Demon Jack

by Patrick Donovan

  “What kind of mark?”

  “Scar, tattoo, something that contains the contract.”

  “So, that?” she motioned towards my face, or rather, the scars of demonic script covering it.

  “Yep. Subtlety isn’t my demon’s strong suit,” I said, wrapping my arms around my stomach. It felt like someone had poured ice water in my gut. My jaw and shoulder tuned up to a new crescendo of ache. I took another long, deep breath and tried to focus on the conversation.

  “And how deep are you?”

  “Soul.”

  “Uh huh. There a lot of idiots like you?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, let me ask you this,” she said.

  I ignored her and set the folder on the bed. She was talking, but I didn’t hear it. I couldn’t take it anymore. The more I had tried to dismiss it the more the craving beat against the bars of its cage. It had finally broken free. If I didn’t get out of here it felt like my brain was going to vibrate out of my skull. I needed to get out of this church. There was no room left for debate. If they wanted my help they could give me that right? I deserved it; I was going to put my life on the line for them. I had listened to their offer; I had fought to ignore it that long. I couldn’t keep doing it. I needed heroin or Alice and there wasn’t any room left for debate.

  “I can’t stay here,” I said finally.

  “Eh?”

  “I can’t stay here. It’s... I’m...” I sighed, trying to get a handle on the frustration and urgency pushing at my words. Deep breath. Pause. Try again. “I’m going insane here. I can’t be inside a church, it’s not healthy for me.”

  Maggie smirked.

  “Seriously, please. Can we go for a walk, something? Anything?” Even to me my voice sounded whiny and desperate, kicked up an octave or two. My hands were shaking.

  Maggie stared at me. Her eyes softened for a moment. She pursed her lips, drawing them into a tight line across her face.

  “Please?”

  “No,” she said finally.

  Desperation morphed into anger. I stood up, or tried to rather, a wave of cramps rolling through my muscles. I collapsed back against the bed, my head thumping off the wall.

  “God damn it! Please. You owe me this,” I cried desperately.

  She moved quick, bursting into motion and grabbing my shirt. If I hadn’t been cut off from Alice, it would’ve seemed comically slow. Broken and hurting though, I didn’t even realize what was happening until she was nose to nose with me, that warm, summery perfume rolling over my senses in a heady wave. It seemed to have grown stronger with her mood. Her eyes were narrowed, burning with rage. Her face, once soft, had sharpened with anger.

  “Listen mate. Let’s get down to brass tacks ‘ere, so yer complete and thorough on exactly what you’re owed.”

  I reached out, struggling to push her away. She slapped me, hard. I could feel the warm spot rising up on my already aching jaw.

  “Yer owed not a damned thing. Matter of fact, way I see it, you owe me an I’m collectin’. I ain’t the slightest bit crazy about ‘avin to be saddled with a junkie, but there’s bigger things goin' on ‘ere than poor Jack,” she said, contempt dripping from her words.

  She shoved me back on the bed. For a long moment, she stood over me terrifying and beautiful.

  “Ya got that?”

  “Please… just a walk? That’s all I’m asking for.”

  She damn near growled at me.

  “Yer fuckin’ pathetic.”

  She turned and left, slamming the door behind her. A second later I heard the snap of a heavy lock.

  I lay there for the next hour, or maybe it was five minutes. I really couldn’t tell. With no clock the time seemed to stretch and then constrict, a minute turning into an hour and an hour turning into a second. My whole body ached, begging and pleading for just a second’s worth of peace.

  I picked up the folder, holding it in trembling hands. I needed something, anything, to take my mind off what I was feeling.

  I took a deep breath, fighting to keep my focus. It felt like an animal had been set loose in my stomach and was currently trying to claw its way out through my throat. My skin burned. My thoughts raced. For a long moment, I wasn’t able to do anything more than stare blankly at the paper and shake. I swallowed and it felt like moving a lump of concrete down my esophagus. I managed to compose myself enough to try and draw lines between each report mentally.

  I’m no expert in possessions, demonic or otherwise, but having Alice around and being somewhat of a supernatural… thing, I’d learned more than my fair share about the things that go bump in the night. I had a general idea about what they could do, what they couldn’t, what rules they had. With vampires, for example, sunlight didn’t kill them. It just made them really sluggish, forcing them into a near death like state. Prolonged exposure to direct light would burn them, pretty badly, but it wouldn’t out-and-out cause them to erupt into towering pillars of flame. I knew about the rules that governed them, how a duel was the next best thing to trial lawyers to settle a dispute. I knew that the Fae were lying little fucks concerned with little more than their own naked self-interest, or that shifters didn't have to have a full moon to change and weren't limited to the classic wolf.

  What I didn’t get was how this thing was jumping back and forth from body to body. Or for that matter, why if was doing it.

  I tossed the folder on the desk, too frustrated and distracted to think and I settled back on the bed. I closed my eyes, crossing my arms under my head and tried to ignore the feeling of being gnawed apart by my own nerves.

  I woke up when Maggie came in. Her hair was damp and combed back from her face. She wore a pair of jeans, hiking boots, and a loose fitting t-shirt under a black leather jacket. She had a messenger bag over one shoulder and it bumped against her hip with each step.

  I sat up, wiping the sleep from my eyes and taking comfort in the ridges of scars beneath my fingertips. I was awake for maybe a second before the first stomach cramp hit me, an ice-cold knife turning in my guts. I curled up waiting for it to pass. After what felt like a literal ice age worth of time, it faded away enough for me to stand. I still felt sick, really sick.

  “What time is it?”

  “Eleven.”

  “AM?”

  She nodded. I estimated I’d gotten maybe four hours of sleep, give or take.

  “Come on. There’re clothes in a donation pile upstairs in the closet just off the kitchen. I’m sure you can find something there that will fit, and then we’re on the road. We’ll get breakfast.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  She shrugged and turned, vanishing down the hallway. I stood, my whole body shaking, ablaze and ice cold at the same time. Pressure built behind my temples, in the base of my skull with each heartbeat. Every muscle was cramped and my head felt like someone had packed my skull with napalm.

  It took a bit of effort to climb the stairs. The trip was full of pauses and leaning against the wall to muster up my strength. I wanted nothing more than to forget all about this whole damned mess and succumb to feeling like total shit. I would have preferred to just curl up, lie on the floor and give up. I forced myself to focus through the curtain of misery that had settled over me.

  I found an old pair of jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt in a pile of clothes in the closet, just as Maggie had said. I pulled them on, stripping right there in the hall. I'd been to prison, modesty, even in a church, was something I didn't really concern myself with. I slid my worn black combat boots back over my tingling feet and made for the door.

  I met Maggie outside. She was leaning against a miniaturized sedan, some Japanese make. At the moment, I didn’t care. I just wanted to get as far away from Saint Cecilia’s as humanly possible.

  “T... Tell me you didn’t bless this too.”

  “No.”

  “Thank God.”

  Maggie opened the door and slid in. I climbed into the passenger seat and laid my head back, eyes clos
ed. The interior was cramped, even for a guy my size. I’m not exactly huge, but it honestly felt like I was in a clown car. It sounded like a sewing machine when she started it, and I instantly reached out to turn off the obscenely loud punk music that came pouring out of the speakers. While I appreciated her taste in music, the timing was god-awful.

  We drove for maybe five minutes, ten tops when the craving, the weariness, the feeling of burning alive from the inside out simply vanished. Just like that, not a whisper or a shadow of it remaining. I sat up, my head focused and clear and looked around. Boston looked the same as it ever did, alive in the daylight and thriving with life. People passed on the sidewalks, traffic sucked, and horns blared as its denizens made their daily commute.

  “Oy, feel better now do ya?” Maggie said, her eyes narrowed furiously at the work truck that had just cut us off.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Do yer homework?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.”

  “I don’t like her, Jack,” I heard Alice say from the back seat.

  I turned to look at her. She sat calmly, hands folded in her lap, her white everything standing in stark contrast to the car's gray cloth interior. She watched the world go by out the window, a look of complete serenity on her face.

  “Yeah? She’d probably say the same about you,” I told Alice, not bothering to carry the conversation in my head. I seldom did.

  Maggie looked at me lifting a curious brow. I waved her away.

  “Ignore me, talking to my demon.”

  I filled Alice in on the last several hours, about the Ordo, the killings, though she knew about Essie. As long as I wasn’t on holy ground, Alice had access to every bit of sensory input that I did. It was a part of the bargain, she wanted to experience humanity as much as she could while on the lam from Hell. I was her conduit. So far she hated it. On that same note though, if I was cut off from her, she was cut off from that input.

  Alice said nothing while I related the entirety of the events. Finally, she looked towards me, eyes a solid, untelling white.

  “I still don’t like her, Jack. Get rid of her,” Alice said finally.

  “I can’t really do that, Alice.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “You should get rid of her,” Alice said, her voice flat, emotionless.

  Demons don’t have a morality so to speak. They see no need for evil or good, or anything of the sort. For the most part they are primal, sensation junkies of the highest order without restraint. It isn’t that they are evil, their tastes just ran towards self-destruction. The seven deadly sins, truthfully, were all things we just fought to suppress. Demons reveled in them. It wasn’t an issue of it being morally right, so much as it was an issue of it being unrestrained and just fucking fun.

  Maggie watched us from the corner of her eye as she drove, occasionally glancing back to what she would see as just an empty back seat.

  ”You call her ‘Alice?’” Maggie asked.

  I waved the question away.

  “Do you have a take on any of this?” I asked Alice.

  “Yes. I still think you should get rid of her.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Oh. Yes, I have a take on it.”

  I waited for a minute or two, waiting for her to go on. She remained silent.

  “Are you going to tell me?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I sighed and turned back around.

  “Problem?”

  “She doesn’t like you.”

  “Shame,” Maggie said rolling her eyes.

  “Where exactly are we going?” I asked.

  “Remember the girl that survived?”

  “The one in the nut house?”

  “That’s the one. We’re gonna go have a chat with her,” Maggie said.

  “And they’re gonna let us in?”

  Maggie grinned. “I have my ways.”

  Chapter 5

  We parked in the lot outside the hospital, where the girl, Lucy something or other, was being kept before going into police custody. From what I’d gathered, after the cops had picked her up, she had been pretty much incoherent. Rather than take any chances with the girl’s health, or open up the possibility for a lawsuit, they had gotten a court order to have her institutionalized for three days of observation. To make sure she didn’t chew out her tongue or something I guessed.

  The hospital itself was a sprawling complex made of graying bricks and mirrored glass. The doors were unmarked and it was void of the typical lighted signs that directed ambulances, visitors, and the like. I could pick out a few nurses in the distance, gathered under a tree, smoking cigarettes. The parking lot was filled with German cars, each one of them worth a whole shit ton more money than I’d see in a lifetime. An ambulance drifted in, lights flashing without the siren. It rode smoothly towards the back of the hospital and out of sight.

  “‘Ere we are,” Maggie said as we got out of the car.

  “What hospital is this?” I asked

  “It’s private. The girl’s parents are loaded. Found out about what ‘appened and ‘ad ‘er sent ‘ere.”

  “Huh,” I said. They’d have to, to have the kind of money that got TV lawyers to pull those kinds of strings. “And she’s a street kid?”

  Maggie just shrugged.

  “You know about as much as I do, mate,” she said.

  I’d seen it before, the spoiled kid wants to get away from whatever heart crushing problems are sludging up her perfect life. So, she decides to run away from home. I’d also seen it end badly more than once. They end up bailing because they didn’t get a new BMW for their birthday and refused to settle on the Mercedes and within a year they're strung out and turning tricks.

  Walking in, I was reminded just how alien hospitals had always felt to me. There was something about the smell of the sanitized air. It was something so fake and stifling that it seemed to permeate everything from the pastel tiled floor to the false cheer of the building's staff. There was more to it than that though. When I was four, I had sat next to my mother’s bed while cancer ravaged her body. I’d held her hand, amazingly fragile and tiny even to a kid like me. It felt like, even that young, that if I’d wanted to I could shatter it just by squeezing. I’d been there when she died. It had been storming outside, the beeping machines playing counterpoint to the peals of thunder. One minute, she was looking at me, smiling. The next, she just wasn’t there anymore.

  I shook my head, chasing the memory away. I didn’t like to think about it, even now.

  Maggie led the way past a large circular reception desk set in the middle of a lobby bathed in rich browns and faux leathers. The lighting here was dim, almost subdued, giving everything a slight golden glow. A fish tank bubbled in the corner, colorful saltwater fish chasing each other through a miniature maze of living plants and coral. There were a few people seated here and there in overstuffed chairs, eyes perched on magazines or staring into the distance.

  Maggie stopped at the reception desk, striking up a conversation with a woman who looked liked she had spent her childhood frolicking in the fields of the Paleozoic era. She reached into her pocket and withdrew a slim black wallet. She flipped it open towards the women. A badge, bright gold and gleaming in contrast to the subdued light, rested in its center. They talked for a few more moments, the woman giving up a wheezing laugh. Maggie smiled, patted the old woman's hand, and started towards the elevator. She motioned for me to follow and I fell into step beside her.

  “You’re a cop?” I asked, barely masking my disgust.

  “Was,” she said, stabbing a finger into the “up” button.

  “Was?”

  “Yes. Was. In the sixties.”

  “How fucking old are you?”

  She cut me a glare and I backed off. Quick.

  “What’d you find out?” I asked.

  We slipped into the elevator, and Maggie pulled the file from her bag, flipped it
open to check the floor and then pushed the corresponding button on the elevator’s panel.

  “That she’s lucid, and we’re going to be talking to her about what happened.”

  “Well that’s... sparse,” I muttered.

  Maggie’s glare intensified.

  A moment later the doors slid open on silent tracks. We stepped out onto the third floor. I kept my head down, face hidden in the shadows of my sweatshirt’s hood. Being scarred as I was it was hard to keep a low profile in places like this, or well, anywhere. So, I did my best to be as unobtrusive and not hideous as possible. The decor here was a drastic change from the warm glow of the lobby. Everything here was meant to be safe, soothing. Everything was done in simple colors, all cool blues and greens. I didn’t know enough about colors to judge if it would actually achieve its goal, and truth be told, I gave about no fucks whatsoever.

  Maggie walked to the nurse’s station, another one of those circular desks similar to the one in the lobby. She chatted briefly with the nurses, flipping the badge open again, chatting a bit more and then closing it before returning a moment later. She had two visitor passes in little plastic sleeves. She handed me one and I clipped it to the pocket of my hoodie.

  “Room three oh four,” she said, and turned, marching down the hallway. I followed her. The door was closed. Maggie knocked lightly.

  “Come in,” a voice from the other side said a moment or two later. It was soft, muffled by the door’s thick construction.

  The room and furniture were all constructed to be completely safe. Everything was bolted down, rubber coated, or had blunt, rounded corners. A wardrobe sat in one corner. A TV was bolted to its top with soft coated metal straps. The bed, a simple set of rails with a headboard, was held to the floor with bolts as thick as my pinky. A window overlooked a patch of woods, and a slight chilled breeze came through the barely six inches at the top that would open. You couldn’t fit through the window, let alone jump out of it. It reminded me of prison, only with a better decorator.