A God in the Shed

by J-F. Dubeau

  “Maybe if you set off the fire alarms,” he said. “I don’t think the cell doors will open automatically, but someone will have to come check . . .”

  His words trailed off. The commotion upstairs had stopped. All he could hear now was a single pair of feet walking across the station. Hurried and nervous and wearing boots. Like Pavlov’s dog, his stomach gurgled at the sound.

  Jackie. Bringing his dinner.

  “Tell her I’m not well,” Randy whispered.

  A moment later the door to the cellblock opened, and Jackie’s voice called down.

  “Dr. Hazelwood? I’m going to ask you to come upstairs. I don’t have enough staff to allow for visitors right now.”

  Randy nodded at Erica, prompting her to do as he’d instructed. Jackie would trust her. Jackie wouldn’t let him suffer in his cell.

  “I . . . I don’t think Dr. McKenzie is feeling too well,” Erica said.

  “What? Let me have a look.”

  She didn’t suspect anything. She was simply worried for his well-being. But the moment she was within arm’s reach, Randy grabbed her from between the bars and pulled Jackie toward him, slamming her forehead on the cold metal.

  “Her gun!” he called out to Erica.

  The psychologist didn’t hesitate. She made a grab for the firearm, but Jackie didn’t go down without a fight. Surprised to be facing two opponents, she was quickly disarmed.

  “Randy!” the officer objected. “Are you insane?”

  “Open the door!” Erica yelled at the poor policewoman, pointing the gun.

  Erica was clearly not used to holding a weapon. Randy didn’t wait to see how the standoff would end. Holding on to Jackie’s hair in one tight fist, he took the keys from her belt and tossed them to Erica.

  After some fumbling with the wrong keys, the psychologist managed to get the door open. From there, it was a simple matter of tossing Jackie into his cell. Columns of books and magazines were knocked to the floor.

  “I’m sorry. Really sorry, but Stephen did something stupid and I have to stop him.”

  “You don’t want to do this, Randy!”

  Furious, Jackie pulled her nightstick out and rushed the cell door, but she tripped on the tomes that littered the floor, smacking her head against the ground with a loud thud.

  “Oh shit,” Erica said. “Is she okay?”

  Randy looked over at Jackie’s unconscious body. Her chest seemed to be moving and there was no obvious wound to her head.

  “Hopefully,” Randy said before locking the door to the cell with the policewoman inside.

  He then went to open the door to Sam Finnegan’s cell, but hesitated. Instead of sending Erica away alone, he could escape with her. They could abandon Jackie and Finnegan, leave Saint-Ferdinand and its dark, bloody secrets behind. All they had to do was walk up the stairs and drive away.

  What then, though? They weren’t lovers who could go on the lam together. The whole point of having Erica leave was so that her life wouldn’t be destroyed. They were well past that point now.

  He placed the key inside the cell door lock. “Let’s go,” he said to the madman. “I have a plan.”

  “Do you now?” said the Saint-Ferdinand Killer, a toothy, curious smile splitting his face. “Let’s hear it.”

  DANIEL

  DANIEL RUSHED, KNIFE in hand, toward his father. They’d had their differences recently, but never had the boy expected that things would go this far. As far as he knew, Stephen Crowley had never shot or killed another man.

  Before he could get to his father, however, Daniel was stopped again by the small crowd gathered around the SUV. Were they doing this for his protection or to keep him from interfering in what they saw as the inevitable? Their hands grabbed at him, holding him back as he attempted to push through. Only once the deed had been done would they release him.

  “Dad! What . . . what have you done?”

  He couldn’t believe it. Standing before the amassed circus employees, his father looked up from the lifeless body of Cicero. Daniel could finally see the extent to which his father had gone. This was Stephen Crowley with his fury unleashed. He had become the embodiment of his rage. His skin was red with anger and his eyes burned with an intensity that no human should ever possess.

  “Get in the car, Daniel.”

  Since the day he could understand English, Dan had learned the difference between Stephen Crowley’s fatherly voice and the tone he used when he required immediate, unquestioning obedience. Now there was an edge to his voice that Daniel had never heard before. His fury had been given control, purpose. Something had changed inside him.

  “I can’t,” Daniel answered, standing as he looked down on the serene corpse of Nathan Cicero, squeezing the knife still in his hand.

  “You can and you will, buddy.” Crowley’s left hand tightened on his gun. “The Crowley boys aren’t welcome here.”

  Daniel raised his eyes to his father. His fishing buddy, his best friend, the man who had raised him single-handedly. That man was gone. Only a shadow remained. The bloodied and bruised husk of Stephen Crowley, now brimming over with hate. Hate that had been given purpose by a god.

  “Put the gun down, Dad,” Daniel said, surprised at how level his voice remained. “I’ll get Lieutenant Matt. You need help. You’re . . . not yourself.”

  “Not myself?” The inspector took a menacing step toward his son. “I’m more myself today than I’ve been since your mother left! You don’t know what I know, haven’t seen what I’ve seen. This!” He waved his ruined hand in front of his face. “This is more me than I’ve been in years! Now get in! The car!”

  The police inspector pointed his gun at Daniel to emphasize his insistence. For a moment, looking down at the still-smoking barrel of the shaking weapon, Daniel thought his father was actually going to shoot him.

  Clearly, he wasn’t the only one. The sound of a gunshot blasted through the air, coming from close range. The blast tore off the right side of Stephen Crowley’s face, leaving behind a shredded mess. Blood, brains, and skull fragments spattered onto the SUV’s windshield. Yet despite the mortal damage wrought upon his body, Inspector Crowley stood firm. He turned his ruined, dripping head to gaze at his attacker, who was standing behind Daniel.

  He was a middle-aged man. One of those who’d held the boy back moments prior. By the looks of him, he’d been with the circus for most of his life. Perhaps he’d worked as a performer years ago, but now he wore the plain overalls of a stagehand. This was no hero, Dan saw. The man was terrified, probably of his own action more than anything else. He’d likely never shot the rifle at anything but empty tin cans sitting on a fence, but there he stood, trying to defend a stranger.

  It took Daniel a moment to notice that his would-be savior’s abject terror was spreading through the crowd. When he looked back at his father, he understood why.

  Stephen Crowley hadn’t been felled by the shot. Though half his head was missing, he seemed none the worse for it. Instead he stood tall, his shredded face twisted in a familiar mask of anger. Black wisps of pure shadow worked beneath his skin, pulsing through his raw flesh.

  Without pausing to consider his wounds, he raised his own gun and fired. His left hand didn’t afford him much precision, so his bullet missed the intended target, hitting instead a young trapeze artist at the base of her jaw.

  Hysterical screams exploded behind Daniel. The crowd scattered as another shot blasted from his father’s pistol, probably wounding another innocent, but the boy barely noticed. He could only watch, mesmerized, as Stephen Crowley’s face began to knit itself back together in a gruesome display of crawling sinew and writhing musculature.

  Another shotgun blast ripped through the inspector’s right arm, nearly severing it above the wrist. However, before the broken hand could detach, tendrils of bloody tendons and shadows shot out of the wound, reattaching the damaged limb and mending the flesh before a single drop of blood hit the ground.

  Stephen Crowley
had freed the god and been rewarded. A blessing of shadow and blood that made him invulnerable. He was no longer human or even mortal. He had been touched by the divine.

  Inspector Crowley pulled the trigger of his pistol until it clicked, then shoved a fresh magazine into his sidearm. Daniel hadn’t taken note of exactly how many bullets his father had shot into the fleeing crowd. The absence of any return fire suggested that his old man had managed to kill his attacker. Yet the police inspector kept on shooting. The anger he’d spent his whole life keeping in check, especially around his son, had completely consumed him.

  Feeling numb, Daniel Crowley watched his father fire. How many more would his father kill, cripple, or wound before he was satisfied? Would he stop once he ran out of bullets, or would he take the rifle from the car? Would he keep going until all of them were dead?

  Suddenly the teenager remembered the kitchen knife in his hand. Tightening his fingers around the handle, he could feel the cold power of the weapon calling out with its own hunger. The god-touched blade.

  Calmly, swiftly, Daniel walked toward his father. Suppressing all his emotions and memories, the son of Inspector Crowley plunged the kitchen knife into his father’s throat.

  The blade slid into the soft flesh of his neck, entering the left side and exiting the right. Daniel waited for his father to turn his gun on him, for the wound to close, for any sign that the knife, their secret weapon, was useless.

  Instead ichorous black blood spurted out of the wound. The blade wasn’t satisfied with simply cutting; it burned, corrupting and melting the flesh around it. The laceration quickly became a nightmare of decomposing meat. Before Daniel had time to see his father’s reaction or even pull the knife free, Stephen Crowley’s body began to fall apart, devoured by the very shadows that had inhabited it. The power of the god turning on him.

  For a second, Daniel’s father seemed to be at peace. He looked upon his son, trying to mouth something, but he couldn’t push the air from his lungs. Daniel thought it might have been a question or perhaps gratitude for being freed of the god’s grasp. Later he would decide that he’d tried to say, one last time: “We were the Crowley boys.”

  Then the inspector’s face collapsed, devoured by the hunger of the knife blade.

  AUDREY

  THE LAUGHTER WAS terrible. Audrey wished that Uncle Randy had driven black iron nails into her ears to protect her from such a grotesque sound. It seemed to be all around her, and she recognized the voice. She’d heard it the night she’d died.

  She never saw the god, though. After falling from her bicycle, she’d remained in her body, hiding and waiting. It wasn’t the first time she had died. She couldn’t remember before, but now she knew. Back when she was a baby, she had expired, just for a few minutes. But her soul had stayed put, hiding and waiting, and everything had been okay. So that was what she tried to do again.

  She heard people talk at her funeral, and heard all the nice things everyone had to say about her. She thought she might cry, but instead it made her happy and satisfied.

  Until the monster found her.

  She could see it trying to reach into her body, to pull her spirit out of the decaying flesh. The thing was hard to describe. It looked like the smell of rotting flesh and sounded like shadows. It moved like lightning. Always a step behind her, yet everywhere, like the skin of the world.

  That night, Uncle Randy had given her back her eyes. She couldn’t see the creature anymore, but neither could it see her. Uncle Randy had saved her from the monster, and now she had to be brave and return the favor.

  Now that it had been released, Audrey could see its physical form moving through the police station. It had built itself a coat of flesh and blood, but instead of looking like a proper human being, it had spread itself into the garment of writhing sinew and bones, a mass of shadow and blood. It looked a little like a child, not much older than she was, hiding in a thornbush or a tumbleweed. It seemed to sense Audrey, looking in her direction but unable to see her. They had switched places—she was in its world and it was in hers, but only she could see it.

  The only people left in the station were Jackie, Old Sam, Uncle Randy, and Ms. Erica. Audrey was sad to see that Erica hadn’t listened to Dr. McKenzie’s advice, but there was nothing to do about it now.

  “Hey, sweetie.”

  It was an old, familiar voice that broke her reverie. She looked over and saw that Sam Finnegan stood next to his own body. Wispy tendrils of light and shadow still connected him to his mortal flesh.

  “Sam!” she cried out, and threw her arms around the old man.

  “Are you ready to help me fight the monster?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Audrey answered with as much confidence as she could muster. Deep down, she was terrified. “What do I do?”

  “Well,” Finnegan said, gently tapping the iron nail in her left eye, “first you gotta remove these.”

  Audrey understood a lot more dead than she ever had when she was alive. She knew that the nails in her eyes let her see the physical world, and the ones in her feet tied her to the world of the living. She knew her parents had planned this, to keep her between life and death until they could get her a new body. She also knew that removing the nails meant the god would see her. She knew what it did to the spirits it saw.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Determined, Audrey grabbed the tip of the nail embedded in her right eye between her thumb and index fingers. She expected pain but was surprised to find the piece of metal slid out of her socket with ease. The sensation was beyond description. She could feel the nail rubbing against the inside of her skull, and once she had finished pulling it out, her vision became a little clearer. She could see impossible colors, superimposed over Randy’s and Erica’s bodies. The colors shifted as they turned toward the sound the nail made as it hit the floor, having found its way back into the physical world.

  “Audrey?” called out Randy, panic staining his words. “Don’t take those out, honey. You need those or the monster’ll get you.”

  Saving Audrey’s soul had been a great comfort to Randy when everything else in his life had fallen apart. He didn’t want to see her consumed now. When the second nail fell, bouncing into existence on the police station floor, he closed his eyes in resignation.

  “Randy?” Erica said nervously. “Where did those nails come from?”

  “From Audrey. She’s breaking the spell that’s protecting her.”

  And now the monster can see me, Audrey thought. She tried to swallow, but her ethereal anatomy wouldn’t allow it. Instead she settled for balling her fists nervously as she crouched down, reaching for the nail in her right foot.

  “Don’t,” Finnegan’s spirit interrupted. “Keep those in. They’ll protect you.”

  The world around Audrey and Sam Finnegan rippled like the surface of a pond. Shadows grew darker, and light brightened for a moment.

  “It knows you’re here,” the old man continued. “Remember, Audrey: it can see you, scare you, maybe even hurt you, but it can’t take you.”

  The dead child nodded, determination etched onto her bright, delicate features.

  “Good. Now hide in here.” Sam pointed to his own empty body.

  Ever obedient, Audrey moved closer to the old man’s limp form. Unlike Randy and Erica, his body didn’t glow with any color. It might as well have been another inanimate object, like the books piled up in Randy’s cell or the handle on the doors.

  She reached out her hand to touch Sam and realized she’d never tried to touch a living person since she had been dead. The feeling was strange and electric. She could feel a tingling sensation, like each cell in Old Man Finnegan’s body was pulling her in. His motionless form was hungry for her soul, wanting to absorb it, assimilate it. Audrey found that she could resist, but that if she let it go, it would pull her in, force her to fill the vacuum.

  As she let herself submerge completely into the pile of aging flesh and bones, she saw the door to the jail roo
m explode.

  Erica cried in surprise but choked on her scream when she saw the creature that walked through the doorway and down the handful of painted concrete steps. The lattice of human and animal remains slithered around the god, an aura of living decay that quickly spread tendrils around the room, crawling into corners and through bars. Audrey could see that, despite the vastness of its physical form, the creature was magnitudes larger on the wrong side of life, filling the jail and extending outward to cover most of the town.

  The blood-covered monster grabbed Erica by the arm, twisting backward until her shoulder popped out of its socket. With a cry, Randy jumped toward his former student, in a futile attempt to pull her away from the creature. But before he could grab on to her, the psychologist was pulled within the garment of quivering animal parts. Erica Hazelwood cried out in agony and confusion as her extremities were pulled into impossible, bone-snapping configurations.

  “Neil . . . ,” the monster said with a thousand voices as it laid its burning red eyes on Randy.

  For an instant, Audrey feared that Dr. McKenzie would suffer the same fate as Erica, whose screams had quickly turned to pleas of mercy and then into unintelligible gurgles as her body was crushed and lacerated.

  Then Sam Finnegan intervened.

  “Hey!” he said, his voice ethereal and ageless outside of its body.

  The god turned. It saw the man whom, for decades, had held it captive. Who had tormented and mocked and lied to it over and over and over again. It cast aside Erica’s body, and the world around it became dark with hatred—tangible, burning hatred.

  It lunged at the Saint-Ferdinand Killer. The bloody creature in the living world reached to tear the old man’s physical form apart, while it seemed as if the entire world of the dead fell upon Finnegan’s spirit.

  But it was to no avail. The god, despite all its power, all its anger, couldn’t harm Finnegan’s spirit as long as it remained tethered to his body, and it couldn’t hurt his body while it was inhabited by Audrey’s grounded spirit.