Demon's Reach

by Kevin Singer

  Sleep left Vickie again. At best she claimed an hour or two, her mind overrun by melancholy and fear. During these fitful hours she drew sketch after sketch of Yani's beautiful face. Was it from trauma? Or was it a reminder? Or totems to keep the evil at bay? She wasn't sure. All she knew was that it was a compulsion.

  She sat uneasy before the easel. The red she used for Yani's lips wasn't quite right, but it was the closest she could get. Randy lay sprawled out on the floor before her lost in a comic book. She glanced at him. He wiggled his foot as he read. When he was five he ran into the street and was hit by a car. His body bounced off the front grill and his head smashed onto the pavement. His body and limbs were only scratched, but he suffered a massive concussion. He'd slipped into a coma for three days. Vickie flew from San Francisco and sat at his bedside. The day he'd opened his eyes was her happiest. A voice from within her bones whispered that she'd never have such a happy day again. She went back to Yani's difficult lips.

  The phone rang. It was Eula. "Come over. I've learned some things that might help."

  Vickie grabbed Randy and led him outside. He mounted his bike and slow pedaled beside her as they crossed the ground to Eula's house.

  "The grown-ups got important matters to discuss." Eula's face was worry-lined and grim. "Go, boys. Ride."

  "What is it? More spells?" Vickie asked.

  "Not right now. Soon." The front door was open. A breeze rustled Eula's gray tracksuit. She shut the door.

  "I have to know how to deal with this thing."

  "Come into the kitchen. I think better when I'm working."

  Vickie sat at the table, folding and unfolding her hands while Eula hacked away at a slab of beef. "I've talked to people, old people, wise people. I've talked to the medicine woman, anyone who might have an answer." The right sleeve of her tracksuit slid past her wrist and came close to touching the raw meat blood.

  "What did they tell you? Did you get an answer?"

  "Perhaps." Eula smacked the butcher knife against the cutting board. "But this thing you've seen, I may know what it is. And if I'm right, it may be much more dangerous than you could ever imagine."

  Maybe it was the fact that Eula would not look her in the eye. Maybe it was the sullen tone of her voice. Whatever it was, Vickie knew suddenly there was no way to stop this creature. "Oh, God."

  Eula sliced at the meat. "Calm yourself. Just listen to me first. You have to know what it is you're facing."

  Vickie covered her face with her hands and breathed in deep. "Okay."

  "Let me tell you a story about creation.”

  “For God's sake. Is now really the best time?”

  “Yes. Now hush up and listen. Before all the things we know, there was the first world, where first woman, first man and the great coyote lived. They traveled from the first world into the second world. When they got there, they found all the other animals – the hawks and the gophers and snakes and lizards. Then they traveled on to the third world. This world was full of water and the sacred mountains. They kept on with their traveling and finally they reached the fourth world. That's the one that we live in today.” She raised her knife in the air and swooped it around. “This beautiful mess of a place all around us. Lord knows why they decided to stop here.”

  "I don't see what this has to do with me."

  Eula hacked at the meat. The thunk echoed in the room. "In this first world, the one they left, there were these other things. Spirits, I suppose is the best word for them. We call them mist people. Most of these mist people migrated through the different worlds and they became the creatures that are all around us. But some of the mist people stayed behind, and they were trapped back there. They watched and they grew envious. They still watch, to this day, and they want nothing more than to become flesh. But these spirits, they're nothing but hate, hate and evil. Every so often one escapes into this world and when it does, it carries with it pain and death."

  Vickie tried to bend her mind around the legend. "Mist people?"

  "There's something like it in Christianity. Think of hell. It's chock full of demons, and sometimes one escapes. When it does, it possess the living, or shows up as someone already dead, and it causes nothing but mayhem."

  There was a time when Vickie would have thought of this as nothing more than superstition. That time had passed. "So you're telling me this Yani is a demon."

  Eula bent over and grabbed a pot from the cabinet. "Maybe. I can't be sure. All I know is what those far wiser than me have told me."

  "Okay, let's say this is true. That means that this has happened before."

  Eula set the pot in the sink. She rolled up her sleeves and filled it with water. "Yes. I know people who've seen it."

  “Claim to.”

  The water stopped. Eula turned and glared. “People I trust.”

  Hope returned to Vickie, clear and bright and fresh. "So there's a way to fight this."

  While Eula carried the pot to the stove, her right sleeve unrolled itself. "There may be. But they told me the way is very, very difficult. And it doesn't always work."

  "I don't care. As long as there's a way."

  Eula twisted the burner. Blue flames billowed beneath the steel pot. Eula rested her right hand on the edge of the stove and faced Vickie, contemplating her next words. Vickie gazed toward where Eula stood. Then, behind her, Yani appeared. The girl was only half visible. She breathed in deep, then exhaled toward the burner. The fire flickered. A filament caught the edge of Eula's unrolled sleeve. It smoldered, then it flashed and spread up the arm of her tracksuit, then down her legs, becoming a blue-orange blanket that swallowed her.

  Vickie scrambled from the table. She searched for a fire extinguisher but she couldn't find one.

  "Help me! Help me!" Eula screamed. The fire flashed and crackled around her body. The air reeked of burning hair and skin and chemicals. Vickie grabbed the pot from the stove and flung water toward Eula. Sizzles of steam rose from her blackening body but the fire raged on.

  Eula collapsed. The screams ended. The fire was gone, and her charred body lay on the floor.

  EMTs, firefighters, police all cycled through, collecting, cataloging, reporting, observing. Eula's grandson Shark had nowhere to go. The boy lumbered around Vickie's cabin for two days until a middle-aged man in a pinstripe suit – no tie – knocked at her door. His skin was copper and his hair a silver flat-top. Vickie was terrified this grim, broad man was one of Yani's kind until he shook her hand. Smooth, human. From the tribal council, he told her. Since Shark had no next of kin, they would place him with a local family, keep him with his people.

  "Oh, yes, that's for the best," Vickie said. She expected him to agree, maybe explain the importance of continuing traditions, but he didn't.

  "Is he ready?"

  The man kept his sunglasses on. Vickie found it maddening. "Shark, honey, go pack. Randy, help him please."

  Already Vickie didn't like this man, treating her as an outsider not even worthy of an explanation. Still, she needed something from him. She pulled him out to the front porch. "How well did you know Eula Sparrow?"

  "She was a good woman."

  Vickie hated the pat answer. It's what everyone said about the dead when they had nothing better to say. "She was helping me." Vickie waited for a question, maybe a "how" or "why," but he said nothing. "I have a...spiritual problem. Eula told me of others who know of...similar problems."

  "I don't know any of what you're talking about."

  "Is there a shaman, or a medicine man or woman I could talk to?"

  "I'm afraid I can't help you with any of that."

  "But Eula said–"

  "Eula was a character," he said with a laugh that sounded too close to a sneer.

  She pulled him close by his sleeve. He smelled of cologne. "You don't understand. I need help."

  "Ma'am, my apologies, but I have to get going." He stared at where Vickie clutched his suit. She let go. It felt as if the world was falling out from be
neath her. Eula was not crazy. Someone had to know. There had to be a way to escape Yani.

  Shark was stone-faced as he was led away. They never saw him again.

  6.