by Peter Nealen
Summoning Evil
The weird odor in the air, that managed to smell like blood, rot, sulfur, and burned meat all at the same time, got more intense. My guts twisted and I tried not to inhale, but it seemed to reach into my nose anyway, forcing itself past my nasal passages and into my sinuses. A piercing, stabbing pain started to build behind my left eye.
I heard Kolya grunt, and Eryn was panting, breathing shallowly. I spared a worried glance at her, to see that she still had her shotgun up, though she looked pale and sick. Granted, some of that might have been the green light of the candles on her already fair complexion, but whatever was happening in that room was not conducive to human life.
As soon as they landed on the corpse pile, both figures went limp, though blood continued to pump from their savaged throats, coating the floor and the already bloody meat that had once been human beings. For a moment, all was still. Father Ignacio was continuing the Rite of Exorcism, but the three still-living cultists, or whatever they were, were still facing the pile of human remains, still croaking that blasphemous sound, though they still flinched with each syllable of the Rite.
Then the pile started moving.
Older and Fouler Things
Peter Nealen
This is a work of fiction. Characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination.
Copyright 2017 Peter Nealen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, to include, but not exclusive to, audio or visual recordings of any description without permission from the author.
Printed in the United States of America
www.americanpraetorians.com
Also by Peter Nealen
The Jed Horn Supernatural Thriller Series
Nightmares
A Silver Cross and a Winchester
The Walker on the Hills
The Canyon of the Lost (Novelette)
The American Praetorians Series
Drawing the Line: An American Praetorians Story (Novella)
Task Force Desperate
Hunting in the Shadows
Alone and Unafraid
The Devil You Don’t Know
Lex Talionis
Kill Yuan
Chapter 1
Crossing the police line felt like stepping into a sauna. It had been warm enough out on the street; it was the middle of August, after all. But Spokane was relatively dry and arid. This felt like we’d just walked into a swamp in the middle of Mississippi. In August.
There was also a heavy scent in the air, that caught at the throat and made me feel like I was simultaneously going to cough and sneeze. It wasn’t quite incense, and it wasn’t quite burned blood, though it was close to the latter; there was a faint hint of something metallic in it. It was a stink that I’d smelled before, and didn’t care to smell again. It was cloying, sickening, and utterly wrong.
I had felt like we were being watched even before we set foot across the police line and onto the yard in front of the spruced-up old neo-Victorian house. Of course, there were swarms of cops, firefighters, EMS personnel, reporters, cameramen, and curious neighbors gathered on the street behind us, but that wasn’t the source of that hackle-raising feeling of exposure. There was someone, or something, up in that house, watching us as we ducked under the yellow police tape; and it didn’t want us there. That was abundantly clear as soon as Eryn, Kolya, and I stepped onto the grass.
Any noises from the house were being drowned out by Father Ignacio’s chanting. The long-haired, mustached, craggy-faced itinerant exorcist was presently right behind me, a stole over his biker leathers, a large silver crucifix held up in one hand and an ancient book of prayer in the other, praying in Latin at the top of his gravelly voice.
But while we might not have been able to hear the thing that had been whispering and growling at the police line for the last ten hours, we could sure feel the pressure it was exerting to keep us away. Walking up the sloped front lawn was like walking into a stiff wind, except there wasn’t any wind. Whatever was in there was bad medicine.
“I do not like this,” Kolya said from beside me, his voice low.
“There ain’t much to like,” I replied. And there wasn’t. Not when three of the sixteen people who had been in that old house, only recently turned into a Bed and Breakfast, had come screaming out at three in the morning, all but incoherent in their terror. Not when half of the Spokane Police Department was standing behind us, watching nervously, having been unable to get in there in the first place. Only the police chief’s growing desperation had gotten us past the police cordon. Even worse, half the local TV news stations had cameras pointed at the house, and therefore at the four of us.
But what really bothered me was the fact that this incident was so high-profile. The Enemies of God and Man who lurk in the darkness of the Otherworld or the hellfires of the Abyss generally keep to the periphery, sticking to the shadows, picking off their victims from the fringes of the herd, as it were. It doesn’t suit them to be exposed for an unbelieving world to see. As old Screwtape had said, their overall strategy generally ruled out direct terrorism. It was easier to corrupt those who didn’t think there was a threat at all. Complacency kills, as the Marine Corps is fond of saying. This was different, a departure from the norm, and it was disturbing.
I looked to my right and left. Kolya was as impassive as ever, his flat Russian face set and his .35 Whelen Remington 750 ready in his hands. The little Russian expat always looked a little angry, but I couldn’t recall a time when I had ever actually seen him lose his temper.
Eryn was calm and serene, her red hair pulled back in a ponytail and her Remington 870 held with the muzzle down. My lovely wife had come a long way since she’d first swallowed her fear and stood her ground against hordes of monsters on the steps of St. Anthony’s Church in Silverton. She might still be nervous, but she always had it under control. Sometimes it felt like she had it under better control than I did; I always worried more about her getting hurt when we stepped into these things than I probably should. After all, she wasn’t about to let me continue the life of a Witch Hunter alone, going into the dark places after monsters and spooks and other things that go bump in the night without her.
Together, with Father Ignacio calling on Heaven to banish whatever was in there causing that awful pressure, we started up the lawn.
The front yard was on a slope leading up to the porch. Unlike a lot of the places we end up having to go, the house was very nicely kept up. Of course, it had only opened as a B&B a week ago. Three stories tall, with the requisite Victorian tower on one corner, it had been painted light blue with white trim, and there was a white-painted sign out front proclaiming it to be the Cedar Slope Bed and Breakfast. The whole thing should have looked bright and inviting.
But even under a clear sky and the bright summer sun, there was something dark and foreboding about it. The light didn’t change as we got closer, but it still somehow felt like we were walking under a brooding overcast. The windows were all pitch dark, and the sheer, oppressive awareness of whatever was lurking in there, watching us malevolently, only increased as we crossed the sweltering lawn.
The heat was building, and the pressure increasing, but every time Father Ignacio raised his voice again, it seemed to give way, just a little. We had already gotten farther than the cops had by the time we reached the porch.
It was getting hard to breathe. Whatever was in there, it wasn’t happy, and this was bound to get wo
rse.
With Eryn and Kolya covering down on the door, I reached out and tried the knob. To my complete lack of surprise, it didn’t budge. It was also hot to the touch, as if it had been in direct sunlight, even though it was deep in the shade of the porch, and there were two big pines overshadowing the east end of the same porch. It threatened to sear my palm as I tried to turn it.
It didn’t feel like it was locked; there was just enough give in the knob that it felt like there was someone on the far side trying to hold it closed. I grimaced, took half a step back, and slammed my boot into the door just below the latch.
It still didn’t open. A deep snarling noise came from the other side. I kicked it again, and the jamb cracked, but the door stayed stubbornly closed.
Father Ignacio paused in his litany, and spoke a single, growled command in Latin. The door flew open under my boot as I kicked it a third time, though I could have sworn I heard another vicious snarl as it did so.
The inside was dark, and as we stepped through the doorway it was as if we’d left the summer sun behind us altogether. The brightly lit doorway was behind us, but it cast no light on the interior. The darkness was thick, almost cloying, and the air was even hotter and more oppressive inside than it had been outside.
There was nothing in the entryway that might have been blocking the door. There was also no place that anyone who might have been holding it closed could have run and hid after it swung open.
That this came as no surprise to any of us should probably tell you something about our line of work.
While the sunlight seemed to stop dead at the threshold, that didn’t mean we couldn’t see anything inside. Far from it, unfortunately.
The living room was lit by what had to be close to a hundred black candles that burned with a weird green flame. That could have been done with chemistry, but still didn’t account for the cloying darkness inside.
The candle flames lit a scene of horror. A pentagram had been drawn on the floor in blood, and there were five headless bodies hanging from the ceiling by their ankles, naked and blood-spattered, one at each point of the pentagram. At first glance, I couldn’t see how they’d been suspended, which was somehow even more disturbing.
There was a bundle of something in the center of the pentagram. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust before I could see that it was the chopped-up body parts of at least three more corpses.
That was about all I could make out before the five still-living people kneeling at the points of the pentagram all turned and looked at us with a creepily singular motion.
All five of them, three men and two women, were naked, and painted in blood. Their hair was plastered to their skulls with it, and dark clotted splashes made their skin look mottled in the green light. Their eyes were rolled back in their heads, far enough that only the whites were showing, though they still seemed to be staring at us even though they couldn’t have actually seen anything besides the insides of their own eye sockets. Every one of them had a kitchen knife in one hand.
As one, they suddenly lurched toward us, hissing, their knives raised. The three of us stood our ground, shoulder to shoulder. Two big-bore rifles and a shotgun snapped level, and fingers tightened on triggers.
“Hold it!” Father Ignacio growled, right behind my shoulder. “Don’t shoot!”
I almost blasted the nearest one anyway; my trigger was that close to its break. When the nearest blood-smeared, knife-wielding maniac is already within bad-breath distance, it can be almighty hard not to let that shot fly. But I trusted Father Ignacio. I let off the pressure on the trigger, though I didn’t take my finger all the way off it.
Somehow, miraculously, nobody fired. But we didn’t get swarmed and stabbed to death, either.
The closest naked psychopath, or whatever he was, stopped four feet from me, his knife still raised, and actually recoiled. It took me a second to figure it out, but I soon noticed that if he’d had the use of his eyes, they would have been fixed on the center of my chest.
Right where my worn silver crucifix was hanging on its age-darkened leather thong.
The rest were similarly frozen, snarling and hissing, dancing back and forth on the balls of their feet, brandishing their knives but evidently unwilling to get close.
“They’re possessed,” Father Ignacio said. “And whatever’s inside them doesn’t have a high tolerance for silver or the sight of the sacred.” I kept my eyes on the five possessed psychos in front of us, my old Winchester 1886 leveled and the muzzle not moving a millimeter away from the bridge of the closest guy’s nose. I heard the priest shuffling pages behind me. “Spread out and keep them contained,” he said. “We can deal with this.”
“You’re going to try to cast out all five at once?” I asked, even as Kolya started to work his way around to the right, and Eryn did the same to my left. We were going to have to be very, very careful. We needed to make sure they didn’t have an escape route, while avoiding inadvertently turning ourselves into a Polish firing squad in the process.
He grunted. “See how they’re all moving in unison?” He was right; after a moment I could see that while their movements weren’t all identical, they were close. They’d all hop on the same foot at the same time, and they all had the same arm cocked, knife in hand. It was like they were all on the same set of puppet strings. “If there was more than one entity, they’d all be behaving differently. Whatever they did in here, they all opened themselves to the will of one spirit, and it’s playing them like marionettes. If we can banish it, we can deal with them.”
I was edging around the room, careful to watch my step and avoid putting my boot on a burning candle while still covering down on the five slavering, blood-smeared meat-puppets. “If they committed close-up mass murder to summon this thing,” I pointed out, “they might not be all that reasonable once they’re freed. Probably weren’t to begin with.”
“Maybe not,” Father Ignacio growled in reply, as he lifted the crucifix again. “But how about we deal with that after the ancient evil is banished back to the Abyss?”
I shut up and let him get to work.
Exorcisms are not comfortable things to witness or participate in. Any direct struggle with the demonic is deeply disturbing, and I’ve been in a few. This one was no different. At least, it started out that way.
Father Ignacio began with the typical Latin prayers, calling upon God to chastise the demon and then ordering the demon to be silent. He was answered with the usual screaming, screeching, hissing, snarling, cursing, and blasphemy. All the noises and all the curses, coming from five separate throats, were the same. The same noises in the same voice. Then things went pear-shaped.
The center guy, the one that I’d nearly shot in the face, suddenly turned to the young woman next to him, and, quick as a wink, sliced her throat. In the same instant, the other woman did the same to the skinny short guy next to her.
Without making a sound except for a horrible gassy bubbling noise as they choked on their own blood, both of them turned and threw themselves on top of the pile of body parts in the middle of the pentagram. Meanwhile, the remaining three started to croak something, still in the same voice and precisely harmonized.
Although “harmonized” doesn’t sound right. There was no harmony in anything happening in that room. Whatever they were chanting, it didn’t just sound ugly. The weird odor in the air, that managed to smell like blood, rot, sulfur, and burned meat all at the same time, got more intense. My guts twisted and I tried not to inhale, but it seemed to reach into my nose anyway, forcing itself past my nasal passages and into my sinuses. A piercing, stabbing pain started to build behind my left eye.
I heard Kolya grunt, and Eryn was panting, breathing shallowly. I spared a worried glance at her, to see that she still had her shotgun up, though she looked pale and sick. Granted, some of that might have been the green light of the candles on her already fair complexion, but whatever was happening in that room was not conducive to human life.
Then the pile started moving.
At first, it looked like a tentacle made of blood came slithering out, though it soon solidified into an arm. A very long arm, with talons on the end. It was followed by three more, then a head, apparently put together by mashing five skulls together under a miasma of blood and patches of torn flesh. There was only one mouth, a massive, three-sided maw lined with broken bones for teeth, but all five sets of eyes were there, glaring the thing’s hate at us.
I immediately put a shot through the apparition’s head. Four hundred five grains of silver-jacketed lead blew right through the mess of blood, skin, and bone, but didn’t so much as slow the thing down. That mass of gore was as much of a puppet as the people had been.
It took a swipe at me, but even as I ducked, Father Ignacio roared, “Pray! Open your mouths! That’s the only way to fight this thing!”
I shot it again anyway, and so did Kolya. The three of us had shifted back closer to Father, so we were no longer in any risk of shooting each other. Which was good, because the big bullets we were putting through that thing were going right through and blowing big holes in the walls beyond.
Dan Weatherby, my mentor, had taught me a long time ago that defiance, exemplified in this case by shooting, was another weapon to use against the creatures of the Abyss. A big bullet to a travesty of a face was a pretty powerful denial. The gunfire couldn’t actually hurt a spirit that was puppeteering a mass of dead flesh and bones. But it was something.