by Bryan Smith
Kayla thought of how he’d slipped unnoticed into the room in the moments before sticking it to Red Nose. “Yeah. That I can believe. I’d be grateful for that if I didn’t also know it was part of how you got away with the crazy shit you did back in the day.”
Jack just smiled.
“Anyway…where is this trophy room?”
Jack’s smile broadened. “In due time. First we must settle matters with Red Nose.”
Kayla glanced at the sprawled form of her abductor. He’d stopped crawling toward the door, too weakened by blood loss to go any further. He was still alive, though. His mouth was moving, squeezing out unintelligible sounds that were barely audible.
Kayla frowned. “What do you mean by ‘settle matters’?”
“He has to die.”
“Um…look, don’t get the wrong idea, because I know this dude’s a murdering freak, but what’s the point? He looks halfway dead already.”
Jack shrugged. “Perhaps. But I must report to Lucifer after this episode is concluded. Trust me when I tell you the dark lord does not tolerate loose ends. True, this man’s survival is unlikely, but not out of the question. He has examined your personal effects. He knows where you live. Therefore he must die before we leave this place.”
Kayla saw the logic in that. But that didn’t mean she had to hang around to watch it happen. She wasn’t a ghoul. She didn’t want to watch a man die, no matter how much he might deserve it. “Okay, fine. You kill him. Do what you have to do, I guess. I’m gonna go find this room you were talking about and get the hell out of here.”
She started toward the door.
And stopped when Jack laid a hand on her shoulder, making her flinch as his rough fingers dug into her bare skin. “I thought you might like to do the deed yourself.”
Kayla gaped at him, her face twisting in a disbelieving scowl. “What!? Why would I want to do that? Wet work is your job, right?”
“Wet work?”
“Killing.”
“I see. Quite right.”
She shrugged his hand off her shoulder and started toward the door again.
“However.”
There was some steel in his tone and it made her stop in her tracks again. “What now?”
Jack was smiling again. Kayla hated it when he smiled. There was something so patently false about it. It was a mask. A disguise. A means of obscuring the monster lurking not so far beneath the surface. And maybe it even worked on people who didn’t know what he really was. But Kayla knew the truth behind the lie and so it only served to make him seem more ghoulish.
“What you ultimately do here is your choice, of course. Lucifer was explicit in that regard. However, there is an aspect to this you may wish to consider before you hurry off.”
“I doubt that.”
“Oh? Are you quite certain?”
“Christ, why is it you motherfuckers from hell have such a hard time just getting to the goddamn point? Just spit out whatever it is you’re thinking, okay?”
“Very well, then. You have agreed to a deal with Lucifer requiring you to take the life of another human being within the week, correct?”
“It’s probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but yeah. Your point?”
“The point, dear, is that when the time comes to get the job done, you will not have the luxury of slipping away to another room while someone else does the ‘wet work’ for you.” He had the dagger out again and was rocking the handle between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. It was still wet with Red Nose’s blood. “Think of this as practice. After all, if you cannot murder someone so obviously deserving of death, how could you ever take the death of a relative innocent?”
Fuck.
He did have a point, the smug son of a bitch. Knowing that didn’t make her any more willing to finish off Red Nose, but it did cause her to again question what she was doing. She foggily recalled the resolve she’d felt in the moments before being taken by Red Nose, that certainty that reneging on her agreement with the devil was the right thing to do. The moral certitude of those moments was eluding her now.
She frowned, staring at the dagger as it tipped side to side like a metronome.
Jack closed his fingers around the handle and extended his hand, proffering the blade to her. “Do it. You’ll see. Taking the life of the person you choose as your sacrifice will be infinitely easier after this.”
Kayla reluctantly accepted the dagger, taking it and wrapping numb fingers around the sticky-wet handle, wetting her flesh with the blood of her tormentor. “So why can’t Red Nose be the sacrifice? We could be done with this shit right now.”
Jack smirked again. “You can’t really imagine you’d get off so easily. He is already nearly deceased, for one thing. My doing, obviously. In order to satisfy the conditions of your contract with Lucifer, you are required to complete the task with no assistance from anyone else. You alone must still the heart of your chosen offering.”
“Lovely. You’re right. I should’ve known better. The whole point is to make this shit as hard on me as possible, right? You know what? You people from hell are a bunch of assholes.”
Jack just grinned.
Kayla approached Red Nose’s prone form, dropping to her knees next to him. She stared in disgust at his hairy, blood-drenched back. The blood had smoothed down some of his profuse back hair in little gory swirls. That was bad enough but the close-up view of the hole in his back was much worse. She felt bile creep up her gullet and touch the back of her throat. Her stomach fluttered. Her whole body was in revolt at the thought of sticking the bloody blade in this man’s flabby flesh. No part of her wanted to do this, not even a little bit.
But none of that made what Jack had said any less right.
She leaned over him, positioning the lethally sharp tip of the dagger just above the side of his neck with her shaking hand. One good, deep cut right there might get the job done, if she managed to sever one of those big arteries. She tightened her grip on the dagger’s handle, gritted her teeth, and pressed the tip of the blade to his neck, dimpling the doughy flesh. She exerted a bit of pressure and a pinpoint of blood welled up around the tip of the blade. A great deal more bile rushed into her throat at the sight of the blood. She choked it back, but knew she could go no further. Not this time. And maybe never.
She lurched to her feet and let the blade tumble from her fingers. She looked at Jack. His smirk was more pronounced this time. “I…can’t. I’m sorry.”
She wanted to punch herself in the face for that remark.
Why am I apologizing to this abomination?
“I know.”
Kayla couldn’t think of a suitable reply. So instead she staggered from the room and set off in search of the trophy repository her monstrous rescuer had described.
It was a small house. Finding the room didn’t take long It was filled with cardboard boxes and old furniture. And mannequins. Dozens of them. Some of the mannequins were nude, but many had been fitted with the clothes of dead women. The mannequins were arrayed in various poses. One in a pretty yellow sundress sat in a rocking chair, its bottom half, the legs, missing. Some of the boxes were open. They were stuffed with still more women’s clothing and a wide array of personal effects. Wallets. Wigs. Purses. Watches. Jewelry. It might have been overwhelming, except for the fact that she spotted her stuff right away. Her jeans and the now-hated Van Halen t-shirt were folded in a neat pile atop the closest box. Her purse sat unopened next to the box. Probably Red Nose had meant to sort through its contents later, at his leisure.
After he’d killed her.
Kayla pushed back another dizzying wave of sickness and hurriedly dressed, trying hard not to look at the mannequins as she pulled her clothes on. It felt like they were staring at her. Like they were moving when she wasn’t watching. Had she really thought Red Nose wasn’t cut from quite the same cloth as Jack? That he didn’t possess an equivalent creep factor?
She’d been wrong and this room was t
he proof.
And for the first time she understood precisely how close to death she’d come tonight.
She got her shoes on, grabbed her purse, and ran out of the house.
14.
Much of the ensuing hour passed in a haze induced by a combination of shock and a general sense of disorientation. She’d spent a lot of time in Nashville since the start of her freshman year, but she was on unfamiliar ground in Red Nose’s neighborhood and she wasn’t a native of the city anyway. It didn’t help matters that there were no obvious major landmarks with which to orient herself. However, she figured she was at least several miles from campus. She knew this because couldn’t see the downtown skyline regardless of which direction she turned.
But she continued on regardless, turning down more random residential streets lined with houses that looked exceptionally well-maintained. Few of the homes looked very new, but she suspected they were expensive anyway, judging by the luxury cars parked in most of the driveways. She glimpsed the stylized Lexus logo more times than she could count. Vehicles from Mercedes and BMW were present in abundance, as well. So this was a prosperous neighborhood. She wasn’t likely to run into a mugger here.
Or so she might have thought prior to tonight. Now she knew better. Safety was an illusion. Bad things could happen anywhere. Even here. The man who had taken her had obviously called this place home for a long time. It made her wonder what horrors might be lurking inside any of these other unassuming abodes. How many moldering bodies might be buried in backyards or stuffed inside crawlspaces. This train of thought made her paranoid and eliminated the possibility of knocking on some random door to ask for help. So she even kept her head down and her mouth shut as she passed other pedestrians on the sidewalk. Odds were any one of these people might have been able to help her, but she didn’t know them and therefore felt she couldn’t trust them. The truth was she couldn’t trust anyone at all anymore.
But she couldn’t just keep walking all night and hope she might somehow, perhaps by pure luck, wind up somewhere familiar. She’d been through a lot and she was exhausted. She couldn’t keep this up much longer. If only some miraculous solution would somehow suggest itself.
So far, no luck.
Now and then she imagined she caught a faint whiff of the chemical that crazy man had used to knock her out. She would whirl around when this happened, terrified that a somehow resurrected Red Nose was sneaking up behind her. But there was never anyone behind her. It was just nerves. Her memory and imagination playing cruel mental tricks on her. One time she was sure she caught a flashing glimpse of a tall figure in a long cloak at the end of the block, but it was there and gone too fast to be truly certain. That part she couldn’t chalk up to mere mental trickery. The devil had assigned Jack to shadow her. So he was definitely out there. Somewhere. It creeped her out, even knowing that she wouldn’t be walking around free without his assistance.
She came to an abrupt stop at the next street corner she reached. Green street signs were screwed onto a metal pole in the strip of patchy ground next to the sidewalk. The signs were readable in the glow provided by a street lamp on the opposite side of the intersection. The street she was on was named Lear. The crossing street was Alabama.
Enough fucking around. And enough of this pathetic helpless chick routine.
Think, Kayla.
What do you need to do?
She took a deep breath and heeded this advice. She thought. Hard. Okay, so she was lost. But she wasn’t quite helpless, was she? She had in her possession one pretty significant lifeline to the world beyond this unfamiliar neighborhood.
Of course. Jesus.
She felt monumentally stupid for a moment. But the oversight wasn’t her fault. Not really. She’d recently taken a hard blow to the back of the head. And not long after that she’d been drugged. She might have a concussion. Maybe even brain damage.
Great. More scary shit to worry about.
But she had to put those concerns aside for the moment.
She reached into her purse and dug around until she found her cell phone. Then she opened her contacts list and tried to think of who might be the best person to call. She scrolled through the list of names, lingering occasionally at entries for fellow students who’d been her best friends in previous semesters. The desire to reach out to one of these former friends was nearly overpowering. But she didn’t feel like wasting a lot of time placing a series of likely to be unanswered calls. She needed to be rescued as soon as possible. There was just one person on campus she already knew for certain had reverted to the pro-Kayla side of things.
She tapped a button and put the phone to her ear.
Sheila Compton answered on the first ring. “Kayla!”
Kayla winced. Her roommate’s voice was shrill and slightly slurred. There was noise in the background. Music and a babble of voices. “Sheila, I need your help.”
“Hey, girl!” A loud burst of feminine laughter from somewhere close to Sheila resonated clearly in Kayla’s ear, making her wince again. “I’m out here partyin’ with my girls at Play. You should come out!”
Play Dance Bar was a gay club in downtown Nashville. From the sound of things, Sheila and her friends were well on the way to being ripped out of their minds. She wasn’t going to be any help at all.
“Come out, Kayla!” Another feminine voice, this one unidentifiable. “Sheila’s been talking about you all fucking night! Come party with us!”
Kayla sighed and waited a beat. The music was still thumping in the background. The voices in Sheila’s vicinity were even louder now. “Sheila? You still there?”
Sheila giggled. “Yeah! You comin’ out?”
“Maybe another time. I’ve…got other shit going on tonight.”
She cut the call off before Sheila could reply.
Shit.
Well, there was nothing for it. She had to come up with an alternate plan. So she opened her contacts list again and scrolled through it some more, her face crinkling as she tried to guess who amongst her acquaintances would be most likely to answer a call from her.
Just then her phone chimed, signaling the arrival of a text. Her eyes went wide at the name that appeared on the screen.
“Holy. Shit.”
The message was from Lee Stanley.
Lee was the former stalker who had recently run screaming from his dorm room rather than spend another moment being pawed by the hot girl who’d once scorned him. A text from Brad Pitt would have been a smaller surprise.
The text read, Hey, Kayla. Just wanted to say I’m sorry for how I acted when you came over that time. Can’t figure out what got into me. I won’t bother you again. Just wanted to apologize. Bye.
Kayla couldn’t help laughing.
Of course. It fucking figured. Lee Stanley was one of the select few freed entirely from the shunning spell. It was just another in a string of jokes the cosmos was playing on her. Or maybe it wasn’t the cosmos. Maybe it was a certain scaly, red-skinned demonic son of a bitch. She figured his modification of the shunning spell randomly caused some people to revert to treating her as they normally would. But he’d undoubtedly applied the modification to specific other people simply because it amused him to do so.
People like Lee fucking Stanley.
Somewhere, the devil was laughing at her. The handsome red bastard.
But her options were limited. She didn’t want anything more to do with Lee, but what choice did she have? She chose the option to reply to the text by placing a call and put the phone to her ear.
Like Sheila, Lee answered on the first call. “Kayla? Is this really you?”
Kayla cringed at the sound of his reedy voice. The familiar nerd inflections got under her skin just as much as they had every other time she’d talked to him.
“Yeah. Hey, Lee. I was really surprised to hear from you. Happily surprised.”
“Really?”
There was a pathetic kind of wonder in his voice. He sounded like a child liste
ning to his mother tell him a story about Santa Claus.
“Yeah. Listen, Lee…I have kind of a big problem. I need your help.”
Lee laughed. As usual, to Kayla’s ears it was more like the braying of an asthmatic donkey than an expression of human mirth. What a fucking dork. Maybe she’d be better off if God just struck her down now.
She shot a nervous glance up at the sky.
Didn’t mean that, dude. No lightning bolts, please.
Lee stopped laughing. “Sorry. It’s just I thought you’d never want anything to do with me again. This must be my lucky week. I won big on a Lotto ticket yesterday, too. Five-hundred bucks.” His tone abruptly turned sober. “Look, Kayla, I just want to apologize again for--”
“Never mind that.” Kayla took a deep breath, counted to three. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. I really need help, Lee.”
“Of course I’ll help you, Kayla. I’ll do anything I can to make up for being such an ass. What do you need?”
“I’m sort of lost. Long story. Could you maybe get on your computer and look up a location for me? And then, well…” She hesitated, not wanting to say this next part, but it again came down to the extremely limited set of options available to her. “Could you come get me?”
There was a rustling sound from the other end. The phone was being jostled. “Sorry. Oops. Okay, there we go. Just getting on my laptop. I’ll definitely come get you, Kayla. Don’t worry about that. Anything I can do to help. Now what’s this location you want me to look up?”
Kayla glanced up at the street signs again. “Corner of Lear and Alabama. Hold on, I’ll get you a street number.” She turned around and approached the nearest mailbox. “I’m at 651 Lear.”
“Okay, hold on.” She heard the sound of fingers rapidly tapping keys from the other end. “Got it. That’s not too far. I’ll see you in ten, fifteen minutes.”
“Great.”
Kayla ended the call and moved away from the street corner, slinking into the shadows at the edge of the nearest yard. She didn’t want to be seen by anyone other than Lee if she could help it. She especially didn’t want to be seen by one person in particular.
