Vampires in Devil Town (22 page)

Thirty-eight

Being shoved through the door was like being shoved into an atrocity. The room on the other side of the door looked kind of like a church but it was a church bent on destruction and carnage. The pews were from some kind of stone that seemed to rise from the very earth itself. There was a raised stage area but instead of a pulpit there was a large stone slab that looked like a sarcophagus. Lining the walls were the corpses of some of the Devils’ victims. They hung like lanterns or lamps on the wall, their bodies in various states of decay, twisted, black mouths opened, radiating a death stink.
  Jacob recognized a couple of the faces. They were people from town. They were his neighbors. They were the normal people he had always wanted to be.
  “Do you like the artwork?” Ernst asked him.
  “Fuck you,” Jacob said.
  “So unimaginative,” Ernst mocked.
  “You know you’re not going to get away with this, don’t you?”
  “Stop threatening me. You have nothing. There is not any way we can
not
get away with this. This is what we have lived our lives after death for. Who do you think is going to stop us, really? Your girlyfriend? Well, let me give you an update as to her condition. As of this moment she has just drifted off in the car and, soon, she is going to receive a visit from a very charming young man.”
  “Bones,” Jacob hissed.
  “Whoever,” Ernst said. “He’s on quite a rampage. He’s already put away the other girl you came with. He’s coming in a lot handier than I thought he would. For a halfwit.”
  “You’re lying.”
  “You know I’m not.”
  And, the worst part was that Jacob knew this man was right. He had no reason to lie.
  “So there is no one who can help you. There is no one who is going to stop Ilya and I from tasting the Dark Fire. You’ve heard that name, haven’t you?”
  “No. Guess you guys aren’t as popular as you thought.”
  “Beyond the Dark Fire is like Heaven and God all in one. It appears as fire but a whole world burns within it.”
  Jacob guffawed. He couldn’t help it. At that moment, Ernst reminded him of a Baptist minister.
  “Very well. Let me tell you what it is we intend to do. I want to make sure you are not going to run away first.”
  The couple led him up to the stone slab. The man pushed Jacob down on it but Jacob wouldn’t simply lie down. He waited for the man to loosen his grip and then he was back on his feet, taking a wild swing at him. His fist glanced off Ernst’s cheek, leaving absolutely no damage whatsoever.
  Jacob dashed for the door.
  With his hand on the cool handle, he felt a shimmer of excitement run through his body but, no matter how hard he pulled, the door would not open and his excitement completely dissipated.
  Ernst laughed from the other side of the church, walking slowly toward Jacob.
  Jacob knew he was going to have to stand and fight. He had no choice. But he didn’t know what he was supposed to fight with. The tire iron was long gone.
  He charged at Ernst. Ernst stepped out of the way, grabbed Jacob’s arm, and threw him into one of the stone pews. Jacob hit the pew with his shoulder and heard a sickening pop.
  “Fuck!” he screamed in pain.
  Jacob scrabbled to his feet, convinced he was going to go after the woman, thinking this might be the man’s weak spot. He charged at her and launched himself, wanting to take her down completely, but Ernst was there, snatching him from the air as though he weighed absolutely nothing.
  This time, Ernst wasted no time in placing him on the slab, holding him down by pressing a huge hand on his chest.
  From beneath his back, Jacob could feel the stone quivering. It felt alive, malleable. Sections of the stone snaked up from either side of his waist until they met in the middle of his stomach. There they fused together.
  “There,” Ernst said. “That should keep you from moving around a whole lot.”
  “Tell me why you’re doing this,” Jacob said. He realized he was practically begging. If he was going to die, he didn’t want to die without knowing the answer to the mystery. He didn’t want to die thinking people like the Devils existed solely to destroy the human race like reckless gods playing a game.
  “I deserve that much,” Jacob said.
  “Well,” he began. “If you’re referring to your present situation, that would be because Mr. Latch seems to have disposed of himself and we need someone to fill in in that capacity. Are you aware of what happened to Mr. Latch?”
  Jacob thought about what he saw in the deformed man’s eyes. The horrors he saw there, more extreme than anything he could imagine.
  “That’s not what I’m talking about. You know that.”
  “I see. You’re talking about a more all-encompassing kind of thing. Well, I guess if you think we owe that to you, then we are somewhat obliged to answer. After all, this is an evening of conclusions. I don’t see why the end to your sanity is any less conclusive than the end Ilya and I have planned for ourselves.
  “But I think we need to get to work as time is running a little bit thin so I guess we will just have to converse as we go along. Try not to scream too loud. You’ll disrupt my thought processes.”
  Jacob looked at Ilya, who seemed to be reaching under the stone altar. She came up holding a large horseshoe-shaped metal device. It reminded Jacob of a pair of bent scissors, the tips flattened down.
  “It’s really pretty simple,” Ernst said. He held Jacob’s left arm down. Jacob struggled to move it but the man’s strength was just too great. Ilya placed the tip of the scissor-things on his elbow and began depressing them. Jacob drew in a wince with the first sign of pain.
  “There are all kinds of what you would call Devils. Some of them have been around far longer than others. The oldest of those are no longer human. They are more like pure energy.”
  The scissor-things tightened on his elbow. Jacob heard a pop and then a crunch. He cried out at the pain, shooting all through his arm. Ernst held his forearm and twisted it in a clockwise fashion, the shattered bones grating together as he did this. Sweat drenched Jacob’s head, the pain only increasing.
  “These old ones are kind of like our gods, here to usher us through the Dark Fire. But they need human forms to hide within. More than that, they need souls to hide within so that, wherever there is a god, there is a body of flesh with two souls in it.”
  Methodically, Ernst popped each of Jacob’s fingers in that hand, breaking them at the middle knuckle. That pain was nothing compared to his arm, it felt lost in the throbbing redness.
  “The gods are very careful about who they choose to hide themselves in. Many many years ago, they came to Ilya and I. It was more than two-hundred years ago, in fact, and it happened right here in Lynchville.”
  Together, Ilya and Ernst crossed over to his other arm.
  “Please stop this. Don’t turn me into that. I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what I can give you but please don’t turn me into that man upstairs.”
  “I think we should remove his tongue,” Ernst said. “That way he can listen to our story, because it has to be told, and he won’t be able to tell it to anyone. Oh, sure, he could try and write it down but I don’t know what good his fingers will be.” Ernst chuckled.
  “Jesus, stop this. Just let me go and I’ll do whatever it is to stay away from you.”
  “Aww, where’s the brave Jacob we used to know? You came here to stop us and now the only thing you want to do is to escape without hideous deformity.”
  He grabbed Jacob’s jaw with his huge, strong hand, prying the teeth apart. Ilya inserted the device into his mouth, clamping it around his tongue. Jacob tried to scream a few things but the pathetic sound of his trapped voice made him too sad to continue. She pulled the tongue out, touching it to his chin.
  Ernst held a hand before him, his fingernails long and razor sharp. He drew the nail over the back of Jacob’s tongue. Jacob tasted blood, felt it fill his throat. He wanted to spit it out but could not. At least it hurt less than his arm.
  Jacob didn’t know how long the torture continued. It was spliced with Ernst’s tale from the past. Jacob was not blessed with unconsciousness, was not allowed to feel its painless black depths, so he listened to Ernst murmur on.
  It happened one summer when they were fifteen. Ernst was the son of the only Lynchville minister, also the founder of the town, Sparrow Lynch. He didn’t name a specific religion he was minister of. Ilya was the daughter of the church’s treasurer. That was how they met each other. Of course, given the miniscule size of Lynchville, they were bound to meet each other eventually. But, upon meeting, they fell instantly in love. Consequently, falling in love with each other, they had somehow fallen out of love with the church. Ernst had always had his doubts about the powers of the church but he thought this might have stemmed from his hatred of his father more than anything. And Ilya, Ilya would follow Ernst wherever he went.
  That was when they found this house. And the man who lived in the house, before it was abandoned. Ernst did not give the name of this man. Ernst described some of the things the man was able to do. Predict deaths in the town. Summon fire from the sky. Disappear. Change his shape. Speak inside of the mind without moving his lips. See one’s past, see one’s future. Ilya and Ernst were enchanted.
  The main reason they continued to go to this house, however, was because the man was often away, and he didn’t care how they used it. So Ilya and Ernst copulated constantly. That was what teenagers did, especially when there wasn’t anything else to do.
  Ilya ended up pregnant and that was when Ernst first became aware that people in the town were talking. They knew about the man in the abandoned house. General consensus believed he was the Devil, a tortured soul who was hellbent on torturing everyone else’s soul. But the talk grew stranger than that. Ilya had kept her pregnancy a secret until she began to show. The rumors said the baby was most likely the Devil’s. They were too naive to believe Ilya and Ernst, two children of upstanding church leaders, were capable of performing these ungodly acts.
  The man in the house sensed Ilya and Ernst’s unease. He began to regale them with legends of a place beyond the Dark Fire. Then one day, he offered to show it to them, if only for a second. He told them it was beneath this very house. They followed him down there, figuring it couldn’t do any harm. From the way the Devil talked about it, they were not sure if this world beyond the Dark Fire was a place or a person or both. He showed it to them. It was only a few seconds they stared into the roaring flame, but they saw enough to last them several lifetimes. They saw enough to devote those lifetimes to gaining admittance to the Dark Fire’s paradise.
  On the surface, things were getting worse. The townsfolk had banded together. Headed by a Dr. Millicent, they were determined to end Ilya’s pregnancy. Although they did manage to forcibly remove the fetus, it did not end there. Ilya and Ernst were not prepared to let it end there. They fought back with extreme ferocity, having had their unborn child pried away from them and murdered before their very eyes. Now they were intent on doing some murdering of their own.
  The townsfolk retreated out of the house, convincing themselves that the Devil, the evil man in the vacant house, had taken control of their souls. Gathering around the house that night, not caring if Ilya and Ernst were inside sleeping, they burned it to the ground and cursed the ashes it became.
  As it turned out, Ilya and Ernst
were
in the house. Yet, somehow, they had changed. They were dead but not dead. And they had powers they did not have before. They had powers they thought the Devil had revealed to them only as some kind of hoax. But now they knew all of that to be real. And they realized this was part of their journey beyond the Dark Fire. The Devil had told them certain things, mostly what they were telling Jacob now, and they knew these gods must be inside of them, empowering them and giving them the ability to empower others, or remove that power when it was necessary.
  That was a violent year in Lynchville. There would always be disappearances, but never as many as in that year when, by next summer, there were only seven members left in the community.
  And now, Ilya and Ernst felt as though they had served the gods well. They thought maybe it was time for the gods to move onto someone else and for themselves to move into the awesomely powerful land beyond the Dark Fire.
  Maybe that was it, Jacob thought, even though he was not really capable of rational thought at this point. Or maybe it was all lies. He didn’t care. He was as good as dead, he knew. Once a large stone had been smashed onto his pelvis to shatter it in half, he stopped feeling the pain. He could only see out of one eye and the only thing he wanted to do was close it and slip away but he knew he would not be able to do that.

Thirty-nine

Rachel opened her eyes and couldn’t believe what she saw.
  The house was back. She was certain she had seen the house burn down until it was little more than a pile of rubble but there it was in front of her and she had a terrifying thought that it looked better,
stronger
than it had before.
  Her heart jumped when she realized she shouldn’t have been looking at all. She had fallen asleep behind the wheel of Jacob’s car. Why was she out here, on the grass, looking at the house? Why wasn’t she in there, trying to help him?
  In a rapid flood, the present exploded through her. She was being dragged toward the house. Someone’s hands were around her ankles. She was very confused.
  “Jacob?” she said.
  “I ain’t Jacob,” a voice, frighteningly familiar, called back to her.
  She saw broad shoulders under the moonlight. With every bit of energy she had left, she tightened her leg muscles and clawed her fingers into the ground, trying to bring the descent down the hill to a halt. She knew who it was dragging her. It was Bones. In Rachel’s world, she figured people only really got one chance to kill her and then it was time for her to fight back.
  She remembered her tools, the can of tire sealant and the lighter that were, hopefully, still up by the car. Now it was just a matter of reaching them.
  She plunged her legs to the ground, trying to turn over onto her stomach so she could stand up and bolt.
  Bones did let go of her ankles, but only for a second. She scampered momentarily along the grass, trying to stand up, before he hurled his crushing weight down on her.
  “No you don’t, bitch,” he whispered harshly in her ear.
  “Fucking watch me,” she said, driving a sharp elbow back into his ribs.
  He grunted with the blow, retaliating by taking a fisted swipe at the back of her head. It felt like a rock shattered her skull, knocking her forehead into the mercifully soft ground. She was too focused to let the pain stop her. The only thing she wanted to do was get to the car. Once she got to the car, once she reached what she needed to reach, she would worry about finishing this guy off for good.
  He seemed surprised when she brought her head back up and began her scrabble anew. She knew if she could just manage to break away from him, she could manage to get to the car.
  Bones grabbed the back of her shorts, dragging her up. She let him do this and when she felt her feet leave the ground, she brought her foot back, ramming it up between his legs.
  “Fuck!” he shouted, still holding onto her. “You can’t hurt me!”
  Maybe he was right, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t try. She just didn’t know how she was going to do it.
  She surprised him by planting her feet on the ground and running toward the house. He had his weight leaning the opposite direction and this toppled him over. She took a couple of steps, just enough to allow her to turn around and go charging up toward the car. He was right behind her. He seemed bigger than she remembered.
  She charged up the hill as fast as she could.
  Within feet of the car, Bones caught up with her. She made one more desperate lunge for the car. Bones simultaneously reached his hands out for her, unable to get a grip, and this only served to propel her into the car.
  The door was still open. She cracked her head on the roof of the car and collapsed on the soft cushion of the driver’s seat. Blood began a rapid rivulet down her forehead but she saw the can in the floorboard and grabbed for it. Bones had her by the left ankle, yanking her out of the car. On the way out, she saw the lighter lying in that no-man’s-land between the seat and the door. She flicked her hand out and grabbed it.
  Once outside the car, she flopped to her right and banged her shoulder on the inside of the door.
  She wasted no time. She knew Bones would be leering over her any moment now. She tried to hide the spray can as much as possible in her right hand. She let him get right down over top of her, until she could feel his hot breath and smell its death stink.
  Quickly, she held the can just inches away from his face, flicked the lighter, hoping like hell it ignited on the first try, and depressed the tab on the tire sealant. A thick blue-orange flame shot out, spewing into Bones’ face. His hair caught fire instantly and Rachel thought she saw a look of genuine surprise on his face.
  This stuff was like napalm. Drops of it dripped, burning, onto her lower stomach where it felt like it melted into her skin.
  He leapt off her.
  He backed up a couple of steps and she followed, igniting another flame, showering his body with the burning fluid.
  Bones screamed as his clothes burst into flames.
  Finally able to think for just a second, Rachel found herself entranced as Bones burned. Something wasn’t right. She had learned to never ignore intuition. Something told her that Bones was already dead. There was just too much of a difference between this Bones and the one who had kidnapped her. It was impossible, she knew, for a boy to bulk up this much overnight. And then it hit her. He
was
dead, of course. He was one of them now. Which meant that when his body burned, his soul would be free to go wherever it wanted to go and why would it want to go anywhere when there was a perfectly good girl standing there in front of it? A girl who could easily get into that house and go places Bones had only dreamed about going.
  Rachel sprayed him once more with the fluid. He moved toward her this time, rather than backing away, like he wanted to hug her with this fire that consumed him.
  Rachel sidestepped until she was behind him. The burning was at least confusing him, distracting him. She thought he was burning entirely too fast and then...
and then he would be loose
. The thought of him inside of her, spiritually or physically, made her want to vomit.
  What was the thought she had earlier? she wondered. Something about healing them to death. She almost laughed at herself. There wasn’t any healing for something as far gone as Bones and she didn’t really think she wanted to heal him anyway.
  So she thought about her power, about how she had made the blood move back into Jacob’s body, his skin solder back together, and then she thought about this power
in reverse
. Surely those who can heal can destroy just as adequately. It was just that, usually, the power to destroy was not in her. It was not something she let herself think about an awful lot.
  But now she did. She focused on it. Feeling that screaming blue magical power roll through her.
  She wanted to destroy Bones. And not just his body that burned before her very eyes, now nothing more than a dancing black skeleton. No, she wanted his soul. She wanted to destroy it and make sure it could never escape.
  In her mind, knowing that was where Bones would end up going, she created a kind of horrorshow. A kind of hell, waiting for his arrival.
  His bones crumbled and she felt him come screaming into her. She turned back toward the house with a smirk, casually brushing the blood from her forehead as though it were so many stray hairs.