In the Devil's Name

by Dave Watson

  ….rip it out…..grind it up….cut cut cut….crush them….burn twist bite…..bite….never coming home…head on a pole…crack your spine and eat your soul….

  Jim clawed at his head, trying in vain to tear out the thing that was driving him to the brink of madness. His eyes bulged from their sockets in terror as he writhed there, naked and rolling in his own piss on the cold, bare floor with the sound of an asylum ripping at him, dominating his very being.

  ..Kill the cunt…little pig…little fucking junkie nothing…claws at your window…teeth at your door…

  And he could hear it. A loud scraping noise coming from the door in the hall accompanied by a tap tap tapping at the living room window. He felt the presence of something insatiably hungry drawing near.

  “I’ll do it,” he moaned. “I’ll do it, Jesus, please, I’ll do it, just stop…”

  In an instant, the insane cacophony in his head ceased, leaving only a high pitched whine. Nothing at the door or window. Nothing seeking entry. The bare room that he called home brightened again. Gasping for breath, Jim crawled to the handset lying on the floorboards, a rivulet of blood running from his nose.

  “I’ll do it,” he whispered into the handset.

  And the line went dead.

  The next hour or so was a blur to Jim.

  He vaguely recalled frantically crashing around the flat after the phone call had ended, all bug eyed and shaking, trying to calm down enough to dress himself and leave. It was all he could do to avoid panicking completely and running screaming and naked into the street, and this would have been the case if it hadn’t been for the small part of his mind that had somehow been expecting this day for years. That fragment of his consciousness had allowed him to keep it together long enough to hastily put some clothes on and get out.

  He hurriedly made his way into the city centre on foot, heading in the direction of Buchanan bus station while constantly looking back over his shoulder. He stayed in the daylight, shying away from gloomy places between buildings where shadows lay. His insides were still shaking, and his mind kept going back to the phone call and what his apparent course of action now was.

  It was nuts, he told himself. Just a nightmare. Must’ve been a nightmare. But his feet kept moving him towards the bus station, as if he was no longer fully in control. Jim made a conscious effort to halt himself and succeeded in slowing his determined pace till he managed to come to a stop. He stood there in the middle of the pavement, eyes closed and trying to control his breathing as other pedestrians gave him strange looks and wide berths. The muscles in his legs still trembled, itching to be flexed in movement and his feet shuffled restlessly on the concrete, shifting his weight from one to the other like he was in dire need of a piss. The shaking in his thighs and calves seemed to spread upward into his torso and out along his arms till he stood there, shuddering like a third stage Parkinson’s case. No matter how hard he gritted his teeth, his breathing continued to come fast and shallow till he started to feel dizzy from hyperventilation. A rising panic started to fill him from the belly upward.

  Got to move, got to move, got to move…

  Just as he was on the point of breaking, he felt something tugging at his jacket sleeve. He opened his eyes and looked down.

  A child stood before him, maybe eight years old. A small girl with long, unkempt blonde hair and huge pale blue eyes, her translucent skin smudged with dirt. She was dressed in a ragged grey overcoat buttoned to her throat that reached below her scrawny skint knees. Her feet were bare.

  “’Scuse me mister. I’m lost. I can't find my mammy,” the urchin appealed to him.

  Jim just stood there voiceless, staring at the kid, the panic within him continuing to rise.

  “Can you help me find her? I keep asking people but they can't hear me. Nobody’ll talk to me,” she said.

  “How come no one can hear you?” Jim heard himself ask. He wasn’t aware that he had spoken, thought it impossible. He was a fraction of a second from losing his grip on immobility and breaking into a mad dash.

  “They don’t hear me,” said the little blonde girl. “They don’t see me.”

  Jim started to edge around the child, unable to stand still any longer. The need in him to move was irresistible. He began slowly backing away from her. She followed him.

  “Please, mister,” she implored, starting to cry. “I’m scared. You see me don’t you? You can hear me?” Tears started to spill down her pale cheeks, cutting streaks through the imbedded grime.

  Jim continued retreating, unable to take his eyes from the strange blonde waif. He nodded.

  “Aye, I can see you,” he babbled, “but I cannae help you, I’ve got to go. I'm in a hurry.”

  The child continued to come towards him, her arms outstretched, reaching for him. Jim cringed away as if she had offered him a tarantula.

  “Where are you going to? Can I come with you? Please, mister. No one sees me.” The child blinked, and when she opened her eyes again there were only black orbs like polished eight balls in her optical sockets. She kept coming, and spoke again in a whisper that Jim heard even above the noise of the traffic that passed him by on the busy main street.

  “No one sees me because I’m D, E, A, D.”

  The kid spelled out the word, speaking with all the emotion of a headstone, then started to unbutton her raggedy overcoat. She was still crying softly.

  Jim didn’t want to see what was under that grimy garment. He tried to close his eyes again, but couldn’t. She unfastened the second button.

  “They burned me, Jim,” she said. And kept coming.

  Still Jim backed away from the blank eyed child, his mind reeling in terror and his hands held out in front of him as if to placate a dangerous animal. He was vaguely aware of stumbling as he stepped backwards off a kerb.

  The little blonde haired girl undid a third button as her face began to blister. Flames suddenly appeared from nowhere and swept across her small body. Jim could smell her burning.

  “They burned us all. Curse Labhrainne and his blood,” she snarled, her small face contorting from pitiful weeping into a flaming rictus of hate.

  Jim’s scream joined the blare of a car horn in a discordant harmony.

  “In the Devils name, Densmore,” the blazing kid shrieked at him as she loosened the last coat button and spread the fiery rags.

  For the tiniest slice of a second, Jim caught sight of what was below the little girl’s coat… but the world suddenly turned upside down, mercifully sparing him further exposure to the terrible sight, and Jim found himself seeing the grey clouds overhead. Insanely, he thought, looks like rain, then there was an impact which spun him again, his vision turning into a confused blur of colours, he bounced off something else and went skidding across the tarmac.

  He hadn’t felt the first impact from the taxi that hit him, the one that gave him time to contemplate the weather. He had registered the second and third blows, but without pain.

  As he lay there on his back, regarding the overcast sky once again with his legs still on the road, he heard a screech of brakes. A car door opened and a stranger’s face appeared in front of him, blocking out his view of the clouds. Definitely going to rain.

  “For fuck’s sake!” the face yelled. “You want to watch where the fuck you’re goin’ ya nutter?”

  The concerned citizen was a bald man in a dark blue polo shirt, a taxi drivers badge attached to the breast. He was angry.

  Jim struggled to his feet, and looked around. The girl was gone.

  “Where’d she go?” he asked the taxi driver. Simon Wickman, the badge said his name was.

  “Whit?” Simon Wickman asked, aghast. “Mate, you just walked backwards into the main fuckin’ road and got hit by my motor.”

  “The wee lassie. She was on fire,” Jim murmured.

  Jesus, Simon Wickman thought. Another fuckin’ space cadet. Seemed like the city had more of them every day. This guy was off his tits on something. The skinny guy that ha
d suddenly blundered backwards into the road in front of his cab seemed to be amazingly unhurt somehow. Fuckin’ lucky though. He’d clipped the guy on the leg and the daft cunt had just backflipped out of view and bounced off the roof of his cab. Simon Wickman, watching with astonished shock in his wing mirror, witnessed the guy landing on the bonnet of a car parked at the side of the road and sliding off the front of the stationary vehicle into the gutter. Now he was just standing there as if he’d merely tripped on his shoelace. Probably a junkie, Simon Wickman surmised. He had that wasted, pale look about him, and his eyes were rolling about in their sockets. Probably fucked on smack and didn’t feel a thing.

  “Are you alright, pal?” he asked Jim.

  The wasted guy ignored the question.

  “There was somethin’ under her coat,” the stoned pedestrian insisted. “Where’d she go? She was standin’ right there,” he said, pointing at a spot just next to the parked car that he’d landed on. He pushed past Simon Wickman and walked off, looking around in bewilderment, seemingly in full use of his faculties. His physical faculties anyway.

  Simon Wickman shrugged and got back in the taxi with a sad shake of his unfurnished head. They said that God looked after drunkards and children, or something like that. The guy who’d performed some impromptu gymnastics using his taxi as apparatus was, he guessed, in some regard a drunkard. Sober folk don’t walk backwards off the pavement onto a main road and see things that aren’t there. A wee lassie on fire, that’s what the guy had said. Simon Wickman had seen some weird stuff the first time he’d done acid while watching Led Zeppelin at Knebworth all those years ago, but not a wee lassie on fire. There was certainly no one there now, nor had there been. Children ablaze in a public street usually attract some attention, and he had seen no such thing.

  He started the engine and drove off. In his rear view mirror, the guy he’d hit pushed past a couple of passers by that had witnessed the accident and ran off in the direction of the bus station.

  Later, as Jim sat huddled low in the back row of the bus winding it’s way south down the west coast of Scotland, he tried to piece together how he’d ended up on the Intercity coach. Everything after being hit by that motor was a blank, and he had no recollection of being in the bus station or buying a ticket. It occurred to him he didn’t have any money, so how the fuck had he even got on the bus? There was also blood on his t shirt and more encrusted under his fingernails. Not his own. He was unmarked, apart from a taste of blood in his mouth which he put down to perhaps having sustained when the taxi had hit him.

  Last thing he remembered was tearing off down the street, now certain that he would do as the strange and terrifying caller had bid him that afternoon. He was on his way to murder his father.

  What he had seen beneath the flaming overcoat of the blond haired waif in the street had convinced him of that. Any doubts he’d had were gone. There was no alternative. There never had been.

  Jesus, that thing knew my name, he thought in terror, and started to weep quietly, drawing up his legs and rolling into a ball there on the back seat of the coach.

  Some hours later, the body of an elderly man was found in a toilet cubicle in Buchanan Street bus station. The only thing stolen from the victim was the Intercity ticket to Stranraer that a cashier remembered selling the elderly gentleman when she was later interviewed by the police. The old man's throat had been ripped out. Apparently by someone’s teeth.

  Police were looking for anyone who may have seen a thin and unshaven young male wearing a black jacket and woollen hat acting in a strange manner, who had been seen in the area and who had also been witnessed following the seventy year old man into the toilets.

  Chapter 32

  When Jim finished talking, he was very pale. For him, that meant he had the complexion of a sheet of tracing paper.

  “Stay where you are,” I said to him, and turned to go upstairs to check on dad.

  “He’s got to be dead, Phil,” Jim shouted after me with panic in his voice. “You don’t fuckin’ get it do ye? The cunt’s got to be dead!” His voice cracked on the last word and dissolved into pitiful sobbing.

  I ran upstairs, my mind whirling and praying Jim’s grim wish was not a reality. His desperation for dad’s demise chilled me. I knew that Jim hated him, but the sheer obsession he apparently harboured for his death was something else. It was purposeful.

  Furthermore, I didn’t doubt his story. Too much had now happened to me to think that his strange tale was anything other than fact. The inexplicable and horrifying had become the norm, and I feared that it would continue to be so.

  I burst into my father’s bedroom, suddenly certain that I would find him as dead as Jim hoped. He wasn’t. He lay on the bed, grimacing in pain and clutching his broken arm. More blood than before coated his lips and chin. There were tiny bubbles in the blood, and his skin was cold and clammy to the touch.

  “Where’s Jim?” he asked me, his breath hitching and causing him to cough a fine crimson spray.

  “He’s downstairs, dad. Don’t worry, he’s not going anywhere. Don’t try to speak. I’m phoning an ambulance.”

  I reached for the phone on his bedside table and hesitated. Something was not right. The air seemed cold, and a nervous tickle in the pit of my gut, now recognisable as a symptom of my new found awareness, warned me that something was amiss. Dismissing it for the moment due to my dad’s worsening condition, I snatched up the handset to call for help. I expected the phone to be dead. Mercifully, the dial tone greeted me as it should and I punched in three nines.

  The emergency operator picked up promptly and calmly asked which service I required.

  “Ambulance,” I said, trying to ignore the tickle in my stomach that was rapidly growing into an itch.

  “Please hold,” the operator said.

  The line rang a few times and was picked up again.

  “Ambulance service,” an accented voice, male, prompted me. ”Who’s in pain?”

  The odd question threw me for a second, I frowned in confusion.

  “Erm, my dad’s been attacked. He needs help fast.”

  “Is there blood?” the dispatch agent asked, with a strange, almost lustful quality, like how a pervert would sound making an obscene phone call and asking about a woman’s underwear.

  “What? Eh, yeah, he’s got a bad cut on his head and there’s blood around his mouth. He’s coughing up blood as well. Please, he needs help quickly.”

  Amazingly, the voice on the other end of the line chuckled softly and sighed. “Calm down, sir. Everything’s going to be okay. Does the blood have little bubbles in it? Does your dad scream in pain?”

  The itching in my stomach now became intolerable, and the air in the bedroom dropped another few degrees as the warped ambulance dispatcher chuckled again.

  “What the fuck?” I muttered.

  “Sounds like he has broken ribs,” the voice went on with horrible, gleeful enjoyment. “One or more of the bones has punctured your father’s lung and the little bubbles are caused by air escaping from the ruptured sac. Broken ribs are one of the most painful things the human body can experience, and when the sharp points of a splintered bone rupture the lung it feels like you’re being stabbed. Each time he coughs, it happens again. Another delicious little prick. If he doesn’t die of blood loss, the lung injury will cause him to eventually drown in his own blood as the sac fills up. He’s fucked.”

  I started to shake with combined fear and rage, each emotion vying for domination.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I whispered into the phone. Beside me on the bed, my dad coughed again and gave a cry of pain.

  “Oh, Jesus, Phil, it hurts,” he moaned in misery.

  The voice on the line gave a sharp bark of laughter.

  “Phil, I’m the dark. Eat, drink and make merry.”

  Ozay laughed again and a scathing, shrieking scream erupted from the headset before the line went dead. I dropped the phone on the floor in terror as the terrible screa
m continued, not from the phone, but from downstairs. From the kitchen.

  I leapt to my feet and was halfway across the room before the door to the bedroom slammed shut with such force the surrounding wooden frame cracked. I desperately tried to pull the door open again but it wouldn’t budge. Wouldn't even give a millimetre despite my frantic efforts.

  On the bed, my father coughed again, flecking his shirt with blood. More this time. He was losing consciousness.

  He was dying.

  Chapter 33

  Jim dragged his body across the kitchen floor, cutting his fingers on broken glass from the smashed patio door. His legs were a sea of agony. Every intolerable inch he gained across the blood splattered tiles sent a bolt of pain sweeping through his entire lower body as he desperately clawed himself toward the counter, his eyes fixed on the wooden block which held an array of kitchen knives.

  He had to finish the job. Had to make sure his bastard father was dead. The pain he currently felt was a mere itch compared to what he knew awaited him should he fail. The vision revealed to him beneath the burning grey coat of the little blonde girl in the street that afternoon, though it was only for a split second before the taxi had struck him, was imprinted on his very soul, and he was helpless to disobey Ozay’s command. He would drag his wailing, broken knees across a mile of jagged rocks to slit his father’s throat if that’s what it took. There was no option.

  Ignoring the fiery torture in his legs, he made it to the base of the kitchen cabinets and pulled himself into a sitting position, groaning in anguish as he twisted round so he sat with his back against the fitting. The golf club was lying on the floor where Phil had dropped it before running upstairs, and Jim reached out and grasped the rubber grip. Craning his head round so he could see his target, he swept the club along the top of the work surface, knocking the kitchen block to the floor at his side. He eagerly groped for the large carving knife.