by Bryan Smith
The creature shook its head. “Except it isn’t. And you know it.”
Mary stared at the creature for another long, silent moment. She glanced at the store and saw no sign of John in the brightly-lit interior. He was probably still in the bathroom, either pissing away all the coffee he’d thrown back tonight or asleep on the toilet. Her gaze shifted back to the creature. She’d half-expected it to vanish the moment her gaze was averted, revealed after all as a lingering wisp of something carried over from a nightmare.
But the thing was still there.
“You’re real.”
The demon scratched a long black talon along the edge of its pointed chin and looked thoughtful. “I am, yes.”
“So why are you here? How are you here?”
She was amazed by how calm her voice sounded. By all rights, she should still be screaming and squealing with terror. Whether the thing next to her was real should still be an open question. Demons didn’t exist. She’d always believed this. They were mythological things, bits of lore left over from a less enlightened age. A more logical explanation for what she was seeing would be that she’d suffered some kind of psychotic break and was hallucinating.
The creature’s thin, blackened lips stretched in a manner suggestive of a smile, revealing black, diseased-looking gums and rows of long, crooked teeth. “I’m able to appear to you here because the area surrounding the interstate exit your husband took tonight happens to be adjacent to an actual, physical portal to Hell, one of only a handful on earth.”
“You’re kidding.”
The creature’s sickly smile stretched wider. “I’m not. And you’re not hallucinating.”
Mary thought about that a moment.
She glanced again at the store. Still no sign of John.
She looked at the creature. Still there.
“What do you want with me?”
The creature scratched his chin with a long talon again. “I’m here to tell you something. A revelation. Information you can use, as they say. And to offer a solution to your problem.”
Mary frowned. “What problem?”
The creature indicated the convenience store with a tilt of his chin. “The one squatting on a toilet in there. Your husband. Who, by the way, is taking a while because he’s busy jerking off while thinking about your sister.”
Mary shook her head. “You can’t know that.”
The creature chuckled. “Except that I do. He thinks about Karen every time he has sex with you.”
Mary flinched at the mention of her sister’s name.
The creature sighed. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to upset you. You just seemed to need extra convincing.”
Mary glared at the demon, getting angry now. “Is that the information you were talking about?” She laughed harshly, the sound devoid of actual mirth. “Because I don’t care what John thinks about when we have sex, which we hardly ever do anymore, by the way. I don’t think I even love him anymore.”
The creature chuckled. “Be honest, Mary. You know you don’t love him anymore.”
Mary said nothing to that.
The creature nodded. “As I thought. And to answer your question, no, that’s not the information you need.”
Mary sighed. “So how about you just spill it? I’m tired and I’ve got no interest in guessing games.”
The creature tilted its head, the twist of its strange mouth now looking more like a smirk than a smile. “Making demands of a creature from Hell, are you? Gosh, you are far ballsier than your husband believes.”
Mary groaned in frustration.
The demon chuckled again, but when it next spoke, its tone was unexpectedly somber. “Your husband has fantasies of killing you and your children. Very vivid, very bloody fantasies.”
Mary frowned, trying to gauge from the set of the creature’s strange, distorted features whether he was telling her something that might be true or was just fucking with her. The latter felt like a distinct possibility. After all, this thing was a demon and thus a servant of the devil, the so-called father of lies.
John was an imperfect man. She wasn’t naïve. He’d abused her in the past and now, after a long period of more or less behaving himself, he’d demonstrated a capacity for doing it again. He’d let her have one across the face while he was in his cups and frustrated. There was no denying the wrongness of that, regardless of excuse. But thinking he could go from that to butchering his entire family was quite a leap. Despite his flaws, she thought John loved his children too much to harm them. And she had no good reason to trust this . . . thing.
“Are you wondering why you should trust me?”
Mary arched an eyebrow, mistrust evident in every line of her face. “There’s no way I can trust you. You’re a demon. By definition, you’re evil. And evil things lie.”
The creature laughed softly. “You’re smart. Far smarter than John knows or deserves. And despite your agnosticism, those old Sunday school lessons have stuck with you. You require proof that I’m telling the truth.”
Mary nodded. “Yes. And I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“When you were a child, you went into your sleeping brother’s room and held a pillow over his face until he gagged. He mumbled your name in his sleep. You got spooked and ran out of the room. You were five years old and you’ve barely thought of it since then because the memory understandably troubles you, but if your little brother hadn’t uttered your name, you might have suffocated him that night.”
Mary’s heart pounded in her chest.
She gaped at the demon, unable to breathe for a moment.
The creature nodded. “See? I know things.”
Mary sucked in a big breath and blew it right back out. “But . . . how can you know that? Nobody knows that. I’ve never told a soul.”
The creature’s smirk deepened. “Hello? Fucking demon over here. I can possess humans who come within range of the portal. This allows me to know things. I briefly possessed you and your husband after you left the interstate. For mere moments, mind you, but it was long enough for me to know all your deepest, darkest secrets. The one about your brush with childhood murder is a doozy, granted, but it’s an anomaly in your life. You never did anything like that again. And you were just a small child. You were jealous of the attention your baby brother was getting and you didn’t know how to deal with it. John, on the other hand . . .”
The creature shrugged.
A silent beat passed.
Mary huffed an impatient breath. “What about him?”
The creature’s smirk faded, giving way to a more serious expression. “He’s done things, Mary. Bad things. We don’t have time to detail them because John won’t be sitting on that toilet much longer, but trust me, I’m talking about some of the worst things you can imagine. They usually happen on his so-called business trips. And he thinks about doing the same things to you and your kids all the time. One day, perhaps not too far in the future, he’ll actually do those things. But there’s something you can do right now to prevent it. A choice you can make. This is where I come in.”
Mary glanced at the store.
Still no sign of John. The bored clerk at the counter was paging slowly through a porn magazine.
She looked at the demon. “What kind of choice?”
And now the creature smiled again. “You can choose to do nothing. I’ll vanish before John returns and you and your family can return to your home and await your sadly inevitable fate. Or . . .” And here the demon paused to snap its fingers, a sound that made Mary cringe. It was a skeletal, graveyard rattle. “I can induce a heart attack in your husband right now. He’ll be gone and all your problems will be over. John does have a sizeable life insurance policy, you know.”
Mary did know that. It was in excess of seven figures.
She looked at the store. Still no John.
The creature frowned. “You have very little time left to decide. John is currently wiping his flabby, flatulent ass. Soon he’ll b
e back in the car and this opportunity will pass. Think about it, Mary. This is your chance for a clean end to things. You won’t have to do anything desperate later. It’s better this way.”
Mary looked at him. “Why are you doing this? It can’t be out of the goodness of your heart. You’re a demon.”
“You’re right, of course. My motivation is simple, though. I’m getting my jollies simply by putting you in the position of having to make this decision. And, frankly, I will get to gloat a bit over the initial trauma your children will experience when the ambulance arrives and the EMTs are unable to revive your husband.”
It grinned wickedly now.
A cold shiver went down Mary’s spine.
She looked at the store. Save for the clerk, the visible part of its interior was still empty.
The demon made a loud throat-clearing sound. “John is washing his hands.”
Mary looked at him, her voice quiet as she said, “Do it.”
The creature’s wicked grin broadened. “There is one other option.”
Mary groaned.
She should have known the creature’s mind games wouldn’t stop there. “And what would that be?”
“Instead of inducing an instantly fatal heart attack, I could engineer another kind of demise for him. Something that would give him the scare of his life before he dies. Before you automatically say no, you should know that John doesn’t just fantasize about your sister, he actually has fucked her. Many times.”
Mary’s hands curled into fists in her lap
She seethed inwardly, her face twitching. The information confirmed a nagging suspicion she’d tried hard to ignore for years. But she was aware of time passing and knew she couldn’t afford to brood. She let out a breath and looked at the demon.
“Do it.”
“Scare the bastard first?”
Another tightly released breath. “Yes.”
The creature laughed, sounding smug. “Excellent. Consider it done. Keep your eye on that clerk. He’s about to experience an unexplained psychotic episode.”
The demon vanished and the driver’s seat was again empty.
Mary’s gaze shifted back to the store. John had emerged from the bathroom and was approaching the counter. His face was very red. Evidently the frantic masturbation session had strained his heart. Mary felt contempt when she saw the long piece of dirty toilet paper clinging to his shoe.
John approached the counter, probably intending to buy some cigarettes.
The clerk took a gun out from under the counter, screamed something in a foreign language, took aim at John, and squeezed the trigger. John was too stunned to react. There was no time, anyway. The bullet hit his forehead dead-center and a spectacular rain of blood and brains erupted from the back of his head. As he fell dead to the floor, the clerk put the gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger again. More blood and brains splashed against the window behind him before his corpse dropped down out of sight behind the counter.
Mary stared in disbelief for a long moment. A part of her thought this might still be some insane dream from which she would soon awake. But that didn’t happen. John stayed dead on the floor, an ever-widening pool of blood spreading out around his head.
Mary turned her head and glanced at the backseat.
Her children were still sleeping.
Her gaze went back to the store.
Then she smiled, dug her phone out of her purse, and called 911.
THE DOLL
THE DOLL WAS ON THE dining room table in his two-bedroom apartment when Sam Thorne got home from his security guard job at the local mall that night, but its presence there did not immediately register. He was tired and distracted by stress related to his job. All he cared about was getting changed out of the goddamn security guard uniform, cracking open the first beer from his nightly six-pack of Old Style, and settling into his recliner for a night of mindless entertainment crashed out in front of the TV.
Sam walked right by the table on the way to his bedroom. He saw the doll. It was almost a direct look rather than a fleeting glimpse in his peripheral vision, but there were other objects on the table, familiar things, and their obscuring presence contributed to the delayed recognition. Among the other items were a basket in the center filled with white napkins, salt and pepper shakers, and an 18-inch-tall mini-statue of W.C. Fields. He’d inherited the statue from his grandfather. Sam didn’t care much about the old-time comedian, but his grandfather had been a big fan so he held on to it for sentimental reasons. The doll, folded into a sitting position, had been wedged in between the legs of the statue.
After passing by the table, Sam shuffled bleary-eyed down the hallway to his bedroom, where he began the process of shucking off his uniform. His face was fixed in a grumpy frown as he tore at the buttons of the shirt, anxious to have the uncomfortable garment off his body. He’d gained considerable weight since starting the job six months ago, causing his pudgy flesh to strain against the fabric. A sigh of relief rolled out of him as he pulled off the shirt and tossed it aside. He’d put in a requisition for larger uniform shirts and slacks several weeks ago, but his bosses had yet to approve it, the penny-pinching bastards. It was just one of many aggravations that had him thinking about looking for some other form of gainful employment. Right now, though, he didn’t care much about that. He’d reached the end of a long week. All he wanted to do was get some drinks in him and unwind.
After changing into cotton gym shorts and an XXXL-sized Looney Tunes T-shirt, he walked out of his room and into the bathroom on the other side of the hallway. He pushed his shorts down to his ankles, sat down on the toilet seat, and selected an old issue of Fortean Times from the wicker basket on the floor next to the toilet. Midway through an article about a mysterious creature spotted in the woods near York, Pennsylvania, the image of the doll shifted from the foggy outskirts of his subconscious to the forefront of his brain.
The magazine slipped from his suddenly numb fingers to the floor as his eyes opened wide and his mouth fell open. His throat felt constricted and he was unable to swallow for a long moment. The thudding of his heart in his chest felt more labored than usual. Sweat rose on his brow and formed in his armpits. His sphincter opened wide and some good-sized turds plopped loudly into the toilet, a sound that made him wince because he feared it would give away his location to the intruder in his apartment.
Granted, the person who’d put the doll on the table might not still be on the premises, but he couldn’t be certain about that. That someone with malicious intent had broken into his apartment and placed the doll there was not in doubt. Not only that, but it had been put where he was sure to see it, a deliberately provocative act. Until proven otherwise, he had to operate on the assumption that the culprit was still here.
At last, he was able to swallow and draw in a deep breath. His heart was still thudding, but not quite in that same scary, laborious way. After sitting there several more moments and listening very carefully for sounds of movement elsewhere in the apartment, he relaxed a little. The situation remained dangerous. He had no doubt his life was in imminent danger. However, he thought there was a decent chance the intruder had left the apartment and was lurking somewhere outside, perhaps waiting for him to show himself, which of course he would have to do at some point.
He couldn’t stay here.
Not now.
Not anymore.
But he couldn’t quite dismiss the possibility that the intruder was still in the apartment, perhaps lurking in the second bedroom. He used that room for storage and kept its door shut most of the time. He had not peeked inside it upon returning home tonight. If his intruder was still here, that room would be the likeliest hiding place.
Not bothering to wipe his ass, Sam lifted his bulk off the toilet seat and pulled up his gym shorts, taking care to do this as quietly as possible. He didn’t want to tip off anyone who might still be here that he was in motion again. He wouldn’t be able to manage that indefinitely, of course, b
ut anything he could do to possibly gain even a little bit of an edge was worth trying.
After moving quietly across the bathroom floor in his bare feet, he put his ear to the closed door and listened for a few moments. Again, he detected no hints of movement, hushed voices, or other human activity. His Glock was in the top drawer of the nightstand by his bed. He could get to it within seconds if he could just work up the nerve to open this door and get moving. His right hand went to the doorknob and curled loosely around it, lingering there a few moments longer as he kept his ear to the door and continued to listen.
All he heard was the quiet hum of the air-conditioning.
He let out a breath and made up his mind. No matter what else happened here tonight, time was of the essence. He had to get moving and get out of here to have any hope of living to see the next day. After allowing himself one last moment to psych himself up, he pulled the door open and raced across the hall into his bathroom. In the moment just before he reached his nightstand, he stumbled on a wrinkle in the threadbare old carpet and pitched forward. His forehead smacked the edge of the nightstand, opening a gash in his forehead.
Things went blurry for a long moment as he tumbled to the floor. When his head was clear again, there was blood in his eyes and his head was throbbing. He wiped the blood away and sat up slowly, wincing at the sharper ache this movement provoked. Remembering his predicament, his head snapped up as his gaze went to the open bedroom doorway.
No one had come into the room.
He relaxed a little, deciding the intruder almost certainly wasn’t still in the apartment. Otherwise he (or she) would surely have come running at the sound of his tumble, which had been quite dramatic and loud. Pushing his way through the pain, Sam got to his feet, pulled open the top drawer of the nightstand, and took out his Glock. He breathed a ragged sigh of relief upon seeing it. Until just then, the possibility that the intruder might have stolen it had not occurred to him. But it was here and now he was smiling. The predicament facing him remained dire, but a loaded gun in his hand evened the odds nicely.