From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (181 page)

“May I help
you?”

Molly jumped. A
petite woman with long, flowing, black hair looked up at her through olive
eyes. Her squat nose sat on a round face.

“I didn’t see
you,” she replied.

The woman
smiled as her hand lifted a menu from the container hung on the wall inside the
door. “Is okay. One?”

Molly’s face
turned red.

“No. I’m meeting
someone.”

The woman
nodded and smiled as if she had gone through this same conversation many, many
times. A white arm shot from behind the booth in the far corner of the
restaurant.

“Yes. Your
husband.”

Before Molly
could correct the hostess, she began walking toward the corner. Molly followed
her through the maze of empty chairs. The woman placed a menu on the table
opposite Brian, who sat with a glass of water with lime.

“Drink?” the
woman asked.

“Seltzer water,
no ice,” Molly replied.

Brian smiled at
Molly and retracted it when the hostess looked at him.

“Order?”

“We’ll need a
few minutes, thanks,” replied Brian.

Molly set her
purse on the booth but did not remove her coat. “This is not a good idea.”

“Drew’s in
trouble.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think the
police are coming for him.”

Molly laughed,
her eye twitching as she grasped the front of her coat with white knuckles. “Why?”

“I think they
want to question him about the Crooked Tail River murders.”

“Oh my God.”

Brian reached
over and placed his hand on top of Molly’s. She withdrew it, almost knocking
his water from the table.

“Please don’t,”
she said.

His hand
hovered in midair for a moment before he pulled it back and placed it on his
lap, under the table.

“How do you
know?”

“It’s all over
the news.”

“Drew?”

“They didn’t
name him, but who else could it be? It wouldn’t take long to figure out he’s
got a history with Vivian, and Johnson was his boss.”

Molly fell back
against the high cushion of the booth and looked up. Her eyes followed the
ornate, metal ceiling. She grabbed her purse and rummaged through it for a tissue.

“He didn’t do
anything,” she said.

“I know. We
both know that, but the police don’t. I’m worried in his current state that he
might be, you know, a bit unstable.”

“What do you
know about his current state?” she asked with an edge in her voice that crept
through like smoke seeping under a door.

Brian sat back
and held both hands in the air. He drank from his glass and looked back at the
menu. The exotic hostess reappeared, smiling as if she had been let in on a
secret, one that was difficult to keep.

“We’re going to
need more time,” he said.

The hostess
smiled and bowed before turning back for the kitchen.

“Don’t pretend
you understand,” she said, dropping her voice low.

“Listen. Drew
is my best friend. I’m trying to look out for him. And for you.”

“We can take
care of ourselves, Brian.”

He sat back and
watched Molly twirl the wedding band on her finger.

***

Drew crawled
into the corner between a tall, plastic shelving unit and the cinder-block wall
of the garage. He heard the door leading from the house to the garage open,
followed by a cacophony of cascading metal being dumped into a recycle bin. The
odor of stale beer and soured milk filled the garage. The woman—clearly a woman
by the sound of her whistling—shook the bin until Drew could hear the last of
the cans tumble from it. She coughed and then walked around the pile of boxes
on the floor, coming into his view.

She stood
almost six feet tall with the build of a long-distance runner. Drew stared at
her calves, following the long legs up to a pair of boxer shorts with “lady”
written on the rump. She had turned the elastic waistband down over the outside,
revealing the small of her back up to the muscle shirt she wore without a bra. A
fire-breathing-dragon tattoo curled up from underneath the boxers and climbed
around her side and over a hip. The woman wore long, blonde hair in a high
ponytail that swayed when she moved. Drew sat transfixed by her, the perfume
she wore slowly overtaking the smell of the recycle bin.

“Turn around,”
he whispered.

As if on cue,
the woman turned toward Drew, staring at a shelf littered with blue, plastic
bags. He watched her reach up to grab a new recycle bag. She stood on her toes,
forcing her breasts up.

His hand
dropped and reached around a growing erection, pulling and nudging it into an
upright position. As the woman pushed the box of blue bags back on the shelf, she
heard the door to the house close.

“Oh shit,” she
said.

Drew
saw the woman pulling on the doorknob. After two or three unsuccessful tugs,
she walked to the garage door. The damp chill brought her nipples stiff against
the light fabric of the shirt. She hit the garage-door button, but nothing
happened.

“Damn it. What
the fuck is up with this door?”

She punched the
button again. The door did not move.

Drew watched
her pat down the front of her jockey shorts and come up empty. Her phone was
sitting on the kitchen counter. The woman sat on the steps and put her head in
her hands. He could see the inside of her thighs. Drew’s pulse quickened and he
cared less about being discovered the longer he sat there.

A low,
grumbling sound came from the opposite end of the garage. At first Drew thought
it might be noise made by the pipes or the furnace, but it increased in
intensity. The woman sat up.

“Who’s there?”
she asked. She stood and crossed her arms over her chest and backed into the
door that locked her out of the house.

Drew felt the
panic in her voice, and then the creature stepped from the shadows of the
garage. The same fear crept into his blood, dropping his erection to a
harmless, flaccid appendage. He felt breath escape from his lungs, and dark
circles crept into his field of vision until the darkness pulled him under.

***

He woke to the
sound of dripping water. His head ached and his muscles were cramped in the
tight corner of the garage. The space had taken on a musty, damp smell unlike
the petroleum-based odors from before. Drew opened his eyes and the filtering
light from the garage-door windows seared his face. He put a hand to his
forehead and tried to stand. More cramps seized his calf muscles, dropping his
naked form back to the cement floor. He lay there breathing and kneading the
meaty flesh on his legs.

“Cannot stop
it.”

Drew stood
hunched over, looking to the corner and the source of the voice. He knew the
voice.

“I’m dreaming. I’m
asleep in the corner of the garage.”

The creature
laughed, chortling through wet lungs and tight lips.

“Not anymore. Come.
See your work.”

Drew shook his
head.

“There, in the
other corner.”

Drew turned his
head as his eyes adjusted to the low light of the garage. He saw the drain and
a dark swath of liquid oozing into the broken holes of the clay cover. Farther
back in the shadows he saw strands of hair, clumped together and now sticking
to the floor.

“You withdrew
the pain, feeding on it.”

A lump caught
in his throat. The stark, white flesh of the woman contrasted with the dark
floor. He saw trails of blood on a thigh, leading inward.

“I passed out.”

Gaki laughed
again.

“I didn’t touch
her,” Brian yelled.

“Look down,”
Gaki replied, spitting the words like venom.

Drew looked at
his hands. He turned them around and saw the dried blood caked under each
fingernail, felt the sticky, cloying pinch of dried blood in his pubic hair.

“You did this,”
Drew cried. He felt the tears burning his cheeks. “Why are you trying to ruin
me?”

“Release you. I’m
releasing you.”

Drew walked
toward the drain and the sprawled body of the woman. She laid facedown, spread
eagle on the floor. Her wrists and ankles gripped the rag shackles tied to
shelving units on the walls. A flimsy, blood-soaked tank top and boxer shorts
sat in a pile on top of a red gas can. The woman’s ponytail had come undone,
her long hair now reaching down to the middle of her back. Drew felt a flutter
in his chest and his sore penis pulsed and bobbed with excitement.

“You want her
again.”

Drew shook and
threw himself into the wall. He tasted the coppery blood in his mouth.

“You will take
her again, through your own self-inflicted misery.”

Drew shook his
head back and forth.

“Look,” Gaki
said.

A hazy film
covered Drew’s vision as if he had put on a pair of dark sunglasses. He saw the
woman, alive and gasping through a gag. He noticed the soles of her feet were
black from the garage floor, and he caught a tantalizing glimpse of her most
private areas, even in the darkness. Drew felt his body pulled to the floor and
on top of the woman, mounting her from behind amidst her cries. He saw his
hands grip her shoulders as he thrust. Drew felt his release deep inside and
knew he had to have more. He tasted her flesh, running his tongue on her back
and around to her breasts. Drew yanked her body to the side and bit into the
soft flesh of her breast. A force yanked his head backwards and he rose over
her body as if pulled by an invisible harness. A violent thrust knocked his
head down between her legs, splitting his chin open on the cold floor. Drew
smelled her. A pressure on the back of his head pushed his face into her, his tongue
lashing at each orifice.

A force slapped
his face and Drew blinked. The hazy covering disappeared and he sat again,
staring at the defiled corpse of a young woman he had known as a neighbor hours
before.

“You,” said
Gaki.

Drew shook his
head, tears streaming down his face.

Ravna sat at
his usual table, papers spread and cascading to the floor. He took a sip from
his cup and flinched when the hot liquid hit his tongue. He typed “Gaki” into
the search engine, bypassing the first few results that he had already read. His
eyes stopped midway down the page, where the search string returned an entry
along with the word “exorcism.”

“Exorcism, from
Latin
exorcismus
—to adjure. Evicting demons or evil,
spiritual entities. Ancient practice but still part of many religions. Exorcist
is often a priest thought to have special powers. The possessed are not
regarded as evil themselves, and are not entirely responsible for their
actions. In recent times, exorcisms have diminished as the study of mental
illness has become more common.”

He
rubbed his eyes and put his hands behind his back. The cursor at the end of the
sentence blinked. Ravna skimmed down the page until the heading of “Buddhism”
caught his eye.

“Buddhism
absorbed and reinforced shamanism. Many Buddhist exorcists work in Japan. They
use a
sutra
and incense to scare evil spirits away.”

Ravna
scribbled a few notes onto a fraying, stained legal pad before slapping his laptop
shut and packing up his bag. He thumbed through the contacts on his phone until
he found the one he was looking for. It had been a long time.

***

“Ravna!”

Father William
wrapped his arms around Ravna, who lost his breath, smelling the powerful
incense on the priest’s clothes.

“Must be Lent,
Father.”

“Of course! Are
you coming to mass this Sunday? I have a sermon that will really make you
think.”

Ravna shook his
head and smiled. He would have to play the game. “I’ve been really busy,
Father.”

“The Lord will
welcome you back whenever you decide to return to Him. Please, sit down.”

Father William
motioned to the plastic-cushioned armchair in the lobby of the rectory. The
television mounted in the corner cast its electric haze on the room. It had projected
Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam, 9/11, and Katrina. The cramped desk sat
against the back wall, complete with a black, corded phone purchased in 1982. A
squat woman with purple-tinged hair shuffled through the lobby toward the
coffee machine on the counter. Ravna looked at the priest. The man’s hair had
whitened considerably, and Ravna thought he detected a growing paunch
underneath his black coat and jacket. Liver spots darkened on William’s face
and his eyes were creased with uneven wrinkles like an old paper that had been
folded too many times. His glasses hung precipitously on the end of a bulging,
red nose.

Sully had
deserved it. The husky Irish boy called Ravna “an asshole,” which, in second
grade, is quite obscene. In return, he picked up a handful of rocks and
launched them at Sully. Most fell amongst the trees of the woods behind their
houses, but one landed square on his forehead. He remembered seeing that thin
line of blood racing down his nose and he could still hear him yell. Ravna ran
back to his house and hid in the basement until the phone rang. His father
lumbered down the steps like a gorilla and Ravna’s ass hurt even before his
father took a belt to it.

Father William
called Ravna into his office the next day and he was terrified. His father had made
him pay for the rock-throwing incident the previous evening, and Sully was in
school with a bandage on his head. He remembered the noises the plastic chair
made as he squirmed on it, waiting for Father William. His sore rump could not
take another paddling. He would own up to whatever his accusers threw at him.

Much to
Ravna’s surprise, the conversation was about Sully, not him. He was in trouble
and Ravna could not believe it. Father William asked Ravna the usual questions
about homework, first-communion studies and, of course, sports. After
commencing the second-grade icebreaker, William asked Ravna difficult questions
about Sully and Mr. Rankin.