Demon Key

by David Brookover

  A bizarre din, not unlike a cheering throng at an NFL football game, descended upon them, and although the men realized that there was no stadium in the rainforest, it did nothing to allay their escalating apprehension. The misty horizon blackened behind them as skeleton branches scraped the bow cabin like bony fingers. The men swiveled their heads swiftly in both directions, their senses acutely attuned to danger.

  The wild cheering faded to monstrous fluttering, and before any of them could squeeze off a single burst from their automatic weapons, thousands of bats were upon them! Teeth, leathery wings, and claws filled the men’s wide-eyed visages as they fought to protect their eyes from the lethal onslaught of the repulsive, blood-starved creatures. The natives swung their long knives in quick angled slashes above their foreheads, chopping bats faster than experienced chefs could mince benign onions on a cutting board.

  Hostile, toothy mouths, beady black eyes, and ominous, hissing mouths loomed above the boat rails. Long, mottled, sinewy bodies followed and violently rocked the boat.

  “Inside the cabin!” Holloway screamed, his panicked countenance concealed beneath a bloody veil.

  Demmy and Yokie remained outside the cabin door and kept the bats from invading the open threshold as the men scrambled into the cabin. A dozen or more anacondas slithered over the deck rails and closed in on the natives. Without breaking his slashing rhythm, the medicine man lowered his strokes in time to decapitate the closest anaconda. When the agents were all safely inside the cabin, the natives slipped inside like wraiths and slammed the door shut on the swarming bats. Several of the furry creatures crashed to the deck, either stunned or dead.

  Jackson peered out the portals in time to witness a storm of screeching monkeys raining down from the tangled canopy onto the beleaguered boat. Their nails clicked across the cabin top like deafening hail. The dazed and bloodied FBI agents huddled in the starboard corner with their rifles held stiffly before them like the last defenders of the Alamo, and in their dazed state, they were oblivious to their torn clothing and the severity of their hemorrhaging wounds. The natives stood stoically in the opposite corner, concerned but calm. Too calm, Jackson reasoned.

  Three of the attacking anacondas encircled the cabin, searching for a way to reach their prey. Suddenly, the port cabin wall creaked and groaned. The agents’ frightened gazes shot to the stressed wall. Desmond appeared ready to fire a fusillade of bullets through the fiberglass.

  Holloway waved his hand in front of Desmond’s crazed stare, and the agent slowly lowered his rifle barrel.

  “Don’t,” Holloway ordered brusquely. “You’ll blow out that wall so that the damn monkeys and anacondas can join us in here!”

  The hysterical special agent was near tears. “I’m . . . I’m sick of this, Holloway! I can’t stand being trapped like rats in here.” Perspiration drenched his forehead. “I’ve got to get out of here . . . now!” Desmond’s arms shook as he raised his rifle again, but a silhouette appeared behind him and brought a handgun butt down hard on the back of the special agent’s head.

  Desmond slumped forward, and Holloway caught him and his falling rifle.

  Holloway nodded to Jackson. “Thanks. We were almost goners there for a second.”

  “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

  “Don’t you mean rainforest?” Malloy added with a feeble grin, a halfhearted attempt at humor.

  Jackson lightly patted Malloy’s shoulder. “Now don’t you go off the deep end on us,” he warned.

  “I won’t.”

  “What are we going to do, LaFevre?” Holloway whispered. “Got any bright ideas?” He wedged Desmond’s limp form into the corner behind them.

  “Give me a minute to figure out what’s happening out there,” Jackson replied thoughtfully.

  “Wait? Figure out what’s happening?” Holloway’s blood pressure spiked. “What’s happening is that we’re stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with exactly zero prospects of being rescued!”

  “Have you tried radioing the base for help?”

  Holloway’s face froze. “Uh, no,” he said sheepishly. “I’ll try it now.”

  Jackson poked his face close to the grimy door window and hastily jumped back when a monkey leaped against the glass, its fangs bared and eyes ablaze. Jackson frowned. The monkey’s wildly hostile features reminded him of rabid animals he’d come across in the Bayou, except there was no foaming at the mouth. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? An entire jungle filled with rabid monkeys? Not a chance, and yet their violent actions appeared unnatural. Maybe supernatural.

  The bats had promptly retreated when the monkeys arrived, and Jackson had no clue why. Perhaps the two species were mortal enemies, but securing that knowledge wouldn’t help them escape their current predicament. He kneaded the burgeoning pain in his temples. Like he had observed earlier, before they’d launched the boat, something was dreadfully wrong about this entire scenario, but what the hell was it? The more he strained his brain, the more elusive the answer became.

  Suddenly, an even stranger spectacle materialized outside, if that was possible. He moved close to the window again and watched a white-whiskered spider monkey race across the stern deck with the boat’s antenna in tow. Jackson turned to Holloway, who was desperately trying to raise someone back at the base camp on the radio.

  “You can forget the radio,” Jackson announced in a low voice.

  Panic glazed Holloway’s eyes. “What do you mean?” His tone sounded a lot like a condemned man on death row.

  Jackson quickly answered.

  Holloway shook his head slowly. “We’re doomed, man. We’re fucking doomed!”

  The skittering ceased atop the cabin, but it was quickly replaced by furious scratching.

  “What the hell . . .” Malloy murmured, glancing up.

  “Now what?” Holloway asked no one in particular.

  “It sounds like our damn monkey friends are trying to dig their way inside,” Malloy speculated.

  Holloway swallowed. “At that pace, it won’t take ‘em long to breach the fiberglass.”

  Jackson listened with growing dread. Malloy was right. The psychic turned to the natives to find out if they had any clever ideas of how to escape their predicament, and his jaw dropped.

  The digging monkeys were forgotten for the moment.

  Demmy had vanished.

  Chapter 50

  “Where’d Demmy go?” Jackson hollered at the agents.

  Holloway and Malloy glanced vacantly toward Yokie and merely shrugged. Jackson approached the Indian, who didn’t understand English.

  “Malloy, ask him where Demmy went,” Jackson directed.

  Yokie glanced past Jackson and pointed at the small head.

  “He’s in the can,” Malloy answered curtly. “Something wrong with that?”

  Everything, Jackson thought, but he didn’t have time for lengthy explanations. His gaze drifted up as a monkey clawed the first small hole in the ceiling. Fiberglas dust fell like snow to the teak floor. He quickly wedged his semi-automatic Colt barrel into the opening and squeezed off a few shots. There was an instantaneous shrieking uproar as the attacking monkeys abandoned their dead allies on the cabin roof.

  Jackson pivoted. “That’ll buy us some time,” he proclaimed, then rushed to the closed head door. “Demmy, are you in there?” he called. He knew damn well the chief was, but a pleasant approach was less threatening than breaking down the door.

  The only response was a deep, rolling rumble that shook the entire boat down to its beam. Jackson warily stepped back. What the hell was happening in there?

  The wall creaked again behind the huddled agents, followed by a resonant craaack. A pair of jagged fracture lines appeared in the polished fiberglass beneath the portal. Malloy and Holloway leaped aside and exchanged frightened looks. The anacondas were still at work outside.

  “I’ll get Demmy out of there,” Malloy volunteered, anxious to get as far away from the weakened wall as possible.<
br />
  Jackson held out his hand. “Stay back.”

  “Listen, Psycho Man, I’ll . . .”

  Malloy didn’t get to finish. The head door exploded outward into the cabin, nearly missing Jackson. Tendrils of grayish-black fog drifted from the opening, followed by Demmy, or something that resembled the native chief. Demmy’s face was blistered black and oozed yellow pus from numerous open sores. His flat nose was now a bulbous lump with nostrils like cavernous, shadowy wells. But it was his eyes that both mesmerized and alarmed the cabin occupants. Dancing yellow and crimson flames filled his orbs as if there was a conflagration blazing inside his skull.

  Demmy strode forward and ominously panned the cramped area, pausing on Malloy and Holloway. His lips parted, revealing a picket fence of razor black daggers, as his right arm pointed in their direction. His fingertips morphed into writhing piebald vipers; their hideous mouths opened, exposing baleful pairs of venomous fangs.

  One of the vipers struck at Holloway, narrowly missing his shoulder.

  “Jesus, you see that?” he screamed. “That finger snake grew five feet for that strike!”

  Jackson had seen enough. He’d been on the money when he’d sensed a change in Demmy after their earlier conversation, but now he recognized the Indian’s personality shift. The malignant force inhabiting Teddi’s blood sample had rapidly consumed the chief’s identity after he merely tasted it. He didn’t immediately lapse into a coma like Teddi, but someone was now controlling Demmy’s conscious actions. But who?

  While the chief was occupied with the two agents, Jackson poked his gun barrel into Demmy’s temple and pulled the trigger. Demmy ducked with inhuman speed, dodging the bullet. It harmlessly punctured the cracked fiberglass wall and whizzed by one of Holloway’s ears.

  Demmy’s movements were a blur. He shoved Jackson so hard that he literally flew across the cabin and crashed into the far wall. His head bounced against the fiberglass, and he momentarily blacked out. When he recovered, Demmy leaned over him, his writhing finger vipers a foot from his face. Jackson froze. He was trapped! He stared into the malevolent, flaming eyes and searched for some trace of Demmy, but the monster inside had totally consumed the chief.

  Before unleashing his poisonous snakes on his helpless victim, Demmy spoke strangely. “You and your damn pooch are history, pal.” He grinned broadly, stepped backward, and commanded his snakes to strike. All five serpents lengthened and coiled. Jackson searched for a weapon or means to escape, but he found nothing. He was doomed. Teddi would perish because his psychic senses had failed him, as they once had in his youth.

  He glared at his adversary; he was going to die like a man. He sat there, waiting stoically for the venomous fangs to penetrate his flesh and inject their lethal poison.

  After several seconds passed without a strike, he broke eye contact and tentatively searched for the finger snakes. Demmy’s possessed hand lay on the floor, severed from his arm; gnarled fingers slowly displaced the venomous digits. The chief glanced first at his bleeding arm, and then at his medicine man, Yokie, who stood beside him clutching a crimson-stained long knife. Yokie’s expression remained placid as he poised the knife for another blow. With a swift movement, the medicine man swiped at his chief’s neck, the blade cleanly separating Demmy’s neck and spinal cord. Jackson watched the head tumble to the floor with relief and revulsion.

  Malloy shouted something at Jackson, but the stunned psychic couldn’t quite grasp the meaning. His nerves were shot and his mind in a daze. The Indian medicine man had just saved his hide — that much registered. Holloway’s unintelligible shouts mingled with Malloy’s, but Jackson was totally focused on the proffered hand that helped him to his feet. It was Yokie to the rescue, again.

  It took another few minutes for Jackson’s mental cobwebs to clear before he comprehended the agents’ shouts. The monkeys and anacondas are gone. It dawned on Jackson that Demmy’s controller had conjured a spell through Demmy to initiate the attack from the rainforest creatures, and now that the controller’s medium was dead, the spell was broken and the creatures returned to their normal existence. Holloway flung open the cabin door, and the fresh jungle breezes diluted death’s fetid stench.

  Yokie lugged Demmy’s body, withered hand, and decapitated head outside and unceremoniously dumped them in the river’s black current. He muttered something in his native tongue as he watched the river carry the chief’s remains downstream. Malloy translated it.

  “Evil life forms receive no tribal funeral. Goodbye, my old friend. May the gods purge the evil presence from your soul.”

  Yokie spun around and addressed Jackson. Jackson looked at Malloy for help.

  “He says that he will guide you to the flowering tree that will cleanse the evil from your friend. He is no longer . . . uh, interested in confronting the smugglers.”

  “To be frank, neither am I,” Jackson said. “I’ve just about had enough of this jungle life.”

  Holloway managed a tenuous grin. “No shit.”

  Yokie spoke again, and Malloy translated. “Jackson and I go alone. I will guide him safely back to your camp before nightfall. You take boat back to dock and meet us there.”

  Desmond groaned inside the cabin and gingerly massaged the throbbing lump on the back of his head. “What’d I miss?” he asked, standing.

  “We’ll fill you in on the way back to camp,” Holloway replied brusquely, annoyed by his associate’s hysteria under fire. “See you later, Jackson . . . and good luck.”

  A twinge of foreboding nagged Jackson as he kept up with Yokie’s fast pace through the thick tangle of alien foliage. Deeper and deeper into the shadowy tropical forest they ventured, and although Jackson liked hiking through his beloved bayou, he was uneasy about tramping through the world’s most dangerous jungle with a mysterious savage who didn’t even speak English. He always considered himself fairly courageous in dire situations, but a disquieting angst plagued him nevertheless.

  The medicine man effortlessly sliced a slender path through the gloom, where sunlight rarely penetrated the dense green canopy overhead. Birdcalls, high-pitched whines, screeches, cries, and rustlings enveloped them, but Yokie appeared right at home in the perilous wilderness. The tree-blotted landscape towered above them like skyscrapers lining Wall Street, filtering brilliant sunlight to twilight. The trek seemed paradoxical to Jackson — so many stimuli assailed his finely tuned senses, and yet his anxiety gradually yielded to a deeper calm than he had ever achieved in his beloved bayou.

  After four strenuous hours of brisk hiking, Jackson was drenched with sweat. His lungs and muscles ached from the relentless exertion. At last, they broke free of the jungle and stood in a dusky, round clearing. Jackson guessed it to be a hundred yards in diameter — a circular football field. He leaned against a ominous strangler tree that had enveloped and leeched the life from another tree, sapping all the nutrients. A crooked, decayed hulk stood in the center of the predator, lifeless and broken. He was disturbed by the predatory nature of the strangler tree, and wondered how many other such plants existed in the world. Cannibalism wasn’t limited to the barbaric behavior of mankind.

  He peered through the grimy haze and gawked at the colossal tree growing in the center of the clearing. The magnificent citadel was at least two hundred feet tall and as big around as a California sequoia. Its ponderous limbs and branches didn’t begin until halfway up the trunk. Below that boundary, large white red-tipped flowers, nearly ten times the size of jungle orchids, smothered the craggy black bark. Yokie pointed at the tree and gestured at his companion to stay put.

  The medicine man disappeared behind a stand of thorny undergrowth and soon reappeared clutching a weathered wooden shield that completely screened his entire frame. After another animated warning, Yokie steadily advanced toward the beautiful tree. Jackson watched as Yokie cautiously crept across the clearing. Why was Yokie being so damn cautious? How dangerous could it be to pick a few flowers off a tree?

  Jackson quickly
discovered the reason. Thorns, the size of six-foot spears, shot out from the tree’s trunk and struck Yokie’s shield! The medicine man continued unabated as Jackson shuffled forward into the haze for a better view of the ancient tree. After three more lethal thorns stuck in Yokie’s shield, Jackson spied a myriad of holes in the bark akin to camouflaged gun barrels. Jackson whistled. This forest was amazing.

  Jackson ducked suddenly as a spear whistled past his face. Yokie turned and waved angrily to his companion to retreat to safety. Jackson didn’t argue.

  From a safe distance, he tensed as Yokie approached the hostile tree. The closer the fearless medicine man got to the tree, the harder the spear-like thorns impacted the shield. Several nearly penetrated its rock-hard veneer.

  Jackson unconsciously held his breath when Yokie reached the tree, stretched his arm beyond the shield’s protection, and picked eight blooms. Jackson wondered why the tree didn’t attack Yokie’s vulnerable arm. Because of their communication rift, he would never know.

  Yokie backtracked with the shield positioned between him and the tree, and pressed the blossoms tightly to his chest. A few bees scouted the fresh flowers, but then moved on. Finally, Yokie reached safety and dumped the blooms into Jackson’s arms. He returned the shield to its hiding place and rejoined Jackson.

  They skirted the hazardous clearing and continued their trek into the endless jungle beyond. The gloom deepened on the rainforest floor, and Yokie quickened his already brisk pace. Jackson dug deeply within himself and somehow found the endurance to keep up.

  Two hours later, the DEA campsite communication towers slid into view. Yokie grabbed Jackson’s arm and motioned for him to sit. Jackson didn’t argue, thankful for the rest. The medicine man built a small fire, hollowed out a short length of a fallen branch, placed the flowers on a flat rock, and crushed them with the blunt end of his knife handle. Jackson was amazed how easily the flowers dissolved to a white snow. After Yokie poured the fine flakes into the woody tube, he held it above the fire. The flakes rapidly congealed to a clear waxy substance; Yokie removed the branch from the heat, and when the antidote cooled, the native shook it out of the branch and rolled it into a tight ball. He presented it to Jackson and motioned to the area beneath his own tongue.