Thought Forms

by Jeffrey Thomas

  He shoved the box away from him, flaming, out into the open.

  Shit—bad move. The creature followed it with the spray.

  A flash-ball of fire. The fire flowed like water up the bridge of the jet-ting foam in the opposite direction, as flame will travel up a stream of squirting lighter fluid sometimes and explode the container in the hand of the person unwise enough to squirt lighter fluid into a fire.

  Paul briefly marveled that the foam was so flammable, even as he buried his head in his shoulders and under his arms.

  There was a whuuump, and a dull sort of miniature explosion. Loose things flew, one of the radios went off, and peripherally Paul saw an orange glow from under his sheltering arms. The monster’s tea kettle shrieks were like ice picks through his ear drums.

  Run!

  Paul charged out from his hiding place, turned his head to see what was happening to the creature, and saw the creature had charged also and was bearing down on him. It leaped. It landed. It swatted Paul across the side of the head with a terrific backhand that sent him rolling onto the floor.It loomed. He scrambled backwards away from it, blubbering incoherently. It followed after him more casually now, like a mantis stalking.

  The fire and foam and explosion had charred it black, blasted the skin from its black grimacing smoking skull, screwdriver still jammed into one socket, Abby’s charred body dragging behind it, only loosely bound to it now, its child’s clothing and child’s hair seared away, the ribs jutting out bare and the penis bubbled down to a mere melted nub. The great white hands were now great black skeleton’s hands. Its gray-green sap squeezed out of cracks and fissures in the obsidian black remains. Its smell was terrible, like a tire burning. Its skin still crackled like burning sticks, its shrieks having died down to a determined, impatient wheeze.

  The spreading fires behind it outlined its towering, advancing form.

  It was Tar-Fiend.

  246

  Chapter

  11

  The Cyclopean skull eye of the .38 and Ray’s two organic eyes peered down anxiously through the narrow hole into the second floor’s back shed. Despite the one shadeless window in there he might as well have been looking into a well. Time was wasting; his advantage had probably fully exhausted itself until he could get hold of fresh ammo or weapons. Ray quickly swung his legs into the opening (expecting great white shark) and squeezed his body down through with little regard for abrasion. On the steps he crouched, guns ready, but there seemed to be no one in here with him. No sounds. They were waiting in ambush, but where?

  Ray descended the last steps, crossed the room, pocketing the .38. He reached out with one hand, the barrel of his rifle braced across his reaching hand’s wrist. He opened the door into the second floor hall.

  The door to the second floor apartment swung open and a tall middle-aged man grinned directly across from him, lips stretched back, eyes bulging and a bread knife with an eleven inch serrated blade cocked over his head, looking like a hammy actor in a cheap slasher movie. The man took one step forward obligingly into the last two bullets from the .22, which Ray mindlessly bolted and clicked empty at the man once. The bullets had punctured the man’s chest. He jolted backward the one step he had taken, the knife tumbling from his hand, his eyes still bulging but his mouth fallen open in a kind of surprised disappointment. The tall man held the door frame for support but collapsed softly, his hands sliding down and falling away, and he sprawled into the vacant apartment on the ruined tile floor.

  Ray leaned the rifle hurriedly behind the open door of the shed, tugged out the .38. God, only two bullets had been left in the rifle, and now only two in the .38! He even wondered now in sizzling panic if he dared risk a move for his remaining three guns.

  He had to, that was all. He turned the corner and raced down the stairs.

  Six…six, he thought. Seven left.

  He made the bottom of the steps. Shattered glass from his first kill.

  No one here. Before that door or the door to the first floor shed could fly open he turned the knob of his apartment, needing no key since the door had been forced, the wood cracked almost from top to bottom. He shoved the door fully open.

  The shed door flew open behind him, while in front of him a pretty young woman sprang out of the bathroom, wild-eyed. “Jesus!” Ray yelled, and let off a shot at her. Boom. She doubled up and fell back against the side of the stove with force. Ray spun and crouched and boom… the final shot from the snub-nosed .38 caving in the nose of a withered old woman with sunken cheeks and sucked-in toothless mouth and yellow-gray hair and an egg-sized shiny tumor or cyst growing out of her forehead, weighing down heavily on one eye. Her nose was just a black skull cavity now, blood spattered on her face and flowing instantly as if from a faucet as she danced backwards, backed against the shed door frame and slid down it to sit on the floor of glass dust and shards. She leaned against the frame in propped-up staring death, mouth wide open, another sudden cavity, to catch the blood.

  Ray slammed the door shut, turned to the girl. She was bent over her knees, head nearly touching the floor, her pretty long brunette hair hanging down free of her hood to veil her face, which had seemed teenaged or in its early twenties, with a square-jawed perfect American prettiness though distorted by hatred when he saw it. Ray scooped up the weapon she had dropped; a pair of his nunchakus, which he was pretty proficient at since his earlier days of fanatical martial arts study under the tutelage of a friend, the fanaticism now tempered down to a more realistic perspective. They had clattered loudly. He pocketed the empty .38, and glanced again at the girl. She wasn’t moaning or sobbing but her body was moving very slightly in her balled up position. He had the urge to smash the octagonal black oriental mace down on her unprotected skull, but didn’t. Instead, he left her, and dashed on into the large, central livingroom.

  An old man lurched out from his study. He may have been the mate of the woman Ray had killed, for his hideously exaggerated ancient appearance, and they may have been the somber couple from the farm with the goat; at least, the farm from his dreams. Ray twisted and swung the nunchakus down, and the old man caught the black stick in both hands, his flaring glazed eyes fixed hatefully on Ray’s. With one savage jerk the old man wrenched the nunchakus out of Ray’s hand, and Ray lost his footing in his effort to cling to them, went down on his side with a grunt.

  Above him, the glaring old man spun the chained sticks around him in a blur as he stepped clear of the study’s threshold, despite his bent anthropoid posture seeming to tower over Ray with ominous power. Ray would have been afraid to clip his elbow or whack the back of his head to spin the sticks so fast.

  Ray tugged the .38 out of his pocket as the man stepped near to his feet, and hurled it at the man with all the strength and accuracy he could muster from such an awkward pose, crying out in defiance as he did so—a soldier lobbing his last grenade.

  The heavy revolver thumped into the old man’s collarbone. Ray rolled over and sprang up and cried out in pain, now, as the end of the reaching nunchakus cracked him on his left shoulder blade. Ray fell forward but stopped himself against the coffee table with his palms. He practically vaulted across the table and ducked flat behind it as the nunchakus crashed down again. A semi-circular dent was gouged into the coffee table.

  The old man scurried around the end of the coffee table for a clear shot.

  Ray rolled onto his back on the floor between the coffee table and his new love seat and in doing so drew out the shotgun from underneath it.

  The shotgun’s one shell exploded with the sound of a bomb, one of the loudest, if not the loudest, sounds Ray had ever heard, and all the more shocking for the immense recoil in his loosely poised hands, and all the more shocking because this killing blast was the first time Ray had fired this or any shotgun.

  The old man was jarred violently straight from his bent over posture as if a car had slammed him up against a brick wall. His arms flung out to his sides, the nunchakus went flying off on t
heir own like a propeller. The fireworks of blood and flesh and black cloth tatters from his back matched well with the bomb blast, spraying the wall behind him and sticking, splashing the blank TV screen and the expensive VCR atop the television. The powerful blast cut so directly through and out the man that he actually, amazingly, was still on his feet glaring hideously down at Ray for another three or four beats after the blast before he finally slumped heavily back against the TV screen, the rage in the eyes preserved as in a photograph.

  Three more .12 gauge shells were strapped to the stock of the single-shot shotgun with a strip of wide masking tape. As Ray rose he peeled back the tape and picked two shells off, stuffed them in his back pocket.

  Took the third shell in hand.

  From behind the blue velour love seat reared up a figure. A knife rushed down. In twisting and leaning forward instinctively Ray saved himself from a full thrust, was gashed painfully in the small of his back.

  He screamed and rolled over the coffee table safely to its other side. The figure tumbled calmly over the back rest of the love seat, onto the cushion and onto its feet.

  Ray leaped to his feet, broke the shotgun open, backed away as the spent casing ejected over his shoulder. The advancing robed man calmly stepped over the obliterated old man, and was smiling confidently. This one was young, intelligent-looking, snotty and cold and remote. The evil in the eyes was less animal, less furious, twinkling with an icy desire for vengeance.

  The young girl Ray had shot in the stomach hurled herself against his back and he went down, the shotgun shell dropping from his hand. She folded wetly over his back as if for a horsey ride.

  Ray saw the advancing shoes of the icy-eyed young man.

  He rolled out from under the wounded girl, came up facing the man, and as the main raised his knife with icy confidence, Ray swung the empty shotgun by the barrel with both fists like a bat, swung with everything he had.

  In a fraction of a second Ray saw the confidence die in the man’s eyes before the gun stock crashed against his temple with such force that he was launched sideways nearly off his feet and fell loudly to the floor.

  Pivoting, Ray thumped the gun down on the girl’s back as she crawled on hands and knees.

  A man ran out of the bedroom where Ray had been sleeping during the painting of his room and leaped onto Ray’s back as if for a piggyback ride. He was small and light but he yanked a fist full of hair and seized Ray’s infected ear lobe in his teeth viciously, grinding. Ray wailed, struggled to stay upright, reversed the shotgun to thrust the barrel spear-like over his shoulder into the man’s face. There was contact and the teeth left his ear.

  The wounded girl reached up with both hands and grasped the shotgun. The little man bit into the back of Ray’s neck and the shotgun was torn from his hands. Flailing helplessly behind him, he lost his footing and toppled backwards to the floor. This, as it turned out, was to his benefit.

  His weight falling atop the little man drove the air out of him and dislodged him. The little man scrambled crab-like one way, Ray the other, but it was Ray who stood up with the nunchakus in his fist. Now it was his face that blazed with animal fury, lips unfolded from thrust gritted teeth.

  Ray wound up, smashed the little man as he was straightening with a tremendous backhand across the bridge of the nose. Turning, Ray brought the mace down across the top of the skull of the icy-eyed man as he was pulling himself up with the aid of the plush new armchair. The man sank down humbly. A third swing batted the girl with the shotgun as she reached feebly for the shell Ray had dropped, sitting cross-legged dreamily on the floor. She raised up her now frail arm in delayed defense as she toppled over. Ray tossed the nunchakus into his study, strode to the kitchen, opened the closet, withdrew his baseball bat, strode into the parlor once more and brought the bat down across the head of the little man as he was rising on wobbly legs. The bat shattered near Ray’s fists at the narrow neck, the heavier thicker chunk flying off to gong against the gas heater. The little man slammed to his face. Ray flicked the handle of the bat away from him, dipped and retrieved the shotgun.

  The girl lay on her side, eyes heavy-lidded up at him. Now she was as pretty as a groggy young woman in the morning, no animal snarl. It was a trick. Ray pointed the long barrel down at her. BOOM.

  The spent casing jumped over his shoulder. He stepped around the arm chair. The icy-eyed young man’s head rested on its side on the pillow-like seat cushion, icy eyes closed, but his hand was still moving, clenching and unclenching.

  BOOM. Lovely blue velour ruined. Fuck it.

  Ray confidently allowed himself the luxury of a body tally. For a moment it was a struggle to extricate one killing from another. One in the attic, two in the driveway, one in the upper hall, one on the front stairs, the old woman, don’t forget the black man, the old man and these three.

  Eleven? It couldn’t be.

  Eleven. My God—eleven. Only two more left. Just like that.

  But where?

  Ray picked up the dropped .12 gauge shell from the floor, inserted it in the shotgun. Now to go get his Magnum, hidden in a drawer under his underwear.

  He made it to the bedroom, approached his bureau, his crooked left eye peripherally mindful of the closed sliding closet doors, his feet staying prudently distant from the bed and his body half-turned toward the door through which he’d come. Ray slid open his drawer, reached in his hand.

  He looked fully into the drawer now, pawed more intensely through the folded underpants and socks. There was no sense trying the other drawers, was there? He knew better.

  The .22 revolver and the .357 Magnum were gone. Further, the boxes of .22, .38, .357 bullets and the new .12 gauge shells were also missing.

  Ray had the one shell in his shotgun. That was it.

  Now they had the firepower.

  A heavy mantle of nausea folded over Ray, but he tried to straighten up proudly against it, mouth clenched in a tight sneer, lower jaw thrust out. Even now he didn’t consider running for his car. They weren’t going to win unless they killed him. If he left any of them alive, they might some day come back.

  A creak overhead. Ray’s cold gray eyes lifted.

  ««—»»

  The frocked man was youngish, in his twenties in appearance, wiry and rather small, dark-haired and dark-skinned, Middle Eastern-looking maybe, with a trim mustache and goatee. He stalked bent over, tensed for surprises, and in his right fist he clung to the nine shot .22 revolver.

  This was the middle room of the abandoned second floor apartment, with its fissured ceilings, ruined wallpaper, grimy floors and cobwebs like Spanish moss hanging down in dirty dark vines. The eyes of the goateed man jumped from one bedroom doorway to another; he felt vulnerable in the middle room’s intersection. He was grateful for the lights his companions had put on in every room, but he was not inclined to wonder why Ray paid two electric bills on his barely adequate salary. He only knew that light was comforting and darkness dangerous, even for him.

  On a shelf in the built-in bookshelf corresponding with the one downstairs, a ghostly white face peered out of a dark window between two mounds of books. The goateed man swung the revolver and nearly discharged it…but it was a plaster bust, white-eyed and handsome, maybe some ancient Roman king. (It was Elvis.) There was also a painted ceramic St. Francis holding a bird, but he was broken in two at the waist like an egg. Like the Black Dahlia.

  The goateed man crept into one of the bedrooms off the central livingroom, filthy floorboards squealing out like squashed mice. Tacky wallpaper with a war motif, a recurrent blue cap with two crossed rifles under it, looking like a skull and cross bones. Civil War. Scratching cats had obliterated it in places, dug right down into plaster. Festooned cobwebs black with dirt, like rotten Christmas garland. A closed sliding closet. The goateed man was hesitant, tempted to turn and retreat, torn between fear and the duty that hammered in him, a bellowing possessing voice filled with hatred and bloodlust, berating him now for his weakness.
He was too afraid of the voice commanding him not to obey it, and stole closer to the closet, exerting his pressure slowly on the boards as he advanced lest the mice cry out in warning.

  He hid around the edge of the doors, almost flat to the wall, reaching out, pistol ready. He shoved one door away from him on its track, open.

  The door made a raking sound and then a loud crack as it struck the frame. The gun jumped in his hand as if it had had a muscle spasm of its own. The closet was empty but for a hulking broad-shouldered coat on a wire like a headless apparition.

  The other two bedrooms were empty. He was still no doubt downstairs, maybe listening to his footsteps up here, waiting for him to finally come down and blunder into a trap. He had to be leery of that. The goateed man strangely had the unexpected idea to remove his shoes so as to pad more stealthily, but he couldn’t do that, and he dismissed the thought along with his unexpected high level of fear as best he could, and crept into the kitchen. He must be quiet as he moved downstairs, be mindful of an ambush…

  Ray popped up from behind the stove just as the goateed man began to pass it and slammed the screwdriver down into his chest just below the collar bone, the metal cracking bone with a loud sound as if outside, not inside, the body, jamming before it could puncture all the way to the transparent yellow handle. The goateed man’s heart toppled like a vase off a shelf. He fell back three steps, and Ray snatched his wrist in both hands and twisted it. The pistol went off.

  The tiny .22 caliber meteorite fizzed past Ray, plowing air, and punched through the closed back door. The goateed man seized a fist full of Ray’s hair and gave it a sharp yank. Ray cried out and twisted his head in the direction of his hair, almost letting go of the man’s wrist. The goateed man turned the pistol inward as much as he could and fired again.