his wife hadn't bled to death there.
He only allowed himself a few seconds to stare about before he went to the dresser and grabbed some clothes, completely unmindful of whether they matched or not. He then went to Katie's closet and fished out her sundress, all of this went into the first piece of luggage.
His room was next. Unlike the scene in Katie's room, it was near perfect, with only the unmade bed suggesting anything out of the ordinary. Here he didn't pause, but dashed around collecting clothes, shoes, and all of the essentials on his mental list.
Within a minute the first suitcase, bulging at the seams, sat parked at the top of the great stair. William then started down the hall as quietly as his large, heavily muscled body would allow. His sense of purpose hadn't left him, but the back area of the house had seemed to be where the demon was not only the strongest, but also the most likely area for it to be lurking. However, the house still felt completely normal—that is until he stepped into Talitha's room.
The room was a perfect illusion of normalcy.
All of her belongings sat eerily silent waiting for her to return. It was as if her room hadn't heard the news and fully expected her to come strolling in at any second. Her bed looked warm, comfortable, and inviting. John Travolta, hanging in his customary spot, still wore his hair slicked back and still stared out with his impossibly blue eyes. The piles of books that seemed to litter every surface were all impatiently demanding to be read or re-read. It was all somehow inappropriate and even indecent that it jarred him on an emotional level.
His eyes filled with tears and though he tried to hold them back, blinking furiously, they came heavily. A loud sniffle escaped him and in the quiet house he felt sudden embarrassment, and cast a quick guilty glance at his son, who had moved to stand guard in the hall just feet from the backstairs.
Will looked tall and strong, and wore a hard, resolute look on his face. Seeing his son so much like a man, gave William the license, at least momentarily, not to be one. He went and sat on Talitha's bed and cried. He cried, uncaring of the demon, knowing he was being guarded over, and he cried, as he knew he never would in front of Gayle. For nearly five minutes he cried out his misery. He cried until he was hollow and empty and sat staring at nothing.
"Ahem," Will eventually gave a slight cough.
"Right." William shook his head. The sad hollowness he felt inside of him started filling with anger over his family's situation. It got him moving. He wiped his face with his shirtsleeves and took the second suitcase over to the closet. Since Talitha owned only a few dresses, the white one stood out. Quickly, but neatly, he folded the gown and stored it away. Only then did he remember the ribbons.
The man in him didn't want to bother with ribbons. He wanted to get Will's things and go. However the picture of Talitha lying in a coffin, looking like she was simply sleeping came to him. Now the father in him pictured her wearing the white dress and the matching shoes and saw that this was how she would lie forever. Suddenly the ribbon became an imperative.
"Will," he whispered to his son as he placed the suitcase gently down in the hall. "I forgot the ribbon, I'll be right back."
As he turned to go, Will responded with a whisper of his own, "I'm going to get my stuff. Do me a favor and...uh...when you get the ribbon wait right here. I don't want both of us up there. I kinda like the idea of you being down here, you know, to keep an eye on things."
William could tell his son was afraid of being trapped up in the attic, as Gayle had been. It was quite an understandable feeling, therefore he gave his son a quick reassuring nod before hurrying back down the hall to his room. William was in the master bathroom in seconds, and snatched up all of the gold ribbon he could find, stuffing it into his empty cargo pocket. After a last glance around the room, he turned and hurried down the hallway and that was when the demon appeared in all of its glorious malevolence.
4
From the length of the hall, the demon looked upon William. When it did, the shocking blast of the thing's wickedness sent him reeling backwards.
A tremendous static roared through his brain and there was absolutely no opportunity for rational thought. Now he knew what Gayle had meant by an explosion. She had failed to mention the pain. Invisible flames seared his skin and raced down his spine. He felt the demon punishing him, burning him and he staggered back against the wall between his and Katie's room. His body started reacting on its own. Stumbling like a panicked drunk, tearing at the walls for support, William fled into the master bedroom.
There he threw himself to the floor and writhed in agony, attempting to smother the flames he couldn't see but certainly felt. Thankfully, being out of direct sight of the demon, the burning sensation felt slightly less. The static became muted as well, so that as William crawled across the carpet, a thought was able to slowly balloon up through the pain: Will is trapped upstairs!
It was the only thought pushing through the phantom flames, and that was good because he didn't want to think— he wanted to act! William felt a terrific rage surge through him...a terrible anger at what the demon was doing to him and his family, and the rage was stoked by the pain of the fire torturing him. He liked the anger. He wrapped himself in it, knowing he would need it if he was going to fight the beast. And fighting was truly his only choice. There would be no way he'd run from the house, not with his son still inside.
The terrific mental onslaught wavered, but only slightly, as his anger grew. Even though he could still feel the demon pounding at his brain and charring his flesh, he was able to claw his way up the tall dresser. His eyes fell upon his sword. It sat atop his dresser just where he had left it after his inspection.
Trembling, he stood while pain and anger f
ought for supremacy within him. The feelings were so great that his vision doubled and it took a scrambling hand to find the gold-braided hilt. With a practiced motion, he pulled the polished blade from its gilded scabbard and stared fixedly on it. This is what he needed, a weapon!
The pain faded into the background and his mind became clearer as his anger intensified. Soon his hand shook, as he gripped the hilt with all his strength. Seething with rage, he threw off the worst of the pain and let loose his anger.
"WILL!!!!" he bellowed in his tremendous sea going voice—so loud that the mirror over the dresser shook and he heard a light zing sound come from the sword. "It's back! Get ready to run!" He took four long, slow breaths, all the while looking with an unbelievably animalistic ferocity at his sword.
These were purposely not calming breaths, he wanted his fury to be almost beyond his control. The breaths were only to allow Will time to get near the stairs, if he wasn't there already. On the last breath, he held it momentarily, until opening his bedroom door; he let out a bestial challenging roar and charged down the hallway.
In a cold silence, the great, black monstrosity waited for him. It was partially on the stairs leading to the attic and partially on the landing and that end of the house looked like midnight, as if the creature had sucked all the light out of the day.
William felt as if he was running headlong into a vomitus river of cold, unyielding, selfish hate.
It dragged at him, weighing him down and even though he pumped his legs furiously, he couldn't seem to build up any speed; it felt like the slow-motion running of a dream. However, despite this dream-like feeling, he was on top of the demon in a flash, and he felt the near-paralyzing cold of the thing burn his lungs and freeze his sweat.
William swept the sword up and even before he thrust it, he knew the outcome; he would die right there and right then. But he was completely unconcerned about himself and only wished to live long enough that his boy might escape. With that thought, he lunged into the outer reaches of the swirling blackness and thrust his sword with all the great strength of his right arm and shoulder, into what he took to be the face of the beast.
A second can be split in half and each of those can be split again, and this can happen over and over so that a second can be at once quick, just a heartbeat, and also eternal. For William it was both.
With a last flash of light glinting from the steel, he drove his blade into the black pit of the thing, nearly to the hilt. It felt like he had pierced soft yielding flesh, only instead of retreating from the sword, the demon sucked on it hungrily. William knew an instant of revulsion at the feeling but then realized that his mind was his own again! The mental conduit between him and the demon no longer existed. Gone was the torturous pain! The blade seemed to have knocked it askew, almost causing a prism effect, so that William felt the malicious evil of the creature flying all about him without hitting him as it had.
However, what replaced it was far worse: screams of pain, shrieks of the tortured; souls by the tens of thousands desperately crying out for pity, for mercy, for help. This frantic cacophony raced up the length of the sword from the depths of the demon, and in that half second before William knew true misery and before his sword shattered, he not only heard, but also felt every cry, moan, whimper, and shriek. It was overwhelming and after the first tenth of a second, the voices blended together into one gigantic cry of selfish agony. Then right at that moment, exactly at the point when he felt utter despair and helplessness and grief beyond his ability to cope, he heard a single clear voice.
It ran against the grain of the self-centered demands of the damned.
"Run, Daddy!"
It was a pure sound from a pure soul. It rose high above the cries of the sinners. It was Talitha's voice!
William wanted to call out to her, to tell her how much he loved her, but more than anything, he wanted to save her—yet there was no time.
For three-quarters of a second, he had been standing with his sword transfixing the demon, and now when he needed time the most, he was out of it. Something had followed the miserable cries up from the deepest layers of the demon: something beyond human ability to comprehend or even to describe.
It was Evil. It was Evil stripped of its petty excuses, of its human desires, of any restriction whatsoever. It was as pure as the voice had been, but it was only pure in its blackness, entirely devoid of a single virtue. It was Evil totally for its own sake and it was Hell.
William had assumed Hell to be a fiery place, but now he knew it was cold: a cold far beyond the understanding of science. It was that combination of cold Evil that chased the voices up from the depths of the terrifying pit of the creature's face.
William's mind acted in self-defense in the only way it could, it ceased to function altogether and it died. Every cell in his brain, still with the screams echoing through them, simply shut down. With the loss of his brain controlling the rest of his body, William collapsed down the stairs, breaking the connection with the demon. As his body started to fold in on itself, the sword, now brittle with the absolute cold of Hell, exploded into a million pieces, so that it appeared to turn to smoke, which was then instantly sucked into the pit of the creature.
Chapter 10
Will and Adrina
June 5th, 1980
1
On the walk from the hospital, Will tried to hide his fear from his father. He hardly spoke at all and when his teeth begun to chatter involuntarily, he clamped his lips together tightly. His hands shook so he kept them stuffed deep in his pockets, and it was only when he reached for one of the suitcases that Mrs. Harris had lent them, that anyone could have seen how they danced about like those of an old man with palsy. He felt that if he were to relax, they would just simply fly away.
By the time they entered their house, the shaking in his hands had progressed to his arms, and he took to almost hugging himself to hide the movement from his father. He held his father in awe. The man...the Commander seemed to be completely fearless and calm, in perfect control.
It only made Will feel worse.
Will understood the logic behind coming back, they would definitely need some of their belongings, and they couldn't stay away forever. But logic and fear did not at all mix. He didn't care that there had been five men going over every inch of the house earlier that morning. Or that there was a great likelihood the demon was a night creature, or in fact may have gone back to whatever Hell it had come from. These logical points did nothing to diminish his terrific fear, however the atmosphere in the house did. It was warm, inviting, seemingly empty, and altogether normal. He allowed himself to relax...too much...so much so that he even talked himself into the idea that going up to the attic alone wasn't at all risky.
All of it; the warmth, the normalcy, the quiet, was part of a trap. The demon had been lurking somewhere, probably in the boiler room and had slipped up the stairs as silent as the smoke it appeared to be. And Will would've been trapped for certain if it wasn't for his father's warning yell. In a flash Will understood completely and he was so keyed up that he didn't need the advice on running.
The Commander's warning coupled with his tremendous fear set him sprinting with amazing speed. So fast was he that he couldn't feel his feet touching the wood of the floor so it almost felt like he was flying. From his room in the attic, he made it down the first flight of stairs in a matter of heartbeats, but stumbled to a halt at the sight just below him.
The demon was there, just feet away, almost filling the entire landing with a churning blackness. A powerful rush of noise in his ears and a mind-numbing fear sent him to the verge of panic, but just as he felt rational thought start to leave him, he heard a distant roar.
In an instant, his father appeared racing down the hallway, charging the great beast. In his upraised right hand he held a gleaming sword. The sword no longer looked to be part of a fancy costume. Now it was a weapon, a real weapon, a man's weapon. His father brought it up in a flash to strike and the hi
ghly polished metal seemed to gather the remaining light of the darkened stairwell into it. For an instant it blazed against the dense blackness of the demon.
Commander Jern then threw his arm and body forward in a picture-perfect lunge, so that all of his momentum, weight, and strength centered on the point of the sword. Will watched as the sword drove straight and true into the deadly black pit of the demon's face.
Wild elation filled Will's heart in the half second before the sword seemed to just turn to dust and break off near the hilt. However, in that incredibly short time, he was able to see the heroic look on the Commander's face and the large straining muscles of his sword arm. The pair of them, the Commander and the demon, for just that fraction of a second were frozen as if statues, a picture from the cover of a fantasy book in which the hero wields a mighty sword and never falters in the face of evil.
But his father's sword was neither magical nor mighty and it shattered in a puff of silvery smoke, leaving only a jagged piece just above its gilded hilt. Moreover, his father was not a hero out of a book, he was merely a man. As great as he was, the demon was far greater, and it somehow struck him down so that he collapsed like a ragdoll.
Falling down the stairs, the Commander lay in almost the identical spot and position that Will had been in just the night before, with his feet and legs pointing up toward the landing.
The sword strike had some effect on the demon. The terror, as well as the noise enveloping Will's mind, suddenly left him and he blinked in surprise at the clarity with which he could see the situation. However, it was with dread that he noted that his options were very limited. The demon's immense form nearly filled the landing and left only the smallest amount of room to try to escape down the hallway. It would take a fantastic leap from the railing to jump clear of the creature...but this would leave his father at its mercy.
The Trilogy of the Void: The Complete Boxed Set Page 24
