Hellfire

by Jeff Provine

  Nate took up his club and hit him again right on the wrist.

  Parvis shrieked. He dropped his head again and waved his arm, holding it with the other. He ran in a circle.

  Nate followed him and hit him again.

  Parvis fell, and Nate hit him over and over. He wasn’t certain why, but he had to crush the short man. Maybe it was fear. Maybe wrath after what Parvis had done to him in the airship. Yet, deep down, he truly felt he had to destroy him because he was evil. He wanted to rid the world of evil.

  “Nathan!” a voice called. It was the nurse. “Run!”

  Nate looked up. Biggs was nearly on top of him. The giant’s red eyes glared out from behind the broken lenses of his mask.

  The giant hunchback already had a fist wheeled back. His enormous boots hit the ground as loudly as Nate’s pounding of Parvis had rung.

  It was too late to try to duck and retreat. Instead, Nate tucked down his head and lunged forward.

  The fist hit him squarely in the middle of the back. Nate let out a loud cry before he ran into Biggs’s leg with his face and shoulder. The giant’s boot came up, flinging Nate backward.

  Tangles of branches and leaf-strewn forest floor whipped past his vision. The ground caught up with him, and soft dirt slammed into his face. Still he rolled, finally coming to a stop against the base of a tree.

  Nate looked around himself. Biggs stood over Parvis, who still rolled on the ground. He couldn’t see the nurse, and he hoped she had gotten away.

  Nate picked up his hands. Little bits of decayed wood stuck to them. He had lost his club. He searched for a new weapon, any weapon, but there was none.

  The sound of leather shuffling made him look up. Biggs had lifted Parvis by the collar. His stocky feet dangled for a moment before they found their place on the moist ground. His leather coat was open.

  Parvis didn’t have a neck, just a clean set of shoulders. Its flesh was gray and smooth. Beneath his coat, there was an enormous face splayed out upside-down over his torso. Just beneath his collar, an enormous mouth had a few huge square teeth jutting out of it. Where his stomach should have been, eyes the size of fists were set wide beneath a stubby nose.

  The little hunchback truly was a monster. When Nate had kicked Parvis in the side earlier, his foot had actually landed in the hellion’s eye. He had been peering through thin cloth patches Nate had thought were just decorative stripes on the coat.

  Biggs looked down at Parvis and said something in a language Nate didn’t know. It rumbled and groaned, making his head ache as he heard it.

  Yet he had heard it before. Sometimes the fire whispered things to him on the train in English. Other times, it wailed with these horrid sounds. He had never thought of them as a language.

  Parvis squeaked back. Nate could see his huge mouth wag as he spoke.

  Biggs took off his wide-brimmed hat with one hand and pulled off his leather mask with the other, freeing his horrible bat-face and dropping the last shards of dark glass. Nate winced and tucked himself closer to the tree.

  Both of the hunchbacks peeled off the rest of their clothes, revealing twisted bodies beneath. Parvis’s arms were black and covered in matted hair. He tottered out of his boots to reveal another set of hands instead of feet.

  Biggs’s ugliness was almost beautiful, which somehow made it all the worse. His hands and feet both ended in claws. The huge mound at his back, which anyone at a glance would have thought was a misshapen spine, was actually a pair of wings. Biggs pulled two leather strands, and the wings unfolded on spines that extended from his shoulders.

  A wave of rotting stench from them washed over Nate. The nurse was right: he should have kept running. He told his body to move, but it refused, stiff and frozen as if all his limbs had fallen asleep.

  What he saw was impossible. Nate wanted to let his eyes close and not open them again. Monsters weren’t real. He had been mistaken before, just seen things. This wasn’t real.

  A voice rang clearly in his ears. Stop thinking such things.

  Nate looked up. No one had been there. Yet, he knew the voice. It was the light that had spoken to him when he fell.

  And it was right. He had to stop running away from what was real.

  “Help me,” he whispered.

  Biggs and Parvis both looked over at him.

  Why am I whispering? Nate muttered. He cleared his throat and shouted out to the light, “I need your help!”

  The hunchbacks growled and walked toward him.

  Nate didn’t know what to expect to happen. Perhaps lightning or fiery stones would fall from the sky and wipe out the monsters. Maybe the Lord would send an angel with a sword of pure light that would cleave them in two.

  Nothing happened.

  Nate swallowed deeply. His voice shook this time. “Please!”

  Parvis made a squealing laugh. Biggs pulled his leathery lips back from his disjointed fangs in a grin.

  A log appeared over Biggs’s head, swooping furiously downward. It met Biggs’s skull with a deafening crack. Splinters flew in every direction. Biggs fell to the ground, landing face-first in a heap. Behind him, nurse Ozzie stood, holding what remained of the enormous branch that had felled the giant.

  Nate was impressed she was able to lift it at all.

  Parvis shrieked and turned toward Ozzie with his long arms outstretched.

  Nate didn’t give him the chance. He pushed himself off the tree and tackled the short hunchback.

  Parvis flailed underneath his arms, but Nate kept up his grip. The monster’s feet-hands grabbed his legs and scratched. The dirty nails bit into his bare legs where the gown didn’t cover.

  There was another loud crack. The monster gave a loud grunt, and his grip loosened. Nate pushed him away and struggled to his feet. Ozzie stood there with a new branch.

  A groan and shuffling sound came from behind Nate. He turned, seeing the other monster’s leathery wings flapping. Biggs was getting back up.

  Nate grabbed a piece of the branch Ozzie had whacked Biggs with and slammed it down onto the fallen giant’s head. He turned back to the nurse even before he heard it crack.

  “Let’s go!” he yelled and grabbed her hand again.

  Ozzie said something, but Nate didn’t quite hear it. After they had gone a few yards, he glanced at her while they ran. “What?”

  “Monsters,” she said. Her voice was shaky even beyond gasping for air.

  Nate nodded. He didn’t know what else to do.

  “Monsters!” Ozzie screamed. “You were telling the truth!”

  He looked at her again. Her eyes were wide, and tears streamed out of them. If he had nearly given up after what he had seen yesterday, Nate could only imagine what she felt. He squeezed her hand tight. “I know.”

  She looked up at him. Her feet slowed down, but he tugged her back into running.

  Nate risked a glance backward through the trees. Parvis was next to Biggs, dragging him to his enormous clawed feet. Without their heavy leather coats that disguised their monstrous forms, they had nothing to slow them down.

  He focused back on the trail ahead. Glimmers of light shone through the trees. Just as Ozzie had said, they were not far from the edge of the woods.

  They broke into sunshine. It washed over Nate like a warm bath. He took several gulps of the delicious warmer, drier air.

  The woods parted because of the road that led out from the town of Oak Grove. A telegraph wire ran above it on tall wooden poles. Beyond the edge of the trees from where they had circled, he could see the top of the brick hospital walls and the canvas balloon of the Rail Agency airship. Nate turned back at the woods, wondering how long until the monsters were upon them again.

  “Look,” Ozzie said.

  He spun around.

  A rider was coming up the road. His horse frothed, over-worked, but it was a horse nonetheless. Nate pulled Ozzie and hurried toward it.

  The rider was older, and Nate could see from the dust all over his trousers that he
had come a long way. It didn’t matter how far he’d come, he had to hand over the horse and walk the rest of the way to the hospital.

  They could take it and ride double into town. There they might be able to trade it for a fresh horse. Then , they could warn everyone about what was coming.

  When they were close enough, Nate called out, “We need your horse!”

  The rider didn’t reply. He pulled the reins back and stared at them.

  “Did you hear me?” Nate asked. Before he could go on, he recognized the rider and blinked.

  It was the sheriff from Bastrop.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Clancy Blake had nearly ridden the horse to death.

  True to his word, the messenger boy had taken him to his uncle’s livery stable, but the man had a keen mind for business and could tell Blake was desperate. It had meant clearing out his wallet, but Blake had the best horse in the place.

  It was fifteen miles to Oak Grove, and then just a little more to the State Mental Hospital. He had ridden steadily over the past few hours, breaking just once for the poor horse to catch her breath and get a drink of water from a farmer’s pond. Blake didn’t know what he would do with her once he got there, but he would worry about that later. Right now, he had to find Kemp.

  In the last leg of the trip, he had seen the Rail Agency airship cross overhead. Blake had gotten a good head start thanks to the messenger, but there wasn’t much he could do against the right of way an airship had in the sky. Instead, he pressed the horse. She seemed to know something was very wrong and did her best to hurry.

  The morning had turned into afternoon while Blake was on the road. His lunch had been the little jerky he kept in his wallet for such occasions. It wasn’t much, but it would get him through to dinner without hunger pangs. He knew better than to wonder where dinner would come from.

  Blake had made it to Oak Grove before the horse really began giving out. It was a sleepy little town, like Bastrop, where the daily excitement was the whistling of the trains coming through four times a day. It was a far cry from the bustling industrial center of Lake Providence, where he’d spent the morning. He had nearly run over ten people as he raced to get out of the city. They were racing, too, in their own busy lives.

  People were just as bad out west in Shreveport’s boisterous lumberyards. Blake could only imagine what Tom Husk was doing out in Shreveport; he might have even been on his way back to Bastrop by now on the noon train, unless he had stuck around for some of the river-port’s excitement.

  Oak Grove was quiet when Blake charged through it as fast as his weary horse would let him. A few people stood on boardwalks while Blake rode past. He waved to a few to show he was all right, though he wondered if he might raise some kind of alarm about the corruption in the Rail Agency, despite being out of his jurisdiction. He had thought about calling on the Oak Grove sheriff, a youngish fellow named Tewman, but by the time he convinced him to get a posse together, the rail agents would have Kemp and be long gone.

  His horse took the last leg of the journey more slowly, panting and taking breaks to walk despite Blake’s spurs. Blake had also thought about finding an inn and trading out the horse, but there wasn’t time. The asylum wasn’t too far out of town, just enough so that locals didn’t worry about escapees but not so far that town businessmen couldn’t send out wagons of goods bought with state tax dollars.

  “Come on, girl,” he had coaxed his horse. “Just a little farther, and you can have plenty of rest.”

  The horse tugged at the reins and kept going.

  At last, the new hospital came into view. After years of complaints from law enforcement about locking up all the maniacs who had inhaled too much smoke in the foundries, Governor Burr had picked Oak Grove as the spot for a state asylum. Blake had been there several times in his career dropping off men labeled by the judges as insane, which seemed to be a more and more common affair as the years rolled on and people needed more furnaces.

  The old asylum had been a fortress. It was completely surrounded by a timber wall with the tops of the trunks shaved down to points like a fort on the frontier. Patients were allowed out into the yard on good behavior, but Blake had wondered who would want to wander around the muddy plot. He supposed the inside must have been even worse: windowless, crowded, and filled with people screaming for no reason at all. He never went inside, but the smell of human waste that came out was bad enough.

  That had all changed when Dorothea Dix rolled through on her crusade to fix the woes of the unfortunate. Blake had read about her work in the paper and even come up to Oak Grove for her lecture. The little woman tore into the state government and just about everyone else for allowing fellow human beings to be treated like that. He himself had donated to her fund afterward and voted on the bond to build the new hospital.

  It was a work of art. The outer wall had been torn down and replaced by a charming ironwork fence. Orchards and gardens had been planted. The building itself was sunny and seemed almost welcoming whenever Blake handed someone off to their white-coated orderlies. By the time the state began offering private care for folks with nerves and addictions, it was a place people flocked to get in.

  Now the Rail Agency airship rested in its yard. They had beaten him by maybe even half an hour. He wanted to make the horse run the last half-mile, but she was spent. Blake had to wait tensely the last few minutes of the ride as she trotted.

  Then a young man and woman burst out of the woods next to the road. The man had wild red hair, sticking up at all angles. He wore a mud-stained, white gown down to his knees. His legs and arms were covered in red scratches. The young woman wasn’t much better. The front of her whole dress was covered in blood, and her soft=brown hair had sticks and leaves poking out of it.

  What’s going on here?

  The man ran at him and yelled, “We need your horse!”

  It was Nate Kemp. Blake’s jaw sagged open like an oaf.

  “Did you hear me?” Kemp asked. He blinked and then looked puzzled with squinted eyes.

  “Kemp!” Blake called to him. “Are you all right?”

  The fireman looked down at his legs and back up at the sheriff. The answer was obviously no.

  “We have to get out of here!” the girl shouted from behind him. She looked back at the woods.

  Blake swallowed. He petted his horse’s mane. “This one’s no good. She’s exhausted from the ride up.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Kemp said. He tightened his hands into fists and marched toward Blake.

  His horse shifted nervously. Blake patted her neck and then held up his hands. Kemp was actually going to fight him over a worn-out horse.

  “Calm down. I’m here to help,” Blake told him.

  Kemp paused. He narrowed his eyes. “You let them arrest me.”

  “I know.” Blake took a breath. “I’m sorry I did.”

  “But how can I trust you?”

  Blake lifted his head. “Because I went to tell your mother what happened to you. I kept my word.”

  Kemp looked up at him with narrowed brown eyes.

  The horse let out a horrified whinny in spite of how tired she must have been. She reared, and Blake had to lean forward to stay in the saddle. If she hadn’t been so worn out, she would have tossed him.

  He patted her neck again and asked, “What’s the matter?”

  The horse stared off into the woods. Something glared back from the shadows. Blake raised a hand over his eyes to peer into the darkness and saw monsters.

  There were two of them. One was huge, seven feet tall or more. Its face looked like a bat’s with its pulled-wide nose and fang-filled mouth, yet there were no ears. Muscles rippled through its furry body, and leathery wings dangled from its shoulders.

  He could have guessed it was some kind of freak of nature, but the other was something that shouldn’t exist at all. Its body was that of a dwarf, but its arms were too long and it had no head. Instead, its face rested on its belly upside-down wit
h its mouth above its eyes.

  A cold shiver ran down Blake’s spine and over his limbs, all the way to his fingers and toes. The monsters Kemp had warned him about were real. His mind went back to when he was a boy at church, back when going to church was still fashionable. Old Mistress Alcott warned him about the powers of darkness on earth. Even then, he didn’t know what to think of all the stories. As he had grown up and made himself into a man, he worried more about his morality than any abuse by the “Princes of the Air,” she called them.

  In one glimpse of the monsters, his world collapsed like an old barn into a sinkhole.

  “Fifty years,” Blake mumbled. “Fifty years I’ve been worried about being a good man.”

  What good is paying debts or tipping a hat to a lady or shining his boots? Everything he had built in his life seemed worthless when horrible things like that existed.

  He reached for his Colt Dragoon revolver. It was nearly five pounds of wood and steel tucked into the hidden holster he wrapped around under his shoulder. He didn’t think it was proper to have a gun dangling from his hip in town, especially out of his jurisdiction when calling on Mrs. Kemp, but he was always glad to have it.

  He held the revolver out, steadied his horse and let a shot fly at the giant monster. The gun flashed and a thunderous crack filled the air. Birds scattered. Blake watched the monster’s head snap back from where he hit.

  Blake blinked once to clear his eyes, and then he moved the gun to the small monster. It was looking up at the giant, the eyes set into its gut squinting. He pulled the trigger, and another clap of thunder exploded. The monster stumbled back several steps and clapped its hands over the middle of its torso.

  Then it walked forward again. The giant rolled its head and snarled.

  Blake lowered his gun. A clean shot of .44 caliber lead did nothing but push the monsters back with the force of the blow. They truly were not of this earth. Another long chill ran down his spine.

  “They aren’t coming into the sunlight,” the girl noted.