by Wood, Rick
And on Derek’s hand was a ring. Eddie had never seen an item of jewellery on him, but sure enough, there was a gold band around his wedding finger. He had never seen this woman, or even heard of her before.
And it was safe to say, as long as Eddie had known Derek, he had never seen a ring on his finger.
Shaking his head to himself, he left the photo and meandered into the kitchen. It’s amazing how you can work so closely with someone, know so much about them, have so much dependence on them, yet not know one of the most important things about their life.
Where was this woman now?
He grabbed himself a tumbler and poured a small drop of whiskey in it. He had fully intended to have a coffee, but he didn’t care at that precise moment about what time of day it was or kind of standards he would be dropping; he needed it. And the harsh hit of the kick against the back of his throat did the trick, if only fleetingly.
He opened the cupboard to find the coffee. Nothing. Empty. How did someone get through the day without coffee?
There’s two strange things about Derek I didn’t know.
Eddie filled up the tumbler once more and stepped out of the kitchen. He didn’t want to join Derek in the study. He didn’t want to sulk in the air of misery that room was encompassing, so he dragged himself into the living room and planted himself in front of the television. At least Derek had a television. He felt like the kind of guy who wouldn’t, for some reason, and Eddie was relieved.
Some cartoons were on ITV, so he flicked over to BBC2. Some tennis match was going on, with two women grunting as they hit the balls. Why did they always need to grunt? He flicked over once more to BBC1, where he found the news.
He decided he should probably watch the news. Once they had broken out of their funk, they were going to need to go after Kelly, after whatever the thing was inside of her, and they were going to need to have some idea of where to look. As if by chance, he didn’t have to wait long to get it.
“And to other news, a couple were murdered on their own farm, along with all their animals slaughtered, in a freak attack the police are labelling as unsettling.”
“Oh shit,” Eddie muttered to himself, then shouted out of the room, “Derek, you’re going to want to get in here, and fast!”
Within moments Derek had scuttled into the room, watching with dismay in the doorway as the news reported the senseless killing of a whole farm of animals. Cows had been mercilessly slaughtered, as had sheep, and even the dog; some of which had been eaten, and some of which had their limbs stripped, torn apart, and strewn over the field.
The couple who owned the farm had been murdered; the man from a supposedly induced heart attack and the woman from asphyxiation. They were an elderly couple named Bill and Mildred Pearson, and the police were apparently considering potential avenues.
That meant they had nothing.
“Grab your coat,” Derek spoke in a husky voice, as if he had a cold. “We need to go.”
“Why?” Eddie rose and frowned at him.
“Because this was clearly our demon.”
“Yes. And what do we hope to find there?”
“I don’t know, a clue maybe? Somewhere she’s gone?”
“And what then?” Eddie shouted, raising the tension between them. “What are we supposed to do then? You keep avoiding the conversation, Derek, but that thing killed a man without even touching him. That thing – spoke to me as if it knew me. Why?”
“I said I don’t know –”
“And I say that’s horse shit.”
They stared at each other in tense silence, a sense of unspoken conflict rising between them. For the first time, Eddie was angry at Derek, and he wasn’t even sure why or how to direct it. He just felt like there was something going on, something he wasn’t telling him; he was too distant. He was surely hesitant to talk about it, as there was something he didn’t want to talk about.
Derek just grabbed his coat and left. Eddie sighed with exasperation, torn in his mind. He knew he shouldn’t be mad at him. Whatever he did, he did it with the best of intentions.
He grabbed his coat and followed, closing the door behind them.
26
Berlinda typed the e-mail with difficulty, her new nails getting in the way. She would not remove them, oh no; she had spent too much money getting these nails put in, and as she admired the length of them stretching an inch away from her finger, she concluded they were worth the money. So, she kept stubbornly hitting the backspace key to remove her mistakes and type the error-filled sentence again.
Her fingers were too fat anyway, what difference did it make? Since her husband had left her, these nails were the only thing keeping her going and she would be damned if she was to remove them, resulting in her breaking down and crying.
She gave her hair a nudge. Moulded into a perfect afro on top of her head, she glanced at herself in the reflection in the computer monitor through the white of the e-mail message and smirked. She looked damn good and she felt it, possibly for the first time in a long time.
“Excuse me,” came an impatient voice, prompting Berlinda to lift her head up and recoil in horror at the audacity of someone addressing her so.
“Excuse me?” she replied, moving her head from side to side with maximum sass. “Excuse you.”
“I need some help,” came the breaking voice of the timid boy in front of her. He was evidently a fresher, still young, and was yet to grow any balls that he could use when the vain receptionist was completely blanking him to focus on writing an e-mail to the yoghurt company for causing her fingers to become unduly fat.
“Hello.” She lifted her left eyebrow and tilted her head toward him to display her annoyance, needlessly elongated the “o” of “hello.”
“I need an extenuating circumstances form for my assignment.”
“And what is so extenuating with your circumstances you think you demand an extra week?”
“Er, well…” he stuttered, staring at his feet and wobbling from side to side anxiously. “I had to go home, my little brother needed me.”
“I don’t know if that’s enough,” she answered, the pitch of her voice rising at the end of the sentence as if it was a question. “Maybe you should go speak to someone who gives a shit.”
Without daring to look her in the eye, he turned on his heel and shuffled away awkwardly, keeping his head facing the floor. Berlinda tutted to herself whilst shaking her head and turned back to her e-mail.
You said that your yoghurt had ftbt carbories.
“Fuck it!” she exclaimed, hitting the backspace once more. She loved those nails, but they were getting rather annoying.
“I need some help,” came a blank voice that made Berlinda jump. Out of nowhere stood a young lady in front of her with a vacant expression. She had bags under her bloodshot eyes, her skin was overly pale, and she looked at Berlinda in a way that made her blood run cold.
“I, like, am totally sure you do, but as you can see I’m doing something, and you proper made me jump.”
“I need the home address for your lecturer, Edward King,” she spoke monosyllabically without reacting to Berlinda’s rude outburst.
“Right, yeah, sure you do. But there’s a word beginning with p peeps say around here, maybe you should try it.”
“I need the home address for your lecturer, Edward King,” she repeated, with the exact same monotone voice.
Berlinda pulled her head back and frowned.
“Did you not hear me, I said –”
“I need the home address for –”
“Yes, I heard you the first time. We aren’t really used to giving out the home addresses of our staff to our students here. I’m sure you can go see your professor on your own time.”
The girl didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t change expression whatsoever. She gazed into Berlinda’s eyes and Berlinda grew increasingly uncomfortable from the empty stare forced upon her.
She went to object again, but her throat tig
htened up. She felt it swell and swell, like her oesophagus was closing in on itself. She tried to speak but she couldn’t, a helpless gasp coming out of her mouth instead.
All through this, the girl just kept staring, without faltering once.
After a few seconds of clambering at her throat with her oversized nails, she gasped suddenly, breathing in and in, feeling the reprieve of her throat liberate her and finally let her have more air.
“I need the home address of Edward King.”
Berlinda nodded. She didn’t know why she agreed to it, but she echoed blankly, “I’ll give you the home address of Edward King,” and began typing on the computer.
The young lady took a post-it note from beside Berlinda’s computer and placed it in front of her.
“You will write it on here.”
“I will write it on here.”
Once she had found it on the computer, she wrote it down on the Post-it note and handed it over, the whole time desperately thinking, why am I doing this?
“I don’t know what the hell you just done, young lady, but you better learn some manners,” she quarrelled at her, venom in her voice.
The girl tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. Berlinda felt her own hands lift and her nails point toward her throat. She cried and whimpered as big, sharp, fake spikes attached to her fingers edged closer and closer to her neck. Slowly but surely, they pressed slowly into them. She felt blood trickle down her collar bones.
The last thing she heard was the thud of her head against the keyboard.
27
Eddie and Derek pulled up outside the farmhouse to a barrier of yellow tape. They stepped out the car together and walked slowly toward the crime scene where policemen hustled and bustled. There were Scene of Crime Officers in white protective outfits walking in and out of the farmhouse with bags of evidence. Officers were stationed by the door and on the edge of the police tape, creating a border between the crime scene and the horde of reporters who had gathered with their microphones and cameras as close as they were legally allowed.
“How the hell are we going to get close enough to see anything?” Eddie muttered to Derek, buttoning up his coat, feeling the cold winter air against his face. “What did we hope to gain from this?”
At that moment, two bodies were transported in body bags to the vehicles to the side of the house. Eddie’s focus was on those bodies, his eyes glued to them, watching them being wheeled away. He could feel the death underneath them.
“Perhaps you could help out there,” Derek answered. “Can you tell us anything about those bodies using your gift?”
“I wish we’d stop referring to it as a gift, Derek. I think we both know it’s far from a gift.”
“Okay.” Derek forced a fake smile, refusing to be drawn into an argument. “Can you tell us anything? Anything that will give us a clue as to the whereabouts of our demon?”
Eddie watched the bodies get loaded into the van with a determined intensity.
“The first one was the man, the second was the woman. The demon did it, it reeks of it. I can feel it in my bones.”
He wasn’t lying. Everything he had felt when next to the demon inside Kelly’s body was filling him up and spilling over like a jar of acid. His nostrils filled with a uniquely dusty scent, its anger and hostility filling his mind. This was more than the presence he had with the other demons. This was him becoming the demon itself.
“Come,” Derek suggested. “Let’s see what we can make of the animals.”
They followed the police tape to the adjacent field, where a few more people in white outfits retrieved samples and took pictures. Despite the barrier between them, they could see everything clearly. The cows were on the side, sheep on the back, their bodies slit open and their insides strewn over the field. There were very few patches of complete green left, diluted blood having soaked into the grass in most places, often surrounding some body part, like an intestine or a liver.
Eddie could see it happening before him. He could see Kelly walking through the field, in the dead of night. She was naked. Her eyes were glowing, her hands were raised, and as she crossed each animal they were slit open in turn.
He saw another flash as Kelly ate their hearts, threw out their entrails, even fornicated with one of the corpses.
“What is it?” Derek asked.
“It’s…” he wasn’t sure where to start. “I can see it. Everything. Kelly was here, she did this, she ate their body parts, she mutilated them, she even fucked them.”
Derek bowed his head. When he lifted it again, Eddie was flinching his face away, avoiding looking at the field, the visions his mind were forcing upon him evidently too much.
“I think we need to be prepared, Eddie,” Derek spoke softly.
“Prepared for what?” Eddie spat out, angrier than he had intended.
“For what this may mean. For the world. For you.”
Eddie turned his back to the field and put his hands on his hips. He faced the woodland area, not wanting to look at Kelly killing helpless animals, nor particularly wanting to look at Derek.
“I know you aren’t particularly content with me right now, for whatever reason,” Derek spoke. “But we need to expect the worst as to what this might mean.”
“For whatever reason? Derek, were you ever married?”
Derek didn’t move. He forced his face to show nothing, no hurt, no reaction whatsoever.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I have worked beside you for years, and I have never questioned anything you have told me, nothing that you have… Then I see a picture of you with a woman, in your house, and you have a wedding band on. How can I work so closely with a guy and not know something as personal as that about him?”
“You did not need to know.”
“That’s it, Derek.” Eddie turned and jabbed his finger, avoiding the images of Kelly continuing out of the corner of his eye. “What else is there that you think I need not know?”
Derek put his hands in his pockets and looked away.
“Now’s not the time, Eddie.”
Eddie sighed angrily and turned away, throwing his arms in the air.
“Eddie, we need to be together with this, don’t turn against me. If this… ‘thing’… is, as it claims to be, the devil himself, then we are up against the epitome of evil. The living embodiment of everything that is bad in the world in the body of a helpless young woman. Whatever you are, whatever it is you have, the world needs it, and it needs it now more than ever.”
Eddie lifted his head, his foot tapping with agitation unbeknownst to himself, as he kept his irritable gaze toward the wood. He looked to the house.
He saw Kelly leaving it. He saw Kelly pause, blood on her hands. The blood faded. She looked up.
He saw her mind. He saw her thoughts.
“Oh my God.” He felt sick. He turned to Derek with immediate terror. “I know what she’s after.”
“What?”
Eddie closed his eyes and took a deep breath in.
“Me.”
28
The rough cement under Kelly’s bare feet caused her no pain, despite the blood patches trailing behind her. Those patches soon got washed away with the rain, a belting barrage of rain that didn’t bother her in the least.
She paused beside a building, looking up toward the fifth floor. This was where she needed to go.
The door was locked. She didn’t care. She pressed a random buzzer on the intercom pad in front of her and was greeted with a poorly sounded “Hello.”
“Open the door,” she spoke, and they complied without hesitation. It buzzed open and she entered, walking straight to the lift without deviating her attention.
As she pressed the up button, a man in a suit walked up to her in a fizz, taking down his umbrella and shaking his jacket out. They entered the lift together. She pressed floor five, he pressed floor six.
“It’s mad out there,” he observed, making idle chitch
at. “I’m drenched.”
Her head turned and glanced at him, at this street urchin that dared speak to her. Did he not know who he was underneath the young, attractive, female exterior? Sure, he may be looking at her as a young lady he could idly flirt with, but it wasn’t so.
Not for the first time, it became disgusted with the body it had chosen. It needed a weak-willed, vulnerable young adult, and it had chosen a sack-of-shit girl who was too pretty for her own good.
“Hey, I haven’t seen you before,” he sweetly smiled at her. “You new to the building?”
Kelly sliced her arm forward, upper cutting him with the palm of her hand, sending him clashing against the ceiling of the lift and collapsing on the floor in a lump.
The door pinged open and its foot trod over the mess and entered the corridor. It made its way down the dimly lit passage, lights flickering above it as it passed. It reached the intended room and without needing to move an inch, sent the door flying off its hinges into the distance.
It entered and switched the light on. The fluorescent light rapidly flickered in reaction to its presence. With a flick of her hand, it forced all the lights around the room to burn out and break.
There was no one there. The presence it was after was not so present. This search was taking far too long and impatience was beginning to grow.
Kelly felt herself being dragged for a moment. She was inside her body. She could feel the anger, the hostility, consuming her, but she was not in control. She was in there somewhere, but lonely, scared, in the corner of the mind.
It picked up a picture from the bedside table. It was one of many scattered around the flat that featured Eddie and two women. One blond, one brunette, both cuddling each other intimately, occasionally with their arms draped around Eddie.
It took in the photo. It consumed everything about it; not just the image, but the feelings associated with it; feelings of love and caring. She visibly repulsed.
Lifting the photo to Kelly’s nose, it deeply sniffed inwards, consuming the scent; light perfume and non-bio washed clothes, a hint of lavender air freshener. The history of the photo. It had been taken on a picnic, a few years ago. And the women. They were in love.