Rememberers

by C. Edward Baldwin

  Now, standing in his living room, still holding the watering can, and having a lustful fascination with the desert rose, he arrived at a new fact—something had happened to him. He didn't feel like himself. It felt as if his body had been invaded, putting him at war with himself. His recent thoughts weren't just of a sexual nature. Some of them were downright grotesque. He wanted to maim, mutilate, defile. He felt…unholy…unclean. The desert rose began to mock him, shape-shifting before his very eyes. First, it was Ruth Coward, and then it morphed into a little girl, and then to a little boy, and then ultimately it became a dog. And he wanted to do them all, and afterwards, defile and mutilate the corpses. The watering can dropped to the floor, hitting it with a splashy metallic ting. He stumbled backward, catching the glint of his car keys where he'd thrown them earlier on the coffee table.

  He scuttled his dress-shoed feet across the hardwood leading into the dining room, leaving long double scuffed marks in their wake. He ended up against the blinds of the bay window, knocking two snake plants off the sill in the process. The potted plants fell to the floor in weighted thumps, cracking apart and scattering rich black dirt. He grabbed his privates, yanking fiercely; unable to shake the tantalizing image of the ever-changing desert rose from his mind. When relief finally came, spurting down his pant leg, he relaxed against the window, his breathing slowing in quick degrees. Outside, he could hear the shuffling about of fallen leaves on his lawn as if God himself walked across them, a witness to his transgression.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Twice the urge to stop and run inside a store to grope something had nearly overpowered him. But Adam Sampson resisted it fiercely, keeping his foot on the car's accelerator. He had to get to New Vibe Community Church and Reverend Swag. What resided inside him was demonic. He knew that two and two was always four despite whatever Orwellian-like ruminations implied.

  But there was something else, too. It was midnight, the witching hour and the wee moments of a Friday the thirteenth. And she would be there. How he knew that was lost to him as was why he needed to see her so badly in the first place. He was being pulled to her. He needed to savagely have his way with her. The thought hardened him, making his member throb violently against his pants. He started to free it, but resisted the urge. New Vibe was but a block away.

  He screeched to a halt in the church's parking lot. Leaving the vehicle haphazardly angled, he stumbled out of it and went wobbly to the church steps. The front double-doors were unlocked. Surprisingly, there was no resistance. No unseen force pushed him back. The door handles felt as cold to the touch of his hands as the night air was upon the rest of his uncovered skin. He entered unabated.

  The sanctuary was partially dark. Bits of moonlight managed to snake in through the variegated window panes. Swag knelt at the altar amongst fake foliage and candles. He was alone.

  Sampson yelled. “Help me!”

  There was an instant of silence. Then Swag, moving nary a muscle, said, “Stop fighting it. Give in to yourself.”

  Sampson moved closer to the altar. “You must help me, Reverend. Please! Help me!”

  “Adsum,” Swag said.

  It was Latin. Strangely, despite the fact that he'd never studied the dead language, Sampson understood him perfectly well. “Adsum et tu dominus. I'm here as well, master,” he replied, the dead words rose up from his belly of their own volition.

  Swag stood up and turned around. His eyes were a fiery red and all of his fingernails were long. Harsh disbelief swept over Sampson. It couldn't be. Swag was one of…no, no. But as he watched Swag's bendy finger motioning him forth, he knew it was so.

  Sampson had known Swag for over eight years and never before noticed the pastor's long fingernails. Then again, he'd had no inkling of this side of the young preacher either. Even as the wave of understanding swept over him, Sampson stared drop-jawed at Swag as he continued beckoning him hither; but Sampson didn't want to go and for a few moments willed himself still. Soon, however, his legs, as the dead words had before, started to move on their own accord. Then the demon once again exerted control of his tongue. “Cepi Corpus, I have taken the body.” But Sampson strained against the forced movements. He wouldn't relinquish his body so easily. With much effort, he forced himself to his knees, crying out. “God, help me!”

  Swag laughed harshly. “Fool! Esto quod es! Be what you are!”

  “I'm Adam Sampson, professor of history!”

  “Sampson is no more,” Swag said. “It's over now. Fui quod es, eris quod sum. I was once what you are; you will be what I am. Et vadam ad eam. Go to her.”

  Sampson dug his knees deep into the green carpet. “No, I will not leave my body. You can't have it!” But the thing inside him forced him to his feet, and soon he was scraping across the carpet toward a room at the back of the sanctuary.

  In the back room, Sampson discovered who 'she' was. She was asleep on a sofa. She wore blue jeans and a greenish-blue sweater that rose up just a little, exposing a little skin, making him think of Ruth Coward. But not even Ruth Coward could compare to Kallie Hunt who looked so beautiful and dangerous lying there, waiting for him. Memory of the death of a cancer-stricken mother and the accompanying near déjà vu-fueled mental breakdown of her daughter a day short of a year later was distant and foreign. All that remained was lust, a lust that was perhaps always there, simmering underbelly, masked by a pretended asexuality. He licked his tongue over his lips as savagely lustful emotions gripped him, controlling him more so than the demon within. He leapt the short distance to her, intending to finally have his way. To give into himself as Swag had so eloquently put it. Puckering his lips, he bent down. As he drew closer, her eyes opened.

  Professor Adam Sampson was destined to be her first.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  She was at the crossroads of wakefulness where dreams and reality crossed paths. Initially, she thought that she was on the dream side of the equation and merely aware that she was having a lucid dream. No Kallie, you're not birdlike. You can't fly. You were dreaming. Yes, Kallie, your mother and grandfather really are dead. No, you're not going on vacation with them. You were dreaming.

  But this time, she wasn't dreaming. This time she really was awake and smack down in the midst of reality. This time she was on the reality side of things, the side where celebrities and mega-lottery winners were living the dream, and victims of tragic accidents and horrific acts of violence were living the nightmare. When she'd opened her eyes and saw the professor leering over her with vengeful lust in his eyes, she'd screamed—or wanted to. What had actually come out was only a quiet hissing sound. Yet, the demon within Sampson's body heard it perfectly well and responded to it like a dog would to a Galton's whistle. It leaped out of Sampson's body and landed right on top of her. And before she was even aware that she was doing it, Kallie was tearing into the shapeless entity with fierce abandon, clawing it with fingernails that had suddenly stretched out like vampire fangs and gnashing it with long fangs of her own. Incredibly and literally, she beat, bit, and ripped the demon-thing into nothingness. Sampson's body, once freed from the clutches of its uninvited guest, convulsed and then slumped to the floor beside the sofa, leaving its original proprietor dazed and confused.

  Throughout it all, Swag, like a boxer's corner man, motivated and pushed her to reach deep inside her soul for something she hadn't known was there. “And it is written,” he said, his voice melodious and hypnotic, his cadence-perfect, “With unrelenting power, the goddess destroyed one after the other, crushing some with her bare hands, stomping many with her feet, and gnashing countless others with her teeth.” After a heartbeat's pause, clearly for effect, he added, “Let me guide you to your true self, Kali. You're a destroyer. Demons won't stand a chance. Nothing will.”

  After the defeat of Sampson's demon, Swag told Kallie that she was ready for the others. Then she and he took off in his Volvo, spending the remaining hours before dawn's break riding all over the metro area with Kallie's head leaning out
the car window as she sent her ultrasonic squeal into the cold night air. Her message, heard only by the black hearted creatures that had fallen from the sky on the night of the UCB Center bombing, was simple and not unlike a school bully's “meet me after school at three o'clock down by old man Johnson's farm. I'm going to bloody your nose. By God I am.” In her case, old man Johnson's farm (at Swag's suggestion) was a potter's field, which, coincidentally, was not too far from the Tom-Tom Club in Chesterfield. The time would be that very night before the stroke of twelve. As for the bloody nose, both sides understood that the stakes would be much higher. It would be existence or oblivion for one or the other.

  * * *

  Calling them out had seemed so ridiculously simple and for Kallie, had nearly strained credulity to its breaking point. Yet, at a little past eleven o'clock, she, after having summoned the blood-seeking demons with her almost soundless pied piper like scream, stood in the middle of the potter's field, surrounded by gathering evil spirits. Their collective smell flared her nostrils. It was acrid like the pungent odor of old rubber set afire in a city dump. Their host-bodies had come by hook or by crook, some even stood before her in pajamas. There were third-shifters from various fields—firemen, policemen, hospital personnel, factory workers, night clubbers, and others, mixed in with Friday night homebodies. All were impervious to the reason for their nightmarish excursion to an unfamiliar area located far from their homes, previous destinations, and places of business. Their synchronized breathing intermittently formed massive exhalations in the nighttime coldness, floating to the heavens like smoke signals.

  Ditching their modes of transportation on the side of the road, the demons, with a single purpose and mindset, headed to the field. In the days and weeks following the apocalyptic battle and the other troubling events of this Friday the thirteenth, including a two hundred car pileup on a desolate stretch of interstate miles from the city's border, none of the host-people would remember what had led them to the middle of nowhere, this isolated field filled with the buried bodies of the poor and unknown. And none of the city's other living souls, not common man, not anyone in authority, would be able to answer with any measurable confidence why the city of Charlotte's sudden rash of criminal and offensive behavior following the decapitation of its tallest building would suddenly decrease as quickly as it had recently increased.

  For Kallie, who would know such answers, none of the questions held sway at the present moment. Earth's cleansing was at hand. A demon, residing in the body of a twelve-year-old pigtailed girl wearing a pink nightgown, drew first blood when it reached up and slashed grotesquely at Kallie's left cheek, perforating the skin, leaving a dotted line of blood. Absently, Kallie brought her hand up to her cheek, feeling the warm wetness of her own blood. She bought her fingers to her lips and kissed them, tasting her blood's metallic sweetness. Nodding and smiling at the demon-girl, Kallie opened her mouth and let loose the near soundless squeal that had invited the demons here and invoked Sampson's demon to its own demise. Now the demon inside the little girl leapt out of its host and lunged fiercely at her, as Sampson's had before.

  The battle started.

  Kallie's moves were fluid, matrix-like, and came in droves. She operated outside herself, practically floating above the host-bodies as they fell at her feet. Had she been an athlete she would've described it as “being in the zone.” With hands, teeth, fingernails, and feet, she stomped, sliced, diced, and pureed. Demon spillage, in shades of dark reds and purples before eventually dematerializing, splashed everywhere, creating a red-purplish fog that temporarily tinted the florescent yellow of the half moon, making it appear as if a half-eaten apple had been set ablaze in the night sky. Swag watched the battle from the sideline, still and speechless. His pupils reflected the carnage like mirrored fiery, reddish-blue dots.

  The battle raged for three hours. For the longest time, the demons' numbers didn't seem to waver, but neither did Kallie's energy or resolve. Each side found their second, third, and eventually fourth and fifth winds. But ultimately it, as do most battles, reached its bloody conclusion and a decision was rendered. There could be but one winner. And as the quiet rumbling created by hundreds of people suddenly awakening from a demonic stupor slowly gave rise to the panicky din of confusion and the collective facial expressions of “What the…,” it was clear who that winner was.

  Kallie stood tall over the mass of people whose bodies were suddenly their own once again. Then, without warning, she began to fall to the ground, finally giving in to thorough exhaustion and complete energy depletion. But Swag, who had moved to her side, was able to catch her as soon as her knees buckled.

  “How do we get them home?” Kallie asked, falling into his embrace and looking around at the people, many of whom were obviously in a fugue state.

  Swag lifted her up into his arms. “There're emergency personnel amongst the crowd. They'll figure it out. Right now, I'm getting you out of here.”

  She nodded agreeably and then closed her eyes, resting her head on his shoulder.

  He'd parked the Volvo on the side of a dirt road located about a mile from the field on the other side of a wooded area. He carried her through copse all the way back to the car. When he finally reached it, he dug into his pants pocket for his car keys. Finding them, he popped open the door locks and loaded her sideways into the backseat.

  She slid in easily, nestling herself into the black leather upholstery. She steepled her hands together, using them as a pillow under her head.

  He leaned over her for a moment. “You did well. I'm proud of you.” He leaned in further, sliding atop her and bringing his lips to hers. She opened her eyes just as he got there, and then fully met and reciprocated his kiss.

  It was fifteen minutes to five o'clock in the morning when Swag finally made it back to the church. He found Adam Sampson in the same place and position he and Kallie had left him late last night, lying on his side on the floor beside the sofa. Swag kneeled down beside him, turned him over onto his back, and then shook him. Sampson, mumbling incoherently, attempted to roll back onto his side, but Swag held him in place. “No, no professor. It's now morning. Time for you to get up.”

  Sampson snorted and jerked involuntarily, looking like a man trying to regain his bearings after a long liquored night of revelry.

  Swag stood up and pulled out his cell phone. He flipped through the list of contacts, selecting an underling. The call was answered immediately. “How long will it take you to get here?”

  After he was given the answer, Swag said, “I'm going to need some help getting him into the car.” He paused and listened. “No, the girl's not here. I took her home.” He paused and listened again. “No worries, she's mine now.”

  They arrived at Sampson's house with about thirty minutes of darkness left to spare. It was early Saturday morning, just before the time a rooster would normally crow. The neighborhood was quiet and indifferent to most goings-on, particularly quiet unassuming ones. Swag parked Sampson's vehicle in the driveway and then he and a faithful servant, a hulking, bald sampling of pure obedience who'd followed behind Swag in his own Dodge Avenger, pulled the professor out of the car, taking him up the front steps and into his house. Swag had anticipated an alarm and had a readily prepared story should a police officer happen by. But no excuse would be needed. Though Sampson had an alarm, he'd apparently been into too much of a hurry on Friday night to set it. They entered the house without fanfare.

  After they'd tucked Sampson into his bed, the professor opened his eyes. Understanding and remembrance fought for leverage, but his thoughts were muddled. He couldn't piece anything together. “What hap…happened?” he asked Swag.

  “You've had a nasty fall,” Swag said. He nodded to his servant. The servant left the room and a moment later, the front door could be heard opening and closing.

  “Whe…where was I?”

  “You were at church.”

  “Church?” None of it made any sense. Why had he been at churc
h? Was today Wednesday or Sunday? He had no sense of time or place.

  Swag stood over him, staring intently. “I wish there were some other way. I've always liked you Professor Sampson. You could have been a most faithful servant.”

  Faithful servant? What in God's name…and before the question could form completely, his mental dam broke. He tried to sit up, but he was still much too weak and Swag easily pushed him back down. “You're one of them! Let me up.”

  Swag smiled. “It's a shame that you've but two lives to give to the cause.”

  Sampson tried rising up against Swag's hand. But his effort was futile. He was barely able to move a muscle. And then, in his mind's eye, he saw her. “Kallie? What are you going to do with Kallie?”

  “You needn't worry about Kali,” Swag said evenly.

  Though his body was still weak, Sampson's mind was sharpening rapidly. He caught the slight change in the pronunciation of the girl's name. “Kali?”

  “Yes, Kali. She's a goddess and more powerful than you'll ever know.”