The children’s screams finally stopped when a pair of burnt feet with claws for toenails appeared in front of Aaron. He lifted his head. Cody stared back at him with black abysses for eyes. The boy held out a clawed hand and opened it, revealing the necklace with the pentacle key. Cody dangled it before Aaron’s astonished face, then hung the necklace around his neck and eased him up with a deformed hand under his chin.
Aaron took a step back away from this demonic deformation of a thirteen-year-old boy. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked, lifting the key to eye level.
Cody’s body erupted in flames. He cried out in a voice that sounded like a thousand children screaming in unison. Aaron fell back to his knees and covered his ears in a failed attempt to shield himself from the horrendous cries.
“You should have let him die.” The voice wasn’t Cody’s, but that of an adult male. He raised his head. Robert Smith stood before him in a flaming black tunic. “You cannot hide from the curse you both now bear. How many more lives will perish because of your obstinacy? How much more innocent blood will spill before you realize there is only one solution to end the devil’s nightmare?”
“You caused this!” Aaron cried out. “You put that demon-summoning bullshit into Cody’s head. This is your doing, not his! None of this would have happened if it weren’t for you!”
Smith laughed and pointed. “Your curse will cause the deaths of many more innocent souls until you make the proper sacrifice. It’s your choice, Aaron. How many more will die before you accept this truth?”
A bright flash obscured Aaron’s vision. When his vision returned he found himself standing in front of his home in Lost Maples County. A woman screamed from inside the house. He ran as fast as his feet would carry him and burst through the front door.
“Maria!”
More screams came from the hall bathroom. Aaron rushed into the bathroom and found his wife on the shower floor in her nightgown, covered in blood. “Noooooo!” he cried out. Maria had several stab wounds in her torso. The knife was still stuck in her chest. Blood oozed from the wounds and dripped from her fingertips onto the stone tiles.
A girl screamed. Samantha!
Her bedroom door was open. Aaron stood in the hallway and wept. Samantha’s bare legs and feet stuck out from behind her bed in a pool of blood. As soon as he stepped inside her room, a curved dagger pierced through his back and exited through his chest. He fell to the floor and landed on his side.
Cody knelt next to Aaron and whispered into his ear. “How does it feel? How does it feel to lose your family and know that it’s all your fault?” He lowered a bloodied butcher’s knife in front of Aaron’s face and grinned. “You should’ve let me die.” With a disgusted frown and hate-filled eyes, he slid the blade across Aaron’s neck.
†
It was a few minutes after three in the morning when Aaron awakened from his nightmare. Cody slept on the couch across from the hospital bed at Brackenridge in Austin. Aaron ran his hands over his face and stared at the ceiling for several minutes.
A hand grasped his arm. “You need to go back to Saint Hedwig.”
“Damn it, Cody,” Aaron said, startled. “You scared the shit out of me.”
Aaron lifted himself up, but then Cody placed his hand against Aaron’s chest, pushing him back down on the bed. “You’re not listening to me. You need to go back to Saint Hedwig.”
Aaron grabbed his wrist and watched in horror as Cody’s eyes turned solid black. His face contorted into a bloodied deformation. The demon applied more pressure on his chest as it kept him down on the bed.
“Non est ultra tempus!” it yelled in a deep inhuman voice. “Acceptabis sacrificium necesse est!”
The demon’s face morphed back to human form. Cody lifted a small dagger under his chin and slit his own neck with it. His eyes rolled back as the blood spilled over his shirt. His body fell limp across Aaron’s chest.
†
Aaron jolted up in his bed and grasped the hand that shook him.
“Aaron, you’re hurting me!” Maria said, pulling away.
He released his grip and rubbed his eyes. Cody and Samantha also stood by the bed. Aaron didn’t say anything. He just lay there with panic in his eyes. His nightmares were getting worse, and he didn’t know what to do about them.
“It’s okay, now. You were having a bad dream,” Maria said reassuringly. She whispered something to Samantha, who nodded and rushed out of the room. “Cody told me about the nightmares.”
Aaron shot an angry glare at him. “Damn it, Cody. I told you not to say anything.” He turned back to Maria with apologetic eyes. “I didn’t want to worry you.”
“Is it true, then?” she asked, her voice trembling. “Are you having dreams about that… that thing?” She grabbed Aaron’s arm. “Is that what killed Mr. Travers?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I mean, I don’t know, okay? This isn’t something you can just talk freely about without people thinking you’re nuts.” He took a deep breath and exhaled through his nose. “I don’t know what to do. Now I’ve got this FBI prick asking me a bunch a questions about… Hell, I just don’t know.”
“Aaron?” Cody said. His voice was timid, his eyes moist. “What if they were right?”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
“What if I really caused this, and—”
“No, don’t think like that,” Maria said. “None of that was your fault. Those people were sick monsters. That’s it. Nothing more.”
“Then why is it back?”
“That chimera thing?” Maria said. “Honey, Aaron’s right. We don’t know that. Just because—”
“I know,” Cody stated as a matter of fact. “You know it, too,” he said to Aaron. “They’re not just dreams. They never have been. And they aren’t now.”
“Cody, don’t—”
“No, he’s right.” Aaron sat up and pulled the monitoring wires off him. As he got out of the bed, the head nurse stepped in.
“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” Pamela said. “You get that pale butt of yours back in that bed until we say you’re good and ready to leave. You hear me?”
“No, I need to—”
“What you need to do, honey, is crawl back into that bed.”
“But I—”
Pamela cocked her head, placed one hand on her hip, and stared at Aaron. When he didn’t comply, she snapped her fingers and pointed to the bed. Aaron sighed and finally surrendered.
“It’s not like I’ve been shot,” Aaron said, almost in a pout. “There’s no reason for an extended stay.”
Pamela reaffixed the monitoring wires. “You just stay put until Dr. Pierce says you can go. And not one minute before that.”
“And when will that be?”
“When the devil starts churning ice cream in hell, if you keep being a pain in my rear end.” She winked at Cody. “I’ll bring you all some dinner plates. You gonna love the meatloaf.”
Cody grimaced and shook his head in disagreement.
That managed to spark a smile on Aaron’s face. “Well, I guess they’re holding me captive for at least another night.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Welcome to Walls Unit
Aaron spent the next two days in the hospital before Dr. Pierce cleared him to head back to Lost Maples. Sheriff Donovan encouraged him to take a few more days off to rest at home, but the persistent workaholic in Aaron refused. The last thing he wanted to do was sit around the house with his feet propped up watching reruns and talk shows. No, he needed to be back in uniform and at the Sheriff’s Department.
His first order of business was to catch up on his email and voice messages. Most of the emails were memos, interdepartmental mass messages, and a few law enforcement newsletters, all of which went straight to File 13. His voicemail had a single message on it. Dr. Allen Westminster from the Natural Science Center at the Unive
rsity of Texas in Austin had the results regarding the tooth fragment pulled from Doug Travers’ body. He confirmed the tooth fragment was consistent with the teeth found on the severed alligator’s head.
As Aaron lifted the receiver off the cradle, Sheriff Donovan entered the office with a file in his hand. He set it on the desk. Aaron set the receiver down and opened the file. “What’s this?”
“I need you to sign that so we can close the Travers case.”
“You’re closing the case?”
“Yes, Aaron, we’re closing the case.”
Aaron skimmed through the report. “This says he died in a boating accident. He didn’t drown. The autopsy proved that.”
“He got drunk, hit his head, fell in the water. Bottom line, it was an accident. Case closed.” The Sheriff retrieved a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and held it out to Aaron. “Just sign the darn thing so we can move on and put this behind us.”
“But what about the woman he was with? And what about the fact we only found the head of the alligator that supposedly chewed up Mr. Travers?”
“Her name is Cindy Hallister. She wasn’t local, but she was in the system. Former harlot. Nothin’ recent, but that’s prolly how she met Doug. We found her body—or what was left of it—while you were vacationing at the hospital in Austin.” Before Aaron had a chance to respond, Sheriff Donovan held his palm out. “I know I should’ve informed you earlier, but I didn’t want you worrying about this here case while you were in recovery. She’s mentioned on page two of that report.”
Aaron flipped over to the second page. The Bexar County medical examiner in San Antonio had performed an autopsy on Cindy Hallister and determined she had also died from injuries sustained from an alligator attack. He had found a significant amount of alcohol in her system, which also indicated intoxication at the time of her death.
Aaron closed the file. “Still doesn’t explain the decapitated alligator.”
“So, we got a bigger gator in that lake we don’t know about. We’ll post up signs, prohibit swimmin’ or boatin’ until we can find and get rid of it.”
Aaron shook his head and smiled in disbelief.
“Somethin’ funny, Lieutenant?”
“They won’t find anything.”
“Well let’s hope to God we don’t, because I sure as heck don’t want to have to close the park. We’ve always had gators. Never had a problem. The quicker we can put this behind us and move on, the better.” The Sheriff opened the file and flipped to the page with Aaron’s name printed underneath an empty signature line. “Now would you please sign the dag-gum report?”
Aaron thought about it for a moment before breathing a subtle sigh. He finally grabbed the pen and signed the document.
†
Aaron watched an occasional car drive by on Main Street in front of the Lost Maples Sheriff’s Department while he smoked a cigarette outside. After realizing that a third of it was nothing but ash, he dropped it on the pavement and snuffed it out with his shoe. He wasn’t convinced Doug Travers had died from a boating accident or even an alligator attack. While the evidence did point in that direction, he couldn’t ignore his vivid recurring nightmares. Common sense would lead him to believe his nightmares were just that, horrible dreams and nothing more. He would easily have passed them off as simple dreams had he not experienced the recent horror at Saint Hedwig. That was no dream.
He pondered why the chimera continued to spare his life. It could have killed him on numerous occasions, yet it had chosen to spare his life when it attacked and killed Robert Smith, effectively saving him in the process. It killed Chief Hernandez and his minion satanic priest, Father Henry Marwick, at Saint Hedwig when they had Cody on the altar in preparation for a sacrificial offering to the devil. It had saved both him and Cody that night. He could somewhat understand why it had protected Cody, as if its very existence in this world depended on his survival. But why spare Aaron?
Cody had somehow triggered that chain of events after inadvertently summoning a powerful demon for some childish prank on his friends, which had led to their brutal deaths. He did not fault Cody for that, because Robert Smith had groomed him into the occult. As far as Aaron was concerned, that bastard owned the responsibility for all those who had perished because of the devil’s nightmare curse.
Now Aaron was seeing the chimera again, not only in his dreams, but also in the flesh. He wanted to tell Sheriff Donovan and the fed exactly what had happened to Detective Millstead, but he also didn’t want to end up in a padded cell. He didn’t know what to do. There were only two people he could talk to about the chimera without being thought of as a raving lunatic: his wife and Cody. They both had seen firsthand what it was capable of and how formidable it could be. None of them had answers to the myriad questions about that beast from hell. Then it hit him. There was one other person—if he was willing to talk.
†
“Welcome to Walls Unit,” Prison Warden Sheldon Crain said, greeting Aaron with a firm handshake. The Huntsville Unit of the Texas State Prison System had earned the nickname “Walls Unit” for the red brick walls surrounding the state’s oldest and first enclosed penitentiary for convicted felons, located seventy miles north of Houston. It was also Donald Luther’s new home.
“I appreciate you scheduling this visit for me on such short notice,” Aaron said as the warden escorted him to the prison visitors center. “It’s still hard to believe that he’s here.”
“Were you and Luther pretty close before he landed himself in TDC?”
“On a professional level, I’d say he was the best ME I’ve ever worked with.”
“And on a personal level?”
“We didn’t hang out at the bars after work, but, yeah, he was my friend. That’s what makes this whole thing so shitty.”
The warden snorted a huff. “Well, true evil can hide itself pretty well, if you ask me. Just about every inmate here has friends and family who would argue that they were the kindest and most gentle people you could know.”
Aaron formed half a smile. “And they’re all innocent, too.” He did feel a sense of remorse for those family members, because he had the same feeling for his old friend, who was the last person he’d have believed would participate in such horrendous crimes. Don truly was one of those kind and giving people you would trust to take care of your firstborn child. At that thought, Aaron shook his head, considering how many children had died at the hands of Don’s cult.
“The visiting room is just behind those doors.”
Aaron followed the warden through a set of double-doors that led into a narrow U-shaped room lined with visiting booths. They were the non-contact type, with a window separating the visitors from the inmates.
“I made sure we didn’t have any other visitors in the room while you meet with Luther. You’ll be able to speak freely without any prying ears.”
“Except yours, of course.”
The warden smiled. “You’ve got twenty minutes before I have to start letting other visitors in.”
A corrections officer led Don to a booth in the center of the visitor’s room. He eyed Aaron with suspicion as he approached the booth and sat down. Neither one of them said anything for a minute until Aaron finally broke the silence. “How’re you holding up in here, Don?”
He frowned. “Of all the things you could have said, that’s what you open up with? How am I doing in here? How do you think I’m doing? I’m going to die in this place.”
And well-deserved, Aaron thought. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what? Falsify autopsy records or help murder a bunch of kids? You know I could never—”
“How long were you involved in David’s cult?”
“That was a mistake.” Don’s demeanor changed to that of remorse. “And I wasn’t as embedded as you think I was. I had nothing to do with the deaths of those people.”
“And Jackson Smith? What about him?”
“That was his father’s doing. I just—”
“You just what? You made it look like he died of natural causes. And you knew his own father had killed him. Why would you do that?”
“Because I believed I was doing the right thing. I thought…” He looked away for few seconds. “I thought I was doing the will of my higher power.”
“Satan?”
“I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Oh, that’s right. If Cody didn’t die, then the world was going to end, or some bullshit like that.”
Don narrowed his eyes. “What the hell do you want from me, Aaron? I can’t change the past. I’m sorry those people died, and I’m sorry you were mixed up in it. But none of this would’ve happened if Cody hadn’t been so foolish. He summoned demons he knew nothing about.”
“So, just kill him. That’s your answer. Jesus, Don, he’s just a kid. And frankly, I’m growing a bit tired of it. Ending bloodshed with more violence makes no sense.”
“Shit happened, and Cody bears responsibility, whether you want to hear it or not. And what David and Robert did was for the greater good.”
“It’s just some bullshit excuse to practice acts of evil, all in the name of Satan. Murder is murder, plain and simple.”
Don laughed. “If only it were that simple. None of us wanted anyone to get hurt, but as long as Cody lived, more people were going to die. You can’t blame us for what we were doing. You can’t blame David and Robert for trying to fix what that boy unleashed.”
“Oh, yes I can. You weren’t there. You didn’t witness it. Innocent people died, including children.” Aaron recalled the ritual that David and the priest had performed before attempting to sacrifice Cody. He thought of the pain and agony that Mr. Hadley had endured before the priest gouged out his eyes and slit his throat. “None of them had to die.”
“And none of them would have died, if it weren’t for Cody.”
“And who introduced him to your sick cult? Robert Smith. Where’s his blame? He’s the one that gave Cody that goddamned demon summoning book in the first place. If he hadn’t done that, none of this shit would have happened.”
Devil's Nightmare: Premonitions (Devil's Nightmare, Book 2) Page 9