Evil Spirits

by Mark Lukens

  Begay swung his legs over the bed, wincing and grabbing his knee. Angie bent down and put his shoes on for him. “The doctors aren’t going to be happy about this,” she said as she laced up his shoes.

  “I know,” Begay said as he got to his feet and hobbled over to the chair she had been sitting in moments ago. He sat down and rested, breathing hard.

  “I’ll go talk to the nurse,” Angie said. “I’ll be right back. You just wait here until I’m back.”

  He nodded. He could feel a headache at the back of his head, the pain creeping up from his neck. The pain was also wandering down his back. He thought about asking Angie for some aspirins, but he didn’t want to give her a reason to keep him here. “Thank you,” he told her.

  Angie just nodded and she left the room.

  Begay sat in the chair for a moment, getting his breath back. He was hurt and sore, and so tired, but he needed to do this. He needed to summon all the energy he had left, and all the courage he had.

  Angie was back in ten minutes. She had a metal cane with four plastic-tipped feet at the bottom. “I signed everything and the nurse gave me this for you. There are some wheelchairs down by the elevators.”

  Begay took the cane and got to his feet. “I don’t need a wheelchair,” he grumbled.

  “Yeah, I thought you would say that. That’s why I got the cane.”

  The cane did help, but he didn’t want to admit it.

  They walked out to the hallway and turned left towards the elevators. It was a little darker out here in the hall than Begay thought it would be, and there didn’t seem to be too many nurses walking around.

  As they got closer to the elevators, Begay noticed that the hall beyond the elevators was dark and gloomy, like the lights had all burnt out down there.

  Angie pushed the button for elevator. They were on the third and highest floor so there was only a down button here.

  Begay looked at the hall again as they waited for the elevator doors to open. He couldn’t believe how dark it was down there. Something seemed to be moving in the darkness, coming their way. He heard the sound of bare feet shuffling on the floor and the crinkling of thick plastic.

  “Begay,” a voice whispered from the darkness.

  “You hear that?” Begay asked Angie.

  She nodded, staring down the hall.

  “Begaaaay,” the voice said again, stretching out his name. It was a female voice.

  The person who had called his name came closer, materializing out of the darkness. It was a woman shrouded in thick clear plastic. Her throat was a black sticky mess. It was Awenita.

  CHAPTER 44

  Stella

  The Void

  Stella was in the Ancient Enemy’s world—the Void. The last thing she remembered was being in the small airplane as the pilot flew them right into the thunderstorm, trying to climb above the clouds. But then they saw the black hole in the clouds, the spinning vortex that was sucking them in.

  And now she was here. She still felt like she was in the sky, among those churning gray clouds because everything around her was a gray mist. Objects only ten or twenty yards away became blurry dark shapes in the mist. It was like being underwater, but instead of an endless blue, this was an endless sea of gray. It felt like everything went on forever here, and maybe it did.

  A wave of panic washed over Stella.

  Am I dead? Is this the afterworld?

  No, she knew what this was—this was the Ancient Enemy’s world, the Darkwind’s world, the dimension where it lived, where it popped out of into her world.

  She wasn’t dead. She was still alive. But why? The answer came to her as quickly as the question had; the Ancient Enemy hadn’t killed her and Cole in their home or at the airport because it wanted to bring them here alive, it wanted them as bait to lure David here.

  Cole. Where was he? She looked around, turning around in a slow circle, but all she could see were shadowy shapes in the fog. Some of the shapes looked like they were moving around, maybe coming closer to her.

  She could feel the Ancient Enemy here. It was close to her, or at least a part of it was. An electric current tingled on her skin, a cloud of energy buzzed all around her, a light pressure pressed on her mind like fingers gently pushing into her brain. She wondered if this was how David felt when the Ancient Enemy was near him.

  Something moved in the mist, a shadowy form running right towards her, a human form. Cole materialized out of the fog.

  Was that Cole? Was that really him, or was the Ancient Enemy inside of him? She remembered seeing him in the chair in their living room, staring at her with that blank expression.

  “Stella,” Cole breathed out.

  It was really him.

  He hugged her, holding on to her for a moment. “I didn’t know if I was going to find you in here,” he whispered to her.

  “I think it wanted us to find each other,” she said when he pulled away from her. “It still wants David. It’s using us as bait to get David here.”

  “That’s why it didn’t kill us earlier.” He saw it now.

  But it will destroy us once it has David, Stella thought but didn’t say it. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t kill them. Maybe you didn’t die here. Maybe it would keep all of them alive in this dimension, where time stretched out into infinity, their torture going on and on.

  She didn’t want to think about that.

  A low growl rumbled from somewhere in the distance, the beast that had made the noise hidden by the mist. Footsteps crashed down onto the rocky ground, the sound echoing through the fog. The large thing seemed to be close yet far away—it was hard to judge distance in the unending fog.

  Cole took Stella’s arm gently and they hurried away in what they thought was the opposite direction from whatever had made that growling noise and those thundering footsteps.

  It felt strange here, like sound didn’t travel like it was supposed to. This place was a world of contrasts; it felt claustrophobic here yet everything seemed to stretch out forever. It felt like they were outside yet inside. The ground felt rough and made of stone, but mostly flat. There were bits of gravel and pebbles scattered around. Maybe there were bigger rocks in the mist. Maybe those large blurry shapes in the distance were large rocks or small hills.

  “We should keep moving,” Cole said as they walked.

  “To where?”

  “Away from whatever that thing was.”

  It will find us no matter where we move to.

  They held hands as they walked through the mist, but then they stopped. There was something in the distance, something taking shape in the mist. She felt the tension in Cole’s hand as he squeezed hers harder, ready to pull her away from whatever lurked in the grayness.

  A moan came from the object in the mist, then another one, then a few words in Spanish, incoherent mumbling.

  “It’s Juan Carlos,” Cole said. He took a step forward, then another.

  Stella could see better now as the mist seemed to move away from an object that was turning out to be the trunk of a thick and twisted tree with only a few stubby branches reaching up towards the gray ceiling of fog. There were no leaves on the tree and it looked like something that had been struck by lightning a century ago, dead and charred and gnarled now. It looked like there was a piece of paper tacked to the tree.

  When they moved a little closer Stella realized that it wasn’t a piece of paper, it was a face skinned away from a head and nailed to the trunk of the tree. The face had inches of thickness to it, like a giant sawblade had cut off Juan Carlos’ entire face like a Halloween mask.

  “Help me,” Juan Carlos said. His mouth moved with the words, his eyes rolling back and forth wildly. “What happened? Where are we? What is this place?”

  At the bottom of the tree was a large heap of shredded flesh and clothing with sharp ends of splintered bone sticking out. It looked like Juan Carlos’ body had been run through a meat grinder and then dumped at the bottom of the tree in a pile.

>   “Please . . .” Juan Carlos said. He closed his eyes, his mouth drawn down into a frown under his big mustache, the gold tooth in front twinkling just a little in the gray light.

  He’s not alive, Stella told herself. No way he’s still alive. That’s the Ancient Enemy in there. The Ancient Enemy is doing this.

  As if the Ancient Enemy had heard her thoughts, tentacles poked out of the heaping mound of flesh. The tentacles were small at first, worm-like, slithering over the pile of flesh, blood glistening on the black skin of the tentacles. Two large tentacles erupted from the top of the mound of flesh, one of them snaking up the tree trunk towards Juan Carlos’s face. The thin end of the feeler poked at the large nail that had been driven through the flesh right underneath Juan Carlos’s chin, then it ventured up to the corner of his mouth, probing it, pushing his lips apart.

  Other tentacles shot out of the mound of shredded flesh, bits of bloody and slimy meat clinging to them, the stench of rot carried on the misty air.

  Cole grabbed Stella, pulling her as they ran.

  They ran for what seemed like a few minutes, but in this place it could have been hours or even days. They stopped to catch their breath, trying to locate the dark shapes in the distance and use them as some kind of landmarks.

  “That wasn’t real,” Stella said. “The Ancient Enemy can do anything it wants here; it can make us see whatever it wants us to.”

  Cole didn’t say anything. He looked like he was going to get sick. His eyes were wide as he looked around. He didn’t have his gun here. He didn’t have his wallet, just the clothes on his back.

  “We should stay on the move,” Cole finally said.

  “But David—”

  “If David can find us, he will. The Ancient Enemy will show him how. Until then, I don’t think we should stay in one place too long.”

  Stella nodded. She couldn’t argue with him; she didn’t know what else to do.

  A voice called Cole’s name from the mist, the hiss of a whisper, but the sound traveled easily through the fog.

  Cole had been about to grab Stella and take off again, but he froze.

  And Stella knew why he had stopped; he knew that voice. And she knew it too.

  “Cole,” the voice said. It was Trevor’s voice, Cole’s dead brother.

  CHAPTER 45

  Palmer

  Bone Canyon

  “What the hell’s that doing there?” Palmer asked as he drove up and over the hill. The trail they were driving on led down into a large valley that stretched all the way to the line of hills miles away. The trail was hard packed dirt, and without any rain for months the dirt was like concrete. Scrub brush, smaller cacti, and other plants dotted the sand and rocky landscape in every direction, the plants somehow clinging to life out here.

  After David had found the envelope in Joe Blackhorn’s hogan with the hand drawn map inside, they had jumped into Begay’s truck and followed the directions.

  At least they weren’t going to the ghost town, Palmer was happy about that. As much as he wanted to help David finally kill this thing, he wasn’t sure if he could go inside that church again. But who said Bone Canyon was going to be any better than the ghost town?

  Bone Canyon wouldn’t be too far away David had told Palmer when they started their drive here, but Palmer had learned that out here in the desert “not too far” could mean several hours of driving. And the going was slow because the trail was rough in some areas and Palmer was trying to take it easy on Begay’s pickup truck.

  The day was ending now, the sun hanging low over the mountains in the distance, a bloated, blood-red disc hovering above the jagged peaks. The wind had picked up a little, the air growing colder by the minute. It would drop another twenty degrees when the sun finally disappeared behind the mountains.

  David had gotten another text message on the way to Bone Canyon even though Palmer’s cell phone still couldn’t get a signal at all (Palmer had turned his phone off now to save the battery). But David assured him that he didn’t have a signal on his phone either—this message was from the Ancient Enemy.

  He had shown Palmer the text message. It read: HeLP me He haS me And Cole HE is hurting mE hElp me DaviD.

  The writing was strange, like the use of capital and lowercase letters were a mystery to the Ancient Enemy, like it was struggling to translate a message into the English language.

  With each new text message, David got more aggravated and impatient, but Palmer could only drive so fast down this trail. If they wrecked or bent an axle then they weren’t going to get to Bone Canyon, or anywhere else.

  But they were here now, and Palmer drove down into the wide valley; it was like a gigantic bowl in the desert, but the land was flat down there at the bottom.

  “It’s an airplane,” Palmer said as they drove towards the small aircraft parked in the distance. It was some kind of Cessna or something, Palmer guessed. He parked twenty feet away from the airplane.

  David’s attention wasn’t on the airplane sitting in the middle of the desert; he was focused on what looked like a gigantic circle of white rocks around a big hole in the ground.

  “Is someone supposed to be meeting us here?” Palmer asked, nodding towards the airplane as he shifted the pickup truck into park.

  David shook his head no. He finally looked at the airplane. The windows of the aircraft looked dark and there didn’t seem to be anyone inside. The airplane looked older and a little beat up. There were identification numbers on the back of it.

  “Maybe the pilot saw the burial grounds from the air and landed to take a closer look at them,” Palmer said as he turned off the truck’s engine.

  David didn’t say anything.

  Palmer looked over at the collection of rocks circling the large pit in the ground. The circle was big enough to fit the airplane inside, big enough to fit the plane, the pickup truck, and still have room for more vehicles. “What is the circle of rocks for?” he asked David.

  “It’s a medicine wheel that Joe Blackhorn made around the burial site.”

  “Joe Blackhorn did that?”

  David nodded. “That’s what he drew on the map, a medicine wheel.”

  “What’s a medicine wheel?”

  “It’s a place of power,” David said.

  David didn’t seem like he wanted to explain much more about it, so Palmer left it alone. He looked back at the airplane, staring at it through the windshield. “Maybe that’s a scientist’s plane. Like an archaeologist or something.” He didn’t think it was a police or government plane, but he couldn’t be sure.

  David got out of the truck without a word and started walking towards the plane.

  Palmer got out, grabbing Begay’s gun and taking it with him. He caught up with David. As he got closer to the plane he was sure it was empty now. He stepped up to the side of the plane and looked in the window—no one inside. He could smell the odor of flesh and blood before he even saw the splatters of blood all over the pilot’s seat, the control wheel, and the instrument panel. A few tiny specks of blood dotted the windshield. There was a handgun on the passenger seat.

  Palmer opened the door and grabbed the gun. He knew he shouldn’t be touching anything that could be evidence in an obvious crime here, but this was a different situation. He inspected the gun, a 9mm. He checked the magazine; it was fully loaded.

  “In the back seat,” David said. He sounded excited and nervous.

  Palmer saw what David had alerted him to, some kind of thin wallets, like a passport or ID, and a crumpled white envelope. He reached in and grabbed the leather wallets and the envelope. He stepped back away from the airplane and opened the passports.

  “It’s them, isn’t it?” David said from right beside Palmer. He sounded hopeful that he was wrong, but he also sounded certain that he was right.

  One of the passports had a photo of Cole inside but the name was different. The other one was a fake passport for Stella. The crumpled envelope had a few thousand dollars of cash inside,
all in American one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “Cole and Stella were in this plane,” Palmer said, trying to wrap his mind around that. He stuffed the money back into the envelope and looked around at the desert all around them. “They flew up here from Costa Rica?”

  David didn’t answer.

  “That’s a long way,” Palmer said. “Where are they now? Did they walk from here?” He looked for signs of footprints on the hard packed dirt, but he didn’t see any.

  “They’re not here anymore.”

  Palmer looked at David. “What do you mean?”

  “The Ancient Enemy has them.”

  “Has them where?”

  “In the Void. In its world. In its dimension.”

  Palmer remembered the hole David had opened up inside the church seven years ago, the spinning black hole that had sucked the Ancient Enemy into it. He didn’t want to think about that so he took the IDs, passports, envelope of cash, and the 9mm back to Begay’s truck. He put the IDs and money in the glove box but kept the gun out.

  David had walked back to the truck with Palmer, but when they got to the truck David stared at the medicine wheel and the large hole in the ground in the distance. He started walking towards it.

  Palmer followed David, stepping inside the circle of rocks after him. Some of the rocks were about the size of soccer balls, but others were larger than that. He wondered how Joe Blackhorn had constructed this circle of rocks by himself. He wondered if he’d had help.

  As Palmer followed David towards the edge of the large pit in the ground, he noticed that there were straight lines of rocks coming from the edge of the circle towards the pit.

  “These lines represent the four directions,” David explained as if Palmer had asked him about it. He stood at the edge of the gigantic hole in the ground now.

  Palmer stepped up beside David and saw what looked like a homemade wooden ladder standing up at the edge of the pit, the thick rungs lashed together with cordage. “I suppose Joe Blackhorn left that ladder here for you.”