Gray revived then, at the lip of the rif t. A big black Tomcat, our world he had been chewing on. The huge man split his focus between a world of possible dark death and dealing with Doug and Mavis. His mind had been hiding in a dark corner, an evil spider watching his prey.
“You have grit, crone.” Gray uttered. “Few working brain cells, but courageous as Warriors I’ve known.”
“Close it.” Doug yelled. “Don’t do this.” Gray pushed back against a red tendril snaking its way past the rift into our world. Gray slashed it with his nails, cutting offf the appendage, forcing the dripping arm to curl up and burst into caustic plasma. Hissing juices sluiced back into the ebony maw. What few drops escaped free of that dimension plopped onto Chicago soil hissing before they dissipated, making fetid air smell like dog farts and rotten pumpkin.
Doug exhaled quickly.
“You have eternal life. Just leave. Don’t do this.” Gray’s eyes teared black blood, his shoulders shuddering.
He was in the throes of outer dimensional forces. The Gray was barely here. Had anyone on earth encountered a relic like this? Whatever lay beyond the rift was infecting his mind. Nothing could stand its pull for long. Alive or undead. Impossible to conceive that anyone on our planet had ever done so.
Doug prepared himself to assault Gray, but his body wasn’t responding fast enough to his brain’s commands. Hell was winning the fiight of wills.
Is this what Dante had seen somehow those centuries past? Levels of damned souls mixed with abominations, all seeking anarchy, that desperate yearning to be free. Pandora’s box was merely a pathway between dimensions. Bloodsuckers may have escaped from that world. One of the demons freed from when the box had once been opened, if fables and myths had any ounce of truth to them.
Imagine having the gift of eternal life only to choose to do evil. Doug’s thoughts churned. Why did things go bad? Was it because grace, kindness and a charitable nature became banal over decades? Maybe the axiom was true: evil is more fun.
What awesome things could he accomplish if he let go of any hindering human morality. Douglas’ mind warred with the renewed whispers of twisted notions: Joan raped, his therapist staked to the ground with vultures at his privates, his mother and father being whipped by green demons on red concrete abattoirs. His heart slammed against his ribs trying to flee from its cage. Sweat poured from every pore. Terrifying radical thoughts and feelings erupted from every neuron. Nerves stung their sharp points in every vulnerable junction.
He knew he couldn’t take much more. It would be better to just die. Mocking laughter oated from the rift. Doug was stymied with confusion. Gray stood axe-poled. More slithering things began to crawl out of the tear in sickened space. The vampire’s massive frame was conquered by countless arms, grasping tendrils overwhelming him with desire to escape their prison.
Hell had Gray’s full attention. Mavis swung the Eviscerator down cleanly separating Gray’s left arm from his shoulder. It had taken time for her slight aging body to lift the heavy weapon, using the metal’s heft to sever the limb. But she put her bruised back into it. Black gore, like rotten spaghetti marinated with gallons of Cabernet wine, flooded out from the gaping wound. Gray didn’t appear to notice his loss of limb.
The vampire had lost his fiight with the rift. Staring at legions of demons viler than himself, Gray had forgotten his way. Whatever sad, twisted plans he’d had for the denizens of Chicago were now mere fever blisters fiilled with pus. The blade swung by Mavis burst his hateful boils cleaning them away.
Gray began his second death. A sharp shif t in his retinas occurred, pulling presence of mind back in to his body. What remained of his mutilated form swayed as he took notice of the heinous wound. Mavis slid her blade free, but another attack seemed dubious due to exhaustion and heft of the weapon. Gray began grasping at his lost shoulder preventing a fleeing gush of remaining fluids. He looked up to confront his enemy.
Mavis had begun lifting the sword for a second blow. Doug saw his moment. Breaking free of the rif t’s pull was akin to a locust shredding its skin. Doug leapt with all that was left of him sideways, like a defensive back for the Bears, colliding into Gray. The impact made the huge vampire stumble. Offf balance now, focus shattered, Gray grabbed the rift with his one good hand. His face peered deep into Hell.
“There’s so many.” The dark man murmured. Gray was astonished. His focus was on the endless sea of writhing souls. Unclean things writhing with altering colors and hues. Creatures never seen by anyone, certainly not Dante or Lovecraft, on planet Earth roiled and writhed in the rift.
Gray was totally o fff balance. Doug saw what was coming and crawled away. Shaking hands grasped for a shorter knife laying in the dirt.
Mavis swung the sword over her head. It swept through the air as her old muscles groaned, guiding the glimmering piece of silver in a circular motion, picking up momentum. The sharp edge of the blade came down neatly slicing through the gray man’s right ear, cutting down thru his shoulder separating heart ventricles, lung, all vital organs, ending in red muscle.
Gray blinked as black blood spilled from his head and chest. The old woman shucked her leg, bracing it on the larger man’s thigh using her body as a fulcrum pulling the sword free from the target. Mavis grunted again raising the sword for another blow. She was determined to hack Gray into pieces.
Her luck ended as Gray backhanded her away from the rift. Old bones became brittle jigsaw puzzles. Mavis flew past Douglas as he pivoted back to help her. Gray turned towards him. They collided into one another.
Douglas slammed his weapon, Mavis’ husband’s bayonet, right into the man’s skull, jabbing up through two century’s of hateful muscle and bone. It sunk in Gray’s brain with a solid thunk. His head snapped back towards the rift.
Doug followed through with Mavis’ mason jar, smashing it into the huge man’s face. Hydro-chloride acid sizzled, eating through what flesh remained on Gray’s face. It began to burn away at Doug’s gloved hands making the leather smoke.
Doug fell away from Gray, dancing out of the way, of the desperate vampire. Voices began to clammer and shout. Fine clothing fell away in tatters as the smoking continued. Gray’s eyes were gone, burned away. His nose dripped away from his nasal cavity. The Gray tried to scream but his lips were melted together, unable to respond. The bayonet strike scrambled his already addled brains.
The shimmering rift chittered and chattered. Panic, thought Doug. Hell was afraid the best chance to open their prison and escape was threatened. The vampire was dying. Demons were afraid their chance was lost.
Doug rose, pressing his advantage. Mavis beat him to it. Broken, yet unbowed, the old woman rushed under Gray’s one last weapon, his powerful arm. Her short blade in hand, a gift from her Mother Superior back in High School, was sunk deep into Gray’s neck, tearing thru her nemesis’ muscle like carving a turkey. Doug could only watch Mavis work.
Her words ashed in Doug’s mind, spoken to him back in her kitchen. “They are not unlike us. We are cruel. Sel fiish. Bent on our own desires. Vampires have the gift of inhuman strength, longevity—we cannot call it ‘long life’, for they have passed beyond what we call life—but they can be slain. I’ve done it before. I am sure to do this again.”
Mavis had smiled her tried grin wincing through the acrid spiral of nicotine death. “It’s what I was taught to do.” The old woman killed Gray then.
Doug could only watch what happened next. The old woman found her chest wrapped around Gray’s flailing upthrust fiist. It easily punched its way through her frail form. Her skin went sallow, her blue eyes paled before him. Like a Roman Praetor, Mavis bore her dying weight upon the sword severing the Gray’s spine, pushing it into his black heart, burying the silver blade deep into his frame.
Gray shu fffled forward, the short sword pommel glowing, throwing sparks offf. Both he and Mavis were on fiire. The flames engulfed them. Mavis lay draped over the monster’s mutilated, barely ambulatory body.
&n
bsp; Gray was nished. Tentacles dragged them closer to the rift. Mavis’ head fell onto the sword’s pommel, clear blue eyes streaming tears. They stared at Douglas.
Finish it! He could hear her words in his mind. Douglas dove for the gas meter. He recalled Louie’s instructions in his head. His military training steadied his actions now. He found it easy to accomplish, nothing in Race Mansion had been updated since the 1950s. There was only one nozzle to fiiddle with.
By throwing open the lever, he was allowing all the street pressure in the old gas pipes to divert into the Mansion. Louie’s plan had to work. The main street regulator had been disabled by Louie. All the natural gas now simply had to be directed here.
Doug remembered Louie’s excited words. “See, natural gas needs to be pushed and regulated through pipes so we get it into structures, right?The linepack in these streets are old. And I’ll bet since the mansion is a historical landmark, no pipes have been installed or maintained since the early days. Open up the pipes, and what you got is more than a thousand pounds of pressure at fantastic psi rolling at ya. Nowhere else to go but where you are. Light a candle, you’re liable to have a really brief day.” The fat man had laughed.
“It’ll make what happened in Buck Town back in the 90s, look like a sparkler-fart.” Louie had said. In the nineties, a regulator failure in the street had leveled an entire city block.
All Doug needed to do was open a channel for the gas pipes. Instantly, there was a dull roar like a sixty car freight train bearing down on them. The entire Mansion was fiilled with screams from a world brimming with lost souls.
Sad wails of approaching death.
Chapter 43
Gas regulators clacked in the boiler room. Gray held the edge of the rift, his monstrous body repairing itself even now. Weeping blood, spitting poisonous venom, the rift continued to undulate and scream. Vile forms attacked Gray trying to remove him, so they could save themselves. A war on the edge of Hell.
The rif’s horrible lips had not closed. Seams bled with despair.
Hell screamed its outrage. Chaos wanted out!
Douglas could not leave yet. Mavis was congealing upon the chest of the dark man. Her body was stuck around the sword. She was already stifff. Both bodies were ruined and covered with blood. The dark man had knees down collapsed into the dirt. Tendrils continued to drag them both toward the gash.
Doug looked at the diminutive broken woman who had given him so much. She embodied the spirit of Old Chicago. He remembered what she had told him, ‘Never mind the flesh, save your damn soul!’
Doug said a quick prayer for her soul. He got up trying to limp to safety, when he saw the Eviscerator glowing dimly in the dirt. The sword had been thrown away when Gray had backhanded Mavis. Grabbing it, he turned, eyeing Mavis’ corpse.
“Thank you.” He whispered to himself. Placing his grandfather’s zippo lighter on a stack of broken brick, Douglas lit a handful of oily rags he’d carried for this moment. A small fiire ignited, burning steadily.
The regulator broke o fff as a rush of gas released itself into the basement. Doug rushed atop rubble climbing broken stairs up to the fiirst floor. He tossed up the sword towards the front landing. There came a sudden clanging of metal and frumpf of ignition from below. Doug kicked out the front window as the house erupted from the basement. Floorboards split, cracked and flew around him as if spitting up gravity.
The house seemed to lift offf then.
Douglas ew into the window pane reopening a gash on his forehead. The building exploded launching his body into the Christmas night. Glass, metal shards, slivers of wood sailed all around Doug. His body was lifted over a fence. Iron Fleur-de-Lis decorations scraped pieces of flesh offf his legs. Doug was lifted even higher. He watched frosted tundra pass underneath him.
His arms pinwheeled as his muscles pulled back to earth. Behind him the entire structure of Race Mansion imploded,groaning as beams snapped folding in on itself. The roof gave way, glass disintegrated, walls crumbled to dust. The Gray Mansion, a festering black mark on the neighborhood of Old Irving Park, disappeared into a cloud of smoke, asbestos and death.
Doug landed with a thump, cushioned by meters of packed snow. A pocket park, catty-corner to the YMCA, forgotten by nearby children due to frozen temps was the young soldier’s re-entry point.
His body missed by inches the upright half of the iron teeter-tauter buried in a crusted snow drift. The white environs swallowed him up, lowering his body temperature. Doug lost consciousness right after thrashing a few seconds. The fear of being buried alive surfaced, then sank with him into darkness.
Chapter 44
It was dark when Doug opened his eyes. His vision had cleared. So had the sky. He looked up at the multitude of stars over his head. Expelling a long volume of cold air, his jaw cracked.
It was a relief to be alive. Muscles were tight. It was as if he hadn’t breathed for hours. A rotating ribbon of red reflected offf the white landscape as he lifted his head gingerly from the depression he found himself laying in.
Chicago cops and fiiremen were climbing like ants all around the ruins of Race Mansion. What had once been a grand historical landmark was now a smoking trench. He rose up further and could see a deep hole. Louie had been right. The regulator in the street had directed gas like a torpedo at the building with such force, it exhumed the structure. Race Mansion was gone.
Doug remembered, as a child, there had been a new building site a few doors down from where he lived. He remembered broken bricks and loose sand remained in the lot after the workers left for the day. The lot began as flat ground. Later, earth moving machines ripped divots into the earth.
Here, the gas explosion excavated earth like an abscessed tooth ripped from a rotten mouth. Doug ears were ringing. He gently shook his head. He throbbed all over. No diffferent than the last few days really. Still, the pain was intense. He knew he must have a concussion. Going to the doctor’s would be high on his list when Chicago vital services revived this week. He watched men scurrying about posing and looking concerned. Where were you all when we needed you? He thought. He closed his eyes for a moment to stave offf vertigo.
When Doug next woke, he was covered with an inch of snow. Wind had kicked up again. One of the work lamps the fiire department had managed to trundle over popped in the distance. Doug could hear the sounds of workmen yelling at the minor setback. His eyes closed again. Images of sunny San Diego came to mind. Warm beaches, bikini girls and miles of blue ocean under a smiling sun. What he would give for a month to lay on a beach. Drinking rum. Whiskey. Tequila. Anything to rid him of the anxious tendons and constant pain. Crusted over scabs. Infected cuts. Abraded skin.
Hell lingered, its angry residue clutching for purchase even as memories faded. Doug leaned up again. He watched the men work, looking at them in their long coats and heavy jackets. He realized that it was damn cold out. Dizzying cold. It had to be minus 30 out. Doug tried to move his legs. A bad idea that just got worse. Were they broken? He couldn’t tell. There. His limbs began to respond. They were numb from sitting in one position for too long. He looked around realizing that his right arm was wrapped at a funny angle around the iron teeter-totter. It didn’t look too good either. He tried to wiggle his fiingers. Damn. Too painful. How much of him was broken?
Vision blurred again. His focus was trying to adjust like an old camera fiinding frame. Shouts over the buzz of a snowmobile skimming by on the street converged. What Doug thought to be sobs of anger mixed with warnings that came from cold frustrated men. Doug thought he heard George’s voice, anger rising with each obscenity. The crescendo ended with the shout of, “Ma!”
Then the comforting buzz as a snowmobile slid away into the winds. Doug’s listened to the unseen altercation, his consciousness fading again to peaceful black.
Doug awoke next, to fiind himself covered with ice. Dying in the cold must be the most pleasant way to go. Everything must just shut down and stop. Just quietly fade away. That wouldn’
t be so bad.
The people he had lost. What had he accomplished? What was left for him to live for?
Crying was for pussies, if he couldn’t do it for himself, what the hell was the damn point? Doug lay deciding to slowly disentangle his arm from under the iron teeter-totter. His right ulna was not responding. His left hand was sore. Slowly, his fiingers began to move. Doug gritted as his arm pulled away from the iron. He still wasn’t sure how bad his arm was. But add frostbite to the mix. Good times in Chicago.
There. His arm was free. Now, just lay back. Let the cold take him. Who would give a shit?
He licked his lips. Hopefully it wasn’t too damn painful to freeze to death in Chicago.
“Hey dickhead. That your frozen ass?” A voice whispered close to his ears. Was that his brain? Had his marbles leaked out onto the ground. He was hearing things.
Doug’s face was insensate, blood was leaking from his ears, yet he was sure he had heard words. They were raspy and hoarse, yet totally familiar. What the hell was going on? The voice whispered again.
“We got to go now if we have any chance to save your ass, brother. I’m here for you. But we gots to do this on the QT.” Tears seeped, as Doug continued to listen to this voice coming from the sky. He closed his eyes. Behind him, the frosted chain link ripped apart like tinfoil. Whoever it was, crawled closer, no more than ten feet from behind Doug’s head. The fiigure approaching him looked familiar but for the life of him, Doug couldn’t place the name. Whoever it was looked upside down. A giggle escaped Doug’s lips. He was dead. Laying in a fun-house for demons.
Two thin arms reached for him then. Red eyes sparked from slits sliced into Cray Lamb’s head. He slunk low to the ground, an animal reduced to taking advantage of disabled prey. His powerful arms grasped Doug, dragging him away into the dark.
Red and white lights, re flected offf the white landscape. Lights from fiire engines followed Cray as he dragged Doug’s prostrate body back into the dark YMCA parking lot. They both retreated unharmed into the arctic night.
Grayland: Chapter Three of the Dark Chicago Series Page 19