“Who else is home?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, who else is in the building? Is your wife here? Your son?” I left off the “jackass,” but it was pretty well implied.
“No, they’re gone. My wife is out of town on business for two weeks, and my son has been staying at a friend’s house since Kayleigh got sick. It’s just you, me and Kayleigh.” And whatever has got its claws wrapped around Kayleigh’s soul.
“That’s good. You might want to make yourself scarce for a little while.” Please don’t ask a lot of fucking questions.
“Why?”
Shit. “Because what I’m dealing with up here is pretty dangerous, and I don’t want you to get hurt.” And I don’t want this fucker to have another vessel to jump to if your daughter suddenly becomes uninhabitable.
“I don’t think I can—”
“Would you please just get the fuck out so I can quit worrying about your fat ass and save your daughter?” I yelled. Maybe a little direct, but I really didn’t want to have to fight this thing more than once. I heard a clatter of footsteps and then the front door slammed shut. Nice. I didn’t believe he’d actually leave. Maybe that panicked edge in my voice was useful after all.
I turned back to the door. “Just you and me, now, buddy. So why don’t you come out of the girl and let’s handle this like men?”
The voice that answered rang through my head like a dentist’s drill, piercing and ululating. “I can’t come out. Not yet. But when I do you’ll see that I’m nothing like a man.”
Then it laughed, and in that laugh were the screams of millennia of tormented souls, all shrieking together to make one terrible sound.
“Then I guess I have to come in,” I said, and strode to the door. I lifted a size 11 Doc Marten and kicked the door just beside the lock. The jamb splintered, the door flew in, and my worst nightmares were realized.
“Oh fuck me,” were the only words that came to mind as I looked at the picture before me. Geiger couldn’t have imagined a sense of greater torment. Hieronymus Bosch had nothing on the cruel artist that created the image before me. I didn’t throw up, but only because I learned years ago never to have breakfast before an exorcism. You puke on a couple of nuns and that gets drilled into you pretty fast.
The thing in the bed used to be a pretty little girl. I knew this because I’d seen enough pictures of her around the living room and on the walls going up the stairs to figure it out. There wasn’t anything pretty about what was in front of me. It still kinda looked like a little girl, if that little girl’s face was stretched into new positions from screaming for the last two days, if that little girl’s pajamas were covered in piss, shit, sweat, blood and pus, if that little girl’s matted hair was stringy with vomit and other bodily fluids. If that little girl, who probably stood around five-two and weighed maybe a hundred ten pounds last week looked like she was about to give birth to a goddamn baby elephant.
The demon hadn’t possessed Kayleigh Garda. It had impregnated her. And it was about to deliver Hell on earth.
I staggered back from the shock and the stench and raised my Bible in front of my face. The thing laughed. I realized that I wasn’t talking to Kayleigh, or the demon that possessed her—I’d been talking to her soon-to-be-born half-demon child this whole time. Kayleigh was gone, dead from the inside as the demon consumed her body and soul. And in a couple of hours, it was going to burst free of Mommy and move on to eating anything and anyone it could find. I backed slowly out of the room, then turned and ran down the stairs, almost tripping over an Xbox controller in my mad dash to the front door. I took several deep breaths, then stepped out onto the porch where Kayleigh’s dad stood chain-smoking Camels. I guess he hadn’t really left after all.
I walked over to him and leaned on the porch rail.
“Well?” he said after a moment’s silence.
“It’s worse than I thought.”
“How bad is that?” His voice went up a little on the end, like he was fighting off panic. I didn’t blame him. I was a little, too, and it wasn’t my little girl up there. Of course, I did have to live in this dimension, so demons running loose sounded like a terrible idea to me.
“Your daughter is dead. I’m very sorry.”
“But I heard her, she was talking just a minute ago!” He spun around to rush back inside, but I grabbed his arm right above the elbow.
“That wasn’t her. That was the demon. It was using her vocal chords.” Please don’t make me explain.
“What? That’s stupid. It was Kayleigh. She’s up there, and she’s in trouble, and you’re too chickenshit to help.” He pulled against my grip, but got nowhere. I’m a lot stronger than I should be for my size.
“Demons don’t have voices like you and I do. If they’re possessing someone, they can control their body completely, use their voice perfectly. You’d never know it wasn’t Kayleigh if it didn’t want you to. But this thing, it won’t have to use Kayleigh’s voice for long.”
“You mean it’s going to let her go?” I hate it when they hope for the best.
“I mean it’s almost through with her. It’s killed her and has devoured almost everything it can. When it’s finished, it will leave Kayleigh and come out here looking for another meal. If that happens, it will be almost unstoppable, because it will have one foot in our world and one foot in Hell. Usually demons can’t stay in this world past sunrise, but not this one. It won’t be bound by normal demonic rules, and it will be very, very hungry. I need to destroy it while it’s still in your daughter.”
I watched him process as much of that as he could, and thought he got pretty far for a mundane, but I could almost see the moment when hope made him go stupid again. “But you can save her, right?”
Yep, every friggin’ time. Sometimes I think we should have left Hope locked in Pandora’s box. It causes as much trouble as it fixes. “No. She’s dead. Her heart is still beating, but Kayleigh is dead. The demon inside her has eaten her soul. All that’s left up there is a meat suit that a demon is wearing with a face that kind of looks like Kayleigh’s, but not really very much. And if I don’t get up there, and send this thing back to Hell before it delivers, we’re going to all be in a lot of deep shit.”
I saw the realization cross his face a second or two after I said the word “deliver.” “Deliver? You mean my Kayleigh is pregnant with a demon? But, she’s only fifteen! She wears a promise ring! This can’t happen! We had the talk, we agreed that she should wait… She doesn’t even date.” He collapsed into a chair on the porch and I just stood there, staring at him. The man wasn’t the least bit surprised that his daughter was possessed by a soul-eating demon from Hell, but the mere thought of his precious little girl bumping uglies with some senior in the back of daddy’s Lexus reduced him to tears. People and their fucking priorities.
I went back inside, but not before popping out to the trunk of my Honda for a few extra goodies. I sealed the door behind me both mystically and physically. Mystically with a spell of warding designed to provide a non-lethal shock to humans trying to get in, but a lethal shot of balefire to anything from any of the lower realms. Angels could come and go with no problem, although I wasn’t expecting anyone from the upper reaches to come join my party. Physically I wedged a chair under the door.
A few strides and a lot more deep breaths found me outside the bedroom again. I so did not want to do this. But it’s my job. This was why they paid me the little bucks.
I raised my foot to kick the door in again when a soft voice called from within. “Come in, John Abraham Quincy Holmwood Harker. We’ve been waiting for you.”
For information on appearances, signings, autographed copies, etc. please visit
http://www.johnhartness.com
@johnhartness on Twitter
Copyright 2015 by John G. Hartness
Casket Case by John G. Hartness is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
John G. Hartness is a recovering theatre geek who likes loud music, fried pickles and cold beer. John is an award-winning poet, lighting designer and theatre producer, whose work has been translated into over 25 languages and read worldwide. He's been published in several online literary journals including The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, cc&d, Deuce Coupe and Truckin'. His poem "Dancing with Fireflies" was nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize.
His first novel, The Chosen, is an urban fantasy about saving the world, snotty archangels, gambling, tattooed street preachers, immortals with family issues, bar brawls and the consequences of our decisions.
He followed up The Chosen with Hard Day's Knight, a new twist on the vampire detective novel and the first book in the highly successful series The Black Knight Chronicles. The Black Knight Chronicles currently consists of four books and is available from Bell Bridge Books wherever print and electronic works of fancy are sold.
An avid reader, drinker and talker, John is the host of the podcast Literate Liquors, where he reviews fantasy novels and tells you what you should be drinking while you read them. He’s kind of like a sommelier for books and hard liquor.
John has been called "the Kevin Smith of Charlotte," and fans of Joss Whedon and Jim Butcher should enjoy his snarky slant on the fantasy genre. He can be found online at www.johnhartness.com and spends too much time on Twitter, especially after a few drinks.
For more information about appearances, signings, and other silliness, feel free to follow John on Twitter (@johnhartness), or on his website www.johnhartness.com.
Also by John G. Hartness
Bubba the Monster Hunter Short Stories
Voodoo Children
Ballet of Blood
Ho-Ho-Homicide
Tassels of Terror
Monsters Beware - Bubba the Monster Hunter Vol. 1
Cat Scratch Fever
Love Stinks
Hall & Goats
Footloose
Monsters Mashed - Bubba the Monster Hunter Vol. 2
Sixteen Tons
Family Tradition - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Prequel
Final Countdown
Monsters Everywhere - Bubba the Monster Hunter Vol. 3
Scattered, Smothered and Chunked - The Complete Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 1
UnHoly Night - A Skeeter the Monster Hunter Short Story
Love Hurts
Dead Man’s Hand
She’s Got Legs
Dead Man’s Party - Bubba the Monster Hunter Vol. 4
Fire on the Mountain - A Beauregard the Monster Hunter Story
Howl
Double Trouble
The Black Knight Chronicles
Volume 1 - Hard Day’s Knight
Volume 2 - Back in Black
Volume 3 - Knight Moves
The Black Knight Chronicles Omnibus Edition
Volume 4 - Paint it Black
Movie Knight - A Black Knight Short Story
Black Magic Woman - A Black Knight Short Story
Gone Daddy Gone - A Black Knight Short Story
Knight UnLife - Collected Black Knight Shorts
Co-Edited with Emily Lavin Leverett
The Big Bad: An Anthology of Evil
Other Work
Headshot
Balance - Tales of Alternate Reality
Genesis - Return to Eden Book 1
The Chosen
Returning the Favor and other slices of life
Red Dirt Boy
The Christmas Lights
Fair Play Page 3
