by Adam Millard
Tom turned to Wood and said, “We need to read that book.”
“I thought you’d already started to,” Wood replied.
“It’s very… it’s very wordy,” Tom said. And it was. There were all manner of words in it Tom didn’t understand. Sexagesimal? Heraclitean? Cuneiform? What did it all mean? Well, Tom had managed to get through the first chapter, and still he hadn’t a clue.
“Of course it’s wordy,” Wood said, scathingly. “It’s a book. What did you expect? Black-and-white pictures and a packet of crayons?” He must have realised that he was shouting, in a library, of all places, and took several deep breaths before continuing. “If we’re going to stop this sonofabitch, we need to know everything about it. Bring the book back to mine this evening and we’ll make a start—”
“Oh, you can start as soon as you like,” said Margaret, cheerfully. “You’ll never stop Him.”
Tom and Wood turned to the counter, to where Margaret Banks sat smiling. “How do you mean?” Tom asked.
The librarian’s smile turned altogether nastier, a grin, a sickeningly thin grin which seemed to stretch out the old lady’s wrinkles so that she was almost smooth. “You can’t stop Him. He’s going to come, and He’s going to make you suffer, and there’s nothing you can do to stop HIM YOU FUCKING CUNTS! YOU FUCKING CUUUUUUNNNNTS!” And then she was up, leaping onto the counter as lithe as a cat. She hissed like a cat, too. Her face was contorted into an expression of pure hatred, and black drool began to seep from her impossibly wide maw.
“It’s HIM!” Wood yelled, wheeling himself back, away from the counter, away from the crazed demon librarian tap-dancing upon it. “It’s Ghuul!”
Tom, who had staggered backward as the librarian had jumped up onto the counter, could not speak. All he could do was watch as the transformation continued, as the old lady’s spectacles fell from the creature’s nose, and her skin turned black—as if someone was scorching her with an invisible blowtorch—as her eyes burned red.
“FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!”, IT/He/she spat in staccato rhythm. “I’M COMING, AND I’M GOING TO RIP YOUR FUCKING HEARTS OUT! YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS!”
Tom was knocked even further away by the power of the creature’s voice. It was like being hit full-on in the face by a jet-engine. Even Wood was struggling to remain on four wheels as books and papers flew across the room. Shelves rattled and shook, threatening to fall over, creating a domino effect which would take years to clear up.
“COMING!” it said, and then it was moving across the counter, leaping over the archaic monitor, a stack of returned books, tendrils of black smoke whipping out behind it like a superhero’s cape, screaming as it went.
Before Tom could even move, before Wood realised what was about to happen, and before anyone else in the library—were they the only ones left to witness this madness? Where was the porno-perv from the computer room? The students? —had a clue what was happening, the thing that was once Margaret Banks leapt up into the air, propelling itself so high, so far away from the counter that Tom couldn’t watch what happened next.
He heard it, though.
A sickening thud, like meat being slapped down onto a butcher’s counter, and then the broken and twisted bones of Margaret Banks as they settled into place for the final time.
Then… silence.
TWENTY
October 30th, 2016
Bromley, London
Danielle stood, phone in hand, shaking nervously as she listened to everything her husband was telling her. Dead librarians, levitating ghouls, ancient books. She took it all in while her sister simply watched from across the room with her arms crossed and a telling smirk upon her face. Thank God the children were in bed. Danielle wouldn’t want them to see this, to see what was about to happen.
A tear streaked down her face as she screeched into the phone. “Stop!” More calmly. “Tom, please, just stop!”
And still he persisted, trying to convince her that every word falling from his lips was true, and not just some terrible psychosis. His words were all garbled, jumbled together until they made almost no sense to her.
This was her husband, the man she loved—still loved? —but he was different now. Unstable. Insane. How could she possibly believe a word he was saying, when everything that came out of his mouth sounded like something out of a terrible horror movie? How could she help him, when he wouldn’t help himself?
“Tom?” she interrupted once again. “Tom, I’m begging you, please. Call Doctor Kurian. He will help you, or at least point you in the direction of someone who might be able to.” The last thing she wanted was for the love of her life, the man she had wanted to start a family with, locked up in some secure facility, but if that was what it took to make him realise that none of this was real, that there was help out there for him if only he looked for it, then so be it.
Rebecca had had enough, apparently, and left Danielle standing there, trying to talk some sense into her frantic husband, who was now chuntering on about Halloween, about how something—the same thing which kidnapped his best friend back in 1988—was going to come back, and come back stronger than ever. Danielle could take it no more.
She hung up the phone.
She cried.
After almost ten minutes, she dried her eyes and dialled the mobile number of the only person she thought could help. He answered on the third ring. “Hello, Doctor Kurian speaking, how may I help you?”
Danielle sighed with relief. She didn’t think he would answer at this time of night. It was past eight; surely the good psychiatrist had better things to be getting on with than answering patient calls.
Seemingly not.
“Hi, yes, Doctor Kurian, it’s Danielle Craven, here. Tom Craven’s wife?”
For a moment there was only silence. Had Kurian forgotten who she was? Who Tom was? And then, “Ah, Mrs Craven! Is there a problem? Is Tom all right?”
Is Tom all right? Is Tom all right… erm, well, I’ve just had a conversation with him about ancient spirits and flying librarians, so no, I’d say he’s far from all right.
“I think Tom’s in trouble, Doctor,” Danielle said, wishing all this madness would just go away, and don’t ever darken my doorstep again.
“Trouble, Mrs Craven?” Kurian sounded calm. Of course he did; he was a psychiatrist. It was his job to remain collected while everyone around him lost their heads. It simply wouldn’t do to have a psychiatrist on the edge. But still, Danielle resented that calmness; she wanted him to panic, like she was. She wanted Kurian to leap up, throw on his trousers, and rush out to the car. She wanted him to drive over to the house with orderlies and strap Tom to a gurney so that he would no longer be a danger to himself.
“More than just trouble,” Danielle said. She told the doctor about how she was no longer living at home, how she had moved in with her sister—albeit temporarily—to allow Tom time to sort his life, and his head, out. The doctor told her that he already knew this from his prior meeting with Tom, and Danielle was relieved to hear that Tom had at least maintained the appointment. Lord knows she doubted he had. She told the doctor about how, over the past few days, Tom’s phone calls have become increasingly nonsensical, that he was talking about Mesopotamia and things that go bump in the night. How he had somehow convinced a man in a wheelchair—a former police Sergeant, of all things—that the things he was seeing were real, and that now they knew how they could beat it, or at least where to start. While she told Kurian all of this, he uhhmed and ahhed and responded monosyllabically. Rebecca had returned to the room and, after pouring herself a large chardonnay, stood in the corner, frowning like a chastised child as she listened to the conversation.
“I’m worried he’s going to do something stupid,” Danielle said, her story finally told. “I’m worried for my husband, Doctor, but I’m terrified to go over there in case… in case…”
“Do not go over there, Mrs Craven,” Kurian said. “If this is what I think it is, then your husband will need t
o ride it out for a while. Episodes like this—”
“Like what, Doctor Kurian?” Danielle needed to know. Needed to know what was wrong with her husband.
“I believe your husband has chronic hallucinatory psychosis, Mrs Craven.” He sighed; Danielle took that as a bad sign. “Your husband is seeing things and hearing things which are very real to him. These are not things of flesh, of substance to us, but to Tom they are a tangible and material threat.”
“So you’re suggesting I leave him to his delusions?” It sounded so cruel, so inherently wrong. Across the room, Rebecca was nodding. At least she agreed with what the doctor was telling her.
“I will try to make contact with him,” said Doctor Kurian. “If I can convince him to come and see me, we might be able to work out a course of treatment. You say he called you this evening?”
“Just now,” Danielle said.
“Then he is retaining insight. In other words, he knows what he is doing. Believe me, I have seen far worse cases than this. If we can assess and treat your husband, Mrs Craven, there is no reason why we can’t get this thing under control.”
When Danielle hung up the phone less than a minute later, she was paralysed and unable to speak. Rebecca was saying things to her, but none of it was sticking; she might as well have been—might very well have been—talking in a completely different language.
Back on the sofa, Danielle trembled and sipped at a glass of red wine she didn’t really want, but felt she needed. “It feels so wrong,” she said. “Tom’s sick, and there’s nothing I can do to help make him better.”
“You are helping,” Rebecca said. “The rest is up to him.”
That, Danielle thought, is exactly what I’m afraid of.
TWENTY-ONE
October 30th, 2016
Redbridge, London
For almost two hours Wood had been silently reading the book. Even as Tom called his wife, Wood pored over the pages of GHUUL: THE CHILDREN-EATER as if he were trying to select a pair of slacks from a shopping catalogue. Occasionally he would stop to take a sip of brandy—a bottle they had picked up from Wood’s as they stopped to collect the book—before delving right back in. He was nothing if not determined.
“Anything?” Tom was eager to know what Wood knew, and yet Wood seemed happy to be doing the legwork. When Wood found something relevant, Tom was certain he would be first to know about it, and yet he couldn’t relax, paced back and forth across the room.
“Will you sit down?” Wood said without looking up from the book. “You’re driving me crazy.”
Crazy? Crazy was planning to bring down an ancient Babylonian evil. Crazy was watching a geriatric librarian leap into the air so high that most of her frail bones snapped on impact with the ground. Crazy was what Danielle thought he was—he could tell by the way she spoke to him on the phone, how she kept deflecting back to Doctor Kurian—and that only served to make him even crazier.
“Have a drink,” Wood said, refilling his own glass. “It’ll calm your nerves.”
Tom had already considered it, but he didn’t want to walk along that dark path tonight, not while that thing was out there, stirring up chaos and getting stronger by the second. “I need to keep my head clear,” he told Wood.
“Suit yourself.” Wood went back to the book, and didn’t speak again for thirty minutes, but when he did it was with an excitement Tom had not heard from the man in days. “This is definitely our bogeyman!”
Tom, who had been smoking at the window—watching cats duel and neighbours drag their wheelie-bins to the ends of their drives—turned and said, “You sure?” He moved across the room, distinguishing his butt in the already over-spilling ashtray on the coffee table. “What does it say?”
Wood read over the paragraph he had just finished once again, perhaps for clarity. Once he was sure, he began to read from the page. Tom sat down in the armchair opposite and listened. “Ghuul endlessly consumes the souls of human children. His power grows alongside his collection; in other words, the more souls he has to feed upon, the more powerful he becomes.”
“But he only has four,” Tom said. Ryan, Cheryl, Harvey, and Rochelle, collected precisely seven years apart on the exact same night. If that was all it took to make the Ice Cream Man strong enough to possess people and drive them to suicide, he hated to think what the thing would be capable of in seven more years, or seven after that.
“In this incarnation he only has four,” Wood said. “This thing is centuries-old. It has been picking up souls for thousands of years. Every seven years for as long as you can imagine.”
Tom winced as if Wood’s words had caused him actual pain. “That’s a lot of kids.”
“The book says that whomever summons Ghuul shall only lead him until the next.”
“Lead him until the… what does that even mean?” Tom was confused, part of the reason why he hadn’t been able to get into the book himself.
“It means that Ghuul is endless, infinite, at least the demon is. If someone were to summon Ghuul right now, this instant, Frederick White’s evil soul would be forced out, expelled like a bad fart, go straight to Hell, do not pass go, do not collect two-hundred-pounds.”
“But Ghuul would go on?” Tom asked. “Within its new host?”
Wood nodded; Tom didn’t like where this was going. “That’s the gist of it.”
“So how do we stop it?” Tom asked, the brandy on the coffee table calling to him once again. He managed—just—to ignore it. “I mean, there’s got to be a way. There’s a way to kill every-fucking-thing if you look hard enough.”
Wood shook his head, flipped through the pages of the book. “If there is, I haven’t got to that chapter yet. I’ll keep looking, but you might want to get some rest. You’ll be no good to anyone tired, and—”
A knock at the door startled both of them. Wood gave Tom a were-you-expecting-anyone? look. Tom shook his head. But maybe… just maybe…
“Danielle,” Tom said. “It must be Danielle. She sounded concerned on the phone.” He was already moving toward the hallway.
“Is she going to be okay with us…” Wood trailed off there. Tom knew how the rest of the sentence went. Is she going to be okay with us doing all this weird shit in her house?
Without stopping, Tom called back across his shoulder. “She knows about it.” And while that was not the same as being okay with it, she would understand.
Tom didn’t even check, didn’t call out to make sure it was his wife standing there on the other side of the door. He simply turned the key, unlatched the chain, and pulled the door open, certain it would be her.
It was not.
“Hey, Tom?” said Marcus ‘The Banger’ Berry. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”
* * *
Tom couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe it so much that the brandy finally won, and he poured himself a large glass.
Marcus told Tom and Wood everything that had happened in the past week, how he had been attacked by the Ice Cream Man during his fight with Samuels Jr., and how Luke was over at St George’s, slightly worse-for-wear. He explained how Luke had almost strangulated his own daughter, believing her to be that thing—the shadowy beast they had not seen since they were kids—and how the poor bastard had been taunted by the creature yet again, this time in the form of his mother’s new live-in lover.
“Interesting,” Wood said.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Tom said. God, it was so good to see Marcus. They had been so close as kids, inseparable, living in each other’s pockets; latchkey kids, but that was okay back then. “I mean, I had a feeling this… this shit wasn’t just happening to me, but I didn’t think for one minute that you would actually come.”
Marcus appeared to be slighted by that remark for a moment, but then he smiled, and Tom relaxed once again. “You didn’t think I’d let you take on this sonofabitch on your own, did you?” he said. “I mean, no offence, but you were never the strongest out of us.”
Tom would have argued if it weren’t for the fact Marcus was telling the truth. Sure, he had been their self-appointed leader when they were twelve years old, but if it ever came to a fight—bullies, drunken tramps, older girls—Marcus was above him in the pecking order. Shit, even Luke was better at fighting than Tom. “And you made a living out of it,” Tom said. “You know, I’ve watched every single one of your fights, some at least twice.”
“You didn’t happen to see that prick Samuels Jr. sucker-punch me while I was being attacked by that demon, did you?” He was still annoyed about that; Tom could hear the fury in Marcus’s voice, no matter how hard he tried to stifle it.
Tom shook his head. “Missed that one. We’ve been a little busy, you know?” He motioned to Wood, who had returned to the book set out on the coffee table in front of him. He wasn’t paying attention to Tom or Marcus, and Marcus surreptitiously mouthed, Why’s he here? Of course, it had been Marcus’s house they had all gathered at after Ryan was abducted, and it had been Wood who had interrogated them. A lot had changed since then; Marcus needed to be brought up to speed.
Tom mouthed back: I’ll explain later. He didn’t want to interrupt Wood while he was reading.
“So, how ‘bout a glass of that brandy?” Marcus sat down; the armchair squeaked for mercy beneath him. He was a lot bigger than the last time Tom had watched him fight. Old age, he guessed. It was getting to all of them.
Without looking up, Wood said, “Help yourself, Banger.” There was a certain affection to the term, and Marcus took it as such. Tom fetched a clean glass from the kitchen, and by the time he returned Marcus and Wood were laughing and talking about boxing.
“What’d I miss?” Tom poured Marcus a brandy and handed it to him.
“I was just telling The Banger here that he once cost me my trousers in a bet.” Wood’s cheeks were red from laughter, shiny. It was, Tom thought, good to see. After everything they had been through these past few days, a little humour and banter would do them the world of good.