by Joe Mahoney
“Certainly,” I said, smiling vacuously, with no idea what I was excusing her for.
She reached up and plucked the left eyeball from out of her head. My smile froze on my face. She began to polish the eyeball with the hem of her skirt.
I let my breath out. A glass eye. Unusual in so young a woman but not unheard of. She followed the same procedure with her right eyeball too. “I don’t know how you people see with these things.”
The woman was blind. No, she’d made eye contact several times. Could a person see with two glass eyes? Of course not. I felt hot and tried desperately to think rationally. I clutched at a fragile hypothesis. She looked like a television character from my youth, Jaime Sommers, the bionic woman. That was it. She was bionic.
I worked to regain my composure. Iugurtha placed each eyeball back where it belonged. To my horror, her pupils now glowed like twin drops of molten lava. As she fixed me with that volcanic gaze, I knew that these were not the eyes of a six million-dollar woman.
They were the eyes of a demon.
II
Demon in the Den
I leapt to my feet and tore from the den. At the door to the bathroom I whispered urgently, “Doctor Humphrey!” but the doctor did not respond.
The door was slightly ajar. I nudged it further and found the bathroom unoccupied. Perplexed, I rushed to the kitchen, thinking maybe the doctor had gone for a bite to eat, but I did not find him there. I searched in the dining room, the office, the rec room, all three bedrooms, two bathrooms, the furnace room, the laundry room, and the attic, but couldn’t find Humphrey anywhere.
The doctor was not in the house.
Pacing frantically in the front entranceway, I tried to think where he could be. The closet nearby caught my eye. Something about it tugged at my brain. I realised I hadn’t searched in any closets for the doctor. Absurd, of course, the thought of Humphrey hiding in a closet, yet the longer I stood there, the greater became the urge to open that door.
Finally, I could stand it no longer. I eased the door open and stepped inside to take a look. Stuffy air assailed my nostrils. Everything seemed in its place: hats and jackets, boots, shoes, scarves and mittens, and hanging on the wall, my Remington double-barrelled shotgun. But no Doctor Peter Humphrey.
As I began to close the door, the back wall of the closet slid open. A dark form leapt out at me. I struggled against it but my efforts proved fruitless. Seconds later I found myself held fast, with my arms pinioned tightly behind my back.
A male voice whispered harshly in my left ear, “Try anything stupid and you’ll regret it.”
The threat did not bother me quite so much as the stench of garlic that accompanied it. My captor could no doubt have made good on his threat simply by breathing in my face.
My assailant spun me around and prodded me into a red-dirt tunnel that I was stunned to learn existed behind the closet. I needed to act quickly if I wanted to avoid an uncertain fate at the hands of this ruffian, so I kicked back hard, trying to connect with his knee, or anything else that might cause him to release his hold on my arms.
I hit nothing. An instant later I received a thunderous blow just above my right ear. I stumbled and fell. Cold steel nuzzled my neck. I heard the metallic sound of a gun being cocked.
“We’ll have none of that,” the thug said into my ear. I gagged at the stench of his breath.
Garlic Breath hauled me to my feet and shoved me ahead of him once more. The tunnel quickly became a cramped affair. I was forced to my hands and knees where I crawled like a baby for what felt like forever. Finally, dirty, fatigued, my head throbbing, I arrived at a well-lit area large enough for me to be able to stand up again.
I recognised my new surroundings immediately—the largest of several caves dotting the sandstone cliffs adjacent to my property. Perhaps two dozen men and women occupied the cave. Half appeared to be technicians, busy monitoring banks of complicated-looking gear. The bearing of the others, along with the daunting weapons they possessed, suggested a more military orientation, though no one was wearing uniforms. My assailant, a well-muscled man with a curiously misshapen head, figured among the latter. Silver brooches shaped like crescent moons were pinned to everyone’s shirts.
A great deal of equipment clogged the cave. Aside from paraphernalia that I couldn’t identify, there were a dozen full-colour video monitors covering one of the cave’s walls and displaying every square inch of the interior of my house. Several of the monitors showed Iugurtha sitting tranquilly in the den applying lipstick. I could not tell from the angles provided whether her eyes still glowed a preternatural red.
Humphrey lumbered forth from one of the cave’s many crannies, red-faced and covered in dirt.
“Doctor!” I winced, as speech made my head even worse. Reaching up, I found a large lump over my ear where I’d been struck.
Humphrey was accompanied by a small, wiry man clad in black. A pencil-thin moustache lent the man a dapper air. A tiny earpiece sat snugly in his left ear, connected to an equally unobtrusive microphone suspended before a pair of thin, bloodless lips. As near as I could tell all of the men and women in the cave wore identical wireless gear.
“Kindly keep your voice down, please,” the man in black admonished in a clipped British accent.
Having discovered that excessive volume hurt my head, I had been planning to do just that, but being commanded to do so made me change my mind.
“Who are these people?” I demanded of Humphrey.
“This one calls himself Rainer. Other than that, I have no idea. They forced me here at gunpoint.”
“Me too. After some convincing.” I indicated the growing lump on the side of my head.
Humphrey examined my injury. “Dizzy?”
“No more so than usual.”
“We’ll keep a close eye on you.” He scowled at Rainer. “Do you have any idea how serious head wounds can be?”
“As a matter of fact I do,” Rainer said. “For what it’s worth, Mr. Schmitz here knows just where and how hard to hit. I assure you, under the circumstances we could not have just up and rung your doorbell.”
“Why not?”
“I really must insist that you speak more quietly, Doctor.”
“Why is that?” Humphrey practically bellowed.
I winced. Rainer looked pained. “The entity has an extraordinary ability to hear. It must not learn of our presence here.”
“And just whose presence is that?” Humphrey asked.
“We call ourselves Casa Terra.”
“What does that mean?” Humphrey asked.
“It’s Latin, my good man. It means Earth is our home.”
“Yes, obviously, but that tells me nothing.”
“We are humanity’s last line of defence.”
“Against what?”
“You could not even begin to imagine.”
“How long have you been spying on me?” I asked.
“We are not spying on you. We are observing the entity.”
“Whoever you’re spying on, I think it’s outrageous and I won’t stand for it.” I shouldered my way past the man, only to have garlic-breathed Schmitz and one of his colleagues block my way.
Fuming but with nowhere to go, I found myself forced back to Humphrey’s side.
A hint of a smile played on Rainer’s lips.
“We are your prisoners,” Humphrey observed.
“You are here for your own protection.”
“Protection from what?” I snorted. “This entity of yours looks about as dangerous as a pussycat. Except for her eyes, she seems quite—” I struggled to produce the right word “—nice.”
Inwardly, however, I could not suppress a mental image of Iugurtha’s white, bulbous eyeballs loosed from the confines of her face.
“Nice?” Humphrey grunted. “Get it through that foolish head of you
rs, Wildebear. It’s a demon.”
“Nonsense. The entity is extraordinary, but there is nothing supernatural about it.” Rainer touched his earpiece and fixed his gaze on the bank of monitors. I followed his line of sight. One of the screens showed Ridley arriving home. I realized that the camera tracking him must have been concealed in one of the gargoyle’s eyes.
The breadth of surveillance within and around my home awed me even as it outraged me. I missed nothing as Ridley (exercising none of the caution he had displayed earlier in the evening) fairly capered up the front steps and entered the house. He appeared to be whistling as he hung up his jacket and headed for his room. Perhaps those in the cave equipped with earpieces could actually hear him.
As disturbed as I was to discover a covert surveillance team monitoring my house (not to mention having been struck in the head and kidnapped in my own front-hall closet), a greater concern gripped me now. What did Iugurtha want with my nephew?
I turned to Rainer. “If this entity of yours is as dangerous as Humphrey believes—”
“There’s nothing we can do for your nephew,” Rainer informed me quietly.
“You took us out of harm’s way. Why not him too?”
“I’m sorry. The boy’s fate is sealed. It’s too late for him.”
I started forward again. “Not if I can help it.”
Rainer stepped in my way. “I will not have your blood on my hands as well.”
“You risk blood on your hands either way,” I told the man. “You’ll have to kill me to make me stay here.”
Beside me, the doctor began moving purposefully toward the mouth of the cave. Schmitz moved to block him. Rainer waved the thug off.
“You’re wrong,” Rainer said, stepping aside. “If you wish to face the entity I will not stand in your way. I will, however, not be responsible for the consequences.”
I wasted no time sprinting after Humphrey, catching up with and passing him just outside the entrance to the cave. A full moon lit my way as I raced along the rocky shore beneath the cliffs to the section of beach adjacent to my property. I clambered over several sand dunes to get to my backyard. Once there, I groped in my pocket for my keys and let myself in the back door, thinking that although I had fed the boy, housed him, and clothed him, it hadn’t been enough. Not by a long shot. Now he was consorting with demons and it was my fault. I had failed my sister and failed Ridley. I only hoped it wasn’t too late to put things right.
I headed straight for the front closet and plucked my Remington off its hook on the wall. Handy for warding off skunks, coyotes and door-to-door salespeople, I saw no reason why it wouldn’t serve equally well against demons. I inserted two shells into the gun’s breach and shoved a handful of others, along with my fears, deep into the pocket of my corduroys.
Peering cautiously into the den, I confirmed that Iugurtha was no longer there. I ran upstairs and kicked the door to Ridley’s room open, where I was confronted by the sight of Iugurtha and the boy sitting together on the bed, the book clasped firmly in Iugurtha’s arms. I dared meet her eyes, now as blue as a summer sky and devoid of any trace of their former fire. Iugurtha did not look the least bit like a demon to me. On the contrary she looked like an angel. I half expected her to unfold an enormous pair of ivory wings from behind her back. Perhaps she was a fallen angel, like Lucifer.
I heard a rustle from behind. A thrill of fear gripped me and I spun rapidly, ready to blast any demons coming at me from that direction. I removed my finger from the trigger a fraction of a second before blowing Doctor Humphrey’s head clean off. Seeing a shotgun pointed squarely at his fleshy face, the doctor looked alarmed but said nothing—perhaps because he couldn’t, he was panting so heavily.
Lowering the shotgun, I faced Iugurtha and demanded, “What have you done to the boy?”
She cocked her head to one side. “I took in a little bit here, and let out a little bit there.”
Sweat made the shotgun slippery in my hands. “What do you mean? What does she mean, Ridley?”
Emotion played over Ridley’s face like ripples on the surface of a pond. A pond from which, I might add, his nose protruded like the dorsal fin of a shark. “I’ll explain everything, Uncle, if you’ll just put the shotgun down.”
“You’ll get nothing out of him,” Humphrey panted. “He’s under the demon’s influence.”
Ridley wrinkled his brow. “Demon?”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, boy. The demon stole my wife and now it’s trying to steal you. Fortunately, your uncle had wit enough to call me.” Humphrey faced Iugurtha. “You may as well know I won’t rest until I get my wife back. And I won’t let you steal the boy.”
Ridley rose quickly to his feet. “Just hang on, everyone. I’m sorry to hear something’s happened to your wife, Doctor, but whatever it is I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.”
“This is a creature of the netherworld, boy —”
“She’s a jinn!” Ridley cut him off.
I narrowed my eyes. “A what?”
“A jinn.” Ridley nodded earnestly. “You know, a genie. Except she came out of a book instead of a lamp. I would have told you before except she didn’t want me to. Plus, I’ve been a bit distracted lately.”
“Now listen, Ridley—”
“I beg your pardon, Doctor, but maybe it’s you who should listen. Maybe you should hear my side of the story.”
Humphrey’s cheeks reddened.
I had come to accept Humphrey’s wild notions of our uninvited visitor. Despite his radical personality change, however, Ridley appeared sane and reasonable. Keeping the shotgun levelled at Iugurtha’s pretty face, I said, “Perhaps we should hear the boy out.”
The doctor shook his great unkempt head but said nothing.
“Thanks, Uncle. It all started one night when I couldn’t sleep. I went into the guest room looking for something to read, and I found this really interesting-looking book, but when I went to read it, I must have blacked out or something because the next thing I knew the book was on the floor, Iugurtha was sitting on the bed, and I was thinking, ‘Whoa! Where the heck did she come from?’
“I’m looking at her when she says, ‘Make a wish, Ridley,’ and I think, right, either I’m nuts or a heckuva lot more tired than I thought. It takes me a second to recover from the shock of seeing her. Then I’m, like, ‘What are you, my fairy godmother?’ She just smiles this amazing smile. And that’s when it hit me—she’s a jinn.”
“So you made a wish,” I said.
Ridley nodded.
“What did you wish for, son?” Humphrey asked.
Ridley blushed. “There’s a girl I know in Port Kerry, Rebecca Redwood. I wished for her to like me.”
Humphrey grimaced. “You didn’t need a demon to help you win a girl. If you’d tried, you might have won her by yourself.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Doctor, but Becky wouldn’t have wanted a guy like me. Not the way I was.”
“Why not?” I asked. “You’re half Wildebear, after all. You have a lot going for you.”
“Like what?”
I shrugged. “The strong Wildebear chin. The Wildebear height and intellect. The imposing Wildebear masculinity. You have all of that.”
“The Wildebear modesty,” Humphrey put in.
“Yes. Thank you, Doctor.”
“Thanks, Uncle. But let’s face it, I’m not the best-looking guy.”
I attempted to reassure him. “It’s what’s inside that counts.”
Ridley looked sceptical. I couldn’t blame him—the truth was I wasn’t much of a ladies’ man myself.
“What harm could come from such a wish?”
Our heads swivelled as one at the sound of Iugurtha’s voice.
“Only good, surely,” she continued. “I tailored the metamorphosis to correspond t
o what would appeal most to the girl Rebecca. Typical of your species, most of the required changes were superficial. No dramatic physical alterations were necessary. They rarely are. In the end it was a simple affair—more to do with attitude than looks.”
Ridley’s smile reached his ears. “Becky and I have been seeing one another since Wednesday.”
“You are dealing with a creature of the netherworld, son,” Humphrey pointed out. “You will be required to pay for the services you’ve received. The price my wife paid before you, and who knows how many others before her.”
“Nothing in life is free, I know that,” Ridley said. “If there is a price, I’ll pay it.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying, boy!”
“That’s very noble of you, Ridley,” Iugurtha said. “What price the love of a woman for a man?”
She snapped her fingers. Ridley slumped like a marionette on strings. Humphrey and I looked on in horror as his eyes glazed over and his head lolled loosely from side to side.
“I made a few additional alterations,” Iugurtha admitted.
I gripped the shotgun tightly. “Whatever you’ve done, undo it now.”
Iugurtha ignored me. Perhaps she recognized my weakness. That I could not bring myself to shoot a woman (nor, if the truth be known, a skunk, a coyote, or door-to-door salespeople). She licked her thumb and used it to flip through the tome in her hands before selecting a page and allowing the book to fall to the floor. At least, it would have fallen had not it expanded upward and outward, becoming a rectangular slab about twice the size of a refrigerator. Within this slab, dark shades swirled incessantly, and I knew it to be the gate of which Humphrey had spoken.
The colours within the gate began to change. I caught a hint of purple. Seconds later, trees and fields of a sort I had never seen before coalesced into being. A mountain range loomed majestically in the distance against a violet sky. No sound emerged from this alien panorama to disturb the heavy silence that had settled in Ridley’s room.
Just when I decided that it was all a trick involving a concealed holographic projector, a preposterously ugly creature swathed in mauve fur emerged from a thicket of extraterrestrial bracken and padded through the gate. After tracking alien mud into my home it stopped and stared up at me with wide, trusting eyes. I stared back.