“But I don’t want to live that life without you, Allie. This last week has ruined me for anything else.” The next sentence came out before he realized it. “I’ll be waiting here for you to come home.”
“It might be a long wait.”
“I think I’ve already proven I’m pretty good at waiting for you.”
“I’ll call you when I land in LA. I love you, Scottie.”
“I love you, Allie Cat.”
The call ended and Scott just stood there with the phone against his ear, wishing he could back up time just eight hours, and freeze it forever.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Every muscle in Scott’s body ached. He’d hoped that the physical labor would help cover the pain of separation from Allie. He’d been wrong. It just made him tired as well as empty. But he had to finish today, for more reasons than one.
The sun had about an hour of life left before it would kiss the day goodbye at the horizon. He’d worked the formers for the garage’s concrete pad all day, squaring and leveling them to perfection. The concrete mix in the spinning mixer was almost ready to pour.
In the dead center of the pad, he’d dug a recess a few feet around and three feet deep. A brick stood on end in the center. He stepped out of the prepared area and switched off the rumbling concrete mixer. The barrel coasted to a stop and silence filled the air. He took a deep breath and headed for the house.
Scott went down to the basement and flicked on the light. Storage boxes lined the unfinished walls. The Portal lay in the center of the concrete floor, still swaddled in the altar cloth. It was as if the evil in the Portal had terrified the boxes and sent them fleeing to the room’s far edges. Even at halfway down the stairway, Scott could feel it. Not as strong as when Oates had it opened, not even as strong as when he and Allie had found it in the church crypt. But the Portal still radiated malevolence, like a subsonic thrum that threatened to ramp up to a thundering crescendo at any minute. Scott took the last few steps to the Portal’s side like he was walking across late spring ice.
He knelt and grasped the Portal with both hands. The Portal shifted underneath the altar cloth, the same slight deformation he’d felt the first time he’d touched it. Although the altar cloth kept him safe from direct contact with the evil inside, and its ability to draw him in, it still felt unnerving.
He carried it upstairs, out the back door, and into the ocher light of the day’s dying sun. He stepped over the formers for the concrete pad, knelt by the deeper hole in the middle, and balanced the Portal on the brick at the hole’s bottom. The altar cloth lay over it like a tablecloth. Scott pulled it away like a magician’s reveal.
A chill ripped up his spine at the sight of the Portal. Despite all the power that had surged through it, it appeared unchanged from when he’d first seen it in the church. The glossy finish remained unblemished, the inlays still shone, pristine and sharp. The demonic figures around the edge seemed to eye him in silent fury, awaiting the chance to exact revenge for their renewed incarceration.
Scott backpedaled out of the prepared area, eyes still locked on the Portal. Knowing it was inert for the next three hundred years did nothing to dampen the fear the thing engendered. He switched on the concrete mixer. The rolling barrel rumbled to life with a grind of aging, dusty gears. With a flip of his hand, he dropped the discharge chute and aimed it at the Portal’s new grave inside the formers. A slurry of concrete rushed down the chute.
The thick gray mass pooled in the bottom of the hole, then rose until it covered the lower half of the Portal. Scott gave the mixer a bump in speed and a surge of slurry subsumed the rest of the Portal. In his mind, Scott imagined the screams of the demon figures, now twice entombed. The concrete bubbled up out of the hole and began to ooze toward the frame of formers. An hour later, by the artificial light of the house security lights, he had a full concrete slab over the Portal’s new, and hopefully last, crypt.
He wiped his hands on his pants and scooped the altar cloth up from the ground. He’d decided not to bury the Portal in its power-dampening shroud. In the event it was found later, he didn’t want his only defense against it found as well.
The cloth’s bloodstains illuminated in the darkness, glowing in that same yellow hue they made when they covered the Portal. Energy danced across his fingertips. He’d assumed the bloodstains’ glow that day had been them absorbing the power of the Portal. But now he knew it was the blood channeling the stronger power that subdued the Portal, a power as positive as Oates’ was negative.
Everything around him went white. Then a scene coalesced. Scott’s heart sank at the familiarity. The setting was the main counter of the hardware store. Scott’s father, Gary, stood behind the counter reading an inventory list, in a time before he grew his widower’s beard. Oates leaned against a display to the right, inspecting his fingernails, wearing a black turtleneck. This was the moment his father had sold his soul, and become a murderer.
“You’re having some wonderfully dark thoughts,” Oates said.
Gary looked up startled. He did a double take to the front door and back. “Who the hell are you?”
“An answer, a solution, a friend. When someone contemplates murder, I like to drop by.”
“How would you….” Gary came out from around the counter, baseball bat in hand. “Get out of my store.”
Oates snapped his fingers. The bat disappeared. Gary stopped dead in his tracks.
“We can dispense with all the theatrics. You called me, whether you know you did or not. I chose to answer. I think you know who I am. Every living soul can feel it.”
Fear crept into Gary’s face. Scott knew exactly what he was feeling. He’d felt the same thing, standing in the same place, when Oates first walked into the hardware store on him.
“Mind if I call you Gary?” Oates said. “This kind of transaction does put us on a first-name basis.”
“I’ll call you Lucifer?” Gary said.
“Most do. I’m good with it. But let’s stick with Mr. Oates. Now, you understand what you’re about to do is murder,” Oates said. “Murder has consequences. In prison, you’ll lose all this, and your son.”
Gary nodded. “I don’t see any other option.”
“No one ever does. I’ll wipe away the consequences. You’ll never be caught, never punished.”
“In trade for my soul, I assume?”
Oates laughed. “No, once you kill, I’ve already got your soul. But while I keep you free, you work for me.”
“I’m not killing anyone else.”
“Nothing so active is necessary. You’re just gonna watch. Something valuable of mine is on the island. If it surfaces, you’ll tell me. Simple.”
Gary gave Oates a wary look. “And no one, especially my son, will ever know I’m a murderer?”
“You’ll die with your name untarnished. All you have you’ll leave to him.”
This was where Oates skipped ahead in the vision. This time there was no break.
Gary gave his head a slow shake, and bit his lower lip. “I’ve never supported euthanasia. The church teaches it’s wrong. It’s illegal. But when it’s someone you love….”
“You don’t need to rationalize anything to me. I’m the king of anything goes. But if you really think what you’re planning to do is fine, don’t be so sneaky about it. Just deliver the poison you plan on giving your wife to her doctor and have him administer it. You know he won’t.”
“She’s suffering. The disease is killing her anyway. She’d want me to do it.”
“The same way she’d want you to stay out of prison, to watch over her grandchildren when they arrive, to leave both your reputations in this town spotless. I’m here to help.” His malignant smile said exactly the opposite.
“I can’t bear to see her suffer so,” Gary said. “You have a deal. May my son and God forgive me.”
The vision disappeared.
A weight lifted from Scott’s heart. His father hadn’t acted out of malice, killed someone over debt or jealousy or wild rage. He’d eased his mother’s suffering, delivered her from the scourge of the disease that was destined to take her anyway. If his father had told Scott, Scott would have approved. Hell, he would have helped him. He knew his mother would have begged him to do it.
And it hadn’t earned his father eternal damnation. His spirit had met Allie when she died, turned her back around to come home. However redemption worked, his father had earned it. And his father had promised her that Scott would understand someday. Somehow he’d used whatever connection this altar cloth had to the afterlife to send that message through, this time without Oates’ edits.
Scott clutched the cloth against his chest. Tears welled in his eyes as he felt, for the first time in weeks, at peace with his past. And for the first time since the morning, strong enough to face the future, that far distant time when his descendants would have to protect this ground from whatever Satan might send their way.
And there was only one way he wanted to have those descendants.
He knelt down beside the wet concrete. With a nail left over from building the formers, he wrote three words.
Allie and Scott.
Afterword
Big thanks go out to Teresa Robeson for her usual, irreplaceable beta reading of this book. Also thanks to Don D’Auria for his faithful support and insightful editing. My whole career is entirely your fault. Thanks also to the entire Flame Tree team, who make and market some truly beautiful books.
One night in college, I was walking up the staircase to my fifth-floor dorm room. A guy I’d never seen before passed me on the way down. Well-dressed, like he was going out someplace special, he wore a camel’s hair coat that had to cost hundreds. He was good-looking, and gave me a friendly smile as he passed.
I’ve never been so scared in all my life.
There was nothing about him that should have been scary, but his mere presence filled me with an irrational terror that makes me shiver today, decades later. And it wasn’t just me. By the time we made it to the fifth floor, the girl I was with was shaking. She’d felt it too. I am firmly convinced that we met Satan in that stairwell.
So that became the core of the Satan you see on these pages, one who walks the Earth in human form, but cannot hide his true self from instant recognition, and deep fear. I gave his story a few twists, stripping him of some of the omnipotence usually attributed to Lucifer. Because seriously, what kind of punishment for an angel’s rebellion is being given immense power and dominion over Hell? God has to be much more creative at doling out sentences than that. I hope that you enjoyed this different take.
I’ve had a lot of people ask me what happens when Allie returns from California. In my stories, time is no match for true love. What do you think happens?
Russell James
About this book
This is a FLAME TREE PRESS BOOK
Text copyright © 2020 Russell James
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