Demon Harvest

by Patrick C. Greene

  “We can’t let our love for her cloud our judgment. We have a duty to this town. And to her.”

  When Maisie nodded her agreement, Violina continued. “Let’s go to the church. Let’s do what she would want us to do.”

  Violina raised her drink, coaxing Maisie to do the same. “Let’s make Ysabella proud.”

  * * * *

  The deputy found himself both annoyed that the rockers essentially had taken over his house and touched that they had come to help him. “You guys aren’t gonna do anything kinky to me, are you?”

  “You’re awfully particular for a murderous monster.” Dennis said. “Just count yourself lucky we don’t sell you to the circus.”

  Pedro checked the tautness of the same silver-coated chain that had restrained Aura, now stretched over a quilt, handmade by Leticia Lott and Elaine Barcroft, that lay across the prone Yoshida and around the bed. “I bet you wish you were back in L.A. about now.”

  “Nah,” answered Yoshida. “I never had any friends like you guys back there.”

  Pedro and Dennis both looked at Yoshida to see if he was being sarcastic. It was Dennis who broke the silence. “In case you forgot, you hung with me more times than you should have when I was balls-out blitzed. Even held my hair when I puked, like a true sorority sister.”

  Yoshida laughed for the first time since the night of Aura’s ritual.

  “Me, I’m just lookin’ to get out of future speeding tickets,” added Pedro. “And believe this—there’s gonna be a lot.”

  Yoshida no longer felt alone—or doomed. He felt like whatever was happening to him, there were friends who cared, who would see him through to the other side. “So you think your magical girlfriend and her buds can help me?” he asked Pedro.

  “Hey, I’m really into her, so don’t jinx it, bro,” answered Pedro. “They got that biker chick declawed, so I’m thinking you should be a cakewalk.”

  “Yeah, but…look how she wound up.”

  “Shut up and comb your face,” said Dennis. “Sorry. Look, you might as well relax, ’cause, like Petey said, you ain’t going nowhere.”

  “You want a lullaby, sweetie pie?” asked Pedro.

  “Just promise me, you…won’t let me hurt anybody.”

  Pedro reached for the tranquilizer rifle Yoshida had taught him to use. “Don’t blame me if you wake up with a sore ass cheek and a hangover.”

  The Outlines stepped out of Yoshida’s bedroom. Dennis gave a thumbs-up before easing the door nearly shut.

  Yoshida closed his eyes—and felt a now-familiar tingling sensation radiate from the bite location and out though his body.

  Chapter 16

  Lupine Tooth

  A short while later, Maisie stood behind Violina, watching her finagle the padlock to Saint Saturn Unitarian’s landscaping shed with a lock-picking set, as she had the front gate, never asking herself why her elder would have such a thing. She followed her down into the catacombs, a battery-powered lamp held at eye level.

  “How far back in time can you go?” Violina asked.

  “Infinitely,” explained Maisie, “but I have to align with the lunar cycle.”

  “It’s a three-quarter moon now,” whispered Violina. “Does that mean you can only travel to a time of the same cycle?”

  Briefly, Maisie felt apprehensive about divulging such sensitive information. But she knew Violina could learn it easily enough on her own. “That’s right. I just have to fall into the InBetween and search for early human contact with this region.”

  “How do I help you?”

  Maisie’s answer was simply to take Violina’s hand. “Can you remember the things I describe?”

  “Oh, I won’t forget,” Violina said. “I promise.”

  * * * *

  With Yoshida’s pantry and fridge well raided, Dennis and Pedro set up the keyboard, bass and a small amp in the living room, Pedro keeping the tranquilizer rifle close.

  As Dennis presented Pedro with a fresh, clean copy of the new material, Pedro suggested “Let’s try something by, say, Psyclon Nine or Rammstein, dude. Then we’ll get, you know…dronier.”

  “Petey, my boy, I think you’re starting to get it,” praised Dennis. He cracked his knuckles and pinged the D on his new keyboard, cycling through several instrument settings before settling on musical saw. Pedro plugged in his bass, keeping the volume set at low, in consideration of their host.

  They would not get a chance to play another note.

  From Yoshida’s bedroom a low growl alarmed them—then a violent crashing. Both leaped to their feet and bolted down the short hallway, Pedro grabbing the rifle.

  Dennis yanked open the door—and ducked, pulling Pedro down with him. A piece of the headboard flew over their heads and smashed into the hallway wall behind them.

  “Dart him!” shouted Dennis. Pedro didn’t hear him, but he rose and tried to aim, nonetheless—a daunting task. The shadowy figure in the darkened room was fast, erratic and loud.

  Dennis reached for the light switch. He was snatched into the dark before he could find it. As he cried out, Pedro fumbled around on the wall. Sensing the mêlée coming closer, he pointed the rifle at the murky movement but stopped short of aimlessly firing. There was only one dart.

  The snarling and screaming painted a horrifying mental picture. When Pedro finally found the light switch, the reality was only mildly better—a wild-haired, fanged, misshapen mockery of Yoshida, straddling Dennis.

  Not as wolflike as the bikers, not as man-like as Yoshida, the man-strosity snapped at Dennis’s face with teeth too big for his mouth. His hook-clawed fingers stretched toward the singer’s eyes.

  The silver chain they had wrapped around Yoshida lay slack and meaningless in a heap of wood, cloth and foam that had been a bed. Pedro realized that they should not have wound the chain under the bed. It gave the beast a weak point, uncontacted by the chain, that allowed him to break free.

  Pedro quickly raised the trank rifle and fired at center mass.

  For a split second, Yoshida’s head was a blur. Then he was facing Pedro with furious, feral eyes, the dart clenched between his teeth.

  “Holy shit!” Dennis and Pedro locked eyes for a moment, exchanging a look of astonishment.

  Yoshida tossed his head to the side, pitching the dart away. By the time it flew over his dresser, bounced off the wall and fell behind the dresser, the wolfman had resumed trying to tear Dennis apart.

  “PeteeeEEEY!” cried Dennis, pushing against Yoshida’s chin with one hand, blocking the killing claws with his leather-coated forearm.

  Pedro snatched the chain and tried to jerk it away from the ruins of the bed. Hopelessly entangled, it yielded only two or three useless feet.

  Pedro dropped it and launched himself to tackle Yoshida. The impact would have driven those nail-point teeth straight into Dennis’s face if the singer hadn’t bobbed to the side.

  Pedro briefly felt bad about smashing Yoshida’s face into the floor—until the beast wriggled and rolled like a fresh-caught trout, trapping him under its back. The monster scrambled, stomach-down, with agility more befitting the rounder physique of a wolf.

  Now Petey was the prey.

  Dennis tossed the torn sheet over the deputy’s head and yanked it up and away from Pedro, who used the weight shift to shove him off.

  In less time than Dennis had taken to ensnare him, Yoshida tore the sheet away like tissue and tossed the singer into the dresser.

  Pedro glanced at the chain. In grabbing the sheet, Dennis had untangled some of the slack. Pedro lunged for the nearest section.

  Shaking away the cobwebs, Dennis knew what his friend had in mind. Yoshida crouched to pounce on the bassist’s back.

  “Hey!” Dennis dove for the door. “Come and get me, boy!”

  Hunter instincts drew the beast like a moth to a
flame. He leaped across the room, as Dennis ducked and yanked the door in his path.

  Yoshida smashed headfirst into the flimsy wooden panel with wrecking-ball force, blasting through it.

  Pedro, knowing the monster would recover fast, slid the end of the chain across the floor to Dennis. As Yoshida started to charge, Dennis entwined his furry left wrist. Pedro grabbed the right. The boys butted shoulders as they met to switch ends, drawing Yoshida’s wrists together.

  Pedro bobbed his head to the side to avoid a snapping bite, while Dennis dropped to his knees to loop the chain around Yoshida’s feet.

  Pedro took the end from him and jerked hard, putting the beast on its back and bringing its razor-clawed hands and feet together. Hog-tied, Yoshida jerked hard, nearly sending Pedro headfirst into the hallway. Dennis, still kneeling, caught Pedro’s leg and kept him steady.

  They pulled in opposite directions, taking away all of Yoshida’s leverage.

  “Now what!?” called Pedro.

  “I don’t know!”

  Yoshida’s roars of rage pitched up, becoming squeals of pain. Smoke rose from the chain’s contact points at his wrists and ankles.

  “Ah, shit!” said Pedro. “We’re hurting him bad!”

  “You gotta hold him!” Dennis said, handing Pedro his end of the chain.

  Pedro doubted he could, but he wasn’t about to let go.

  Dennis went to the dresser and yanked it to fall facedown to the floor.

  Tears of blood ran from Yoshida’s amber eyes. The chain was melting through his bones like hot steel.

  Pedro coughed at the stench of burning flesh, feeling his gorge rise.

  “There you are!” Dennis picked up the trank dart and dove over Pedro to land on Yoshida’s chest. He plunged the dart into his friend’s neck as hard and as fast as he could, hoping it was with enough force to open the plunger and release the sedative.

  “Unwrap him,” Dennis called as he rolled to the side.

  Pedro did, his eyes stinging from the smoke of sizzling skin; then he leaped in front of Dennis with the chain held out, the first line of defense against the monster they had just caught—and released.

  Yoshida tried to stand. His weakened ankle snapped at a sickening angle, drawing a deafening cry of pain.

  “Dammit, what can we do?”

  There wasn’t much. The musicians took positions on either side of Yoshida to keep him from hurting himself any further, until, after two excruciating minutes, he finally fell still, panting hoarsely as a veil of forced slumber fell upon him.

  * * * *

  En route to the church, Maisie gave a crash course on her method of accessing the Akashic records.

  “I know the Akashic records are literally the past, resonating through our collective consciousness, but I confess I’ve never tried to access them,” Violina told Maisie.

  “I’ll feel better just knowing you’re there,” Maisie explained. “All you have to do is pay attention while I tell you what’s happening…did happen.”

  “I’ll be right beside you.”

  * * * *

  Dennis, Pedro and Bernard had already run power cords into the basement from a generator and set up a string of lights, which switched on at the top of the stone stairway. The foreboding gloom of the witches’ introductory visit was gone.

  Nonetheless, Violina tensed with apprehension upon setting foot across the doorway. “Those poor people!” she almost whispered. “What it must have been like to face all those terrors down here.”

  “They are a brave bunch,” said Maisie.

  “You’re just as brave, my dear.” Violina touched her new protégé on the shoulder. “Lead the way.”

  They went through the archway, along the corridor and into the chamber where the stone coffins had lain. Their shadows stretched across the high ceiling. Their breath rode on wispy steam.

  Near the farthest wall, they cast a circle with white chalk, lit candles, called on the directional spirits.

  Maisie took Violina’s hand. “Let’s sit.”

  They took cross-legged positions facing each other. Maisie closed her eyes and slowed her breathing, while Violina waited for the flow of information.

  Maisie visualized a book—thick, heavy and ancient—and saw on its dark brown leather face the title Chronicles of Ember Hollow, flaked gold paint filling the hand-tooled letters.

  She looked up to envision the moon as she had seen it just before they stepped down the stairs, sending from the heart of her astral self a silver cord to attach to it and another to tie her to the earth. Spreading ethereal arms, she rose out through the ceiling of the basement, passing into the sanctuary, then out into the sky.

  She opened the book to its first few pages and saw something in troubled script: the beginning of the settlement’s problems.

  A wild land from which rose pillars of chimney smoke and the vapory colors of various auras opened up far beneath her.

  Descending, she saw cabins, fields, barns, streets of dirt, herds of livestock.

  A dense stream of light off to her right shocked her. In her Akashic travels, Maisie had never seen such a vivid red. Stranger still were the dark brown streaks running through it.

  It was the very hill where her physical body now sat. But it wasn’t a church. It was Conal O’Herlihy’s home.

  Passing through the wood and clay walls, Maisie floated into the master bedroom, to the wellspring of the scarlet hatred—a mean Irishman who grimaced even in sleep.

  Maisie sensed from this man, Conal O’Herlihy, an abiding understanding and resolve that his myopic self-service must eventually empty into a dark sea of despair. Yet he was committed to enjoying the benefits of his wicked acts without regret, and in their fullness, until that time.

  In his coat, hanging by the bed, there smoldered a bone knife coated with the blood of a dead man.

  He reminded her a bit of Violina, only she was more evolved. Wasn’t she?

  Below Conal’s lonesome room lay the basement that, in this time, was secret from all but a few dozen confidants, dug for the propagation of the Patmos mushroom—and more.

  Several objects carried the heavy energy of this devious commitment.

  Implements used to enslave natives—whips and whiskey.

  The corridor led to a larger chamber, the one where her body sat now. Here lay the stone coffins, affixed with some type of funnel. They were empty.

  But someone was here…

  There was something beyond the wall, a congestion of decay.

  Where was the entrance? For Maisie, it was simply a matter of passing through.

  …into despair.

  A pit, recently filled in. It held dozens of corpses, tossed atop each other haphazardly like detritus. Natives. Tsalagi men and boys.

  Maisie passed through them to learn more, tensing with despair and horror as she did. Conal and his men had abducted them, one at a time, plied them with alcohol, and enslaved them to dig the chambers. They were worked to death.

  No wonder Ember Hollow wreaked of despair. These souls deserved the sanctified farewell of their culture. The town had been doomed to dark times since its inception. It was terrifying, alarming and draining.

  Farther out from the town’s center, lined with rough-hewn buildings, was another powerful emanation.

  There was the thick sense of a man who presided over the estate like a benevolent dictator. It came as a relief.

  A servant, a woman of hearty constitution, slept fitfully, her hands performing the work of sewing and cleaning. Chloris was her name.

  Blackness fumed from the bed of a small room at the end of a corridor, where a candle burned near the window.

  A man who was out of place, out of time, and…missing something.

  A soul.

  This was an automaton whose only gears were kill a
nd live, in that order. Here it lay—he lay, wounded but healing fast. This being did not belong here, or anywhere.

  If Conal was a vessel filled with undiluted hate, the wounded guest of Wilcott Bennington was a killing machine oblivious to morality.

  As she reluctantly explored the strange pale man in Bennington’s guest room, Maisie came to a devastating realization.

  This de-man was Everett Geelens, the very killer who had plagued—would plague—Ember Hollow.

  He had already interacted with the settlers, killing at least one—and would do so again, when able.

  Maisie tried entering his dreams, tried filling him with love—but found there simply was no capacity. Everett existed as a flesh-and-blood reaper, and nothing else.

  What if…he’s the end of us all? Maisie wondered. It was the despair of this terrible thought that made her want to flee back to her own temporal terrain. Alarmed and despaired, Maisie was ready to give up on Akashic travel forever, then and there.

  * * * *

  In her lifetime of learning the craft, Violina had visited other realms, other sectors of consciousness; she had even skirted the InBetween, where dead and living souls commune. But astral travel in the Akashic realm was not her area of experience. Years of dedication were required for any branch of magic. Violina found her time and energy were better focused in other areas, such as controlling outcomes—and people.

  Now it would have benefited her agenda, but without the expertise, she had to rely on Maisie.

  Watching the girl intently, Violina cemented the details of the scheme she was improvising, an opportunity that would be sinful to waste.

  When Maisie came out or trance, it was with a shocked gasp that startled Violina.

  She touched Maisie’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “The sorrows there began when the settlers arrived.” She told Violina about Conal and Everett. “I couldn’t be near those energies any longer,” she finished. “So much…darkness.”

  “It’s in the past, Maisie. Don’t be troubled,” said Violina. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I don’t think you understand…”

  “No, dear.” Violina arced her hand—with Matilda’s athame in it—across Maisie’s throat. “I just don’t care.”