Hellraiser- The Toll

by Mark Alan Miller

  Was he mocking her? Did he know the importance of those words? They were the last that Frank Cotton ever spoke to her. It was as if The Cold Man had always been watching. Remembering. Waiting for the perfect time to use them against her.

  “And if He weeps for your pain, why not heal it?” The Cold Man said. “If He wishes you were not so weak and easily tempted, why not give you strength? If He hears your cries, why is He silent?”

  The Cold Man laid his palm upon her spine, close to her neck. She felt a barbed blossom of ice spread across her back. Her teeth began to chatter. Her heart thumped against her rib cage as though it were trying to escape her body, which was still in shock from The Cold Man’s touch. Kirsty wished for distance from this place, for safety from this demon, for the possibility of feeling any recollection other than terror. Kirsty’s mind retreated. Time became a lie, and sound an elegy. But the smell…oh God the smell. It called Kirsty back from her depths. It breached her icy fugue, waking her mind once more.

  “Agree,” he said. “And you will witness the conquering of Heaven and Hell.”

  Kirsty had tears welling in her eyes. “I…don’t think—”

  “I didn’t bring you here to think!”

  He came at Kirsty suddenly, and delivered a vicious blow that threw her down in the dirt. The dust that she tried to hawk up had the foul taste of old shit. She spat, but the stink or the taste, or both, could not be expelled.

  “This is not what I desire,” The Cold Man said. “You were exquisite. You were a force. You were worthy.” He looked away from her, glancing up at the hordes. “You should die if you cannot be who you were.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kirsty lied. As she spoke, she spit out more of the foul-tasting dirt.

  “Now is not the time for apologies. If you wait any longer, it will all be over. An opportunity that comes along once in a millennia will have come and gone. There is nothing here of the witness I desire.”

  The Cold Man continued to stare into the distance as he spoke. Kirsty, on the ground, saw the gleam of the claw-headed hammer in the corner of her eye. In her fear, she had forgotten she’d brought her weapon with her. It lay now in the dirt, mere inches from her grasp.

  “Have you made your choice?” he said.

  “I…,” she said, looking back at him. She saw this his eyes remained focused on the worshipers as they bowed down to their great hole. The Cold Man’s message was clear. Her cowardice was beneath him, in all regards, and he would only grace her with his visage when she had made her decision. In that moment, her hand darted into the dirt, and she drew the hammer close to the small of her back.

  “There is no time left now,” he said. “We have played out all the puzzles.”

  “This is a puzzle to you,” she said, summoning the courage to utter the next word: “Pinhead?”

  At this, The Cold Man’s steely gaze moved finally from the throng to Kirsty, the flecks of silver in his bleak, blank eyes rising with his anger. Behind her back, Kirsty squeezed the handle of the hammer, her knuckles white with rage.

  “You dare use that word,” he said.

  There was a tremor in his voice that belied his stoicism. Had she hurt his feelings? She couldn’t allow herself to believe it was possible. Just another of the Devil’s tricks. If for a moment she permitted any idea claiming otherwise—if for a second she thought she had the upper hand—the battle, she knew, would be lost.

  Then he was leaning down in front of her. She willed herself to remain in place as he brought his pallid flesh close enough to suck the warmth from her, his carrion breath stinking worse than the shit-stained soil.

  “With that remark, you have chosen death,” he told her.

  She looked at the creature that kneeled in front of her. He was regarding her with abject hatred and she saw, for the first time, that she had been wrong; the demon was not exactly as she’d remembered him.Though ageless, he had grown older, and wearier. Kirsty saw despair and fatigue in his eyes. Where once a genius had shone, there was now only desolation. In a different life, she might have felt pity for this odious beast, but this was not that life, nor would it ever be.

  “If you have nothing left to say, then make peace with your chosen fiction.”

  “I want to say something,” Kirsty said, near breathless.

  “Say it.”

  “I found your tell.”

  At that, Kirsty loosed a cry of hatred, and with her concealed hand she brought the hammer out of hiding and swung it, claw first, at the demon’s head. It connected with his cheek, the sound of metal grinding against bone. The demon staggered backward and a nail caught in the hammer’s claw, and wrenched sideways. The Cold Man uttered a guttural cry of anguish as a beam of harsh blue light burst forth from the wound in his face.

  X

  KIRSTY WAS ON HER feet in an instant and launched herself toward the doorway that led back to the island.

  The Cold Man screamed in fury, and before Kirsty could reach the doorway, he was on her, flinging her back into the soiled mire of the Wastes. He was in pursuit, his objective plain: to end her existence.

  He struck at her, his blows a fury, opening wounds on her face and neck. For a split second, Kirsty saw a vision of Frank Cotton wearing his brother’s flesh, standing above her in the attic on Lodovico Street, possessed of a similar rage and similar intent, a furious tattoo of lashings gouging her flesh. The weight of the memories begged her to lose consciousness. It would be so easy to let go. She would be free. She felt her life slipping away and with it, her fear. She felt something else in her haze, but couldn’t find the words to describe the sensation. It was a heaviness, not of spirit, but one that remained in the physical world. It weighted her hand down.

  She focused her attention on the heaviness. It felt important to her, as though it were trying to tell her something, as though it held some significance. It brought her back to the house on Lodovico Street, and the woman who ruined everything.

  Julia.

  She had murdered all those innocent men.

  With her hammer.

  Like the one Kirsty still gripped in her hand.

  It was the weapon that had launched this assault.

  Kirsty’s consciousness stirred in her, surprised to find that her body still gripped the hammer.

  Without thinking, Kirsty swung the hammer. It connected a moment later, driving more metal into bone. But as Kirsty pulled the hammer back, intent to strike The Cold Man once more, the hammer’s claw took with it a nail embedded in the demon’s nose. He let out a curse as another, brighter shaft of corrupted light oozed from the fresh wounds in his face. He instantly released his grip on her and stepped back as he attempted to block the light that now poured from his wounds.

  Kirsty could breathe again.

  She opened her eyes, regaining her bearings. There she saw The Cold Man, staring at her. His fury was subsiding, giving way to something else. Though she could not tell what it was.

  He made no advance towards her. Moving only on instinct now, she crawled a few paces back, lest he decide to make another appeal. She stood then, and reeled for a moment, afraid that her legs would give out on her. Her mind suddenly took her back to grade school. To that classroom where the wretched Miss Pryor had struck Kirsty when she’d caught her teacher in a lie. She had never finished the assignment. Kirsty’s trip to the nurse’s office saw to that. But all these years later, Kirsty finally knew what she would ask for Mankind.

  Before The Cold Man had ever entered her life, Kirsty had already learned to stop asking things of God. Miss Pryor was far from a great teacher, but that didn’t mean Kirsty hadn’t learned any lessons from the woman. And now, in this place, when Kirsty felt the furthest from God that she’d ever felt in her life, she knew what she wanted of Him—and she wanted it for her and for the good of all Mankind: to be rid of the blight that was The Cold Man. Perhaps he had once served some purpose, but that purpose had long since played out and what was left was an angry husk of rage and sorrows.


  I know better than to ask you for anything, Kirsty thought, directing her appeal heavenward. But I’m willing to make an exception. Even if I don’t survive this, please don’t let this sack of shit keep doing this to people.

  Then, as if in answer, she felt a kind of ecstasy begin to course through her. She felt herself come alive. She wanted to live. She wanted—finally—to live. The feeling began in the fingertips of the hand which gripped the hammer—a newfound vitality threading itself up her arm, under her skin, into bone. She understood her enemy in that moment; realized the pleasure in his pain. Though he was an agent of the Hell, his Hell was of his own design. And in that moment, she knew one thing: as certainly as she’d seen the deeper soul—or what was left of the soul—in her adversary, he too witnessed a depth in her previously unseen. She didn’t wait for him to confirm what she already knew. Instead, she began to move toward the doorway.

  “You won’t follow me, you son of a bitch,” she told him with her remembered courage.

  “There she is,” The Cold Man replied, still unmoving, but slowly smiling. “And taking a piece of me with her. This is, to some, a romance.”

  “Don’t make this something it isn’t. We both lost something in this fight. I see you now. You had me fooled that your cowardice is actually righteous anger. But you’re just a bully, afraid of being seen. That’s all you’ve ever been.”

  As she spoke, Kirsty edged closer to the door. All the while The Cold Man stared at her with a curious mix of obvious contempt, but what also seemed to be admiration.

  “You are welcome to your trophy,” he said. “In the world that is to come, it will be priceless.”

  “Why don’t we just wait and see how everything shakes out. A lot of apocalypses have been predicted. Last I counted, none of them have ever happened.”

  “Then you haven’t been paying attention.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open,” she said.

  And then she was out of the door at a run—out of the Devil’s world and back on his island. But before the world at her back was gone forever, she heard The Cold Man’s voice calling to her one last time.

  “Do keep them open, Kirsty. I will come for you.”

  XI

  I SURVIVED, KIRSTY THOUGHT. How did I survive again, where so many others have failed?

  It was a question that had plagued her most of her adult life. She didn’t want to believe that something bonded her to the darkness. But the darkness that continued to follow her, like an umbilicus never properly severed, seemed an inextricable part of her, albeit one that should not remain. But remain it would. Kirsty understood that more with each passing day. And now, as if serving to remind her, the doorway through which she had entered the Wastes was beginning to refashion itself before her very eyes.

  She looked down the tunnel, toward the stairs that would lead her out of this hellish prison, but her feet refused to move. Her gaze returned to the doorway, which continued its transformation, the mortar and mechanics disappearing into the concrete halls of the prison’s basement completely. The doorway and its parts didn’t fade from sight, like some spectral figure—they simply became one with the building, like an iron door welded shut, forever sealed, no longer functional. She was happy about the transformation. Though she now carried with her more memories of the infernal and what it wrought upon the human psyche, the sealed doorway had the benefit of safety, or at least the facade thereof.

  When the door at last sealed itself shut, Kirsty left the passageway in the basement of the prison, passed through the halls of the Big House and found her way outside once more with little memory of how she had arrived there. The first rays of morning sunlight dappled the landscape as it broke through the trees, causing the jungle at the threshold of the prison to appear brighter than she’d expected, as though she’d forgotten she might ever see the sun again. She found her footprints and followed them into the brush, never once relinquishing her grasp on the hammer, until she was in sight of the hotel. The old building was also a surprise to her eyes, as though she were viewing it with a new pair of eyes. In many ways, she was. She had followed hew own footsteps, which were essentially those of a dead woman—evidence of a former self, like a song sung by a long-dead crooner—and they led her to a hotel she had once thought charming. But where she had seen style and character, she now only saw the warped, worn walls of a building that seemed to be sinking into the earth, as though Hell itself was trying to reclaim it. This place had nothing left to show her. She turned her eyes from it and went to the dock where she flagged down the ship which she’d paid to wait for her.

  “If you don’t see me on that dock in thirty-six hours,” Kirsty had said, “you’re free to go back home. And if I don’t return, neither should you. Kiss your loved ones and pray for a tomorrow.”

  She had doubted the captain’s promise to wait for her. Had she any tears left, she would have cried at the sight of the vessel. Instead, she stood on the shore, hammer in hand, sun searing her wan flesh, watching as the black boat was deployed and came for her. She never took her eyes off the boat.

  By the time it reached her, the sun was at her back and it was growing dark again. Silently, she climbed into the boat without any problems. Then the two oarsmen, careful not to question the woman with the blood-soaked hammer, pushed the boat back into the ocean and rowed toward the reddening horizon until they reached the ship. From there, Kirsty would take a train and two planes, and she’d be back on her own continent within another twenty-four hours.

  That was the extent to which she was willing to plan ahead. The tasks of finding a new home, again, and starting life over, again, were simply too daunting a proposition. And though she knew they were the twin realities with which she was presently faced, she was content to focus on the island that grew smaller and smaller at her back with each of the oarsmen’s thrusts.

  I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.

  —Louisa May Alcott

  Epilogue

  I

  KIRSTY SETTLED INTO HER new life with an ease that troubled her. The first call she made when she established a secure phone line was to the supposed Dr. Lansing. Kirsty was not surprised when the number led to a deli in New York. Kirsty was even less surprised when the man who answered the phone—he called himself Hans—stated that he’d never heard of a Dr. Lansing and as far as he knew, the number she called had always belonged to his deli. She thanked him for his time. He hung up the phone, wishing her a good day with a single word: “Gesundheit.”

  Certain that any road to reach the man calling himself Dr. Lansing, if man he was, would lead to nowhere, Kirsty changed course and followed currents of information that were in the air. Once she knew what to look for, the information flowed all to quickly. Something big had been happening in the world, and then beyond. There were stories of mass slaughter of the world’s most powerful magicians, some deaths indescribably violent, and in one case where the man had been found with his stomach pulled out through his asshole, seemingly personal or at least done with a notable appetite for suffering.

  But the accounts didn’t stop there. In New York people had reported seeing doorways to other worlds, and faceless demons with raging hard-ons walking empty streets in the dead of night. In Arizona, a world-famous televangelist was left for dead in the scorching heat in the very same city that a family sought vengeance on the man who murdered their children and several others.

  And then there were the rumors that the Wastes and everything associated with it had vanished overnight without a trace. Kirsty heard rumors that demons were summoned by devices and that those demons failed to appear, when the devices opened portals into sheer nothingness, and that Lucifer himself had abandoned his post and was walking the planet, waiting. For what, she knew not, but the implications robbed her of what little sleep she would normally find.

  In her searches, however, two words remained constant: Harry D’Amour, the name of a detective living in New York
. This she knew to be the other witness The Cold Man had mentioned. Kirsty resisted the urge to call this detective. She had far more pressing matters to address, and she couldn’t risk exposing herself again before she had done what needed doing.

  II

  MONTHS AFTER HER ENCOUNTER with The Cold Man on the aptly named Devil’s Island, Kirsty lay awake in bed, the sun long since set, the information she’d gleaned swimming through her mind while the mockingbirds sounded their warnings, mirroring the alarms going off inside her head.

  There was so much work to be done; her great work. Every night since last she saw The Cold Man, she expected him to appear. She imagined all the ways he would drag her back to the Wastes and throw her into the well, to be united with the God that never existed. But The Cold Man never came. And instead Kirsty replayed the events that transpired on the Devil’s Island over and again.

  Something The Cold Man had said to her that day had stayed with her.

  There is another, he had said. He had revealed that he had spread his seed and that it—she—was in the world. Kirsty had followed the trails in the sand and entertained the rumors as far as they would take her, but every current of information she had gleaned on her own had reached a dead end. Every current, save for the one The Cold Man had supplied for her himself.

  Knowing what to look for, it wasn’t long before she had in her hands a police report detailing the brutal murders of four university professors that took place shortly before her visit from The Cold Man. Kirsty recognized the names as belonging to four of the world’s most powerful magicians. It was too coincidental to be ignored.

  These unlucky four had been butchered, strung up, flayed, and mangled beyond all recognition. There was language in the report suggesting a theory that at least three other people (one an infant, based on the bloody hand and knee-prints indicating a crawling babe) had been present during the time of the massacre, but that no trace of their whereabouts had ever been found. It was as though they had vanished into thin air.