Hell House: A Tim Reaper Story
Sean Cummings
Back Alley Books
HELL HOUSE – A TIM REAPER STORY
Copyright © 2018 Sean Cummings
Sean Cummings asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or in any means – by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without prior written permission.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Also By Sean Cummings
Hi There.
1.
2.
3.
Want More Tim Reaper?
Chapter 1
About Sean Cummings
Also By Sean Cummings
Tim Reaper Series
IMMORTAL REMAINS
THE GIRL ON VICTORIA ROAD
THE EMPTY VESSEL: A TIM REAPER STORY
Jia Song Series
#GRUDGEGIRL
For Teens
Poltergeeks (Shadowcull Series Book One)
Student Bodies (Shadowcull Series Book Two)
Straight Up Urban Fantasy
Marshall Conrad – A Superhero Tale
Shade Fright – A Valerie Stevens Novel
Funeral Pallor – A Valerie Stevens Novel
Post-Apocalyptic
The North – A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller
For Children:
To Catch a Cat Thief
Visit Sean online at:
sean-cummings.ca
Twitter: @saskatoonauthor
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Hi There.
This is the second time I’ve published a short story from Tim Reaper’s world. Last year, I released THE EMPTY VESSEL, the first Tim Reaper short story. It’s interesting to dig into the character’s previous lives and these little journeys give me the chance to foreshadow things to come in the novel series. In this installment, it is 1978 and Tim Reaper, long a fan of whacking soulless serial killing pricks, has his hands full with a trio of bad guys and a house that might just be a portal to hell itself. This story is a bit longer than last year’s short story and you’ll want to pay attention: something is going to happen in this story that has a bearing on the Tim Reaper book series. so, you know … SPOILERS! Enjoy!
SC
For 1978
Sometimes your habits can draw too much attention …
1
Sudbury, Canada
1978
You can always tell when a murderous son of a bitch has taken up residence in your town. Assuming, of course, that you know how to spot the signs. I mean besides bodies left to rot in shallow graves somewhere near a footpath in the woods. Or a ditch at the side of the road. Or a fifty-gallon oil drum. They want you to find their victims. They want to be the number one news item ever single night.
We’ve all heard about Jack the Ripper. Those still unsolved killings amount to about as gruesome a murder spree as the human mind can conceive. Jack wasn’t the first mass murderer; killers have existed all through human history. I should know, I was there. The name is Tim Reaper, but only to my friends and they are few. For everyone else. The handle I go by these days is Reg Dumont. He died, I moved into his body. It’s complicated.
I’m a grim reaper by the way, but you already figured that out, I suspect. I did a bad thing about sixty years ago at the tail end of the Great War. Like, seriously. The worst shit ever.
I had long been questioning why anyone should have to die at all during that phase of my existence. Maybe I’d hit death-dealer puberty at fifty miles an hour and my questions were a form of defiance. Maybe I was just an asshole (probably). Whatever the reason, I decided to see what would happen if I didn’t claim the soul I’d been assigned to.
Pretty basic, right? Would the world no longer spin on its axis? Would there be madness in the streets?
And why should anyone have to die in the first place? I was an immortal (still am) and so was everyone inside the pearly gates or down in Hades. What was the point of introducing a planet full of mortal souls when up to the moment He created the earth everyone and thing was just grooving along nicely since the beginning?
Biblical numbers of people died.
I got tossed out of my order. (Yes, grim reapers are part of an order. It too is complicated.) As punishment, I was condemned to live amongst you as a lingering spirit. Forever bearing witness to human contrived calamity like nuclear war, CB radios, processed cheese and the Chevrolet Vega.
But enough about me. I want to talk about monsters.
Jack the Ripper was probably the very first monster whose legend wove itself into mankind’s collective conscience. The sheer depravity of his crimes shook Victorian London to its core and baby, that’s a city with a long bloody history going back to before the Romans.
My interest in the Ripper (and every other murderous bastard I can find) is due to a strange gift: I can see the monsters. It’s easy for an elemental like me because to my eyes at least, all of humanity glows with living energy from their creator. The souls of men, women and children shine so brightly they paint the landscape with warmth.
Sick whack-job killers have no soul. Just an empty space. A void. Nothingness. When I see a dark stain on the fabric of the living, it practically advertises that a monster is on the loose.
So, yeah, I kill monsters.
I had been drawn to Sudbury for work. I drift from town-to-town. I do odd jobs for money, many of which you would probably disapprove of. When I hopped off the bus from Parry Sound three weeks ago, I was surrounded by a landscape of stunted trees and dead vegetation all caused by the nickel smelting process. Sudbury is a mining town. Sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide are the cost of doing business. Acid rain. They built the Super Stack just eight years ago, back in 1970. Twelve hundred and fifty feet high; it’s supposed to blow all the poison far enough away from town, so the trees and grass will grow back. If you live outside of town, well, tough luck.
Pierson and Brothers Construction Company was looking for men to help carve a new highway to Timmins out of the Precambrian igneous and high-grade metamorphic rocks of the Canadian Shield. Seriously, I think the whole of northern Ontario is one big boulder. Because of this geologic fact, if you want to build a highway you need a lot of men because you’ve got to blow up miles upon miles of rock. I had a blaster’s ticket, (or at least Reg Dumont did) so I got the job on the phone at the bus station.
The company transports us from our luxury accommodations at the Driftwood Hotel which is smack-dan in the middle of The Donavon; the roughest part of town. You do a day’s honest work at nine bucks an hour for blasters and six bucks an hour for everyone else. You’re bused back to your room at 7:00 o’clock. Enough time to have a
shower and then head over to the tavern for a greasy burger and twenty-five cent glasses of draft.
So, it was that four nights ago, a man with no soul walked into the tavern and took a seat at the bar. I was off in a corner quietly enjoying a cheeseburger when I caught a glimpse of him. He was dressed in an amber polyester turtle neck that clung to his large belly like a second layer of skin. He wore thick-framed aviator style eyeglasses with a smoky tint on the lenses. His brown-gray hair seemed sculpted to his enormous head. A perm most likely. His round face was framed by a pair of chunky reddish-brown sideburns.
I decided to call him Polyester Pete.
He was also wearing a golden Baphomet sigil, the symbol of the Church of Satan, on a gold chain around his neck. Perfect, a soulless monster in league with the guys from down below.
Listen.
Mucking about with devil worship is basically the dumbest shit I can think of. I happen to know a few demons who are low on the pecking order down in the dark place. Each one of them is a huge asshole whose sole purpose is to cause shit in the world of the living. And these guys aren’t even the Fallen, they’re just low-end underlings who are as disposable as a roll of Charmin.
Now regular folks who aren’t monsters sometimes dabble in Satanic rites. They’re clearly too dumb to realize they’re playing with fire. Fiddling and farting around with ancient dark rituals and summoning is a lot like giving a three-year-old a burning blow torch and a gallon of gasoline. That kind of thing is what I call, bad shit.
The only thing worse is VERY BAD SHIT.
Polyester Pete gave every indication he was VERY BAD SHIT. And for the record, you can tell that VERY BAD SHIT is about to down any time you see a soulless bastard with a hard-on for Beelzebub. Seriously, if you ever spot a monster wearing a Satanic rune, relic, ring or necklace, head for the fucking hills. These guys are calculating and nearly impossible to predict. They kill with psychological depravity steeped in twisted symbology known only to them. And I’m just talking about the ones who HAVEN’T made a dark bargain with the guys downstairs. So, you know, run for your life.
Now, me? We’ve already established that I’m here for the long haul and eternity can be a boring place. So, I’m going to start tailing the guy. I’ll map his movements in preparation for a late-night visit, garroting wire or lead pipe in hand.
Which is precisely what I decided I would do.
I hadn’t spent any time exploring the Donavon district of Sudbury in the three weeks I’d been in town. I simply went to work each day, got the bus home. Went to the tavern. I ate, drank Molson Golden and smoked Player’s shit ends while watching championship wrestling or The Rockford Files on the TV above the bar. The Donavon was an older part of town, most of the houses built between 1900 and 1930. Nearly every one of them constructed from solid red brick. A Red & White grocery faced out onto Kathleen Street. A block down was a pizza joint and a service station with a bunch of dented up wrecks in a yard behind a rusted chain link fence.
A Canadian National line cut through the neighborhood like bad set of stitches, and about a quarter of a mile down the track I could see the flickering light of a convenience store blinking away in the darkness like a seedy beacon for 7 Up.
Polyester Pete crossed the road and stopped at a phone booth. He pulled a cigarette out of a package from his breast pocket and lit it with a match. He then poked an index finger in the phone’s coin return slot and pulled out a winner. He took a deep drag on his cigarette and then flipped the coin in the air, snatching it with his left hand.
I watched as he sauntered across a side street and finished his smoke before heading into the Crystal Mart, a late-night convenience store. I stayed in the shadow of a garbage bin as I spotted him paying for a chocolate bar which he’d already started eating by the time he walked out of the store. He tossed the wrapper over his right shoulder as he strode up a residential alley; slag gravel crunching loudly under his feet. I dashed across Kathleen Street and into the alley a few moments later.
I knelt behind a post box and saw him swing right onto another street. I raced up along the fence line as I slipped my brass knuckles onto my fists because I fully expected him to jump out at me. I’m about as stealthy as charging bison with a boner; basically, everybody hears me coming.
I braced myself as I veered right and exhaled in relief to see that he was half a block ahead of me. I tailed him from the shadows and hit the dirt as he turned his head to look over his shoulder. This lasted for about fifteen seconds until I figure he was satisfied that he hadn’t been followed because he opened a rickety wooden gate and disappeared up the front walk of a house.
I raced up the sidewalk and hid behind a massive Ford Country Squire station wagon parked across the street from a house that appeared to be a standard two-storey with brick exterior walls and an A-frame roof. Like Polyester Pete, there was no warmth of living energy to the dwelling. A house stood before me, but it was a cold thing. An empty husk that left a foul imprint. It stained the air with despair.
I got up onto one knee and poked my head around the front fender. The temperature had plummeted. It was as if I’d put my face in blast chiller the moment my stuck my neck out. I drew in a chill breath. The air, though ice-cold, was stale and flat. Like walking into an attic that hadn’t been visited for about a decade. If that room were inside a freezer.
Oh yeah, VERY BAD SHIT.
2
There were missing or broken slats every few feet on the battered wooden fence. The front porch looked like the it had last received a coat of paint the day after Harry Truman’s inauguration. Waist-high crab grass brushed against the bricks on the right side of the house with each gust of chill wind. The only light I could see was coming from a grated-up basement window at end of the path that ran around the left side of the foundation.
I was just about to dash into the yard with the intention of spying through the window when a pair of headlights rounded the corner. I ducked back into the shadow of the big wagon hoping the car would just roll on by. It didn’t because that’s how shit goes in Tim Reaper’s world. I gazed out to see a red Buick Century crawling up the slag driveway next to the house.
It came to a stop with a squeak. A moment later the engine stopped, and two men climbed out. Both were dressed in casual wear, the one on the left in a plaid leisure suit and the one on the right had clogs on his feet and a pair of flared jeans. A second or so later, a woman dressed in a tube top and cut-off jean shorts stepped out of the car’s right rear door.
Chillingly, both men were like Polyester Pete. Soulless creeps. And the girl? Her living energy flickered and ebbed every few seconds as the two men each took an arm and led her around to the back of the house.
Perfect.
One murderous prick could be a handful, even for a guy like me who’s had a few lifetimes worth of scraps and brawls to his credit, but three? Taking all three down would likely require the use of firearms and my guns were back in my room.
The girl. I had a pretty good idea about what was going to happen once her escorts got her down into the basement. She’d be dead within the hour. I wanted my guns badly but my palatial suite at the Driftwood Hotel was about ten minutes away by foot. Say three minutes in my room to grab my guns and ten minutes to back to the house, well shit. By then those soulless creeps under the direction of Polyester Pete would be well on their way to calling up something from the dark place.
That’s how it went with a summoning – you always needed a blood sacrifice. The bigger the better.
Sure, they could sacrifice a squirrel or a hamster or the family cat, and something would probably show up. But there are some hard and fast rules about sacrificial offerings to the darkness. The less significant the sacrifice, the lower down the chain of hellish creatures you get. If these guys were planning on sacrificing a human being, it meant they wanted a serious player from the abyss.
I sprinted across the street hugged the left side of the house. I got onto the ground and crawle
d up to the basement window. It was hard to see through the thick coat of dirt and grime, but I could make out a few things. A punch-board fixed to the wall atop a work bench. Various hand tools adorned the punch board, and each was organized in order of size from smallest on the left to biggest on the right.
Two shovels leaned against the wall next to the workbench. And a sack of lime.
The girl was doomed. I had to do something.
No guns, no blade. Just a Bic lighter, a pack of Players and the knuckle dusters on my fists. If I was fast enough, I could make a run for the shovels and use one as a weapon. God knows I’d seen enough French, English and German soldiers at Ypres or The Somme use their entrenching shovels in bloody hand-to-hand combat. Unfortunately, I didn’t know if either of the three soulless pricks were carrying a piece and while I’m an elemental as old as time itself, I suck at dodging bullets. Those bullets won’t kill me but they’ll sure as shit kill the body I’m occupying.
What I needed was a distraction. Something to buy me enough time to separate the three so I could deal with each, individually.
Like stealing their Buick, for example.
I crept as silently as possible across the slag. Every driveway in Sudbury, I noticed, was comprised of slag. The rail line was built on a carpet of slag. Slag existed everywhere you looked.
I put my hand on the driver door handle and held my breath for a moment before I pressed the door button with my thumb. Slowly.
I released the button and pulled as the unlocked door swung silently on its greased hinge and amazingly, the interior dome light didn’t kick in. I reached up to the sun visor, the one hiding place in the car that makes me think people actually want bad guys to steal their shit. Seriously, 95% of the time, that’s where I find a set of keys and I’ve been stealing automobiles since 1947.
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