by N. P. Martin
Maybe the demon will come across with a lead.
Something else I wasn’t comfortable with. Did I really want to be in debt to a demon?
Yes, if it helps to catch this killer.
Looked like I didn’t have a choice then.
A small sigh escaped my lips, and I looked at Leona, who was driving as erratically as ever as she headed for the expressway exit up ahead. “You alright?” I asked, settling back into my relationship with her, enjoying the deeper connection between us again.
"I just want to catch this creep before he kills any more people," she said, yanking hard on the steering wheel to overtake the car in front. "This is my town, and I don't like motherfucker's painting it with innocent blood."
“I get you.”
Leona hated Blackham city when she first arrived. Coming from West Virginia, she was used to wide open spaces and huge skylines. City life got to her. In case you haven’t guessed, Leona is not a people person. Although she could interact quite expertly with others when she needed to, she preferred her own company. So being around so many people in a packed city like Blackham was a struggle for Leona, as it was for me at first as well. You get used to it, though, and if you hung around the city long enough, you even grew attached to the place, as both Leona and I had done. Despite our backgrounds, Blackham is where we called home, for better or worse, and we could both be protective of that home, especially Leona.
“Thanks, by the way,” I said to her. “For helping me. For trusting me when you didn’t even know who I was. Knowing you, I’m sure it wasn’t easy.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Yet you did. Why?”
She turned the SUV off the main road and into the Lafayette neighborhood. Lafayette was a shithole. That’s about the only way to describe the place. A sprawling rats nest of low rent housing and rundown tenement buildings that spilt over into nearby Little Haiti. Not a place I had visited very often in the past. Not too much magickal goings on there. Gang-related activity was the only thing that happened in Lafayette. Once upon a time, the place was up and coming, but something happened during its development, and most of the investment got pulled. Of the businesses that were built in that development stage, only a few survived, mainly just essential services like corner stores and a gas station. And a cinema, believe it or not. Which is exactly where we were heading to.
“You seemed to be telling the truth,” Leona said. “You knew things. That was enough for me.”
"Admit it," I said smiling. "You just couldn't resist my Irish charm again, could you?"
A smirk creased her lips. “Wise up.”
“That’s what I thought.”
As Leona negotiated the narrow streets while we headed for our destination, I stared out the window at the dilapidation all around us and the human detritus in the form of gangs, bums and drug addicts that littered every street. I used to think that parts of Ireland were bad until I came to the States and saw what real poverty and degradation looked like.
“Can you believe there’s a cinema in this dump?” Leona said. “Why would this place need a cinema of all things?”
“It’s a relic from times past that shows mostly classic movies. Even these people need a bit of escapism, you know.”
“I thought that’s what the drugs were for.”
I shook my head. “You have a dim view of people sometimes.”
"Hey, I just think people need to help themselves because sure as shit no one else is going to do it for them. If they want to remain in their filthy origins, then I have no sympathy for them."
"Not everyone wants to join the military," I said, well aware of Leona's convictions when it came to personal development, which the Army only strengthened.
"I get that, but look at them." She gestured out the window at the people lining the streets, nearly all of them staring hard at us as we drove by. "They don't even try."
“Maybe they’re happy where they are. You ever think of that?”
“I doubt it, but more fool them if they are.”
I shook my head as we came upon the roadblock that cut off the street near the cinema. Leona put her window down and flashed her ID at one of the uniformed cops manning the barriers. The cop nodded at her and signaled for the barriers to be moved so we could drive through. On down the street was the cinema, flanked on either side by empty tenements and a corner store across the street. As expected, the street was full of dark-suited government agents and parked SUVs. I also noticed the black trucks, three of them, which I knew were meat wagons there to transport the dead to Division HQ in the Highlands. Leona parked the SUV in the first free spot she found, and we both got out, heading grimly towards the cinema building.
The Roundhouse Cinema was an incongruous looking building made out of white stone, with two thick pillars manning the steps to the entrance. When it was first built, I was sure the Roundhouse was a grand building, but after years of abuse by the Lafayette residents, it looked more like something that might be used as a drug den with nearly every inch of stone covered in old and new graffiti. Chunks were missing from some of the stone blocks as well, almost as if bullets had struck off them, which, to be honest, was probably the case. It amazed me that a place such as The Roundhouse had stayed open for so long and I couldn't imagine how hard it must have been for the owners to have maintained the place in such a hostile environment over the years.
Leona flashed her ID at a couple of dark suits who tried to stop us on the way into the cinema (mainly because of me, I have to say, as always). Once inside, we stood for a moment and looked around as the intense activity of the crime scene agents continued around us, with forensics teams and investigators scurrying back and forth or hovering to talk in small groups. A few of them gave me dirty looks as our paths had crossed before, and not in a good way obviously. There were no cops inside the building, only Brentwood’s people. As always, Brentwood was keeping the scene locked down tight.
The foyer of the Roundhouse was an open square space with marble floors. Tattered red curtains hung down the whitewashed walls. To our left was the ticket booth, the owners having learned from experience to protect the booth with bullet proof glass. Above the circular hole at the bottom of the glass was another less symmetrical hole at about head height, the impact clearly caused by a bullet. I shook my head at the surreality of the place and headed towards the door of the main cinema room up ahead, Leona falling in beside me. The two agents guarding the door moved aside as Leona showed them her ID. “He in there?” she asked one of the guards, a tall man with a goatee.
“Yep,” the agent said. “I should warn you. It’s rough in there.”
Leona shook her head. “Is it ever anything else?”
39
Green Fire
THE FIRST THING that hit me as I the screening room was the smell. The putrid stench of blood and offal, and of urine and loosened bowels. Something you might get if you put the worst toilet in the world inside an abattoir. As horrible as the smell was, though, I was used to it, having come across enough dead bodies over the years. What disturbed me more was the acrid smell underneath all the death. The smell of black magick, so thick and cloying in the stuffy cinema that it felt like you could reach out and grab a handful of the stuff from the air as if grabbing a handful of treacle.
And speaking of treacle, black stuff oozed down the red painted walls like blood, but much thicker. More like tar. A forensics guy was going around scraping samples of the stuff into Petri dishes. Which horrified me slightly, because if he knew exactly what he was dealing with, the technician wouldn't be going anywhere near that foul substance.
"Mr Black," I uttered to myself.
"What?" Leona asked, too preoccupied with trying to process the carnage all around her to pay me much attention.
"Mr Black was here."
"No shit." She pointed to the dirty white cinema screen and the words there written in blood in large letters: RLOTH, EATER OF WORLDS, IS COMING.
"At l
east he bothered with punctuation. Most serial killers don't, I find. Usually too worked up and in too much of a rush to even think about it."
Leona gave me a hard look. “Are you fucking kidding me right now? All these bodies and you’re talking about fucking punctuation?”
"I just mean the killer was calm and collected enough to use it. He was in no hurry. It also obviously mattered to him, otherwise, why bother?"
Shaking her head, Leona stared around the room at the dead bodies that seemed to be in every seat. “Well, he’s hurrying up his body count, that’s for sure. How many would you say are in here?”
“Sixty-seven.”
That wasn't me who said that, but Brentwood, who came walking up the center isle to us, more grim-faced than usual.
"Jesus," Leona said like she had a foul taste in her mouth, sickened by the extent of the horror in the room. And she wasn't the only one. Everyone that was there—the forensics people and the investigators—all had the same grave looks on their faces like they were being forced to drink their own piss so overwhelmed were they by the sheer number of bodies they had to deal with. I couldn't blame them. Sixty-seven bodies was a lot to process. It was mind-boggling, in fact, that someone could kill so many people. And for what? So some fucking Dimension Lord with a barely pronounceable name could come along and eat the fucking world up? I swear these nutjobs confound me sometimes.
"What's up with you, Creed?" Brentwood asked though he didn't wait for an answer. "A while ago I had a sudden recollection of our history. I can't tell you what an unpleasant experience that was."
"I'm sure," I said, unsurprised by Brentwood's sudden frostiness towards me. It's as Leona said, Brentwood considered me something of a liability and a downright pain in the ass, mainly because I did what I did alone and I rarely informed him about anything. He seemed to think that since I worked magick-related cases that I should, therefore, be working under him. And while our paths did often cross (largely due to Leona), he knew I would never consider working for him or any other government agency, just so they could control what I did and how I did it, which more often than not, wasn't exactly in line with how they did things. Brentwood and his like were all about containment and coverup. That was their main priority. They didn't care who they railroaded or hurt in the process, and they certainly didn't care about helping people. That was the difference between Brentwood and me. I used my power to help people (whenever possible anyway), whereas he used the power he had (which wasn't inconsiderable) to shut people up and bring people down. Of course, I found myself having to do those two things as well from time to time, but it wasn't policy to me. To do the right thing, sometimes you had to do the wrong thing, a fact I was less comfortable with than Brentwood was. Or Leona for that matter, who shared Brentwood's military callousness, though to a lesser degree, it must be said.
"Now that you're burned back into in my memory again," Brentwood said. "It doesn't surprise me that you ended up involved in this, Creed. Or that you ended up on that island. Wherever there's trouble, you always seem to be in the thick of it."
"You would never have known about that island if I hadn't led you there," I pointed out, tearing my eyes away from the body of a middle-aged man whose face was frozen in terror, his throat slit to the bone.
"We did know about that place."
“So why didn’t you do anything about it?”
“Because there was no one crazy enough to take on Hans Belger. Until you, that is.”
“I did you a favor then.”
“That remains to be seen. A lot of powerful people were connected to that island, some of whom run the damn government.”
I nodded, understanding. "Which is the real reason why you never tackled Belger. Why he's been so protected all these years."
Brentwood looked away for a second as if in shame. "I just follow orders. The government is what it is and no one's going to change that. Not even you, Creed, with your self-righteous bullshit."
"Christ, alright!" Leona said agitatedly. "Now is not the time for a pissing contest. I mean, take a look around, will you?"
Brentwood and I looked at each other as we silently agreed to put our mutual hostility aside, for the sake of the dead people in the room. All sixty-seven of them. “Alright, Brentwood,” I said. “Fill us in.”
Nodding, Brentwood began to reel off what he knew so far. “All of these people here sat down around 8:30 p.m. to watch a screening of Evil Dead 2.”
“Groovy,” I said.
“What?” Brentwood asked, scowling at the fact that I had interrupted him.
“Nothing. Carry on.”
Leona threw me a look, and I shrugged. I mean, if you see an opportunity for an Evil Dead reference, you gotta go for it, right? It would have been disrespectful not to.
"Anyway," Brentwood continued. "The current owner, a Mrs Duvall, closed the doors once the film began. Then at around 9:00 p.m she heard screaming coming from the screening room. She ignored it, thinking people were screaming because of the movie. Then a few minutes later, she seen a flash of orange light around the screening room door and then heard more screaming. When she went to investigate, she couldn't open the door. That's when she rang the local cops, who got here about half an hour later."
“Good response time for Lafayette,” I said. “It’s usually hours, or never.”
“We picked up the call,” Brentwood said. “Got here at the same time as the cops.”
Brentwood's Division kept a constant monitor on the emergency channels in the city, always on the lookout for any calls that concerned odd or supernatural goings-on. I was convinced that the Division's reach extended further into every phone and internet cable in the city, but they would never admit that, of course.
“Let me guess,” Leona said. “They were all dead when you got here.”
"Correct," Brentwood said. "All sixty-seven had their throats cut. So far, it also seems they were all marked with the same symbols as before. We're still checking bodies, though. We've a lot to get through."
"How was he able to do this?" Leona asked. "It doesn't even look like any of them put up a struggle. It's like they just sat there and waited to be killed."
"Magick," I said. "He cast a spell on them. A Paralysis Spell would be my guess. They wouldn't have been able to move. Our Mr Black would then have just gone from person to person with his blade like these people were no more than cattle lined up for slaughter."
“What about that shit on the walls?” Brentwood asked. “What is it?”
“A residue from the use of black magick. A bit like ectoplasm. I’d tell your techs to be careful with it. It’s been known to put bad thoughts into people’s heads if handled too much. Violent thoughts.”
“My guys know what they’re doing.”
“You find anything else?” I asked him.
"Yes, actually. A video of Mr Black."
“A video?” Leona said. “How?”
"This place still uses old fashioned projectors and film reels," Brentwood said. "The projector room is up there." He pointed to a small window above the seats at the back of the cinema. "The projectionist was in there when Mr Black showed up. He managed to get a three-second video on his phone through the window before he was killed. Had his neck twisted completely around. Never seen anything like it."
“Can we see the video?” I asked.
"The phone has been taken away for testing, but I had the file sent to my phone."
Just as Brentwood reached into his jacket pocket to get his phone, there was a loud whummfing sound. The sound you get when flames ignite. Then there was an even louder scream. Everyone looked to the back of the cinema to see a forensics tech covered in flames, waving his arms around wildly and screaming continuously as the fire melted his flesh. The body he had been examining was ablaze also. It was no ordinary fire either. The flames burned a bright green color and seemed to burn hotter than ordinary fire. In seconds, the forensics tech had stopped screaming and had dropped to the floo
r.
Before I could even say holy shit, another corpse ignited not far from the first one, then another and another in a chain reaction at different places around the cinema, spraying out green flames like human blowtorch's and giving off a fierce heat in the process.
“Booby traps!” I shouted.
“Get those flames out!” Brentwood yelled.
"No!" I told him. "That's not just any fire. Everyone in here will burn if we don't get out now."
“But the scene—”
“Now!”
"Damn!" Brentwood turned and yelled for everyone to exit the room. People rushed to the door, trying not to panic as the flames spread at a rapid rate, filling the room with the acrid smell of burning flesh.
The three of us ran back up the aisle towards the door, only to be blocked halfway by one of Brentwood’s agents who was currently on fire and burning to a crisp in front of us. Without hesitation, Leona took out her gun and put a bullet into the burning agent, who immediately stopped moving and fell to the floor as the flames continued to burn his body. As brutal an act as it might have seemed, Leona did the guy a favour, putting him down like that.
“We’re trapped!” Brentwood shouted.
My thought was to grab Brentwood and Leona and teleport them out of the building, but when I thought about it, I realised that Mr Black had warded the building with magick to prevent me from doing so, knowing I would have to deal with the fire if I wanted out.