by Ninie Hammon
“Honey, listen to me. You have to try to get—”
“I love you, Jack.” Her voice is soft. She is crying. “I love you so much. I only wanted to have…something of you…”
“We’ll have a baby! Lyla, I swear! When this is all over, we’ll—”
“They’re jumping.”
He had seen it…something…when he was running, before he had to look down to guide the bike. Things were falling off the building. He lifts his eyes now and sees a man high up, above the rip of flames that slice through the building. The man steps out the window and…
“I don’t want to burn, Jack.” She’s not hysterical now. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“That I’m going to leave you here, leave you behind.”
“You’re not going anywhere. You’re—”
“Heaven will be beautiful…” she’s coughing out words again. “I—”
The line goes dead.
“Lyla! Lyla, answer me. Lyla, I love you.”
He calls her back. He has to tell her that. She has to hear him.
Speed Dial: Lyla. All lines busy.
He punches the button again and again. Looking up at the building, tears streaming down his face.
Speed Dial: Lyla. All lines busy.
Speed Dial: Lyla. All lines busy.
Then he sees the figure in red in a high window. There is no air left in the world. No breath. He stands and tries to scream. In his head, he does scream, “Lyyyyyyla.” But no sound comes out his lips.
The red figure falls from the window. She is holding the hand of a man in a dark suit. The red petticoat flutters around her like the wings of a hummingbird. They fall together. Down and down and down.
Later, a long time later, he wonders who the man was, the man who died with her. Jack wishes he could have been that man.
* * *
Jack said nothing else. Only his wife’s name. But Daniel had heard the sound of grief often enough to recognize it even in a single word. Though Daniel hadn’t meant to mention Emily’s affair, Jack had made a decision to tell Daniel about his wife. Daniel understood that Jack Carpenter didn’t do a thing like that lightly.
“What happened to her, Jack?” he asked, and made it a point not to look at him.
“She died in Tower One on 9-11,” Jack’s voice was flat, toneless. He might as well have been reading the assembly instructions on a backyard swing set. “She wanted to have children and I didn’t. I was a self-centered fool.”
“Copy that,” Daniel said, and sounded just like Jack. He’d meant to.
Jack flashed him a look, then relaxed a little. They rode together in silence. Neither felt the need to talk, but something had shifted. They both felt it. The nature of their relationship was not the same as it’d been when they got into the car in Bradford’s Ridge for the drive back to Cincinnati.
Daniel could see a menacing collection of dark, bubbling clouds in the western sky. He liked bad weather. The violent crash and fury of a storm sometimes put his own problems in perspective, helped to clarify his thinking.
“I need a drink,” Jack said, “a big, drown-all-your-problems drink.”
“Can’t drown problems like these,” Daniel said. “These babies can swim.”
There was a beat of silence, and when Jack spoke again his voice was unexpectedly soft and intense.
“Do you own a gun, Daniel?”
A pulse of lightning strobed the black sky.
“Are you serious? Of course, I don’t own a gun!”
“You need to get one.” Jack paused. “And a conceal carry permit.”
Lightning tore at the sky and finally ripped open the clouds, releasing skeins of rain as fine as angel hair. Thunder rumbled and rolled around them. Neither man spoke. The only sounds were the windshield wipers and the swish of tires on wet pavement. The trees on the roadside stood shadowless in the gray light as they flew past, silent in the pregnant stillness of a coming storm.
* * * * * * *
Theresa looked across her wide kitchen table, watching the two men who sat sipping their after-dinner coffee. She’d fixed fried chicken and mashed potatoes, along with green beans and corn on the cob picked from Miss Minnie and Mr. Gerald’s garden. She’d fried some okra, too. The boys—men, they was men—ate like they hadn’t had a good meal in days—and she suspected maybe Jack hadn’t.
The storm had grown in intensity all evening. Now black rain, as if from a dissolving night sky, poured down, rapped angrily at the windows and cried in sullen streams down the panes.
As they told her the tale of Michael Rutherford and the strange occurrences in Bradford’s Ridge, she studied them, more interested in their faces than the story they were telling. Nothing they had to say was a surprise to Theresa. It merely confirmed what she’d already figured out her own self. A conclusion it was now time to share with Daniel and Jack.
She looked intently at one, then the other, trying to see in the men the boys they had once been. Daniel’s smile had come easily and often when he was young; the earnestness and sincerity in his wide brown eyes made him irresistibly likable. He was like a Cocker Spaniel puppy, Bishop had once observed, always underfoot, but when you wanted to scold him for getting in the way, that wagging tail just melted your heart.
Some of that hadn’t changed. He was still so likable folks flocked to his church because his affable presence made them feel better about the pain in their lives, and he fed them watered-down truth so’s wouldn’t nobody in the pews get they toes pinched by something they didn’t want to hear.
Jack had changed the least, in appearance anyway. He was a bigger version of the boy he’d been. Unsmiling, serious, determined and a will as strong as a catgut rope. Though she hadn’t known he was a police officer until that day he showed up in Andi’s hospital room, it didn’t surprise her. She might have guessed he’d go into something like law enforcement. It suited him, his sense of right, wrong, justice and taking care of those as couldn’t take care of theirselves.
Theresa’s eyes filled with tears as she looked at the men before her, and she felt for them the fierce love she’d had for them when they were children. These two unlikely friends had been knit to each other by the shared deprivation of orphans. Neither had functioning parents. Jack’s mother was dead; Daniel’s was so wrapped up in every breath his little sister took she had no attention to spare for her son. Jack’s father was lost to alcoholism and Daniel’s to workaholism. When Jack went home of an evening, his father’d start swinging soon as he saw him, and Daniel’s father never saw him at all, looked right through him at the “hurting” person who was standing behind. The boys had bonded to each other as brothers, to Theresa and Bishop as the parents they’d lost, and to Isaac…
She couldn’t go there. If she let her mind go there, she’d lose what little she had left.
Jack set his coffee mug on the table when they’d told Theresa everything they’d seen and heard, and she asked, “You want another cup?”
He nodded, then put his hand out on her arm as she began to rise.
“Sit.” He stood and crossed to the counter with the coffee maker. After he poured his own cup, he held out the pot toward Daniel with a quizzical look. Daniel nodded and Jack brought the pot to the table to fill his cup.
“The coffee I had this morning in Bradford’s Ridge tasted like battery acid,” Jack said.
“Drink a lot of battery acid, do you?” Daniel asked.
“Tastes like that in every police department in America—required by law to keep us tough. You didn’t know that did you?”
“You Cro-Magnons think you’re so much smarter than the rest of us.”
Theresa watched their banter. They was going back to they old ways of relating to each other even though they didn’t even remember their own friendship, their childhood feelings oozing out like water through cheesecloth.
“I’ll wager nobody with taste buds ever complained about your coffee,” Jack told Theres
a as he sat back down again. “Or anything else you cooked. That meal was delicious. You know you didn’t have to—” She waved him off and he hushed up.
He paused, looked thoughtful. “Did you used to make chocolate chip cookies with—”
“—pecans in them!” Daniel finished for him. “I have this memory of reaching into my pocket and coming out with a handful of crumbs from the cookie I’d stuck in there.” He paused and his eyes widened. “And Mikey Rutherford wanted to know if I had any more cookies.”
He turned to Jack. “Is that happening to you? Are you—”
“—remembering things, pieces of things? Yeah.”
“Either one of you remember Bishop’s library?” Their blank looks told her she would have to start at the beginning. “Come on then.” She rose and lumbered toward the door leading into the parlor. “It’s time for you boys to get your first look—for the second time—at what he kept in that library.”
She passed through the parlor and down the hall to the house’s third bedroom that had been transformed years ago into a library. She stepped inside and flipped on the lights.
It was a big room, twenty feet square. A double window opened above a love seat on the far side of the room, but other than that, the surfaces of every wall were lined with book shelves jammed with books. There was a huge oak desk in the middle of the room, piled high with papers and books that cascaded off it onto the floor. Three small tables with reading lamps were spaced around the walls, and the chairs beside them were invitations to sit awhile and get comfortable—’cause what you was about to read was going to blow your mind.
The lamps were on the central switch Theresa had flipped, as was the desk lamp on the oak desk and a lamp set on a long, narrow table behind the big desk. Above the table was a bulletin board, five feet wide, reaching all the way to the ceiling. Affixed to the cork board with stick-pins were drawings and pictures of varying shapes and sizes. Theresa watched the men’s eyes swing in a survey of the room, saw them stop at the bulletin board. She waited.
Both men froze; their eyes open wide. Then, as if propelled by some unseen force, they crossed the room together to stand in front of the largest of the pictures on the bulletin board, a thirty-six by twenty-four-inch reproduction of an ancient painting, artist unknown.
Well, that there’s the ballgame. If’n I needed any more proof, that’s it.
She shook her head slowly. She was so tired.
Lord, I’m too old for this! I can’t do it again. Shoot, I couldn’t do it the first time. Couldn’t you…please…?
But there was nothing for it, of course. Jesus had asked for the cup to pass from him, too. Wouldn’t do her no good to plead—this was the way it had to be.
When she spoke, her voice was hushed, but she was sure Jack and Daniel heard her just fine.
“That painting, that’s an efreet.” She paused. “That there’s the demon king we up against.”
CHAPTER 26
Jack stood mesmerized by the image on the wall. He’d been drawn to it from across the room, had no memory of taking steps to get there. He had seen it and the rest of the world vanished, leaving him before it, staring up in wide-eyed revulsion and horror.
Cold, greasy terror crawled relentlessly through every turning of every blood vessel in his body. He could feel Daniel beside him, knew he was staring up at the painting, too. He could feel Daniel tremble. Or maybe it was Jack who was trembling.
As if from a great distance, he heard Theresa’s voice.
“That’s an efreet. That’s there’s the demon king we up against.”
Yes, it was an efreet. Jack knew that. He knew something else, too, and the knowledge stole his breath. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen it.
The painting showed a man with his back turned, standing amid tendrils of smoke on the charred, desolate shore of a lake of fire. A creature engulfed in flames rose up fifty feet above him out of the fiery lake. It was obscured by the smoke that hung in a pale haze over the lake, but you could see its silhouette, a shape made of darkness, a black hole in the universe, massive, with the suggestion of wings that, when unfurled, would stretch out twenty feet in both directions.
Jack could not make out anything about the creature—and yet he could. He couldn’t see it, but even in the not-seeing, images of horror in orange and red and black splashed across the transfixed retinas of his eyes. Images of a mouth with too many teeth. A head with horns. A face that defined ugliness.
What was astonishing was that the hazy dark image could convey such intense emotion. The shape, the thing hated. No, it didn’t merely hate. It was hate. It wasn’t filled with evil, it was made of evil. A life form devoid of all goodness and beauty, it had gathered together there in the blackness an unfathomable ugliness, the essence of cruelty and depravity. And evil. Total, all-encompassing evil. To see it clearly was to be blinded forever, to be sentenced to an eternity of darkness where no light shone, and where the darkness itself was a vicious, snarling beast hungry for your blood.
Mesmerized by the vile, otherworldliness of the creature, Jack was aware of breathing in short, panting gasps, felt his heart crash so hard against his shirt he could see the fabric move, each beat a sledge hammer blow trying to knock a hole in his chest.
Then the world went black and the image vanished.
Jack blinked, seemed almost to come back to himself from somewhere far away. He gasped, felt Daniel next to him sucking in air as well in the darkness. Theresa spoke from behind them.
“You turn around now, hear. Face me with yo backs to the wall and I’ll cut the lights back on.”
The men turned to face her, she flipped the switch and the lamps poured golden light back into the room. Jack started to look back over his shoulder at the picture, but decided against it. Theresa saw the move.
“You can look at it, but ain’t a good idea to stand there the way you done, staring at it. That image can grab hold of you. It’s so awful, the horror of it can wipe out every other thought in your head.”
Jack did turn then, looked back over his shoulder at the artist’s rendering of a nightmare creature. But what had grabbed hold of Jack and held him breathless was…what? A memory? Something like a memory, an image at least. An image of that creature. And the image wasn’t a painting.
Jack turned back resolutely to face Theresa, who had come into the room and eased herself into one of the armchairs beside a table and lamp.
“You’ve figured out something here, haven’t you?” He said. It wasn’t a question. “Are you going to tell us what’s going on?” He was surprised that his voice wasn’t shaking.
“You boys pull up chairs and I’ll do best as I can.”
He and Daniel dragged chairs across the room and sat opposite Theresa.
“This here”—she gestured at the room—“is…was Bishop’s library. He was an expert in demonology, pro’lly knew more ’bout them creatures than most anybody in the world today—though they used to be lots of people who studied demons, understood ’em. Not no more.”
“That thing, that efreet…” Daniel began. But he didn’t seem to have enough breath to go on so he had to inhale to continue. “What did you mean ‘that’s what we’re up against?’”
“Meant just what I said. That’s the demon that sent the other demons out looking for you two and Becca. They was just errand boys.”
“Why—?” Daniel began but Jack interrupted.
“Before we get to the why, I want to know the what.” He turned and gestured at the painting. “What is that thing?”
“You don’t remember, neither one of you?” she asked them, and her voice roughened, as if she was fighting tears. “You don’t recall that we done had this conversation? Well, you done had this conversation, only it was with Bishop. I’s just bringing in cookies and lemonade.”
She paused. “I made cookies ’cause you liked them, of course, but it was more that I wanted the house to smell of them, to smell good and wholesome and…well, they�
�s those believe chocolate chip cookies is holy and I’s one of them.”
It happened again, like it had before. A memory or a flashback was thrust out of the depths of Jack’s mind into the spotlight and he froze, mentally gaped at it in wonder.
The room smells of chocolate chip cookies and Bishop’s aftershave lotion. Jack doesn’t know what the name of it is, but he’s never smelled it on anybody but Bishop.
When I grow up, I’m going to smell like that.
The Three Musketeers are here, Jack and Daniel seated side by side on a lumpy couch in the small living room. Bishop sits across from them in a large chair and Becca is seated cross-legged on the floor at his feet. He leans toward them, his elbows on his knees, his huge, kind face looking intense and sincere.
“What you children needs to understand is that all them old stories—they’s mostly true. Some of them creatures we laugh about now, they’s real.”
“Victor’s demon has the ugly face of a dragon,” Becca says softly to Jack and Daniel. She looks up at Bishop. “Don’t you think?”
“All they faces is so ugly, it’s hard to say one’s uglier than another.”
Jack stares at the two of them, awestruck. They can see what nobody else can see. They can see demons, creatures from another realm, spiritual beings at war with God’s angels—monsters that have turned six of their friends into savages. Ok, maybe not their friends. Cole Stuart and Jacob Dumas would never have been their friends, but they’d just have been guys. Bullies, probably, but you could stand down a bully.
“We got to look back at the stories and folklore of the past to find out about demons, because they don’t come around out in the open anymore like they used to hundreds of years ago.”
“Why not?” Jack asks.
“’Cause Satan done figured out that being secretive is the best way to accomplish what he wants in the world.”
“And what he wants to accomplish is…?” Daniel asks.
Jack suspects Daniel already knows the answer to the question. Daniel often asks questions he already knows the answers to because he knows Jack doesn’t know. Daniel’s like that. He senses Jack feels “less than” sometimes, because the others are so “spiritual.” Daniel also knows sometimes Jack doesn’t want to let on that he doesn’t understand, so Daniel pretends he doesn’t understand so Jack won’t feel bad.