The Devil's End

by D A Fowler

  When they got back in the truck, Bruce removed a small brass case from his glove compartment and removed a neatly rolled joint. “I’ve got a test next hour,” he explained, “and I’ll never pass it if I’m not stoned, ’cause I was stoned when I studied for it. I can’t cross-reference different states of consciousness.”

  Lana shook her head, trying to look disapproving but unable to keep the smile off her face. Bruce was so crazy. “Whatever you say.”

  Fourteen

  Rose Hester began to tremble like a massive bowl of Jell-o, fat fingers clutching the garish gold cross that hung from her wattled neck. The most apparent emotion on her face was fear, but beneath it surged passionate zeal, the natural response of the Born Again to the onset of spiritual battle. Onward Christian soldiers! Far too much time was spent sitting idle in the reserves.

  “I’ll call Brother Mitchell right away,” she said gravely, gray eyes twinkling. “This is a serious matter, as I’m sure you know. Next prayer meetin’ isn’t till tomorrow night, so he’ll probably call a special one, seein’ as how this is an emergency. You two will be there, won’t you?” Jane had finally managed to get rid of Edna—it wasn’t hard; after Marla had told all there was to tell, the urgent need to get to a telephone was clearly visible on Edna’s face—and Jane had afterward told Marla she was going to her mother’s house for advice. Marla had wanted to go along, in spite of Jane’s warnings.

  Marla now curled her lips in an attempted smile. “I have to go to a church meeting?”

  “Land sakes, you gotta get under God’s protection,” Rose declared, laying a hand on her breast. “Lest you’re covered by the Blood, you got no defense against the Prince of Darkness, and that’s exactly who’s behind this thing, as God’s my witness. Otherwise you’ll be out there like a little lamb without no shepherd, and that ol’ wolf’s a’gonna eat you alive. Mark my words.”

  Jane fought the urge to bolt from her mother’s house and run until there were no soles left on her shoes. “Mother, don’t scare her like that.” How many times had that analogy been pushed in her own face? A thousand, ten thousand? “We don’t know for sure this is anything but a prank. If it’s not, well…we’d just like to see it stopped. We really don’t want to get personally involved, if we can help it.”

  “Anybody who still has breath is involved, whether they like it or not!” Rose retorted. “If you don’t cast a vote, then it’s cast for you—an’ I don’t think you’re gonna like who yer electin’. You remember what Brother Gibson warned you, Jane Rachel, about a’goin’ into the pit. This is just what he was talkin’ about,” she prattled fiercely, her jowls becoming flushed. “You gonna take this young girl with you? You gonna close the door of eternal salvation in her face?”

  Jane wondered which would be worse; leaving Marla defenseless against the jaws of the Wolf (a.k.a. Satan, Lucifer, Belial, Beelzebub) or the jaws of her determined mother, a black belt in gospel karate. “Mother, leave Marla alone. If she wants to go to church, that’s up to her. I’m not going to talk her out of it any more than I’m going to let you harangue her into it. The only reason I came to you is because I didn’t know what else to do. But if this is the help I’m going to get, I’m sure I can think of something else.”

  “You can’t fight the Devil on your own.” Rose lowered herself to her overstuffed Early American couch with a sniffle. “Only the mighty power o’ God can fight against that evil, and you know what happened to those men in the Bible who tried to cast out a devil without bein’ saved. It tore ’em to pieces.”

  “Which is exactly why we don’t want to get involved.” Jane sighed with exasperation, signaling Marla to head for the door before they were both forced to convert for the sake of peace. For her, the years were flying backward; the scene was beginning to reek of a deja vu sewer, relentless sermons, WARNINGS, thou shalt nots, and bucketfuls, truckfuls of wonderful guilt, guilt, GUILT—

  She got herself and Marla safely outside before she actually started screaming. Blackness threatened to usurp her consciousness; she had to sit on the front porch with her head between her knees to recover. Too much caffeine, she decided. And not enough sleep.

  Marla squatted down beside her. “Hey, are you going to faint or something?” She was already regretting her involvement with Jane; what was she to do if the woman fell unconscious? Give her mouth-to-mouth? No way in hell.

  “No, I’ll be all right.” Jane took a few deep breaths and tried to relax. She felt like a telephone pole vibrating with the current of deadly voltage.

  Marla glanced at the closed door behind them, afraid Mrs. Hester would come after them to continue her campaign. “So what’s your mother going to do? Just have a prayer meeting? What good is that?”

  “The way I see it,” Jane said sickly, “is, if this witchcraft thing is real—God forbid—then their prayers just might do some good. If this is a contest between two fantasies, then nothing is going to happen and you and I can have a good laugh about this later. But if we’re talking about a clash of two opposite and very real powers, then we’ve done the best that we can do. My mother’s church is about as religious as you can get.”

  Marla needed no convincing of that. “I won’t argue with you. But I just can’t sit around and do nothing…there’s got to be a way to find out for sure what’s going on. Maybe Dennis can get something out of Jay.”

  “Couldn’t hurt to try. And like I said earlier, try to get a peek at your grandmother’s things.” Marla nodded, though she would never get around to it. Jane rubbed her forehead and cautioned finally with a weak smile, “And watch out for the big bad wolf, of course.”

  Pamela Mingee stared at her shape beneath the crisp beige sheet, trying to remember how it had looked twenty years earlier. Roger Snell traced a forefinger around the outline of her navel.

  “Ready for another round?”

  “You’re a fiend,” Pamela accused, then added with a wink, “but that’s what I like about you. I’m still hurt, though, that you and Beth didn’t come to Mama’s funeral. How could you forget a thing like that?”

  Roger pulled his lower lip down. “I thought being horny meant never having to say you’re sorry.”

  “That’s being in love. Which has nothing to do with us.”

  He leaned over to give her a lingering, wet kiss, his tongue probing deeply into her mouth. She moaned when he started down her neck, the movements of his tongue sending electric thrills down the entire left side of her body. Roger always joked about her left side being more sensitive than the right; he called it her 220 outlet. Harold had never noticed any difference.

  He lingered at her left breast, sucking gently, nipping playfully with his teeth as he kneaded the other. She tugged at the hair on his temples. “Easy, easy.”

  He pushed the sheet down farther, his hands exploring supple, perfumed flesh, the scent of sexual release mingled with an exotic fragrance he knew had cost Harold Mingee a small fortune. But, of course, the pompous bastard liked to brag about how much his possessions were worth. His favorite T-shirt to wear fishing proclaimed, “He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins.” Harold had a lot of expensive toys. But Roger had his wife at least twice a week.

  The fact that she was also his wife’s best friend didn’t cause him much added anxiety. Though she would never admit it, he knew that deep down, Beth despised Pamela. The two had always been fiercely competitive, but there had only been one brass ring. One Harold Xavier Mingee, Attorney at Law. Roger had been the booby prize. And Beth never let him forget it.

  Pamela closed her eyes and relished the sensations coursing through her body. Roger wasn’t much of an intellectual, but he was good at what she needed him for. Today she not only needed him for sex, but as a distraction, something to get her mind off her mother’s death, the funeral, the fact that her own life was little more than a paper cutout. There was comfort in it, in a one dimensional sort of way, but few re
al joys. A world painted in very pale pastels with no vivid colors or shapes. Just one wild streak of purple, hidden offstage, named Roger. Physically speaking, he was everything that Harold wasn’t: attractive, hairy, muscular, sexually well-endowed. His face evinced both toughness and sensuality, an irresistible combination. Her affair with him kept her going. Surely Beth wouldn’t really mind, if she knew. She had a lot in common with Harold.

  When Roger and Pamela again lay spent in a panting heap, her mind drifted, rebelliously, into memories of the dream she’d had the previous night, the dream that had sent her rushing to the telephone to call Roger that morning the moment her daughter had left on some unexplained errand.

  Her mother—not the wrinkled, lifeless thing she’d seen in the white satin-lined casket, but the former Jasmine, plump and full of energy—had suddenly appeared in her bedroom, wearing her red paisley- patterned apron over a pale green frock. She held a spatula in one hand, a large iron crucifix in the other. She asked Pamela if she would like some pancakes. In the dream, Pamela sat up and pointed to the cross. “What’s that for?”

  “Demons been in the pancake mix again,” was the irritated reply. “Don’t do a bit of good to fry ’em…they’ll go down hot right into your belly. Then they’ll just take over and push your soul right out through your eyes. Dad-gum witches been foolin’ in my kitchen again, puttin’ demons in the cereal boxes and everything else. Have to stick this cross down in there to drive ’em out.”

  The next moment, Pamela was sitting at the breakfast table in pigtails, a stack of pancakes dripping with butter and syrup on the plate in front of her. Breathing, those pancakes. Yes, ever so slightly…

  “Mom, are you sure you got all the demons out of this?”

  Jasmine, busy over the stove, called back to her, “Of course I did, sugar. Now eat ’em up before they get cold.”

  The first forkful made its way down Pamela’s throat like a glob of scalding fat, the sweetness instantly turning bitter. Then the fire began to spread and she was on the floor, kicking and screaming as her eyes began to bulge and expand like water balloons, bursting at last in an excruciatingly painful spray of blood which splattered clear up to the ceiling. And then she was looking down at her body on the floor, into the empty eye sockets through which a hellish fire began to glow…

  “I need a drink,” she said to Roger, banishing the memory with a violent shake of her head. Roger snorted; he was sound asleep. She shoved his weight off her and got up to mix herself an anesthetic. The phone rang. “Roger, your phone is ringing.”

  He grunted, “You answer it. I can’t move.”

  “And suppose it’s Beth?”

  “You came over to get a new battery in your watch. I went to the john. No big deal. Take a message.”

  “I’m your lover, not your secretary,” Pamela complained, but she stepped over to Roger’s nightstand, naked, to stop the dreadful ringing. “Snell residence.” She listened in shocked silence as the caller, assuming she was Beth Snell, proceeded with the message. Pamela felt the blood draining from her face. As the voice rambled on, she slowly replaced the receiver.

  Roger rolled over and cracked an eyelid. “Who was it?”

  “Just an…an obscene phone call,” Pamela whispered hoarsely, staring at the instrument as if it were a tarantula.

  “Make you horny again?” He chuckled sleepily, following his question with a stretch and a waking yawn, a suspicious lump rising under the sheet. Pamela didn’t answer. She was already reeling down the hallway toward the den and her best friend’s liquor cabinet.

  A familiar voice was calling her name. Lana turned in the crowded corridor and saw Nancy waving at her. Battling her way through the oncoming human traffic, Lana approached her with a guarded smile. Beware the Ulterior Motive. “Hi. What’s up?”

  “Friday night is Halloween,” Nancy replied in an almost reverent tone. “You have any plans?”

  Lana shrugged, a small alarm going off somewhere in the back of her mind. She immediately associated Halloween with the cemetery, then the rabbit. She had to know. “Listen, Nancy, I want to know the truth. Did you or your boyfriend have anything to do with killin’ that white rabbit?”

  “The truth?” Nancy’s smile widened. “You want the honest to God, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, stick a needle in my eye TRUTH?”

  “Yes.”

  “We didn’t have anything to do with it. So what are you doing on Friday night?”

  “I don’t know…Bruce hasn’t said anything about it.” Lana wondered how many people vowed to stick needles in their eye and lied anyway. Nancy certainly didn’t look guilty now. Maybe she wasn’t, after all. If she was, then she was one of the most convincing liars Lana had ever met. Second only to Dennis Bloom.

  “If you’re askin’ me to that graveyard party I heard about…”

  “No.” Nancy placed a possessive grip on Lana’s arm. “It’s a private party, very exclusive. Just you, me, and our dates. I heard you were going with Bruce now. That true?”

  “Well, not officially.” Lana blushed, casting her eyes downward. Nancy’s intense stare was disturbing. “But we like each other a lot. Anyway, I’d better head on to class. We can talk about it later, after school. Thank God it’s almost over for today, huh?” She glanced back up in time to see darkness flash over Nancy’s expression.

  “Tell me your phone number. I’ll call you.”

  Lana quickly recited her phone number, having an unexplainable urge to transpose the last two digits, but she didn’t do it. The correct number could be obtained from directory assistance anyway. Nancy repeated the number, smiled tightly, then turned and blended in with the eastbound flow of bodies.

  After the final bell, Lana hurried to her locker, where she found Bruce waiting faithfully. His eyes, bloodshot and glazed, settled appreciatively on her face after quickly scanning the rest of her body. “Hey fox, you willing to go out with a nerd like me?”

  “I don’t know.” She giggled, twisting the combination dial on her locker. “Gimme a month or two to think about it.”

  Bruce scowled. “Damn. That’s what all the foxes say.”

  A tall, heavy-set boy with the nose of a platypus walked by and clapped Bruce on the back. “Hey, Apple Head, how’d you do on the test?”

  Bruce grinned weakly. “Don’t ask. Hey Dave, this is Lana. Lana, Dave. Or if you prefer, you can call him Duck.”

  Lana didn’t have to ask why the nickname Duck. “Nice to meet you, Dave.” They exchanged nods. Lana nudged Bruce with her elbow. “So you flunked your test, huh?”

  “I’d have done good if it had all been multiple choice,” Bruce whined. “But the schmuck put about ten essay questions on it. No fair.”

  Dave the Duck laughed abrasively and moved on. Lana took out the books she needed and handed half of them to Bruce.

  “Your friend has some nose.”

  “Yeah, picks it with a shovel.”

  Lana was getting used to his unique sense of humor. “How nice.” She could hear Dave saying to him later, when she wasn’t around, Hey, your girlfriend sure talks funny, and Bruce would say, That’s nothing, you should watch her eat. He would just be kidding, of course. As usual.

  “Well, I think you’d be better off doin’ a little more studyin’ and less smokin’ of Mother Nature, Apple Head.”

  “Nag, nag, nag.”

  “You wanna spend the rest of your life in the twelfth grade?”

  “No, Mommy.”

  Lana gave up. “Okay, it’s your life.” They walked together toward the stairwell. There was a man on his way up.

  Bruce stopped abruptly. “Hey, Mr. Montgomery. When did you get out of the hospital?”

  The man didn’t acknowledge him; he kept slowly ascending the stairs, his gaze fixed straight ahead, his right hand gripping the rail. His skin was pale, almost translucent, but there were
dark circles under his darker-than-usual eyes. He passed them without answering.

  Bruce shrugged, guiding Lana down the stairs. “Guess he’s still not feeling too good. Looks like he died a couple of days ago.”

  “Was that the teacher who got taken away in an ambulance last Friday?” Lana asked, glancing nervously over her shoulder.

  “Yeah, had an attack of some kind in the office. Wonder what he’s doing here now? Classes are over for today.”

  Lana hurried him along. “Maybe he needs to take some papers home with him or somethin’.”

  The sky was overcast with a blanket of gray clouds, but the October air was dry and warm. After emerging from the school building, Lana took a deep breath. “Freedom, an’ eight more tons of homework. It’s not fair. They screw up a kid’s life enough makin’ ’im sit in a classroom for six hours a day. That oughta be the extent of the torture.”

  “Just be glad you’re not living in Japan. They have to spend a lot more hours in a classroom than we do. That’s why Japs have slanty eyes—too much reading. You know they’re smearing us in technology. Their brains are getting too big, stretching everything out. Ever notice how tight their faces look?”

  “You’re really weird, Bruce.” Lana shifted her load from one arm to the other. “An’ speakin’ of weird, Nancy waved me over in the hall this afternoon an’ invited us to an ‘exclusive’ party Friday night…just you, me, her, an’ her boyfriend. What do you think?”

  Bruce arched an eyebrow. “Exclusive party, huh? Sounds ominous. Where’s it gonna be?”

  “I don’t know yet. She’s s’pose to call me.”

  They reached Bruce’s truck in the parking lot, and Lana got the feeling that someone was watching her closely. She looked back toward the school building and saw the familiar lurking shape of Spiro’s body on the other side of the darkened glass, stooped and pressed against the wall. Was he spying on her?