Evil Dark

by Justin Gustainis

  As happens every time I'm in the process of doing something stupid, I started hearing from my gut.

  Uh-uh, Stan. Bad idea. You know how far up we are? Get us the fuck out of here before it's too late!

  Then my brain decided to join the conversation.

  Shaddup.

  Now for the real hard part.

  Two feet wide, that ledge was – give or take an inch. People say "Everything's relative," and that sure is true. Two feet would be pretty impressive if it was, say, the length of my dick. But right now that ledge I was on seemed about as slim as my chances for sainthood.

  The fey opened his eyes for a second, saw what I was doing, then clenched them shut again.

  Good. Keep the baby blues closed tight, pal. Don't look at me, and especially don't look down. In fact, I think I'll take that advice myself.

  "What do you think you're doing, you fool?" he snapped. "If you try to manhandle me back inside, I will simply jump, and take you with me."

  Oh, would you? If only…

  "I wouldn't dream of it," I lied. "But I really want to understand your pain, your desperation, and I feel that I can only do that if I share this with you."

  God, I'm so full of shit, I'm surprised it isn't coming out my ears.

  Arms spread wide, palms flat against the concrete wall, I started edging toward him.

  "But why should you care?" he said.

  "Maybe I once fell in love with the wrong woman," I said. "And maybe, just maybe, I lost her forever. We may be more alike than you think, Butch."

  "You have rare understanding, for a human," he said.

  Another foot. Another. Almost there.

  "I understand more than you know," I told him.

  Mistake. He realizes my voice sounds too close. He opens those big blue eyes that they all have, stares at me in disbelief.

  "You idiot! What are you–"

  No point in stealth now. I shuffled toward him a couple more feet, then grabbed his wrist where it was pressed against the wall behind us. Butch gave something like a gasp.

  Then, after a quick mental prayer, I stepped forward into nothing – taking the screaming, flailing fairy right along with me, all the way down.

  I never did get to Luigi's, but, on the plus side, I arrived for work ten minutes early. Who says clouds don't have silver linings?

  My partner was even earlier than me, for a change. Karl was absorbed in something on his computer monitor, but when I came in he glanced up, then did a double-take.

  "Jesus, Stan, what the fuck happened to you?"

  "Went flying with a fairy," I said. "Trouble is, neither one of us had wings."

  He looked at me for a couple of seconds. "OK, you don't get to dangle something like that in front of me without providing the details. So, spill."

  "Yeah, all right. I'll tell you as much of it as I can until McGuire sends us out on a call."

  "Oh, that's right," Karl said. "You haven't heard yet."

  "Heard what?"

  "Start of our regular shift is gonna be delayed for an hour or so. A couple of Feebies are in town, and they're putting on some kind of dog and pony show for us. McGuire says the detectives on every shift have to sit through it."

  "Oh, great. That means the FBI wants something from us."

  "It always does," Karl said. "One of them's kinda hot, though – in a hard-ass sort of way."

  "I hope you're talking about a woman here," I said. "Not that there's anything wrong, you know, if you're thinking about changing teams."

  "Hey, you're the one who was goin' on about flying with the fairies. Now, let's hear it."

  "All right," I said. "I left the house early tonight, with the idea of having a leisurely dinner at Luigi's…"

  We weren't interrupted by Lieutenant McGuire or anybody else, for a change, so I was able to tell him the whole thing.

  "Holy shit," Karl said, about eight minutes later. "You just grabbed him and jumped?"

  "Sure. I knew the fire department was going to set up some of those big, semi-inflated air bags they use at fires, in case somebody falls from a ladder. I saw them do it once for a jumper, too – about three years ago. I made sure they did it this time, too."

  "So, how'd you get all banged up?"

  "Aw, I hit the fucking bag face first. I don't do this kinda thing every day, you know. The impact got my nose bleeding, although it's not broken, they tell me. And they make those air bags out of pretty rough fabric – that's where the facial abrasions came from. It'll all heal in a few days."

  Karl shook his head. "What I don't get is why you even bothered, man. I mean, if the dude, uh, fairy's choices are either jump into an air bag or go back inside, he'll make up his mind by himself sooner or later. Either way, no harm."

  "I'm not so sure," I said. "If he was determined to off himself, he could've found a section of asphalt the air bags didn't protect. They don't have enough to cover the whole front of the building, you know. That's why I was glad he kept his eyes closed – he didn't see the air bags deployed down below until we were on our way down. And, besides…" I shrugged.

  "Besides what?"

  "I hate to see city resources tied up for hours over bullshit like that. That fire truck and those black-and-whites had more important things to do than wait for Butch to make up his fucking mind. It offended my sense of… I dunno, efficiency, I guess."

  "My partner thinks he's Batman," Karl said in mock despair. "And I thought I was the vampire on this team."

  "You are, and besides–"

  That was when McGuire came out of his office and yelled, "All right, everybody head to the media room. Let's go, people."

  There was a general shuffling of chairs and feet as detectives got up, most of them grumbling a little.

  "Time for the dog and pony show," Karl said.

  I walked with him to the door. "Didn't you tell me that you saw one of those once, in Tijuana – a dog and pony show?"

  "Nah, that was a donkey and a midget. A couple of chicks were involved, too, although it turned out one of them was a dude."

  "Hope this exhibition's gonna be better than that," I said.

  "It could hardly be worse."

  How wrong we were. How fucking wrong we were.

  We sat in darkness for maybe half a minute. If we were watching old-tech VHS, I would have figured it was just leader tape we were looking at. But this was a DVD, which doesn't need blank space at the beginning. I guessed the darkness was part of the program – a way to build suspense, maybe. If so, it was working.

  Some people like total darkness – they say they find it restful. Me, I slept with a nightlight on when I was a kid, and I still do. Complete darkness freaks me out. I read once where Freud is supposed to have said that fear of the dark is subconscious fear of death, which the dark symbolizes. Of course, a lot of people think Freud was full of shit.

  Personally, I think it goes back to prehistoric times, before man figured out how to make fire. The blackness between sundown and sunrise must've been an uneasy time for Joe Caveman, especially when there was no moon. Most predators see better at night than people do. In the dark, a man can't tell what's creeping up on him with dinner on its mind – until it's too late.

  Some things never change, I guess.

  Suddenly, a light illuminated the video screen – bright and sudden, like you find on a film set. You know how it goes – some guy yells "Lights!" and, boom, the sun comes out. What I was looking at on the screen didn't exactly fill me with eager anticipation, however.

  The red circle, which was maybe ten feet across, looked like it had been carefully painted on the concrete floor. The five-pointed star inside it had also been done with care, probably by someone who understood the consequences of getting it wrong. It was easy to see the detail under those bright lights.

  Inside the circle squatted two heavy wooden chairs. One of them was stained and splattered along its legs and side with a brown substance. When it was fresh, the brown stuff might have been red
– blood red.

  A man sat in each chair. There was nothing remarkable about them – apart from the fact that they were both naked and bound firmly to the chairs with manacles at hands and feet.

  Not far from the chairs stood a cheap-looking table, its wood scarred and pitted. Someone had laid out a number of instruments there, including a small hammer, a corkscrew, a pair of needle-nose pliers, a blowtorch, and several different sizes of knives.

  A man's voice could be heard chanting, in a language that had been old when Christianity was young. This had been going on for several minutes. The men in the chairs sometimes looked outside the circle in the direction of the chanting, other times at each other. The one with dark hair looked confused. The other man was blond and clearly the more intelligent of the two, because he looked terrified.

  Then came the moment when the air in the middle of the pentagram seemed to shiver and ripple. The ripple grew, but never crossed the boundary of the circle. After a while, some thin white smoke began to issue from that shimmering column. Over the next minute, the color of the smoke went from white to gray, then from gray to black. The chanting continued throughout all of this.

  The column of smoke gradually took the form of a Class Two demon. I blinked. Class Twos are hard to summon, being near the top of the demon hierarchy. The wizard these people were using must've been pretty good.

  I'd encountered a Class Four the previous year that Karl had saved me from, and those things are so dumb they don't even have language – they're all appetite. Class Twos are different. They manifest an appearance that's almost human-looking, and they speak every language known to humankind, as well as their own tongue, developed over the millennia spent together in Hell.

  The demon looked in the direction the chanting had come from and spoke angrily in Demon, demanding to know who had dared to summon him.

  The voice from off-screen came back, firm and fearless. I listened for a bit, then whispered to Karl, "The wizard's threatening to lay a whole bunch of hurt on the demon if he doesn't obey the wizard's commands."

  Karl looked at me. "How the fuck do you know that?" he said softly.

  "I speak Demon. Sort of."

  I'd studied their bastard language off and on for over ten years, and was still a long way from fluent. But I figured understanding it might save my life one day – or, more important, my soul.

  The demon gave a piercing scream and doubled over. The wizard must have zapped him pretty good.

  When the hellspawn spoke again, it was more conciliatory – for a demon, that is. Then it bowed its head in acquiescence. The wizard had better hope the demon never got out of that circle, or he was going to be a long time dying – and death would only be the beginning.

  "The demon agreed to cooperate, and the wizard just told him to possess one of those guys in the chairs," I muttered so only Karl could hear.

  The dark-haired man went suddenly rigid. He threw his head back as if in great pain, the muscles and tendons in his skin standing out all over his body. This lasted for several seconds. Then, all at once, the man seemed to relax. He looked around the room, and the circle, as if seeing them for the first time. His facial expression was one he hadn't displayed before. It combined cunning and hatred in roughly equal proportions.

  Then the wizard's voice said a couple more words in Demon. He spoke sharply, as if giving a command, and that's exactly what he was doing. I swallowed. Things were about to get very ugly, I figured.

  The shackles holding the dark-haired man to the chair sprang open, as if by their own accord, and fell clattering to the floor.

  The dark-haired man walked slowly to the table and surveyed the instruments that had been lined up like a macabre smorgasbord. He turned and looked at the blond man, a terrible smile growing on his thin face. Then the dark-haired man picked up from the table the pair of pliers and the blowtorch. After taking a moment to make sure that the blowtorch was working, he walked over to the chair where the blond man sat chained, naked, and speechless with terror.

  What happened next went from zero to unspeakable in a very few seconds. Soon afterward, it went beyond unspeakable, to a level of horror that there are no words to describe.

  Twelve very long minutes later, the blond man gave one last, agonized scream and escaped into death. We sat there and watched him die.

  Then somebody must've pressed Stop, because the screen went mercifully dark. A few seconds later, the lights came on.

  The nine people in the room sat in stunned silence, blinking in the sudden brightness. Then everybody started talking at once.

  There had been eleven people in the room when the lights were turned off. But there'd been enough residual glow from the big monitor for me to see two tough, experienced police officers quietly leave over the last few minutes, one with a hand clasped tightly over his mouth.

  I was glad nobody would know how close I came to being number three out the door.

  My partner Karl leaned toward me and said softly, "Sweet Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. And people say vampires are inhuman."

  "Well, strictly speaking, you are," I told him, just to be saying something.

  "You know what I mean, Stan."

  "Yeah, I do. And I'm not arguing with you, either."

  The two FBI agents walked to the front of the room and stood waiting for us to quiet down. They'd been introduced to us earlier, before the horror show started. Linda Thorwald was the senior agent, and she'd done most of the talking so far. She was average height and slim build, with the ice-blue eyes I always associate with Scandinavia. Her hair was jet black, and I wondered if she was a blonde who'd had it dyed to increase her chances of being taken seriously in the macho culture of the FBI. People have done stranger things, and for worse reasons.

  Her partner was a guy named Greer, who had big shoulders, brown hair, and a wide mustache that probably had J. Edgar Hoover spinning in his grave. He moved like an athlete, and I thought he might be one of the many former college jocks who find their way into law enforcement once it sinks in that they're not quite good enough for the pros.

  When the room was quiet, Thorwald said, "I regret that I had to subject all of you to that revolting exhibition of sadism and murder. If it's any consolation, I've seen more than one veteran FBI agent lose his lunch either during or immediately after a showing of this… supernatural snuff film."

  Snuff films are an urban legend, probably started by the same kind of tight-ass public moralists who used to rant about comic books destroying the nation's moral fiber. But the myth made its way into popular culture, and stayed there. There's been plenty of counterfeit ones made over the years, with sleazeballs using special makeup effects to rip off the pervs who think torture and murder are fun. These days, you can see stuff like that at your local multiplex. It's all fake, but I still wouldn't want to know anybody who was a fan. If I'm going to hang out with ghouls, I prefer the real kind – they can't help what they are.

  There have been some serial killers who took video of their victims to jerk off over between kills, but that was for their own private use. If by "snuff film" you mean a commercially available product depicting actual murder, then there's no such thing.

  Or rather, there wasn't. Until now.

  "I wanted you all to see that video," Thorwald said, "because it's important that you understand what we're up against, and what the stakes are. Copies of that DVD have surfaced within the last month in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and, uh–" She turned to her partner.

  "Baltimore," he said.

  "—and Baltimore," she went on. "But the Bureau has been interested in this case for longer than a month. Quite a bit longer."

  Thorwald took a step forward. "You know that expression, 'I've got good news and bad news'? Well, I'm afraid I don't have any good news to offer you today. Instead, I bring bad news, and worse news. Brian?"

  I could almost see the two of them rehearsing this act in their hotel room last night. The whole thing had a stagy quality th
at was getting on my nerves. Of course, after what I'd just witnessed, my nerves were pretty damn edgy already.

  "The bad news," Greer said, "Is that what you just saw isn't the first video depicting this kind of torture-murder. I mean, one apparently carried out by a demon that's been conjured and then allowed to 'possess' an innocent party."