Vincent landed a perfect blow with the butcher knife, driving it beneath a wolf’s chin, but the animal batted his hands away and ignored the steel in its throat. It reared up over him. Vincent fell on his ass, crying. The animal tried to howl, and blood sputtered from its mouth. It tore his face off in a rage.
Vetta was in the club, watching through the front door as the wolves each selected a chef and took him down. It was a lightning-quick massacre and suddenly all the fanfare was over and there was just the sound of contented munching.
Munch munch munch in the dead of night.
Vetta screamed.
The Lugal-wolf looked up from Grant; it had prepared his chest cavity like a soup bowl, and its snout was drenched in crimson. Its eyes locked with Vetta’s.
Like Chith, it tried to form words with its alien mouth, groaning:
“I eat you noooooooooow.”
Lugal loped toward the club’s entrance. Vetta staggered back into the podium, knocking it over. She rolled over and ran through the dining area – the cats were gone again! “GODDAMN YOU!!” She screamed at them, stumbling up the spiral staircase.
The hall had three doors. The one at the end was Chith’s office, and it was still open. All the cats were there.
The orange tabby stood in the open window beyond Chith’s desk. It stared at her, as if calling: this way.
She ran into the office, slipping in blood, vaulting over the desk and running into the windowsill. Downstairs, glass and tables crashed; the wolves howled.
The window was a two-story drop into some bushes. She could just jump out and scurry down the mountainside. But what about the cats, all these cats…? She turned to look at them.
All the crumpled notes that Chith had written while on the phone were being batted into a pile on the desk. She took one of them from a Persian and opened it.
for burning
That was all it said. She opened another, and another; the same.
She yanked the top desk drawer open and found the Zippo. Tears streaming down her face, she ignited the pile of paper. It went up with a whoosh and the cats jumped back.
Lugal reached the top of the stairs. He saw her, behind the burning desk. His jaw CLACK-CLACKED as he forced words through his snout. “STUPID! BITCH!”
Vetta turned to jump out the window. She felt the hem of her skirt catch on the window frame, on some errant splinter; and she heard Lugal stalking down the corridor, seconds away from sinking his claws into her flesh. In spite of herself, she glanced over her shoulder at the wolf.
The ceiling in the corridor groaned and sagged downward. The entire hallway seemed to warp, and she knew it couldn’t be the result of the fire; the raging beasts were bringing the club down around themselves.
Lugal leapt back from the doorway, cringing as the hall shook. Vetta, jostling about in the window, stared into his hate-filled eyes.
Lugal let out a miserable howl. It was answered by others from downstairs. The pack was in retreat. He began backing down the staircase, his gaze never leaving Vetta.
Then the ceiling came down.
Vetta tore her skirt free and jumped.
The night sky and the ground below were the same shade of midnight black, and then everything was black, sound sight taste smell touch, she was unconscious.
Vetta woke up at the bottom of a slope, nestled in leaves. It was dawn. The smell of smoke was thick in her nostrils. She sat up and realized she was still on the mountainside. The little winding mountain road was just a few yards away, and it would take her up to the Ambrosia Supper Club if she dared go.
She stood up and brushed herself off. She didn’t look too bad, but she smelled like she’d slept by a campfire. The foliage around her was green as ever, though, wasn’t it?
As she headed up the road, it wasn’t so.
It turned gray, then black, then it was all a charred smoking mess. A fire truck perched precariously on the shoulder rained water down on the ruined woods. A stout fireman jumped down and ran to Vetta. “Hey! Don’t you work at – up there?”
She nodded. He took her by the hand. “Are you all right? Have you been out here all night? Jesus, did you breathe in any smoke? Are you hurt? Let me look at you. Where were you?” Other firemen surrounded her like she was some kind of wonder, and Vetta just nodded in response to their questions.
She walked with them up the road. The fire, they said, had started at the club (which had closed early, God bless) and made its way down the mountain just a bit before the fire department hit it, and they’d spent all night containing the blaze, raining water down on the beast from all sides. It seemed to be dead now. They were, for the first time, venturing into its heart – and they hoped Vetta could tell them about the fire’s origin.
“I don’t remember much,” she said. “I fell out an upstairs window. Or I jumped…”
“You must have jumped.” The stout fireman put a blanket over her shoulders. “It’s all right. It’s common for the trauma to take your memory away, at least for a time. We’re just glad you’re okay.”
“Did you find anyone else?”
“Well, we just barely put out the club fire, and I don’t think there’s anyone up there. We never met anyone coming down – it’s like no one was there, but you know who was there, don’t you? Or you will, in time.”
They reached the parking lot. The building had been gutted by flames, carving a great black teardrop into the mountainside. “That fire must have been hotter than Hell itself,” the fireman marveled. “I don’t know if we drowned it or if it just burned itself out.”
What at first looked like the remains of fallen trees, Vetta saw, was actually the splayed-out bodies of ten giant wolves, sprawled across the debris that had vomited from the restaurant, each blackened to a crisp. Their very bones were dark as night. The firemen whispered in awe to each other, picking through the scene, and Vetta was able to break away from them and search through the remains herself.
She found what she presumed to be Lugal, tangled up in the molten spiral staircase, its rails snarled around his enormous limbs, his jaw wide open, belching smoke even now. His dead, cooked eye looked up at her. She tugged it out and went to throw it, but then the orange tabby emerged from the brush beyond. It looked expectantly at her.
She saw the bite marks on Lugal’s corpse. She saw the gaping voids where the cats had feasted, after he’d been broiled in the collapsing building. And she saw the heads of cats poking from the woods, each eyeing her, as if to say: we never really wanted to leave. We miss him too.
The tabby made a gesture with its forepaw. She tossed the eyeball to it. It grabbed the treasure and trotted away.
Minotaur
A child stops on the sidewalk. An ant crosses his path. What does he do?
You know the answer. But do you know why?
Because he can.
I have been a silent sentinel over these fields for untold ages. I have felt the insects burrowing in my chest, I have felt the birds tugging and tearing at my flesh, I have felt the sun’s blistering heat and the rain’s icy needles and from all this know I am alive. But they do not. They prod with their sticks and throw their beer bottles and burn my feet with their cigarettes. My eyes have been plucked out and cast into the wind. My entrails have been spilt again and again upon the earth. A rusty sickle is buried in my side.
I have never raised my voice. I have never shed a tear. I have only waited, and tonight, as they wander the maze, I slip silently down from my station and vanish, with a whisper, into the corn.
What would a poor ant do, if he could?
You know the answer.
I am the scarecrow among the stalks. I am the minotaur in the labyrinth. Find me, if you will.
If not, I will find you.
Hell's Razor
The ice cream truck had been her dad’s. When he got sick, he and Mom talked of selling it, but she was always reluctant to do so; even after he died she held onto it. It was the last thing she had to hold onto.<
br />
Sue was sixteen when Mom passed. She didn’t sell the truck either. She moved into it.
Half-peeled stickers worn thin by the elements still promised childhood treasures within. They were inside the truck too, ads for Shark Pops and Fudge Claws and Rainbow Rockets. Sue had never before noticed how oddly threatening the name of each confection was. She tried scraping the stickers off with her razor, but they just gummed up the blade and made it harder for her to cut. Before long, the razor was useless.
As a result, the scars on her arms began to fade.
* * *
She worked odd jobs for food and gas money. A true drifter like her parents before her, she was incapable of staying in one place for long. Sometimes she felt like she was running from something. Maybe it was him.
He’d been with her for as long as she could remember. His skin was bleached white like burning charcoal, and his eyes were pure, glittering obsidian. He spoke to her sometimes, often in her sleep, but mostly he sat in the back of the truck with his wings folded around his body, only his head protruding. Those eyes.
Clicking long black fingernails on the floor, the Devil stretched his limbs and called to her. “You’re tired. Pull over and get some rest.”
She’d been on the highway all day. They were somewhere west of the Rockies, of that much she was certain. Seventeen dollars in her pocket and sleep’s shroud pressing down on her skull. Her eyelids fluttered and she sat bolt upright, tightening her grip on the steering wheel. She was tired after all.
“Just let me sleep,” she told him as she unrolled her sleeping bag in the back. Tucking a small hatchet under her threadbare pillow, she laid her head down and looked at him. “All right?”
“You’re eighteen today,” the Devil said.
* * *
She’d never told Mom or Dad about him, but she suspected that at least Mom knew. Little Sue would be caught talking to something in her closet, or under her bed, and her mom would stare worriedly at her. Where others might have seen a child’s imagination at work, she saw something else entirely.
They had the same scarlet locks and the same dark eyes. Dad often joked that they looked more like sisters. He was a good man, but Sue had never felt quite as close to him. He let her ride along in the truck sometimes, the speakers playing that tinny Dutch tune, kids swarming the vehicle as Dad slowed to a stop on a street cleaner and richer than their own.
He let Sue give change to the kids. They never asked her name, or if she wanted to play, or why she always looked so sad.
When the truck became her home, Sue had ripped out the speakers. That creepy damn song always made her cry.
* * *
She’d waited eighteen years to ask the question. Tonight, lying in her bedroll, hand on her hatchet, she did.
“You are the Devil, aren’t you?”
“I’m not as bad as they say,” he replied. Leathery wings unfolded, spanning the whole interior of the truck, and he clicked his claws together. When he smiled, his flesh cracked and bled.
“I’ve watched over you all these years, just as I watched over your mother.” He folded his legs and sat beside Sue. “You’re part of a very special family, dear. And soon you will bear a daughter of your own.”
“I don’t ever want kids,” she said.
He nodded, patronizingly. “You may change your mind someday, Sue. When you look into your baby’s eyes for the first time, when you hear her cry...you’ll think differently. Just as your mother did.”
“What makes you so sure I’d have a girl?”
“It’s foreordained.” The Devil smiled again. His teeth were black and broken. “You’ll make a wonderful mommy.”
“Why...” She started to ask, but fell silent.
“Why what?”
“Nothing.”
The unspoken question hung in the air between them like a cloying mist. Why did my mom kill herself?
* * *
He whispered into her mind, into her dreams.
“He wasn’t your father.”
Sue sat up with a jolt of fright. She was alone in the truck. It was late morning.
She drove into the next town – Denver, Colorado, as it turned out – and cruised the industrial areas in search of Help Wanted signs. Though most men would think her better suited for waitressing, her talent was in metalwork.
It was a bleak, slightly chilly day, sometime in October. The truck’s heater was dead. The engine rattled and the clouds overhead began to grow dark and ominous.
“Yesterday was your eighteenth birthday,” the Devil said into her ear.
“I know. You told me.”
“Don’t you want to know who your father is?”
“Stop talking,” she snapped.
“Oh, it’s not me, Sue. No, I could never conceive life. I thought you would know that. That’s why I had to make him...to piece him together from the parts of other, lesser men, to design him using bits of former lives.
“He came for your mother, and her mother, and her mother’s mother. He carries the sacred seed. Now he comes for you.”
She slammed on the brakes. The Devil didn’t so much as stumble. He hissed into her ear, “He’s coming. He is your father, and tonight you will be his bride.”
Sue turned and stomped right through him, into the back, where all her supplies were rolled up inside her sleeping bag. She slung the bag over her shoulder and stepped out onto the street.
“What are you doing?” He called. She didn’t look back.
“You can’t run, Susie. His instincts are too strong. He smells his own blood in your veins...”
* * *
So here we are.
The building was obviously long condemned, and for good reason. It was all warped wood and burst pipes. Rainwater ran down through the ceiling, dripping from snarls of cobwebs and punching holes in the dust on the carpet. Mushrooms grew out of the floor and mold covered the blinds, which allowed only a few slivers of rude neon to intrude from the night outside.
Sue sat at a waterlogged table and stared into darkness. This must have been a cheap hotel at some point, maybe a piece of history; now it was a decaying relic. Yet she never felt more at home.
“Haven’t I been your constant companion?” The Devil’s voice sang.
“I never asked for it.”
“No, you did not. You were blessed – your bloodline will give rise to a very special young man. For centuries you have anchored me to this earth – all is foreordained, Sue, including this night, and now he comes—”
There was a creak from downstairs. Then another.
“He comes up the stairs—”
Heavy footfalls on spongy carpeted floor. Guttural sounds.
“He comes down the hall-”
Something’s weight settled in front of the door to Sue’s room. She rose from the table, hatchet in hand.
“He’s at the door, Sue—”
It flew off its hinges, spraying water and splinters across the room, and the thing filled the doorway.
Seven feet tall, a patchwork of uneven limbs and skins. Heavy black cloth was sewn into its flesh. Dark skin had been grafted over its face like a veil, rendering the creature blind and mute. And yet she knew it was staring right at her.
One of its meaty hands drifted across the fabric covering its belly, drifted down to caress its engorged manhood through the coarse material. It made a series of wheezing grunts, as if suffocating, then it came across the room at her.
Sue sidestepped the beast and ran for the doorway. He caught her by the hair and swung her. Her feet left the floor and she was flying, weightless – then she crashed into a wall and felt her teeth jump in their sockets.
She fell to the floor in a heap. Already she felt powerless, drained, as if the monster were sapping her strength by its mere presence. She heard its bare feet crossing the room and looked up. It was right there.
She buried the hatchet in its foot.
The beast’s toes splayed out; it let out a muff
led scream and tore at its leg, but the blade had nailed it to the floor and it was stuck while Sue got to her feet and ran.
She was in the hallway then, streaking toward the staircase. The world before her erupted; the wall at her right came apart like a shattered puzzle, and the monster stepped into her path. She was knocked onto her back and the air left her lungs.
Grabbing her leg, it tossed her down the stairs. She crashed down on the landing and lay still.
It started after her.
“Razormantic Sarcoidium.”
The beast stopped in its tracks, looking blindly around the hallway.
“Be gentle with her, Razor...love her.”
Sue lay unconscious on her back, her legs open. The creature grunted and began limping down the stairs, black blood squirting from its wounded foot.
Somewhere in there, Sue was aware of what was happening. She was barely awake, and her limbs were immovable lead. Every rise and fall of her breast sent pain coursing through her skull.
Mommy...she must have seen its face every time she looked at me. That’s why she couldn’t hold on any longer. It was my fault.
The creature knelt before her, reaching out with trembling hands. It opened her jacket, ran its fingertips over her flesh. Her nipples hardened, and she felt sick...This is happening. This is really happening.
Its wrists bore layers upon layers of scar tissue, ugly pink ribbons that ran into its sleeves and, presumably, over its entire body.
What would the beast think when it saw her scars?
My scars. They’re mine and no one else’s. NO!
She swung out and caught two of its fingers, folded them back with a hideous snap. It howled beneath its veil of flesh. Sitting up, Sue backpedaled into the wall, then swung a boot up into the monster’s face. It fell sideways, flailing wildly, and tumbled down the next flight of stairs.
Sue struggled to her feet. Already she could hear it doing the same. She had to go up.
Racing back into her room, she grabbed the waterlogged table and, with all the strength her terror could muster, hurled it into the window. It plowed through the glass and blinds and hung there, half in and half out, blocking her escape.
Dark Entities Page 4
