by C. T. Phipps
That was when the door of the men’s room opened and a man in a long red coat walked out with long black hair as well as a winter beanie. He smelled of reefer and was carrying a joint in hand. Gerald immediately pulled out a pistol he’d managed to steal from one of the Sons of Mars along the way, Nancy lifted her ax, and Carrie pulled out a pair of knives. I just blinked.
“Ah, fuck, it’s medicinal!” the man said, raising his hands.
I blinked. “Uh, who the hell are you?”
“Winston!” the guy said. “I’m like one of the people these guys were going to sacrifice before vampire Naomi Campbell killed everybody. I decided to hide in the bathroom.”
I blinked. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t be a slasher movie without a stoner,” Nancy muttered. “It’s probably the first time one ever lasted to the end, though.”
He is not what he seems, the Spirit of the Hunt whispered.
Oh, you think? I asked, aware of the situation’s absurdity. Whatever would have given you that impression?
Sarcasm suits you, the Spirit of the Hunt said. Much better than acting the part of the dutiful son.
I have never been dutiful, I snapped.
“You were kidnapped, survived a massacre, and now you’re getting baked?” Gerald asked, incredulous.
“Yeah,” Winston said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Absolutely,” Gerald said, desperately pleading and frightened. “Please tell me you have enough for everyone.”
“Agreed,” Nancy said, looking exhausted.
Winston smiled and pulled out two bags thick with cannabis.
“You are the worst Artemis ever,” Carrie said, looking at Nancy. “I can’t think of a reason not to partake, though.”
“You can’t?” I asked, stunned. Was there some kind of magic at work here or had everyone just gone insane in the last few minutes? Well, not that any one of us was particularly sane.
“You never bummed a hit off the guards?” Carrie asked. “Possibly in exchange for sexual favors if they weren’t creepy and not breaking their fingers if they were?”
“No,” I replied. “Winners don’t do drugs.”
“Pfft!” Carrie said. “It’s a plant not a drug.”
Nancy and Gerald nodded.
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t suppose you happen to know where the vampire who carried out this massacre is?”
“You’re looking for her?” Winston said, rolling joints for everyone on the top of the bar.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Why?” Winston asked.
“To kill her,” I replied.
“Oh,” Winston said, handing out a trio to my group. “Well, no I don’t, but the eyeless guy in the bathroom does.”
I blinked. “The eyeless guy?”
“Yeah,” Winston replied. “He’s been asking for you for about an hour.”
My companions all blinked before Carrie took a long drag.
“Somehow this started insane and just happened to get more so as time passed,” Carrie said. “I wonder if we’re all still in the asylum at this point.”
“Don’t even joke,” I replied. “It makes more sense than what we’re currently doing.”
That was when a bloody faced man in a business suit smashed through the restroom and collapsed at our feet.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Nancy immediately ran over to the fallen figure as I took a more reserved approach, slowly approaching him while not taking my eyes off Winston. The man had no aura I could perceive and there was an amused beatific expression on his face. I didn’t think he was my mother shapeshifted because, well, she didn’t have enough of a sense of humor to pull this off.
Carrie and Gerald just stood behind me, smoking on their joints.
“Hey, can you even enjoy this?” Carrie asked Gerald.
“Smoke goes directly into the bloodstream from the lungs,” Gerald explained. “Can’t enjoy edibles but this is fine.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re not going to die of cancer,” Carrie muttered, puffing away.
“It does mean I can’t satisfy the munchies,” Gerald replied, blinking. “Well, there’s one way.”
“Only if you ask nicely,” Carrie replied.
“Bark,” Cujo muttered, putting a paw over his face.
Winston just stood there, bemused at the situation, singing Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff” without any music to go along with it. For a moment, I saw that he had no shadow before one appeared behind him as if he’d noticed I was looking for it. “You sure you don’t want a toke, friend? If anyone in the world could use something to help them relax it’s you, man.”
“No thank you,” I replied.
“True,” Winston replied. “You’ve got to keep that good boy, virginal, no sex, no drugs, no alcohol thing going on. Smart.”
I stared at him. “What are you?”
Winston blew a smoke ring in my face. The interesting thing was he didn’t take a puff off of a joint first. “I am what I am.”
“Popeye?” Carrie asked.
Winston shrugged. “Awesome chicken.”
I shook my head and went over to Nancy and the man by the restroom, who I immediately recognized as Aiden Cassidy. The elderly man was dressed in an expensive tailored suit that was now thoroughly covered in his blood. His eyes had been plucked from his face before the injuries sealed with the telltale smell of vampire blood, oozing now rather than bleeding. X’s had been carved around his eyes and a pair of spirals on his cheeks. The billionaire and wizard should have had a powerful aura of both murder as well as magic but there was no sign of it. It took me a second to realize why.
Nancy looked at me. “He needs help.”
“He’s dead,” I replied.
“What?” Nancy asked.
“Check his pulse,” I replied, looking at him with a mixture of pity as well as scorn.
Nancy grabbed his wrist as he thrashed around. “Son of a bitch. Is he a vampire?”
“No,” Gerald said, walking up. He looked thoroughly baked despite having had only a a few drags off his joint. “I don’t think he is. If he could then he’d probably be going for your throat. You have a very nice throat.”
“Back off,” Nancy said, having put her joint out. She showed no signs of the magical (or perhaps just very powerful) pot’s effects that the others had been subjected to.
“We were supposed to be rewarded,” Aiden Cassidy spoke, his voice now a squeaky whine. “She promised us immortality.”
“You have it, after a fashion,” I replied.
“We did everything she wanted,” Aiden said. “More even. Our wealth made her cult!”
“The only thing she despises more than humanity is those who would betray it to her,” I replied. “You were rewarded as a traitor deserved.”
Aiden gave a short chuckle, utterly devoid of mirth. “They have not heard the last of the Cassidy family. My brother and his child escaped. We will have our revenge.”
I stared down at him. “You’re a zombie. You have no magic. You have no soul. Your essence is probably burning in Hell now. She’s taken it to fuel her power.”
Nancy glared at me as if I was being abusive to the murderous cultist. “You’re not helping.”
“He sent a demonic will-o-wisp to threaten us,” I replied. “I’m not overly sympathetic.”
Aiden lifted his hand to me, perhaps following my voice. “She wishes to destroy this world, you realize that, don’t you? That’s what the rituals are all about. That was what flooding the world with stories about murderers like you and your father are for. She will bind one of the Red Gods to each of her chosen slashers and then let them become the avatars of fear. They shall incarnate in this world and the world shall drown in the blood.”
Nancy looked up at me. “Does that make any sense to you?”
“Yes, it does,” I said, trying to parse how this all fit together. “My grandfather was always terrified of the ancient
gods waking up or entering this dimension. They were bound millennia ago by the gods of humanity and their champions. The followers of these ancient gods, chiefly my mother, have always tried to break those chains. I think what he’s saying is that the slashers are all tools to waken them gradually.”
“No, to become them,” Aiden said. “We were supposed to be the new gods but instead they were hers.”
I looked down at him. “The Spirit of the Hunt is the rogue Red God, isn’t she? The one who wants humanity to keep surviving so that she can continue to hunt. A world that is awash in chaos and horror is not one where she can thrive. That’s why she’s been helping us. This is all an attempt to screw with Lamia’s plans.”
I want to hunt, not be fed, the Spirit of the Hunt hissed. You understand this. She must go.
I risked a question that was always dangerous when dealing with demons but was one of the few ways to confront them. “What was the demon’s name?”
“Bloody Mary,” Aiden whispered, staring with his eyeless face. “Bloody Mary is the renegade Red God.”
The name seemed to have a peculiar kind of weight and I knew he was speaking the truth. Bloody Mary was one of the original slashers and had hundreds of forms across human history. She was the ghost in the mirror that children said the name of to summon, but she was also a figure who had antecedents across every culture in human history. The Yuki-onna of Japanese mythology, the Crying Woman of Latin American folklore, and many others. She was known to my grandfather as the Spirit of Murder and had existed since Cain killed Abel.
Yes, the Spirit of the Hunt whispered. No, Bloody Mary did. I am she. I’ve always had a fondness for mortal killers with tortured pasts. Say my name three times into the nearest mirror and become my chosen one, just like the others have taken their chosen in this group. You will have power equal to that of a god.
No, I said. I don’t want that.
You will never be human, Bloody Mary whispered. That is your fondest and stupidest desire. One you have already shown you lack the commitment to follow up through. Perhaps if you abandoned your sister and chose to live under a rock, then maybe but then you would have to give up the thrill of the kill. The attraction to the woman who does kill. My daughters as much as anyone’s.
You were the one who corrupted the Artemises and their predecessors, I said.
I could feel Bloody Mary’s Cheshire Cat grin in the back of my skull. Yes, I was the one who reached out to the Herakles and Medeas of history. All the demigods and heroes of your kind had only one skill and that was killing. What was the difference in the end between killing monsters and humans? Evil humans at first then anyone who offended them. The sad fact is it was so easy that I barely had to do anything to get you all to turn on the race you were supposed to protect.
And you want me to join you, I said, sickened.
Yes, because if you don’t then you will all die here, Bloody Mary said. Starting with Nancy. Besides, do you think for a second that your sister won’t join me? I plan to recruit her as well. I just think she needs a bit more seasoning.
Nancy reached over and took my hand. “You don’t have to do this alone.”
“What?” I asked, blinking.
Nancy took a breath. “I know who you’re talking to. I also can guess what you’re talking about. Whatever happens, we’re going to do this together.”
“That’s a lot of commitment to make for someone you met yesterday,” I replied.
“I make terrible life choices,” Nancy said, smiling. “Besides, we have plenty of days ahead of us to start hating one another.”
I smirked. “That’s—”
Nancy’s eyes widened. “Behind you!”
I barely moved out of the way even as I felt the breath of a man standing behind me a second before his knife came down at me. Thankfully, I moved forward the moment Nancy shouted and felt the knife slice into the back of my janitor’s overalls rather than my spine before I rolled on the ground. A cold chill ran down me as I looked up to see the mask of Mike.
Mike Miner wasn’t the oldest of all slashers, unless you believed the story about him being Jack the Ripper, but he was one of the most iconic. He was a mountain of muscle and stood close to seven feet tall. He was dressed in a gray prisoner’s uniform with 102578 just above his heart. His face, however, was covered with a plaster mold mask that was expressionless but showed empty soulless eyes through simple round cuts. In his right hand was a chef’s knife that I could sense a hundred or more victims’ blood on. He was someone purer than me in his devotion to the hunt, a being that had given himself utterly to the kill and had removed every bit of humanity left in him.
Standing beside Mike was a woman only slightly less tall with bronze skin, long black hair that trailed down over her shoulders, and a flattering black evening dress that covered a body that was both toned as well as curvaceous. Her ethnicity was ambiguous and predated most of the ones that inhabited this globe today. Demonic blood ran through her veins, but she appeared to be a woman of mixed Arabic and African descent. In her hands was the Necronomicon that had somehow been taken from Carrie. Looking between the pair of them I saw both Gerald and Carrie lying down on the ground, passed out, with no sign of Winston. God dammit. Apparently, I’d underestimated just how much of a sense of humor my mother had.
“Hello, Mother,” I said, dryly.
Nancy got up behind me, holding her battle ax in hand. Her attention was not devoted to Lamia alone but to Mike, who she looked at with undisguised hatred. I wondered if Mike was the one who killed her mother and grandmother.
“Hello, William,” Lamia said, her voice dry and seductive despite the fact we were mother and son. “I must confess, I didn’t expect much from you or Carrie. Yet, here you are, murdering your way through my minions. Billy proved to be a more talented guardian than I expected.”
“Billy is dead,” I said. “Nancy and I killed him.”
Lamia smirked. “Even better. He could have been a god of the new age. Instead, he tried to use his father’s copy of the Necronomicon to seize the power of the Red Gods for himself.”
“I wonder who inspired him to do it,” I muttered.
Lamia chuckled. “Yes, your father was led to his treachery by the Red Woman. Mary thinks that this world needs to continue. That evil has no place without good to define it. She is a fool. When the world is nothing but rolling fields of chaos, suffering, and horror—then we can begin building a paradise for a race worthy of living. I’d like you to be part of that, my son.”
I stared at her. “Surely, you must be joking.”
Lamia’s expression bore no humor, though. “The Creator cursed me and others like me with a life of suffering, horror, and pain. Through the power of demonology, I was able to escape mortality and become a goddess. Demons and others like them are every bit as flawed as humanity, though. Both deserve to be destroyed. Only from their ashes can a new creation be born. I’ve lost thousands of my children across time, but those who follow me will be reborn in the new age. You and your sister can join me. Be a family.”
I would never have considered my mother’s offer if not for the fact her voice drilled into my head and began playing with my mind. She could have erased my memories and taken over my will with a thought, but that would have left me nothing more than an empty shell. I wondered if that was what she’d done with Mike. I could feel his hatred radiating outward and it was a barely restrained fury that was not directed at just Nancy but also at me, Lamia, my siblings, and perhaps himself for being captured by her.
In my mind, I saw Lamia bestow upon me all the power I could ever want. I never would have to be afraid of being murdered or my sister being struck down. We would be able to live freely in a paradise of our own creation, like the fake world that my sister’s dreams had conjured. There were other lies she put inside me, showing how little she knew of me, that included concubines as well as vast wealth. I could have any victims I wanted as well, men or women, that would be drawn from th
e survivors of humanity bred like cattle across her Hell-world.
Lamia didn’t understand that I didn’t want those things, that I didn’t lust for people and had only ever wanted one person. She didn’t get that my need for killing was restricted to the guilty, and then she tried to change that element of my personality. There was a small part of my personality that wanted to go along with it, just for the promise of a mother that would increase the size of my family by one. But even as she tugged that string, I knew she was someone who had no feelings for me whatsoever. As she looked in my mind, I looked in hers and I was just an experiment. A tiger cub she’d bred and hoped to raise as a pet.
Sensing my resistance, I felt her pull on my memories and feelings to punish me. I remembered all the fear, abuse, and horror I’d suffered at Billy’s hands. Worse, I remembered how he’d done all of this with the belief he was making me better, stronger, and more prepared for the world. He had a twisted affection for me, right up until he’d planned to take over my body and wear me like a suit. That made it worse.
Lamia made me experience all of that over again, the years of imprisonment in H.P Lovecraft’s, and a horrific collection of possibilities yet to come. Nancy turning on me in disgust when she realized what a monster I was. The government recapturing me and subjecting me to show trials followed by putting me to death by electric chair after decades in solitary confinement. I saw my sister chopping up young boys, utterly insane, and having to put her down due to the hunt consuming her. Then I felt myself killing the innocent, killing Nancy, and becoming something identical to Billy. In that moment, I moved from indifference to hatred of my mother.
“Will you kneel?” Lamia asked. “Obey my commands and love me?”
Still, it took every ounce of my willpower to speak my next words. “No thank you, Mother.”
I collapsed to one knee, sweating, and ready to vomit on the floor. I’d been shot, stabbed, almost drowned, and pulled into an alternate dimension in the past 24 hours, but that was nothing to how I felt now. My mother had left me devastated emotionally as well as violated mentally. Worse, I knew she could destroy me with but a whisper more.