The Wicked

by James Newman

  The baby squalled as David stumbled back, holding him tightly. David did a quick inspection of his son’s body, and found no burns. But had he been a minute or two later, he knew his son might have been dead. Tears streamed down his face as he held the infant to his chest, protecting Christopher from the swarm. He stumbled back toward George and his M-16, shards of pain from the stings coarsing through his forearms.

  “Give him back!” Kate screamed at David. “The master is here now! He must have him!”

  “He belongs to Moloch!” cried Reverend Rhodes.

  “Fuck you, and fuck Moloch,” George Heatherly shouted, pushing Becca back over to her father. He cut loose with his M-16 then, Moloch’s left eye bursting in a gooey mess of black and gray. Optic fluid ran down the demon’s gargantuan face, onto its massive chin, and sizzled upon the carpet like acid. The monster—the building itself—made a sound resembling some massive, resounding groan. A smell like rotting meat filled the room.

  Reverend Rhodes trembled as he stared at the scene, as he glanced back and forth between those who would oppose his god and Moloch himself.

  “No, no,” he wept. “They will pay, O Lord...I promise, they will pay...”

  George fired again. This time at Reverend Rhodes. Four of the bee-things lit upon the ex-Marine, stinging his face and arms with their shiny black spears, but the tough old man barely seemed to notice. He swatted them away and kept firing.

  His first few shots missed the preacher entirely. Rhodes ran across the foot of the stage, but he tripped upon Moloch’s long beard. A spray of bullets struck him in the stomach, in the chest, and at last the man went down, disappearing—save for one outstretched, grasping hand—into Moloch’s beard. The ocean of greasy hair swallowed the reverend’s body up like a mass of squirming, hungry snakes, before growing still again save for the putrid breeze wafting through the church from the creature’s open mouth.

  Moloch sighed, and the sound was like a heavy wind on the highest mountaintop.

  “You ruined everything!” Kate screamed at her husband.

  “Bitch,” George said, bringing up the gun.

  David stopped him, placed one hand upon the old man’s arm. “No...”

  The old man lowered his weapon.

  Kate ran then, as fast as she could, ran past Moloch’s face and through a side door, out of the building.

  “Kate!” David cried. “Kate, stop!”

  “David,” George said. “Don’t you think it’s best to let her go?”

  David said nothing, just stared at the leviathan god who had grown from the back wall. He swatted one of the insects away from his son with his sore arm, and the thing darted back at him, stinging David in the crook of his neck right where Kate had bitten him earlier.

  “I LIVE!” Moloch’s voice boomed through the church.

  “Not for long,” said David.

  David stumbled through the carnage to the center of the church, placed his hands on the base of Moloch’s scrap-metal altar. He groaned, strained, pushed until his entire body shrieked with agony. His flesh burned, and he could hear it sizzle and pop as the heat inside the metal god’s body ate away at his palms. At his back those insect-creatures buzzed and trilled. His hair flapped in the breeze created by their rapidly vibrating wings. He felt dozens of stings upon his back.

  David roared, a sound derived from an equal mixture of agony and rage.

  Finally, the altar teetered.

  David’s knees locked. His palms hissed, and his vision blurred behind a thick red fog. He pushed...pushed...

  “Please God, give me strength...”

  The altar teetered again, rocked toward the stage, toward Moloch’s massive head.

  And then it fell.

  It crashed onto Moloch’s humongous face, and the demon was suddenly gone, as if he had never existed. His bee-creatures vanished too—all of them, suddenly gone.

  Glowing embers danced in the air, and now flames began to lap hungrily at the church carpet. The flames grew. Quickly. They trailed across the main floor of the church, up its walls in a matter of seconds like hot orange fingers reading brittle wooden Braille.

  “Come on,” George said, holding his bleeding, broken arm. “It’s time to go.”

  With Becca in one arm and Christopher in the other, David looked back one last time at the mess they had caused. What Moloch had wrought. At the blackened bodies lying everywhere. At the roaring fire, spreading through the place so rapidly.

  David ran from the church behind George, as fast as he could with his children in his arms, as the fire blazed at their backs. The blisters on the palms of his hands swelled and popped, but David barely even noticed as he ran with his children from that place of death.

  Within seconds, the building began to fall. Creaking, groaning. A dying behemoth.

  It was over.

  Finally, it was over.

  “Let’s go, Daddy!” Becca shouted from the 4Runner. “I think Christopher’s hungry.”

  “I’m coming, sweetie,” David said.

  He stood back, his thickly bandaged hands on his hips, and stared at the FOR SALE sign for another minute or so. Then at the house, at the way the setting sun framed it from behind like an old friend guarding its back. It was a melancholy scene, but David wondered why he didn’t feel something. Anything. Though they had lived in the house for only a few months, he thought he should feel at least a sad sort of nostalgia for the few memories his family had shared at 31 Honeysuckle Lane. Because there were good memories, along with the bad. As hard as those were to remember.

  Still, he felt only a cold sort of distance from the place, as if it had never truly been home to begin with. As if it were only a sort of dark way-station between one domicile and the next. An empty vessel, waiting to be filled by the next family who moved in with big dreams and a decent checkbook.

  He glanced in the direction of George Heatherly’s place before climbing into the 4Runner. He thought of his last conversation with the ex-Marine one morning a couple days after their long night at the church. He had already begun to pack up all of his family’s belongings, and George had asked him if he was sure he wanted to do this, moving away so abruptly when the town felt truly clean now. David had assured Heatherly he was damn sure he wanted to do this, and nothing the old man said could change his mind.

  George had nodded, moved to shake David’s heavily bandaged hand, but then opted for a friendly pat on the younger man’s back. One of his own muscular arms had been confined to an off-white sling. Thick red welts covered his face and arms, like David’s own, where Moloch’s terrible bee-things had stung him.

  “It was nice knowing you, David,” the old man said, “However briefly. Have a good life, my friend.”

  George had walked into his house then with his shoulders high, a strange expression upon his wrinkled face. It was the expression of a man who had accomplished something grand, so he could at long last retire and find some much-needed rest. Months later David would hear that George Heatherly had left Morganville himself, moving to California to live with his daughter and her husband. He would hear about the book George Heatherly wrote about their experiences—with all of the names changed, or course.

  As he started up the 4Runner, David’s thoughts turned from George Heatherly to Kate. He wondered if he was wrong in not telling Becca the truth about her mother. The little girl had a right to know. But he had told her that Kate had gone to Heaven to be with God. Mommy and Joel were up there right now, he said. They were looking down. And they were so, so proud of her. It was a decision he feared he might regret, a burden of guilt he suspected he would carry for years, but in the end he had decided it was for the best. Perhaps, one day, he would tell her the truth. But not until she was older. When she would understand. When he fully understood everything that had happened. But for now, how was he supposed to tell the seven-year-old that her mother had been committed to the asylum upstate, that Daddy had tried his hardest to talk to Mommy through that Plexig
las window but all she did was murmur incoherently about “forgiveness” and her “merciful Lord,” about how she hoped He would allow her into the Kingdom of Heaven if only she could prove her worth?

  How, David wondered, could he ever explain the violent twitches, the occasional guttural cry—“Moloch!”—that would slip out now and then like a harsh wet cough amidst Kate’s ramblings about the God she had once worshipped so devoutly? How could he explain the four large brown M’s Becca’s mother had drawn with her own feces on the walls of her room at the sanitarium, or the MOLOCH smeared upon her forehead in menstrual blood?

  He had done the right thing. He was sure of it.

  For now, he would tell Becca that his mother was with Jesus. It was hard, so hard for both of them, but the truth would be even harder.

  “I love you, Becca,” David said as he drove the 4Runner down Honeysuckle Lane and their former home grew smaller and smaller in his rearview mirror. He wiped a single tear from his eye with the sleeve of his shirt before his daughter could see it.

  “I love you too, Daddy,” Becca said. She squeezed Lucky, the fat pink bunny Uncle Joel had bought for her when they first arrived—how long ago that seemed now—as if she could transfer her love through the stuffed animal into her father up front.

  Baby Christopher made a “glaaabaagh” sort of noise from his car-seat, and Becca put one skinny freckled arm around her brother, kissed his tiny fingers one by one. She looked up at her father, in the rearview mirror, and grinned proudly.

  David winked at her, the swollen pink scratch on his cheek resembling some crusty tear trailing all the way down to his jawline, the thick gauze bandage upon his neck a soft white tattoo. “I love you two more than anything,” he said, looking back at his children one last time before devoting his attention entirely to the road before him.

  The road leading out of Morganville.

  AFTERWORD

  Something Wicked This Way Comes (Again)

  I am a child of the 80s.

  Most folks these days are quick to follow that up with a disclaimer: “But I sure am glad that decade’s long behind us, and ain’t never comin’ back!”

  Screw that.

  I loved the 80s. Still do. And I’m not ashamed to say so.

  I can’t help but think a lot of the folks who make fun of the things that were popular in the 80s—the music, the movies, the fashions (okay, I will give them that, the clothes we wore back then did deserve to be made fun of)—are the same folks who adore anything “retro” today. There’s a saying that “everything old is new again,” and I think that’s especially true where the era of Reaganomics, Pac-Man, acid-washed jeans, the Pet Shop Boys, and big, poofy hair is concerned.

  Maybe I’m wrong. But I don’t think so.

  If I were wrong, shows like I Love the 80s wouldn’t be popular. Hair metal wouldn’t be seeing the resurgence it has seen over the last few years. (Sure, many of the new bands who play that style of music today are doing it with their tongues firmly planted in their rouge-heavy cheeks; however, there’s another saying that goes “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”) 80s pop culture wouldn’t take up ninety-nine percent of the merchandise racks in places like Spencer Gifts, nor would more and more entire stores dedicated to the “Decade of Excess” be popping up all the time.

  But enough about the music and fashion of the 80s.

  We’re here to talk about horror.

  As a child of the 80s, the books I enjoyed during my formative years have stuck with me all of my life, naturally. I still remember the first “adult” horror novel I ever read: The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers-Siddons (if you’ve never read this one, I urge you to check out this seminal haunted-house tale—but don’t take my word for it, as a fellow by the name of Stephen King also cites Siddons’ novel as a personal fave). After reading The House Next Door at the age of...oh, I must have been fifteen or so...I couldn’t get enough of this stuff.

  As the old Firehouse song says, “That was all she wrote.”

  After The House Next Door, I bought all the horror novels I could find. Works by Mr. King—of course—took up every minute of my free time, as well as stories by other phenomenal but lesser-known writers such as Graham Masterton, Richard Laymon, Gary Brandner, Ronald Kelly, and Ray Garton. These were the guys who made me decide early on that I wanted to do this too, one day. I wanted to be a horror writer.

  Of course, just like anything in life, with the good comes the bad. As horror began to make serious money for the publishing houses, it soon became a classic case of quantity over quality. The big “horror boom” of the 80s brought countless generic, terribly-written novels into readers’ hands, books that quickly gave the genre a bad name.

  I’m not gonna name names here. I don’t have to. And if I did, I doubt you’d recognize those one-hit wonders anyway. When the bandwagon crashed and burned, those folks—or should I say, their careers—went up in smoke along with a genre gone bloated and very, very tired.

  You remember the cheesy covers. They were all the same: holographic demons...leering skulls...ominous-looking houses...and let’s not forget the possessed dolls and/or children. Those demonic brats were all over the place! Browse your local used bookstore, pick up five yellowed paperbacks originally published in the 80s, and I guarantee you at least three out of the five will feature a leering, red-eyed kid on the cover. Even if you were to grab a title by one of the “good guys” I mentioned above, chances are the poor author would have been cursed with one of those awful, generic covers that made his or her work look like more of the same at first glance. (Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, anyone? Those of you who remember the first edition undoubtedly recall that wretched “skeleton cheerleader”—yuck!)

  The plots were interchangeable too. I’m generalizing here, in a major way, but for the most part they could all be lumped into three categories:

  ...stories about those pesky, aforementioned children Possessed By Evil...

  ...or small, picture-perfect towns Possessed By Evil...

  ...or a church, a school, a movie theater, whatever, that had been unwisely constructed atop an old Indian burial ground...thus, it is now POSSESSED BY EVIL...

  You get the picture.

  Back then, this stuff was product—nothing more, nothing less. And the suits who published it couldn’t have cared less about separating the proverbial wheat from the chaff.

  ...at least till the money dried up, and readers who had been ripped off one too many times suddenly stopped buying anything with HORROR on the spine.

  I didn’t start off this piece intending to trash the horror novels of the 80s. Honestly. Remember what I said at the beginning of this piece about how I loved the 80s, still do, and I’m not ashamed of that?

  I wasn’t lying. I adore the era, and I adore the horror stories from that era.

  I even like some of the bad stuff, if you wanna know the truth. Even some of the badly-written stuff was fun, at least, and if nothing else it taught those of us who dreamed of one day writing our own tales of terror exactly what we shouldn’t do. That’s just as important, when learning your way in any craft—learn the right steps toward achieving your goal, but also learn the wrong way. Then you can avoid the mistakes made by others before you.

  The Wicked is my tribute to those “evil in a small town” novels of the 80s. I don’t consider it to be a parody, a spoof, or even quite tongue-in-cheek. At least, I never sat down to write it with those intentions in mind. Maybe it’s a little bit “self-aware”—not to the extent of something like those Scream movies that refuse to go away—but insofar as this is a story that knows it is treading territory that has been tromped all over before. It knows it, but it doesn’t care. It says, “Let’s have fun with this.”

  Ultimately, I sat down to simply write a story that I would want to read. And that’s what I attempt to do with everything I write.

  When the timing was right for The Wicked to at last see release in a paperback edition, I w
anted everything to be perfect. I had a vision, and I didn’t want to sell anyone the rights to a new edition unless I could do exactly what I dreamed of doing with it. I envisioned a version of The Wicked that brought to my readers not only a story that paid tribute to those novels that made me what I am today, but a total package that would take fans back to another era.

  Thank Moloch for Shock Totem Publications.

  They got it, man. These guys really friggin’ got it!

  Kick-ass cover art, done with the classic media of—gasp!—paints and a canvas, as opposed to something thrown together digitally? Check.

  Ads in the back of the book (even a cigarette ad!), just like those old paperbacks used to have? Check.

  A general sense of fun about the whole thing, via an author and a publisher who obviously don’t take themselves too seriously?

  Check, check, check!

  The Wicked is my ode to the stories I grew up with. The over-the-top, demented, but most-importantly fun horror novels that were all over the place when I was a teenager, for better or for worse.

  There were good ones. There were bad ones. Just as there are today.

  I like to think The Wicked is among the former.

  Hopefully you agree.

  James Newman

  Skinny-dipping the River Styx

  February 13, 2012

  THE BOARACLE

  There’s more than one demon in Morganville...

  “Home sweet home,” Paul said as he jogged up the steps of his colonial-style mansion. The Mazarati logo on his keychain glimmered beneath the security lights bordering his patio. He unlocked the door, humming a few notes from some generic techno tune that was stuck in his head, probably the last song he’d heard back at the club.