by Glenn Rolfe
“You’re a demon.”
“Maybe,” the thing said. “My father built this hotel. This was his real baby,” the demon’s voice sent a chill through Rhiannon. “He was in love with his–”
Sarah looked up as if something was there.
Rhiannon, seizing the moment, focused on the pages before her.
Burning Darkness; the incantation that Lee had instructed her to read once the demon revealed itself and moved into place. She read the words in her mind, trying to commit them to memory.
Sarah’s dead eyes turned back to her. “Sorry about your boyfriends.” She looked over her shoulder at Jeff. “Jeffrey was the most fun.” Her eyes latched back onto Rhiannon’s. “He had one last good fuck before he went. He tried to think about helping you, but I wouldn’t have that. I needed his full attention.” She stopped and looked down toward the notebook in Rhiannon’s hand. “Why don’t you hand that to me?”
Before Rhiannon could reply the notebook flew from her hands, into the air, and landed in the blood pool behind Sarah.
“No,” Rhiannon cried. Her voice sounded even more desperate bouncing back at her from across the room.
“I can’t have any more of these little hiccups.” Sarah looked to her left. Rhiannon followed her gaze; the frost on the door had melted, the conflagration on the other side blazing against it as if hell had come knocking.
Sarah’s eyebrows furrowed as she glared back at Rhiannon, her eyes now matching the orange glow outside the room.
Didn’t see that one coming, did you?
“You little bitch,” Sarah said, her voice doubled, sounding like a chorus of evil. She took a step toward Rhiannon and stopped. The grin from her lips dissolved into a sneer. “You,” the voices said. Sarah’s blazing eyes stared past Rhiannon.
Rhiannon circled to find Christina behind her. The ghost was more solid now. She had short black hair, soft features, and black eyes that had locked onto Sarah’s like a sniper eyeing its mark. Rhiannon stepped aside.
“Little Tina, come back to try and finish what you fucked up before?”
The shadow—Tina—didn’t answer.
“I knew these fucks couldn’t stop my boys without some kind of help.” Sarah stepped forward, her skin crawling, stretching and ripping from her body. “You’re nothing. I helped you become something.”
Tina didn’t respond, or move.
“I gave you freedom. I gave you this. Can’t you feel the power? What a waste.”
The form beneath Sarah’s skin was rotten, her blood-darkened hair turned grey and rose around her skeletal features. Patches of skin clung to bones and the browned tissue of her face, her voices taking on a shrill edge. Rhiannon remembered what Lee had said. You must wait until the demon reveals itself. She tried to recall the chant.
“This time, it’s my turn to snuff you out,” the demon said.
Christina’s features blurred. The blue luminance around her intensified.
“Come here you fucking bitch and take your goddamn medicine,” the Sarah-thing screamed and launched at the blue shadow.
They tangled, resembling a throbbing, dark cancer attempting to attach itself to a healthy cell. Rhiannon ducked down as they flew up and shot around the room from side to side. Unintelligible shrieks burst in quick audible strikes making her cringe and cover her ears. She recalled the chant, but needed to wait. The dark spirit had to be in the center of the star.
They bounced from one wall to another, to the floor, to the ceiling, knocking down lighting fixtures and the rack of towels before dropping into the pool of bodies. A splash of crimson shot up like a geyser, and covered the area surrounding the pool in blood. Rhiannon didn’t hesitate:
“Bind thee, dark spirit, to rest. Let darkness burn and come to light. Let darkness burn and come to light…” she stalled.
Oh my God, what’s the rest of it?
A charge went off in the pool. Waves of blood rose over the concrete lip and spread out onto the floor. Rhiannon raised her hands to her temple trying to block out the activity and concentrate on the missing line. The thing that tangled with Christina began to rise from its lake of blood. Its eyes–now red and brimming with hatred–zeroed in on her.
Rhiannon was ready to curl up into a ball as the light went off inside her head. She spit it out: “Bind thee, dark spirit, to rest. Let darkness burn and come to light–”
The demon let loose a howl of rage reaching out its skeletal claws in Rhiannon’s direction.
“–Let darkness burn and come to light. Give into the power that rules your fate. Demon, burn, and come to light.”
The demon was at the pool’s edge when the blood ignited into flames. Howls of anguish and defeat filled the room; the cries of a tortured soul. Rhiannon covered her ears, and watched the magnificent flame engulf the demon and pull it back within the pit of fire. Rhiannon stole one last glance at Jeff–sadness sliding in behind her exhausted mind–and lunged for the door. More flames met her as she realized she was trapped. She dropped down on her hands and knees, positioning herself between the red hot door, and the burning pool.
Across the room she saw the changing area. There were windows in the stalls. She got up, ran over and threw the door open, not bothering to watch the shamanic fire morphing from orange and red to purple and green. The demon’s cries had faded. Rhiannon burst through the door of the first stall and saw the open window above the toilet. She climbed the porcelain god, and punched at the screen that blocked her exit. It came free after a couple of whacks. She grabbed the window sill and the side of the stall and pulled herself up. Grasping at the wet grass and clawing her fingers into the mud, she pushed her body through, clearing the window and liberating herself from the inferno.
Chapter Nine
Lee’s body lay motionless farther down the lawn. Rhiannon climbed to her feet and ran to see if he was still alive, praying he’d made it, but not thinking it likely. The entire hotel was ablaze. Flames and smoke billowed out from almost every window. Crackling, loud pops, and shattering glass replaced the serene night that otherwise surrounded the inn. From ten steps away, she could tell he was dead.
Rhiannon dropped to her knees. Lee’s death, a final cheap shot from this God-awful night, landed the hardest blow of them all, sapping the last of her will to fight.
The building sizzled and popped giving off a nonstop, high-pitched whistle that sounded like a scream.
The building’s dying.
The thought would have made her smile if she could. Instead, she got back up (one more time) and stumbled away from Lee and the burning hotel.
“Uhhh…”
Was that?
Rhiannon spun around to find the shaman slowly lifting his head from the ground. “Lee!” She dropped to her knees by his side. His eyes opened.
“Did we, did you…”
“Yes, we did it–me, you and Christina.”
“What about…what about Jeff?” he said, turning his eyes to hers.
Her tears pelted his shoulder as she shook her head and squeezed his hand. “I thought you were dead, too.”
“I had a little trouble getting back to my body,” he said. “Help me up?
“Are you sure you can?”
“No, but it seems we haven’t let that stop us yet.” He tried to smile.
She helped him to his knees, then to his feet. Together, they limped their way across the lawn. With the blazing hellfire at their backs, they watched their shadows limp along as well, stopping at the road. Lee–one arm clutched around his ribs—Rhiannon was sure some were broken–let go of her shoulder, then slid down onto his ass in the dirt. Rhiannon put a hand behind him and helped him lay back. She dropped down beside him.
Waiting for anyone to pass by, she stayed next to him, silent, bruised, alive and staring up at the starry sky watching the old inn burn into the night. Rhiannon prayed that no one would call the fire department until it was too late. She wanted the whole place to burn to the ground.
She t
hought of Jeff, of Kurt, of a blue shadow named Christina.
We did it.
Epilogue
Lee Buhl sat at his laptop smoking a cigarette in a crummy Econo Lodge outside his hometown of Malden, Massachusetts. It had been nearly a year since the incident at the Bruton Inn and his father’s subsequent passing from a sudden stroke two days afterward. He’d finally come back home to visit his father and his grandparents’ graves and see about putting a claim in on the old family ghost house. His mother, grateful to have her boy home again, wanted nothing to do with the haunted relic and said it would just be a matter of paperwork to get him the keys and the deed. He should be in by week’s end.
In his meditations following the happenings at the Bruton Inn, he’d made a promise to his grandparents to stay on the path of his heritage. Roots were important. Family was important; not to be forgotten or taken for granted. His days as Lee Buhl, “Urban Shaman,” were done. No more working lonely old crows for their savings; no more novelty merchandising or crappy volumes of half-believed haunting books. The true shaman practiced love and respect and harmony on a daily basis, on his own and out of the spotlight.
He’d not gone back to the scorched land off Route 5 that once held the foundation of the Bruton Inn. He did not care to.
Rhiannon had kept in touch on Facebook. He was proud to have made such a great friend and extremely impressed with the way she had entered the battlefield, slayed the demon, and pulled through what would have crippled many. Via email, Facebook messaging, an occasional phone call, and Skype, per her request, Lee had shown her the path to Shamanism. She was a willing and open receptor taking his teachings and–with an amazing grace–applying them to a life in progress. She was attending school at Oswego in upper New York with a friend of hers. She studied Zoology, trying to put all of her focus on animals. She’d joked that she’d had enough of humans–too many skeletons in the closet, too many ghosts. She’d encouraged Lee to write the book of all books and tell their story–so long as he promised to change her name to Alana or Crystal and pass it off as fictional.
He felt dirty even considering the book, especially in the wake of his spiritual rebirth. But eventually, through Rhiannon’s constant support, he finally put pen to paper and crafted his most honest and cathartic piece of writing to date. And his first official work of “fiction.”
For once, he was going low key, choosing a small horror press to release their story, changing the names and places in the book as he’d promised Rhiannon (though he did cave to the will of his publisher who pushed for the “based off true events” tagline for the back jacket). Burning Darkness was set for an October 2015 release.
Lee finished typing his message to Rhiannon filling her in on the details of the release. He sent it off on the wings of the web, closed the laptop and crushed out his last cigarette. He stood and stared out at the perfect clear night beyond the window of his hotel room. Even calm nights like this made him shiver if he stared into the darkness for too long. He stripped off his shirt and ran his fingers over the row of ribs that had taken nearly six months to fully heal.
After a moment, he lowered himself down onto another lumpy mattress, dropped his head to the pillow, and clenched the wooden pendent around his neck. He kissed the head of the Native figure, whispered a prayer of love and light, and closed his eyes.
His dreams were filled with blood-bathed mermaids and a lake of fire–a small penance for redemption.
THE END