by Simon Holt
Reggie whispered, “Something else is in there.” She shined the light at the room’s ceiling.
The shadow darkened.
“It looks like smoke,” said Aaron. “No, wait. You don’t think it’s…”
Black vapor formed, rolling in on itself like burning paper. It was thicker and denser than smoke. Reggie, Aaron, and Eben watched it meld into an oily cloud, roiling as it grew ever darker.
“Move away from the glass, Regina,” Eben whispered with urgency. “Do it now.”
“Is it — I mean — could it be one of them? The thing from the cornfield?” Aaron asked. The bat trembled in his hand.
“It can’t get out,” Reggie said. “Macie imprisoned it. She did it. She caught the monster that took her brother.”
“You don’t know what this thing can do,” Eben said. “Please back away, now.”
Aaron’s voice shook, and he stepped back. “Reggie, come on.”
He pulled on her sleeve, but she shook him off. She couldn’t take her eyes from the swirling smoke; it undulated with some sort of sickening purpose, something too dark and cold to call “life.”
The baseball bat dropped from Aaron’s hand and clattered to the floor. “I can’t … I can’t … ,” he mumbled as he backed away. He tripped at the base of the stairs and then dashed up them like a fleeing animal.
Reggie’s body felt leaden. Eben touched her hand.
“Regina, step away from the glass.”
“No.”
Her gaze locked on the window. Above them, Aaron’s footsteps crushed bones as he raced through the living room.
“Regina … ,” Eben pleaded.
“Something’s going to happen.”
The cloud fumed and churned over the corpse, seeming to pull the flashlight’s beam into itself and devour it.
“Regina, I —”
“Go with Aaron! I’m staying!”
The chair inside the glass rocked, and Jeremiah’s skull moved back and forth on its skeletal neck, as if it were nodding at her, saying Yes, it’s all true.
The skull snapped off, rolled down the chest, bounced off a knee, and shattered into pieces on the floor.
A face emerged from the smoke, a relief in the vapor. The features melted and reformed. It settled into the countenance of a sad, young boy, and spoke with a voice of rustling leaves.
“Let me devour your fear.”
A piercing chill swept across Reggie’s body. Nausea seized her.
The boy’s face twisted into something inhuman — vicious, pitiless. Its sooty maw opened, tendrils of smoke wafted out like vipers, and a deep inhuman voice called to them.
“Let … me … out.”
Pulsing vibrations coursed through the room, thick with madness and hate, making Reggie clench her jaw and wobble on her feet.
“Can you feel it, Eben?” she asked.
“Yes. I —” He coughed and cleared his throat. He tried to take a breath, but doubled over, gasping.
“Eben!”
Another violent spasm sent him to his knees. Reggie dropped the flashlight as she knelt in front of him. She grabbed his shoulders.
“Breathe!”
The coughing stopped, and he gulped in some air.
“I’m okay,” he raised his head. Blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth.
“Eben…”
Eben raised a hand to his lips and blanched at his crimson fingertips. He took another breath, but it caught in his chest.
“Oh, no … Eben…”
He erupted in a wrenching, jagged cough, and a torrent of blood spewed from his mouth, splashing his shirt and the floor. Reggie screamed. Eben gasped and gagged, reeling back before his body stiffened and jackknifed over again. His jaws opened wide, and a thick red gush splattered at Reggie’s feet; it gathered in an expanding wet heap of ropy organs and gore. She stood frozen in shock as Eben convulsed. Damp pink lungs slithered from his mouth and hung like fleshy pendulums from his chin.
Something grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around.
“Regina!” Eben shouted. “Can you hear me?”
She blinked rapidly and saw her old friend standing before her. The blood was gone.
It had been a nightmare, a waking nightmare.
It was the Vour.
“We’re getting out of here — now,” said Eben.
She felt defiled … violated.
Through the window, the smoky face stared at her. There was an intelligence at work behind the glass. Venomous and clever. Cruel. She saw the faint curl of a smile on the thing’s lips. It had sensed her fears, rummaged through them, and played one out for her in her head. The eyes gleamed hatefully.
The face caved in on itself, like bones giving way. The whole of it whirled into a vortex, fueled by a growing fury. The chair rocked faster and faster until the corpse collapsed: neck, clavicle, scapulae, ribs, sternum — one after another the bones tumbled to the floor in a heap. The skeleton’s forearms, hands, and shins remained tied to the chair.
The frenzied, smoky Vour whipped around its prison until it suddenly rushed the window.
“LET — ME — OUT!”
It smashed into the glass and burst into bits of smoke. And then it was gone.
Reggie’s entire body quaked. Eben put his arm around her and helped her up the stairs.
Aaron huddled by the front tire of the Cadillac with his head in his hands. When he saw Eben and Reggie coming toward him he jumped to his feet.
“Reggie, I’m sorry, I —”
“Get in the car,” said Eben.
Reggie lay down in the backseat and Eben drove away from the house. Aaron reached back from the front seat and took Reggie’s hand, but he couldn’t say anything. Reggie’s tears had left thin, pink trails down her dust-coated face.
“It was a Vour,” she murmured. “Now I understand what she was talking about.”
“What do you mean?” asked Aaron.
“Give me the book.”
Aaron pulled his copy of The Devouring from the backpack at his feet and handed it to her. She paged through it until she found what she was looking for.
“I stayed with it for fifty years,” Reggie read aloud. “When the cancer began to eat at the body and it couldn’t get out of bed, I knew what I was going to do. My brother would have his revenge, even if I had to do it for him. And the more bitter the wound, the sweeter the vengeance.”
Reggie caught Eben’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Macie built that room and sealed Jeremiah in. She trapped the Vour when her brother died.” She closed the book. “It’s true. It’s all true. Eben, what do we do?”
“I don’t know, Regina. I don’t know.”
“We need to —”
“No! Never return to that place. No one can know of what we’ve seen. And God help us if that thing is ever set free.”
They rumbled over the gravel, through the woods, and out onto the main road. No one said another word the whole way home.
13
Aaron wanted to hang on to his copy of the book that night, but offered to print one out for Reggie later. When Eben dropped her off at home, she raced up to the bathroom, stripped down, and let the steaming water hammer at her, as if it could wash away the horrifying memories of the Vour in the basement and of Eben spewing blood.
Back in her room, she eyed the volumes on her bookshelf: the abominations of Lovecraft, the creatures of King, Stoker’s seductive vampirism, Poe’s deathly plots. She and her mother had read half of them together for bedtime stories, her mother’s voice giving life to all of the horrible, beautiful monsters.
“I sure hope I’m not turning you into a paranoid neurotic reading you this stuff,” Mom would say, seated in the chair by Reggie’s bedside.
“Don’t stop now, Mom. It’s getting good!”
“It doesn’t scare you?”
“Well … a little bit.”
“Hmmm, I guess that could be a good thing.” Mom laughed. “That y
ou’re not scared of being scared. Maybe you won’t grow up to be a wuss like me.”
“You’re not a wuss, Mom.”
“In some ways I am.”
“Like how?”
“Well, sometimes when things scare me, I want to turn and run away. But not you. You get in the face of what scares you.” She poked a finger in Reggie’s cheek. “You’re a little Mithri-dates.”
“Miss Who?”
“King Mithridates.” Mom put the book aside. “Mithridates became a king when he was just a boy. His greatest fear was that someone would poison him to steal his throne. So he gathered up every poison that grew in the kingdom, and as the years went by, each day he ate a tiny bit of one — wolfsbane, deadly nightshade, hemlock, snake root — a different poison every day to strengthen himself against their effects. Three times in his reign traitors poisoned him, but they couldn’t kill the king. In a way, he conquered his fear by making it part of him. Like what we do with the books.”
“Is that true?” Reggie had asked, wide-eyed.
Mom nodded.
“I tell the tale that I heard told. Mithridates, he died old.”
Reggie stared at the empty chair, wishing she could go back to those times, if only for a moment.
“So, Mom, got any more words of wisdom?” she asked aloud. “Maybe something on killing Vours? If you do, feel free to call, anytime.”
She got into bed, pulled the covers around her, and fell asleep, wondering if she could ever do what Jeremiah’s sister had done.
The Vour’s words poured through her head like sewer sludge. Let me devour your fear. Devour your fear. Devour your fear. It was a mantra repeated in the book as well. What did it mean?
Reggie woke with a start. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep, but it was dark outside. Her cell phone was ringing, chirping out Carpenter’s Halloween theme. She clumsily grabbed at it and put it to her ear.
“Hello?” she mumbled.
“Reggie?” It was Aaron’s voice. “Reggie, I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Yeah, I’m just dandy.”
“I wanted to talk about something. We have proof that Vours exist now, right?”
“I’d say so,” Reggie replied. “Or we’re all suffering a group delusion.”
“I’m trying to figure out some way to come at these things. Macie’s journal’s got plenty of info, but she goes so wacko partway through that it gets harder and harder to make sense of her entries.”
“I’ve been thinking about it, too. You come up with anything?”
“Well, we saw markings like the ones in the journal on the walls of the Vour’s cell. On its window, too. I’ve looked for those symbols in every book of magical weirdness I could get my hands on. Found nothing. Macie just scrawled them without any explanation. They’re useless to us right now. We have to work with what we know.”
“Which isn’t a lot.”
“But better than nothing. As far as we know, it’s impossible to tell a normal human from a Vour-ized one just by looking at them, but there are some signs. Vours detest the cold, for example — we proved that one with Henry. When I hit him with the snowball, his skin turned black, like a severe case of frostbite.”
“And he wanted to touch fire, so they’ve got some fixation with heat,” said Reggie.
“Also, we know Vours manifest as smoke. And lastly, according to Macie, Vours can’t cry.”
“But how can I stop one?”
“That’s the thing. There’s no real science to guide us here — and we know Macie never discovered a magic bullet. If she had, she would’ve saved Jeremiah instead of watching him die.”
“So Henry’s lost to us forever?” Reggie’s voice cracked when she spoke.
“Look, we can’t give up. We just can’t. I have an idea,” Aaron said. “I know this is going to sound dumb, but it’s all we’ve got, so hear me out.”
“Okay.”
“First of all, we know they’ve got a weakness — the cold thing. They’re not some sort of Lovecraftian Elder Gods or anything.”
“Wonderful. So I don’t have to worry about Henry swallowing our entire planet. He’ll just kill off pets and give me hallucinations, until he goes psycho like Joseph Garney and wipes out a Sunday school class. I’ll sleep much better now.”
“Look, I’m going somewhere with this. If it has a weakness, then it’s not invulnerable. If it’s not invulnerable —”
“Then we can destroy it,” Reggie finished.
“Exactly.”
“So we freeze the Vour to death?” Reggie asked.
“It might not be that simple. We don’t know where Henry’s consciousness is, so killing the Vour may not be enough. You have to rescue Henry’s soul, or whatever, and get it back in his body.”
“And if we freeze Henry’s body, we might kill the Vour, but we’d also kill Henry.”
“There’s something else,” said Aaron. “Think about Jeremiah. His body was dead, but the Vour wasn’t. It was trapped, and it couldn’t get back to where it came from, but it didn’t die.”
“Great. They’re immortal.”
“Maybe. But right now, we just have to take care of Henry, which means really going toe-to-toe with his Vour and dragging it out of his body. And that brings me to my second point,” he said. “We know we can’t fight the Vour physically, because we risk hurting Henry’s body.”
“So what does that leave us?”
“There’s only one thing I can think of. We need to go after them the same way they come after us. It’s not our bodies they attack, for the most part. They go after our minds. What we need is a way to connect to the Vour psychically.”
“How are we supposed to do that?”
“That’s the big question — and I don’t know the answer yet.”
“You don’t know? That’s not much of a second point, Aaron.”
“It’s still a developing plan, okay? Listen, the reason I mentioned point number two is that it leads up to point number three. If and when we get that psychic connection with the Vour, I think it’s a pretty good bet it’ll throw everything it’s got at us. Now, what do you think is its greatest weapon?”
“Fear,” Reggie said. “They’re drawn to it. They feed on it. They attack us with it.”
“That’s what I think, too. Which means we’ve got to get a whole lot braver … and quickly.” Aaron chuckled bitterly.
Reggie heard voices through the vent in the wall. Dad was in Henry’s room, tucking him in for the night.
“Fear is poison,” she said.
“What?”
“Fear. It’s like poison,” she said, “or a disease. You just need to build up immunity, little by little, or get an inoculation. You have to face it, and beat it, if you ever want to be able to keep it out for good.”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve read more horror novels and seen more monster movies than anyone I know, except maybe you. And all this still scares the shit out of me. This is real.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I’ve got to go. Let’s talk more to-morrow.”
“Hey, Reg?”
“Yeah?”
Aaron was silent for a moment before he asked, “Where do you think they come from? And why do they want to do this to us?”
“I’m not sure I even want to know. I just want Henry back.” She clicked off the phone.
Dad’s muffled voice drifted through the vent, speaking to the thing that pretended to be Henry in the room next door. She knew what it was. It was a Vour. She knew the horror of what it could do to her, and to the people she loved. It wasn’t fear she felt now — it was rage.
“I tell the tale that I heard told,” she said through gritted teeth, “Mithridates, he died old.”
Reggie climbed onto her desk chair and pressed her ear to the vent. Voices wafted in on the warm caress of central heating.
“You feeling okay?” Dad asked.
“Sorta, yeah, I guess,” said Henry.
“Well,” Henry said, “it’s Reggie.”
“What about Reggie?”
“I’m not tattling, but I love Reggie. And she’s different.”
Reggie’s brow rose. The monster was really good. Right down to the little catch in his throat when he said, “I love Reggie.”
“Different how?”
“I think maybe she’s getting high, Dad,” Henry said. “Maybe Aaron, too.”
Reggie would have laughed at the thought of Aaron Cole riding around on his ten-speed with a big joint hanging out his mouth, if the Vour hadn’t been playing to Dad so well. He was better than really good. He was brilliant.
“Why would you think that?” Dad asked.
“They talked about it in school, and I saw those commercials — but, well, she’s been getting weirder, and that’s what they say to look for. We could make a whole list of stuff about her — right?”
Reggie heard Dad’s weary sigh, and knew Henry had sunk the hook in nicely.
“Thanks for caring, Henry,” Dad said. “Your sister’s lucky to have you. Go to sleep now.”
“Okay.”
The vent’s warm air bathed Reggie’s cheek with a faint whoosh. What was Dad doing now? Kissing Henry goodnight? Pulling the covers up? Going down the hall to make a phone call to some tough-love intervention group? Hello. My name is Thom Halloway. I have a fifteen-year-old daughter named Regina who appears to be in some sort of crisis and may be using drugs, but her mother walked out on us and I am totally incapable of functioning as a father on any meaningful, emotional level. Can you people do it for me?
The air from the vent stopped blowing.
A whisper crept into her ear from just behind the vent. Deep. Sonorous. Frigid.
“Regina…”
It was Henry. Gone was the naive, eight-year-old voice he’d just used with her father. The thin metal bars of the vent seemed an appropriate mouth for this voice: heartless, cold, and cruel.
“You’re a very curious girl,” said Henry.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean, Regina. What’s the old saying? Ah, I remember now. ‘Curiosity flayed the cat alive, ripped it apart limb from limb, and listened to it scream before it killed it.’ That’s the one.”