Earthbound and Down ebook 20170826

by Shaun Meeks

  I say goodbye again to Rouge and get in the detective’s car. It smells so clean in here. From the outside I was expecting a mess and the stale odour of cigarettes, onions and patchouli. The outside of it is covered in a layer of dust and there’s thin lines of rust veining along the sides near the bottom. It comes off as someone who uses it a lot, but doesn’t take the time to give it the care it needs and deserves. So, to me the expectation was a matching inside. Instead it smells like cleaner and air freshener and has the appearance of a car that’s vacuumed every day. The seats are spotless and there isn’t a speck of dust on the dash. The only thing in there that didn’t come with the car is a rosary, which hangs from his rear-view mirror. Very nice. I wish I could say the same for my dearly departed vehicle. That interior was a mad disarray of old coffee cups and receipts as well as some blankets and bags of things I don’t even remember buying. This is a great example of how different the two of us are. This should be even more fun than I thought.

  As we pull out of the hospital, there are a few moments of uncomfortable silence, and then it starts.

  Question time.

  “So, how did you and Big Red there meet?” he asks, and pulls into traffic, already knowing where he’s going since he has my address.

  “On the job. And her name’s Rouge, not Big Red.”

  “Oh, sorry. No offense. Not that Rouge Hills is her real name anyway. Do you even know it?”

  “Of course. She just prefers Rouge, so that’s what I call her,” I say, and think that I have a lot in common with her. Nobody calls me by my real name either.

  “It’s a good stripper name.” He all but laughs as he says it, though the words are more mean than humorous.

  “Look, if you want my help like you say, maybe you can kill the disrespect,” I say, and am a little more than irritated. I’m pissed off. I don’t appreciate his tone or the asshole-ish way he’s coming off talking about her. He doesn’t even know her, or me for that matter. “First, she’s not a stripper, she’s a burlesque dancer. There is a difference. How would you like it if I say you’re pretty much a meter maid or an over-paid security guard?”

  He nods and from the stern face I see something I’m guessing is his form of regret. “Sorry about that. I’m normally not this much of a prick. Sometimes, cases like this just eat away at me and get under my skin. Can we pretend like I never said any of that just now?”

  “Sure,” I say, but I’m not so convinced that he’s not an asshole on a good day.

  Then again, I guess it’s a good enough reason for the crap coming out of his mouth. Stress can do crazy things to people. I haven’t even had a chance to look at the file, but the fact that Father Ted brought him to me means something. I go back quite a ways with the priest, close to ten years in all. He called me out of the blue, long before I’d set up my website and said he’d gotten my name from Godfrey and that alone had me intrigued. The old seller of strange goods had never once sent me a client, so why this one, and why a Catholic priest of all things. Before then, I had rarely had any dealings with religious groups, and never once a Catholic.

  Father Ted claimed there was some sort of porthole in the basement of the church he’d been asked to take over. It was just opening, but wasn’t actually new. It was to him, but far from new in the grand scheme of things. The grey stone building had been constructed back in the late 1890’s in the High Park area of the city. Set off a side street, the church had been shut down during the 1940’s when three nuns were found in the basement carved up and naked. It was a gruesome story I read after meeting Ted and it haunted me a little. One of the local papers posted pictures of one of the dead women, laying in a bare, dirt-floored room in the lower level of the gothic structure. It was no wonder the place had been closed down. Who would want to be in the same place as those who’d been murdered in such a terrible way?

  Yet, like the pages of the newspaper, memories fade with time and one day in the early 2000’s, the higher ups decided it would be a good idea to re-open the place. A crew went in and cleaned it up, but as I said before, tragedy is a great way to weaken the thin wall between this realm and other worlds. Soon after the doors were open, Father Ted and a few others began to see things. At first he thought it was nothing more than a trick of the shadows, being under-slept and in a new place. It didn’t take much longer for him to see differently.

  What happened in the church years before, an unknown assailant assaulting and brutalizing such innocent souls, not only weakened the veil, but attracted the worst of the worst. What came through was not the spirit or soul of some creature or entity looking for a better life, one trying to escape pain and torture. This type of horror left a stain, a scent that attracted the lowest of the low in the demon world. It called to and opened up for a beast known as a Wredth. In demonology—which gets some things right, but not much—these would be known as low-level demons; bottom feeders. Nothing in the ether world cares for or respects a Wredth, and neither do I. These things love blood, violence and all things rotten. The one I found in there was small and twisted and had made her body up of old tree roots she called forth from the earth floor of the cellar.

  She was hungry and had been going up to the church to try and feed off the parishioners. She’d hide under pews and scrape their ankles and then lick the blood from her gnarled, makeshift fingers. As soon as I heard the story I knew what I was up against and this time, unlike so many others, I was right. I’d brought the right tools for the job and went at her without a thought.

  I went into her place, into the cellar of the church and told Father Ted to wait upstairs. I found her hiding, partially buried in the dark, terrible smelling earth where the nuns had once been laid out and offended. I used a Cufter to pry her from the ground. This is a tool made for her kind. To someone who might find one, it looks a little like an old metal fan blade with three triangular grooves taken from it. She screamed as the curse metal touched her and I yanked her out. Soil rained down from her body as she struggled and cursed in a language most humans never have to hear. I pulled out another weapon, a bottle of yellow water that is believed to have come from the pools between life and death. As soon as she saw it, she calmed down.

  “Please, sire, I do no more wrongs,” she pleaded, and held her hands together as if praying to me. “I am Middia, and I only want to stay in this rich earth and smell the spilled blood of the Jesus witches.”

  “Shut your mouth, demon!” I barked, and uncorked the bottle of vile smelling liquid. It looks like it’ll come close to being a urine type smell, but it’s closer to that of very unwashed feet and spices. Either way, it smelled horrid.

  “No. Don’t send me back to the ether place. I will stay and help you hunter. I can be thy side kicker.”

  “Right,” I said, and stepped forward. “It’s a nice offer, but I work alone.”

  “I can make dreams come true for you, give you lusty things. I just need to call a new form. A soft, wet one for you to find satisfaction. Let me stay and a play thing you will have for life.”

  I cringed right then and there. I’m pretty sure I nearly puked at the idea of it. The only thing that helped was when I tipped the bottle over her and poured it on the nasty little demon. The thick liquid spread over her, false flesh bubbled and popped and filled the air in the basement with the acrid odour of burnt hair and garbage. Her screams echoed in the small room. I let her drop from my hands and thrash about on the ground. She was coming as close to dying as she can in this world. It’s something like death, but it does no more than send her back to the ether world.

  “My Lord, Dillon, is this what you do?”

  The sound of the priest’s voice nearly scared me to death and I spun around. He stood there on the shadowy stairs, his cross clenched so tight in his hand his knuckles glowed white. His eyes were not on me though. They were on the Wredth who was dying on the floor in front of me. He looked horrified, confused and disg
usted.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I told him plainly, and looked down to make sure it was still going the way it should. No problems there.

  “And what of that? Should it be here?” he asked, and stepped off the stairs and made as if he wanted to come over. I held I hand up to him to warn him to stay back for the moment.

  “No. That’s why I’m sending the damned thing home.”

  I turn back towards the dissolving demon and see there is no way for her to come back to life anymore. The roots that once held together to form what resembled her body had begun to fall apart and at that point she was no longer in this realm. Mud and loose earth oozed and fell from the form and pooled under the collapsed body. It was one of my favourite types of job; fast and easy. Any case where I walk away without a scratch is a good one in my book. I’m not always so lucky.

  Behind me, I heard footsteps and knew it was the priest.

  “Don’t you have any pity for them?” the priest asked from behind me as I kicked apart the past of her remains.

  “I can’t have pity for them, Father. I have a job to do. These things that find their way through are breaking the law and I’m here to send them home. If I let them stay here, not only am I breaking the rules, but I’m risking so much to how this planet is. It’s a simple as that. There’s no time or place for sympathy or apathy in my line of work.”

  “There’s always time, son. Everything in God’s world deserves understanding and pity,” he said, and his voice was low and solemn.

  I couldn’t understand how he could feel bad for something like the fallen thing before me. It was the equivalent of the devil, a demon who represented evil spoken about in his own Bible. Catholics can be a strange group at times.

  “You’d think so,” I tried to explain, “but these aren’t creatures of the God you pray to. There’s nothing natural about them. Some seem harmless and pathetic, sure, but they’re not. Think of what they could do to the faith of your flock alone.”

  He considered the words and then shook his head as though he couldn’t see my point. “We all know evil exists.”

  “That’s just it, Father, not all these things I send off are evil. Some are children, others are parents. Some of these things were tortured and abused back where they come from. They come here to escape, to get away from it. Others come here because they imagine it’s a better place than their own home. Many of them just want to come here because they’re told they can’t. Sure, there are evil ones like the demon I just got rid of for you, but that’s not all that’s out there.” I walked across the compact dirt and stood in front of him, wanting to get this across to him even better than I could. “If people here find out about these other worlds and planes, most will question everything they know. How can one God exist when there are millions of different worlds and dimensions out there? How unimportant would they all feel if they came to realize they’re not alone in this universe, but they’re no more than a speck in the grand scheme of things? How does it make you feel knowing that?”

  He was silent and even though I hated telling him the way I did, he’d already seen too much. Most people can’t handle the truth of it all, but when someone sees a demon dispatched or nearly gets gutted by a monster made up of bog moss, you might as well take the kid gloves off and give it to them straight.

  “So, you’re saying my belief is nothing, that I’m wrong in all of it? Is every follower of God, Buddha, Allah wrong in what they choose to believe?” he said, and I hated that he jumped to that right off the bat.

  “I’m not saying anything like that, Father. We all need faith in something. Never let that go. Faith is a good thing. So many people sleep better with the idea that something bigger than them is keeping watch, and they’re not wrong. There’s something out there. Just believe that and you’ll be fine. Even if it’s different from what you picture in your mind, doesn’t make it any less real. If a child is born and smells a rose, maybe they get an image of what it looks like and that’s enough to make them happy. Do they need to be told they’re wrong, that a rose looks different than they think it does? Does it make it any less real? Not at all.”

  After that, we went up to the rectory and had some tea and talked for hours. We spoke about the universe, spirituality and belief. I told him bits about myself, but nothing of how inhuman I was. That might’ve been too much for him to absorb. We really hit it off and I decided to stop by twice a month just to have tea and chat with him. He never spoke to anyone else about me, promised not to say what he’d seen in the basement. There were other cases at the church after that. He’d call me right away, but he never came around when I was at work. I’m sure seeing one demon was more than enough for him.

  In all that time, there’d never been a time when he passed on anything outside that church that might interest me. I know I’ve done jobs for some of the people that go to his church, but none of them were sent to me by Father Ted. I don’t know if people never spoke to him about it, or if he just didn’t want to share my particular talents with his flock. Either way, for him to have told Detective Garcia about me meant this was something he felt was important, or at least that’s how I take it. Breaking secrets isn’t something Father Ted is known for.

  Instead of flipping through the file right then and there, I decide to ask the detective himself about the case. I could get some details from the pages, but I want more than that. I want to hear how it affects this man, how deep the crime runs. Just from the sound of his voice I will be able to pick up more of the severity than I ever will from the folder sitting on my lap. There are details in this no doubt, but I want more than that. I want to get a sense of how the case is taking a toll on the detective.

  “Can you give me a brief rundown of what I’m going to be looking at when I read this?” I ask.

  “There’s nothing really brief about this, but sure. When I spoke at the hospital, I held a lot of it back. I didn’t want to say too much in front of the Father, or your lady friend.”

  “I’m sure I’ll appreciate that.”

  “Oh, you will. Trust me,” he said, and I could see that stern look returning to his face. “The first case was about a month ago. A young boy, five years old, was stolen from his own bed. His window was wide open. The perp pried it open with some sort of tool, and then climb through and snatched the kid. There was some weird stuff on the ground, almost like slime, and outside the window. Lab says most of it is human waste, mixed with some other fluids, but there’s nothing really definitive there. On the side of the house was this symbol or pattern. It looked like it was written in grease. There was also blood on the floor in the kid’s room, his blood type. We found nothing really of use, aside from the blood. The symbol is meaningless, the grease was from the boiled fat of a cow.

  “The second abduction happened three days later. This one was a girl, nine years old, taken from a school playground right next door to where she lived. Parents let her go play in the park and when they went to get her thirty minutes later, she was gone. More of the slimy stuff was found on the scene and the symbol in grease was under one of the slide. No blood found, but her shoe was found half a mile away with blood on it. No witnesses to any of it.

  “The next two were more of the same. One was taken from his mom’s car as she ran into the grocery store. She left her six-year-old daughter in the car with their Labrador. When she got back, the dog was dead and the girl was gone. Side of the car was smeared with the slime and the symbol was on the outside of the passenger’s side door. After that, same day, another boy was taken, this time from his babysitter’s house. Just like the others. All this in less than a month. No hair, no fibres, just this nonsense that makes me feel like we’re chasing our tails. I don’t think I’ve ever been so frustrated in my life.”

  Now I get the stern look on his face all the time. He’s been soured by the case. You can hear it with every word, feel the anger and hopelessness pourin
g out of him. I know it can’t be easy, but I have to hope there’ll be something I can do to help him. So far it all sounds strange. It has the tinge of something ritualistic, but nothing I’d ever heard of. Some of the things that really stump me are the symbols and the slime. I have no idea what either of these pieces of evidence mean.

  “Well, I will get a hold of people I know right away and hopefully I’ll be able to have something for you in a day or two.”

  “I won’t hold my breath,” he says solemnly, and pulls over to the curb. I saw I was home. “Want me to walk you upstairs, in case there’s another junkie waiting to jump you in the stairs again?”

  “I think I’ll manage.”

  “I’m sure you will,” he says, and for a moment I feel as though he isn’t buying the story I’d given him. It wasn’t a lie really, so I’m a little offended.

  “Hey, I’d invite you up, but I never put out on the first date,” I joke, as I do my best to make light of his distrust.

  “Sure, joker. How about you just get out of my car and call me when you get something I can use. If you can at all. I won’t hold my breath.”

  I step out of the car and nearly slam the door, but hold back. I’m not going to let him get to me. Maybe I can help him with the case and he’ll be less of a dick. That’d be nice.

  “My number is in the file. Call when you get anything,” he says, and before I can say anything, he’s driving off. I’m not going to hold back the hope that he’ll be less of a dick. Hard case or no, he needs to learn some manners.

  I take more Advil and have one of my special baths. What I put in the water are things of this world and more that are not. After a two-hour soak and meditation in the healing waters, I feel a little better, but my head is still a bit of a wreck. It’s fine if I’m sitting still and keep my eyes and head facing forward, but if I bend over or turn too quickly the throbbing returns along with a little bit of vertigo. Not good. Usually the bath heals almost anything. I guess this is the first concussion I’ve ever had. It sucks.