Grimm Awakening

by Bryan Smith

  Lucien’s discomforting grin reappeared. “That’s because you’ve heard the voice of Lust. As long as you’re in hell, there’ll never be relief from that desire. You would experience the same desire for every attractive woman you encounter here.”

  Jack frowned. “Ah...say, what do you mean by, ‘as long as you’re in hell’, because I’ve been operating under the impression that residence in hell is, well, forever.”

  “That’s true.” Lucien sipped from the big mug of black ale he grasped with his right hand. “For just about everybody else here. But not for you.”

  The hellhound’s words shocked Jack. His grip tightened around the pint glass, and he was unable to breathe for a minute. Lucien’s words sparked a faint glimmer of hope, but he feared the beast’s words might be a cruel joke. He was, after all, a servant of evil, and he clearly delighted in frightening people.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Lucien’s grin widened ever-so-slightly. He cast a slow glance around the bar, as if to determine whether anyone was listening, then he leaned closer to Jack. Jack’s first impulse was to shrink away in terror, but he willed himself to stay still. His nose wrinkled at the hellhound’s fetid breath, a breath that warmed his ear as the creature whispered, “I mean that you have something no other man here possesses. A true treasure.”

  Jack’s heart pounded. “Wh-what would that be?”

  Lucien’s chuckle was so soft it almost wasn’t audible, even at this range. “A pulse. You aren’t dead, friend.”

  Lucien pulled away from Jack, a more subtle grin in place of the old, leering one.

  Jack’s thoughts were racing. How could this be? He was in hell. But he was alive (if he could trust the hellhound). He listened for a moment to the beating of his own heart and marveled at it. It was something so simple, something so plain a child would have divined its meaning, but the high level of distress he felt at his circumstances had made him overlook the obvious. I’m alive, he thought. In hell.

  He downed the rest of his second boilermaker and met Lucien’s gaze. “How is this possible?”

  Lucien’s expression gave away nothing. “I’ll tell you, but we’ll not discuss it here.”

  Jack made an exasperated sound. “Oh, come on. You can’t lay something like that on a guy and then make like a cryptic hellhound of fucking mystery.”

  Lucien’s eyes narrowed and steam puffed out of his nostrils. “I don’t like to repeat myself, Jack. We’ll not discuss it here.”

  The hellhound drank the rest of the black ale and signaled the barmaid. She approached them from the other end of the bar and Jack’s gaze went to her like metal shavings drawn to a magnet. He saw the smirk when she looked his way, but the expression failed to diminish the lust he felt. He wanted to lick every inch of her luscious body. And then he wanted to do...other things.

  Lucien extracted a wallet from a rear pocket of his trousers, fished out a few bills of an odd-looking currency printed in black and grey tones, and passed the money across the bar. He winked at Jack, then met the barmaid’s gaze. “Sonia, why don’t you tell my friend Jack why you’re in hell.”

  Sonia took the money and looked at Jack. “I’m in hell because I drowned my baby in a toilet one night when I got home late from the bar where I worked. My boyfriend was passed out on the couch. Baby had soiled his goddamn diaper and was screaming. I was too tired and pissed off to deal with any of it. So glug-glug-glug went baby.”

  Lucien looked at Jack. “Still want her, pal?”

  Jack forced his gaze away from the sexy baby-killer. For the first time in a while the invisible baby’s cry emerged clearly through the din of conversation. “I want out of here.” Another plaintive cry made his throat tighten. “Now.”

  “You’re in luck, then.” Lucien slid off his stool. “You and I have places to go. And there’s a guy I want you to meet.”

  7.

  Jack gripped Lucien by the shoulder outside the entrance to THE DEAD END. “Wait, we have to go back inside.”

  Lucien cocked his head. The motion made Jack think of the German Shepherd, Max, he’d had as a kid. He chose not to share this insight with Lucien. The hellhound said, “We don’t have time to go back inside, Jack. Relax, there’ll be time to drink later.” His eyes narrowed some. “Be alert. Our enemies are everywhere. Time is short.”

  Jack’s panicked gaze flicked back to the bar’s entrance. “No, you don’t get it. I’m not craving another drink...okay, I am, but that’s not the reason I need to go back in.” He locked eyes with the hellhound. “I came here to get information. I need to know what I did in there last night. I need to find out about a girl.” He frowned. “Wait, ‘our enemies’? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Who’s after us?”

  Lucien shook his head. “Later, Jack. There’s no time now.”

  Jack felt a strange tightness in his chest. A surge of paranoia made him twitchy, and he began casting quick, darting glances at passing pedestrians, wondering whether they could tell what he was just by looking at him, whether they could hear the loud, frantic pounding of his heart.

  Lucien gripped his shoulder. “Calm, Jack. Count slowly to six-hundred and sixty-six.” The hellhound chuckled. “I’m going to help you. But you need to shut up for a while and just do whatever I say. Let’s go.”

  Lucien approached a car that resembled a normal police cruiser in every way but for the emblem on the door--a hellhound insignia exactly like the one on his armband. Below that, a motto: TO FEAST AND PUNISH. The hellhound unlocked the driver’s side door with an electronic key fob and slipped inside. Jack hesitated.

  What the hell am I doing? he wondered.

  Why should a hellhound want to help him? It made no sense. Lucien was likely taking him to meet the prince of darkness himself. Maybe some great reward awaited Lucien for delivering Jack to his master. Jack cast a nervous glance west. There was an alley. He could make a run for it. His chances of making a clean getaway hovered somewhere between slim and not-gonna-happen, but what other choice did he have?

  Lucien’s window slid down. “Jack, what’s the hold-up?”

  “Um...”

  “For fuck’s sake, Jack. I’m a hellhound. If I wanted, I could take you down in a heartbeat and snap your neck like a twig. Think about it.”

  Jack struggled to keep his voice calm. “I am thinking about it. Maybe you need me...” His mouth closed until a wino who smelled like a combination of a landfill and a gin-factory explosion stumbled past him. “...the way I am.”

  “Think some more, Jack.”

  Jack did. And he sighed. “And I suppose you could take me alive without any problem, either.”

  Lucien laughed. “You’re good, Jack. No wonder they pay you the big bucks. Now get in the fucking car.”

  Jack took a deep breath and did just that.

  8.

  Jack studied his surroundings as Lucien guided the cruiser through the city streets. With the exception of the occasional horrific anomaly, like the hellhound they’d seen raping a woman in the street, the place remained as normal in appearance as any depressed industrial city he’d seen in America’s heartland. He saw an open-fire hydrant gushing water, cracked sidewalks, and dismal brick buildings, many of them with broken or boarded-up windows. Lucien’s cruiser occasionally bounced as a wheel popped in and out of one of the many potholes in the asphalt.

  Jack looked at Lucien. “About the girl...”

  Lucien glanced at him. “You were asking about a girl at THE DEAD END last night. You were showing around a photo. Cute little blonde number. You were stinking drunk. Sounded like you’d been in every dive in Greytown looking for this broad.”

  Jack’s brow furrowed. “I say what her name was?”

  Lucien grunted. “Mona.”

  Jack’s breath caught in his throat and his eyes widened. Sweet Jesus, why was he in hell looking for his missing wife? Ten years had gone by, but he’d never stopped believing she was still alive somewhere. The notion that she was
not only dead but damned was incomprehensible. Another thing--why would he have referred to Mona with the impersonal word ‘girl’ in his hastily scrawled note?

  Jack regained enough of his composure to ask Lucien another question. “That photo...do you know what happened to it?”

  Lucien withdrew something from the front pocket of his uniform shirt and passed it to Jack. Jack’s heart broke all over again at the sight of that photographed image. It was the face of the only woman he’d ever truly loved. She was beautiful. Mona. His angel. There’d been an extravagant wedding and two subsequent years of seeming wedded bliss. Then one day she was just gone. No note. No explanation of any type. Just gone. She’d withdrawn every cent from her personal accounts and part of the money from their joint checking account. Years of searching and investigating had turned up just one bit of evidence--a piece of surveillance videotape that showed her entering a convenience store to use the lady’s room a month after her disappearance. She’d been alone and under no apparent duress. After leaving the lady’s room, she paid for a newspaper and left the store.

  Since then, nothing.

  There’d never been any reason to believe she hadn’t left of her own volition. No reason not to believe she was still alive somewhere, perhaps with a new identity. All these years, Jack had never been able to fathom why she’d dumped him in so cruel a fashion, but he’d derived a meager measure of comfort just by knowing that she was probably okay somewhere. What she’d done hurt to no end, but he wished her no harm, and sometimes in the wee hours of the morning he’d lie awake in bed and whisper her name.

  Thinking about her being condemned to hell for all time was like a knife to the heart. “A guy at the Sundowner Inn told me hell is like whatever you hated most in life. Is that true?”

  Lucien’s gaze remained on the road ahead. “To a degree. Do you recognize the woman in the photo?”

  Jack considered his response. He wondered what Mona’s personal hell would be like. He feared the answer might be an eternity of domestic life with Jack Grimm. And he remained unsure of the advisability of sharing everything he knew with Lucien, so he maneuvered the conversation in a slightly different direction. “There’s something vaguely familiar about her. But tell me something. Is my vision of hell also founded on that same principle. Just for instance, let’s talk about Jack the Ripper. I know that sick fuck has to be here. Say he walks these same streets. Would he see cobblestone where I see pavement? Horses and wagons where I see cars?”

  The cruiser’s radio squawked static. A voice just audible through the distortion said something in a strange, indecipherable language. Something about the guttural words made his skin crawl and sent slivers of pain lancing through his head. Lucien squelched the volume. “I’m off-duty and will pretend I didn’t hear that.”

  Jack put a hand to a pounding temple. “What in the name of all things holy was that awful noise?”

  Lucien smirked. “Nothing holy about it, Jack. It was a call to harvest souls. A directive for hellhounds to gather some of these pathetic wretches you see around you and take them off to dungeons for a century or two of torture.”

  “Lovely.” Jack watched a hellhound leap out of a parked cruiser and snatch a teenager with a green mohawk. The kid screamed and the hellhound smashed his head against the fender of his cruiser before tossing him unconscious into the back seat. “Lovely place you call home, Lucien. Heartwarming as shit. You’ll have to stop somewhere so I can buy some postcards.”

  Lucien laughed. “Don’t let it worry you. You’re with me. You won’t be harvested. Now, to answer your question, you’ll have to get your head around a few kooky concepts. First, hell is not a place below the earth’s surface. It is infinitely vaster than that space would allow. Think of it as being something like the human conception of alternate dimensions. And it has many domains. Different provinces or boroughs, if you prefer that terminology. This one is called Greytown. It looks the same to me as it does to you or any other damned person. Mr. Jack the Ripper, or Owen, as I call him, resides in a quaint little place called OverDark. Cobblestone streets abound in OverDark.”

  Jack grimaced. “Wait. I’m...damned?”

  Lucien continued to stare straight ahead. “You are. You’re alive, but you’re damned. You’ll find out more about that when we meet this friend of mine I’m taking you to see.”

  Damned.

  Lucien returned to his overview of hell. “This place we’re in is what I’d call an outer borough. It is as distant as one can get from the center of hell and still be in hell. The outer boroughs are not as tightly patrolled or monitored. The closer you get to the center of hell, and I’ve been there, Jack, this isn’t second-hand bullshit, the more horrible things get.”

  Against his better judgment, Jack asked the obvious question. “Just how much more horrible can things get?”

  Lucien shook his head. “You don’t really want to know, Jack. If things go the way I hope, Greytown will be the only part of hell you ever get to see. Trust me, you best hope you never step foot in the demon boroughs.”

  Jack shuddered. “So...there are, ah, actual demons? Creatures that possess little schoolgirls, make their heads spin around, and spit pea-soup?”

  Lucien looked at him. The grin on his face sent a chill through Jack.

  The hellhound said, “Oh, yes.”

  9.

  Lucien parked his cruiser behind a building that looked like an abandoned warehouse. Its few windows were boarded up and the building itself was coated in a thick layer of grime. Jack saw a few more cars at the far side of the parking lot, but they were in such bad shape he figured they had been abandoned there.

  Lucien retrieved a flashlight from the cruiser’s glove compartment before they got out of the car. Jack followed the hellhound up a short staircase to a grey metal door. Lucien pulled it open and Jack followed him into a dark space.

  Jack couldn’t see beyond a few feet in front of him and even that limited bit of visibility was lost to him a moment later when the door swung shut. The absolute blackness alone was enough to elicit a chill of fear, but Jack’s unease increased tenfold as his other senses compensated for the sudden lack of vision. He heard noises, sounds produced by living things, but he couldn’t identify them. He sensed a malevolent presence nearby and tensed, his heart accelerating like the engine of a race car leaving the starting line at the Indy 500. His nose wrinkled at a rotting smell that tickled his gag reflex.

  He heard a snap and Lucien’s flashlight beam penetrated the darkness.

  Jack gasped. “Oh...my...God...”

  To his right, the withered husk of a hellhound lay slumped against a grey wall. Lucien’s beam played over the lifeless creature’s glassy eyes, then moved south, revealing a hypodermic needle inserted in the crook of a vein. The grisly tableau summoned anew the old images of that Cincinnati prostitute. Snippets from that shame-filled morning played in his mind like clips from a movie. He saw himself reaching out to touch the rail-thin woman’s cool flesh to feel for a pulse. Then he experienced again the sudden surge of grief that had swept through him like a virulent virus, leaving him curled-up and shaking on the floor. He hadn’t known the woman at all, couldn’t even remember meeting her the night before. But he didn’t need those memories to know that his money had purchased the drug that killed her.

  Since that morning, few things depressed Jack quite so much as the misery of the junkie. This thing’s non-humanity did nothing to assuage the resurgence of this old pain. A junkie was a junkie, human or not. And it was clear that this thing had died a pitiful, painful, lonely death. Its limbs were twisted and its head was distended in a way that indicated it had died in mid-transformation.

  Lucien’s flashlight beam ranged farther ahead. Other emaciated hellhounds were present, some of them dead, some of them twitching on the floor in the grip of the drug’s influence. There were creatures other than hellhounds here as well, though none of them were human. Some of them resembled frail gargoyles, while other
s looked like nothing in Jack’s experience. The latter included an assortment of creatures, some winged things, some slithery, slimy things, all of them with glowing yellow eyes that made Jack shiver. These were the things that went bump in the night, the monsters children on earth believed were lurking under their beds or in their closets. Though the sight of them repulsed Jack, he didn’t fear them--they were too pathetic to fear.

  Jack looked at Lucien. “Why have you taken me to a hellspawn shooting gallery? This is awful. How could any of these...things...be of interest to me.”

  Lucien’s voice was cold as he said, “Remember, Jack, I’m one of those ‘things’, and it’s not one of them we’ve come to see. Follow me.”

  Lucien moved ahead, threading a path through the living carnage, and Jack followed him. Gnarled hands and claws occasionally reached for him from the darkness, but they lacked the strength to do anything more than land a fleeting, trembling touch. Jack stepped in a puddle of something wet and yielding, something he tentatively identified as the remains of some frail, dead hellbeast.

  “Why would these...hellspawn...do this to themselves?”

  Lucien grunted. “Why do junkies on earth shoot smack, Jack? They try it and get addicted. Think about this, friend. Hellspawn are the only truly living things in hell, other than yourself, of course, and a small percentage of them are just born wrong. Some inexplicable quirk of genetics invests them with a conscience. An ability to feel things as humans do and to empathize with human suffering. This is more than most of these unfortunates can abide. So they seek escape.”

  Jack’s brow furrowed as he considered the implications. “Um...are you...?”

  Lucien’s voice was almost inaudible: “Yes. I was born wrong, Jack.”

  “But you’re not a junkie.”

  Lucien drew to a stop at a closed door and turned to face Jack. The flashlight beam was aimed at Jack’s midsection and the hellhound’s expression was unreadable as he became a dark figure in a halo of light.