by Deck Davis
Different times, a different future. It was funny the paths life laid out for you. A left hook at the wrong time, at the wrong guy, on the wrong part of his head.
“Nobody’s home,” said Wren.
“Looks that way. But we knew that, didn’t we? If this is the point of entry, the demon’s taken his vessel already, and he’s long gone.”
“Are you picking anything up?”
I pointed my demon eye at the house.
Aura detected. Strength: 4%
Power accumulated: 38% [62% to level 2]
“It’s faint, but there’s something.”
“Then we’re here in time. We need to get in and look for any sign we can find. If I can narrow the signs down to even 2 or 3 demons, at least we have a vague idea who we’re dealing with.”
“There might be a security system,” I said.
Wren shook his head. “The demon took the owner of the house as a vessel. You can bet on that. He’s gone now, and he won’t have done anything so human as setting the alarm before he went. Their minds don’t work that way.”
I guessed he was right. Even so, even knowing the entity probably wasn’t here, the house filled me with a chill, and I wished it wasn’t just the two of us. Molly had always seemed more confident, more in command of things than me or Wren.
“What do you think the Grandmaster wanted?” I said.
He shrugged. “I’ve never spoken to him. Molly’s always been his contact.”
“And she’s never seen him?”
“If she has, and I doubt it, she hasn’t told me. I’m just the Loremaster.”
“Well let’s not waste any more time. I hate this place.”
“I thought you used to live around here?”
“I did, and I hated it. People like me don’t fit in around here. Me and you aren’t as different as you think.”
Just as Wren had promised, the demon hadn’t set an alarm before leaving the house. I was thankful for that, at least. We got in through the back door, which was unlocked, and found ourselves in a kitchen larger than any I’d ever seen. There was a marble island counter in the center, and when moonlight shone through the wide windows it glinted on the surface, lighting faintly over a pile of letters. Bills, I guessed, and I doubted the demon had settled his vessel’s electricity bills before leaving the house to wreak havoc.
Leaving the kitchen, I looked around for any sign that the demon had been here. Instead, all I saw were the decorations the occupant had chosen to hang. There were framed posters in the hallway leading out of the kitchen, glass frames with vintage posters of old boxing matches. Ali vs Foreman. Bowe vs Holyfield. Tunney vs Dempsey. Some of them I’d watched on tv as a kid, others I’d had to watch on the internet, grainy footage of old legends duking it out. It was watching guys like that that had drawn me deeper into the sport, elevating it from just a hobby I practiced so I could get fit and feel good about myself, and turning it into a passion.
We crossed into the living room. Here, we saw signs of life. Nobody was there, of course, but there was a half-drunk bottle of low-strength beer on a coffee table. In each corner of the room were some kind of brass tubes, the metal almost golden. Maybe they were some kind of modern art sculptures, I didn’t know. They looked ugly to me. But then, Glora always said that even when I got rich enough to leave my old estate, the poor-family aesthetic had stayed with me. I didn’t have the tastes of a rich guy.
The centre piece of the room was a grand fireplace, big enough for me to climb inside and stand upright, if there was ever any reason. Not that I would; seeing rats climb out of the fireplace in the cottage had given me an aversion to them.
Above the fireplace there was more memorabilia; this piece a WEC world championship belt, silver on the edges and gold in the middle. A replica. It must have been. But then again, I thought back to what I’d had to do to make ends meet, to having to sell a few of my British belts to pay the bills. Maybe the rich owner of Stopwatch House had bought the belt on eBay. I eyed it greedily. I’d never had the chance to fight for a world belt. Maybe this was the only way I’d ever have one; I could just pop out the nails from the wall and take it. I’d fasten it around my waist and wear it when we left the house. I’d leave Stopwatch House as a world champion.
Wren hovered by the doorway. He reached for a light switch.
“No,” I told him.
Too late. He flicked the switch, but nothing happened.
“Electricity is off,” he said.
“Good thing. We hardly want to light the place up. Have you seen anything?”
“Nothing.”
I cast my demon eye around the room.
Aura detected. Strength: 2%
Power accumulated: 39% [61% to level 2]
“It’s getting fainter,” I said.
“I think we’re too late. Whatever was here, it’s long gone.”
He was right. There was a stillness to the house, a suggestion that we were the only people to set foot in it in days. It left me wondering why the demon had chosen this house, why’d he’d taken its owner as his vessel. He was just a rich guy. A guy who drank low-strength beer in moderation, by the looks of things, and enjoyed the sport I used to love. A guy who took pride in hanging memorabilia on his walls. Maybe he lived alone. It certainly didn’t look like a family lived here. So, he was alone, and he spent his nights in front of the tv because even though he was rich he didn’t like being a socialite, he didn’t like the bars where everyone bragged about stock deals and pension funds, where they drank champagne and tried to one-up each other by boasting about how many cars they had. The owner of Stopwatch House just wanted to be left alone, to enjoy his fortune in peace, to watch fights on tv and maybe get a buddy or two over for the big events. That was how I imagined him, anyway. As a regular guy who just happened to be rich. So why him? Why had he been taken as a vessel?
Wren elbowed me in the ribs. “Joshua.” He nodded at the brass tube in the far-left corner of the room.
“The hell?” I said.
The hollow top of the tube in the far-left corner was glowing red, almost like the end of a cigarette. No heat came from it, but the light grew brighter, burning. It crackled, and more crackles joined it, and I saw that all four of the tubes had lit up now.
Wren grabbed me, his face alarmed. “We need to get out. Now.”
“What is it?”
It was too late. Burning red light rose from each tube and then spread out like walls, joining each tube together to form a square around us. Four walls of light that looked like burning flames. I approached one but I couldn’t feel any heat.
“Don’t touch it,” said Wren.
“What is it?”
Before he could answer, a face formed in the light-wall nearest to me. It was a shadow of a face, an image lacking definition but just clear enough for me to make out the hint of two slanted eyes and a wide mouth. The mouth was open, as if the owner of the face was screaming.
Faces formed in each wall now, hundreds of them all packed tight together. I heard a rush of flames, and then the silent screams stopped being silent, and I heard the noises now. Cries of pain, roars of anger, long, drawn out wails of torment.
And the walls began to close in on us.
“It’s a trap,” said Wren.
The word sent a flare of adrenaline through me. I saw it now; the way the walls buzzed with menace, the agony-filled faces getting closer and closer as the walls closed in.
“What happens when it touches us?”
“We die, I’m guessing. Something bad, anyway. I told you, it’s a trap.”
“How are we supposed to get out if we can’t touch it?”
Wren reached into his pocket and pulled out a collection of stones. He picked through each one, his movements frantic.
“I don’t have anything I can use,” he said. His voice was edged with panic now.
I looked around. The walls of doomed faces, of heatless fire, closed further. They were a few feet away now. I
didn’t know if I should chance it. What else was there to try? I could take a gamble and try and walk through, but I even as I had the thought, I let it pass. Wren knew more about this than me. If he said it was a trap, if he said touching it could be fatal, I had to listen.
But we couldn’t just stand there and die.
Wren crossed his arms, hugging himself. His body had taken the flight option over fight, and now he couldn’t move, like he was accepting his fate. His face looked like the silhouetted faces of terror in the trap walls now; scared, worried, staring into the darkness of fate. His hands were shaking, I saw. He’d clenched his fists, but his hands still shook.
I looked at my own fist. At my southpaw, at the demon flesh welded onto my own.
That was it.
The walls fenced us in. The ceiling was too high to reach. But the floor…
It was the only chance we had.
I kneeled down. I touched the wooden laminate floor. It felt cold. I raised my fist and in my mind I tried to picture my Melt ability, tried to imagine what it looked like, how it would feel.
The demon flesh glowed hot against my own skin. My clenched fist vibrated, the feeling running over my fingers and to my wrist and then up my arm, setting my whole body on edge.
As the walls closed in further, leaving just a foot between us, I raised my fist and smashed it into the floor.
The laminate flooring melted at my touch. It sizzled, and smoke rose from it. The laminate turned gooey as though acid was eating through it.
I punched again and again, turning in a circle and smashing holes into the flooring, melting chunks of it away at a time.
Finally, I’d smashed through enough that the structure weakened, and suddenly I was falling, and Wren was falling with me, and we both tumbled down into darkness.
I landed with a crash. It sucked the air out of me, and agony shot through my spine. I heard Wren groan, and I looked up to see little pieces of wood falling on me, pattering on my head.
The living room was above us now, the trap walls closed in completely and hovering over the hole I’d melted with my fist. Darkness swam over my vision, so thick I felt like I could breathe it in. When I did, I smelled dust and oil, and when I put my hand out to try and get to my feet, I touched cold stone.
It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but even then, I could barely see through the shadows. I saw the faint outline of a wooden workbench fixed to a wall. There was a wooden cork board behind it, where hammers and screwdrivers and drills were held in place by nails. Over in the corner there was a punchbag, the bag red and bulbous and crumpled from where it had been hit again and again.
“Must be a basement,” I said.
Wren groaned.
“You okay?”
He groaned again.
Looking around, I saw that he was to my right. He hadn’t gotten up yet, and I wondered if he’d broken something in the fall. I kneeled beside him, and that was when I saw it.
He’d landed on a four-inch nail sticking out of the stone floor. Maybe it had been used to hold something in place at some point, but whatever it held was long gone, and now the nail stuck deep into Wren’s thigh.
I touched his leg. He winced and flinched away from me. “Don’t touch me.”
“We need to get you up.”
“No. Don’t touch me. It’s sticking in my leg.”
“Take a breath,” I said. “I’m pulling you up on three. One…two…”
“Wait! Give me a second…Okay.”
“One…two…”
“Wait!”
“Damn it, Wren. Suck it up. We can’t stay here.”
“Okay go.”
“One…two…”
I didn’t count to three. I pulled his right leg upwards, heaving it away from the spike. Wren cried out, and his face twisted in agony, but I got him free. I helped him up to his feet.
“We need to leave.”
“But the signs…we haven’t found anything.”
“Whatever happened up there…we can’t stay. Who knows what else is waiting? Come on.”
We left the basement via a set of wooden stairs, and after unbolting a door, we found ourselves back in the hallway. From there I led the way through to the kitchen, with Wren hobbling behind me.
Just as I was about to leave the house, I glanced at the marble island in the center of the kitchen. I saw the piles of envelopes, un-opened. But there, sticking out in the middle, was a page of lined paper, with what looked like a name and a telephone number.
Something tugged at me then. The sense. Not of darkness, but something else.
I grabbed the paper, and when I looked at the word written on it, a cold shudder ran through me.
Molly.
I searched my jeans pockets, but they were empty. I pulled my wallet from my back pocket, opened it, and found a little receipt. A receipt for vodka with Molly’s name and number in her hand writing on the back. The same handwriting as what was on the paper.
Chapter Eleven
We left the estate under the kind of dismal sky only a place like Manchester could conjure. I led the way, and Wren hobbled on a wounded leg and took labored breaths as he tried to catch up. With the plaster on his cheek and the hole in the thigh of jeans, he looked like the kind of guy the Manchester police would lock in a cell for the night. The kind of guy who’d had a few too many tequilas and all the frustration in his life had come brimming to the surface, fueled by alcohol, and he’d gotten into a fight.
He struggled to walk, but we couldn’t call a cab yet. We needed to get away from the estate first, because if there was ever two guys who’d raise suspicion in a place like this, it was us. Beaten-up, clothes covered in dirt and dust, me still wearing faint hints of bruises from my fight with Franz Huck, Wren looking like he’d tussled with a steroid-infused rhino.
We were ten minutes outside of the estate when Wren stopped walking. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s hurting like hell.”
“There’s a bus stop over here,” I said. “We’ll take one to the city.”
As soon as I said the words, something gave me pause. City buses had CCTV. It was there to protect the driver from drunken passengers causing a scene when they tried to get on the bus for free and the driver said no, or to provide evidence for the police when fights broke out among inebriated passengers getting into an argument on the way home. I had the dim idea in my head that we didn’t want to get caught on camera tonight. Not without our Cleanser, anyway. After all, we’d broken into a house on one of the richest estates in Manchester, and if the house owner - the vessel - turned up dead somewhere, I didn’t want there to be anything connecting Wren and I to it.
“How long does the ward last?”
“The quartzite? A few hours.”
“Good. We should be okay.”
I wondered what would happen to CCTV while our ward protected us from it. Would the video pick anything up? Would we be faceless blurs, or would there just be empty space where our beaten-up figures should have showed? What if I picked up something, maybe one of the newspapers they left for free at the front of every bus, piled up neatly in the morning but strewn everywhere by the time the last bus of the night headed back to the depot. Would it look like the newspaper was floating on its own?
There was so much to think about with all of this stuff. Wards, demons, signs, vessels. I’d never felt more of a stranger to it all than I did right then. That was because deep down, I knew that all my stupid thoughts about ghosts reading newspapers and what would happen to us on video, they were all sidetracking me from the one thing I had to think about, but didn’t want to.
I hadn’t shown the note to Wren yet. The truth of it all was in my pocket, a name and number on a scrunched-up sheet of paper, written in Molly’s handwriting.
I felt sick. I tried to think of something to explain it, but I couldn’t. What possible reason could there be for a note written by Molly to be in the house? Not just a house, though. The house w
here a Mighty had taken a vessel. How long had it been there? It was sandwiched between a pile of mail, so it could have been there for days. But why?
All I could think about now was Wren. Poor, beaten-up Wren, with the nasty bite on his face and the nail hole in his thigh. The guy with skin a sickening shade of pale because he hardly left the bunker, because the bunker was his life, one that had taken him away from the poor background he obviously didn’t like to talk about.
Capgrove had been like a brother to Wren, Molly said. And she was like a big sister. I’d seen it clearly, the bond between them. Wren had lost someone close to him already, so how was he going to react when I showed him the note? That would leave him with just me, with the outsider, the new Banisher who he’d held in contempt from day one because I’d taken the place of someone close to him.
“I just don’t get it,” said Wren. “A trap like that…only a demon could have left it. That never happens, Joshua. They’re always so keen to leave their points of entry. I told you – they’re like dogs in cages. They don’t hang around. They don’t set traps. They can’t, usually. When they first take a vessel, it takes a while to adjust. They don’t have their full powers for a while.”
“Could anyone else have left it?” I said, knowing what I’d have to tell him.
“Like who?”
“Like Molly.”
“What?”
He looked at me now with wide, surprised eyes. But they quickly became slants, and I could see the suspicion in the way he stared at me.
No going back now.
I took both notes from my pocket; the one Molly had given me in the hospital waiting room, and the one I’d found in Stopwatch House. I explained how I’d gotten both, and I told him what they might mean. I told him about what Trickerie the demon had said, about how one of the hunters had worked with the demons and helped bring the Mighty into the world.