by Peter Nealen
I closed my eyes. “Just got a bit of a reminder, that's all.” I whispered an Our Father. It's a simple prayer, but an effective one. When I opened my eyes again, everything around us looked...paler. To include the house. I could almost see a tool shed inside of it. “Everything here is an illusion. We stepped into a waking dream that something concocted for just this purpose; to disorient and trap us. But we're still awake, still in the real world. We've just got to see through the dream. Sam taught me that, in Silverton.” I looked around, raising my voice so the rest could hear me. “Pray for clarity, and concentrate on what you know is real. The rest will fade.” Even as I spoke, the horror-movie set got a little paler, a little more transparent. I was pretty sure if I walked up to several of the trees, I could pass my hand right through them.
“Well, well, well.” The deep, resonant voice was the same volume and timbre as the booming laugh that had replied to my pistol shots. “This is magnificent! Before today, I could count the number of mortals who gave me this kind of sport on one hand.” The antlered figure was standing only yards away, still as shadowed as before, except for its eyes. It's tattered cloak still stirred as if blown by a breeze none of us could feel.
And it was still as solid-looking as ever. It was no illusion.
“Of course, I've never faced true Witch Hunters before, either. My preferred quarry tends to be a bit less...formidable. Unrepentant sinners and the like. Truly,” it said, a tinge of regret in its voice, “I would rather it not have to end this way. Professional courtesy, and all that. But in this case, alas, the One who called upon me to hold this place for him is great enough to override my personal preferences. He has my word that none shall leave here alive until he gives the word.”
The great, antlered head tilted as if in thought. “However...I truly would regret simply killing you out of hand. After what you have already accomplished here, it would be downright unsporting. If there was only a way...hmm. Perhaps there is. There is a task you could perform, that might just buy you your lives. It will not be an easy one; in fact, the odds of meeting your deaths in its accomplishment are quite high. But it might at least spare me the disappointment of having to end your lives myself, while giving you something of a sporting chance.”
“Save your breath,” Eryn snapped. I still had my arm around her. “We don't make deals with demons.”
“Your manners are lacking, young lady,” the thing said, its voice dropping an octave. “I am no denizen of The Abyss. Under the circumstances, I might find it in me to forgive such an insult, however.” Its eyes seemed to home in on Father Ignacio. “Well, priest?” it asked. “Will you hear my offer? There is no other way out. Your Hunter here might be seeing through my glamours, but do not think I cannot still prevent you from leaving. I have forborne killing you outright so far out of respect, one Hunter to other Hunters. Refuse me, and that will change.”
Father hesitated. I understood why. Deals with the Fae are treacherous. Remember what I said before about how they always stack the deck? Always. Without fail.
But what other choice did we have? Dishonest the Fae might be, but they are rarely outright lying. No, they prefer to twist and stroke what they say so that they can tell you the absolute truth while still leading you to believe something entirely false. Still, I believed that thing when it said it could and would kill us all, and so did Father Ignacio, because he had more experience with these things than any of the rest of us.
Finally, with a faint sigh, Father said, “Tell us about your little task.”
The thing nodded. “I knew you'd see sense. Some chance is better than no chance at all.” It looked around, taking in the entire town as it did so. “This place is a battleground, one I have cast a spell of confusion over in order to calm it. There are creatures within this town that should not be, abominations against Nature and the Natural Order of things. You have seen some of them; misshapen mockeries of men. You know of what I speak.”
It was another indication that there was more than one unnatural force at work. If the humanoid monsters weren't this thing's doing, where did they come from? But all of us nodded, if reluctantly.
“I will give you a Hunter's chance,” it said. “Cleanse this place of these twisted creatures, and I will let you go free. I shall face the Great One's wrath with pride, should you accomplish this.” It faded back into the shadows near the gas station, which I could now see clearly through the fading illusion of the trees.
Before anyone could say another word, a wild, gibbering howl went up all across the town, which was now emerging from the mist of the Fae's glamour. It was loud, crazy, and all around us.
“Everybody get in the shed!” I yelled, as I grabbed for Blake. The first weird, twisted figures were already starting to boil out of the alleys and side streets. There were a lot of them.
Chapter 12
It wasn't a large shed, and there was a lot of stuff in the way, but desperation can speed things up like nothing else. In moments, the scrap, junk, and handful of lawn tools that had been cluttering up the shed were piled in the big yard that still held the ghosts of twisted, menacing trees and creepy streetlamps, and all eight of us, with all of our weapons, had crammed inside, with about six barrels pointed at the door. We barely got inside in time.
Aside from the headless example we'd run into earlier, I'd never quite gotten a real good look at the monsters lurking in Ophir. They were actually more horrific than the flesh golems in Bowesmont had been; while the golems were all fairly human in shape, if mismatched and twisted, these things were truly devoid of much of any apparent humanity.
A mass of bunched muscles with too many limbs, to include several tentacles and what looked like a lobster's claws came barreling at the shed, howling through a sphincter of a mouth that had completely taken the place of a face, in a head that was almost implanted on the thing's shoulders without a neck. It didn't have teeth so much as it had articulated talons arranged around the mouth. I didn't see any eyes. I think every one of us who had a shot blasted the thing from about twenty feet away. Very human-looking, bright red blood splashed from multiple large-caliber holes, and the thing dropped on its non-face. There were no searing flames, none of the usual reactions to silver or iron that might have been elicited by the jackets on the bullets. As soon as it fell dead, it started to shrink.
Nobody had time to notice much of its postmortem transformation, because about a dozen others were trying to scramble over its corpse to get at us, clawing at each other and getting in each others' way in the process. The two that I could kind of sort out of the mass of limbs and puckered, bloody flesh were the bigger ones. One had horns the size of a longhorn steer's coming out of either side of its head, a tongue about three feet long, and two-foot talons sprouting out of hands and feet. It was the most humanoid of the two; the other one was shaped much like a mutant silverback gorilla, except with a grossly elongated neck sloping into a misshapen skull with an enormously outsized lower jaw sprouting a thicket of crooked, viciously barbed teeth.
Another fusillade of rifle and shotgun fire slammed into the two big monsters. The thunder of gunfire was deafening in the tiny shed, but under the circumstances, nobody was going to be complaining much about the ringing in their ears, provided they came out the other side intact.
The hail of silver, steel, and lead slammed into the monsters and blew sizable chunks out of both of them. The horned one took my bullet between its squinty eyes, and half of the back of its skull was blasted off. It sort of crumpled where it was. I worked the lever, cranking another round into the chamber, all too aware that I only had five left, shifted, and shot the other one in its cavernous maw, which by then was close enough that we could smell the rotten-meat stench coming out of that hedge of teeth. About four rounds hit that one in the face at the same time, blasting teeth to splinters and pulping one of its too-large, glaring eyes. It fell on top of one of the smaller creatures, which started apparently trying to eat its way out from under the mountain of
twisted meat on top of it.
Killing the big ones hadn't done a thing to slow down the tide of warped, spiny flesh bearing down on us. I shot something that looked like a slightly over-exaggerated version of an old-fashioned illustration of Old Scratch, just with a cluster of about twenty eyes in the middle of its forehead instead of horns, worked the lever, and blasted an apish creature with four arms and an extra mouth growing out of its shoulder before frantically shoving more rounds into the loading port, while Eryn pushed in front of me to take up the fire with her shotgun.
“What I wouldn't give for a couple of belt-feds right now!” I shouted over the roar of gunfire.
“No kidding!” Tall Bear replied. His AR was actually doing pretty well from what I could see, in marked contrast to how it had performed on anything Otherworldly so far. But he was running out of mags, a situation that we were all going to be facing sooner rather than later. “Where are they all coming from?”
Eryn ran her tube dry and fell back, an awkward, jostling affair that resulted in more than a few jogged elbows and missed shots as I moved up to take her place, just in time to shoot a frog-faced, wart-encrusted creature in the chest from point-blank range. I actually think I left some powder burns on it. It screamed in a croaking voice and fell backwards.
“All right,” Charlie yelled, “That's it! Everybody look alive!” It took me a second to realize he'd lit one of his Molotovs, especially since I'd just fired again when he started shouting. Unfortunately, there really wasn't room in that tiny shack to get away from him; I just had to hope he didn't drop the thing before the flame reached the gas in the bottle. Especially considering the fact that he wasn't exactly right in the doorway.
He flung the little bottle of liquid fire, hooking it through the door and right at something that had so many horns bursting out of its inflamed flesh that it was a wonder it could move at all. The bottle exploded on impact, showering the horny thing and several other monsters in burning gasoline.
They were about as resistant to fire as they were to bullets, by which I mean not very. Soon about half a dozen were thrashing around, screaming and burning. Several of the others were still trying to get to us, but Charlie had inflamed his inner firebug, and already had two more lit cocktails sailing out the door as fast as he could light and throw. The fireworks were impressive, I'll say that much, and Charlie's aim was equally so. In a few seconds, we had a fiercely burning half-circle in front of the shed, and the monsters were starting to shy back from it, as apparently afraid of fire as they were unafraid of bullets. Weird, I know, but nothing else in that town was normal or logical, so I didn't spend a lot of mental energy thinking about it. I was just thankful for the respite.
For a long moment, it didn't seem to sink in. We all still had our guns up, crammed into the relatively narrow firing port afforded by the door, and just stood or crouched there, panting, sweating, watching the mob of hideous creatures swarming on the other side of the fire. There still seemed to be hundreds of them, though some of that might have been an illusion born of fear and the feeling of being cornered.
I had just run the Winchester dry, even though I had been trying to top it off every three or four rounds, and now I frantically crammed another eight rounds through the loading port as fast as I could make my hands work. Take the time when you've got it.
“Well, New Guy,” Charlie said to Tall Bear after a moment, “feeling in over your head yet?”
“Why don't you let me worry about that?” the big deputy retorted, deftly swapping magazines. He kept his eyes focused outward, but I still noticed the slight shake in his hands as he did the mag change. He was rattled, probably more rattled than he'd ever been in his life. He was holding it together pretty well, but he was getting a more brutally mind-shredding introduction to the darker side of existence than most of us got, and it was shaking him to his core.
Well, he could join the club. This entire job was turning out to be beyond creepy. It was disturbing on a level I doubted I'd ever experienced myself. I'd thought Silverton had been bad, but it had been a kind of bad that brought the cavalry running in the form of The Captain of the Archangels. This apparently wasn't on that level, which just made dealing with it that much harder for us mere mortals.
“What are these things?” Eryn asked, still staring at the creatures. “I've never even heard about anything like them.” She frowned. “Of course, I'm still learning, but I'd think that they would be memorable enough that somebody would have written something down about them.”
“I don't think these are typical monsters, Otherworldly or otherwise,” Tyrese said. He was squinting at the corpses through the fire and the heat haze. While the illusions that the antlered thing had thrown up had faded, the overarching darkness and bruise-purple sky hadn't; it was still just as dark as it had been. “I might be mistaken—in fact, I hope I am—but it kind of looks like they're shrinking into human corpses once they're dead.”
I squinted at the heap of burning and dead flesh outside. The light was really bad, but I thought I could see what he was talking about. It was hard to tell, but the shapes slumped on the ground did look more human. Even as I watched, the frog-faced abomination I'd shot, that was still lying not six feet from the open door, shrank into a pale, flabby, middle-aged man with a patchy beard.
“Oh, hell,” I said, a leaden feeling in my gut. “Here we go again.” I ran my free hand over my face. “This is getting to be the highest body count I've ever seen in one of these incidents.” And the fact that I'd dropped the hammer on more than a few of the dead people wasn't far from my mind at the moment, either. Forgive me, Lord, I prayed. I had no other choice. Eryn started to shake a little at the sight, and I knew she was struggling not to cry. Coldwell had been bad enough. Now this.
Father Ignacio seemed to have heard the prayer, even though I hadn't said a word of it. Or, more likely, he just knew me that well. His hand descended on my shoulder. “Self defense has never been murder,” he said softly. “The people in Coldwell, these...people, or what were people, here...they were trying to kill you, and us. You really had no choice.”
“So, if they were, or are, actually human,” Miguel asked, “What's turned them into these things? Just being a horrible person doesn't make you a twisted monster, not physically. At least not that I've ever seen. Are they all cultists? Did they conduct some kind of--” he swallowed “--ritual to do this?”
Edgar, who was pressed against my shoulder, his Remington 760 still aimed out the door, actually shuddered. That reminded me that the twins, while ordinarily stoic, slightly machismo types, had found themselves engaged with a cult down in New Mexico that, in trying to “rediscover” old Anasazi rituals, had bound themselves to a Yahui. It had gotten ugly; that was all anyone besides the brothers knew. They wouldn't talk about it except in the most general terms. Apparently, the trauma still ran pretty deep.
“I doubt it,” Father said. “I've seen some pretty rotten towns, but this doesn't feel like a cult, for some reason. Especially not with the way that Fae described it.”
“You're thinking a curse?” Tyrese asked.
“Quite possibly,” Father replied with a deep breath.
“Oh, boy,” Charlie said sarcastically. “This ought to be fun.” He looked over at Tall Bear. “Ever seen a big curse lifted, New Guy? It gets messy. And ugly. Think The Exorcist.”
“No, I haven't,” Tall Bear bit out. “But it can't be much uglier than what I've seen so far.”
“That's enough, Charlie,” Ian said suddenly. “Some of us still remember your first meeting with a Stick Indian.” Charlie's mouth shut with a snap. I looked at Eryn, who was a little red-eyed, and raised an eyebrow. I hadn't heard that story. It was also the most I'd heard Ian say in days.
“What do you need us to do, Father?” I asked, ignoring the byplay. The monsters outside looked like they were getting restless again, and we didn't have time. I could dig into things later.
“Just keep them out,” he said. “This
could take a while.” He knelt down on the tiny patch of open floor he could find in the crowded shed, drew out his Rosary and the crucifix with one hand, and opened a small prayer book with the other. He had quite a job on his hands. Exorcisms aren't generally much fun; demons don't let go without a fight. It's the exorcist's faith and willpower against an ancient, powerful, inimical spirit with a bottomless malice and hatred for mankind. Lifting curses is, as Charlie had pointed out, comparable. There was something holding sway over these people and what was left of their lives. It had to be banished, and its influence with it.
The power involved in not only controlling people, but actually twisting their physical forms is considerable, let's put it that way. Curses might be a little more indirect than outright possession, but there's always a demon at the root of it. And this one wasn't going to give up without one hellacious fight.
“How's everybody fixed for ammo?” I asked. There was more movement outside, beyond the fire. I checked my own bandolier as I asked. It was still about two-thirds full.
One by one, each Hunter reported how much he had left. So far, I was surprised to note, everybody was hovering between half and two-thirds of what they'd brought in, aside from Tall Bear, who was running low. Nobody else was shooting .223, and his supply was somewhat more limited than the rest of ours. Eryn and I had cases of .45-70 and 12 gauge in the truck, and I was sure the rest had similar stashes of their chosen cartridges, too. Unfortunately, the generally solo nature of the work was threatening to work against us; few of us were running the same caliber, making sharing ammo difficult to impossible.
Father waited, his head bowed, until after Miguel had called out that he still had about sixty rounds left. Then he lifted his head, crossed himself, and began.
True to expectations, not long after Father started the rite, his gravelly Latin chanting barely audible over the hoots and shrieks from outside, not to mention the crackling of flames steadily consuming dead flesh, the demented things outside apparently got over their consternation and fear of the fire, and tried to charge again. The flames were going down a bit on the right, so they all tried to cram in there.