Haunted: Dark Delicacies® III

by Del Howison

“That’s all I wanted to know,” Mollie said with a smile, “because I have news for you as well, joyous news.” She took his hand and a smear of blood went down the front of her palm. “I’m pregnant, Jerome. I’ll have our first child in your new town.”

  * * *

  When the church was finished—when all the siding had been painted white, the black shingles laid down, the bell installed in the steeple that perched like a triumphant hand raised toward Heaven—it was time for a great celebration. The three men who had delivered the stained-glass window from Chicago stayed for the festivities; Jerome hoped they would remain permanently, since the town needed glaziers.

  Jerome felt that he had lived all his life for this day. His clothes were freshly laundered, his hair combed, his beard trimmed. Mollie had sewn herself a fine new dress from a bolt of pink fabric she’d purchased at the general store in Bartonville. She had left the waistline loose, because now the curve of her belly was becoming noticeable. Jerome thought she looked radiant.

  The bell pealed out a shrill, melodic tone as two young farm boys took turns yanking the rope to set up a clangor that rang from horizon to horizon. The people streamed in: more men, women, and families than Jerome had thought lived in the area. They came to dedicate the church they’d helped to build. Though Jerome had not yet secured a piano to lead the music, they would sing familiar hymns in unison. That was all a church really needed.

  Jerome spoke up when they had squeezed into the pews so that everyone could have a seat. “This place of worship stands on holy ground, for I have made it so. All of your crops will be blessed, and all of your children will be strong and protected from evil. I will make it so. We will make it so. We will be a community, a bastion against darkness.”

  He turned to the altar and touched the demon jar. “You have all seen me cast out demons. The most powerful and most dangerous of those evil fallen angels are here, trapped inside this urn.” He brushed the surface of the vessel. “They are locked there by the grace of God, by the holy symbols … and by the gift of blood.”

  Jerome extended his thumb toward the congregation. “Today, we make one grand final summoning to draw out all the evils and ills that permeate this land, that permeate our hearts. We will draw away the pain and darkness so that Tucker’s Grove can be a perfect place, a shining example for mankind.”

  The people in the church shouted their amens. Some stood in the pews.

  “A drop of blood,” Jerome said, “from me, from you—from all of you—and this town will lock away those evil spirits forever.” With a flick of his knife, he sliced open his thumb once more, this time a little more extravagantly than he’d expected. The blood flowed, and he touched it to the Cross so that the ancient, mysterious urn drank the scarlet liquid. He held up the knife. “Who will be the first to join me?”

  The people in the front pew nearly fell over themselves to come to the altar. Each took up the knife, drew blood, and touched red thumbprints or fingerprints to the pale ivory curves of the ancient vessel.

  The second row of people came forward, jostling and pushing each other. Some wept with joy, while others closed their eyes and prayed as they made their offering. This was not like a somber Communion ceremony: they were an army laying siege to the evil things that had troubled them all their lives.

  With Jerome’s command, a great wind of shadows, dark thoughts, evil deeds, frightening memories—the very manifestation of sin—swept up the hills and blew like a quiet winter wind into the church. The congregation could sense how much more darkness the demon jar was drinking, but their blood maintained the seal, trapping the bad things forever.

  Jerome felt his heart swell with love for these people, his people. Mollie stood looking preoccupied, maybe a bit worried. Beaming, he slipped his arm around his wife’s waist. “Why are you so quiet, my dear? This is our finest, most perfect hour.”

  Mollie bit her lower lip and shook her head, afraid to answer at first. Finally, she said, “All that blood … Instead of trapping the demons, what if it’s feeding them?”

  With a great outcry, the last of the parishioners stumbled back from the urn. The incredibly old Egyptian—or Sumerian, or Assyrian—vessel had begun to glow a faint orange, like fire within an eggshell. The embellished clay walls began to pulse in a heartbeat, as if the demons inside were fighting and struggling to break free.

  Jerome took a deep breath but could find no words. He had gathered numerous demons from all across the countryside on his travels up to Wisconsin, collected them from suffering people over the course of his journey. Victims had come to him from far and wide, and he had tom out the demons and imprisoned them in the vessel, carried them here to his new town.

  And they were all furious.

  Cracks appeared in the ivory ceramic; then fire belched out of the fissures. The demon jar exploded with a thunderstorm whirlwind of black, screaming voices, buzzing flies. Howling anger and dripping vengeance roared out with enough force to snuff a tornado.

  Parishioners ducked, throwing themselves onto the pews, onto the floor. The unleashed demons filled the church and swirled around; some streaked through the open front door. A black, smoky jet smashed through the stained-glass window, sending jewel-toned shards flying in all directions.

  The evil blackness whistled around Jerome and Mollie. He grabbed his wife, tried to protect her, but he didn’t know how. A murky, miasmic face that seemed made of fangs rose up before them, screaming: a scream that sounded more like laughter.

  Mollie cringed. The shadows pummeled her, wrapped about her as though she were being sprayed with mud. She collapsed to the floor, crying in terror.

  Jerome balled his fists and shouted, “Begone, I command you all! Begone!”

  And the demons fled the church, racing out and away to find new hosts in the vicinity of Tucker’s Grove.

  The evil storm subsided just as abruptly as it had begun. The interior of the new church had been shredded, leaving clouds of dust, splinters, and fear. The people were stunned, moaning, touching small cuts, and inspecting tattered clothes. As Jerome ran among his people to help, some of them looked away in deep shame, afraid to let him see the shadowed hollows in their eyes, the new darkness that glinted from their gaze.

  Jerome felt his bones turn to ice and understood that his dreams had been dashed. He had meant to establish a perfect town, to create a new Eden completely free of sin or evil or hate. Instead, he had brought more darkness to the area and saturated this very place.

  He clung to the sharp foundation of his faith. He would not surrender. He refused to leave his town. He had far too much work to do here.

  Crumpled and sick, Mollie retched onto the floor, cradling her abdomen. Jerome knelt beside her, helped her to her feet. She swayed against him. “Are you hurt? Are you all right?”

  Mollie drew a deep breath. “I’ll be fine. I just felt the baby kick, that’s all.”

  He didn’t ask her why she was shuddering.

  And she didn’t tell him that the kick had felt distinctly like that of a cloven hoof.

  STARLETS & SPACEBOYS

  JOSEPH V. HARTLAUB

  THE SKY LOOKED as if it had been splattered with multicolored droplets, a light blue background for the hot-air balloons decorated with all manners and sorts of colors and patterns. It wasn’t even noon on Saturday, yet the wide-open space over Festival Park seemed improbably jammed to capacity, with even more balloons rising majestically upward to the oohs and aahs of the crowd below. Sparkle, too self-consciously hip at age eighteen to make noises of approval like she had when she was five and six (and maybe even twelve or thirteen), nonetheless felt an internal thrill as she watched the spectacle of it all, both in the air and on the ground. She wasn’t ordinarily given to thinking ironic thoughts, not even when asked to do so in her senior English class; Sparkle considered, however, if only for a second, that she was all alone in a crowd of thousands.

  The day hadn’t started that way. She had ridden the Sun Tran with her fri
end Marie to Festival Park early that morning, looking forward to a day of hanging out at the Balloon Fiesta and staying loose. They had done just that for a couple of hours, wandering through the park, taking in the hot-air balloons decorated like people and the crowds of people dressed like balloons, all of it framed against the backdrop of the Sandia Mountains rising so majestically out of the desert to the northeast of Albuquerque.

  Their pair-up had abruptly ended, however, when Marie spotted Michael, her all-too-recent ex-boyfriend, strolling through the crowd and not even ten feet away from them. Marie had a hurried conference with Sparkle (who assured her friend that she would be fine, just fine, on her own) and had walked up to him. Michael had smiled, said something, and the last Sparkle had seen of either of them, they were walking hand in hand into the maw of the crowd, which quickly swallowed them up.

  Sparkle took stock of things. She was beginning to feel a bit overwhelmed by the crowd and by some hunger pangs that were starting to hit. She had left the house in a hurry that morning, taking a whore’s bath and then quickly applying all over herself the sparkle makeup that had earned her the nickname, and she hadn’t had time to eat breakfast. She was looking for a food vendor who didn’t have a mile-long line when she felt a hand grip her shoulder.

  She turned around and there was Rod, all decked out in his gray slacks and Pep Boys shirt with his name emblazoned in an oval patch on the left side.

  “Hey, there, Sparkle,” he said, his grin revealing what her friends called summer teeth—summer here, summer there—stained with tobacco. “What are you doing here?”

  “Wussup, Rod, no lube jobs stacking up?”

  “Funny girl.” He paused and took a drag on a cigarette, reached into his pocket and pulled out a wrinkled pack of Chesterfields, offering her one, his eyebrows going up. She shook her head no. He put the pack back in his pocket and asked, “Your mom around?”

  “You know she isn’t,” she said. “She’s at home waiting for you.”

  “Yeah, well, I got off early, thought I’d come down here for a little while before I went out to see her.” He took a long drag off the cigarette and blew the smoke out while he smiled at her. “It’s great running into you out here. I’ve been wanting to talk to you anyway. Get to know you a little better.”

  Sparkle just shook her head, thinking, so fucking obvious, this guy. “You’re really smooth, Rodney,” she said, using the name he hated. She had turned eighteen in July, three months ago, and she had caught him looking at her more than once since then, always when she was in profile to him and always when her mom wasn’t looking. She would rather be dry-humped by a Walmart greeter than by this grease monkey.

  “I gotta go,” she said. She turned to leave and took a step away, her forward progress interrupted when he grabbed her upper arm and turned her back around, not hard but maybe a shade beyond friendly.

  “Hold up a minute,” he said. “I just want to talk.” His mouth was smiling, but there was something in his eyes that looked angry. “There’s no reason to get hostile here, pretty lady.”

  She looked around, saw everyone moving in different directions, heading here, heading there. She was all alone in a huge crowd of people. People in different parts of the crowd were shrieking happily, one girl squealing, “Heelllp!” with some others laughing. Sparkle tried to pull away, but Rod’s grip just got tighter, like one of those paper Chinese handcuffs. The grin was frozen on his face, but it was more of a weird-pissed look than a happy one. Sparkle had seen the bruises on her mother’s upper arms, the evenly spaced dark marks that looked like fingerprints, and she was pretty sure that they weren’t the result of erotic exuberance. At least, not always.

  “Don’t pull away, now, there’s no reason for that, and no reason to tell your mom. This is just between you and—”

  Rod stopped talking suddenly. His mouth was open, but no words were coming out of it. His head was turning to the left, looking at a set of fingers that had curled over his shoulder, a set of fingers attached to a hand, which in turn was attached to an arm, which itself was attached to one of the most beautiful guys Sparkle had ever seen. He was an inch or two shorter than Rod’s six feet but somehow seemed to tower over him. All sharp angles, like he had been carved out of stone, he had deep-set blue eyes that peered out from under the shelf of a shaven head, eyes that looked directly into Rod. Rod let go of Sparkle’s arm, his fingers not so much releasing her as falling off her, as if some strings in his arm had been cut.

  “Leave,” the guy said to Rod, his face about an inch away from his. “Now.” Rod stumbled, as if he couldn’t get his feet and legs moving properly, and the guy righted him and turned him, almost gently, in a direction opposite of Sparkle and gave him a soft shove. Rod took a couple of steps away and the crowd enveloped him, as if he were a beaten dog accepted as a nonthreatening presence by a larger pack.

  The guy turned back around and looked directly at Sparkle for the first time. His eyes were like pools; they had lost the laser-beam intensity they had possessed when he was looking at Rod. Looking at her, they were just … warm. She wanted to dive in and lose herself in them forever. He smiled at her, a genuine smile that didn’t overdo it, yet lit up the day and everything in it.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. He’s just a creep.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “He’s a friend of my mom’s.”

  “Ugh.” The guy’s smile went up another hundred watts. “I hope you have better taste.”

  They shared a laugh.

  “I’m Nick,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “I’m Sparkle,” she answered.

  “And so you are, indeed,” he said. They both laughed and shook hands. Nick’s hand was warm and strong, but didn’t grip hers so much as gently encompass it.

  “My pleasure,” he said. “This”—he gestured to the balloons, the costumes, the people all around them—“is amazing, it’s overwhelming. This is my first year here. Have you been here before?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “I live in Albuquerque. I come every year.”

  “Well …” He hesitated a minute, then dialed up the wattage of his smile yet again.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m starving. I’d love to hear more about all of this, and about you.”

  He looked around at the food vendors, at the impossible lines in front of all of them. “Would you care to have lunch with me, and talk?” Nick had wanted to go someplace quiet, away from the noise. He was staying in Old Town and had seen a restaurant there he had wanted to try, so they caught a southbound bus and then walked over to the Church Street Café. Taking her hand as if it were something they did every day. The two of them sat down at an outside table underneath a hanging basket of flowers, sharing chips and a hot bandito pie and drinking frosted glasses of San Felipo Lemon Tea while they talked.

  Nick told her that he was an advance man for a rock band called Starlets & Spaceboys. Sparkle had never heard of them. He told her they were trying out a new marketing model: get on a bus, go to a big open space where there were a lot of people, and put the word out that they were going to have a rock concert. No tickets, just contributions. He had been in town for about a week, putting the word out, waiting for the band to catch up with him. They were going to play a midnight show out under the Sandia Mountains the following Saturday. Maybe, Nick said, looking into her eyes, you’d like to come. She said she’d love to, both of them knowing without saying it that they weren’t just talking about a rock concert.

  Nick never asked her how old she was, or if she was in school, or anything like that. He never asked her about the Balloon Fiesta or about her life or anything else. And Sparkle never asked him about his accent—British, maybe, or Australian—or about how he happened to enter her life at exactly the right time. They simply finished lunch, and she reached for his hand, but he put his arm around her. She melted into him and they walked out of the restaurant and down the sidewalk to his room
at the Hotel Albuquerque.

  Sparkle loved hotel rooms. She had only been in one a couple of times, both of them on so-called vacations with her mom, one of them at a Comfort Inn on the outskirts of North Phoenix, with a real pool bizarrely located in the parking lot, the other one in a Days Inn outside Oklahoma City. Sparkle liked the sheets and the wrapped soaps and the plastic cups wrapped in cellophane, and the way a maid would come in and clean up after you.

  This was different, however; it was even better. Nick’s room was on the top floor of the hotel, the bedsheets crisp and starched and smelling fresh and clean, the air conditioning just high enough to be comfortable, the room bright and airy. And Nick was different. She knew what roofies were, and Nick hadn’t touched her drink, spending the whole meal just paying attention to her and answering her questions, looking into her eyes and not at her tits, though she could tell he wanted to.

  Sparkle was not a virgin, but she was used to furtive groping and quick thrusting by guys her own age, thirty-second encounters that were over before she even got wet. Nick was different there, as well. He took his time with her, exploring her slowly but with a confidence that was an aphrodisiac all by itself. He kissed her gently on the mouth while he unbuttoned her blouse, ran his tongue over her rosebud nipples as he unbuckled her jeans, slowly tickled and tongued her pussy as his hands tweaked her breasts. When he entered her, his cock felt like a fire inside her that she never wanted to put out. There was a part of her that was terrified, that was screaming that this was too pitch-perfect, being in bed with a guy who looked exactly like the guy she had always wanted, someone who made her feel safe, and desirable, turning her inside out with pleasure. It was like that amusement park ride, the Demon Drop. Nick took her higher than she had ever been in her life and then dropped her down into a hole that was so deep she passed out.

  * * *

  When she woke up, the room wasn’t quite as bright. Nick was lying next to her, his arm around her, watching television. He looked down at her and smiled as she moved up against him. “What year is it?” she asked.