by E A Comiskey
But, as he stirred in the bed, trying to alleviate the pressure on his aching buttocks, he heard voices outside and they woke a hope in him he’d been sure was dead.
Help!
“Help me!” he shouted into the dark room.
They couldn’t hear him, of course. Get up, you fool. This is your last chance. Get up now or you die.
The palsy in his hand made it difficult to grab anything, but he latched onto the edge of the blanket and tugged it off to the side. Grunting with effort, he sat up and swung his legs over. It took a moment to stop the room from spinning, but dizziness passed and he gained his feet.
In his first marathon, he’d hit a wall at twenty-one miles. He’d been certain that taking another step would leave him dead at the finish line, just like the poor bastard who started the insane tradition. His lungs were fire. Bile rose in his throat and he’d been certain he was going to vomit. He knew there were five miles to go. Five miles at nine minutes a mile would be… He couldn’t think. The numbers swirled around his head like so many dainty bluebirds in a Looney Tunes production. He tripped and nearly fell. Saved himself by throwing the next foot forward.
That’s all I have to do, he thought. I don’t have to run five more miles. I can’t do that. It’s impossible, but I can throw my foot forward one more time.
A little less than an hour later, he crossed the finish line, dozens of spots behind the lead, but far ahead of everyone who’d quit along the way.
He used the same philosophy to get to the door. He hadn’t walked the entire length of the house in days. He knew he couldn’t do it. He was far too weak, but he could put one bare, bony foot in front of the other one more time. And then, maybe once more again, after that. He could, because he suddenly, fiercely, very much wanted to live.
Chapter Forty-Five
Richard
Burke inched toward the front of the car. “Mr. O’Doyle, we have reason to believe you’re in terrible danger. This sickness that you have—you’re absolutely right. She is causing it.”
“I’m not calling her out here,” he said. His voice carried a hint of amusement. “You have an axe,” he pointed out once again.
“Then, as sorry as I am to say it, we’ll be forced to draw her out by our own means,” Stanley said, and raised the axe as though preparing to throw it.
In Richard’s mind, he saw a machete fly through the air and sink into the earth on the edge of a muddy riverbank. Could Stanley really kill the thing at that distance? There had to be a good twenty feet between them.
The heavy wooden door of the house opened and Finn O’Doyle stepped through. “Please help me. I need help,” he said in a hoarse, breathless voice.
Richard’s poor battered heart skidded to a stop and jolted forward once more.
“Holy shit!” Finn O’Doyle scrambled out of his chair and stood facing the man in the door.
The man in the door stared, open mouthed, at the man by the table. “What the…”
“I knew it!” Richard said. “I just knew it was gonna pull something like this!”
Burke edged along the front of the car toward Stanley, putting distance between herself and the two O’Doyles. Kid had the right idea. Run for the hills, girl!
You can’t run, Richard reminded himself. Man up! A weird little whimper squeaked out of his throat. His feet refused to budge.
Stanley remained firm. The axe head thumped dully on the bricks as he hitched another step away from the car. “If whichever one of you is not the true Mr. O’Doyle could be so kind as to reveal himself, it would be very helpful,” he said. “We’ve no desire whatsoever to kill a human.”
Both men stared at him while he spoke. Both looked back to the other. Both faces grew wide-eyed and panicky.
“Kill?” Finn O’Doyle asked.
“How can this be?” Finn O’Doyle asked.
“What the Hell is happening?” Finn O’Doyle asked.
“I’m Finn O’Doyle,” the one by the table said. “I have no idea—”
“I don’t know who the Hell you are,” the one by the door said, “or what exactly you think you’re doing here, but—”
Burke obstructed Richard’s view of the arguing O’Doyles when she drew next to Stanley and wrapped her right hand around the handle of the axe, just below Stanley’s left hand. “Jeremiah! Reveal yourself,” she demanded.
The O’Doyle by the table twitched and grunted as though punched in the stomach. “I’m Jeremiah,” it choked out in the instant before its features melted like hot wax. Then it vanished, leaving nothing but a shimmer in the air—just another heat wave rising from the desert sand. Almost immediately, the good-for-nothing ex-husband stood in place of the fake O’Doyle. The author’s clothes stretched tight across his muscled form. “Burke, baby, don’t hurt me.” He reached out and stepped closer to her.
“Bad choice of form, demon,” she growled and lunged toward him with the axe.
Without his makeshift crutch, Stanley wobbled. Richard’s legs finally hitched into motion and he managed to catch Stan’s elbow before the old geezer fell and broke his hip. Richard looked up just in time to see the air shimmer where the cheating bum had stood.
Burke made a strangled grunt as the axe swung down hard on empty air. The momentum carried her forward and she fell to her knees on the patio in front of the pretty little table.
Richard sensed motion near the wood pile to their right and turned just as a towering Black man rushed by with a thick tree branch in one hand. The bludgeon struck the back of Burke’s head and sent the girl sprawling face-first across the bricks. Her attacker spun to face Stanley and Richard, a triumphant smile on his face. “I did it! After all these years, I found the beast, Stanley. All because you helped me. Here.” He reached into his pocket and fished out a silver lighter, tossed it across the expanse toward Stan. “Get the fire started. I’ll take care of this part. I’ve been waiting my whole life to do this.” He bent and retrieved the fallen axe.
Stanley’s hand automatically flashed through the air and caught the lighter, but no other part of him moved. Richard felt the trembling of his arm, still in Richard’s grip.
“You gotta do something,” Richard demanded.
Stanley shook his head in a series of tiny little spasms.
The skinwalker lifted the axe over Burke’s body.
Richard lunched toward his unconscious granddaughter. “Jeremiah! No! Don’t hurt her!”
The creature froze. Melting features, a shimmer of heat, and then it was gone again. The axe clattered onto the patio once more.
Warm arms wrapped around Richard’s waist from behind. “Protect me, Richie,” Barbara pleaded and pressed her chin against Richard’s shoulder as she had so many times before. “Please don’t let them hurt me.”
His vision swam. His hands and feet grew numb and cold.
Her arms tightened around his midsection. “You couldn’t possibly hurt me, could you?” she asked.
His breath grew ragged and ineffective under the crushing pressure of her arms. His lungs had no space to expand. His ribs sent flares of fiery protest to his mind under this assault and still, she squeezed tighter.
“Don’t worry, Richie. We’ll be together again soon,” she whispered.
The world grew black around the edges and she bent down with him as he fell to his knees. Burke’s limp body filled his vision.
Warm moisture splashed across the back of Richard’s neck. Barbara’s grip released and Richard landed hard on his side on the bricks. He looked back and up. A knife handle protruded from his wife’s neck. She staggered back, blood pouring down the front of her black, button-front shirt and dripped on the light beige bricks. Miraculously, she seemed only slightly injured.
“You can’t kill me without killing him.” She pointed toward the open doorway of the house. O’Doyle. Richard had nearly forgotten about the poor sap. The man was on his knees, clutching his neck, gasping.
Stanley’s shadow flowed across the three in
jured humans as he limped in front of the Caddy’s headlamps to retrieve the fallen axe. “He’s as good as dead already.” He raised the weapon, but with lightning speed, the skinwalker yanked the blade from her neck and sank it deep into Stanley’s chest.
Stanley’s eyes widened. His mouth opened in a perfect O.
Barbara vanished, leaving a shimmer in her wake. Or maybe the distortion came from the tears in Richard’s eyes. “No!” he gasped, scrambling to gain his feet. Waves of pain shot through him. The hunter’s eyes fixed on something off to the right of Richard before he slumped down like a ragdoll with inadequate stuffing. His braced leg protruded pitifully to one side.
Barbara stood there, leering at him as she never had before. “Sorry, Richie. Girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do.”
Tears burned Richard’s eyes. He’d failed. To live with failure this immense would be a fate worse than the Hell that surely awaited him.
He closed his eyes and awaited the death blow with a wild mix of terror and relief pounding through his veins.
“Jeremiah! Freeze!” Burke rasped.
Richard opened his eyes.
Barbara jerked once and then froze.
Burke pushed herself off the brick floor. Her thick curls were matted with blood. One side of her face was scraped and bleeding, but her eyes shone like lamps in the moonlight. “Reveal your true form, Jeremiah.”
The pretty young girl before him grew tall. Her fair skin darkened and whiskers sprouted. A sneer that revealed a row of picket-fence teeth replaced her lovely smile. Jeremiah stood before them, a man as wretched and pathetic in appearance as any homeless bum he’d ever seen on a street corner. Still, the beast continued to change. Its skin opened in wide, seeping sores. The eyes mutated into yellow luminescent spheres. The jagged nails grew long and pointed. No longer man, but demon encased in flesh. The scent of rot emanated from the foul creature that stood there, frozen, with hatred burning in its hideous, deformed face.
Burke spun and landed a solid kick in the middle of the freak’s chest. The monster staggered backward and struck the front left corner of the Cadillac.
“Go back to the hell you came from,” she growled. She lifted the axe once again and deftly removed the monster’s head from its shoulders. The gruesome skull thumped to the earth between Richard and Stanley, mutant mouth open in an unvoiced scream, eyes blazing with fury, still lucid and now panicking.
Not aware that he’d moved, Richard found himself staggering away from the aberration.
Burke grunted and an arm fell to the ground. Again, the axe flashed. The body toppled and landed in the dirt next to the car, sending a puff of dust into the headlights.
Burke swung, again and again, a nightmarish lumberjack driven by demons of her own.
“Open the trunk,” she shouted.
Richard looked toward the writer, who thrashed about on the patio in front of the house as though in the grip of a seizure.
He looked at Stanley, still and pale, his lifeblood glistening in the car’s headlights as it pooled on the hard bricks.
A hand clamped around his ankle. A hand, separated from arm and body. “Argh!” he screamed and staggered backward. He caught himself on the glass-top table. With his other foot, he stomped on the abomination until it let go. He kicked it away, then scrambled to fetch the keys from the ignition.
The hard thunk, thunk, thunk of the axe kept time to the grotesque scratching of the sentient pieces of the skinwalker, attempting to rejoin one another.
Miraculously, he managed to keep his hand steady enough to get the key into the slot and the trunk popped open with a screeching of springs. His battered ribs roared in painful protest to the effort of lifting the heavy red plastic gas container.
“Hurry!” Burke called breathlessly.
A horrible caterwauling filled the night and he was certain his bowels would let go. He shuffled back to Burke and saw that the thing’s head had reattached itself to its neck, giving it voice once more.
The grisly axe came down again, once more severing the connection.
He unscrewed the cap with the intention of pouring gas on the maimed bits scattered around his granddaughter’s feet.
“No!” she screamed. “I have to do it.”
“What d—”
She snatched the canister from him and splashed its contents in every direction, grabbed the matches from his hands, struck one, and set the night on fire.
The blaze was bright as the sun and hot enough to blister his skin. The paint on the Cadillac bubbled and hissed. Could be they’d all be blown to kingdom come before the night was over. He rapidly backed away and saw Burke do the same, kicking the remaining pieces of the monster into the flames as she went.
He hustled to where Stanley lay, bent down, wrapped his arms around him, and pulled with all his strength. He managed to drag him ten or fifteen feet farther from the flames before he fell to the ground between him and the body of the real O’Doyle. Stanley’s skin was the color and texture of used waxed paper.
Richard reached for the handle of the knife that protruded from his chest but thought of the gaping wound that would remain if he pulled it free and hesitated.
“Stan Kapcheck, you old fart. Don’t you die!” he shouted at the body in his arms. Bile rose in his throat. The world needed Stan Kapcheck. If The Devil showed up in that moment, he’d beg her to deal—his life for Stanley’s. His soul. Anything she wanted.
Why would she take such a bargain, though? She’d already told him Stanley’s life was worth more than his own.
A sob welled up within his bruised chest.
Burke knelt beside them, filthy with blood and dirt and soot. She smelled of smoke and gasoline. Her breath wheezed in short, ragged gasps. “Pull it out,” she ordered.
Richard wiped the back of his sleeve across his stinging eyes, started to protest, then saw his granddaughter reach into her pocket and produce a breath mint tin.
Hope pushed through despair. “You think?” he asked.
“We have to try,” she said.
Steeling himself, he lowered Stanley flat onto his back, grabbed the knife with both hands and pulled. For a moment, it resisted, as though Stan’s body were holding on, reluctant to let it go, and then it slid out so fast and smoothly, Richard nearly fell again. Blood bubbled through the wound and streamed down Stanley’s sides.
Burke already had a glob of Nathaniel’s salve on her first two fingers. She pushed her fingers into the wound and wiggled them around.
Richard gagged. He sent up a prayer. Please don’t let me puke right now.
She scooped more of the stuff up and pressed it into the wound. A third scoop scraped the sides of the container clean, leaving nothing but a silken residue. This was smeared across the surface of the gaping cut. She tossed the tin aside and pressed both hands to his chest as though she were a faith healer. “Come on, Stanley. Come on. Fight.”
Sirens wailed in the distance. The sound, like a splash of icy water, brought Richard fully back to the moment. The fire had burned down to a handful of smoldering coals. Ash drifted on the breeze like so much powdery snow. The writer lay still and silent to Richard’s left, his face hidden by a dark shock of hair.
“Burke,” he tapped her shoulder and motioned toward the man.
“Is he—”
“I don’t know.”
He left her there, still compressing Stanley’s wound, and approached the writer. His lambasted joints popped in protest as he lowered himself and pressed two fingers to the man’s neck, just under his jaw. A slow, strong, steady pulse beat within him. Richard’s relief was so immense he thought he might swoon like a girl. “He’s alive,” he called over his shoulder. “Unconscious, but alive.”
Not only alive, but young again, with a dark growth of beard along his strong, pale jaw.
Burke sighed. “Thank God.
“Don’t thank God, darling. This isn’t over yet.”
The Devil stepped out from behind the wood
pile. Her body-hugging white dress seemed to glow in the moonlight. She picked her way carefully across the gravel drive and crossed the patio in spikey heels that added six inches to her already impressive height. She took a seat in the chair the skinwalker had used earlier and crossed her shapely legs. She pointed one long, slim finger at Burke. “You broke our deal.”
“I didn’t,” Burke said.
“Oh, but you did. I have an excellent memory, sweetheart. I let Stanley go, just like you asked, but here we are. My pet skinwalker is so much dust in the wind. I think the only fair restitution is that I get Stanley back, plus the old man and the writer, too. I mean, Stanley rightfully belongs to me. The writer should, by all accounts, have been dead in a few more days, and the old man…well…he took my iPhone. That’s just uncalled for.”
Richard sweated like a whore in church.
The sirens drew closer. He noticed a phone on the patio near O’Doyle’s hand. He must have called for help.
Burke’s steady calm was as impressive as anything else he’d seen her do that night.
“The deal stands,” she said.
The Devil laughed. “Are you really going to fight me, dear? You are a spunky one. Maybe I’ll take you with me, too. I think you could learn to be a great asset to me.”
Swirling red lights turned toward the long driveway.
The pavement beside The Devil split, opening a crevice from which an eerie red light escaped, along with the gut-wrenching wails of people crying for help across an impossible distance.
“The deal stands,” Burke repeated and stood.
The Devil rose to her feet.
The smoking abyss separated them. Heat waves gave the impression that he watched them through a shimmering curtain.
Burke held her ground. “The deal stands and you need to go.”
The Devil’s angelic face took on a cold, hard cast. She clamped her teeth together so hard it made a muscle in her jaw jump. “How dare you contra—”
“The deal was we wouldn’t kill the skinwalker,” Burke cut her off. “Get it? We wouldn’t kill the skinwalker. I promised we wouldn’t, and we didn’t. I killed the skinwalker. I claimed command over him by using his name. I cut his disgusting, unnatural body into pieces with an axe that I paid for with my own money. I dowsed him with gasoline and I watched him burn in the moonlight. We didn’t do anything. I killed the skinwalker. I killed him. I did it.” As she spoke, her voice rose higher and higher. If she’d unleashed a war-cry of victory it would have been a fitting end to her speech, but she stood there, feet planted wide, shoulders square, chin high, and faced The Devil in stony silence.