by Erik Lynd
Silas staggered out into the hallway. The effects of the leaf were coursing through him and he thought he might have used too much.
“Nahhh,” he said and chuckled.
He pulled out his phone and speed dialed Mort.
“Yeah?” Mort asked when he picked up.
“See if you can pull a list on any submitted plans or notice of public use that involve this block or this building,” Silas said.
“You sound funny, you Okay?” Mort asked.
“Yep, just fine, never been better.”
“Jesus Christ Silas! Are you high? You haven’t been out of my sight for more than ten minutes. Couldn’t you have waited until you got home?”
“Sorry doctor’s orders,” Silas said and hung up on Mort’s outraged squawk.
He focused on Willamet’s door. It wavered a few times, then stood still. He stood leaning against the stair railing letting the drug burn itself off. It was fading. He should wait awhile, let the larthean leaf work its way out of his system.
“Hah, it’s only a fairy. Don’t need more than a fly swatter or a rolled up newspaper,” he slurred.
He walked to the door and knocked, maybe a little too loudly. He waited a moment and heard a shuffling on the other side. A moment later the door opened and a large woman looked around the door. She had to be more than three hundred pounds, wearing a stained housedress and a dark red bandana held her hair back.
“Yes?” she asked, her voice rough and wavering as though unused for a long time.
“Plumber,” Silas said.
“But I don’t need a…”
Silas didn’t wait for her to finish. He pushed open the door, using more strength than he intended. That was a lot of meat to push aside. The woman uttered a little screech as she fell back into the room. Inside the apartment the layout was the same as the others except nothing was packed. Apparently, the lady was not bothered by the pests. The apartment, however, was a mess. Clutter littered the tables and furniture, cigarette butts and old beer cans lay on the floor. The smell of rot was stronger here.
“You can’t just barge in like that. What kind of plumber are you?” The woman said.
Silas looked at the woman. He could see a blue aura faintly around the woman. She had some strong magic on her. Unfortunately the hallucinations remained, her red bandana was shinny as though wet. Even as he watched it appeared to melt and drip onto her forehead.
This was a bad trip.
“I’m not really a plumber, I am more of an Orkin man,” Silas said. “Where is your bathroom?”
“Orkin man?” she said, confused.
Silas sighed, she wasn’t of much use, it was as if she wasn’t all there. He was beginning to think he was going to have to kick down every door in the place.
“Second door on the right,” she said pointing off down the hall.
Silas turned to the hallway and bright blue light swam before his eyes. Briefly the whole apartment lit up like a blue flame. This was definitely the source of the infestation.
“Put the seat down,” the woman called from behind him as he approached the bathroom door.
The smell of rot grew stronger the closer he got, he opened the bathroom door and looked in. Nothing. The bathroom was empty. Silas stepped inside and looked around. Everything looked normal and shimmered with a faint blue aura, so faint that it was almost undetectable. The drug was wearing off. With his foot he flicked up the toilet seat. Still nothing.
Was it hiding from him? Did it know who he was? No, how could it? He shook his head trying to shake off the last of the fog. Based on the condition of the last apartments he thought the fairy should be in a full rampage trying to drive out the last tenant. It should have seen him as just another victim.
He looked under the sink and in the medicine cabinet. It occurred to him that not only were there no fairies, but he had not discovered the source of the smell. He went back into the hall and saw the woman not more than ten feet away, eyes wide as she looked at him. He turned his back on her and approached the door nearest the bathroom.
Here the smell got stronger and was mixed with the smell of feces and urine. It made Silas think of approaching an animal’s den. He kicked open the door this time, in case there was some creature in there waiting for him. The door ripped partially from its hinges and slammed up against the wall with a loud crack.
It was a slaughter house inside. Three bodies dangled from a makeshift rack secured to the ceiling. All three were naked with long cuts running the length of their bodies. Below each were bowls full of blood gathered from the victims, two young men and an old woman. There was movement from the bed behind the hanging corpses.
A large older woman lay naked on the bed, arms tied to the bed posts. Martha Willamet, Silas guessed, grimacing. Although he couldn’t be sure since the woman had been tied to the bed for a long time, she was covered with filth and sores. Her eyes rolled in her head and Silas was sure she had not been fed nor had anything to drink in a while.
So the large woman, now right behind him, had not been Martha. He looked to the bowls again and thought of the red bandana on the woman’s head and how it shined almost like it was moist. He now realized that the red drips on her forehead had not been a hallucination, it had been fresh blood.
“Red Cap,” Silas muttered, now he was sure he would kill Mort if he survived this.
Silas turned. The creature was now inches away from him. So close Silas could smell its foul breath. It had dropped all pretense of the disguise. The creature’s face had melted away, revealing the stretched grin and elongated nose common to the Red Cap species of Fey. Sharp teeth, slick with saliva and rotten meat sprouted from that grin. It was large, stretching the woman frame to its limit like some gigantic blob of silly putty. The bloody red cap for which it was famous sat on its head, fresh blood soaked its dirt matted hair wiggling with maggots. It had fed well and had grown powerful.
“Hi,” Silas said.
Before he could move or react, the creature grabbed him by his jacket lapels. In one smooth, powerful move Silas was thrown across the room. He grabbed the wooden frame of the window as the rest of his body slammed through, shattering glass, parts of the window frame, and the bricks surrounding it. The rubble plunged to the street below, but Silas held the remaining part of the window dangling forty five feet above the sidewalk.
Yeah, it was powerful.
He heard screams from below and looked over his shoulder. Mortimer was standing up from the table across the street and looked as if he didn’t know what to do. Which he probably didn’t
“You said fairies,” Silas yelled at him. “Not Fey.”
“Is there a difference?” Mort yelled back.
“Is there a difference? You son of a bitch, when I get out of this I’m going to…”
Silas didn’t finish, a large clawed hand covered his face and another grabbed his shoulder, dragging him back into the apartment. He was thrown onto the coffee table shattering it. Pain exploded across his back and the rest of his body ached from his turning the window into a door. The body he currently possessed was large and powerful, but even it would have been shattered beyond repair if not for the demonic soul that infused its flesh.
For a moment Silas’ vision swam, he was still groggy from the drugs. The creature’s head came into view. It grinned and pounced.
Silas thought it might be time to show the red cap who the hell it was fucking with. He brought his legs up with inhuman speed and slammed them into the red cap’s chest sending it flying into the ceiling. It must have weighed five hundred pounds, but it hit the ceiling with enough power to split wood and send debris down.
The red cap fell next to Silas with a thud and a grunt as it rolled to its feet. By then Silas was also on his feet. They circled each other, the red cap now weary of what it was facing.
Silas reevaluated the situation. He dug into his ancient memories to a time when he had possessed a witch that had often interacted with fairies and Fey. T
hey were closely related, but the Fey were vastly more powerful and much more dangerous. This particular one started off as harmless as a fairy, but infinitely more evil. Red caps sought to murder humans and soak their caps in the blood of their victims. The more victims, the more powerful the red cap.
The red cap charged. Silas was caught off guard by its speed. He dodged to the side, but he wasn’t fast enough. It hooked Silas around the middle. With a heave the red cap threw him through the living room wall. Plaster shattered and wood studs splintered. He landed unceremoniously in the bathtub. The porcelain rang out with a dull thud as his head bounced off the lip of the tub.
The world spun. He knew he had to move. As his vision cleared he was jerked to his feet and thrown through the wall again, this time into the kitchen.
He fell against the sink and hung there hoping he appeared dead or at least unconscious. He had to surprise this thing, he had to buy himself some time to think this through.
He felt the thump as it pushed through the hole he had made in the wall, splintering wood and plaster. Shit, he thought, it was moving carefully. Maybe it wasn’t as stupid as he had thought. No chance to change the plan now, he had to lie still hoping it would get closer before striking.
Red caps are notoriously hard to kill. The best-known way was for their caps to dry out. If they don’t get a regular infusion of blood by soaking their caps in their victims, they weaken and fade into the mists of their world. That cap had been dripping with fresh blood and Silas was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to hold out long enough for the blood to dry.
He felt it behind him. Still he did not move. It sniffed Silas like a large dog. Under other circumstances he was sure they could have been friends.
It was now or never.
Silas spun, throwing his fist out in a back handed strike. He had once possessed a Japanese warlord in the early fourteenth century who had been quite accomplished at martial arts. His fist slammed into its chin.
Silas heard a snap as the red cap spun away. It stumbled into the living room as it tried to regain its balance. Silas sprang through the air and brought his right foot up stomping the creatures face as it tried to recover from the first blow. This move he didn’t learn from the Japanese warlord, the stomp was pure slam dancing 101 circa 1991.
Its jaw disengaged from it skull. Silas could see it swinging loosely as the red cap fell on all fours. With a battle cry worthy of the Hun tribal leader he possessed around 400 AD, Silas leaped onto the back of the red cap. The red cap reared its misshapen head up and bellowed.
It was like riding a bucking bronco, or because of the red caps massive girth, a bucking cow. A big, pissed off cow. To keep from falling off as the creature tried to stand Silas grabbed the cap. His fingers sunk into the sticky wet mess and he remembered there was another, trickier way to kill a deranged red cap.
He gripped the cap as hard as he could and yanked. It stayed stuck firmly to the red cap’s head. He pulled again putting even more of his demonic strength into it, this time he felt it give a little, like prying sticky gum off the sofa. The red cap felt it also, because it jerked up, rapping Silas’s head on the ceiling, denting the popcorn texture and splitting the drywall. Consciousness wavered, but Silas held on.
With a final heave Silas yanked and twisted the cap. It stretched briefly, with stringy flesh, like cheese on a deep dish pizza connecting it to the red caps head. The cap only appears to be a cap and it can be taken off to dip in blood whenever it so desires, but the rest of the time it is connected like any other organ.
The cap came away and the sudden release from the creature’s flesh caused Silas to fall off the back of the monster. He landed with a thud in the Lazy Boy.
The creature paused in its thrashing and reached its hands up to gently probe the top of its head.
Uh oh, now it is really pissed off, thought Silas.
The red cap raised its claws above its head and bellowed. It shook the walls and shattered the widows. It sounded like Godzilla stubbing his toe.
Silas shot out of the chair and lunged passed the screaming red cap, angling for the kitchen door. The red cap lashed out to catch Silas, but striking him across his already bruised and aching back instead. The force of the blow propelled him into the kitchen.
He fell prone on the linoleum floor, blood from the cap and his numerous cuts and scrapes streaked across the white surface as he slid.
The kitchen was small and the angry red cap would be on him in seconds. He rolled to his feet, ignoring the stabs of pain from almost every joint and muscle in his body and grasped the side of the sink. From the corner of his eye, Silas saw the red cap come into the kitchen preparing for a final, enraged charge.
The other way to kill a red cap when you can’t wait for its hat to dry, was to soak that cap in its own blood. It would be vulnerable for a moment. Obviously, this was very hard to do and probably the reason it was not so well known.
Silas stuffed the cap quickly into the drain. The red cap cried in surprise and ran to the sink as Silas stepped back holding his bruised ribs. It shoved its bloated hand down the drain ignoring Silas as it tried to retrieve its precious cap.
Red caps tend, like many Fey, to be anachronistic and not up to speed with modern technologies.
Like, for example, a garbage disposal.
Silas reached over and hit the switch on the wall next to the sink and the blades roared to life. The red cap threw its head back and screamed. Silas seized a cleaver from the knife rack on the counter top. He swung the cleaver at the red caps throat chopping the head from its body and cutting that ear piercing scream short.
Silas looked around the corner of the sandwich shop. People that had been sitting at an outside table were standing and looking at the gaping hole in the side of the apartment. Several passerbys had stopped and were looking. In the distance he could hear sirens. Somebody had called the police, so much for that famous New York ambivalence.
He could hear the bystanders talking. One had thought it was an explosion, perhaps a gas main igniting. Another thought it was a failed suicide attempt because he had seen somebody hanging from the edge of the window, but was dragged back in by an incredibly fat and ugly woman. Of course another thought it was a terrorist related incident, some bastard cooking up a dirty bomb. That made the bystanders nervous and they began moving away.
Silas knew that most of them will have forgotten the details of what had happened by dinner time. The few who had actually seen him dangling from the window wouldn’t be able to describe him accurately. They would even forget that he yelled. The details would fade to a large man hanging from the windowsill. The gas main exploding would most likely be the explanation that stuck in their heads.
That was the way it was when most mortals brushed against something from beyond the Pale. Most mortals were completely oblivious of the danger growing around them day by day. But then again, that just meant job security to Silas.
After decapitating the five hundred pound Fey, he had slipped down the back set of stairs. Although slipped might be the wrong word, perhaps stumbling, limping, half falling down the stairs would be better, he had made it to the ground floor as fast as he could. He found a back door to the alley behind the apartment and he had looped around to the sandwich shop. Moving was painful, but so would be hanging around for the cops to arrive. Every bone in his body ached and many cuts and bruises adorned his fierce face. He was definitely not his hell born fury self.
Mort sat calmly at the table, tapping away at his laptop. Silas slipped up to him and sat in the chair. He reached out and slammed the laptop shut. Mort pulled his fingers away just in time.
“It was not a fairy,” Silas said quietly.
“The report said it was thought to be a fairy. Maybe if you had read it you might have picked up some detail that would have warned you.”
For the second time that day he really thought he could kill Mort, maybe take his ears for a souvenir, his skull would make a snazzy candle holder.
“Why did you want me to check out the surrounding buildings?” Mort asked
Silas pulled himself from a fantasy about ripping off Mort’s arms and then beating him to death with them. If he just wasn’t so God damn tired.
“Did you find anything?” Silas asked.
“Yeah, it looks like the same development company bought up a few of these buildings. They’re trying to renovate the area, like this sandwich shop. The owner of this building was the last holdout.”
“The owner was no hold out. I think he wanted to sell as fast as he could. I think he knew somebody or knew enough himself to call up some fairies to drive off the tenants who had long term or even permanent leases.”
“He was buying the co-ops in the building over the last couple of years. But I thought you said it wasn’t a fairy?”
“Well I think Mrs. Willamet might have been a little in the know herself when it came to the supernatural. My guess is the fairies didn’t bother her so he had to call in the big guns and made a deal with the Fey. Which is only a little bit better than a deal with the devil.”
His eyes flickered over to Mort’s
“Or the Vatican,” he continued. “Somebody played a cruel trick on him though if they gave him a red cap.”
Mort let out a little gasp, “A red cap?”
“Yep, he has been the one killing mortals out in these parts, to feed. I’m sure the landlord didn’t know what he had unleashed.”
Mort had opened his laptop again and was typing away. Probably updating another report, Silas thought. He pulled out another cigar from the folds of his jacket.
“So the woman is dead,” Mort said, he didn’t mean it as a question.
“Oh no, she is still alive,” Silas said around the cigar. “She’s chained to the bed and severely dehydrated and malnourished, but alive. At least she was a few minutes ago.”
“The old lady is still alive and you didn’t help her?” Mort asked, his voice rising.
“Hell no, I was tired. Besides the police are coming. Mortals can take care of their own.”
