Nick was screaming. Through the pain stabbing at his face he could not tell that it was coming from him. It was just a background noise to the dull, static hum that had filled the air. The sound, not unlike radio white noise, intensified as he was dragged toward the open orifices of the soul eater. The air became thick with it, the throbbing hiss of dead static. It grew and expanded, until the sheer power of it washed away any sense of pain Nick had previously felt in his eyes. It felt as though the wavering thrum was pressurizing his skull.
Nick lurched ahead, still frozen. He was now within two feet of the dark man, who remained seated upon his chair. Nick’s nose was filled with the smell of campfire smoke. Something was burning. That something was him. Even though there was no fire present, Nick’s soul was in the process of being combusted into fuel for the devilish force sitting before him. He was, as the man had threatened, being peeled from his own bones.
Any second now, it would all come to a blissful end. The pain would disappear in the blink of an eye as his light was snuffed out like a flickering candle. The end closed in on him. Blackness engulfed all that he saw, opening into a vision of the night sky. Star-speckled atmosphere called to him from the depths of Goddard’s eyes, promising something beautiful in the beyond, something serene and free of hurt. Except that the closer he got he could see pools of blue fire, just below the horizon. It was the engine that drove this eternal being of death and destruction, the thing which consumed the souls of men. It was the fiery pit to which Nick was being drawn. And it became clear to him that there would be no relief, no respite. He would not simply end upon entering their depths, and neither would his pain.
No, the pain was only just beginning.
And then another noise cut through the static. It took a moment for Nick’s brain to piece the new input together, because it started out softly. But it was a beat, a beginning of a melody. Like an old shitty radio on which the dial had been spun, somebody found a channel that was actually playing some music. The drumbeat continued, accompanied by the unmistakable sound of a guitar.
And then a crucial thing happened. Nick started to become aware of his own body again. He flexed his fingers, lowered his elbows, and could actually feel the muscles beneath the surface of his skin come back under his control.
The band continued to play. It was a song that he knew well, one which had previously instilled terror into him. There were no vocals now, only instruments, but the effect was clear. The sound of The Turtles hammered against the wall of static, breaking the spell that had bound Nick to immobility. Laura Scranton had evidently not been completely consumed yet. The woman who had set off this whole messy, triangular deal, had stepped in to offer Nick one last chance.
Nick broke his gaze with the Black Tar Man, and bent over, gasping. The thing before him roared in fury. It swiped at the open air between them, finally closing both mouth and eyes in an attempt to silence the final intrusion of Laura Scranton. It worked. Happy Together was cut off abruptly and the room filled with the silence of dead calm. An electric pressure hung in the atmosphere, making the hairs on Nick’s arms stand on end.
Goddard rose from his chair, eyes and mouth still closed. He shook his head, no doubt crushing Laura into dust within him, and darted forward. He stood a full eight inches taller than Nick and moved with the surety of a sighted man.
Fortunately for Nick, he had taken a few steps back to recuperate from the psychic assault and was able to dodge the grasp of Goddard. Nick ducked to the left, while Goddard’s arms swooped over his head. He saw the ruined mess of the axe on the floor but did not pause to lament it. Because it was not the tool he needed anyhow.
What he truly needed still rested in his front pocket. He took a moment to dig for it, but was forced to dive across the leather laden table in order to avoid yet another attack by the soul eater.
Goddard was furious. Even without the ability to convey it verbally, it was more than clear. He swiped a thick hand out toward Nick, missed, and split the workbench into pieces. Splinters of wood filled the air like rain while hand tools and bottles of dye were strewn across the room. Goddard spun and struck again. This time a single hammering blow of his fist rent the countertop into two ruined halves.
The familiar rumble of an approaching motor sounded from beyond the walls of the building. Nick recalled the maker of that exact sound not only from his Grindstone film, but most recently from when it had run his own vehicle off the road. Harrow was coming. Goddard had summoned him, or constructed him, or whatever the case may have been. Whichever it was, by the sound of it, he was right outside.
Goddard moved like lightning. Nick could hardly keep ahead of him, especially in the confined space of the shop. There were only so many places he could turn.
Nick crouched by the half of the ruined countertop nearest the wall. He did not make a sound. And Goddard, seemingly, could see him even without the use of his eyes. Because with one swipe of his palm, he brushed aside the counter, flinging the antique cash register toward the front door with a metallic crash.
Nick threw himself into a crouching roll, which was awkward and pathetically executed, but at least it worked. He once again avoided the grabbing fingers of his massive attacker.
Goddard lifted his palms upward, paused, and slammed them down in the air.
And then the walls began to bleed shadow. Like the collapsing road, and the flying demons before it, the same viscous black tar flooded down the wood paneling, gathering in pools where the corners of the walls met the floor. The room became a prison of liquid shadow, with the only dismal light coming from the front windows, reflecting dully off the oily surface of the fluid.
Nick glanced toward the front door, where the vehicular noise had ceased and Harrow’s gaunt frame shadowed the window beside the entry. All around the room, the inky tar spilled forth across the tile, swallowing ground at a rapid rate. It would reach Nick in a matter of seconds. Likely before Harrow ever did. And at the center of it all stood Goddard. His hands remained outstretched in concentration.
Two feet away from Nick’s boots, a pool of shadow erupted in a long dark lance. He flinched and it speared right past his face to disappear in the opposite wall. Nick darted forward as another lancet fired down at him from the ceiling. This one barely missed his shoulder.
The third time, Nick was not so fortunate. The Black Tar Man’s sightless aim was true and a shaft of shadow an inch wide pierced his right thigh. Icy cold pain traveled up his leg to nest in his spine. Nick double over, and would have fallen to the floor had he not been staked in place like a pinned insect. The thick black barrel ran at a diagonal angle, stretched from floor to ceiling, right through his leg.
“Fuck,” Nick spat. He ground his teeth, biting against the intensity of the pain to keep his wits about him. Nick struggled against the lance of shadow but it held him fast and solid as iron. And the movement on his part did nothing but intensify the excruciating burn in his thigh.
The room was deathly quiet. The flow of supernatural shadow halted its consumption of everything. A pleased smile crossed Goddard’s tightly closed lips. He took a step forward, careful not to place his foot in a standing pool of the black liquid. His brown leather shoes were unnaturally silent as a man of his stature crossed the tile floor. With two quick motions, Goddard lifted the cuffs of his stark white shirt and rolled them to the elbows. This exposed arms that were painted entirely in tattoos. The designs were unlike anything Nick had seen before. There was a pattern to them, he saw, as the man drew nearer. It was a language of some sort, one with tiny, almost illegible characters that were as foreign to him as Martian. The tattoos were old. The ink was faded nearly to obscurity. But a single column of letters on each of Goddard’s arms began to glow the same fiery blue as the lake that resided within his eyes.
Instantly, Nick looked away, remembering the paralysis that had stricken him when he met the soul eater’s stare.
But just because he looked away did not mean Goddard slowed his
approach.
In the next instant, he towered over Nick. And though Nick could not see it, he heard Goddard’s inner static escaping his open eyes and lips. All traces of Laura Scranton’s song had been wiped clean from the hellish radio transmission. The crackle and hiss steadily grew in intensity and Nick could feel the magnetic polarity of the monster’s being tug at his every hair.
“Look upon me, boy,” Goddard demanded.
Nick stared resolutely at the floor, preparing himself for the endgame.
“I will not ask again,” the soul eater warned.
He reached a hand out and caught Nick by the forearm. With one solid squeeze, he broke Nick’s arm. It was not a clean break, due to the fact that the bones had been pulverized.
Nick screamed uncontrollably. He tried to focus, tried to ward off the pain, but it was almost impossible. His forearm was shattered. It felt like it had been torn completely off his body. His screams gave way to panting; his face still aimed at the floor. Spit dripped in strands from his lips.
The door opened behind him and he heard Harrow’s voice.
“Wait for me,” Harrow rasped in a chilling tone of excitement.
In response, Goddard gave a tug on Nick’s crippled arm. It brought Nick’s slumped form to life like a marionette. Instead of screaming, this time he growled. And instead of looking helplessly into the crippling vacuum of Goddard’s stare, this time Nick’s eyes locked on the soul eater’s chest. More precisely, they sought his heart.
“Gotcha now, fucker,” Nick said. And before either of the vile creatures had a chance to react, Nick drew the pistol from where he’d stashed it in his rear waistband. He had finally pulled the thing from his pocket during their struggle and had been waiting for the exact moment he could use it with guaranteed accuracy.
Nick planted the snub barrel against Goddard’s chest and squeezed the trigger.
Twenty-Seven
When Nick pulled the trigger, a bolt of flame erupted from the pistol’s barrel. The cursed bullet, in its spectral form, punched a hole clear through the chest of the Black Tar Man. And it was not a simple in and out exit wound, like a typically fired bullet, like the one that had killed Laura. The hole that was blasted through the heart of the soul eater was on par with the kind of devastation one might expect from a cannon ball. It blew chunks of the dark man’s being clear across the room in a shower of gore.
Also unlike Laura, Goddard did not fall. Miraculously, he remained standing, rooted in the exact same spot. He was, however, far from well. His head slumped forward, staring down at the oozing pit that had become his chest cavity. He blinked his eyes. They were actual eyeballs now, not vacuous hollows, and the color of their irises was piercing blue. He blinked again, darting his gaze between Nick’s yet upheld pistol and the grievous wound in his astral body.
He tried to speak, but the only thing to cross his lips was a dribbling mess of ichor, the very same inky fluid that had consumed most of his shop.
Most importantly, the static drone had ceased. It would never return. Of that, Nick was certain. Because the tie that had bound him to Goddard—that leaden fishing line which had threaded through the essence of his very being—had been severed. He could feel it. It was gone, and never to return. It felt as if a weight had been lifted from his entire body.
Goddard released his grip on Nick’s crushed forearm. He teetered on his feet, clearly losing whatever spark of life remained in him.
“Fuck you,” Nick said.
Using the butt of the gun as a bludgeon, Nick put all the energy he could muster into pistol-whipping Goddard on the temple. There was a solid crunch from the dying man’s skull. His jaw slacked and he folded down to his knees. A second and final blow put the demon to rest. All traces of light left Goddard’s eyes and he collapsed into a waiting puddle of liquid death.
As soon as his body connected with the shimmering pool, it was swallowed whole, pulled completely through the floor. Nick did not need to look behind him to know that Harrow was gone as well.
The ground began to vibrate beneath his feet. The viscous layer of tar bubbled where the soul eater had disappeared. It gurgled and churned, spreading from that singular surface to all the others in the room. Within seconds, the walls and much of the covered tile floors had started to glurp and boil.
Nick took a deep breath, trying to muster whatever remained of his wavering strength. He jerked against the black bar which had pinned him in place. It would not move. He smashed the butt of the pistol against it. Nothing happened. The puddle from which it had sprung—only twelve inches from his right foot—had started to churn and he watched as the obsidian rod itself started to spring little bubbles.
The floor shook beneath his feet. In the furthest corner, the ceiling drooped, dropping in hunks to the roiling floor below. That floor, in turn, sunk into the ground; it was swallowed by a growing chasm of empty blackness. From where he stood, he could see that the store was consuming itself. Or perhaps the land of the dead was consuming it, returning a balance to what had been a stronghold of unnatural power for far too long.
Whatever the case was, neither the shoe shop nor its occupants would be around for long.
Nick struggled against the spear in his leg. It grew white hot as the bubbles traveled upward, turning to liquid fire inside his thigh. Just as the pain reached a threshold that threatened to steal his consciousness, Nick gave one last great heave.
The boiling shadow gave way, spraying black droplets across the floor behind him. Each one sizzled and hissed when it met tile.
Nick fought against the momentum, managing to keep himself upright.
Somewhere overhead, a girder collapsed. Dust filled the shop and was quickly devoured by the spectral tar as it continued to surge forward. Like a malignant tumor, the mess spread itself ever further, covering whatever untouched surfaces remained.
Nick barely made it to the door before it too was overtaken.
He stumbled through it and into the flat, gray world of the dead.
The sound of consumption continued behind him, but Nick did not turn to watch, at least not until he had dragged himself through the crowd of drifting spirits to find the Cougar. Brick, wood, and plaster were reduced to rubble in what sounded like a low-level rockslide. And then, just as soon as it had started, it was over. There was silence. Order had seemingly been restored and there was peace.
The spirits of the dead swarmed forth then, venturing through the circular section of city street which they had previously avoided. Whatever spell the dark man had held on the area had been vanquished as handily as his place of work had been. The souls resumed their natural travels, going in all directions, doing whatever it was they did for all eternity. None of them paid attention to the ruined, black pit in the earth between two unharmed brick buildings where a cobbler’s shop had once stood. Nor did they pay any mind to Nick Aragon, who was one of their own.
Nick stumbled, feeling very tired all of a sudden. He looked down at his leg, or rather what was left of it. His jeans were in tatters and soaked with dark black fluid that could only have been his blood. It wasn’t quite blood, but whatever the equivalent might have been in the land of the dead. Either way, he was in bad shape. He put a hand on the Cougar. The ruined, burned flesh of his fingers screamed at him as he did. She was cold, just a dead hunk of steel. She had nothing left to offer him.
But perhaps, he thought, he might have something left to give to her.
The handle snapped off in his hand when he pulled it, but the rusted door did swing open.
Nick climbed inside. A better way to put it was that his legs gave out completely and he dropped into the waiting seat. The leather was rotten and thrashed, but there was an immeasurable comfort in it. He pulled the door shut and gave an exhausted look at his body. It was torn and battered. His left arm looked like it belonged to a Stretch Armstrong that had lost a fight with a Rottweiler. It wasn’t funny, but he couldn’t stop himself from chuckling at the thought. His leg, howeve
r, brought no amusement. It was a sticky, seeping mess. The soul force, or whatever the hell it was, was leaking steadily and it seemed clear that he was going to bleed out. That’s just the way it was. There wasn’t anything he could do about it, especially given the utter exhaustion of his body. He watched the bloody mess run down the crevices of the driver’s seat, gathering in the folds. He leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes.
There were worse ways to go. He knew that for certain.
Nick spent his last conscious moments replaying the happiest moments of him and the Cougar together, when he would sit in his parents’ old garage, in that exact same position, listening to Johnny Cash play on the tape deck. He could feel the seat springs poking at his back, could smell the dust of age that clung to the faded interior and dreamed of a day when she would be whole again, shiny and new as the day she’d rolled off the assembly line in Detroit. He imagined the gloss of her paint, the heavy, drooping curve of the chrome on her tail. As soon as he got to college, he told himself, he’d finally write a movie script that didn’t suck ass. And soon after that, he’d sell it for a fortune.
The Cougar’s motor would purr. It would roar like a lion. The rust and duct tape, much like the trapped feeling he felt in his own home, would become a long forgotten memory.
Then it would only be him and the road. Nothing would keep him down. Nobody would hold him back.
If he listened hard enough, he could hear the motor fire, could almost feel the road dancing beneath her rubber shoes.
Twenty-Eight
The open road welcomed Nick, ushering him along on his final journey.
Twenty-Nine
The light was blinding.
It pressed away the shadows and washed the world in a clean layer of white luminescence.
Tears blurred his vision and Nick was forced to squeeze his eyelids shut. As he did, he became aware of nausea tugging at his insides. But nausea was not alone. Something else, something deeper burned in his belly: an ache which swelled like a balloon, doubling in size and intensity as he rolled his head to the side on the hard ground.
Lovely Death Page 23