by John Everson
“Aaron, or…it,” she whispered.
“Promise,” he said finally, and she nodded, letting her head relax back to the concrete floor. Her lips were white with foam from gasping, and then she coughed. The white bubbles shone with the irridescent prism of blood.
“…Oh yes, Madame, you will be mine to command,” Aaron was saying behind them. “Within the circle I bind thee, within the circle I…”
* * *
Raymond forced himself back off the floor and struggled to his knees, the demon slicing its claws across his back in a deadly embrace.
“You want it, it’s yours,” he gasped. Plunging his thumbs into the demon’s glowing orange eyes, he pried it from his chest. The thing shrieked louder than Sal’s dying screams and Raymond felt its slick eyeballs roll around his thumbs, which stuck deep into the warm soft tissue behind.
The thing dropped its grasp on his chest and arms and grabbed at Raymond’s wrists instead. In turn, he picked it off the ground and threw it at Aaron who stood staring in horror at the edge of the bloody circle.
“Don’t free her yet!” Aaron commanded, but it was too late. The demon laughed and screamed as its claws met the cool silk of the mage’s robes, and it scurried blindly up the legs and waist of the man like a crab, claws ripping the thin material like tissue.
Raymond wiped the slime of its eyes off his hands onto his jeans and watched as the thing jabbered and screeched its hatred at the wizard who’d called it back into this world to experience only excruciating pain. It was now some three feet long and its teeth found no deflection as they bit hard into the soft flesh of Aaron’s neck.
“The circle,” he coughed, pushing the demon back with one hand and pointing at Raymond with the other.
“The circle! I must…” he choked. “I must…complete the binding.”
Raymond shook his head and bent down to retrieve the steel rod that Aaron had used on Sal.
The demon knocked Aaron to the ground and it was all the wizard could do to hold its gnashing fangs back from tearing out his throat. The creature warbled and babbled in an ear-piercing language that echoed painfully throughout the basement.
Raymond stood over the two struggling creatures, the black rent robes of Aaron flickering like an anti-strobe over the cool concrete as he fought for his life. Black oily ichor dripped from the demon’s ruined eye sockets onto the wizard’s cheeks like tar tears.
“Help me,” Aaron begged. “With this demon in thrall, you and I could…” he coughed again and dodged a blackened claw.
“We could rule the world.” The wizard finished.
“I wouldn’t trust you to fuckin’ rule a town, let alone the world,” Raymond spit.
The demon shifted and grew in Aaron’s arms, and the claws of its toes were steadily shredding the flesh of the wizard’s calves.
“Help me,” the wizard begged.
“Help yourself,” Raymond chal-lenged, and stood still as the demon finally sunk its fangs into the old man’s neck. The wizard tensed, his face frozen suddenly in a mask of pain. He was silent then, and Raymond thought of the stance and set jaw of baseball star Sammy Sosa at the plate as he considered the gobbling, bleeding, quickly growing entity beneath him. He gripped his hands tight, joints turning white on the base of the steel bat, and brought its end down to meet the back of the demon’s skull.
“Eeeiiiahhhhh!” it screamed and turned from its feast to meet its new attacker, but Raymond swung again. The steel pole sunk into the demon’s mouth with a scrape of broken teeth, and he swung again, and again and again, until the room seemed to fill with a whistling intake of screeching wind. There was a blinding light, and a pop and then the steel bat met only a lumpy cushion of pulp instead of vicious struggling resistance.
Exhausted, Raymond fell to the ground next to Aaron, whose mouth hung open slackly. The demon lay next to him, a black mottled pulp of battered flesh.
The room was still.
Sal’s guts still dangled from his gore-streaked body, but the boy’s head hung limp and lifeless, bloody hair stuck over his eyes. Raymond was glad; he didn’t want to see the accusation there. He could have stopped this. He could have saved Sal, if not Cind.
The girl was gone too, that much was obvious. A thick pool of blood spread beyond her thighs, and her eyes were open and unblinking. Her empty pupils stared at a point somewhere between Sal and the rafter sky.
Could the wizard have ruled the world? He wondered briefly, shaking his head at the dead man.
“You fuckin’ freak,” he whispered, and shivered at the sound of his voice in the too-still room.
He kicked at the man’s body and recoiled at the touch of Aaron’s hips against his toe.
“You’re a failure, just like the rest of us,” he said.
Raymond picked up the gun and tucked it into the waistband of his pants. He reached into his pockets for bullets to load it with, but then changed his mind.
Leaning down, Raymond nudged a razor in between his thumb and forefinger, and raised the sharp blade to his line of sight. He stared at its edge, deadly fine in the orange light, and thought about letting his neck breathe freely. He imagined his bloody corpse being found rotting and foul amid the reeking guts of Cind and Sal. Clouds of flies would be buzzing like a hive of bees. They would pummel the police as the investigation team struggled to retain their lunches. The basement would be filled with sound and fury again, as the flies droned and the police puked, and Raymond and Sal and Cind would be remembered forever...
No.
Not that way. It couldn’t be that way.
Raymond dropped the razor to the floor, and knelt at Cind’s side.
Her lips were red with blood, just like the long thin line he’d carved through her belly button, which now cupped a darkened pool of crimson.
“I didn’t let him get away with it,” he whispered, and leaned forward to kiss her.
She tasted like copper, but Raymond held the kiss for a long time. He’d dragged her into this. He didn’t blame Sal. All he’d had to say was no.
He stood up then, and patted his late friend’s shoulder.
“I can’t get you out of here,” he said. “Keep an eye on her ’til someone can.”
Raymond stepped backwards, away from his two dead friends, almost tripping over the bodies of the wizard and the demon spawn. There was a book on the floor near Aaron’s left hand, and Raymond bent to pick it up. The cover read:
A Wizard’s Armamentorian
of Magical Spells
By Madame Relaud
“They say anything is possible with magic,” Raymond murmured, looking at the weathered creases in the book’s leather cover.
“I wonder.”
He tucked the book under his arm and turned his back on the carnage. The stairs creaked as he made his way painfully up them, and the floorboards creaked again as he stepped through the kitchen, pausing in thought at the blood-red candle that stood sentinel on the yellowed table.
Raymond nodded, and picked up the book of matches near the candle. He struck one, and it glowed greedily in the darkening light of the room. He touched the flame to the candle wick and watched as it cast his shadow in shivering jumps against the far wall. Then he turned on the gas of the stove, careful not to turn it far enough to engage the automatic pilot lighter.
He sat at the table for a time, watching the flickering shadows on the wall, and wondering what it would feel like when the gas in the room reached the saturation point and the small dingy space glowed white-hot for a flash. His fingers massaged the cracked cover of the book he’d carried up from downstairs, and then, for the second time that hour, he shook his head and said “no.”
IX. There Were No Bullets In The Gun
When he pulled the door shut behind him, the candle was kissing the walls with jumping shouts of light, and the hiss of the unlit stove filled the room like a deadly vaporizer.
Raymond sat in his car on the street for several minutes, wondering what he might fin
d in the book. Wondering if he might actually succeed in obliterating any physical traces of the demon, and in doing so, in helping the souls of Sal and Cind to rest quietly. Without too many questions.
The earth suddenly shook with a sonic boom. A flicker of orange and blue lit the back of the house, and Raymond smiled. A trickle of warm blood ran down his chest as he shifted in the seat, reopening the wound, but he didn’t mind. As the first yellow flames flickered out of a crack below the gutter near the front door, he put the car in gear and eased away from the curb.
He had been a failure at killing himself, but a success at building his friends a hell of a funeral pyre.
He looked at the dull and cracked cover of the book lying next to him on the seat.
For once, Raymond was thinking of living a little more.
He had some reading to do.
Somehow, he wanted to avenge the deaths of his friends. He pictured Aaron suspended from the same chains that Sal and Emily had died on, and wondered if the wizard could be called back to suffer for what he’d done.
The distant wail of a fire siren called to his back, as Raymond aimed the car towards home.
He emptied his pockets of bullets, dropping them onto the passenger’s seat. They rolled from side to side as he drove, clinking metallic kisses ringing from atop the bloodstained ruin of his Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt.
At a stoplight on West 75th, Raymond lifted the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
And laughed. He was alive.
There were no bullets in the gun.
About The Author
John Everson is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Covenant, Sacrifice, The 13th and the forthcoming Siren. His novels have been issued in collector's hardcover editions through Delirium, Necro and Bad Moon, as well as in mass market editions through Leisure Books.
Over the past two decades, John's short fiction has appeared in more than 50 magazines, including Space & Time, Dark Discoveries and Grue, as well as in a couple dozen anthologies, most recently in The Death Panel, A Dark and Deadly Valley, Cold Flesh, Damned, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker Casebook. A wide selection of his short fiction has been collected in three short story collections – Needles & Sins (Necro Books, 2007), Vigilantes of Love (Twilight Tales, 2003) and Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions (Delirium Books, 2000). "Letting Go," one of the short stories from Needles & Sins was nominated for a 2007 Bram Stoker Award.
For information on his fiction, art and music, visit John Everson: Dark Arts at www.johneverson.com.