“We have Bortha unconscious, and we keep him that way. We have to separate his blood from his flesh. That breaks the immortality. Afterward, we have to break the body down into component molecules. The blood, we kill with boiling acid.”
“Uh… You’re not kidding? You’ve done this before?” asked Mike.
Toby nodded.
“How did you…learn how to do this?” asked Lewis.
“Trial and error. Old legends. Experimentation. Oh, and I stole the idea for the M99 from the TV show, Dexter.” Toby cleared his throat. “First, I stalk one, making sure I catch it unaware. Otherwise…otherwise we have something like what happened in the clearing.”
“A mess,” muttered Benny.
“A mess that almost got people killed,” said Toby. Benny blushed again. “But we’ll get better at it.”
“What do you mean ‘we’ll get better at it’?” asked Lewis, turning to face the backseat. “You want to do this again?”
Toby looked back at him, as calm as the Dalai Lama. “I do. I’ve done it…I’ve done it sixty-one times.”
“Sixty-one…”
“Yes.” Toby looked Lewis in the eye. “They are demons, not people. Humans are their prey animals; they commit such acts of atrocity that even Stalin would find them offensive. They are evil.” Lewis returned his gaze, as silent as a mute. “I killed every demon I could. When I saw one, I set about finding out everything I could about them—their habits, their predilections, their routines. Some, I lost and couldn’t find again. Until this weekend, my record was pretty good.”
“What does that mean?” asked Mike.
“Well, before going back to Oneka Falls, I never saw more than one or two demons at a time. In Oneka Falls, they are everywhere.”
“What?” gasped Shannon.
“About one in three people I saw were demons. I’ve never seen such a concentration of them. Not anywhere.” The tires thumped against the pavement beneath the car, and Mike shifted in his seat, but other than that the car was silent.
“But…why?” asked Shannon.
“Something…someone…has made Oneka Falls a sanctuary for them.” Toby looked down at his lap. “Mike, tell me something.”
“Anything, Toby.”
“What happened after Benny and I got shipped off to Millvale?”
“After Owen Gray’s trial and all that?”
“Yeah.”
Mike cleared his throat. “Well, life went on. Paul and I…well, we sort of drifted apart. I don’t even know where he is.”
“What happened to the town?”
“Oh. Everything was quiet during the two years it took to get Gray convicted and sent away, what with the sheriff, and most of the Oneka Falls Police department being dead and gone. But everything picked up after the trial, and things stayed good for, oh, I don’t know…three or four years more. After that, kids started disappearing all over Kanowa County. Sometimes, bodies turned up in ditches or old, abandoned buildings, but most often, the kids disappeared into thin air. No one else disappeared and staggered out of Thousand Acre Wood a few days later. No more old men stumbled across brutalized kids in the forest and drove them back to town.” Mike shrugged. “As time passed by and more and more kids disappeared, people…good people, mind…they drifted away. Property values plunged into the toilet. Lowlifes of all kinds moved in and set up shop. By the time I became a cop, there was already an unofficial policy in the town—live and let live. If you didn’t see it for yourself, it didn’t happen.”
Lewis whistled.
“Yeah,” said Mike. He glanced at Shannon in the rearview mirror. “People developed ways of dealing with things… Anyway, the town became a haven for criminals and the like, and property values fell even further. Bars sprung up everywhere it seemed. Churches closed.”
“The fall of civilization,” said Benny.
“Well, it wasn’t as bad as all that. For the most part, if you didn’t go looking for it, trouble left you the hell alone. After a while, even the disappearances stopped inside the city limits. It was like Oneka Falls was protected.”
“And the rest of the county?” asked Lewis.
“You’ve seen the stats.”
“Yeah. They’re horrible. When I was a kid, there was this scare… The whole satanic thing we talked about when Reid—I mean, Toby—and I first met. I think I might have told you that Kanowa County is the geographic center of the reported abuse in the Northeast.”
“Yeah,” said Toby.
“Anyone want to guess what the geographical center of Kanowa County is?” burbled Benny.
“I think it’s clear,” said Toby.
“So, what then? Is it only that Play Time place?”
Toby shook his head. “No. I’m sure things like that old church exist in a lot of different places.”
“You think it’s Herlequin?” asked Shannon, her voice failing her on the last syllable.
Toby nodded. “I do. Him and his damn dogs.”
Benny shuddered, but he nodded. “I think he moved on for a bit after we got away. I think he laid low, so to speak, which means he went somewhere that no one suspected his existence and got up to his old tricks under the radar. After people in the town forgot the horror-story part of the whole deal, Herlequin moved back into Thousand Acre Wood.”
“Who is this Herlequin?” asked Lewis.
“Have you heard of the character Harlequin from French theater? The mischievous devil?”
“I’ll take you at your word.”
Toby nodded. “Well, Harlequin was most likely derived from an even older myth from 11th century France. Mesnlee d’Hellequin told the story of the Great Hunt, in which a pack of demons led by a black-faced devil, chased the damned souls of evil people to hell.”
“Nice,” said Mike.
“But it doesn’t end there. There is an even older myth from Scandinavian mythology, the name of which was the ellekonge—the elf king. This elf king had a bunch of daughters, and together they haunted forests. The daughters lured men into slavery using desire, jealousy, or lust for revenge, while the elf king himself was a goblin who lured little children to the land of death.”
“Whoa,” breathed Benny. “A goblin?”
Toby nodded.
“And the dog-things?”
Shannon made a strangling sound in the back of her throat. “Babe.”
“What?” asked Mike.
“Owen Gray’s girlfriend. He always called her ‘babe,’ and she always called him ‘my love.’” Mike raised an eyebrow at her in the mirror, and Shannon blushed to the roots of her hair. She ducked her head. “She…she used her feminine wiles to goad him into bigger crimes.”
“The ellerkongens datter,” said Toby. “Herlequin’s daughter.”
“So, what are the dog-things?”
Toby shrugged. “Other daughters? The pack of demons used to chase the damned to hell? Maybe they are just things Herlequin painted in our heads.”
Lewis whistled. “You don’t need me. You need an army of exorcists.”
“No,” said Toby. “You are exactly what we need. You have the resources to help us find more of them, to find other hotspots like Oneka Falls.”
“And you can keep the cops off our backs,” said Benny in a bright voice.
Lewis looked at Benny without speaking. “No,” he said at last. “I want to be more than the research guy.”
Toby smiled. “I knew you would.”
15
With the body of Bortha tucked into the school’s industrial digester, Scott wanted nothing more than to curl into a ball, to disappear into sleep for a while, but he was afraid. Afraid he’d dream of Becky, or worse yet, Jenny. He’d called home, he couldn’t resist, but there was no answer. Same for Mrs. Carmody next door.
“What now?” asked Shannon.
They had set up shop in Toby’s apartment near the school. Exhaustion showed on everyone’s face, but no one was sleepy.
“We have to—”
�
�I need to go home. To check. To be sure,” said Scott.
Benny turned to stare at him. “It’s true, I—”
“Yeah,” sighed Scott. “But I don’t care. I have to see her. I have to call it in, to get her taken care of.”
“That’s understandable,” said Mike. “Do you want company? I could go—”
“No. Thanks, but no.”
“You’ll need these,” said Mike, tossing the keys to his cruiser to Scott.
He caught them and nodded his thanks. “I’ll head home, but I’ll be back…sometime. I guess I don’t know when.”
Toby stood and walked with him to the door. “Don’t worry, Trooper Lewis—”
“Scott. If we’re going to be demon hunters together, you can call me Scott.”
“Scott. Don’t worry about us. I’ve got plenty of food, and if we need something, I’ve got another car.”
Scott nodded. “Okay. I’ll…”
“Scott, are you sure you don’t want one of us, all of us, to come with you?”
“Yes, I’m sure, but thanks.”
Scott left them as the sun was threatening to rise in the east. He was used to pulling all-nighters, every homicide investigation had its share of them. All the emotion, though, left him feeling crippled with exhaustion.
He drove to the house he’d shared with Jenny and Becky, and with each passing mile, his heart grew heavier and heavier. He’d spent twenty-three years with Jenny, and seventeen with Becky, and in the space of a single weekend, he’d lost them both. His hands tightened on the steering wheel until he thought his knuckles would burst through his skin.
His cell phone rang, and he yelped in surprise. He fumbled it out of his pocket and answered it. “Lewis,” he said.
“Scotty!” said LaBouche. “How the fuck are you, partner.”
Heart-piercing fury slammed into his veins. “You fuck!” he screamed. “You miserable fuck!”
LaBouche chuckled. “I fucked Becky, now that you mention it. She was a virgin, can you believe it? In this day and age…”
As quickly as it had come, the fury vanished, leaving him gutted, empty. “I’m going to kill you.” His tone was flat, cold. It was too much effort to add inflection to his words.
LaBouche laughed. “Yeah. I get that. You and Dr. Reid have a good time? Where’d you take him? County lockup?”
“Why do you care?”
“Thought I might pay him a little visit.”
“Yeah. He’s in jail. I charged him in the campus disappearance. Why don’t you go visit him?”
LaBouche laughed, and in the background, someone said, “Jesus. Shut up.”
“Where are you, LaBouche?”
“Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about that, Scotty.”
“Don’t you ever call me that again.”
“Scotty. Scotty. Scotty.”
“Have I mentioned that I’m going to kill you?”
“Yes, you did. But, before you get too far with your planning, you should go talk to Jenny. I talked to her a while ago, and she’s a mess, Scotty. All those drugs. Yech.”
A sigh burst out of Scott before he could stop it. “What do you want, LaBouche? Why are you calling?”
“Oh, I see. You already know.”
“I’m hanging up now.” Scott took the phone from his ear and was about to press the disconnect when he heard LaBouche yell.
“I fucked Jenny, too, Scotty. She said she’d never had it so good. She—”
Scott thumbed the disconnect button and fought the urge to throw the cell phone out the window. Instead, he laid it on the seat next to him, glancing at it from time to time as if it were a spider.
He pulled into his driveway, his stomach sinking, dread rising like a behemoth from the depths. Suddenly, he didn’t want to be there. He wanted to be far, far away. On the moon, maybe, or the bottom of the ocean. He forced his hand to the door handle and opened the door. The sun broke over the roof of the house across the street, stabbing at his eyes. He wrestled one foot out, and with a significant effort, the other.
He glanced across the yard at Mrs. Carmody’s house, hoping against hope that he’d see her puttering around her kitchen as he often did when leaving or coming in at that hour. Her house was dark, quiet. It looked forlorn, abandoned as if it already knew its owner was no longer alive.
He pushed himself up and closed the door. The walk to the front door was the longest walk he’d ever made in his life, but he kept plodding forward until he reached it. He pulled the storm door open, and stopped and listened. He wanted, more than anything, to find Mrs. Carmody puttering around his kitchen, chatting with Jenny, and for a moment, he heard them.
Excitement percolated inside him, and his hands shook as he tried to put the key into the lock. He dropped the keys and had to try again, but he got the door open and stepped inside.
Reality crashed back on him like a huge wave, and he knew it had either been a trick of his mind or wishful thinking. There was no mistaking it, no second guessing it.
Mrs. Carmody lay on the hardwood floor, the skirt of her ever-present calf-length dress hiked up. Her eyes were gone, and gore splattered her cheeks as if she’d cried so hard her eyeballs had burst. Jenny lay across her, missing the skin from her back, naked. Her legs were propped open like some gross caricature of a seductive pose—too wide. Her hips looked like a bag of broken glass. Blood had congealed beneath the two bodies and dried there.
Scott fell to the floor, his legs no longer able to support him. He didn’t sob, he didn’t even cry. He just stared.
16
LaBouche looked at the asshole in the backseat. “You never want to do that again. I don’t care who’s pet you are.”
Next to the asshole, Brigitta sat up and hissed at him, as if she were a fucking snake or cat or something. LaBouche scoffed and rolled his eyes. “You know I’m within my rights. Your…pet…disturbed my feeding. I have every right to take retribution, right now, but instead, out of respect, I’m issuing a warning. To him, not to you.”
Owen laughed. “Fuck you, chum. Who’re you that you think you’re so badass? I’m Force Recon, motherfucker, and let me tell you, I’m the badass.”
LaBouche turned his eyes toward the man. The face of his visage was blank, but his face—his real face—wore what served him as a sadistic grin. “You sure?”
“Do you want to find out?” asked the man, puffing up his chest and pushing Brigitta’s soothing hands away.
LaBouche stared at him and let his visage flicker. The man’s eyes opened wide, and LaBouche laughed, long and hard. He let the man see him, to see all of him, and laughed all the harder as Owen shrank away as far as he could.
“Stop this, LaBouche!” snapped Brigitta, her voice pulsing with power and promise. “Stop this, or I will.”
Sobering, LaBouche recast his visage on the man’s perceptions. “It was a joke, Brigitta. And he asked.”
She sank back into the seat, looking weary and annoyed. “I wish you’d both whip them out, measure, and be done with it.”
LaBouche smiled. “I did, and your pet withered up like an old prune.” Owen didn’t even glance LaBouche’s way, he was staring out into the darkness. LaBouche laughed again.
“Wh-what are we waiting for?” Owen asked in a timid voice.
LaBouche scoffed.
Brigitta put her hand on the back of Owen’s head. “My love, we’re waiting for word from my father. He has a plan, and so far, everything is going according to that plan. Don’t worry, sweet Owen.”
Owen turned and looked at her, fear still dancing in his eyes. “Do you look like him?”
She shook her head, and LaBouche snickered. She cast a baleful glare at him and turned back to Owen. “No, my love. You see me before you. That is what I look like for you.”
“I mean…I mean what you…what you really…”
Brigitta sighed and glared at LaBouche. He knew she wanted him to get out of the car, to leave them alone, but this was too much fun. The
man’s fear was an aperitif.
“Owen, my love,” she said. “You are the first to have seen me, to have seen my heart, for eons. You see what I look like in every way that matters.”
“Oh, how sweet,” sneered LaBouche. “And how nauseous.”
She turned to glare into LaBouche’s face. “Windbag,” she snapped. “Blabbermouth. Cackler. Magpie.” An evil smile broke across her face. “Yes. Magpie.”
“What?” asked LaBouche, a hint of fear in his voice.
“Magpie. That is the punishment I will ask my father to impose on you for your insolence.”
“No,” said LaBouche, his tone bordering on wheedling. “Please, not a bird.”
She continued to stare at him, expression imperious.
“No, please. I apologize. I was kidding. It was a joke. A bad one, but a joke.” LaBouche hated the way his voice sounded—like he was begging.
“You’ll not do it again.” Brigitta waved a hand at him as if to dismiss him from her mind. “You will be quiet.”
LaBouche faced forward again, staring out into the coming dawn. For solace, he imagined doing to Brigitta what he’d done to Jenny Lewis, and he smiled.
17
Scott came to himself sometime later, back sore, hips and knees stiff. Jenny was still dead on the floor before him, congealed and dried blood spread beneath her like a macabre carpet. He knew what he had to do.
He knew, but he didn’t want to do it.
Doing it would make this nightmare real. It would become a fact. The world would spin on without Jenny, without Becky, and Scott would have to move on with it. He didn’t want to.
He took his cell phone out of his pocket. He dialed 9-1-1 and waited for the operator to answer. When she picked up, he did it. He made it all official.
Then, the tears came.
18
“Now, doesn’t that feel better, Benny?” Shannon asked, letting her hand linger on the side of his face.
“Y-yes. It does, Shannon.”
He was so cute, so boyish. She didn’t imagine he’d had a lot of experience with women in Millvale, but there was an innocence to him that made her heart lighter.
Benny was smooth shaven, and his hair was trimmed and neat. He’d bathed and put on deodorant at Toby’s suggestion. With each day that passed while they all waited for Scott to come back, he’d seemed to become more and more normal. Toby had always seemed normal, but he was changing, too. He was becoming Toby again, integrating his memories, his personality, from his childhood with the memories and personality he’d evolved since then. She supposed she was changing too, doing the same thing both Benny and Toby were doing. Of the four of them, only Mike seemed constant.
Blackened Page 17