by Jim Butcher
Now she wore a seductive, diaphanous gown the color of new vitae. She held out a wrist, which she or someone else had bitten into until blood—likely blood she'd taken from him—flowed along her arm. He stared, mesmerized, at the seeping liquid as it slowly wove its way along her skin, hating the waste of it.
"Here, Master. Drink," she said. "Make me your bride."
Suddenly, the arm moved closer until the blood nearly
touched his lips. "No!" he cried weakly. "Let me die! I'm
just about free! I want to be incinerated, to fade with
hunger from this wretched world." But she did not listen. He tried to resist, but the smell of the red stuff drove his depleted, immobile body insane with blood lust.
Instantly, instinctively, thoroughly against his will, he gathered the last fragments of his energy and lunged. He slurped up the coppery elixir like a hungry baby sucking milk. Istvan had the wrist to his lips and the blood down his throat faster than a bat flying out of a dark cave at night. Energy flowed back into him with every gulp, filling his cells as if they were expanding balloons. He knew he was cementing the relationship between them, but, like an addict, he could not kick this habit and only stopped when she yanked her arm away.
He had drunk enough to be somewhat mobile again and wanted nothing more than to throttle her. But Doru had more blood in her veins than he did, and moved faster than he could, and in truth his first movements were to get out of the path of the encroaching light.
"Now we are truly family," she said dramatically. "One big, happy family!" And then she made a theatrical exit.
The realization struck Istvan that this one, this Doru, was more diabolical than the other three combined. Now his existence would go on and on and the four of them would torture him into infinity, to the limits of his endurance, if not beyond!
Weighted down with that grim thought, Istvan staggered to his coffin and pulled the heavy lid closed, immediately soothed by the balm of total darkness. He tried to cheer himself. Tomorrow, he thought, is another night. He could always get up early, buy batteries and there was bound to be a rerun that he'd enjoy, maybe Six Feet Under.
If only he could get the four bitches out the door before midnight. . . . Maybe he could score another pint at the blood bank without it being missed. He'd need a new hiding place, of course, for the blood and, if not more wafers, perhaps a stash of garlic as a safeguard, squirreled away someplace they would never find it. It was doable. Nothing could defeat the all-powerful vampire Prince of Darkness. Well, almost nothing
The Bell... FROM HELL!!!
Jeff Strand
I own a bell forged by Satan himself. With it, I can summon the Prince of Darkness to our plane of existence. I often think about doing it, but I fear my own power.
Some question the authenticity of the bell. "No way did Satan make that," they say. "If Satan made a bell, it would be, like, some big, scary-looking thing made out of black iron with pentagrams carved into it, and, I dunno, boiling blood dripping down the side and stuff. That's just a stupid little plastic bell. It still has the price tag on it."
Of them I ask, "Why would you assume that Lucifer is proficient in bell-making skills?" William Shakespeare may have been the most brilliant writer in human history, but did he know how to successfully milk a cow? Doubtful. Everybody has their own skill set. I don't see why Satan's bell must be an unholy spectacle to convince people of its origin. It was his first attempt. It's not going to be the Liberty Bell.
The price tag I can't explain. Some phenomena are beyond the understanding of mortal man, and should remain that way.
Sometimes my co-workers snatch the bell from my desk and ring it, just to tease and infuriate me. Wretched souls. "Uh-oh!" they say. "The devil's gonna be here any second! Everybody look busy!" I explain that the bell must be rung six hundred and sixty-six times for the summoning to take place. Fortunately, my co-workers do not have the patience for that much ringing.
No, I did not get the bell from Satan directly. It's ridiculous to think that I would have. I'm not so caught up in feelings of self-worth and ego to think that Satan would feel the need to personally deliver his gift to me, any more than the president of the United States has to hand deliver a certificate of commendation for it to be a thoughtful gesture. One of his minions presented me with the bell three months ago.
This is where my frustration with my co-workers becomes almost unbearable. Yes, Satan's minion took human form. Because of this fact, my co-workers constantly insist that it was not a demon at all, but rather a homeless man selling junk he'd stolen from the dollar store. Logic eludes them. Why do they think that Satan would be stupid enough to send a scaly, red-skinned, sulphur-scented, prehensile-tail-wearing demon to wander the brightly lit streets? Of course the demon would have transformed itself into something passable as human. They simply don't understand this line of reasoning.
Oh, I guess I should point out that I'm not a devil worshiper. I can see where you might get the wrong idea.
I'm actually a reasonably devout Christian, which is why it surprised me more than anybody when the minion sold me the bell for such a low price. I would've expected him to choose somebody who practices the dark arts, or listens to evil music, or at least reads Harry Potter. But, no, I was chosen.
I don't want to see Hell on earth or a thousand years of darkness or anything like that. If I do end up summoning Satan, it'll be to defeat him.
My co-workers have a great big laugh at that. I'm fully aware of how it sounds, but I wish they'd give me credit for not being a complete idiot. I'm not saying that I'm going to whip out my +3 vorpal sword and lop off Beelzebub's head for eight thousand experience points; I'm just saying that if I did use, the bell, I could conceivably summon him under circumstances where his evil would be vanquished once and for all.
"Whatcha gonna do, trap him under a net?" asks Rick from Corporate Accounting, playing with the bell. I really shouldn't leave it sitting out on my desk.
"No," I say, trying not to let my impatience show. "I am not going to trap him under a net. His skin would burn right through it." How can he be so highly paid and yet so ignorant?
"Gonna use your martial arts skills on him?"
I sigh. "I don't have martial arts skills."
"Really? I thought you were, like, a ninja or something."
He's making my brain hurt. "I admire ninjas. I'm not one myself."
"Bummer."
"It's not a bummer. I have no interest in taking a human life."
"But you're trying to kill Satan." "I never said I was trying to kill Satan. All I've said is that if I can figure out a way to trap him, I might summon him with the bell. That's a pretty big 'if.' I'm not trying to pass myself off as some mighty devil hunter—I'm just saying that if I figured out a workable plan, I might try to rid the world of him. Give me a frickin' break."
Rick jiggles the bell. "It doesn't even really ring. It just sort of clacks around."
"Well, gee, perhaps a fallen angel has better hearing than you do. Did you ever think of that?" His stupidity is beyond belief.
"I've gotta tell you, Howie, I'm not quite buying the whole devil bell thing."
I've never claimed to be perfect. Sometimes I suffer from the sin of pride. And on that day, I simply couldn't take the ridicule anymore. I snatched the bell out of Rick's hand and began to ring. I rang it ten times. Twenty. Thirty.
Rick stood there, a smirk on his face. Oh, how I would enjoy seeing that smirk ripped off and boiled in bile by Lucifer himself.
I continued to shake the bell, counting each tinkle. Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight...
"I've gotta go," said Rick.
"You're not going anywhere," I told him. "You don't believe me? I'll prove it to you, once and for all."
Fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five ...
"How many rings does it take?"
"Six hundred and sixty-six."
"Is it cumulative?"
"What do you mean?"
/>
"Do my rings count?"
"No. One person in one session."
"What are you up to?"
"Ninety."
Sarah, who sits three cubicles behind me, approaches with a cup of coffee. "What's going on?"
"Howie's summoning Satan."
Sarah smiles. "You figured out how to vanquish him?"
I shake my head and keep ringing. "I'm just teaching Rick a lesson."
"Pretty harsh lesson if Satan does show up."
"I'm teaching all of you a lesson," I announce. "You never believed me. You all think I wasted my dollar fifty. Well, when I reach the six hundred and sixty-sixth ring you'll find out just who wasted what."
"How many rings is that now?" Rick asks.
"One hundred and forty-one."
"Can you call me when you're at six hundred?"
His condescending tone makes me want to watch his eternal torment even more. I ring harder and faster.
In the back of my mind, I question the wisdom of summoning Satan without an escape plan, but I'm far too annoyed to worry about that. Whatever happens, happens.
A crowd begins to gather. They all look amused. I can't wait to see the amusement on their faces transform into a distinct lack of amusement.
I've sort of lost count of the number of rings at this point—I think I'm around three hundred—but the summoning doesn't require me to stop at exactly six hundred and sixty-six rings, so if I go over I won't mess things up. I just need to keep track enough that I know when to duck and cover.
"Shouldn't we make Satan a welcome banner or something?" asks Mike, who is also from Corporate Accounting. The others acknowledge that it's a good idea (though I doubt their sincerity), but nobody goes to make one. They won't have time, anyway.
Patricia, who is also from Corporate Accounting (their area is right next to mine), looks at me sadly. She's always been nice to me and I harbor a secret crush on her, despite her being thirty-two years my senior. "C'mon, Howie, knock it off. You-don't have to prove anything."
If I could have taken her statement to mean "because I believe you," that would've been good enough and I would have ceased ringing the bell. Unfortunately, she clearly means "because nothing will happen and you'll look like an idiot," and so I must continue.
Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, tinkle.
My hand is starting to get tired. See? Even with it being a miniscule plastic bell, the ringing process is tiring. That is why I was provided with this particular bell and not some giant black iron behemoth that would be impossible to ring a sufficient number of times without collapsing from exhaustion. Everything makes sense when you apply simple logic.
"Was that six hundred and sixty-six?" Rick asks.
"No. We're just over five hundred," I inform him.
"This all seems kind of inconvenient."
"Oh, sure, because it makes sooooo much sense that the process of summoning the devil should be so convenient that you can do it just by grabbing the bell from my desk and shaking it a couple of times," I say, making no effort to hide the sarcasm in my voice. "Think about what you're saying, Rick!" I don't have to treat him with respect any longer. You can't respect somebody who is moments away from being skewered by a flaming pitchfork.
I switch the bell to my left hand and continue ringing.
Six hundred (approximately).
I want to cackle with maniacal laughter about what is to occur, but I have to remember that we're still in a place of business, and professional conduct is expected. I can't stop myself from grinning, though.
I ring so fast that my hand tingles.
And finally I reach the Ring of the Beast. I ring ten more times just in case.
I give a satisfied nod to my doomed antagonists ... but then my grin vanishes.
What have I done?
Oh God, what have I done?
To prove a point to my co-workers, I have brought Hell to the offices of Tyler & Bettin, Inc. How can I call myself a Christian when I would so selfishly summon Lucifer himself for no reason but to make Rick from Corporate Accounting look foolish?
Satan may not have arrived yet, but there is still an evil presence in this room, and it is me.
I am so displeased with myself that I want to scream. Rivers of blood will flow over our keyboards and mice.
Our printers will melt and sizzle in the hellflre. My co-workers ridiculed me, but did they really deserve this eternal overtime of misery?
What can I do to stop this?
Though I'd said that a net couldn't hold Satan, that had merely been an educated guess. If we have one around, it is certainly worth a shot. I want to shout for my co-workers to try to find one, but I am so terrified and appalled by my own behavior that I can't speak. I gesticulate frantically, while they stand around my desk, still looking amused.
"Hello? Satan?" Rick calls out, unaware that he is almost certainly making himself the first target.
I have to stop this! But what can I do? What could ward off the Prince of Darkness? What does he hate most in the world?
And then I realize the answer. Love.
The power of love can stop the Beast from invading our plane of existence. A kiss, true and pure. Upon sensing the expression of human love, the devil will be so repulsed that he might—might—return to his hellish plane and leave us alone.
I gaze at Patricia.
She turns and sadly walks away from my desk. I think I can hear a rumbling sound in the distance. It reminds me of the ventilation system, but I am in no condition to accurately judge sounds and know there is no time to spare. I have to express pure love now.
I stand up, whisper "I love you," then pull Rick toward me and kiss him on the lips. I don't really love him, but perhaps Satan will be fooled.
The chaos is so great that for a moment I think Satan has arrived. But, no, they are merely reacting to my act of redemption. Not in a positive way. Still, they can judge me all they want as long as I've staved off the effects of that accursed bell.
Satan does not show up in the offices of Tyler &Bettin that morning. The kiss worked.
I destroy the bell by stomping on it with my foot. It is too much responsibility for one man.
I spend some time down in Human Resources, explaining my actions. I am written up for unprofessional conduct and told that it will negatively impact my raise, but that's okay. I had succumbed to the sin of pride, and my punishment is just.
And I learned an important lesson. Love conquers all... but in a pinch, you can fake it.
Dead Hand
Sharyn McCrumb
In stock car racing, a "dead hand" is a jack-type device with which you holdup heavy car parts (like a transmission) while you unbolt them.
I don't hold with talking to dead people. Of course, that's just a personal preference of mine. It ain't against the rules of NASCAR, you understand. And it's about the only thing that ain't.
Will they let you adjust the spoiler a couple of degrees for less air resistance? Naw.
Can you make the roll cage bars out of aluminum instead of steel to lighten the chassis? Not if they catch you.
How about putting a little nitrous oxide in the gasoline to give your car an instant boost in horsepower? Don't even think about it.
Cheating in stock-car racing is a time-honored tradition, an endless game of Whac-A-Mole. You find some little way to give your team an edge, and then NASCAR catches you at it, and the next day they add a new no-no to the rule book. So then you go looking for some other way to get ahead, and that works for a while, and then they catch you again, and so it goes.
I was on a team that was so far up the creek in engine sludge that we couldn't even afford to pay the fines they'd hit us with if they caught us cheating. We were dead last in points, dead men racing, dead in the water as far as being competitive in the sport. That's what got me thinking about dead people, I guess.
Trampas-LeFay used to be a name to conjure with on the NASCAR circuit, but that was back i
n the day, when drivers still knew their way around an engine, and when most of the guys out there racing had day jobs instead of fan clubs. Back then a race team could be located anywhere, like the Wood Brothers' shop in Stuart, Virginia, or in the garage in back of Ralph Earnhardt's little white house in Kannapolis. Back then Trampas-LeFay was a shoestring operation out of the Tennessee hills, with a lot of moonshining know-how going into their engine building, but they held their own for the better part of two decades, and they won enough races to turn a profit.
Times changed, though. Big money and national media exposure changed the sport beyond recognition, so now we were in an era of West Coast pretty-boy drivers and rocket-science engineering, all propelled by the almighty dollar.
But Trampas-LeFay had hardly changed at all. We were still the same little one-car team in the Tennesseehills with a cheesy regional sponsor and some local good ol' boys working the race shop. But now we were trying to go head-to-head against corporate racing giants who had twenty-million-dollar budgets from Fortune 500 companies, all of them located within hailing distance of Mooresville, the epicenter of NASCAR, where they had access to the wind tunnels, the state-of-the-art engineers, and the Charlotte media machine.
We hadn't won a race in a year of Sundays, but that doesn't mean we don't know our stuff. It just means we're stubborn and maybe a bit behind the times, which in this sport is the fast lane to oblivion.
For one thing, all the winning teams field three or four cars every week. We had one. So while the big boys got three times as much testing and research from pooling their multicar information, we had one car and one set of answers. We also lacked the twenty-million-dollar sponsor that paid for all those engineers and testing equipment that gave them the edge. A three-hour race is often won by just a tenth of a second, and it takes a few million dollars to buy you that tenth of a second. The way things stood now, Trampas-LeFay didn't have enough money to buy the stopwatch, much less the tenth of a second to win.