Hell Freezes Over - A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella

by John G. Hartness

  I held up a hand. “Obliviscor,” I whispered, then blew the irate man a kiss. His eyes glazed for a moment, then refocused on me.

  “What are you doing?” he asked again for the first time.

  “I’m checking for surveillance,” I replied. “Detective Flynn asked me to. Told me to turn the room over to you once I was done.” I gave him one of those “what can you do” shrugs and turned back to the jewelry. My fingers brushed against a silver medal, and I felt a tingle through my fingers, like a tiny electric shock. I brushed aside more rings and brooches until I felt it again, then drew out a silver medal on a string of glass beads, with a small silver crucifix dangling from the end.

  Whoever this fucker is, he’s a nasty piece of work, I thought to Flynn.

  Why? What did you find?

  The Focus for his spell on the Nettles family. Bastard enchanted a rosary to lock them under his influence. I’m coming down.

  I stomped through the assembled cops and crime scene techs on my way to the front door. Flynn stood in the foyer talking to a neighbor but broke away when I came down.

  “Aguirre, finish taking her statement. I’m sorry, Mrs. Ravin, I need to speak with my consultant.” She followed me out into the yard and across the grass to my car. I opened the trunk and sat on the bumper, pulling off the blood-soaked booties and stripping off my shoes and socks.

  “I wondered about the sneakers,” Flynn asked as she caught up to me.

  “Stopped at Walmart on the way over,” I said. I put the booties, sneakers and socks all in a big plastic bag, then scrounged around in the trunk for an old towel I kept back there for emergencies. I wiped the last of the blood off my feet and threw the towel in the bag with the bloody shoes. I grabbed my Doc Martens out of the trunk and pulled on a pair of thick boot socks to go with them. Flynn stood there silent for several minutes while I laced up my boots, then finally she broke.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Deep subject,” I replied, keeping my petty little grin to myself somehow.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Harker. I need to know what’s going on.”

  I held out the medal. “This is a big deal,” I said. “It takes a lot of power to corrupt a truly holy object, and saint’s medals and crucifixes are inherently holy. Put them on a rosary, and one that’s seen some use, and they are significant objects of faith, at least to the owner. This might not mean shit to the Buddhist guy across the street, but to Jim Nettles, this is probably the focal point of all his prayers. I’m guessing his mother died of cancer, probably sometime when he was newly married, or around thirty. He prayed with this rosary through that whole time and carried it for a long time after. Then his wife had a scare, and he started carrying it again recently.”

  “How did you get all that? Some kind of psychokinesis?” Flynn asked. “A spell?”

  “Nah, more like old-school Sherlock Holmes shit,” I replied. “Most of that psychokinesis bullshit is just that—bullshit. There are a few PKs out in the world, but most folks do it with magic. Strong emotions leave impressions on objects, and magic can bring those to the front. But this was all detective work. There were pics of a woman bearing a slight resemblance to Nettles in the house holding both kids as infants, but nothing more recent of her. And this necklace is about ten or fifteen years old and shows signs of a lot of handling. So he prayed with this thing a lot, but there aren’t enough religious items in the house to make me think he did that recently. They did the church thing, but it didn’t drive them. And St. Peregrine is the patron saint of cancer patients, so all that makes sense.”

  “But what about the wife? What makes you think she had cancer?”

  “No, she was a survivor. It was the bras. There was a mastectomy bra on the dresser with a prosthetic built in, and she wore a bra to sleep in. Speaks to a woman with confidence issues centered around her breasts, and some cancer patients have trouble letting their partners see the scars, so they wear their prostheses to bed. But her cancer would have been enough to get him to pull that old rosary out and pray with it again. I’d bet we find out that they started going to church again about two, two and a half years ago. Probably right about the time she was diagnosed.”

  “So what killed them?” Flynn asked.

  “It’s not the what. We know the what, or the who. Jim Nettles killed his family and then opened every artery and vein in his body that he could reach. What we don’t know is the why, and we don’t know what needs an offering of that much blood to break through the Veil. And we really, really hope it’s still locked on the other side.”

  “How are we supposed to find out those things? Especially the bit about whether or not this big bad is still locked away?” Flynn asked, keeping her voice low to not attract attention from the surrounding cops. Most of them knew she was on some oddball assignment with Homeland Security. Most of them didn’t know she was working for the real-world equivalent of the X-Files.

  “Nothing came through here, it would have left a mark,” I said with more confidence than I felt.

  “You’re full of shit.” The problem with trying to lie, or even fudge the truth, with someone who is literally inside your head is that they are literally inside your head. Flynn felt every nuance of every word I said, so she knew I was lying.

  “Of course I’m full of shit, Becks. I can’t tell what kind of magic is causing this because I can’t feel any magic at all. Do you know how fucked up that is? It’s like walking into a room where you know people died, but you can’t see what killed them. They’re just dead. No bullet holes, no stab wounds, no ligature marks, nothing. That’s what I’ve got—a fucking conundrum that’s hiding in an enigma. And not only do I have nothing, but my best resource has been ordered not to help me. So we’re fucked. So I’m going home, and I’m going to do what I do when I don’t have any other options.”

  “Get drunk?”

  “That too. No, I’m going to call Luke. Maybe he’s seen something like this, or read about it. The bastard’s been alive long enough to remember when Gutenberg first played with movable type. If it’s in print, he’s probably read it.”

  “Don’t forget Renfield. He’s a smart little dude,” Flynn added.

  “Good call. You sticking around here?”

  “Yeah, I need to talk with the officer that found the bodies, get the okay from up top to take over the case from the local detective, smooth it over with those guys, all those political things that you don’t have to deal with.”

  “Beauty of being freelance, Detective,” I said, walking to the front of my car. “On the other hand, nobody’s gonna reimburse me for the shoes I just ruined.”

  “Take it up with your rich uncle, Harker. I’ll swing by later and see what you’ve figured out.”

  Chapter 10

  “I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of anything quite like that, Quincy, but that also stands to reason, doesn’t it? I mean, if there was something forcing people to commit horrific murder-suicides, but it went to such amazing lengths to hide its supernatural origins, then we wouldn’t know it was supernatural at all. The only way we would discover these crimes is if, as happened to you, someone were to become haunted by a victim, or by sheer process of elimination.” Uncle Luke sat on my couch, a snifter of brandy in his hand, lecturing to the room. I’ve always thought that his talents were wasted on being one of the most famous monsters in history. If it weren’t for the whole sucking human blood to live thing, he’d be a hell of a college professor. He even looked the part, with leather patches on the elbows of his corduroy jacket, his dark hair curled just a touch longer than his collar, and his refined features that spoke of good breeding and blazing intellect.

  “What do you mean, process of elimination?” I asked, sipping my third scotch. After the second one, the smell of blood started to ever so slowly fade from my nostrils, supplanted by the peaty oakness of a good Dalmore single malt. By the third, the sharp edges on my memories were starting to soften, and I could close my eyes without seeing eve
ry detail of the Minnie Mouse nightshirt Sandy Nettles died in, the pink fabric bunched up high on one leg, showing an expanse of toned thigh streaked with blood where she died fighting for her life and her children.

  “Well, I suppose we’d have to go through every single homicide in the country and filter them out based on similar patterns in victimology, crime scene details, information about the perpetrators, and any other data points we can find,” Luke said. “If we could access that kind of information, we could, theoretically, see if anything like this has every happened before. But we would need basically all the world’s police departments to be networked, with the same type of cross-referencing and recording the same details. I’m afraid the task is so daunting as to be impossible.”

  “Eight,” Renfield said from my desk across the room. Renfield took up residence at my computer almost as soon as we started talking about the murders and buried himself in the internet and the darknet. For a guy who knew about the deepest, darkest recesses of the web, he looked like a stockbroker. His light brown hair was a little disheveled, and there was an excited look behind his wire-rimmed glasses, but otherwise Renfield looked perfectly put-together in khakis, a v-neck sweater over a nice Oxford dress shirt, and loafers that I was pretty sure cost more than my car. This was a confluence of several things. First, Luke took very good care of his Renfields financially. Second, this Renfield had a bit of a shoe fetish, and lastly, I had a really shitty car.

  Luke looked over at his manservant, the most recent to bear the name of “Renfield,” now as much a title as an ode to my uncle’s inability to remember his minion’s names. “Exactly what are you talking about, dear boy? This recent trend toward non sequitur does not bode well for your continued employment. I understand that you humans decline at a rapid rate, but I cannot keep someone in my service once their faculties begin to fail, I’m sure you understand.”

  Renfield shot my uncle a withering look. “Just as I’m sure you understand that your inability to keep track of the conversation at hand has more to do with your personal deficiencies than any imagined failings on my part. There have been eight similar cases in the United States since the end of the Civil War, where nine fathers murdered their families in their beds over a period of weeks. Each instance culminated in a city-wide or regional tragedy resulting in massive loss of life. For instance, the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 came right on the end of a streak of horrific murders among the city’s businessmen. Nine families were slaughtered, with the fire bringing an end to the streak. A similar streak of murders was documented in San Francisco—”

  “Let me guess,” I interrupted. “In 1906, right before the great quake?”

  “Exactly,” Renfield confirmed. “There were also similar catastrophes ending strings of mysterious family slayings in Boston in 1942 when the Coconut Grove nightclub burned; in 1913 in Dayton, Ohio, when the Great Dayton Flood killed over three hundred fifty people; and tracking through the last century and a half to the most recent, when Hurricane Katrina touched down in New Orleans, devastating the French Quarter and bringing to an end the activities of the Crescent City Ripper, as he was being called by the press.”

  “I never heard of that,” I said.

  “Neither did I, and I read the newspapers religiously,” said Luke.

  “But neither of you read the newspapers specifically published and targeted to the African-American community, I assume,” Renfield said. Luke and I shrugged and nodded. Renfield nodded back and said, “I thought so. The Ripper never received any mainstream press coverage because he was killing African-Americans in a city with a high crime rate, so he remained largely unnoticed until Katrina hit, then he vanished.”

  “Let me guess,” I said, “after eight families were slaughtered.”

  “Nine,” Luke said. I looked at Renfield, who nodded. I turned a raised eyebrow back to Luke. “Nine is a holy number,” he said. “It has power. Whatever is doing this is working to bring about something nasty, and it’s getting better at it.”

  “You think it harnessed the power from the nine murders to cause these disasters? Including Katrina?”

  “I don’t know if there’s enough blood magic in North America to create a Category 4 hurricane out of whole cloth, but there’s probably enough power in a couple dozen deaths to steer one,” Luke said.

  “So you think whatever this is building to could be bigger than Katrina?” I asked.

  “It would seem to follow,” Renfield replied.

  “But we’re not near any oceans, and most buildings of any size have enough fire suppression to keep Mrs. O’Leary’s cow out of business,” I said.

  “But there are fault lines running all through the Carolinas, and there is some precedent for magical events triggering seismic tremors,” Luke said.

  “What fault lines? Why haven’t I heard about this?” I asked.

  “They haven’t been active in decades, but most seismologists agree the Charlotte area is long overdue for some seismic activity,” Luke went on, ignoring me.

  “So now we think that these murders are just building up what, psychic energy to trigger a giant earthquake?” I looked around to see if anyone was laughing. No one was. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” Renfield said. “Take a look here.” He brought my laptop over to the couch where I sat across from Luke. He showed me some pictures with red and yellow circles on them, then overlaid those pictures onto a map of the Carolinas. One of the red circles was directly over Charlotte.

  “I have no fucking idea what any of that means, except that it’s gotta be bad,” I admitted.

  “Well, nephew, at the root of it, that’s all you need to know. Something is killing people and is planning to use the energy from those violent and tragic deaths to trigger a giant earthquake that will wipe out the whole city and kill thousands of people.”

  “Fuck,” I said, leaning back on the couch.

  “My sentiments exactly,” said Luke.

  “So what do we do about it?” I asked.

  “Well, you stop it, of course,” Luke replied.

  “Why me? Why don’t you stop it?” I asked. Every once in a while I like to beat my head against the walls of the universe and rail against my destiny a bit. It never gets me anywhere, but sometimes makes me feel better for a few seconds.

  This was not one of those days. Luke, of course, had an answer.

  “Quincy, my dear boy, I am a legendary creature of the night, with a centuries-long tradition of striking fear into the hearts of humans everywhere. I do not save the world, I terrify it. You, on the other hand, are a white hat of almost mythic proportions. There are demon mothers in the sixth circle of Hell who use tales of your exploits to scare their children into obedience. You have saved more lives than Jonas Salk and Marie Curie combined. You are the greatest advancement of humanity since the pasteurization of milk. This, clearly, is your department.”

  We kept hashing around ideas, I kept hammering scotch, until finally I waved my uncle and his assistant off so I could crash for a few hours of drunken slumber. I dropped into my bed, only taking enough time to strip off my shoes and pants, and was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow. Of course, that’s where the real shit started.

  Emily Standish was standing at the foot of my bed when my eyes cracked open. She wasn’t doing anything, just standing there with the preternatural stillness that only the dead can achieve. That’s the one thing you eventually notice about dead people, how they don’t move much. Even the animated ones, or the undead, like Uncle Luke. They don’t have the constant motion of the living. There’s no chest rising and falling with each breath. There are no twitching fingers, or tapping feet, or shifting of weight from one foot to another. There’s no constant blinking, swallowing, eyes flitting from one thing to another. There’s just…stillness.

  I looked down at little Emily standing there, staring up at me with innocent, still eyes.

  “What?” I asked, my voice soft, tongue thick with sleep.


  Nothing.

  “What do you want?” I sat up in bed, shaking the sleep off.

  Nothing.

  “Why won’t you leave me alone?” My voice was louder now, sharper, echoing off the mirror above my dresser.

  Nothing.

  “Goddammit, what do you want?!? I’m trying, dammit, can’t you see that? I don’t know where to go! I don’t know what to do! If you want me to do something, just fucking tell me!” I threw off the covers, surprised to find myself fully dressed.

  “Help me,” she said, stretching out a hand to me.

  I couldn’t resist, I stepped forward and took her hand. The room spun around us, twirled into a vortex of streaks and dashes of light twisting, whirling and spinning us until it stopped so abruptly that I almost fell over.

  We were back in the church, but this time I was wearing Darin Standish’s body. I remembered the polo shirt, remembered thinking how much I hate polo shirts and most people that wear them. But here I was, kneeling beside Annie Standish at the communion rail, bowing my head, then lifting it and opening my mouth as the priest put the wafer on my tongue.

  The wafer dissolved as the priest spoke over my head, but instead of the normal Latin or English blessing, the priest began to chant in Ancient Enochian, the language of the angels. I’ve heard it before, most recently from Glory, but something about this was different. There was a power to these verses that was like nothing I’d ever heard or felt. Each word battered my eardrums and made the room spin. It was like Enochian, but as spoken by God himself, and nothing my mortal mind was capable of processing.

  “OLSON FVORSGGO HOIAD BALTON SHCALZON PHOSOBRA

  ZOLRORITAN AZPSAD GRAATAMAL

  HOLQ NOTHO AZIMZOD COMMAHT ANOBLO ZIENSO

  THILGNON GEALD IDSBOBOLEH GRAMCASARM”

  I clapped my hands over my ears and clenching my teeth to keep the screams in. My stomach did a couple of rolling flips while my eyes teared up from the sensory overload. As quickly as it began, it was over, and I looked back up at the face of the priest. Except there was no face, just a cowled form standing over me with a brilliant white glow from where his face should have been.