Only the Devil Is Here

by Stephen Michell

  “This way,” Rook said. “Follow me.”

  “Back into the woods?”

  “Yes. I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.”

  They crossed the road and entered a deep entanglement of wintered bramble. After a few steps, they reached an old wire fence forbidding trespassers and Rook stepped down on the top line, squashing the whole fence to the ground. He lifted Evan over and then stepped over himself. The fence sprang back up behind them. They walked.

  They crossed a low clearing and the snow was deep. The wind was down and no sounds carried. Dormant birch trees stood along the wings like the guardians of some sacred corridor, tall and white in the looming moonlight.

  Evan lifted his knees high with each step. Ahead of him, Rook walked buckled over on his right side, his arm pulled in against his flank, his steps pecking forward through the snow. Evan imagined Rook like a giant black bird, his breath lifting up above his head like wings.

  Their way led up a hill and the snow was finer and harder. They had to turn their feet at outward angles to wedge steps under the ice. Evan slipped twice and slid down before catching himself. Then he stood and stepped with his right foot and dug his heel into the ice first and planted his toe, then launched his left heel into the ice and again his right until he was running. When he passed Rook, he turned and looked at him and grinned, feeling proud of his achievement. Rook trudged on after him. At the top, Evan stood gulping air.

  They had reached the crest of a hill that rose above the canopy of the trees and they put their arms over their faces against the wind.

  They could see down the hill through the woods and in the distance a town. Evan looked out. Snaking among the trees, there was a hidden driveway leading up through the hills to a house. It was a huge mansion, towering, and dark.

  “Is that where we’re going?” Evan said.

  “No.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To a friend’s house.”

  “You have a friend?”

  Rook looked at Evan over the wind. “Yes,” he said. “Her name is August. You can trust her.”

  Evan gawked. “And she’s a girl?”

  “How are your feet?”

  “Really cold.”

  Over the tops of the trees the lights of the town in the distance shone. The moonlight gave an outline of buildings and a silhouetted globular water tower. Looking over the town, the glow of city lights drew from Evan a reminiscence neither resentful nor nostalgic, but rather a feeling of looking upon an old world. A world in which, somehow, he no longer truly lived. His eye was drawn to the faint glimmering of a surface of water, dark and winding below the trees.

  “Look, a river!” Evan said.

  Rook looked out, unimpressed.

  “Where does it go?” Evan asked.

  “Where all rivers go, I suppose. The ocean.”

  Evan nodded as if he should have known that.

  “Come on, we still have a ways to go.”

  “How far?” Evan had assumed they were almost done.

  “There’s a town over these hills. Shade’s Mills.” Rook turned his face out of the wind, planted both hands over his side.

  “You’re hurt bad,” Evan said. “But you said you could heal it.”

  “It’s deeper than I thought.”

  “Well then we have to get going. Come on, Rook!”

  Evan started along the top of the hill and then paused and waited for Rook to join him and lead the way. They came to a cluster of small poplars and there, using the bare branches as handholds, started down the opposite slope.

  Evan’s boots filled with snow as they descended and when he stopped at the bottom out of the wind to check them he found the rubber soles had torn open. They were shorn with ice.

  Rook looked back, gasping. “What’s wrong?” he called.

  “You keep going,” Evan said. “I’m okay. I’ll catch up.”

  “Lift your feet.”

  Evan hurried after him. They crossed the snowy flat and mounted another, lower rise. At the top Evan stopped and shook his feet in the air, but ice and snow clung to him. Inside his boots, his socks were soaked and stiff and he curled his toes to fight the numbness. The cold shot up his legs. He hurried after Rook, who was already descending the other side of the hill.

  • – – –

  After an hour they had crossed several rises and glades and they were stiff and tired and cold. Their sweat stuck like ice to their skin and their blood pumped like some heated elixir, keeping them going. The air hurt to breathe, stinging their throats.

  They descended one last hill and crossed a shallow, top-frozen stream and walked out through a final cluster of trees. At the edge of the wood they stopped and looked dismally upon the expanse of a barren, snowbound cornfield. But on the far side of the field they saw at last the moonlit outline of the town.

  It was built on a hill, leading up from the river several kilometres below to the east. Evan could see the pointed roofs of houses in rows at one end and square-shaped buildings in the middle of town, and then halfway up the hill there were small, snow-roofed dwellings, dark blue in the lunar light.

  “You see that one up on the hill,” Rook said. He raised his hand and pointed.

  Evan nodded.

  “That’s where we’re going.”

  “It’s still so far.”

  “It’s closer than it ever was before.”

  Hunkering against the sudden gusts of wind, they started across the cornfield. Rook trudged ahead. He breathed hard and rasping. He was curled right over at the waist, with both hands pressed tight against his wound.

  Behind him, Evan hobbled. The boy could not feel his feet. Only a numb sensation somewhere below his knees. He staggered against the wind. Then he stopped walking altogether.

  Rook glanced back and yelled. “Come on, Evan. Don’t stop.”

  “Rook . . . my feet.”

  “Come on. Lift your legs.”

  Evan looked down at his feet in the snow. Tears welled in his eyes. “I can’t,” he yelled. “I can’t, Rook!”

  Rook trudged back through the snow, the wind slamming into his back. When he was within arm’s reach of Evan he pulled his hands from his side and a pain shot through his abdomen that made him roar and drop to one knee. Evan called out his name.

  The pain flared again and Rook fell onto his side in the snow. He was below the force of the wind, breathing raggedly. The tearing, ripping pain came whenever he tried to move. From under him, a dark pool was spreading over the snow.

  Evan dropped down beside him, terrified and frozen, not feeling his face, his hands, his legs, hearing only his own heartbeat in his ears. Rook thought Evan was shouting his name, but his voice seemed far away.

  A gust of wind swirled up from the field and Evan ducked his head and shut his eyes. The world around him became nothing but the timeless, incensed screaming of the cold that erased everything but the thumping in his ears. Tears froze on his cheeks in the wind. His heart beat rapidly. A clear double beat.

  And then a voice came to him. Evan heard it and felt it as if he himself had spoken.

  “It’s okay. I have you. Let me help.”

  When he moved it was to the double beat of his heart. He took hold of Rook’s arm, pulling him up, lifting his great weight to that steady beat and call.

  And again the voice came. This time Evan heard it clear in his ears. There might as well have been someone standing next to him whispering, but there wasn’t. The voice was moving through Evan. It was coming out of him, speaking clearly.

  “Good, Evan. Find the strength. I have you.”

  He slid underneath Rook, so the man was on his back. And somehow Evan was crawling. And then he was walking. Blind in the wind and oblivious to the ice splintering across his face or the weight of Rook on his back, he carried the man and himself like he was floating.

  There was only his heartbeat, his heartbeat.

  August Jones was not sleeping. She lay in
bed with her gaze upon the high, white stucco of the ceiling, following the concentric intricacies round and round, waiting for something. She could not say what it was, only that the pull of sleep had not visited her this night and instead she lay awake, neither restless nor worried, but simply aware of some imminent occurrence for which it was wise to be awake. It reminded her of her earliest encounters with ghosts.

  She sat up and reached to her nightstand for a slim, gold-trimmed case embossed with the inner workings of a clock. She opened it and slid out a cigarette, closed it, and exchanged the case on the stand for a small black lighter. The flame cast the shadow of her hands on the bed cover. Then she placed the lighter down and leaned back into the pillows and smoked.

  She had started smoking when she was thirteen, in middle school. One of the older girls had made a comment that August had the jitters. August hadn’t known what that meant exactly, something similar to what they called cooties, perhaps. The older girl opened her purse and presented a cigarette and told August it would help with her jitters. Oddly, it did, curing August of an ailment she had never known she possessed until they were gone.

  Thinking back, her jitters had started when she was eleven years old, the night she saw the black thing come down the hallway. She had been kept awake that night, not from restlessness but rather a premonition that there was some reason to stay up. As the hours had passed, sleep pulled at her and it had become a struggle to keep her eyes open. In the daze of half-sleep, she had started to dream, but it had felt different. It was a vision. She’d seen the bathroom down the hall from her bedroom, and there had been a dark figure standing in the doorway.

  She’d known she was lying in her bed, and she couldn’t possibly see down the hall. But there it was before her eyes. She’d tried to stop it, to wake up, to turn over, sit up, but her body wouldn’t move. The black figure in the doorway had turned towards her. It had hung in the air like a large wet shroud, dripping and evaporating into trails of black smoke. Then it had rushed down the hall towards her.

  August’s screams had been muted, but she had shaken madly and kicked her legs until at last she’d broke free from the grip that pinned her and she’d sat up, fully awake. Her whole body had trembled, still reeling from the final moment of the nightmare where the black thing had knelt beside her bed, its long arm reaching to cover her mouth. But that had just been a dream.

  The thing that she’d seen standing clear in the lamplight of her room when she’d woken was a ghost, long and black and shivering as if trapped in a freezer. That was when her jitters began. But smoking helped.

  August stamped out the cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand. She checked the time on her cell-phone: 3:32 a.m.

  Any minute now, she thought.

  When she heard the knocking on the window of her front door, she got up, slid her feet into her slippers, and walked downstairs.

  Outside her front door she saw the small, tear-streaked face of a young boy, and beside him on the ground an unconscious man who she knew right away was Rook.

  – • •

  August flung open the door.

  “My god,” she said. “What’s happened? Is he okay?”

  Evan said nothing. He started trying to drag Rook into the house. August helped him and they managed to slide him across the foyer and into the kitchen beside the wooden island. August looked at the blood on her palms. Then shook her head.

  “Get his coat off,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She left the kitchen, her nightgown flowing behind her.

  Evan knelt beside Rook and slowly raised the man’s hands from where they lay rigid and ice-cold against his chest. He unbuttoned the coat but then stopped. Rook’s beard was wet with melted snow and his eyes were closed. Evan thought he looked dead.

  August returned to the kitchen with a pillow.

  “I told you to get his coat off,” she said.

  Evan looked up and his eyes were rounded with tears. He sniffled.

  “Oh, it’s going to be all right,” August said as she knelt down beside Rook, opposite the boy. “He’s been through worse.”

  Evan wiped his eyes. August lifted Rook’s head and slid the pillow underneath.

  “You stupid old fool,” she said, and then, “Come on, help me get his coat off.”

  They lifted him up onto one elbow at a time and slipped his coat off and eased him back down. Rook’s shirt was stained with sweat and soaked almost black with blood along his side.

  “Let me see,” August said.

  The cloth was stuck with ice and blood to his skin.

  “Get a cup of warm water.”

  Evan hopped to his feet and grabbed a glass from the rack at the sink and ran the tap and stood there waiting for it to warm and looked down at Rook and wished his eyes would open. When the water turned hot he shook his hand away from the stream and filled the glass. The water looked murky and the glass was warm when he handed it to August. She poured it generously over Rook’s side, loosening the cloth. Rook lay still.

  When she pulled the shirt back she shuddered. Just below Rook’s ribcage on the right side the slashed red flesh looked like a bloody sinkhole that sucked open with each filling of his slow breath. The surrounding skin was red and swollen and a dark bruise stretched all across his abdomen. August pulled a tea towel from the rung on the side of the kitchen island.

  “It’s really bad,” Evan said.

  “It doesn’t look good, that’s for sure. But he’s breathing.”

  “What do we do?”

  Evan stood over August’s shoulder with his fists clenched beside his head. He stared down at the wound, unblinking.

  All of a sudden, Rook reached and grabbed August’s hand as she gently dabbed the wound with the cloth. She jolted and screamed. Rook’s eyes opened and he looked up at her. The hardness of his expression relaxed.

  Then he looked past her and saw Evan and his eyes widened with some revelation, and he seemed, for a moment, afraid. He turned his eyes back to August.

  “I hope we didn’t wake you,” he said.

  “Of course not.”

  “I need you to stitch me up.”

  “No shit,” August said and shook her head. She drew a breath and pulled back her hair and wound it into a tight bun with a hair elastic from her wrist. Then to Evan, “Get some more water, I’ll be right back.”

  Evan filled the glass again and returned. He knelt at Rook’s side.

  “Do you want something to bite?”

  “What?”

  “I saw it in a movie. A guy bit on a stick when something hurt a lot.”

  “I’ll be fine.” Rook looked at the ceiling. His mind was back in the cornfield, trying to remember what had happened, what he’d heard, and how he’d ended up on August’s kitchen floor.

  August returned with a blue and white polka-dot sewing basket and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. She knelt at Rook’s side and opened the basket and removed a spool of black thread and a packet of needles and carefully threaded a two-inch needle.

  “I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she said.

  “There’s a hole. Just close it up.”

  “I want to wash it all with the alcohol first.”

  Evan sat watching August’s hands as she twisted the cap from the plastic bottle. The careful movements of her fingers gave him a warm, pleasing sensation all through his body. It was a pleasant distraction, but he was worried about Rook. The stab was really bad. Evan’s face flushed and tingled. The sensation in him became more than pleasing. It was invigorating.

  Evan’s heart skipped. His breath was hot in his throat. He had an urge to run outside, to breathe in the night air. But he couldn’t leave Rook. His eyes jumped fast to the window above the kitchen sink from where he thought he’d heard someone call out his name.

  “Rook, I can’t do this,” August said.

  “Yes, you can, just focus.”

  “No, I mean I can’t. My hand is shaking.”

  Evan slid closer to
Rook on his knees, and Rook looked up at him.

  Evan’s eyes were the colour of rust.

  When Evan reached out his hand, Rook flinched away, thinking again of the cornfield, the wind blowing, and the voice that had spoken.

  “It’s okay, Rook,” Evan said. “I’m here. Let me help.”

  “What are you doing?” August asked.

  Evan placed his hand flat over the gash in Rook’s side, pressed gently with his weight.

  “Rook?” August asked, watching Evan’s hand.

  Rook said nothing. His whole stomach and chest had warmed the instant Evan’s hand had touched him. With his head propped up on the pillow, Rook watched Evan’s hand as it began to glow.

  “Oh my god,” August said. “What’s he doing?”

  They were all in awe, Evan most of all.

  “Rook,” August pleaded. “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s calling the night,” Rook said.

  “I’m like you, Rook.” The tone of triumph in Evan’s voice was matched only by his own surprise.

  “Yes, I see, Evan.” The pain was leaving Rook, far faster than he’d ever been able to heal himself. It was like Evan’s hand was a sponge. He could feel the tingling, indescribable part when flesh fuses back together. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s enough, Evan.”

  Evan lifted his hand away. He was beaming, and his eyes had returned to a natural brown. Rook’s wound had transformed from a deep puncture to a shallow cut.

  Evan stood, then turned and went out of the kitchen into the dining room. He wobbled, as if drifting with sudden exhaustion. Rook and August watched him and then Rook let out his breath.

  “Okay,” August said. “What the hell was that?”

  “I’ll explain. I’ll explain everything. But first let’s get Evan something to eat.”

  On the living room floor in front of the roaring fireplace, Rook lay on his back and Evan sat beside him. Rook had a pillow under his head. Evan had taken off his socks and stretched his legs out toward the heat of the fire, wiggling his toes.

  The flickering light was bright on Evan’s face, dancing in his brown eyes as he watched the flames. On the floor next to him was an almost empty bowl with the remains of shepherd’s pie caked to the inside. Evan had eaten two big bowls and drunk three glasses of water. Rook had also eaten, which had been a surprise to both of them.