Kayla And The Devil

by Bryan Smith

  He came another step closer to her and drew her into his arms. Her heart was hammering. She started to put her arms around him, but it was awkward with the backpack straps weighing on her shoulders. She shrugged them off and let the backpack fall to the ground. She put her arms around him, hardly believing this amazing and wonderful thing was happening.

  His voice was quieter when he spoke. Huskier. “Kayla, I can tell you precisely why this has happened to you and how you can reverse it. Before I do that, however, would you mind very much if I kissed you?”

  Her reply came as a barely audible squeak: “You better fucking kiss me, mister.”

  He obliged her.

  And it was wonderful. In fact, the kiss was so earth-shatteringly nice and delicious that it was several minutes before she realized he’d addressed her by her name.

  She hadn’t told him her name.

  She was sure of it.

  3.

  She loved the exquisite feel of his strong hands on her bare skin. The skimpy halter top she’d selected when dressing this morning was paying some serious dividends. His hands were at her waist in the beginning, positioned just above the top of her denim shorts. As the kiss intensified, his fingers slid around to her back and probed the tender flesh there. She angled a thigh between his legs and felt the hardness straining the crotch of his jeans, which further fueled the lust exploding inside her. A dormant part of her essence had been set free and she was anxious to revel in it. To wallow in it. Hell, far as she was concerned, he could lay her down on the grass and have her right here in the middle of the park in broad daylight. Sure, they might get arrested or fined for indecency or some shit like that, but she didn’t care. It’d be a small price to pay to finally have this curse broken.

  Hmm.

  Curse.

  A ridiculous notion, of course. Still…it was really sort of apt. Even though she didn’t believe in such things, it was easy to see the things she’d endured these last few months as the effects of a curse. Funny how she hadn’t thought of it until just now.

  But the thought was forgotten as the guy broke off the kiss with upsetting abruptness. He shrugged gently free of her embrace and moved back a step. The good humor he’d exhibited from the beginning was still in place, but there was a subtle hint of smugness in the set of his features now. “Did you enjoy that?”

  Big sigh. “I sort of wasn’t ready for it to stop. Why talk when we could still be making out?”

  He laughed. “There’ll be time for more of that later…if you’re still interested by then.”

  She snorted. “Seriously? Still interested? Buddy, trust me, you’ve got my interest locked down for life. I’m serious. I’m just gonna go ahead and let you know you can have your way with me. I’m not kidding. Anything you want to do on, like, a sexual level, you can go right ahead and do. Well, with obvious exceptions like water sports.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t pee on me.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Good. Because that shit’s nasty. I’ve seen some videos on the Internet. I watch a lot of gross shit on You Tube and so forth. Just, you know, out of intellectual curiosity. Anyway, point being, anything else you wanna do, kinky or whatever, I’m down. And, well, I’m really just sort of rambling and I guess I should shut the fuck up before you run off screaming like everyone else.”

  “You don’t frighten me, Kayla. Not in the least.”

  Oh. Right. He’d done that once already, just before he started kissing her. At the time, she’d been too overcome with excitement to give it much thought. But now he’d gone and done it a second time. Shit. She couldn’t just go on ignoring it. Something maybe a little bit weird was happening here.

  Dammit, God!

  Why can’t I have just this one nice thing? You’re gonna spoil this for me, I just know it.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I know many things I shouldn’t.”

  “Well, that’s fucking cryptic.”

  He spread his hands. “Obfuscation is an integral part of my nature, I’m afraid.”

  “Look, I don’t have a goddamn dictionary on me. What the hell does ‘obfuscation’ mean?”

  “It means I communicate in a way sometimes deliberately designed to confuse.”

  Kayla felt a flicker of anger. It bothered her. She didn’t want to be mad at someone as absurdly hot as this guy, not after so long a cold spell. And yet she couldn’t just ignore how she felt. “Super. So…you were lying to me before. You are fucking with me.”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “Great. That’s just extra awesome of you.” She snatched up her discarded backpack and shrugged the straps back over her shoulders. “I don’t know what your story is, and I don’t care. Fuck you, man.”

  She spun around, fully intending to hurry out of the park and slink back to her dorm to find solace in a big bottle of something strong. But she didn’t move. The spark of anger intensified, but this time it was self-directed. Despite her wounded pride, she had to know what was really going on here.

  She turned around again.

  “Okay, look, just spit it out. Tell me how you know my name. You’re a stalker, right? You know me from somewhere online? Right?” Her face twisted in an expression of disgust. “God. I knew I should quit that social media shit. Too many creeps like you trolling for chicks. I’d never suspect a guy like you, looking like you do, would pull that kind of shit, but I guess that just shows how naïve I am.”

  He was silent for a long moment. His expression had darkened. There was nary a trace of the dazzling charm he’d displayed until now. It made her paranoid. She did a quick scan of her immediate surroundings, hoping to see other people in the vicinity. She was suddenly afraid of being alone with this strange man. It was so weird. She’d gone from a state of almost uncontrollable lust to paralyzing fear in the space of just a few minutes.

  He lifted his head slightly and shook long locks from his forehead. “Do you want to know who I am, Kayla? Who I really am?”

  No. Not really, buster.

  But some sick, sad, stupid part of me needs to know anyway.

  She blew out a slow, measured breath. Then she dipped her chin minutely in the slightest of nods. “Yeah, okay. I do.”

  The corners of his mouth curved sharply upward, but this time there was more menace than mirth in his smile. “I’m the devil, Kayla.”

  4.

  She was most of the way back to West End when a strong hand closed around her right bicep and jerked her to a stop.

  The so-called devil’s breath was hot against her ear. “I’m not through with you yet, Kayla.”

  She tried to twist free of his grip, but he held her effortlessly in place, which only inflamed her fury. “LET GO OF ME!”

  They were right at the edge of the park, which bumped up against the busy city street. Two lanes of traffic were going in each direction. Dozens of pedestrians were walking by in opposite directions on the sidewalk. The sun was still shining. There was no reason to be afraid. Even if this jerk was a total psycho, which the available evidence emphatically indicated, he couldn’t do anything to her in front of so many witnesses.

  His grip on her arm remained tight, his fingers like an iron band around the flesh.

  It hurt. A lot.

  But Kayla Monroe wasn’t the type to give up easily. She tried to twist free again and screamed at him some more. Even if she couldn’t get free on her own, one of the athletic young men in the area would surely intercede. A pariah she might be, but no way could this fucker get away with aggressively accosting a pretty young college student near a busy street in an affluent part of town.

  “They don’t hear you, Kayla.”

  “Bullshit! Let go of me! HELP! RAPE!”

  The ‘devil’ laughed.

  Kayla’s fury was so intense it took her several moments to realize he was right. She was no more than a dozen feet from the sidewalk, close enough to converse in a normal con
versational tone with any of the many people passing by. But no one--not one single fucking person--was looking her way or acknowledging her at all. She had screeched at the top of her lungs, but no one had heard a thing.

  Her shoulders sagged. She stopped struggling.

  “Shit.”

  He leaned close, his hot breath tickling her ear again. “Ask yourself this, Kayla. Who, other than the devil, could possibly make a thing like this happen?” He let go of her arm. “Now turn around and look at me.”

  “I’d rather not, thanks.”

  A heavy sigh. “Must you make every part of this so much more difficult than necessary? Do as I say, Kayla. I’d rather not use force to make you do my bidding, but I will if I have to. Be sensible. You know you can’t get away from me. And any additional resistance will just make me angrier. Trust me, you don’t want that. So…turn…the fuck…around…little girl.”

  Kayla stared out at the opposing streams of traffic. A light at the nearby intersection had just turned green and the countless cars were in motion again, many moving at a high rate of speed. Maybe he was right. Maybe she really couldn’t get away from him. But what about a quick dart into the traffic? She might well get killed, but surely a quick demise beneath several tons of fast-moving metal would be preferable to whatever sick, unimaginable horror this creepy fuck had planned for her.

  “Enough, Kayla. You and I both know you’re not the suicidal type. You like yourself too much for that. Turn around.”

  She stared at the passing cars a moment longer.

  Then she accepted the undeniable truth of what he was saying and, with great reluctance, turned to face her tormentor. Nothing about his appearance had changed. He still looked like the hunk of the century. But now the sight of him instilled only fear.

  “What do you want with me?”

  “I’ll tell you, but let’s get away from the street. Come.” He indicated the direction from which they’d come with a tilt of his head. “This way.”

  Soon they had returned to the big tree Kayla had thought of as ‘belonging’ to her. This had been her own special part of the park. Her tranquil place. Now she was certain she’d never return here again of her own free will. Melancholy tinged the thought. She glanced up at the tree’s lush canopy of bright green leaves as they stepped into its shadow.

  Then she leveled a stony expression at the ‘devil’. “I hate you.”

  “You say that now, but what if I told you I possess the key to your freedom?”

  “What the fuck does that mean? I’m not in fucking jail. And by the way, how did you manage that freaky cone of silence shit out there by the street? Did you hypnotize me or what?”

  “I did not. I just made it happen.”

  “Who the fuck are you? Houdini?”

  “I grow weary of repeating myself, girl. I’ve told you who I am.”

  Kayla was nodding as he said this. “Right, right. You’re the devil, blah blah blah. Problem with that is, there’s no such thing.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to prove it.”

  Kayla smirked. “Good luck with that.”

  The man smiled. “No luck required.”

  He said something in a foreign tongue that might have been Latin.

  Then, in the very next instant, there was a total eclipse of the sun.

  5.

  Only it wasn’t an eclipse at all, and she knew that seconds after the onset of total darkness. An eclipse wouldn’t happen so abruptly. Besides which, she would have heard about an impending eclipse well in advance. This wasn’t a temporary blotting out of the sun. It was something else. Something not natural. It freaked her out enough to elicit a scream right off the bat, but her dismay soared when she realized she could no longer feel the ground beneath her feet. She was floating in a sightless, formless void. It was as if the real world had simply ceased to exist.

  The one thing that helped her hold on to some small shred of sanity was that she wasn’t some disembodied consciousness. She was still in her body, still in possession of all her senses. The void was cold. She could feel her flesh prickling. She hugged herself as she began to shiver.

  “Help…” Any other time the desperate quaver in her voice might have shamed her, but she was terrified and didn’t care who heard it. “I’m scared. Please…someone help me. Where am I?”

  A nearly inaudible voice whispered a single word in her ear: “Purgatory.”

  She screamed and flailed about in the darkness. There was something insidious and repellant about that voice on a base level, something that caused her to react with the same unthinking disgust she would upon finding a cockroach in her soup.

  She heard low laughter somewhere else in the darkness.

  Then the darkness was gone.

  Kayla screamed. It was her loudest and most protracted scream of the day. She stood at the edge of a vast body of water. A boiling crimson ocean beneath a blazing red sky. She saw countless melting bodies floating in the sizzling water. Some of them rode up on waves and were deposited on the shore of coals.

  Someone spoke behind her: “This is my home. My domain.”

  This voice Kayla recognized.

  It was him.

  She turned slowly around…then her face contorted in shock and she screamed yet again.

  It was the guy she’d talked to in the park. More or less. He had the same impressive build and the shape of his face was roughly the same. But he was nude now. And bald. His skin was all dark crimson scales. Horns protruded from his forehead. He grinned, displaying rows of long, pointy teeth.

  “Welcome to Hell, Kayla.”

  Some more screaming.

  And then the darkness descended again. This time Kayla welcomed it. Given the choice, she’d elect to spend an eternity floating in purgatory rather than endure even one more second of hell. She’d seen some awful things in her time. Snuff videos on the web. Concentration camp pictures. Gory crime scene photos. Things she’d look at out of morbid curiosity. She always felt kind of bad about it, like a creepy voyeur to other people’s misery (not that this ever stopped her). As awful as those things were, though, they all paled in comparison to what she’d glimpsed during her few seconds in hell.

  Kayla blinked.

  The sun was shining again. They were back in the park. She could hear the cars from the street. Birds were singing. The devil was leaning against the tree, his thumbs hooked in his pockets again.

  He grinned at her. “So now do you believe--”

  Kayla didn’t hear the rest of it because she was off running again. This was pure instinct, a primal need to get away from something unspeakably horrible. It didn’t matter that she’d already tried this once without success. Logic didn’t enter into the process at all. She was running flat-out, putting everything she had into it. She shrugged the backpack straps off her shoulders and let it fall away. She didn’t care. It was slowing her down and nothing inside it mattered anymore. Her legs were pumping hard, the muscles really straining, as she reached the edge of the park. She fully expected to feel his hands seize her again any moment. But that didn’t happen. She plowed into the stream of people on the sidewalk, bowling over a slender woman in stylish business attire.

  She ignored the agitated shouts of the pedestrians behind her as she kept going at full speed right into the street as cars were starting to move again in both directions. She heard loud blats from horns, as well as a screech of tires and a crunch of metal. She ignored it all and weaved her way through the sea of automobiles. One man in a suit got out of his Lexus, put himself in her path, and started yelling at her. She balled up a fist and hit him square in the center of his face. She saw blood erupt from his nose as he pitched backward and bounced off the fender of a stalled Buick. His look of wide-eyed surprise was almost comical, but Kayla had never felt less like laughing. She pressed ever forward with the same grim determination, soon reaching the other side of the street, where she at last allowed herself a backward glance.

  There was no sign of
him.

  She could see the park from here easily enough, but the devil was nowhere in sight. Yet Kayla knew she wasn’t safe and wasn’t about to let his disappearance slow her down. She kept on running, threading her way through the slow-moving pedestrians on the sidewalk. She passed a P.F. Chang’s restaurant and a Starbucks and soon the Vanderbilt campus was in sight.

  Oh, please, she thought. Please, God, just let me make it back to my room. I swear I’ll be good from now on. No more looking at gross shit on the Internet. No more lustful thoughts. Within reason, anyway. I’ll do my best to think about wholesome things now and then instead of just sex all the time. I’ll even start going to church. Just please, please, please let me make it back.

  Sweat was streaming in rivers from her body as she zoomed across campus. The other students all looked at her funny as she flew past them. No doubt they could see in her bulging eyes the sheer terror gripping her. Even so, no one called out to ask what was wrong. Which figured. And fuck these people, anyway. If they really wanted so little to do with her, then the feeling was fucking mutual. She was getting out of this place as soon as she could throw some clothes and things in a bag and hit the road.

  She finally reached her dorm and banged through the front entrance, barging her way through a crowd of shrill girls babbling in the lobby about some party. She flew past the reception desk and kept going until she arrived at the bank of elevators against the far wall. When she got there, she stabbed the up arrow button and stood there panting and perspiring as she stared at the lights showing which floor the elevators were on. Both elevator cars were currently at the top floor. Her floor. As she watched, one descended two floors and stopped there, still eight floors above her. The other elevator descended one floor and stopped.

  Jesus fucking Christ!

  She glanced behind her. There was still no sign of the devil. The other girls in the area were all giving her strange looks. Some were giving her the stink-eye, that familiar look of withering disapproval. She wanted to knock the skank right out of those bitches, but she couldn’t let anything like a fight slow her down. She had to get to her room. The one elevator was still on the eighth floor. What the fuck was going on up there? The other descended three more floors and stopped yet again.