The hallway was empty.
Before he left the kitchen, Dennis reached into the drawer under the microwave and grabbed a heavy meat-tenderizing mallet, holding it behind his back as he left the room and went through the hall toward the bedroom. Beyond the bedroom, the yellow and black crime scene tape blocked the nursery and swayed gently in the heat from the air vents. A flash memory of the nurse’s mutilated body came back to mind. How the blood shone in the light from the lamp on the dresser. Her legs flecked with blood, her torso like so much ground meat.
He studied the shadows near the nursery door. Light poured into the hall from the living room and only reached as far as the bedroom entrance, so darkness had pooled in the deepest shadows, right where he didn’t want them.
He walked lightly.
Once he reached the bedroom door, he turned and pressed his ear against it. He couldn’t hear anything inside. Jamie’s in there. He knew it in his gut. There wasn’t any other place for Jamie to sleep. Alison wouldn’t have the baby anywhere else, now.
Dennis cursed between clinched teeth. The mere act of tensing any muscles sent new aches through his groin so he caught his breath and stopped.
He wrapped his hand tight around the doorknob and pressed his cheek against the cool wood, listening as he opened the latch and moved inside. It was dark but for the blue glow of the moon that penetrated the white sheer curtains and cast everything in the room the color of midnight. The curtains stirred around the window; it was open.
He could see the shape of their bed, but the shape of Alison atop it was all wrong. She lay atop the covers, her legs spread slightly, and there was a patch of darkness there beneath her, as if something had spilled between her legs. Her torso looked as if some tumorous growth had made her black and swollen to twice her size from her neck to her pelvis. But then he realized that something was lying face-down on top of her belly.
It was Jamie.
It had transformed again, but this time in addition to its scaly gray skin, jet-black horns protruded from a central point on its forehead. He could see in the shadowed silhouette that the long teeth had grown in again, forked tongue flicking between snake lips. It crouched on meaty arms and legs, the nubs of its clipped wings squirming between the shoulder blades of its back. Its head was buried between Alison’s legs, eating her bloody discharge and licking the stitched wounds of its unholy birth.
When the full realization of what he saw before him settled upon Dennis, he let the door swing open without regard now to being seen. He gripped the meat-tenderizing mallet loosely in his right hand.
Jamie noticed his presence and lifted its head from its gruesome meal. Its eyes flashed red through the gathering shadows. It hissed and bared its teeth.
Dennis lunged toward the creature but it moved fast, even though it was now fully two feet long, and disappeared into the shadows like a giant roach on the other side of the bed. Heedless of the pain screaming at him from his groin, he launched himself toward it. He had to kill it before it finished off Alison, like it finished off the nurse.
His thrust his hand into the darkness near the floor between the side of the bed and the wall. He heard the sound of it scurrying away from him under the bed. Dennis went to the floor, poised to use the mallet. He pressed his cheek against the carpet and looked.
There was pitch black under the bed, except for two red pinpoints of hate.
A sudden growl sounded from the thing and it rushed forward with a hateful cry. Dennis rolled and covered his head with his left arm. He felt its teeth rip into the meat of his left forearm and tear away a hunk of flesh. Blood gushed from the wound. The thing’s weight perched atop him and its claws punctured the skin of his ribs as it raked away more strips of flesh.
When it tried to bite into his forearm again, he shoved it to dislodge his arm from its razor sharp grip. It had managed to sink its teeth yet again, but not before Dennis lifted the meat tenderizer into the air and brought it down in a swift blow against the side of the creature’s skull. It impacted with the sound of an axe against rotten wood. Wet spatters flecked Dennis’s face. Jamie gave a wounded screech and recoiled, releasing him. This one will not die. In his mind, he could see the words illuminated on the computer monitor—bold, black, a sentence of doom.
We’ll see about that, Dennis thought.
Dennis rolled to his feet and faced the hunched shape of...this thing the child had become. Dennis stared in horror, taking in the features of the thing in its true form: ears hooked away from the sides of its head, horn grown to over an inch long. Its red eyes narrowed like those of a serpent before a strike. Its neck and underbelly was light gray and lined with teats. Its testicles were bulbous with a long thin male member that was slender and black. Its legs had become thick and ended in saurian-like talons. When it walked, it moved in the darkness with deliberate deception. It seemed to merge with it and become invisible.
One moment it was there in the moonlight, the next moment, the shadows in the room shifted and it had disappeared. Dennis spun. The room was empty.
When he turned back to the bed, Alison was sitting straight up, hair hanging in front of her face. She was a black silhouette against the window.
Dennis gasped. “Ali,” he breathed.
The creature moved again in the space to his left.
Instantly he spun and swung the mallet toward the sound, the heavy steel head of the tenderizer hissing through the air with the violence of his swing.
He stuck a meaty blow to the side of the demonic creature’s head, but it seemed to deter it only for the moment and by God —his heart caught in his throat when he caught a glimpse of it now revealed in the moonlight—it was growing taller still. It crumbled one way with the force of his hit but before he could reposition himself to send a second blow down on top of its head Alison screamed behind him.
“No!” she cried and leaped onto Dennis’s back. The force of her impact combined with the pain in his midsection was too much to bear and he went plunging to the ground under her in a flurry of fingernails and screeching.
There was a roar from the corner and Alison stopped attacking, as suddenly the very fabric of reality seemed to snap loose from its moorings. The entire room darkened and billowed as though the walls had become water. Ethereal gases gathered in the air until a sudden vacuum pulled at every corner of the room. The curtains came loose from the rods and went flying in a whirl against the wall. A violet light flashed and it was difficult to breathe.
Dennis coughed and Alison fell from his back. He clutched his meager weapon and faced whatever awful event was now bearing down upon them. The air in the room grew thinner and colder like a gust across a frozen wasteland. Dennis could hear Alison cry out but was stunned before the vision.
Something had materialized in the room. Something big.
He sensed the size of the thing before he could discern what it was. Terror gripped his bowels and he released his bladder while trying to catch his breath and keep from hyperventilating.
Alison screamed.
The thing that had raped them—Kokumuo—materialized in the corner of the room, but now it was twice the height it had been before, and had to hunch over to stand in the room. Its dark wings unfurled and filled half the room, its own eyes flashing the crimson of unbridled lust. It walked toward them on misshapen rear legs, its jutting member writhing in the air between them like some hungry proboscis.
The demon reached for Dennis with a long-fingered claw, and he would have screamed if only there were any breath in his lungs to do so.
It reached past Dennis to the wounded form of Jamie that whimpered in the corner.
It picked up the demon child and curled it toward its chest in an unholy embrace, pulling it to its vile breasts, which protruded like grotesque fungi.
A second roar trembled the air in the room and a sudden strike of the greater demon’s tail slashed the side of Dennis’s face open and knocked him across the floor before it turned and dissolved into the g
asses that had begun to emit through the floor and walls. The solid pieces of the room suddenly seemed to become liquid again and reverberated like the surface of a disturbed pool of water. A sound like the massive rushing of surf rose from all around and reached a deafening crescendo before the furniture shook and shifted toward the corner where the thing funneled into a vortex that pulled it, and its child, from this plane of reality back to whatever nether regions of hell from whence it had come.
As Kokumuo disappeared, everything was pulled as if by a giant magnet toward that side of the room, including Alison and Dennis, who were crushed in the corner by the weight of the dresser, the nightstands, a chair, and the bed—all of which came rushing at and piled atop them.
Dennis howled. His leg was pinned across the edge of the bed as the dresser made impact and snapped his leg at the knee.
He could hear Alison’s cries and see the last second whiplash stroke of her head against the corner of the chair as it smashed into her face and sent her falling like a rag doll beneath the bed and falling dresser. A lamp fell. The television rolled onto its side but didn’t break. And then, as suddenly as it began, the wind from the window died down. The blue glow of moonlight replaced the black and green gases of...whatever had just come for them. For it.
Kokumuo had come for Jamie.
Dennis groaned and pushed as hard as he could manage all considered. He was pinned behind the dresser, his groin and arm ripped to shreds, and he was beaten and bruised and hit by something on just about every square inch of his body, but he had to uncover Alison.
“Alison,” his voice was hoarse as he struggled with the weight. He shoved the dresser and let it crash out of the way. The chair was broken beneath it. Alison lay naked and broken beneath the chair.
“Oh God,” breathlessly, all thought of his own injuries cast aside, he hurried to clear the debris from her body and bent close to listen to her heart. It was beating. She was breathing.
He held her for a moment before he realized he had to call someone. An ambulance, somebody. He searched for the phone.
29.
There were a lot of questions. The detectives in charge of the earlier investigation arrived with suspicions anew. The medical form filled out by the nurse while waiting to be seen for the vomiting incident, the one that noted her additional contusions, got produced and discussed as well.
The inquiry lasted a few weeks and when they decided they couldn’t possibly come up with a “plausible” explanation for everything that had happened to Dennis and Alison Walker, the police went away with subtle promises to keep their eyes on the couple. As if that would solve the mysteries, crack the case, or fill in the glaring holes. So, for the most part, the cops went away.
The reporters didn’t. And they weren’t just regular reporters either. In addition to the regular media, the phone rang off the hook from Fate Magazine, Fortean Times, Haunted Homeland, and “students” of the occult. The tabloids hounded them. A major investigation was launched at the hospital when photos of the newborn Jamie emerged—splashed all over the grocery store tabloid racks like the latest special guest of a traveling freak show. They couldn’t escape the onslaught. No matter where they went the whispers and the horrified stares followed. The priest was finally called, the house cleansed and blessed. But still the lurking terror stayed—always in the back of their minds, in their nightmares at night. A sudden chill, a shiver, a moan in the dark, that’s all it took to set their minds screaming and remembering the agony that had been theirs. It wasn’t long before Dennis had their phone number changed and put the house on the market. They got three times the asking price. Sold to some casino that bought up the strange and unusual in order to cash in on the shock value. What did they care?
They took the money and moved to rural East Texas where they could live quietly, without the gossip and the constant reminders.
And life went on. Until a year later, Alison excitedly called him at his newspaper office—where he had happily traded in world travel for small town football and political quibbles—and told him that she was pregnant.
A baby. A real baby. Not some abomination from the pits of hell. Not some demon spawn created from tormenting lust. No, this was their baby. A baby Dennis could stand in front of the hospital nursery window and smile upon proudly just like any other dad.
Dennis smiled. A warm feeling embraced him, comforted him. They were going to have a family.
30.
Wes had waited a year for Travel & Leisure to hire a new reporter and he was meeting him this afternoon over lunch. It was going to be hard to replace Dennis. The new guy had some mighty fine shoes to fill. But it would be nice to have a traveling companion again. Wes threw his clothes into his duffel bag. He wasn’t exactly a neat packer. A handful of t-shirts, a few pairs of jeans. He grabbed a pile of clean underwear and thrust it into the bag. Looking back into the drawer for some socks, his eyes fell on a black stone statue: Kokumuo.
Wes laughed and picked it up, hefting the weight of it in his palm. He had forgotten he had it. The other half of a set of statues he had purchased while in Ouidah with Dennis. He had jokingly given the male half of Kokumuo to Dennis as a good luck charm while they were trying to conceive a baby.
He turned it over in his hand. The black stone demon was a grotesque exaggeration of the female body. Round tummy, jutting breasts, and a gaping hole where the male fetish fit into it like a primitive pornographic puzzle. Or salt and pepper shakers, he thought, and laughed. He traced his finger over the carved wings on its back and dropped it back into the drawer.
He started to leave the room, but a sudden inspiration tickled his fancy and made him smile. He returned to the drawer and retrieved the fetish. Tossing it slightly into the air, he caught it in his hand and pulled open a nearby desk drawer and grabbed a padded mailing envelope. He put the statue inside and scrawled a note on a nearby notepad:
Dennis, long time no see or hear, buddy. Hey, drop me a note—haven’t heard from you in about a year! Off to Greece! Take care! Wes
He ripped the paper from the pad, folded it, stuck it in with the statue and sealed it. Stamps and an address and it was ready. He grabbed his duffel bag, his camera bag and slung his jean jacket over his arm. He’d drop it off at the post office on the way to the airport.
Never break up a matched set, that’s what his mother always told him.
Wes smiled. It would be good to hear from Dennis again.
The End
About the Authors
Christopher Fulbright is a former reporter turned technical writer whose stories have received honorable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror and Best Horror of the Year.
Angeline Hawkes is a Bram Stoker award-nominated author with a B.A. in Composite English Language Arts with works published by Chaosium, Dark Regions Press, and others.
More on their individual and collaborative works can be found at their website http://www.fulbrightandhawkes.com. Follow on Twitter @FulbrightHawkes.
Other eBooks by these Authors
Blood Coven (Horror novella)
Black Mercy Falls (Horror novella)
Sorrow Creek (Horror novella)
Then Comes the Child Page 8