The Devil's Apprentice

by William Massa

  He broke off as a wad of spit landed right on his face.

  Chloe grinned, a wild look in her blazing eyes, saliva dribbling down her cracked lips and pooling around her blood-encrusted neck.

  There had been no premeditation to the act. Chloe had recognized an opportunity when it presented itself and figured it was time to let the bastard know what she really thought of him.

  The Headhunter stared at her, his gaze filled with stunned amazement. She expected his eyes to narrow in rage, but instead, his strange, disturbing smile returned.

  “You want to act like some gutter rat, then perhaps you should hang out with them.”

  Without warning, his hand snapped out and knocked Chloe’s head off the mantle. She sailed through the air and slammed into the wooden floor.

  The landing sent pain cascading through her skull. For a split second, she wondered how she could experience such pain without a functioning nervous system, then decided that such a question had no place in a world where severed heads could remain alive.

  Her head bounced around a little, rolled across the floor, and came to a crashing halt as she bumped into the wall.

  Groggily, she made out approaching footsteps. Before she could utter a sound, the Headhunter had scooped her up by her hair and tore open the front door.

  “You know how many rats hang out under my property?” he asked. “Want to spend a night outside and find out? I bet they’ll love you. All that yummy soft tissue. They’ll start with the eyes, work their way to the lips. And you want to know the best part? Once they finish chewing away your face, the magic keeping you alive will repair the damage, and you get to do it all over again. What do you think of that?”

  “Please…”

  “You treat me with respect, and I’ll return the favor. Do you understand?”

  Yes.

  “I can’t hear you. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, I understand. Yes, yes.”

  “Good.”

  The rage left the Headhunter’s face as he closed the door.

  “From now on, be a lady. Or suffer the consequences.”

  To prove his point, the Headhunter held her head above the flickering fireplace. Searing heat pricked her face, and she gasped in renewed pain.

  “You wouldn’t be the first one I watched burn. It won’t kill you, but it will hurt like all hell. If you thought losing your head was bad, just wait until all the skin melts off your pretty little face.”

  The Headhunter pulled her away from the terrible heat and roughly dropped her on the mantle.

  Letting out a satisfied grunt, he returned to his desk and started typing. He wouldn’t stop for the next three hours.

  Sitting atop the mantle, Chloe prayed with all her heart. She prayed not for rescue, but that death would find her and put her out of this misery.

  Chapter Ten

  Weylock climbed the mountain where Chloe and Erik had lost their lives, the sun growing fainter in the distance. As he edged deeper into the wilderness, his business suit morphed into the tattered leather favored by the demon. Time for his alter ego to take center stage.

  Screams echoed through the forested hills every few minutes. Screams that only he could hear. Each time, Weylock glanced up at the trees to spot a severed head dangling in the branches above. Leaves obscured their features, but he didn’t have to see the tortured expressions on those severed heads to feel the dead women’s anguish. Their tormented shrieks and howls told the whole story.

  They were showing Weylock the way, guideposts pointing him to the stage of the showdown. Their wails crescendoed as he drew closer to the killer’s cabin.

  “Don’t worry. I’m on my way. The fiend will pay for what he’s done to you. Your suffering will soon be over.”

  Every time Weylock spoke those words, the woods would quiet down, and peace would again settle over the mountain—for a few minutes.

  The dead knew the Hexecutioner didn’t make idle vows.

  And on Weylock marched. One powerful step at a time. A relentless force of nature.

  Despite the heat and his thick coat, Weylock didn’t sweat. His muscles didn’t ache from the climb, nor did he feel any thirst or hunger. With each step, the power of the demon inside of him grew stronger. As he fought his way through the wilderness, time ceased to matter. Minutes became hours, yet he continued to advance without faltering.

  He inhaled the pain of the dead and exhaled the promise of vengeance.

  Finally, long after the sun had vanished below the horizon, a lake came into view. As he studied the scene, a new scream broke through the foliage, louder than the ones preceding it. He was almost there.

  In the small clearing up ahead, he suddenly saw a couple sharing a bottle of wine while snuggling up to each other on a picnic blanket. The two lovers were unmistakably Chloe and Erik.

  Weylock realized he was picking up a psychic impression of the past, but that didn’t make it any easier to watch. These were the events leading up to the couple’s murder.

  Erik grabbed Chloe by the hand and pulled her into the tent, their laughter ringing through the night. By the time Weylock reached the clearing, their sounds of joy had died down, and the spectral tent was gone.

  This is where the Headhunter had struck last.

  The cops had cleaned up most of the carnage, but the demon’s power allowed him to peer back in the past. It was a useful trick that had helped his investigations more than once. But that wasn’t why he was here now.

  Originally, Weylock had wanted to check out the murder scene to find clues that might lead him to the elusive killer. That wasn’t necessary any longer now that Chloe’s dog had shown him the way.

  No, he’d come here for another reason.

  Weylock stared into the encroaching darkness and said, “I need your help, Erik. Will you come with me to face the monster who took your life? Will you help set Chloe free?”

  Weylock waited. A wind stirred, and even with the demon’s power, the Hexecutioner felt a chill racing down his back. Despite his supernatural abilities, Weylock was still a man. He still reacted the way all living beings do when they come face to face with the dead.

  A figure materialized a few feet away from him, the deep gash near the man’s heart the only indicator that he’d shuffled off his mortal coil. Erik’s spirit had lingered in this clearing, unable to move on without Chloe by his side. Shadows shrouded the dead man’s face as he lurked in the forest.

  “You know how to find Chloe?” the ghost asked.

  “Yes. Will you join me as we punish the monster who did this?”

  Erik took a step closer. His features were as pale as the bulbous moon above.

  “I will join you,” the ghost said.”

  “Good, then let’s be on our way.”

  The Hexecutioner and the spirit of Chloe’s lover continued their solemn march toward the Headhunter’s lair.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Headhunter’s cabin stood atop a tiny hill surrounded by tall trees and dense shrubbery. At the bottom of the elevation, a lake shimmered in the sickly moonlight.

  Windows burned bright and warm in the night, making the place look cozy and inviting. No one would have suspected that it was the den of a beast. The cabin offered no sign of the evil which it harbored within its walls.

  Appearances can be in deceiving in this world, Weylock thought. Sometimes the villains wear white and good guys are the ones in black.

  The last thought almost made him smile. Perhaps a world as dark as our own deserved a hero like himself.

  Weylock tilted his head toward the spectral figure by his side.

  “Are you ready?”

  Erik’s alabaster features shimmered as he nodded.

  Satisfied, the Hexecutioner turned his attention toward the lake. Something drew his gaze to it even though his quarry waited within the cabin. The surface of the water was still… but wait, there! Was that a fish or something else moving beneath the surface?

  His eye
s narrowed with understanding as slight ripples stirred the tranquil water.

  Weylock finally understood why most of the heads couldn’t talk. Why none of them except for Chloe could do anything except scream.

  Once done with these women, the Headhunter had dispatched their living heads in the lake. Five of them lay at the bottom of the pond, cursed to endure the agony of drowning over and over again. Without the possibility of finding release through death, it was no wonder that these lost souls had plunged into madness.

  Weylock clenched his jaw, determined to change their fate. Their horrific suffering would end right now.

  He walked toward the small wooden pier overlooking the water. The moldy, sagging boards creaked under his thick leather boots.

  The Hexecutioner held up his hands and tapped into the demon’s power.

  Bubbles formed across the lake’s surface, the water coming alive.

  His magic reached out to the hapless souls imprisoned within the lake, invisible feelers combing through weeds and dragging the bottom. One by one, Weylock located the heads and scooped them up into a net of power.

  Less than a minute later, the bloated, pale heads burst from the lake, the women moaning and screaming. They gasped for air, coughing and spluttering even though they had no lungs to clear.

  Weylock lifted his hand. They continued to ascend into the air, froze, and floated toward the black-clad mage on the lake’s wooden pier. At last, they halted a few feet above Weylock’s head and circled him like miniature planetoids orbiting their black sun.

  “I promised I would come, and here I am,” he announced to the heads as they spun around him. “Are you ready to make the monster suffer for his crimes?”

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes.”

  Their approval droned through the night. After an eternity of being submerged underwater, the women were free again, their voices returned to them. Their desire to turn their past suffering into a weapon had become a powerful mantra.

  The moon loomed like a witch’s cataract-infested eye over them, an unholy witness to their commitment. There would be vengeance tonight greater than any he had delivered before. These spirits weren’t just tormented—the years of pain had driven them to madness.

  Weylock’s lips twisted into a cruel grin as he turned toward the cabin looming on the hill.

  The Headhunter was about to meet the Hexecutioner.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Headhunter stifled a yawn. He was ready to call it a day. He turned off his computer and wished Chloe goodnight.

  To his dismay, his new muse didn’t respond as he dimmed the lights in the living room. Was she trying to start another fight? Honestly, women. Can’t live with them… well, he supposed you could kill them.

  He looked at her, and she defiantly held his gaze despite her fear.

  The Headhunter decided to overlook this newest slight. After all, this was her first day, and she was still getting used to her new life. He would cut her some slack—this time.

  Tomorrow might be a different story.

  Wine in hand, the Headhunter sauntered into the adjacent bedroom. He planned to enjoy his drink and do a little reading before turning in for the night. He’d earned it.

  During the summer months, he liked to re-read his work, working through his series in chronological order. It was the perfect way to get back into the world he’d created and rediscover his main character’s voice.

  Reading and writing had been his escape as far as he could remember—a way of losing himself and becoming someone else. To the tabloids, he was the Headhunter. But to his students and colleagues, he was Francis Augustus. He always hated his name, which explained why he used a pen name for his books.

  His work had lingered at the bottom of the sales charts until he found his first muse. With each new year, his work improved, and his readership grew. And his latest release would be his best one yet. The words were flowing out of him, and he’d written another six pages since his spat with his newest conquest.

  Chloe was a fiery one for sure. Few of his other muses had offered much in terms of resistance. This one was different, though. He rarely lost his cool with them on his first day. Then again, he’d never written fifteen pages in a single day either.

  And it was all thanks to the Devil’s Apprentice.

  Little could he have suspected how much his life would change once his uncle passed away and left him this cabin—along with his collection of medieval relics, artifacts, and weapons. His uncle had been as much of a history buff as Francis. They had bonded over their shared passion. No wonder his uncle was so proud of him when he started teaching medieval history at the college level. So unlike his piece of shit father.

  As a kid, Francis had always enjoyed spending his summers up here in the woods. So once the cabin with everything inside it became his, heading out here during the dog days became a no-brainer.

  Francis loved teaching, but wasn’t too keen on his students. He despised their ignorance and unwillingness to be challenged and constant need to be coddled. He detested their tendency to judge historical people and events by the SJW standards of modern-day culture. The sacrifices of prior generations had paved the way for the world of today. Why couldn’t they get that, the insufferable little snowflakes?

  No wonder he was burned out and tired of navigating school politics. His writing was a ticket out of a job he despised with a burning passion—but only if he could convince the rest of the world of his genius as a storyteller. The first year after inheriting the cabin, Francis retreated here with his word processor. One of his idols was Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, who would retreat to his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica every summer to write the adventures of the world-famous spy. If Fleming could do it, then why not him?

  He loved shutting himself away from the world up here, among the ever-changing scenery, and returning to his regular life three months later with a finished book.

  Unfortunately, that first year the results were middling at best.

  But he kept at it and returned the next year. And the next.

  Each summer, he left the mountain with a new book… and nine months of rejection letters would follow. Francis was about to give up when something happened that changed his life.

  One summer night, while he struggled to put the words to paper in the cabin, two strangers had showed up on his porch.

  A man with more muscles—and tattoos—than good sense and his equally tawdry bitch. They looked like rejects from a drug-fueled punk rock concert, jittery and angry and desperate for a fix.

  Francis bristled at their presence. They were interrupting his very important work, damn it. Perhaps they thought the meek college professor made for an easy mark, or maybe they thought his uncle’s medieval collection might be worth something to the right buyer. Either way, the two meth-heads clearly planned to rob his place.

  Perhaps if the writing had been going better that summer, Francis would have been more reluctant to stand up to them. But he’d been drinking whiskey all evening long, fueled by the foolish hope it might wake his comatose muse.

  Looking at the intruders, he almost welcomed a fight.

  As the thieves broke into the cabin, something in Francis’s soul snapped and his hand instinctively reached out for the machete hanging from the wall. His fingers closed around the hilt, and like in a dream, Francis brought it down on the male home invader’s chest. The blow practically split the bastard in half.

  The male meth head staggered backward; Francis drove the machete through the man’s heart. Breath coming in explosive bursts, his face coated in sweat, Francis felt no remorse as the male intruder collapsed in a twitching, hemorrhaging heap.

  The female intruder stared first at her dead lover, then at Francis, her eyes blazing with unbridled hatred. She pulled out a switchblade from her belt and tore towards him.

  Once again, Francis moved with dreamlike precision.

  His machete was still stuck in the man’s torso, so he needed anoth
er weapon to defend himself with. His eyes landed on the medieval ax, and he knew what needed to happen next.

  Francis’ hand tore the ax from the wall, almost as if controlled by someone else, and swung it at the woman. As if some invisible force was guiding his arm, the sharp steel found the soft tissue of her tattooed neck and took off the blue-haired skank’s head in one fell swoop.

  Seeing her head come off didn’t rattle Francis into paralysis. On the contrary, the violence invigorated him. All his life he’d been the bookworm. The meek one, the shy one, the weird, the single one.

  Now, for the first time in his life, he was the strong one—the one to be feared.

  Francis Augustus died that night, and the Headhunter was born. He fondly recalled standing over those corpses, the ax dripping red, while deep laughter exploded from his lips.

  They’d messed with the wrong PhD.

  He’d never felt so alive before, never so happy. He whooped with the sheer exhilaration that ending their miserable lives had given him.

  And then the yelling started.

  Looking down at the woman’s screaming severed head, Francis’s mind scrambled for an explanation.

  He studied the symbols on the bloodstained medieval ax. Some of them were vaguely familiar from a unit he’d taught on witchcraft and black magic in the Dark Ages.

  Francis knew his life would never be the same again. For the ax in his hand was no ordinary medieval relic. There was an incredible power here that was his to wield.

  That night, he cut the bodies into little pieces and dropped the remains in the nearby lake. The woman’s head, however, refused to die.

  Once she was tired and sore from screaming, the pleas to be put out of her misery began. The skank begged him to kill her. At first, the Headhunter even tried to humor her, but as they both soon discovered, death proved elusive.

  How do you destroy a severed head that refuses to die?

  The Headhunter’s attempt at burning it in the fireplace turned out be messy and futile, as her skin would regenerate as quickly as it melted off. Other methods turned out to be similarly yucky and ineffective.