Demonologist

by Laimo, Michael

  THE DEMONOLOGIST

  By Michael Laimo

  Cover Design and Copy-Editing by David Dodd

  Crossroad Press Edition Published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2010 by Michael Laimo & Macabre Ink Digital Publications

  LICENSE NOTES:

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  PROLOGUE: ISRAEL

  THE SIX-DAY WAR

  The beast shall ascend from the gates of Hell and gather up with thy hand the child that has been cast aside like a thorn...

  The car, barely running, shook along the dirt road. Clouds of dust encapsulated it, like a swelling storm. The boy sat in the back seat, one of six occupants. Beads of sweat sprung from his brow and dissolved into the hot arid air. In spite of the heat, he shivered, not of sickness, but of apprehension. The same feeling had struck him two hours earlier in the moments before his family was executed.

  War had begun. Bloodshed clung to the Middle East like a parasite. Syrian aggressions had coerced Israeli jets to shoot down six fighter planes. Syria, in response, prepared for battle along the Golan Heights. Israel attacked, driving the enemy forces back into the Sinai. Homes were destroyed, many civilians killed. Others found themselves driven south into the Negev desert with very little food or water.

  The desert offered nothing of solace, other than an escape from the bloody combat in the north. A rock-strewn road led the way south, deep into the country’s no-man’s-land, east of the Jordan Rift Valley. The boy was in need of washing, of food, water. The Samarian hills offered fertile valleys, but lay 200 miles away. Was this the driver’s destination?

  The stench of ripe bodies, of death’s hint, wrenched his nose. His gaze followed the barren waste beyond the slow-moving vehicle, his weak form pressed against the door alongside a faceless woman shrouded in a black burka. Next to the woman, an old man stretched his legs and prayed, staring at the blood and soil on his hands. Beneath his skin, slender bones popped.

  The boy’s thoughts wandered; of his parents being dragged away, shot by soldiers while he watched; of he, being tossed atop their warm corpses like a strewn sack, a hot barrel pressed against his skull; of explosions in the house next to his, the soldiers covered in ash, pulling away from their killing intentions; he, fleeing in the dark billow of smoke, finding a miracle with unknowns miles away. What was next? Man’s brittle remains ground to powder with the bones of the enemy? The blood of his people boiled in cauldrons, their flesh seared in furnaces? His thoughts fell away into the drifts of sand surrounding him.

  In the front seat, a man gagged and spit his labors onto the floor. His coughs resounded, like the gales of sand blasting the cracked windshield. His head leaned forward, and sudden words fell from his lips in jabs:

  “Death awaits us. Death, and then beyond, more death.”

  The car ground to a sharp stop. Dust and dirt rose. Quick shadows loomed. Shouting. Savage dogs barking in the distance. Gunfire.

  The driver glanced back, sagging eyes fixed upon something. The boy watched him, troubled. The driver opened the door, stepped outside. His robe billowed in the desert wind. He raised a pensive hand. Shouted in Hebrew: “We are not the enemy.”

  A lone gunshot filled the still desert. Blood burst from the driver’s chest. His form, still for a horrible moment, collapsed to the dry earth.

  Screams erupted in the car. The boy hunkered down. The woman next to him crawled over his unmoving body, out the window. Hands grabbed her. Guns pointed. Fired. Blood sprayed, spattering the torn seat. Falling against the boy’s skin, warm and wet.

  Dogs barked, closer, once loosed upon the outskirts of the city, now sniffing out the bloodshed. Raw hands reached into the front seat, dragging out the remaining occupants. The boy gazed up momentarily. A rebel soldier stood defiantly, his religious cause inexorable. He grinned, teeth brown with decay. He shot the men whose faces the boy had never seen. They slumped to the desert floor, sobbing. Further gunshots silenced them forever.

  Another soldier came, wrenched the old man from the backseat. He continued his prayers until his moment of rapid death.

  And again, the boy was alone. He prayed. Shadows shifted. Feet shuffled. The moments ticked painfully.

  The soldiers. They did not take him. Had they not seen him?

  Silence. Then, a soldier screaming. Swearing. Shouting.

  And then, prayers of desperation.

  The dogs had migrated from the outer-city wastelands, their urges savage and brutal upon those they attacked. The boy rose up and peeked out, fingers picking at the window frame. The rebels were four strong. The dogs ten or twelve. He watched as two beasts fell to gunfire. The rest were too many for the soldiers, and were soon feasting upon them, tearing limbs and face and bowels away with rabid impulse.

  The boy sank down, listening to the dogs growls, their fighting over the scraps of rebel flesh torn free. He prayed to God and waited for an answer. None came.

  Moments passed. The wind hurled sand into the car, grains caught in sticky blood. A prickling raced down his spine a moment before one dog leaped up to the open window.

  The dog snarled furiously, teeth shredding rubber stripping. Spittle and foam leaped from its muzzle. The boy cried, sliding across the seat in a backwards panic, fearful grin biting hard on trembling fingers, eyes fixed on the dog’s blood-stained teeth. The dog’s claws fell into the car, tearing at the fabric, the shredding sound echoing its fierce barks.

  The boy screamed. He spit in the dog’s face.

  The dog leaped back outside, yelping.

  Wind-filled silence dominated.

  “Thank you, God,” the boy prayed.

  Minutes passed. Tentatively, the boy stretched up and peered outside. He glimpsed the gutted body of a rebel soldier. Alongside it, another body; one of the men from the car. Sand had begun to drift over it, the last remnants of his place on earth soon to be extinguished forever. Looking out the rear window, he could barely see the city of Jerusalem, distance blurring the sands of war in its midst.

  More bodies lay stagnant in the blood-drenched sand. A dead dog lay alongside the woman whose open burka flapped in the desert wind. Blood pooled from the bullet hole in her head.

  Barking. In the distance.

  The boy looked up. Cleared a drift of hair from his eyes.

  The dogs were clustered a hundred feet away. All of them, looking back at him.

  Compelled, the boy opened the door and stepped from the car. His feet sank into the hot sand. The wind whipped at his face. He squinted at the dogs, their threat dwindling as some settled down on their haunches. Around him, carnage. Nine human bodies partially devoured, flies buzzing around them in droves. He shrugged away the bloodbath and paced in the opposite direction of the dogs, along the side of the road, keeping a wary eye over his shoulder. Had the dogs been amply sated?

  One dog rose, separated itself from the pack. It shook its head with firm intent. One bark, and nothing more. The boy contemplated the dog, dry earth and deathly remains between them. The wind grew still, oppressive against his lungs.

  God is watching.

  The dog trotted over to the boy, barked, then moved away, turning its head in a “follow me” gesture. The boy followed, in a westwardly direction, off the road. They traveled into the desert for hours, the boy tranced, the dog prowling, nose to the sand. The air vibrated
, leading the way.

  Finally, an impasse.

  The sun beat down on the two. The dog sat, coated tongue lolling from its weather-beaten maw. Here, a muddy stream reached through the desert like a vein. The two drank, then followed the water’s flow as it fell into a depleted ravine. The dog skipped down. The boy followed, fifteen feet beneath the earth.

  The dog fell on its side, and in an hour was dead, eyes milk-coated. The boy slept and when darkness arrived, awoke to a foreign sound: intermittent scratching. He followed the noise to the side of the ravine. He scraped at the sand and unearthed a limestone marker, indecipherable hieroglyphs etched upon its surface. Slowly, he sifted away the surrounding earth, revealing a carving of a scarab. At the top of the five-foot marker, he discovered a familiar face deeply engraved in the limestone: cavernous eyes, flat nose, bulbous lips pulled into an angular grin. An ancient gaze free at last.

  I recognize this face from my dreams.

  God.

  From behind the marker, more scratching.

  He kneeled down and prayed, hands pressed together, eyes tightly shuttered, devoid of the tears they wished to release. It had brought him here. Now, he would bring it unto the world.

  Shadows danced as dark clouds rushed in. The sun fell behind the world’s edge, and the rains fell, softening the earth around the stone. A breeze sprang up, cooling him, offering him strength.

  His heart beat soundly with the conviction of knowing that soon, he would come face to face with God.

  He fell forward against the marker. Quickly ran his fingers around the edge of the stone.

  And began to dig.

  AND SO IT BEGAN

  LOS ANGELES: TODAY

  ONE

  It evolved like the slow birth of a reptile through an egg’s membrane. Evil had finally matured. A torturous cry of horror ensued that sounded out in a place where no one could hear; the great tree in the woods had finally fallen, with no soul present to become its witness. And then, normalcy returned, not a human aware of the event. Though, some animals knew. And they hid.

  Sixteen miles away, the L.A. Forum was packed full of screaming teens. There were even some folks in their twenties and thirties who hadn’t yet found the desire to grow up. The rafters shook. Spotlights swirled crazily from eight uppermost points, smoke spiraling lazily in their beams. For over two hours, Bevant Mathers performed his heart and soul out. It was homecoming of sorts; the local boy’s second CD Beneath had gone platinum, thanks to the number one single, “Blush”, which still rode the top twenty-five on the Billboard charts after eighteen weeks. He’d toured America for nine months and returned home to the wanton screams of fans his daughter’s age. What a rush.

  On this evening, Friday, November 8th, Bev rocked the Forum with nearly every original song in his repertoire, plus a few covers thrown in as surprises, like the Floyd and Zeppelin numbers he’d played night after night in the clubs for over twenty years. Bev waited in the hallway leading from the stage, soaking in sweat and the unrelenting roar of the crowd who waited in hope for one more encore. He’d had one more for them too, a cover of Marillion’s “Kayleigh”, a lighter song that was written and recorded back when most of these concertgoers were still in diapers. A perfect end, he felt, to a perfect night.

  Surrounded by his band, he went back onstage to the frenzied delight of the crowd, the wavering spots focusing on his brazen presence. He thanked them all for coming, then launched into the song with no introduction. He sang Derek Dick’s lyric perfectly. It rang true throughout the hall:

  Do you remember, you never understood I had to go.

  By the way, didn’t I break your heart?

  Please excuse me, I never meant to break your heart.

  At some point after the second verse, during the guitar solo, he felt funny. The music sounded suddenly muffled, the beat of the drums offset, the instrumental pieces falling away from one another, creating a dissonance in his mind. After his guitar lead, he sang the third verse, feeling terribly distant from the music—in over twenty years of playing live, he’d never experienced anything quite like this. It felt as though the music was trying to separate itself from him. He couldn’t concentrate. He stepped back from the microphone. The third and final chorus would go unsung, he decided, but then again, did anyone in the crowd really know how the song was supposed to be played? The song finally ended. He waved to the delirious crowd and said “good night”, then walked off the stage.

  Like magic, the house lights came up. The crowd stopped screaming and started dissipating. Now they would all have to take their fading buzzes back home and lay in the quiet darkness of their bedrooms listening to their ears ring.

  He paced down the hall, shrugging off the looming music reporters with a sidelong smile. Bev and the four musicians in his band waved a few times then closed out the imposing world behind the safeguarded door of their dressing room. Not that it was any less crowded here: family members and friends and music execs awaited.

  Slyly, Bev skirted the crowd and padded down a short hall into the bathroom. He shut the door behind him, muting the noise; he could hear the familiar thump of “Blush” surging from stereo speakers. Taking a deep breath, he ran the water and splashed it onto his face, then looked at the tired man the mirror. Man, what just happened out there? He had no guess. But indeed, it was still happening. He felt a vibration in his head, as though someone was running a fingernail across the inside of his skull. The bathroom took on an oblong shape. His stomach twisted and he felt suddenly nauseous. He’d never felt so...so vague. He gripped the porcelain sides of the sink and held on. I’m getting too old for this. Man, why did I have to break out at such a late age?

  He thought of Kristin, his daughter, who was here somewhere. His twenty-one-year-old was probably mixing it up with the celebs and reporters and drinking rum & Cokes. The tabloids had it right. Rock stars’ kids grew up fast.

  He wiped his face with a paper towel, feeling instantly better now; only a ghostly echo of the sensation remained. What was that? Felt like something crawled into my head. Better get out there and mingle, he thought. Most of the people had come to see him.

  He banded his shoulder-length hair into a ponytail, then exited the bathroom and moved into the crowded room. Feeling a bit tense, he attentively lobbed his glance around. All the people were caught up in conversation and alcohol and cigarettes, and more discreetly, cocaine. The bright lights from above cut into their wearied looks and ignited their bloodshot eyes. His drummer, Ian Mosely, talked to a male reporter but kept his gaze pinned on a young blonde who returned his attention with a coy, accepting smile. People milled about, laughing, chatting, shouting. There were girlfriends, cousins, neighbors, more girlfriends, and a few attractive wallflowers that’d used their assertive sexuality to coax their way backstage. These women, usually named Tiffany or Samantha, were present at every show, wearing outfits more suitable for pole-swinging at strip clubs. Like ferrets, they’d crane their necks seeking Bev, and upon finding him, would wander over and seductively offer their wares to him—sometimes two or three at a time. God. After nine months on the road, even that grew old, especially for a 43 year-old who could barely keep it up on a nightly basis.

  Tonight, he just wanted to see Kristin. He searched the growing crowd. Who are all these people? He didn’t see her.

  “Bev! Bev my man! Fucking brilliant, fucking brilliant!” His manager, Jake Ritchie, overweight and jovial, eyes glimmering with mischief, wrapped his pudgy arms around Bev’s body. For a moment Bev thought he’d suffocate, but Jake let go. Dark remnants of Bev’s sweat marred Jake’s blue silk shirt. “What a stellar performance!” he sputtered, breath reeking of vodka.

  They were suddenly framed by the crowd, who’d taken apt notice of Bev’s presence. Adoring women ogled, even those with partners. A few cameras flashed, and a videographer zoomed in on him. Beyond, folks shouted their approval of tonight’s performance. No one seemed to have noticed his breakdown during the final encore; if
they had, it wasn’t evident.

  “Really, Bev, this was a magnificent end to the tour! Now...uh, not to mix business with pleasure, but I have to remind you that Epic wants you in the studio next week. I do hope you’ve written new material while on the road.”

  “It’s all business, Jake.”

  Bev liked Jake. He’d been there since the beginning, when Bev first started out in the clubs with the various incarnations of bands he played with. Jake had found success in his twenties after his first client Lionheart went into the top fifty with the single, “Back To The Light”. He’d managed them for six years. After their decline, he moved on, earning a number of bands varying degrees of success. Through it all, Jake had never stopped shopping Bev’s demos. Most that’d known Bev had written him off as a washed-up club musician. But Jake had seen the talent and drive in him, and shopped his demos unremittingly until Epic took a shot with his first CD, Re-Birth. It went gold, and laid out the red carpet for the platinum Beneath, and the top-ten “Blush”. Bev Mathers had finally become a star.

  Jake fumbled for a cigarette in his shirt pocket, then a lighter. The act took him at least thirty seconds. “So’d you pen some killers, shithead?” Slovenly, and always in need of shave, Jake’s tendency for profanity was usually overlooked by his indelible grin. His everlasting consumption of alcohol loosened his tongue even further but also exacerbated his joviality. His waning lack of motor skills, that was another thing altogether.

  “There’s a couple of real good ones.”

  “A couple? A couple? Are they thirty minutes long?” He swayed like a bouy.

  “More than a couple. A few.”

  “Well I bloody well hope so. It’s expected of you.”