by Paul Seiple
“What do we do?” Sam asked.
“Pray,” Don said.
A flash of red near the stairs drew Sam’s eye. It was a small boy with the features of Bradley English running up the steps. Joey Carpenter was closely behind. Jessica Challis sat on the bottom steps writing on the hardwood floor with white chalk. In unison, the children stopped what they were doing, turned, and waved at Sam.
“I see them,” Sam said. “Can you?”
Don didn’t see the children.
The rickety box labeled Daemonic Rex Cube shook, splintering the wood. The doors rattled and began to separate like those being ravaged by a hurricane. One of the gargoyles adorning the doors fell. The stench of sulfur seeped through the growing space between the doors. The room switched from frigid to nearly unbearable heat.
“Do something,” Sam said.
The children went back to playing on the stairs. Jessica Challis scribbled the words You Cannot Survive The Mayhem on the floor. Joey tagged Bradley on the shoulder. A deep voice spewed the words “You’re It” that rumbled throughout the museum. The flesh on Don’s left hand bubbled and peeled back, exposing bone. His fingers lit at the tips like a row of Black Cat fireworks. Skin sizzled, joints popped as the flames moved toward his wrist. Don fumbled with the cap from a vial of holy water he had clutched to his chest. He splashed the water on his hand before the fire moved to his arm. There was a soothing sensation as the flames extinguished, but only bones remained on his left hand.
“Get out of here, Sam. Once that gets out of the box, the museum will incinerate,” Don said.
“Come with me,” Sam said, stumbling to gain balance.
“I can’t. It’s touched me. I cannot let it leave here,” Don said. “Go.”
Sam reached for the door. It opened before he grabbed the knob. Sam fell forward into the arms of a tall, skinny yet muscular man with silver spiked hair.
“What’s happening?”
“Demons…” Sam struggled to breathe. “Mayhem…hell’s been unleashed in there.”
“Is there anyone else in there?” the man asked, helping Sam to safety.
“Don…he’s still in there…the demon king,” Sam said.
The man ran into the museum. The heat pelted him, but he didn’t waver. A thin veil of charcoal smoke made visibility almost impossible. He fought through, swatting the smoke as if it were gnats.
“Don?”
A subtle moan was the only answer. It was enough to give the man an idea of Don’s location. He pushed through the heat and smoke, which was thicker, to find Don crouched on the floor flinging holy water in all directions.
“Get away from me,” Don said. He doused the shadow of the man reaching for him.
“It’s me, Lanky. I’m going to get you out of here. Stop throwing water on me.”
“I can’t leave. I’ve been touched by the demon king. It has to stay here.”
“You let me worry about the demon king once we’re out of here.”
Lanky lifted Don and picked him up. He maneuvered through the growing flames following the shards of sunlight from the open front door. Lanky eased Don down beside Sam.
“Don’t tell me super heroes are real too,” Sam said.
The roof of the museum collapsed. Flames erupted through the opening. Bits and pieces of haunted history littered the air. The scene resembled an angry volcano seconds away from spewing lava and then things went quiet. The flames folded back out of sight, and the items fell into the opening left by the roof.
“What happened?” Sam asked.
“God intervened,” Lanky said.
“Who is this guy?” Sam asked.
“Sam Strode, meet Lanky Preston. He’s part of our team,” Don said.
“Team? Like the A-Team? Or Ghostbusters?” Sam said.
“Something like that. How did you know to come?” Don asked Lanky.
“Someone I used to mentor called me and said two cops came asking him questions about Elvin Hayes and black magic. I figured you were involved in some way,” Lanky said.
“Good call,” Sam said.
“How’s your hand?” Lanky asked Don.
Don inspected the damage. His left hand was like something out of a horror movie. There was little flesh and a lot of exposed bone.
“Oh, dear lord,” Sam said. “What the hell happened to your hand?”
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Don said. He tried to laugh, but the pain wouldn’t allow it.
Sirens followed by two firetrucks and an ambulance raced into the parking lot.
Twenty-Six
Derek Gallagher stared at the blank paper. He was a writer who was never at a loss for words. He wasn’t suffering from writer’s block. He thought the term was just a more professional way of saying procrastination. Derek knew what to write; he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.
This was more of a confession than a suicide note. The world needed to know that Derek Gallagher, the man who wrote the bestseller The Devil Beside You, was a liar. He was a man who built his fortune passing off fiction as non-fiction. Hayes didn’t deserve an apology. The things the killer did were beyond redemption. The demon tormenting Derek left him with hopelessness. Each attack on his soul reminded Derek that he was also beyond redemption.
Derek dropped the pen and took a swig of whiskey. It went down like a flame tearing through brush. It was the first time Derek touched whiskey in years. An editor friend turned him on to Macallan scotch at a party, and he was hooked. Derek didn’t want his last meal to be something he enjoyed. He needed the suffering of cheap whiskey and the taste of lead.
Derek stroked the handle of the .38 revolver. He sighed before tipping the glass of whiskey again. He held it in his mouth, letting it burn his cheeks, his tongue, and his gums. Derek swallowed hard, almost choking from the force. He cleared his throat, picked up a pen, and began to write. Derek wrote the word COWARD in capital letters. It wasn’t what he planned to write.
“Leave me alone. This is what you wanted. Let’s get it over.”
The demon that took the form of Ava Weilden sat across from Derek, kicking the foot rest on the chair and licking a dirt-encrusted lollipop. The little girl’s pigtails were fraying like old ropes. She stared at Derek and smiled.
“Coward, huh? Who really is the coward? You’re hiding behind the disguise of a little child,” Derek said.
The demon dropped the lollipop. The room lit up like a fireworks celebration when the candy split into pieces on the floor. The flash took Derek’s sight. He blinked fast, but only rainbow-colored circles returned. A force knocked Derek out of the chair. Every bone in his body ached. His chest caved in. Derek turned on his side and vomited. A shadow fell over him. His vision cleared enough for him to make out a seven-foot-tall mass that formed no definite shape.
“I am the pain of a thousand deaths. I am the evil that brings hell from the underworld.”
Derek lunged for his gun, not to shoot the demon, but to end the madness. Before he could grab the .38, the desk turned on its side and crashed into the wall across the room.
There was another flash of light. The demon returned to the form of the little girl. It picked up the remains of the lollipop and sat back on the chair. The girl licked the jagged edge of the sucker with a snake-like tongue. Blood trickled down her dirty chin.
“I’m only playing. I’m a sweet little innocent child who shares her candy with strangers.”
A force grabbed Derek’s throat like a hand and pulled him toward the demon. He dug his heels into the floor. It was useless. The demon was too strong.
“Have a lick of my sucker.”
Derek’s mouth opened. The demon shoved the lollipop into his mouth.
“It’s the flavor of death.”
Derek’s mouth watered as the taste of dirt mixed with decomposition assaulted his tastes. He vomited again.
“It’s an acquired taste,” the demon said.
“Please…just…let me end this,” Derek said bet
ween dry heaves.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake…” The demon paused to giggle. “Stop being such a cry baby.”
The gun appeared in Derek’s hand. He had no control over his body. The .38 rested against his temple. Derek tensed and closed his eyes. The trigger pulled. Nothing.
The demon jumped up and down like a little child. “Russian Roulette is my favorite game.”
Tears trickled onto Derek’s cheeks. A sharp ache raced over his forehead from tension.
“Please, God, help me,” Derek said.
“God, God, God,” the demon said.
The trigger pulled again. And again, nothing.
“Your plea falls on deaf ears,” the demon said.
“Please, just let this end,” Derek said.
“It ends when my master says it e…”
The demon vanished mid-sentence. The force pressing against Derek relinquished its hold. The back of his head smacked against the hard wood, and the world went black.
Twenty-Seven
Terrence navigated the narrow road. The rented SUV barely missed nicking several cars as he looked for a space open enough to park. Finally, he gave up and wedged the rental between parked cars.
“You almost hit six cars,” Kim said. “But I have to give you an A for that parking job.”
“I’m over it,” Terrence said.
“The address is 212,” Mason said.
All the houses were similar in size and shape. The neighborhood resembled a live-action game of Monopoly. This was definitely more Baltic Avenue than Park Place.
“Believe me, the irony isn’t going unnoticed. This woman lives on Trouble Lane,” Terrence said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think we were part of some cliché horror novel.”
“The pink house on the left. That has to be it. Look at that,” Kim said.
There was a sign with the words “Madame Eileen, World Renowned Psychic” spray-painted in green on a piece of panel board. A crude image of a crystal ball was painted next to the words. The sign was nailed to two pieces of rotting railroad ties. Weeds wrapped around the post. The shrubs in front of the house had branches at different lengths protruding through. Some of the bushes had thorns, another irony not lost on Terrence. Mail overflowed from the mailbox and spilled into ankle-high grass.
“Are we sure she still lives here?” Kim asked
“Utilities are in her name and still active,” Mason said.
“She wasn’t trying to attract many customers,” Terrence said.
Eileen Martha Rollins always knew there was something different about her. She was smarter than children her age. Eileen felt superior. Her feelings led to boredom, and the boredom led to rebellion. Eileen’s parents were God-fearing Christians who were active in their church. Her father was a deacon and her mother taught Sunday School. Eileen never felt close to God. She couldn’t feel close to something she didn’t believe in. She first questioned the existence of a supreme being when she watched her grandmother die from cancer. Lula Rollins held a total devotion to God, yet he let her suffer immeasurably. Someone “who was supposed to look after his children, if they gave him the glory,” as Eileen’s father would say, wouldn’t have let Lula suffer like that.
Eileen was an inquisitive child, questioning Sunday sermons and discrepancies she felt were in the Bible. At age sixteen, her parents had enough and kicked their “harlot” of a daughter out of the house after catching her kiss a boy on the front porch swing at dusk. Eileen thought it was more about “what if the neighbors saw it” rather than the fact she kissed a boy. It didn’t matter; she was glad to be out from under their holy rule.
Eileen spent two years shacking up with the boy she kissed before he turned violent and used her body as a punching bag and her mind as medium to spit out anything to break her ego. She left him a week before her eighteenth birthday. Three months later, she turned her first trick. It was around the same time she met another prostitute who claimed to be a witch. Eileen knew it was more of a form of protection than anything else. Telling a john you’re a witch and if he tries to screw you, you’ll hex him is a pretty viable defense. But there was something alluring about witchcraft.
Eileen’s curiosity led her to shoplift a few books on spells from the local used bookstore. The curiosity gave way to desire. Eileen belonged with witches. She joined a local coven that became the family Eileen never had. The witches taught her to respect nature and to understand the value of her own mind. She dabbled in Satanism, but not devil worship. Eileen read anything written by Anton LaVey. The existence of God was fiction to true Satanists, and that meant the Devil was as well.
Eileen’s life changed forever when a beat-up 1965 Buick Riviera pulled up beside her, and the driver asked her, “How much for a blowjob?” The driver’s true intention was to strangle the life from Eileen, but a book, The Compleat Witch, or What to Do When Virtue Fails, sticking out of Eileen’s backpack piqued his interest. The driver paid Eileen to tell him about the book written by LaVey. Virtue was something that failed the driver long before the chance meeting with Eileen.
Elvin Hayes didn’t see Satanism the same way as Eileen. For him, it wasn’t interesting without a higher power to call upon. He took elements of what he learned while listening to Eileen after she finished earning the fifty dollars he dangled in front of her once a week and made his own form of Satanism, where he was second in command. In the beginning, Eileen was only a means to release the “inner beast” that Hayes tried to contain. He never missed the money. It wasn’t his in the first place. Hayes never held a job. He was a con-artist. Everything he had, he stole. The desire to kill grew within Hayes at a young age. He suppressed the feelings. Eileen was to be his first kill but meeting her brought a peace to Hayes. He would have gladly spent one hundred dollars a week to lie next to her and listen to her views on magic and the world. Hayes loved Eileen. She didn’t return the favor, and after a while, his first love returned to steal his heart back. The love of the kill.
Hayes hid his mistress from Eileen, not that she would have been jealous. She would have refused to see him and probably turned him in to the cops if she knew. Hayes went to the grave telling Wesley Palmer the reason he didn’t tell Eileen about the murders was to protect her. He didn’t tell Eileen to protect himself.
Eileen didn’t know how to love. Being someone’s punching bag for years beat the emotion out of her. She turned cold to men. She used men. Eileen would have never loved Hayes. She could see every man who ever hurt her in his eyes, but he was a regular, good for fifty bucks a week, and that paid her rent in the one-bedroom apartment. The only thing Eileen cared about was surviving.
Eileen wasn’t shocked when the breaking news report spread that Elvin Hayes was responsible for the six missing children. She saw the beast lurked within Hayes. Eileen was the anonymous caller who led Detective Sam Strode to Hayes. She never worried about her safety. Eileen held faith that her protection spells would never allow him to harm her. In her case, the spells weren’t for show.
The protection spells couldn’t shield her from the media. There wasn’t much to tell about Hayes after his arrest and the news was turning over every rock trying to hit pay dirt. Before reporters could dig deep enough to find out about her, Eileen moved away and took their secrets with her.
“Oh…” Terrence gagged as he stepped onto the porch. The stench of decomposition was strong. “Something’s dead.”
Kim searched the door for a section of wood that wasn’t splintered. She knocked just above the peephole.
“This isn’t good,” Terrence said, unholstering his pistol.
“Eileen, are you in there?”
Kim’s question went unanswered.
“There’s a strong sense of dread surrounding this land,” Debbie said. She walked to the edge of the porch and peered around the house.
Kim knocked again. Harder. The door opened. The stench hit Kim like strong wind, robbing her of breath. Terrence turned his head. Mason coughed. Debbie push
ed through the smell without pause. She walked into what was a living room in shambles. Furniture was flipped and scattered throughout the room. A television lay on the floor with the screen spiderwebbed. Debbie stepped over a pile of glass into a hallway.
“Wait,” Terrence said, catching up to Debbie.
“The harm is no longer here. Put your gun way,” Debbie said, moving away from Terrence.
Debbie placed her foot against the bottom of a door and nudged it open. It was the bathroom. Several needles floated in a pool of water in the sink. A thin layer of dirt clung to the surface of the white linoleum floor. Soap scum covered the clear plastic shower curtain.
“At least the toilet seat is down,” Terrence said.
“Mason, did the report say anything about Eileen being a user?” Debbie asked.
“No report of any drugs. Not even alcohol,” Mason said.
“Long-term users are good at keeping secrets,” Kim said.
Debbie moved to another door. She placed her hand on the wood and closed her eyes.
“What is it?” Kim said.
“It originated here. In this room,” Debbie said.
“The curse?” Terrence asked.
Debbie pressed against the door so lightly as to not disturb what was on the other side. The odor was much stronger. Terrence covered his face with his jacket. Kim buried her face into Terrence’s back. Mason turned away and gagged. Again, Debbie wasn’t fazed.
Debbie pushed the door wide. There was an unkempt bed. A purple comforter lay in a ball on the center of the bed on top of lavender sheets speckled with crimson drops. The white walls had matching splatter, only larger circles. Two bare feet were visible on the opposite side of the bed.
“The Mayhem was conjured in this room,” Debbie said.
Debbie stepped around the bed with Kim by her side. Eileen Phryne lay naked on her back. Two dark stones were placed over her eyes. Her throat was slit from ear to ear. Her dirty gray hair matted in a pool of blood. Children’s footprints led away from the puddle. Speckles of crimson drops were on the baseboards.