Nick watched as Laura stood on the streets of New Orleans, in a neighborhood that was unmistakably the French Quarter. With its tiny streets, wandering pedestrian tourists, and ornate iron-railed architecture, he recognized it immediately. She looked down at the piece of paper in her hand, checking the address as her taxi pulled away behind her. She matched the number on the building and it was then that Nick realized he was witnessing his final destination.
The building stood three stories high and its stucco face was painted light brown. A bar occupied the bottom floor and its doors opened out on both sides of the street corner. A wide awning cut away most of the sunshine and welcomed the thirsty with a pleasant respite from the day’s heat. Beside the tavern, wedged between it and the next building over, sat a tiny little business that looked to have been built into what must have previously been an alley. It had a white painted face of brick, with a wrought-iron door set dead in the center. A single diminutive window sat beside the door, barely big enough for the sign hanging inside of it.
It read: Goddard’s Shoes. All soles welcome.
On the sidewalk in front of the bar sat two winos in sun-faded clothing and flip-flop sandals. They murmured to one another, nodding at Laura. One of them laughed aloud.
Laura Scranton, tired but still full of life, ignored them. She kept her eyes fixed on the shoe shop and took a step forward.
And she was crushed in a fist of shadow. A dark, malignant mass crashed into her from nowhere, wrapping itself around her and smashed her into the ground. But it did not stop with Laura. The entire scene to which Nick was witness came under assault of a violent, hungry tide of coal. Darkness swallowed everything from the passersby to the architecture, ultimately rocking Nick back to the reality of the land of the dead and the interior of the Cougar.
Once back in the confines of the speeding vehicle, Nick saw that Laura was gone. She had vanished. And the reason for that was no coincidence. Outside the driver side window, keeping full-bore pace with him, he saw another vehicle. It was one he recognized: a 1974 Chevy Monte Carlo, also dressed in midnight black. Its paint was flecked and weather-beaten, though, spotted with rust around the wheel wells. A peace-sign sticker had been slapped on the front fender and Nick knew that a twin one adorned the other side of the car. Of course he recognized it. The horrible thing had been born out of his imagination. As had its driver. And at the wheel sat its rightful owner: Leonard Harrow, the South Side Skinner.
Harrow grinned, his filthy teeth greeting Nick hungrily. He raised a hand, gave Nick the finger, and then careened the Monte Carlo into the Cougar, which sent it barreling off the road.
Twenty-Five
Nick gripped the steering wheel as the Cougar crashed off course and into the downward sloping shoulder. While neither gravel nor dust flew up as it would have back in the world of the living, the vehicle still jostled violently as its tires bounced across the uneven divider. The Cougar rocked steeply to the right as it reached the bottommost point of the ditch.
Nick’s body left the driver’s seat as a result of the sudden force. He was tossed headlong into the passenger seat.
The car still sped forward, though it had begun to slow. By some minor miracle it did not outright flip over onto its top. Instead, the steering wheel cranked sharply down and the vehicle rode the momentum and used it to continue up and out the opposite side of the ditch.
When he was finally able to right himself in his seat Nick watched the Cougar roll to a bumpy stop in the middle of a barren corn field. He was panting, gathering his wits, when his mind suddenly returned to Harrow. He spun frantically around, expecting to see the grisly killer and his dark steed bearing down upon him. But the fictional monster and his Monte Carlo had disappeared. They had apparently thought wiser than to follow Nick on a crash course into the ditch. But Nick had no doubt the man was still nearby, maybe just slowing down to turn back around on the road and find a softer entrance to the clearing.
Nick crawled back into the driver’s seat.
“Alright, honey,” he said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
The purring motor revved once. The shifter dropped into drive as Nick nodded impatiently.
“Come on. Back to the road.”
Nick closed his eyes, tried to recapture the scene he’d been shown by Laura. He tried to picture the faded ancient storefront in the French Quarter.
The Cougar loped along, gaining speed on the rough terrain. The dome of blackness had lifted another ten or fifteen feet in all directions and Nick watched as busted, flattened stalks passed with greater speed. They were headed back toward the road. Nick did not bother trying to drive the car. It knew better than he did where they were going.
And then they hit the thing.
It had looked like a man, just standing there in the middle of the empty field. Whoever it was, it had not been Harrow. And the Cougar had mowed him down with solid ferocity. At once, being connected to his thoughts, the car ground to a squealing halt. He watched the rearview mirror, found the thing slumped there in the dirt, just at the edge of the darkness.
It was a man. He was certain of it. But if it wasn’t Harrow, who the hell was it? Much of him wanted no part in finding out the answer to that question. Another part of him, however, needed to know. What if it had been another wandering soul, an innocent person. It wasn’t as if he could have killed them all over again, he told himself. But it wasn’t a good enough argument.
Nick kept his eyes on the black heap as the Cougar shifted into reverse and rolled back in the direction of its victim. When the car stopped, he took a deep breath and licked his lips. He became acutely aware of the pistol bulging in his pocket. Though it should have brought him some comfort, it did not. Its sole bullet was promised elsewhere. He flexed his hands into fists, opened the car door, and stepped out.
The air was still, desolate and vacant of sound. There was a soft pressure about it, as if Nick had stepped into a subtle vacuum. It pressed at his temples, its quiet persistence growing stronger when he shut the car door.
The slumped figure in the field was only twenty feet away. He took a cautious step forward.
“Hey…hello?”
The person did not stir. A rusty knot formed in Nick’s stomach as he took another step in its direction. Whoever it was, he was not getting up. The Cougar had battered him into off-road roadkill. But again, Nick reminded himself that this place was not a place for the living. Even if he had mown a spirit down, it wasn’t as if it could die all over again. Could it?
But as he edged closer, Nick noticed a peculiar thing about the fallen being. It actually was moving. Not across the ground, but within itself, its shadowy black coat roiled and snaked back and forth across its form. It writhed, moving within the confines of its own skin, like a gunnysack full of snakes. Which was, more or less, exactly what it was.
The moment Nick recognized the thing as being inhuman, he stumbled backward. His eyes never left the thing. It was entrancing, that aqueous form of tarry night, twisting and stretching there on the ground.
“What the hell are you?” Nick whispered. He knew that the Cougar was directly behind him, could feel the radiation of its safety at his back. And therefore he stood a moment longer to watch the hideously enthralling sight sitting before him. That moment was all it took.
The lumpy form stretched straight upward in a wall of shadow. It grew to six feet, then ten, in an instant. It rose into the air like a rubbery bed sheet, pulling in all directions at once, until, as it reached the limits of itself, it tore into dozens of ribbons.
Nick blinked, staring in equal parts terror and fascination.
The ribbons were not ribbons at all, but rather winged creatures of shadow, each the size of a pit bull terrier, and shaped like bulbous, malevolent fairies. Their little bodies were humanoid, but with devilishly pointed faces, and fangs that were the size of steak knives. Their wings beat a hellish tune that filled the air. The things began to hiss, like pit vipers, and long, fork
ed tongues flicked from their mouths.
“Ohfuck,” Nick said. It was all he could manage to get out. And then the airborne demons attacked.
Nick turned, dove for the driver’s door. It swung open, anticipating him, and unfortunately he was not ready for it. The door arced wide as he was still reaching for the handle and in his panicked state, it threw him off balance. He saw his error too late and overcorrected his footing. Nick ran right into the open door with his arm and hip. It didn’t cause any pain, but when he made unexpected contact with it, the door gave a little spring and used his momentum to roll him off to the side.
He reached for the inside handle, felt the cool steel against his skin, but it was too late. The first of the flying monsters hit him like a bowling ball, driving him to the ground. A second landed on the door itself, razor-like claws digging into the pristine vinyl. It swiped at the armrest further with its hands, sending bits of foam and plastic to the ground with furious hisses.
Nick could feel it, could actually feel the damage being inflicted upon the car, as if those spiky nails were digging into his own flesh. He would have cried out if the air hadn’t been half knocked out of his lungs.
The Cougar’s motor revved violently. The noise startled the monster, and when the door slammed shut on its own, it chopped one of the fleeing beast’s arms off in the process. But that solitary wounded creature was only one of many. In the next instant a half dozen others reached the car, landing like iron weights against the roof, hood, and trunk. Their claws dug deep and the cacophony of hisses rose to a fever pitch as the attackers began their destruction.
The motor roared again, and the car’s frame buckled down as it ratcheted itself into gear. The tires spun free, kicking the tail end into a momentary fishtail, but when they finally found purchase the Cougar darted forward and out of Nick’s line of sight. It left the bubble of his perception, drawing the attention of, or dragging, no less than a dozen of the hissing monsters in its wake. Another half dozen broke their flight pattern to give chase into the darkness.
That left six or seven barreling toward Nick. He sat on his hands and knees, regaining his breath, watching as the Cougar disappeared into the unknown. The fanged goblin that had tackled him had bowled past him with its momentum and now took to the air again. It was only a few feet away. Its brethren, given their speed, would also be upon him any second now. He saw the hungry, seething pits of their mouths, and knew that although he was dead, these things were capable of ending him. They were the progeny of the Black Tar Man, and they had come to claim his soul.
Drawing every bit of strength he had, Nick dug his fingers into the lifeless soil beneath him and lunged to his feet. It was clumsy, but he managed to get his legs moving, finally finding a stride.
He loped five feet, then ten, all the while hearing the slick, leathery beat of encroaching wings. There was a sharp pain in his right side, an extreme stitch, and he knew that the Cougar had sustained a serious infliction of damage. The cramp threw him off balance, and as fate would have it, saved him from having his head lopped off. At the exact moment he bent to the right, the nearest of the winged devils made its killing dive. Its maw snapped at empty air when it sailed right over Nick’s hunched back. Two others followed suit; their weighty momentum too great for the proportion of their wings. The things cruised onward like the aerial bowling balls that they were, unable to stop until they hit the ground.
Unfortunately for Nick, his other three pursuers were directly on target. The first two smashed into him simultaneously, one taking out his left leg from behind, and the other his left shoulder. This spun him completely around, so that he had to watch as the third beast met his chest like an anchor. The first two gnashing killers rolled onward into the dirt, but the third remained fixed to his chest. Its claws dug into his flesh, wrenching and flexing with obscene power. The thing hissed, snapped at his face with its mouthful of sabers.
Nick twisted his head, just out of reach of the lunge, avoiding getting his face peeled off. He batted with his arms, but the pain in his chest was excruciating. It rendered his flailing useless. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced. Not that he had ever had something try to separate his ribcage from his body before, but this was a pain that transcended bodily pain. It was not just the fiery scream of battered nerve endings in the flesh of a human body. This was far greater. It was a pain beyond what could ever be experienced by a living person. It was the pain of his soul being shredded to pieces, being devoured by a relentless supernatural force, a man demon who subsisted on the life force of existence itself.
Nick’s eyes rolled back in their sockets, vision refusing to leave him as it would have if he were still in a living body. He tried to scream, but found that he could not. Maybe he already was. With the high voltage pain racking his body to near paralysis, there was no way of telling. In the distance, he could see shadows forming. The dark man’s other minions were returning. It would not be long now. Soon the pain would be over. For that Nick was nothing less than eternally grateful. He could hear the drumming rhythm of their wings.
But the mercy of death did not come. The release which he so desperately desired, he did not find. Because he found something else instead.
At first he did not notice it. Its sparkle was camouflaged by the tears streaming from his eyes which had brought a glimmer to his vision. But when his fingers grazed the cool firmness of it, he knew it was real. Even though hellish torment commanded his attention, he could almost feel himself smile. Layla had given it to him. She had sacrificed her safety to leave it with him when he had died. And it had been brought to this realm with him just as the cursed bullet had. It was the reason he had found her frozen, hunched over him on the cold tiles of the old woman’s washroom. She had placed it around his neck, and he hadn’t even known it. And only now did he see it, after it had been torn from his neck by one of his attackers. He hadn’t even realized it, but that had been their initial target. And now it stared up at him from the soft earth, easily within reach. All he had to do was seize it.
As in life, forfeit was the easiest option. He would be gone, devoured in a matter of seconds if he did nothing. The pain would end. The suffering would halt. But only for him. He thought of Layla, of the debt he owed her and the danger she no doubt faced now with the Black Tar Man.
Nick gathered every last ounce of willpower he had and seized the key.
The reaction was not as drastic as it had been back in the land of the living, but it was visible nonetheless.
The hissing monster on his chest gasped. It withdrew its talons immediately, more out of revulsion than anything like pain, and it snorted at him in disgust.
The paralyzing shock subsided, though there was still a severe residual ache in his chest. Nick capitalized on the opportunity and battered the monster off his ribs with a hammer-fisted blow.
And then it was his turn to gasp. Because he had cleaved the thing’s ink black head clean off its shoulders. The decapitated body toppled from atop him to fall in a pile, where it melted into the soil in an amorphous puddle.
In Nick’s hand, the key had transformed. It took the shape of a two-foot-long camping axe, with a solid hickory handle and a sharp, heavy blade on the end. The thing grew in his hand as he watched, stretching into a deadly tool that he recognized very readily. In the end, it wound up being just shy of three feet in length, its wood firm but light in his hand. A skeleton key shape was carved into the bottom of the sleek, blood-red handle. The axe was the very symbol that had made him rich and famous back in his old life. Aside from the carving of the key, the thing was an identical twin to the axe from Grindstone. And it was hungry for blood.
Lovely Death Page 20