The Devouring

by Simon Holt

  “Yeah.” Reggie ground her teeth. “One of my favorites.”

  “Terrified of little spiders. Poor girl. You don’t stand a chance against us.”

  “We’ll destroy you.”

  “No. You’ll go mad,” it said. “Your fear will consume you, blurring what is real and what is dream.” The voice was changing, deepening by almost imperceptible degrees of pitch — but changing just the same. “The spiders in your room? That was just a taste, Regina. A coming attraction. You don’t need your scary stories and your horror movies anymore. We’re going to give you the real thing every day of your miserable life until you lose your mind, or until your heart gives out, like that hag you left to watch over me. But I do hope you live a long, long time. Give us years to devour you from the inside out.”

  “I’ll stuff you back into the hole you crawled out of. I’m going to bring Henry back.”

  “Don’t you get it yet? I am Henry. The only one this world will ever know.”

  A laugh echoed through the vent, shrill and ugly.

  Reggie felt murderous. And worse, she felt helpless.

  The thing that used to be her brother yawned.

  “Nighty night, Reg.”

  But Reggie did not sleep.

  You know where you need to go. What you need to do.

  The clock read 2:17 when she climbed out of bed. She grabbed some supplies and a set of keys and then sneaked out of the house. She took the beat-up pickup Dad used for construction work and was soon on the road back to Fredericks.

  A learner’s permit didn’t technically mean she could be on the road on her own, but if she told Eben about her plan, he’d stop her. And if she told Aaron, he’d demand to come with her. Fear had overpowered him once too often and she couldn’t chance it this time.

  As she drove, Reggie recalled one of Macie’s journal entries: I know a secret now. A secret about humanity. Who has a soul and who is a monster?

  Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t see the semi in her rearview mirror until it was almost on her rear bumper. Its roaring engine made her car tremble.

  “Come on, man, give me a break.”

  As if it had heard her, the semi pulled into the left lane and sped up to pass. But when the high-mounted cab was even with her, it slowed and kept pace.

  Displaced air shoved the smaller truck left and right. Reggie gripped the wheel until her knuckles turned white.

  “What are you waiting for? Pass me!” The old pickup was like a boat on rough seas. “Okay, jerkoff! Fine!”

  She eased her foot off the gas and fell back until she was behind the semi … then it slowed and fell back, too. The cab came even with her again. The semi thundered, and the small pickup truck shimmied closer to the icy roadside.

  They had found her.

  The semi’s passenger window lowered, and smoke poured out. Blood pounded in Reggie’s temples.

  An old, grizzled man in a Red Sox cap and flannel coat sat behind the wheel. His eyes locked with hers and his lips stretched into a thin smile. He blew out a long stream of smoke.

  “Hey,” the man hollered, “one of your taillights is out!” He gestured toward the back of the pickup, a smoldering cigarette pinched between his fingers. “Hear me? You got a busted taillight! Drive safe now!”

  He rolled up the window, shifted gears, and pulled ahead.

  Just a truck driver. A shepherd of the highway. Caring, thoughtful. Watching out for his fellow man. Reggie remembered something else Macie had written.

  I know a secret, and secrets breed paranoia.

  Once off the main road, Reggie made two wrong turns before she found the lane into the woods again. She pulled up to the house, her heartbeat thumping in her ears. Sitting there in the pickup, the little girl in her wished it all away and tried to believe it was a dream — to convince herself that if she closed her eyes she would wake up to a world where all the monsters were make-believe, and The Devouring was nothing more than a strange fantasy she had found in a cardboard box.

  She grabbed Dad’s old army duffel and a flashlight from the truck bed and approached the house.

  Whatever the creatures were, they weren’t invincible. They couldn’t be. They had needs and aversions. They craved heat. They hated the cold. The Vours could interact with an or-ganism and change its biology, enabling it to inflict horrible hallucinations but making it vulnerable to cold. This meant, according to Aaron, that they were organic, or at least physical to some degree. And if so, then theoretically the process might work in reverse: something could interact with a Vour and change it. She was fuzzy on the science, if science had anything to do with it, but that didn’t matter. Either Aaron was right, or she was carrying this bag for nothing, and she was dead meat.

  Reggie flicked on the flashlight and stepped onto the creaky porch. Above her, the bird feeders hung motionless in the still air. She turned the knob on the front door and stepped into the dark house. The room was cold and she wanted to run.

  She was going to do this — and not just for Henry. Her own fear was always awake inside her now, changing her, ruling her, lessening her. The Vours had more than one kind of victim. Macie was proof of that. If you knew, you were cursed, too. Your doubt and fear would grow, obsession would take hold. She had to act now, while she still had some control. She walked across the brittle bones toward the basement hatch, her warm breath turning to mist in the freezing air. The thick darkness seemed to swallow the flashlight’s narrow beam.

  “Let me out…”

  She threw open the trapdoor and descended.

  It knew she was here. She took one of Dad’s Sheetrock nails from her coat pocket and clenched it, feeling the sting of the steel point.

  “Let me out…”

  Reggie hung one of Dad’s battery-powered construction lights on the back of the chair and flipped it on. The room lit up, and through the hole Aaron had made in the wall, she could see a smoky face against the glass. The Vour had proven that it could sense her fears and send her into an alternate reality; she had to show it strength and nerve, even if it was mostly bravado.

  “I knew you’d come back.”

  The voice was sly, icy, taunting.

  “You did, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  She took off her coat and put it on the chair.

  “How’d you know that?”

  “You all are drawn to us, as we are to you,” it said. “For so long, I have been alone. No light, no heat…”

  “You had a rotting corpse. If you ask me, you got the better cell mate.”

  “The last girl taunted me as well.I drove her mad.”

  Macie.

  “Mad, afraid, alone. You will share her fate. But I can help you. I can eat your fear. I can end your tears forever.”

  “I don’t want your help.”

  “Lie. You want my secrets. But if you give nothing to me, you shall take nothing from me.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Come closer.” A malevolent smile twisted the melting lips. “Put your hand on the glass.”

  Reggie stepped closer and placed her fingertips on the window. The glass was so cold it burned, and its silvery etchings seemed to quiver beneath her palm.

  “Someone’s here to see you, Regina.”

  The Vour churned like boiling, muddy water, morphing into someone young and beautiful.

  Her mother.

  Reggie could smell the lilac lotion she dabbed on her earlobes and under her chin every morning after her shower.

  They were in the bathroom. Reggie sat in a chair at the sink, looking at her mother’s reflection in the cabinet mirror. Mom stood behind her, scissors in hand, giving Reggie’s freshly shampooed tresses a trim.

  “God, I love your hair,” Mom said. She said that every time she trimmed Reggie’s hair.

  “Of course you do. It’s yours.”

  “Regina,” Mom said, “would you hate me if I just disappeared from your life?”

  “Why would you disappear?”


  “Would you rather think that I was abducted and brutally murdered, or that I just walked out because I didn’t love you?”

  Snip.

  “The first one,” said Reggie. “Murdered.”

  “Really?” Mom said.

  Snip, snip.

  “I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking my mother didn’t love me. That would really suck.”

  “I see,” said Mom, and she stopped snipping. “So rather than finding a joyful life elsewhere, you’d prefer my life just ended. Violently.”

  Snip.

  “Well, I didn’t mean —”

  “If I found love somewhere else, you’d want me murdered before you’d let me have it. Isn’t that right?”

  Snip. Snip.

  “No, that’s not what —”

  “It’s always about you, isn’t it?”

  “Huh?”

  “I brought you into the world, gave you everything I could … but it wasn’t enough.”

  She snipped again. Faster.

  “Mom?”

  “It’s never enough — you suck the life out of me until I’m an empty shell.”

  The scissor blades snapped open and shut, open and shut, and more and more of Reggie’s beautiful hair fell to the floor.

  “Mom, my hair! Don’t —”

  She tried to stand but her mother shoved her back down. The hand on Reggie’s shoulder wrinkled, the fingernails split and yellowed. Her mother grew haggard and filthy.

  “Look what you’ve done to me! Leech! Parasite!” her mother shrieked. “What more do you want from me?”

  The scissors were ravenous now, chopping off big chunks right down to the scalp, leaving mean, bare patches of skin across Reggie’s skull. Mom’s face knotted with anger.

  “Mom, stop! Please don’t —”

  “What more do you want, Regina? Blood?”

  Mom raised the scissors high. They flashed in the light like a silver-winged bird, and then she plunged them into her own wrist. She offered her arm to Reggie like a bloody sacrifice.

  Reggie screamed and pulled away from the glass. She opened her balled fist. The nail had pierced her palm. The pain had broken off the hallucination. It bled and hurt like hell, but she’d stopped the nightmare.

  “You should have stayed longer. You missed the best part.”

  “I hate you,” she hissed.

  The Vour grinned.

  “We can always count on people to hate and to fear. To harm one another and to be harmed. To kill and to be killed. It is what opens the gate.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Reggie snorted. “Too bad you can’t open that window, though.” Now it was Reggie who was grinning. She tapped on the glass. “So tell me … can you things die? I’m kind of hoping you guys are immortal. Forever is a real long time to be stuck in there.”

  The Vour sped at the glass. Reggie tried not to flinch.

  “LET ME OUT!”

  On impact, a million specks of smoke flew apart and then drifted back together like mercury. The face remade itself.

  “I have to tell you,” Reggie said, “the smash-against-the-window thing is only scary so many times. You are never getting out — that is, unless I say so.”

  Part of her wanted to run; part of her relished the chance to study it. It exuded a foulness that was the opposite of warmth, light, goodness, love.

  “Unless you say so?” it asked.

  Reggie nodded.

  The Vour stared back at her. This close, it still made her quake. She worked the nail into her palm until the pain took the edge off her fear. She could feel the blood warm against her skin.

  “You want out? Give me back my brother.”

  “We’re making deals now, are we?”

  “I want Henry back. When he’s free, I’ll set you free. That’s all I care about. Make it happen.”

  The black shape came still closer.

  “Stupid girl. Do you think we are all of one mind, that I, one measly being, have such power? Don’t you think I would have called another to free me if I was able?” It loosed a low, distorted chuckle. “You know nothing of what we are. You confuse the servant for the master. In time, you too shall succumb to the Devouring.”

  “Oh really? How do you plan to do that? Have my eight-year-old brother torment me with magic tricks, or will you just bore me to death from inside your little cage?”

  “Perhaps you were followed. Perhaps you have enemies in your midst. Who can say?”

  The vaporous face pulsed hypnotically.

  “I have a deal for you,” it said. “Why don’t you help me come out of here … and come into you? I gain freedom, you lose fear.”

  “You offered Macie the same deal, didn’t you? After you lost your home inside her brother. What makes you think I would accept when she didn’t?”

  “You’re full of fear, Regina. In every corner of your mind. And now there is Henry. And us. So much to be afraid of. Can you imagine what your life would be like without fear?”

  Reggie’s body felt rubbery; the construction light was too bright, and the room was freezing. Her hand throbbed.

  “But it’s not Sorry Night,” she said. “How can you take me if it isn’t Sorry Night?”

  “The solstice allows us to enter and feed upon the fearful, as I did to the boy in the cornfield.”

  The creature swirled through the corpse’s remains and then slithered back out. Reggie stared at the pile of bones.

  “Jeremiah,” she said. “His name was Jeremiah.”

  “He was devoured in the dark; the light of a single flame led us to him in the midwinter night. But there is another way.” The Vour’s grin was almost lustful. “Surrender to your fear so you may triumph over it. Choose me, open your soul to me, and embrace the Devouring.”

  “Why would I do that to myself?”

  The Vour pressed against the glass once more.

  “Do you believe you came here by your own power, Regina? You’re drawn to me as I am to you. Your weakness is my strength. Imagine the liberation, Regina.” The voice was serene. “The power that grows in the place of fear.”

  “But you’re not human.”

  “We become human.”

  “No you don’t. You’re … a cancer,” said Reggie.

  “No. Fear is the cancer. We are the cure.”

  “You prey on the weak.”

  “And they become strong. Because they feel no fear.”

  She wanted to close her eyes. Just for a second.

  “Why did you come back, Regina? Was it to save Henry — or to save yourself?”

  She heard the voice echo, and she could feel herself falling like Alice down the rabbit hole. “What … are … you?”

  “I am beyond your understanding.”

  The Vour’s eyes dissolved into the churning darkness, then returned again. She tightened her fist. The pain was excruciating.

  “If you refuse, your terror will grow worse, like the girl before you. We know who you are, Regina. You can be sure that Henry has told the others. We will hunt you. We will torture you. And we will never stop.”

  Her father appeared before her, gazing down at a photograph of her mother. With his other hand he raised a revolver and put the barrel in his mouth. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  She dug the nail deep into her flesh.

  “Stop it!” she cried.

  The phantasm dissipated like smoke in the wind. The Vour rolled against the glass.

  “Why choose a living hell when I can devour your fears and take them all away?”

  Blood seeped from between Reggie’s fingers.

  “Does it … hurt?” she asked.

  “No. It doesn’t hurt.”

  “What will it feel like?”

  “Like you are lost in the cold and dark … and then you find your way home. That’s what it feels like.”

  Its voice had softened, almost to a purr.

  The bat Aaron had dropped the day before was on the floor. She bent down and pick
ed it up with her bloody hand.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  The Vour smiled.

  “Good. I need you to be scared. Very, very scared. And then you’ll never be scared again.”

  Reggie raised the bat; as she swung, time seemed to slow, then wood met glass, and the window shattered.

  The Vour billowed, black steam gathering itself, floating before her, growing larger and denser.

  “Freedom!”

  In the bright light, the smoke shimmered; it devoured any trace of warmth around it. The basement’s temperature plummeted. Reggie’s breath steamed as she shivered and faced the monster.

  “Give in to your fear, Regina. Let it call to me. Surrender for me, for Henry, for all of us.”

  She nodded, but she knew that Henry wasn’t an “us.” It looked like Henry, it retained his memories — but it wasn’t her brother.

  The Vour whirled about. Reggie’s pulse raced with adrenaline.

  “Was he as scared as I am?” she asked, glancing at Jeremiah’s bones.

  “He was easy. He wasn’t as strong as you.”

  The whirlwind turned faster.

  “Is it true that Vours can’t cry?”

  “Yes, but you won’t miss it.”

  It glided toward her.

  “When it’s done, what happens to the me that was scared? Does it die?”

  “It does not die.”

  “Then where does it go?”

  “To a place where it belongs, a place where it is needed.” The Vour, a roiling cloud with a wickedly shifting face, stared at her with gleaming black eyes. “It is time. I can feel it in you. I can hear it. Let your fear take you over, so you may say goodbye to it forever.” The voice was a seductive whisper.

  She whispered back. “Tell me why you hate the cold.”

  “Because without you, it’s all we can ever feel.”

  “Well, if you hate the cold,” she said, “then I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  Reggie whipped a fire extinguisher out of the duffel bag.

  “This is for Henry!”

  She pulled the pin and fired, and with a loud whoosh, a frigid white cloud of CO2 jetted into the Vour. The thing howled and thrashed. Reggie fired another blast, holding down the trigger until a haze of CO2 obscured everything. The swirling smoke slowed, and the monster’s moans faded until everything was silent and still. Reggie dropped the extinguisher.