by Greg Kihn
Devila flashed a cruel, cinematic smile, her trademark, then let her face settle into an impassive mask, as cold and distant as the shores of Antarctica.
“Hello, I am Devila, queen of your nightmares. Tonight, I invite you on a great journey, a journey into the unknown.”
Chet checked the film, made sure the Nagra tape recorder was running, too, then nodded to Landis who, in turn, nodded to Devila, who continued her monologue.
“What you are about to see is absolutely real. It is being filmed live, before our cameras, as it happens. There are no special effects or camera tricks. This is really happening. You will be shocked, horrified, maybe even sickened by it. It changes everything you have ever been taught about God and the church, about monsters, about what is real and what is illusion. But, make no mistake, what you are about to witness is evil, and it is submitted to you without judgment or opinion. That, my dear viewer, is up to you.”
She paused, let that sink in, then continued. The camera panned out to reveal José sitting nervously in the background. Devila’s ghoulish dress, tattered and revealing, played to the camera shamelessly. Her tiny waist seemed impossible. It was cinched up so tightly with a wide belt, which made it appear so small on screen, that you could put your hands around it. Her cleavage heaved and quivered, diverting attention from her face and her words. Chet got it all.
“Are you ready? Okay, let’s begin. I am now going to conjure the supernatural entity. Remember, this is not a trick. The demon you are about to see materialize out of thin air is real. I want you to watch closely. This is the first time in the history of filmmaking that anything supernatural, anything beyond the reach of science and logic, has been captured on film.”
She stepped back to a small table, on which rested the tuning forks.
Without explanation, for, in fact, she could not offer one, she hung the two, oddly sized tuning forks from a freestanding floor lamp. U-shaped, they appeared to Landis to be a set of polished silver bars, reflecting the lights sharply.
She struck the first fork, the larger of the two, the same one that she had watched Albert strike first. It hummed and vibrated, warming her ears strangely. The note seemed to sustain forever, suspended in the still air of the projection room.
From the moment the note was struck, Landis felt an uneasiness. Something in the low, mournful timbre of the note made his heartbeat accelerate. He felt a tightness in his chest and a tremble in his breath. He was watching, hoping that what Devila said was going to happen, actually would happen, but he was also uncharacteristically fearful. What was it that made the sound of the note so unsettling?
Devila struck the second tuning fork. The note it made was higher than the first, and wildly dissonant. Then, the peculiar oscillations began, slowly at first, but then faster, changing without any discernible pattern. It was the randomness of the dissonant notes, pushing and pulling against each other, that really put Landis’s nerves on edge. He felt his teeth grind.
The notes had the same effect as a scratching fingernail, slowly wending its way across a dry chalkboard. It set the hair on the back of his neck straight up. Landis was not alone in his discomfort; all the people in the room: Devila, Chet, José and Landis, were affected. It was as if the air in the room had suddenly become unbreathable with anxiety.
The forks began to blur. They vibrated so vigorously and interacted to such an extent that they appeared to lose all visual definition.
Was all this going to film? Landis glanced at Chet.
The cameraman squinted through his viewfinder, sweat beading up on his brow. The alien atmosphere created by the dissonance was palpable; it prickled at their skin like thousands of tiny needles. None of them had ever felt anything even remotely like it. Fear lived in this atmosphere—it was the haunt of something evil.
For the first time, Landis wondered if he was making a big mistake. Danger had never been a factor, yet now he began to consider the possibility that what they were doing was terribly wrong.
Landis kept his eye on Devila, the expression on her face a mixture of dread and triumph. She knew that something impossible was about to happen. Time hung suspended. Indeed, all the rules of nature seemed to be suspended. Landis felt the pangs of panic begin to pierce the thin veneer of his control. Things were getting weird fast.
José squirmed in his chair, as uncomfortable and scared as a cornered ferret.
Landis kept checking to see that Chet was rolling film, although he knew that the strangeness that permeated the air in this room could never be captured on film. The oppressive, evil feeling of impending doom bore down on them like heavy smoke.
Then came the smell. A sewer stench assailed Landis’s nostrils, then disappeared as he tried to locate it again, as if a door had opened and quickly closed. Landis tried to identify it, but couldn’t.
The atmospheric pressure seemed to skyrocket, making it hard to breathe for a moment, worrying Landis further. What had he unleashed here in his own house?
Devila stared at the space in front of her. The air there began to change. It undulated like heat waves, distorting the images of things behind it.
They all saw it.
It was the first manifestation of the supernatural. Chet swung his camera in on the phenomenon, zooming in, trying to obtain a close-up of the rippling air in the center of the room.
“Behold!” Devila said in a choked, halting voice, striving for maximum dramatic impact.
“Behold the first sign,” she said louder, gaining fresh confidence from her focus. Landis admired her professionalism, hanging in there in an increasingly hostile and malevolent environment.
This woman must be made of stone, he thought, and she’s a natural ham. What a combination.
The air continued to pulsate, becoming more agitated with every passing second. The very molecules, it seemed, were excited, angry even, and couldn’t control themselves. Like unstable heat waves, they shimmered within the influence of the ringing forks, tearing a hole in reality.
The sound of the vibration rang in their inner ears as if they’d been temporarily struck deaf. It was simply too much for the delicate human eardrum to cope with. Landis clamped his hands over his ears, but the sound carried right through the flesh and bone.
Coupled with the air distortion, it made all of them slightly dizzy and nauseous.
Then something began to materialize from the distortion. Chet dollied in for a better shot, realizing it was now “showtime,” and he’d better not miss a single second of this.
A huge serpent’s head appeared in the disturbance. Behind it, in a tangle, were its scaly coils, sleek and powerful with rippling, inhuman muscles. It writhed, tying and untying itself into iridescent, snake-flesh pretzels.
“Jesus,” Chet muttered, but kept his camera focused and running.
The serpent’s head wavered for a moment, its eyes flickering around the room, studying the occupants. José stood up, terrified, and screamed.
The snake’s unlidded, wet, reptilian eyes immediately shot across the room to José and locked on him. José screamed again and backed up against the chair he’d been sitting in. He tumbled, falling backward onto the chair and collapsing in a tangle of arms and legs.
The snake’s forked tongue flashed out, testing the atmosphere. It tasted their fear as a sweet, familiar odor carried by the moisture in the air. The odor came from their skin, from every pore, and they stank of it. The cablelike tongue lapped at the flooding mortal emotion, anxious to drink in all the delicious fear it could.
Then, with a whiplike movement faster than the eye could follow, it mounted itself, not on the hapless Mexican, but on the sinuous body of Devila.
The coils wrapped around her pale skin, pinning her arms at her side, then seemed to melt into her. The serpent became her. With a loud snap that sounded like the jaws of death clamping shut, it displaced her pate with its own.
Landis yelped, shocked beyond reason, yet fascinated by the most unimaginable sight he’d ever see
n. The look of mind-numbing fear on Devila’s face a split second before the demon encircled her, when she knew what was going to happen, was the darkest thing he’d ever seen. That look, even though it lasted only a fraction of a second, would be carried in his memory the rest of his life. It sent an electric current of horror through him that connected with the essence of his soul.
Landis, in a lifetime of trying to scare people, would draw continually on that moment and try to recreate the terror of that unexpected turn of events. But he would never even get close to the flash of hell in Devila’s eyes as her face was replaced by the serpent’s smooth, glistening countenance. Landis stood up and moved away. He could hear himself breathing like a wild animal, air coming in great ragged gulps, his heart hammering out of control.
“Holy shit!” he shouted. “Are you gettin’ this?” he asked Chet.
“I don’t believe it, but I’m gettin’ it!” Chet shouted back, his voice cracking like a frightened schoolboy’s.
The snake thing, attached now to Devila’s slender body, turned, pivoting, and looked around the room. The camera followed its every move.
The tongue flickered. The eyes registered. The serpent took in the information from every sense.
Something excited it, made it keep rechecking the surroundings. The head swiveled and the beady black eyes swept the room again and again.
Something was different this time.
No fire.
There was no ring of fire!
These stupid humans had summoned it without the security of the wall of flame that kept the demon contained. What could they be thinking?
No matter. The serpent was overjoyed to be, at last, after centuries of containment, free.
Devila’s body jerked spasmodically, her skin crawled. Her silent scream filled the air.
16
Albert Beaumond looked up. The electric flash of the damaged power line appeared as a shower of heavenly sparks, raining down on him as divine inspiration. He climbed toward it, oblivious to the cold, unyielding surface of the metal girders. He clung to them like a spider to its silken web, working his way up the maintenance ladder, hand over hand, rung by rung.
The wind was intense now, and it threatened to blow him off the structure in wrathful gusts. But Albert would not be distracted; he stayed his course.
He could see that the dangling cable was wrapped around a diagonal girder some fifty feet above him, slapping against other bits of line with a loud zap. The pungent smell of burning insulation was detectable even in the wind. It mixed with the scent of the oncoming storm.
Albert feared heights, and he made a conscious effort not to look down. He was well over thirty feet high now, but the sparks seemed no closer. He realized that they were much higher than he’d anticipated.
It would be a Herculean effort on his part to make it that high, but it was his only course of action. He stubbornly refused to entertain any other thoughts but those of further ascent. His arms ached, and he bit back the fear. The metal was cold and unfriendly in his grip, making each step up a battle.
The wind howled through the girders, whistling like a furious ghost. It moved the tower, making it sway dramatically. Albert could feel it bend, the metal groaning beneath the weight of the tempest.
Shit, he thought, I’m never gonna make it. This thing is swinging like a cheap suspension bridge in a hurricane. It’s gonna take every ounce of strength, every fiber of will I can muster. There won’t be anything left when I finally get there.…
Then, in another revelation, his mind jumped ahead. So what? What difference does that make? It’s time to overcome personal fears and physical limitations. Climbing up there is a spiritual quest, don’t think of it any other way. To make it is to triumph, the soul over the body and mind, to fail is damnation.
Landis Woodley heard a scream and was surprised to find it was his own voice. Chet hung on to the camera gamely, shooting every foot of film he could before something stopped him. The room was insane with apprehension. Devila, or rather the thing that used to be Devila, had begun to walk, to circle the room, arms outstretched, as if feeling for some invisible barrier.
Chet followed it with the camera, keeping a professionally focused and centered shot. Landis had dropped his clipboard and was backing away from the thing. José had never regained his feet from the backwards fall he had taken. He was scuttling back, crablike, until his back made contact with the wall, and he could escape no farther.
He whimpered like a frightened child, crossing himself and praying for deliverance.
The thing did not seem interested in any of them and made no threatening advances. Landis, his mind racing with the intoxication of fear, had time to consider the magnitude of the developed film.
He glanced at Chet. Good man, he thought. He’s rolling and he’ll keep rolling until I tell him to stop. Good. That’s the way to go. We’ll ride this thing out and in the end have some of the most incredible celluloid footage ever exposed to light.
He considered what he would ultimately do with it. He could always build a movie around it, that was no problem. Then, he began to see it as a documentary, Devila’s Mysteries from the Grave. Whatever. The exposed film would be dynamite, and he knew it. Devila had been right.
He looked at her now, the snake head twisting grotesquely on the long neck, black tongue blinking in and out of her mouth, and wondered what would happen. Is this the kind of thing people recovered from?
Landis was fascinated.
He stayed away from the thing as it circumnavigated the room. At one point it passed precariously close to the camera tripod, and Chet nearly fell back, taking the camera with him. José gained enough confidence to jump to his feet and run screaming from the room. Landis kept moving, rotating away from the creature, staying a fixed distance from it as it prowled the room.
Albert’s estimation that the climb up the high-tension structure would be a spiritual journey was not wrong. The flashbacks to his childhood that had begun to pull at his memory when he was on the ground continued. They grew stronger and more poignant as he gained altitude.
Memories dominated his already-reeling brain. He no longer had to concentrate on not thinking about the demon, the quest upward, or his own fate. He was overwhelmed by a flood of emotional recollections. Each one seemed to leave a different imprint on his heart; each one seemed important, indispensable. Each one seemed to aim him, focus him, give him pause for inspiration. He knew what he was doing was right and every passing chapter of his life, replayed now on the cinematic panorama of his soul, reinforced that understanding.
Albert was undergoing a massive spiritual catharsis. Canonized by each level he traversed, his inner voices were fairly shouting and singing the changes through.
It was as if every event in his life, every thought and theism, had been nothing but a preamble to this moment. He shook, sometimes with tears, sometimes with laughter, as he climbed. Forgetting the height and the dangers above and below, Albert gained his wisdom one ladder rung at a time. He pushed on, higher, and eventually forgot who he was.
The sparking cable was almost parallel with him now, and ten feet out to his left. To reach it, he would have to shinny out across a narrow beam, a hundred feet above the ground. Albert did not consider the risk, and, without thinking, he stepped out onto the beam. He squatted and flexed his knees so he could reach down and grip the beam with his hands if he lost balance, and began to edge, crablike, away from the support girder.
The surface of the beam was wet and slick with an oily grit. It was six inches wide, hardly width enough to keep his balance under the best of conditions. He moved sideways, sliding one foot along at a time, inching his body laterally on the narrow beam. It was difficult and uncomfortable. He moved slowly out over the open space with the wind at his back.
Albert’s feet slipped several times as he went, but after a moment of panic, he was able to retain his footing and continue.
The wind sang through the lattice of
beams and girders, blowing his hair into his face, but he dared not wipe it away. To take one hand away from the task at hand would be foolhardy and dangerous. He fought against his natural inclinations and fears. He fought against them every inch of the way, with a tenacity he would have thought impossible a few short days ago.
The cable spit with a violence that almost knocked Albert off the beam. It crackled and sparked as the wind blew it wildly into the tangle of wires. The smell of burned insulation was stronger. The beam he walked on tingled slightly. Albert realized that some of the current that pulsed through the severed cable must be leaking onto the support beam beneath him. He shook it off and continued.
This is it, he thought. The end is in sight. Just keep cool and all will be fine. Just a few more feet and I’ll be there.
Albert glanced down. The ground spun crazily below him as the terrible symptoms of vertigo played with his mind. He steadied himself on the beam, occasionally squatting lower and touching it with his hands. His palm pressed against the cold grit and he felt the tingle of electricity, like ants, invading his skin. The great power of the electricity in such close proximity seemed to throb through him. The electromagnetic field he was now within caused the hair on his head to stand up.
Don’t look down, he told himself. Just keep going. His front heel slipped, and he fought to maintain control. For a moment he thought he was going to fall, and fright exploded in his chest with a flurry of heartbeats. He slipped and the beam came up and hit him squarely between the legs. Pain sent stars across his eyes. He gritted his teeth and endured it. He wrapped himself around the beam tightly, using both arms and legs. He was now curled around it like a giant tree sloth.
He realized he was crying. His breath came in gulps. He was losing it.
Carefully, he raised himself back up to a standing position. The muscles in his thighs began to spasm involuntarily, but he clenched his teeth and kept going.