The Devouring (11 page)

“Now we know what happened to Jeremiah,” said Reggie.

“How do you know this is Jeremiah?” asked Eben.

“The medal. He always wore it.”

Eben frowned.

“Reggie, just because this poor soul wore a religious token —”

Aaron stabbed a finger at the window.

“Come on, Eben! When will you start believing? This house belonged to
Macie Canfield
! Jeremiah was her brother! The Vours got him — she saw the whole thing and wrote it down!”

“You shouldn’t believe a stranger’s story so easily,” Eben replied. “Maybe this man died because of Macie’s delusions, and maybe you’re heading down the same road she did.”

“Reggie, tell him that — Reggie?”

Reggie stared into the chamber. Something hovered on the ceiling over the dead body, a moving shadow. But when she looked at it directly, it dissipated like steam in the wind.

Reggie whispered, “Something else is in there.” She shined the light at the room’s ceiling.

The shadow darkened.

“It looks like
smoke,
” said Aaron. “No, wait. You don’t think it’s . . .”

Black vapor formed, rolling in on itself like burning paper. It was thicker and denser than smoke. Reggie, Aaron, and Eben watched it meld into an oily cloud, roiling as it grew ever darker.

“Move away from the glass, Regina,” Eben whispered with urgency. “Do it now.”

“Is it — I mean — could it be one of them? The thing from the cornfield?” Aaron asked. The bat trembled in his hand.

“It can’t get out,” Reggie said. “Macie imprisoned it. She did it. She caught the monster that took her brother.”

“You don’t know what this thing can do,” Eben said. “Please back away, now.”

Aaron’s voice shook, and he stepped back. “Reggie, come on.”

He pulled on her sleeve, but she shook him off. She couldn’t take her eyes from the swirling smoke; it undulated with some sort of sickening purpose, something too dark and cold to call “life.”

The baseball bat dropped from Aaron’s hand and clattered to the floor. “I can’t ... I can’t ... ,” he mumbled as he backed away. He tripped at the base of the stairs and then dashed up them like a fleeing animal.

Reggie’s body felt leaden. Eben touched her hand.

“Regina, step away from the glass.”

“No.”

Her gaze locked on the window. Above them, Aaron’s footsteps crushed bones as he raced through the living room.

“Regina ... ,” Eben pleaded.

“Something’s going to happen.”

The cloud fumed and churned over the corpse, seeming to pull the flashlight’s beam into itself and devour it.

“Regina, I —”

“Go with Aaron! I’m staying!”

The chair inside the glass rocked, and Jeremiah’s skull moved back and forth on its skeletal neck, as if it were nodding at her, saying
Yes, it’s all true.

The skull snapped off, rolled down the chest, bounced off a knee, and shattered into pieces on the floor.

A face emerged from the smoke, a relief in the vapor. The features melted and reformed. It settled into the countenance of a sad, young boy, and spoke with a voice of rustling leaves.

“Let me devour your fear.”

A piercing chill swept across Reggie’s body. Nausea seized her.

The boy’s face twisted into something inhuman — vicious, pitiless. Its sooty maw opened, tendrils of smoke wafted out like vipers, and a deep inhuman voice called to them.

“Let ... me ... out.”

Pulsing vibrations coursed through the room, thick with madness and hate, making Reggie clench her jaw and wobble on her feet.

“Can you feel it, Eben?” she asked.

“Yes. I —” He coughed and cleared his throat. He tried to take a breath, but doubled over, gasping.

“Eben!”

Another violent spasm sent him to his knees. Reggie dropped the flashlight as she knelt in front of him. She grabbed his shoulders.

“Breathe!”

The coughing stopped, and he gulped in some air.

“I’m okay,” he raised his head. Blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth.

“Eben . . .”

Eben raised a hand to his lips and blanched at his crimson fingertips. He took another breath, but it caught in his chest.

“Oh, no ... Eben . . .”

He erupted in a wrenching, jagged cough, and a torrent of blood spewed from his mouth, splashing his shirt and the floor. Reggie screamed. Eben gasped and gagged, reeling back before his body stiffened and jackknifed over again. His jaws opened wide, and a thick red gush splattered at Reggie’s feet; it gathered in an expanding wet heap of ropy organs and gore. She stood frozen in shock as Eben convulsed. Damp pink lungs slithered from his mouth and hung like fleshy pendulums from his chin.

Something grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around.

“Regina!” Eben shouted. “Can you hear me?”

She blinked rapidly and saw her old friend standing before her. The blood was gone.

It had been a nightmare, a waking nightmare.

It was the Vour.

“We’re getting out of here — 
now,
” said Eben.

She felt defiled ... 
violated.

Through the window, the smoky face stared at her. There was an intelligence at work behind the glass. Venomous and clever. Cruel. She saw the faint curl of a smile on the thing’s lips. It had sensed her fears, rummaged through them, and played one out for her in her head. The eyes gleamed hatefully.

The face caved in on itself, like bones giving way. The whole of it whirled into a vortex, fueled by a growing fury. The chair rocked faster and faster until the corpse collapsed: neck, clavicle, scapulae, ribs, sternum — one after another the bones tumbled to the floor in a heap. The skeleton’s forearms, hands, and shins remained tied to the chair.

The frenzied, smoky Vour whipped around its prison until it suddenly rushed the window.

“LET — ME — OUT!”

It smashed into the glass and burst into bits of smoke. And then it was gone.

Reggie’s entire body quaked. Eben put his arm around her and helped her up the stairs.

Aaron huddled by the front tire of the Cadillac with his head in his hands. When he saw Eben and Reggie coming toward him he jumped to his feet.

“Reggie, I’m sorry, I —”

“Get in the car,” said Eben.

Reggie lay down in the backseat and Eben drove away from the house. Aaron reached back from the front seat and took Reggie’s hand, but he couldn’t say anything. Reggie’s tears had left thin, pink trails down her dust-coated face.

“It was a Vour,” she murmured. “
Now
I understand what she was talking about.”

“What do you mean?” asked Aaron.

“Give me the book.”

Aaron pulled his copy of
The Devouring
from the backpack at his feet and handed it to her. She paged through it until she found what she was looking for.

“I stayed with it for fifty years,”
Reggie read aloud.
“When the cancer began to eat at the body and it couldn’t get out of bed, I knew what I was going to do. My brother would have his revenge, even if I had to do it for him. And the more bitter the wound, the sweeter the vengeance.”

Reggie caught Eben’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Macie built that room and sealed Jeremiah in. She trapped the Vour when her brother died.” She closed the book. “It’s true. It’s all true. Eben, what do we do?”

“I don’t know, Regina. I don’t know.”

“We need to —”

“No! Never return to that place. No one can know of what we’ve seen. And God help us if that thing is ever set free.”

They rumbled over the gravel, through the woods, and out onto the main road. No one said another word the whole way home.

13

Aaron wanted to hang on to his copy of the book that night, but offered to print one out for Reggie later. When Eben dropped her off at home, she raced up to the bathroom, stripped down, and let the steaming water hammer at her, as if it could wash away the horrifying memories of the Vour in the basement and of Eben spewing blood.

Back in her room, she eyed the volumes on her bookshelf: the abominations of Lovecraft, the creatures of King, Stoker’s seductive vampirism, Poe’s deathly plots. She and her mother had read half of them together for bedtime stories, her mother’s voice giving life to all of the horrible, beautiful monsters.

“I sure hope I’m not turning you into a paranoid neurotic reading you this stuff,” Mom would say, seated in the chair by Reggie’s bedside.

“Don’t stop now, Mom. It’s getting good!”

“It doesn’t scare you?”

“Well ... a little bit.”

“Hmmm, I guess that could be a good thing.” Mom laughed. “That you’re not scared of being scared. Maybe you won’t grow up to be a wuss like me.”

“You’re not a wuss, Mom.”

“In some ways I am.”

“Like how?”

“Well, sometimes when things scare me, I want to turn and run away. But not you. You get in the face of what scares you.” She poked a finger in Reggie’s cheek. “You’re a little Mithri-dates.”

“Miss
Who
?”

“King
Mithridates.
” Mom put the book aside. “Mithridates became a king when he was just a boy. His greatest fear was that someone would poison him to steal his throne. So he gathered up every poison that grew in the kingdom, and as the years went by, each day he ate a tiny bit of one — wolfsbane, deadly nightshade, hemlock, snake root — a different poison every day to strengthen himself against their effects. Three times in his reign traitors poisoned him, but they couldn’t kill the king. In a way, he conquered his fear by making it
part of him.
Like what we do with the books.”

“Is that
true
?” Reggie had asked, wide-eyed.

Mom nodded.

“I tell the tale that I heard told. Mithridates, he died old.”

Reggie stared at the empty chair, wishing she could go back to those times, if only for a moment.

“So, Mom, got any more words of wisdom?” she asked aloud. “Maybe something on killing Vours? If you do, feel free to call, anytime.”

She got into bed, pulled the covers around her, and fell asleep, wondering if she could ever do what Jeremiah’s sister had done.

The Vour’s words poured through her head like sewer sludge.
Let me devour your fear. Devour your fear. Devour your fear.
It was a mantra repeated in the book as well. What did it mean?

Reggie woke with a start. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep, but it was dark outside. Her cell phone was ringing, chirping out Carpenter’s
Halloween
theme. She clumsily grabbed at it and put it to her ear.

“Hello?” she mumbled.

“Reggie?” It was Aaron’s voice. “Reggie, I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Yeah, I’m just dandy.”

“I wanted to talk about something. We have proof that Vours exist now, right?”

“I’d say so,” Reggie replied. “Or we’re all suffering a group delusion.”

“I’m trying to figure out some way to come at these things. Macie’s journal’s got plenty of info, but she goes so wacko partway through that it gets harder and harder to make sense of her entries.”

“I’ve been thinking about it, too. You come up with anything?”

“Well, we saw markings like the ones in the journal on the walls of the Vour’s cell. On its window, too. I’ve looked for those symbols in every book of magical weirdness I could get my hands on. Found nothing. Macie just scrawled them without any explanation. They’re useless to us right now. We have to work with what we know.”

“Which isn’t a lot.”

“But better than nothing. As far as we know, it’s impossible to tell a normal human from a Vour-ized one just by looking at them, but there are some signs. Vours detest the cold, for example — we proved that one with Henry. When I hit him with the snowball, his skin turned black, like a severe case of frostbite.”

“And he wanted to touch fire, so they’ve got some fixation with heat,” said Reggie.

“Also, we know Vours manifest as smoke. And lastly, according to Macie, Vours can’t cry.”

“But how can I
stop
one?”

“That’s the thing. There’s no real
science
to guide us here — and we know Macie never discovered a magic bullet. If she had, she would’ve saved Jeremiah instead of watching him die.”

“So Henry’s lost to us forever?” Reggie’s voice cracked when she spoke.

“Look, we can’t give up. We just can’t. I have an idea,” Aaron said. “I know this is going to sound dumb, but it’s all we’ve got, so hear me out.”

“Okay.”

“First of all, we know they’ve got a weakness — the cold thing. They’re not some sort of Lovecraftian Elder Gods or anything.”

“Wonderful. So I don’t have to worry about Henry swallowing our entire planet. He’ll just kill off pets and give me hallucinations, until he goes psycho like Joseph Garney and wipes out a Sunday school class. I’ll sleep much better now.”

“Look, I’m going somewhere with this. If it has a weakness, then it’s not invulnerable. If it’s not invulnerable —”

“Then we can destroy it,” Reggie finished.

“Exactly.”

“So we freeze the Vour to death?” Reggie asked.

“It might not be that simple. We don’t know where Henry’s
consciousness
is, so killing the Vour may not be enough. You have to rescue Henry’s soul, or whatever, and get it back in his body.”

“And if we freeze Henry’s body, we might kill the Vour, but we’d also kill Henry.”

“There’s something else,” said Aaron. “Think about Jeremiah. His body was dead, but the Vour wasn’t. It was trapped, and it couldn’t get back to where it came from, but it didn’t die.”

“Great. They’re immortal.”

“Maybe. But right now, we just have to take care of Henry, which means really going toe-to-toe with his Vour and dragging it out of his body. And that brings me to my second point,” he said. “We know we can’t fight the Vour physically, because we risk hurting Henry’s body.”

“So what does that leave us?”

“There’s only one thing I can think of. We need to go after them the same way they come after us. It’s not our bodies they attack, for the most part. They go after our minds. What we need is a way to connect to the Vour
psychically.
”