by J. R. Rain
Or so I hoped.
Badly hoped.
The floor shook as the demon clawed up the stairs, its nails screeching across wood like fingernails across a chalkboard. From behind me, something exploded and crashed across the kitchen floor. That would be, I knew, the basement door.
In that moment, Millicent appeared before me. If a ghost could look out of breath, she did. Mostly, she looked alarmed. It was the first time I had seen anything but a serene expression on her face. Fighting demons tended to have that effect on witches, dead or alive.
“He’s here, child,” she said. “Is Ivy ready?”
As her answer, Ivy’s mumbling turned into a shout and she raised her hands higher and turned in a circle—as she did so, the powdered ingredients erupted into blue flames.
And then, there was light.
I gasped and shielded my eyes.
Yes, it was only a semicircle. Ivy stepped out, breathless, and looked at me.
“Now you’re on, Allie,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-six
My heart hammering in my chest, I moved forward, standing before the flames, and facing whatever it was that was coming out of the darkness.
I knew, of course, what it was. I had seen glimpses of it, but I had never faced something like this, face to face, and out in the open.
A demon.
Millicent was behind me, giving me support and strength. I felt her own energy swim over me. Ivy was out of the burning semicircle, which flickered and roared behind me. She was behind me somewhere, too.
The house shook. The floor vibrated. The hallway walls, which glowed faintly from the blue firelight behind me, seemed to pulse. The Librarian had said that the demon possessed the house itself. And the land. He had said that it could, quite literally, come from anywhere and everywhere at once.
“Oh, shit,” said Ivy from behind me, and I could only imagine what she was thinking now. Surely she regretted her decision in joining us. Or not. The girl was kind of nuts. Of course, that could be an asset right about now.
In the hallway before us, as the walls pulsed and the floor shook, a dark mass appeared, and I nearly peed myself.
“Be strong, child,” came Millicent’s words.
I could only fake a nod and hold my bladder, and wait for what I knew was coming.
I had my arms raised before me, before I even knew what I was doing. Truth was, I really didn’t know what I was doing. Yes, I had mad psychic skills, but could I always trust them on a moment’s notice? I didn’t know. I hadn’t used them that often.
Still, I felt the energy crackle around me. In particular, it came from around my hands. I could see what others couldn’t: white flames surrounding my hands. No, they didn’t burn my hands, and they weren’t really flames. This was raw energy...and it was waiting for me to use it.
But was it of any use against a demon?
I didn’t know, but Archibald Maximus had seemed to think so...and that was good enough for me. But what he couldn’t predict was the fear that gripped me. Nor could he predict the unpredictable: the rage of a demon.
“Steady,” said Millicent. But now, her words were only background noise.
The house creaked and shook and groaned, and I heard wood crack and pop from all around. Windows even shattered. The entity truly seemed everywhere and anywhere.
Still, a darkness was forming in the hallway.
Filling the hallway.
Coming toward us.
I stepped back...and felt the heat of the ring of blue fire behind me.
“Easy, Allie,” whispered Ivy.
From the hallway, which began across the living room, appeared a black mass. It was perhaps blacker than anything I had ever seen in all my life. Blacker than a moonless night. Blacker than any shadow or creation by man. The thing was devoid of all light. It was the antithesis of light.
I heard myself say, “Oh, my God.” And I meant it.
Ivy said something, too, but I missed it. Instead, I took another step back, and nearly singed my pants leg. Heat blasted me from behind, while a living shadow moved toward me from in front.
It poured out of the hallway slowly, billowing into the big living room. It could have been a dust cloud or fog, had either been blacker than black.
The black fog coalesced, swirling slowly, and then faster and faster, until it took on the vague shape of a person. It stood, perhaps, eight feet tall.
This isn’t happening, I thought. No way is this happening.
“Easy, child.” Millicent was my rock right now.
Two red eyes opened in the region of the head. They focused on me, and now I couldn’t be entirely sure that I didn’t pee myself.
“Oh, fuck,” said Ivy behind me, pretty much echoing my thoughts.
Horrific images flooded my mind. I saw death and blood and corpses. I saw torture and fire and rotting flesh. I saw scurrying rats and snakes and the fearsome eyes of an enraged demon.
The images I knew, were from It.
As the shadow regarded me, I heard slow footsteps, then the sound of clapping. The clapping and footsteps echoed down through the hallway, and they somehow seemed more amplified than they should have been.
As the footsteps drew closer, and the clapping resounded seemingly everywhere at once, a human figure stepped through the tall shadow, which dissipated in a puff of wispy black smoke.
The figure was, of course, the Englishman.
Billy Turner.
He continued clapping as he stepped deeper into the big living room, his features awash in blue light. “Now, that was a smashing entrance, was it not?”
But, of course, it sounded nothing like Billy. Gone was the English accent, replaced by something harsh and guttural and filled with mock humor.
“Billy,” I said, but I knew it was a waste to address him by his human name. There was no human expression on that contorted, stretched face. His eyes were too wide. The smile was too big. Nostrils were too flared. Eyebrows were too high. It was as if Billy Turner had been caught doing exactly what all of our mothers had warned us against: making funny faces and having them stay that way.
His eyes, I noted, didn’t move in their sockets. At least, I didn’t think they did. As he took in both me and Ivy, he turned his head slowly from side to side, rather than shifting his eyes. It was all...so...damn...weird.
He was totally and completely possessed. Of that, I was sure. Billy Turner the Englishman, the human, was long gone, and that saddened me greatly.
Billy lifted his head, and seemed to sniff the air. “Aw, I sense great fear and sadness. Music to my ears, so to speak.” He stepped deeper into the big room, and scanned the furniture that had been pushed aside, then his head swiveled, taking in the blue ring of fire.
“It looks like to me that there’s some kind of ceremony going on.” He sniffed the air. “I smell vervain and mugwort. Nasty stuff.” He turned his wide-eyed gaze back on me. So far, I was certain he had not blinked. “If I didn’t know better, I would think you were trying to get rid of me. Now, that’s not very nice.”
I finally found my voice. “Leave the house, Billy. This is between the demon and us.”
Billy, with his raised eyebrows and wrinkled forehead, regarded me for a moment, as black, wispy snakes continued coiling around him. Around and around and through him. “Yes, I can see that I will have to deal with you, in much the same way that I dealt with my nosy neighbor. She’s behind me in the kitchen, rotting and putrefying. In fact...” He paused and sniffed the air. “I can smell her now. My favorite aroma, if you will. Death and rot.”
“You’re a fucking piece of shit,” said Ivy suddenly, stepping forward. “I’m going to enjoy watching you rot in hell.”
Billy swiveled his head in Ivy’s direction. “This one has spirit, I see. She will make a fine plaything. But first—” Billy reached behind him and removed a knife that might have been stained with blood, although the flickering blue flames didn’t quite give off enough light to know for c
ertain. “First, I have to destroy this plaything.”
Billy brought the knife up to his own throat.
And slit it straight across.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I screamed as Billy’s head flopped forward, and he dropped to his knees.
I rushed forward, but a blast of cold wind, followed by a swirling shadow, literally threw me backward. I tumbled head over ass, and ended up in a heap along the far wall. I looked up from the floor in time to see the once-frozen expression on Billy’s face replaced by one of shocked horror. A human expression. Billy reached up to his damaged neck, then pitched forward, choking and gagging, and then lay still.
“Oh, fuck!” screamed Ivy. “Oh, fuck.”
I found my feet and located the swirling mass which now hovered briefly over Billy. It seemed to be gathering itself, solidifying. The red eyes now returned, and looked directly at me.
It charged.
* * *
Ivy screamed.
I raised my hands as a wall of white light appeared around me, the exact energy I had been instructed by the Librarian to use. The wall surrounded me completely...except that the demon altered its course...and disappeared down between cracks in the floorboards.
“Where did it go?” I shouted, rushing forward to where it had disappeared. The floor shook...and seemed to expand up and out, like a breathing thing.
“Behind you!” shouted Millie in my head.
I spun around to discover the demon pouring out of the floorboards, coming up through the many horizontal slots, like black smoke through a vent.
It came up from directly beneath Ivy, lifting her.
I ran toward her, leaping over the flames, covering my face as the heat blasted me. But she was already pressed up against the high, vaulted ceiling. The swirling darkness beneath her—the utter blackness that held her up—was without shape. However, I suspected what it would do next...and I was right.
It promptly disappeared and Ivy was falling.
I didn’t try to catch her. She was too high; hell, she would have broken my back. Instead, I did the only thing I could think of: I raised both hands with the intention to psychically cushion her fall. And that mostly worked. Halfway through her drop, Ivy hit whatever force I was generally exuding, rebounded off it, paused briefly in mid-air and then crashed to the floor.
I was at her side, but she waved me away. “I’m fine. Just—look out!”
Without turning, I raised my hands again and released whatever was left in me. It seemed to be enough. Still holding my hands up, I turned and saw that I had captured myself a demon.
There it was, contained within a vortex of energy that both my hands were creating. How I created this, I didn’t know. From where the power came, I could only guess: from Mother Earth herself. Either way, I was using it, and the demon seemed bound within.
The darkness and light intermixed and it was truly something to behold. Light and dark, side by side, fighting, battling.
The demon, at present, was still in its smoke state, but as the energy continued to swirl around it, it took on more shape. Shortly, as I stepped around it, holding my hands up, it turned into something bigger than it had been before. Great horns curved up from its black head. The eyes were redder, angrier, and filled with so much hate that I wanted to run from this place, screaming.
But I didn’t. The white light also kept it out of my own mind: no more images of fear and death and evil.
At present, it was behind me, contained within my energy, and I knew just what to do. And Ivy knew what to do, too, even though it was obvious she was seriously injured from her fall.
My new friend, and the newest member of the witch triad, crawled on her hands and knees. As she did so, I guided the demon over the floor, keeping my hands up, as it swirled and formed and reformed, eyes flashing red, and swept him into the semicircle.
But it wasn’t a semicircle for long.
Ivy used the rest of the blue powder to seal off the circle. Almost immediately, the blue flame caught on and formed a full circle that completely surrounded the demon. I lowered my arms, and it dropped down within the ring of fire.
And screeched hideously.
I stumbled back, gasping, as Millicent made a full appearance, looking so solid that she might as well have been alive again. She raised her hands, and began uttering a complicated spell.
With each word, the demon writhed more and more, and still she continued the incantation. She stepped closer and closer, and the demon shrieked louder and louder.
Ivy stared up from the floor. Her leg, I saw, was at an awkward angle. But she had come through. The blue fire illuminated her pretty face...and seemed to go right through Millicent.
The demon grew in size and fought the wall of blue fire, pounding it with clawed fists.
I couldn’t believe I was here, seeing this now, a part of something so...out of this world. But here I was, gasping, feeling the heat from the fire, and watching a ghost witch finish off the demon.
And finish it off, Millicent did.
A moment later, the floor beneath the demon seemed to open up. I sensed a great hole beneath it, although I couldn’t see it. The demon dropped, plummeting down...and was gone.
Mother Earth was waiting. What she would do with the entity, I didn’t know, but she had promised it would be gone, forever.
And I always believed Mother.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Later that night, I was sitting with Smithy in his squad car.
Ivy had already been taken to the local hospital, where she was being treated for a broken ankle. That she had crawled across the floor with a broken ankle...to seal the ring of fire...was still mind-blowing to me. Yeah, she had my respect.
“And the demon is really gone?” he asked. I had just gotten the ill-kempt detective up to date.
“Yes,” I said.
“Did I just say ‘demon’?” Smithy asked.
“You did, Detective. Welcome to my world.”
“I’m not sure I like your world,” he said.
I shrugged. “The two are tied together. The demon had been orchestrating a series of deaths for many, many decades. You could probably single-handedly close some of these cold cases related to deaths in this house—”
“No, I can’t, because no one would believe me.”
“But you believe me,” I said.
“I’m not sure I do.”
“You do. You just won’t admit it. It scares you to admit it.”
“I ain’t afraid of shit,” he said. “Well, maybe a red-eyed demon.”
We were quiet. Outside, the crime scene guys weren’t quiet. They came and went inside the big home. Earlier, I had watched as they’d wheeled out a gurney covered by a big sheet. The sheet was bigger than Billy had been. I knew, of course, that he had been dead for days...and had bloated, as corpses were wont to do. The Billy that I had seen inside the house, slitting his own throat...that Billy had become the demon’s puppet at that point. I had likely never seen the real Billy, aside from his initial phone call to the Psychic Hotline.
Smithy stepped out of the car and spoke to his crew, only to come back and report that the corpse was, indeed, probably Billy Turner. However, it was still hard to verify that yet, since the body was in such poor condition. He did confirm that Billy’s neck wound appeared to be self-inflicted. However, it was still too early to tell that for sure. And the female corpse in the kitchen was a missing neighbor whose frantic family had filed a report only two days before.
“How...how could a demon do that?” asked Smithy. “I mean, they don’t have bodies, right?”
“No, but they operate out of fear and, in fact, they feed on it. It didn’t need hands if humans were willing to kill for it.”
“But...why would they kill for it?”
“I suspect this demon worked slowly at first, meaning, it first came into their lives through their dreams. From there, it preyed on fear and depression and drugs—and anything else tha
t would give it an ‘in.’”
“Did they know the demon was there? I mean, were they aware of it?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I doubt it. Unable to resist it, each of the homeowners undoubtedly found themselves in a darker and darker space, until they, too, could be fully possessed.”
“Jesus! So, what can people do against a demon? How would they resist something like this? Not everyone is, you know, a witch.”
“Fortify your home with blessings. Sage your home—”
“Sage it?” he interrupted.
“The herb, sage, is known to repel negative energy and malicious spirits. And you should be aware immediately if, say, you feel unreasonably depressed or sad or angry.”
“But some people do get sad and depressed and angry.”
“But not unreasonably so, and not without good reason. Often such feelings are followed by disturbing thoughts.”
“And this is the demon causing those thoughts?” Smithy asked.
“Perhaps, perhaps not.”
“What would someone do next?”
“Meditate and pray, and perhaps bring in a holy man or woman. Someone to further bless yourself and your home. The key is to not let anything get out of hand. Demons and other, darker entities must, in the end, obey the light.”
“Did you say darker entities? Lord help me.”
“That’s a good prayer, too,” I said, and nudged him in the gut.
“And you really, you know, defeated the demon...using your, you know, magic?”
He comically waved his hands in front of him.
I giggled. It was a much-needed giggle.
“I had help,” I said.
“So, is it really gone? Is it really over?” he asked.
“I think so, yes.”
“But there are other demons out there, right?”
“I imagine so.”
“God, I hope I never cross paths with something like that.”
“And if you do...”
“Right, you’d better believe I’m calling you.”