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Possessed

Page 27

by Peter Laws

When Matt looked back, he knew why she’d made that sound. He felt like making it himself.

  The double wooden doors were rattling, and though they heard no voice and no scream, they could hear the frantic thud and drag of heavy things being pulled and ransacked out there.

  Oh, shit.

  The handle started to jerk up and down frantically, which wasn’t just scary, it was weird. These doors didn’t even have locks. He heard Nupa shriek as she flung herself towards the stage. Then the doors just smashed open, wood splinters spinning through the air, and standing in the frame, hulking and panting, was Richie. He was butt-naked, looking strangely pale like he was covered in flour, and yet he was splashed with blood. Probably not his. He had so much on his chin it looked like a thick, red goatee. Each of his hands held two hefty shards of … oh God … of mirror. They were dripping onto the carpet, and his eyes were cocked and crazy.

  Stomach rolling, Matt looked at the corridor outside where Deron’s hand was twitching in a black, wet, rapidly growing puddle.

  Richie saw them looking at him and he tilted his head. Which made Nupa scream. It was an ear-splitting squeal of uncontrolled fright. The sound did something strange. It made Richie start to sway from side to side, like a giant white monkey, genitals swinging. He put his ear to the air, as the scream echoed. Matt thought of the rabbit in the lobby, drawing in pain.

  ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God,’ Perry was frantically pressing himself further back under the stage. ‘Matt. Drop the curtain. Matt!’

  It was too late.

  Richie lifted both shards of mirror high into the air and let out this godawful banshee wail. Then with the massive hammering of bare feet he ran towards them all at the stage, arms up and screaming.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Richie left a trail of tremors as his tree-trunk feet pounded towards the now hysterical Nupa. The floor shook with the wet, heavy smack of him. Matt leapt to the side out of his way, which to any passing witness – or indeed to the ever-watching cameras – could have looked like he was simply letting this beast get what it wanted: Nupa.

  Yep. I’m a modern, equal opportunities fella, me, Matt might say in the talking-head interviews after. I’m a big believer that women should be granted the equal opportunity to be the first person murdered by a naked psychopath.

  But there was a much more important reason for the leap. He had a plan. He’d tossed his tripod to the floor earlier and it was way out of reach now, but when he hit his knees he grabbed something more substantial instead. The front two legs of a steel-framed, comfy banqueting chair. Just as he got it, Richie slammed into the stage, grabbing frantically for Nupa, bare blood-soaked backside flexing as he pushed. The entire platform shook, even Tom’s wooden box teetered for a moment. Nupa was scrambling backwards on all fours, mouth moving in terror. The stage wasn’t deep, so she couldn’t go far.

  Richie raised those arms of his and swung them down. The two pieces of mirror sliced the air and one of them landed in the very tip of Nupa’s Italian leather shoe. The same one she’d worn on the night they’d met in the park. She wept when she knew she was pinned to the floor.

  Matt saw fresh blood splash against those shoes, but it wasn’t hers. The impact of the mirror had slashed two deep gashes into Richie’s bare palm. He was oblivious to the pain, and was about to slam those shards down again when Matt staggered forward. He lifted the chair and ploughed that thing into Richie’s bare side.

  Whump.

  The impact sent hot agony racing all the way up to Matt’s shoulders.

  Yet Richie just stayed there, unmoving and rooted to the ground.

  ‘Hit him again!’ Nupa shouted.

  Matt went to lift the chair, just as he heard what must have been the muffled scrape of neck bone as Richie started to turn. Matt raised the chair higher, just as Richie’s mad-eyed profile became visible over the mound of his He-Man shoulder. Wild, bovine eyes strained into the very edge of his socket, so he could look back at his attacker.

  Matt swung again. Arms absolutely aching.

  Whump.

  Another thundering slam sent an earthquake up Matt’s arms. Like a cartoon character whacking an anvil, and Richie finally staggered to the side. Suddenly one of the mirror shards dropped from his hand, which Matt thought was a sign of him faltering, but the flash in Richie’s eyes said something else. This was planned. He was after the chair. Matt yanked the chair back as fast as he could, but Richie clamped his hand around the leg. He ripped it from Matt’s throbbing hands and flung it to the side, so hard that it literally skittered across the tops of the other chairs in a tumble.

  Nupa scream again. Matt backed away.

  Richie was streaming cups of blood, not only from his hands, but now from a growing split on his side. He was mumbling something. ‘I am roaming … roaming … to and fro, through the earth, through the earth … patrolling, and watching …’ The same words Richie had used in the TV studio that night. And Matt knew now, just as he’d known then, that these were the words of Satan in the Old Testament book of Job. ‘Through the soil … I am roaming … coming up from the soil, I come from the fucking soil …’

  Matt staggered back from this lumbering, naked monster of a man, and figured that the best bet was to grab another chair. But there was no time for such luxury, because Richie was coming too fast, with two industrial-sized hands that wanted to crush something. He saw Richie greedily staring at Matt’s windpipe.

  ‘Oh God,’ Matt said.

  Then something else happened. Something that threw an already terrifying moment into a cavern of pure, blind panic.

  Matt felt unseen fingers slip over his shoulder, and wriggle into his hair from behind.

  A woman’s voice whispered into his ear, ‘Shhhhh.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Matt span at the coldness of her fingers, dreading, seriously dreading to look into Abby’s smiling face again. But as he stumbled into a half-circle he was startled to see it was Claire Perry who was pulling him back.

  She yanked Matt backwards, then swung what looked like a black sword through the air. It was the tripod he’d had earlier. It cracked hard against Richie’s jaw and his face crunched into a million agonised lines. Claire yelped with the agony in her arms – a pain she clearly hadn’t anticipated. Richie staggered. A robot losing power and dripping red oil.

  ‘He’s dazed,’ Nupa shouted. ‘Kill him!’

  Claire stumbled, looking at her hands while Matt didn’t think much about it. He swung another chair up and over, and it smacked down across Richie’s naked spine. There was a sickening, moist thud. If this was a cartoon, it’d be the ideal time for animated birds to tweet in circles over his head. Instead Richie just wet himself. What a thing to see. Then he finally dropped to his knees, eyes rolling up into white. Richie fell forward and the floorboards seemed to ripple across the entire Ash Suite as his hefty chest hammered into the floor.

  Everybody stood there for a moment, utterly silent.

  It was a weird moment that. Staring at what Matt simultaneously assumed, hoped and dreaded was a dead man. And maybe it was this latter feeling, the throb of fear and guilt, that convinced Matt that it’d be right and proper to tie Richie up. Even if he did just look like a wet, broken corpse at their feet. Tying him up wasn’t just a good precaution, it did welcome things to Matt’s brain. It helped him imagine that no, no, he had certainly not just killed a man with a chair. Not at all. He’d only knocked that sucker out, Tom and Jerry style. Richie would be fine by the next episode.

  He shivered at the existential throb of it. At the pain in his arms, sure, but mostly at the panic untying his own ideas of who he thought he was. Had he just killed a person? He yanked a power cable from the floor and whipped it back like a snake. He bound Richie’s hands and ankles together – willing them to move or quiver, yet they didn’t. The hands were especially slippery to hold on to, so deep and ragged were the cuts from the mirror’s edge.

  He turned to Claire. She’d already s
unk into one of the chairs, panting.

  ‘You saved my life,’ Matt said, nodding at the tripod in a stinking puddle. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I think we saved each other’s …’ She turned her head to the stage. ‘Is she okay?’

  Matt looked back to Nupa. She was now curled into a ball, pressed against the back of the stage. In any other walk of life, the answer to Claire’s question would have been ‘she’s clearly not okay. Look at her’. But in the upside-down economy of a murder outbreak, she was actually doing pretty damn well. She was even reaching forward to retrieve her shoe. It did look expensive, after all.

  ‘I’m pretty sure Richie here was the last one inside.’ Claire leant forward, elbows on her knees. ‘The rest are out there. Wandering the grounds.’

  ‘Then we need to lock the doors,’ Matt said.

  ‘Already done. Me and one of the security women did it.’

  ‘That’s good. Where’s she now?’

  Claire looked down at the hunk of meat, oozing into the floor, and just pointed at him. Her voice was a whisper. ‘He broke her neck. I took her keys.’ She held them up. They made a tinkling sound.

  Matt pulled the cord tight one final time, then he clambered back up onto a chair, desperately wiping his bloodied hands on the carpet. Kneecaps soaked with blood, Matt turned to the stage.

  ‘Nupa, we have got to find a phone. Like pronto. Do you know how to get this place back online?’

  ‘Yeah. There’s a backup hub, on the second floor. Maybe the third.’

  ‘Well, which is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure. My tech guys dealt with that …’

  Matt and Claire sighed at the same time.

  ‘We’ll just have to search. And when we find it, we can get the Wi-Fi back online at least.’

  ‘Wi-Fi?’ Claire tutted. ‘We need a phone line not Facebook.’

  ‘Oh, shush,’ Nupa started to stand. ‘We’ll try and get the phones on too, but listen. If we get Internet, we can contact the outside. Okay?’

  Claire sucked the inside of her mouth. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’

  Matt nodded. ‘We all are. Nupa, lead the way …’ Matt trailed off when the curtain moved under the stage. Claire saw it too, so she instantly grabbed a chair to swing. Matt put up a hand. ‘Relax. It’s your husband.’

  ‘Simon?’ Her eyes filled with tears, and she rushed to the stage.

  A pink, trembling hand slid out from the curtain, and a face followed. They all just waited while Perry clambered out, all squinty-eyed. A mole, up from the depths. He stood to his feet and brushed the dust from his trousers. On the one hand, it would have been very easy to call the guy a coward, for hiding under the stage the entire time. But on the other, what Perry had done looked like pure and brilliant logic right now. Perhaps if they’d all just hidden under there, Richie would have passed them by completely, and Matt wouldn’t have killed a human being—

  Stop … stop … thinking about it …

  Maybe a little pettiness would distract him from the guilty sense of panic. So he looked at Perry, and said. ‘Glad you could join us.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  ‘Go ahead.’ Reverend Perry straightened his shirt and shook his head, while Claire hugged him. ‘Stand there all smug. Go ahead and sneer.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s not a sneer. Let’s just get—’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘Stress! I’m stressed out. Aren’t you?’

  Perry opened his mouth to snap some caustic comment back, but he seemed to lack the energy, even for that. He looked at Richie on the floor for a few seconds. ‘I’m sorry, I’m stressed too. So much for my faith, eh?’ Claire rested her head on his chest.

  Finally, some humanity.

  Matt put a hand on his shoulder. Gave it a little grip of reassurance. ‘What happened in here?’

  ‘It was all working so well. People were being set free and it was beautiful to watch but … then … it just all changed.’ He looked around the room, eyes scanning the ceilings and the doors. It was as if a wasp had been loose in there, and he wasn’t entirely sure it had actually left. ‘The room started to shake. I saw pictures dropping from the walls. You could feel the evil in the room. The type of cold that gets right inside of you. I can still feel it.’ His eyes passed across Tom’s wooden box, but he quickly looked away. He wheezed and touched his chest. ‘We better get going.’

  ‘Then shouldn’t we just destroy it?’ It was Nupa, standing on the stage. Arms folded, she stared at the plinth. ‘Maybe if we smash it to bits, then all this will stop? Kinda like pulling the plug out.’

  Perry shot out a hand. ‘Do not touch that!’

  ‘Hey,’ Matt hissed a nervous whisper, eyes on the door. ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘Sorry, but don’t even look at that thing. The possessed may well be in the forest now, but if you smash that box they’ll come flocking back in. Kissell told us if it breaks, it’ll be like ripping down the wall of a dam and … Nupa … Nupa, what are you doing? Stop it.’

  ‘Listen.’ She was unfolding her arms, her jaw dropping as she leant towards the box. ‘Listen!’

  ‘What?’ Matt said.

  Perry stamped his foot. ‘We’ve got to go, now.’

  ‘Something’s making a sound in there.’ Nupa leant closer to it. ‘It’s quiet but … Matt, come and hear this …’

  ‘No!’ Perry shouted. ‘It’ll lie. It’ll suck you in.’

  Claire said, ‘Listen to him, please. Don’t touch it!’

  ‘It’s whispering.’ She started to reach one tentative arm out as her head tilted. ‘We should open this up.’

  ‘Nupa, no!’ Perry was clambering up on the stage.

  Matt sprang up there after him and for a moment, Matt heard it too. The slightest hiss of whispering. It was coming from the box.

  Perry was already next to her. He grabbed Nupa’s arm and yanked it to the side, pulling her away with a hard and painful snap. He was so frantic with it that they both stumbled and fell in a crunching heap at the edge of the stage.

  Perry looked up to the box and gasped. ‘For God’s sake, Matt, don’t. Leave it alone. Please …’

  Matt slapped his hands on each side of it, and he felt that familiar scratch of the dry wood, from when he had it in his house last night. Was that whispering … or singing? He pulled it close and pressed his ear to it, which was when the whispering seemed to stop.

  There was definitely something in there. He started to raise his hands in the air.

  ‘I’m begging you.’ Perry crawled closer. ‘You’ll kill us all.’

  ‘Stop it, please,’ Claire Perry was on her knees now, crossing herself. The box was over Matt’s head.

  Perry’s pleading switched to pure aggression. ‘Don’t you dare!’

  ‘Dammit, it’s a box!’ Matt hammered it downwards.

  There was a split second of silence, and a strangely long gap, as if gravity itself was trying to cushion its fall. But then the air burst with a splintering snap and the cracking of old wood.

  Nupa stepped backwards, and Claire immediately turned towards the smashed double doors, watching for the hunched shadows of the summoned. But nothing happened. The air didn’t change. The lights stayed on. Heads remained fixed and in natural positions, all unspun.

  ‘Fine, you’ve done it now. Now we just get away from it.’ Perry was tugging Claire to her feet. ‘Come on, love.’

  ‘Wait.’ Matt was frowning. ‘Look at this thing.’

  ‘Don’t even look at it, just—’

  ‘What … wait … what,’ Matt frowned. ‘What is that?’

  Perry buried his fingers into his hair. ‘Please … it’s making you hallucinate.’

  Matt dropped to his knees, flinging bits of splintered wood to the side.

  Then Perry’s face, so full of fear and foreboding changed too. He took a few steps forward and said, ‘Dear God … you’re right. There’s something in there. Pull it out.’

 
; Perry dropped to his haunches and helped pull one of the panels back. When it was fully visible, he shook his head in confusion. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Matt lifted the little metal mechanism up to the light. A small, soldered box, with battery wires sprouting from one end, and replanting themselves into the other side. He went to prise the metal open with his fingers, but it was stuck tight.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Nupa said. ‘A bomb.’

  Perry shook his head. ‘That’s no bomb.’

  Matt slammed it against the stage and the metal box cracked open instantly. Inside was a small and retro Olympus dictaphone, strapped to what looked like a digital watch and a hefty little battery pack. Matt moved his thumb, smeared brown with blood, towards the play button.

  ‘Play it,’ Perry said, voice low and monotone.

  Click.

  The spools of micro-cassette started turning and a low, barely audible hiss fuzzed up the speakers. Matt flicked the volume dial up. Which is when the words began. Indecipherable at first, but rhythmic and consistent. The sound of whispering.

  Qui intus incolit ego daemon …

  The others frowned, but Matt just pushed it closer to his ear. He felt the cold metal touch his lobe.

  … Baalberith lux te perducendum

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ Nupa said.

  When Matt was sure it was the same phrase over and over, he clicked the tape off, and looked back at them. ‘It’s Latin.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Roughly … I am the demon who lives inside you. Baal-Berith, a light to guide you.’

  Perry’s mouth dropped open, and he looked at Claire. She was staring at the carpet in shock. Actually, Matt noticed that her face was now a mask of white. Her eyes, unblinking.

  ‘Why is there a tape in …’ Nupa trailed off when she saw Perry put a hand against his forehead. He fell back a little.

  ‘My God, Matt … you were right,’ Perry said. ‘I’m so sorry … but you’ve been right all along. I saw his hand …’

  Matt turned to him. ‘What?’

 

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