The Demonists (24 page)

The man cried out, releasing his grip on her neck as he stumbled back.

Theo crouched upon the ground, watching the man as he looked down upon the damage she had wrought. The gray flesh of his stomach was lacerated and weeping a milky substitute for blood.

“That wasn’t very nice,” the disciple of Damakus said as she watched his belly push outward, the skin letting go with a disgusting, tearing sound, his insides uncoiling and spilling out to the ground.

The demons inside her went wild with the disgusting sight, enjoying the obscenity of it all with such intensity that she actually found herself smiling with them at their victory.

Which might have been a bit premature.

The man was on his knees, his internal workings displayed before him. She could hear him muttering to himself as he reached down to the rubbery innards, picking them up in his hands and shoving them back inside the open stomach cavity.

The demons were suddenly impressed, showing their approval with screams and laughter.

The organs stayed where the man had shoved them, his sickly flesh rapidly healing around the open wounds.

“Now, then,” the man then said as he rose. “Where were we?”

B
renna moved down the schoolhouse corridor, gun ready to fire if required.

“Stay close,” she said as she walked, eyes darting to patches of shadow just in case.

The crying was louder the closer they got to the open doorway at the end of the short hall. Her heart was being torn apart by the hopelessness of the sound, but she curbed the urge to run blindly into the room.

In a situation such as this, she needed to be careful.

She thought of her son as she cautiously moved toward the doorway, thinking of how she wished that he had cried out, had given her some kind of chance to save him. But whatever had taken him—SID, crib death—whatever name was given to the crippling phenomena, it had struck with terrible efficiency.

From somewhere in the building they heard a loud, banging sound as if heavy, emergency doors had been thrown open. They stopped, listening for what might follow.

This just spurred them on to move all the faster, Brenna making eye contact with her partner at the open doorway.

“Ready?” she asked, and he quickly nodded as she came around the corner into the room, her gun aimed for business. Her eyes scanned the location, taking in the rows of old-fashioned desks and the five children sitting there.

“We’ve come to get you out of here,” she told them, attempting to stifle the flow of powerful emotion that she could hear in her own voice.

John had already moved to the first desk, a boy she recognized as Christopher Waugh watching cautiously as he squatted down beside him.

“They’re chained,” John announced, already looking around for a possible solution. “We need a key, or something to break the chain with.”

She holstered her weapon, going to the heavy wooden desk at the front of the room.

“Look at the lock,” she instructed. “What does it look like?”

“Simple manacle,” John answered. “Nothing fancy.”

She moved around to the front of the desk, pulling open side drawers, top and bottom, which were empty. She then tried the center drawer, which was pretty much the same except for dirt, an old pencil, and . . .

Bingo!
There were two paper clips inside amongst the filth and she snatched them up as if they were the most precious of rare jewels.

“Check on the condition of the others,” she said, coming down the aisle toward where Christopher sat, bending the paper clips into the appropriate shape for what she was going to try.

“It’s been years since I’ve done this,” she said to anyone who was listening.

“What—” the little boy started, his voice a terrible dry croak.

“I’m going to try and pick this lock,” she said, getting down on the floor. She went to work on the boy’s chains but not before she noticed the dried blood covering his foot.

“This one,” she heard John say. Brenna looked over to see what he was doing. In the next row, John was squatting down next to a little girl, who appeared to be sleeping.

“Is she . . . ?” Brenna asked, afraid for the answer.

“She’s alive,” John said, laying a gentle hand upon her back. “But she’s in rough shape. All these kids need medical attention as soon as possible.

“He’s going to kill us,” the boy, Christopher, croaked. “He’s going to feed us to . . .” The boy turned his head, and Brenna followed his gaze to a tank at the back of the room, something swimming around in the filthy water.

She could see that the boy was on the verge of complete emotional collapse, his lips quivering and his face twisting up with sorrow.

“Let’s get you kids out of here,” she said, looking away before she, too, was breaking down.

She slipped the thin ends of the paper clips into the lock of the manacle around Christopher’s ankle, trying desperately to remember her college days and how she’d taught herself to lock-pick out of necessity because she was always locking herself out of her dorm room.

The lock was clogged with dirt, but she was still able to get in, manipulating the simple mechanism to release the clasp and set the boy free.

“There you go,” she said, looking at him. He’d gotten control of himself, but she could still see that vacant look of shock in his eyes. “You just sit there while we help the others,” she told him.

He agreed with a slow nod.

She then turned to the little girl across from him. “You’re Rebecca, aren’t you?”

The child attempted a smile, and Brenna felt her rage inflame. The monster who had abducted her had taken her teeth. In a way, she had been the one to lead them here, the horrible act committed against her actually contributing to them getting here. Brenna reached out, laying a gentle hand upon the little girl’s hair, and spoke softly to her.

“We’re going to get you home.” She then proceeded to pick the lock on the child’s manacles, freeing her in less time than it had taken with Christopher’s restraints. It was all coming back to her.

Brenna turned to Christopher. “Can you keep an eye on Rebecca while we free the others?”

He said that that he would, and she reached out, giving his shoulder a gentle squeeze, and was horrified by the touch. She remembered the photo of the husky boy, in his Pop Warner football uniform; now he was nearly skin and bones.

“This is Cindy,” John said as Brenna joined him, leaning down beside another little girl who could barely keep her eyes open.

“Hello, Cindy,” Brenna said, squatting down beneath the desk. “Let’s get those chains off you.”

She did that two more times, each child grateful, but not having the strength to do much of anything else other than sit there and . . .

“What’s he up to?” John asked.

Brenna looked to where he was looking and saw that the boy, Christopher, had hobbled to the back of the room and now stood before a filthy fish tank, looking at it with hateful eyes.

“Chris, what’s up?” Brenna asked, standing up from where she’d been squatting, working on the last of the locks.

“It’s being quiet,” the boy said, swaying because of his injured foot. “It doesn’t want you to know it’s here.”

There was sudden movement within the tank, the filthy water splashing.

John moved down the aisle. “Christopher, I think you might want to—”

“It’s because of
him
,” the boy said, reaching out to grab hold of the edge of the tank.

“Who, Christopher?” John asked, almost to the boy. “Damakus,” the boy said, almost as if spitting something poisonous from his mouth. And as the name was said, he pulled upon the tank’s edge, using all his strength to tip it from where it rested on the two desks.

The tank fell from the desks, shattering upon impact, spilling its foul-smelling water, and something else, onto the classroom floor.

John ran toward where the boy was standing, staring with rapt attention at the hideous monstrosity that now flopped and writhed upon the wet, glass-covered floor. He grabbed the boy, yanking him back away from the thing as it immediately lashed out at where the child had been standing, one if its tentacle-like appendages snapping the air like a whip.

“What the hell is that?” she asked.

“That, I believe, is the demon lord, Damakus,” John said, watching the thing as it thrashed about.

“Good to know,” Brenna said, walking a few steps closer, aiming her gun, and firing multiple shots into its fleshy, undulating mass.

She let the demons’ attributes flow, allowing her body to shift and change, to manifest their various traits.

This would be needed if she were to survive.

The disciple of Damakus was fast, evading her claws with ease while pounding her with fists like rock.

Theo lay on the ground, shaking the fog from her mind. She attempted to evade him, to spring away from his reach, but he again proved too fast. One of the disciple’s hands grabbed a handful of her thick black hair, yanking her back to him.

“What are you exactly?” the man asked inquisitively. “I’ve never seen the likes of something like you before.”

She struggled in his grasp, and then felt her hair let go.

Theo was suddenly free, scrabbling away from her foe, who was left holding only a large handful of her hair.

She ran a clawed hand over a newly smooth scalp. One of the demons had caused her hair to fall away, leaving her now bald, and quite angry at the change. Theo loved her hair, and hoped—for the sake of whatever demon had been responsible—that they would somehow return it to its fullness and luster as soon as this matter was settled.

But until then she would use the anger of its loss to her advantage, springing off from the ground in a terrific leap, landing upon her foe’s chest and driving him back to the ground.

“You want to know what I am?” she asked, perched on the disciples chest. She could feel the inner workings of her mouth changing, her teeth reforming in her gums, growing sharper—longer. “I’m the thing put out there in the world to make something like you afraid.”

The man fought to throw her off, but she held fast, the claws of her toes and hands sinking into the putrefying flesh to hold on as she drove her head and mouth forward, to sink her teeth into the skin of his throat.

Theo should have been revolted by the act, but she wasn’t—the demon that was giving her the strength and rage to fight her foe dismissing the disgust and replacing it with something akin to hunger.

The man tried to scream, but his damaged throat was filled with blood, or whatever foul juices coursed through his disgusting body. Theo bit down harder and yanked back, tearing away a large chunk of neck. Part of her wanted to consume the prize, but her humanity won out, and she spat the piece away. Caught unawares, the disciple bucked wildly, and she was thrown from her perch on him.

One hand pressed to his damaged throat, he climbed to his feet. Theo waited, in a tensed crouch, growling like something fresh from the jungle.

The disciple pulled his hand away from the nasty bite, and she watched in horror as it healed before her eyes.

“That was nasty,” the man said, his voice at first a strained whisper, but suddenly stronger. “But I can be nasty, too.”

He charged at her, grabbing her around the waist and tackling her to the ground.

The demons inside Theo all cried out, each and every one of the thousand trying to come forward. It was more than she could handle as her psyche was deluged with the demonic, giving her adversary the upper hand.

The disciple was wild with rage, his fists raining down upon her ripping flesh, and shattering bone with his blows. Theo attempted to fight back to the best of her ability, but she was easily swatted aside, one of her limbs grabbed, twisted, and broken with such savagery that she found her mind going completely numb to the onslaught.

Allow me,
the demonic entity that sounded like little Billy Sharp echoed inside her head.

And she did just that, raising an arm broken in at least two places, as a razor-sharp spine, like something from the shell of some prehistoric insect, sprouted from the palm of her hand, stabbing into the side of her attacker.

The disciple cried out, grabbing at her offending arm and ripping it from her shoulder. Theo cried out in agony, managing to throw the man from her body. She climbed to her feet, gripping the bleeding stump of her arm, silently commanding the entities within her to stem the flow of blood.

The disciple stood up, examining where he had been pierced. He picked at the side wound, plunging his index finger and thumb into the wound and slowly extracting the barbed spine from inside.

He studied the dripping appendage with fascination.

“I think I’ll make you eat this,” he said, his horrible eyes darting from the demonic weapon to her.

She was ready, but seriously doubting that she would have the strength to continue to fight, when something inexplicable happened. The disciple went suddenly rigid, the spine-covered appendage falling from his hands as he turned toward the school.

“Damakus,” the disciple said beneath his breath, darting toward the open door and disappearing inside.

Fearing for her husband’s and Agent Isabel’s safety, Theo moved to follow, but her damaged body had other plans as she pitched forward, unconscious before she even hit the ground.

J
ohn watched as the abomination writhed upon the classroom floor, cries like that of injured infants emitted from the multiple bullet holes that had been shot in its loathsome body.

He still held on to the boy, Christopher, moving him along the back of the room, toward where Brenna Isabel was standing with the other children.

“We should probably think about getting them all out of here,” he said, just as what felt like an ice pick plunged into the center of his skull and into his brain.

John let out a scream, his shoulders bunching up tightly against his neck. Something had found its way inside his skull—inside his brain— and from the looks of Agent Isabel and the children, they experiencing it as well.

He managed to look to the back of the classroom, to where the infant form of the demon lord Damakus lay amidst the filthy water and broken glass. Multiple sets of horrible eyes were fixed upon him—
on them all
—eyes that held them in contempt, promising nothing but pain and misery.

Damakus spread its tendrils within the folds of his brain, showing him the truth of the world and the terror of a future yet to come.

John snapped awake, his fingers still poised upon the keyboard. “Shit,” he said, squeezing his eyes tightly shut and opening them.

He gave his head a little shake to clear away the fog, and looked at the last line of the paragraph he’d been typing and laughed.
Kahisdhgpoashidgpaosidhgasdp89yuwe9p8y9hsa,
it said.
Good one,
he thought.
Another
New York Times
bestseller for sure
. He deleted the gibberish, saving the document in multiple places before shutting the computer down for the night. When he was falling asleep at the keyboard, there wasn’t much sense of pushing it any further, even if he did have an insane deadline breathing down his neck. He’d get back to it in the morning when his brain was fresher.

He glanced at the cuckoo clock in the shape of a haunted house on the wall of his office and saw that it was much later than he thought it should be.
How long have I been asleep at the keyboard?
he wondered, rolling his chair back from his desk.

John had been killing himself on this latest book, a recounting of the whole Damakus affair, give or take some details that might cause the general populace to totally freak out. It was bad enough having to deal with the threat of the world under attack by dark, supernatural forces. It would be near impossible to deal with if the average citizen was truly aware.

Standing up from his chair, he turned away from his desk toward the front of his office, and was surprised that she was standing there. “Hey,” he said to his wife. “You scared the shit out of me. I didn’t hear you come in.”

She stood there staring and smiling at him.

“I was falling asleep at the computer, guessed that it might be time to get some sleep.”

She’d gone up to bed hours ago and he was surprised to see her awake.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded quickly. “I went to your room, but when I saw that your bed was empty I figured you were still in here.”

They hadn’t slept in the same room, or bed, since her change. These days Theo often had nightmares, most likely spurred on by the demonic entities that continued to reside within her body. The sigils that the Coalition had tattooed upon her body gave her control of them in her conscious state, but when she was unconscious, things had the potential to become more dangerous.

They both thought it would be wise that he slept in one of the mansion’s guest rooms until she had a better control of the situation. She stepped closer to him. “Thought you might need to be reminded to go to bed.”

“Yeah,” he said, and laughed. “It’s getting to be that way these days.”

He was suddenly very aware of her proximity to him, feeling the heat from her body. She was wearing a Ramones concert T-shirt and nothing else, and he couldn’t remember her being any more beautiful. Or desirable.

Their relationship since the whole demonic possession thing had been strained. She was still dealing with so much in regard to her mental state, never mind the physical manifestations, that it had driven them apart. John was well aware that she needed time to adjust, and was more than willing to oblige.

But he loved her so much, and to be kept from her, to not being able to be with her, to touch her—it was killing him inside. Theo moved even closer and looked him square in the eye. “It’s time to go to bed, John,” she said. She was standing so close that he could feel the warmth of her breath on his face.

“Thanks for the reminder,” he said, fighting desperately not to take her by the shoulders and pull her to him.

They’d talked about this before, about waiting until they knew it was safe.

She put her hand on his chest, and he jumped, as if shocked by electricity.

Theo laughed, a sexy sound that he hadn’t heard often enough these past months.

“What are you doing?” he finally had the courage to ask her. She ran her fingers down his chest while looking at him. “Getting you ready for bed.”

“That’s not getting me ready for bed,” he said, and laughed nervously.

Her fingertips left his chest, moving down to his stomach. “It’s not?” He shook his head.

Though it pained him to do so, he grabbed her wrist. “This probably isn’t—” he began.

“No, it is,” she corrected him, twisting her hand free from his grasp and continuing her progress, only this time much lower. “Theo, we talked—”

“And talked, and talked,” she said, moving herself closer as her hand found what it had been searching for.

The pleasure of her touch was something that he knew he’d missed, but right then he hadn’t been aware of how much. “I’m tired of waiting,” she said, bringing her lips to his in a kiss that made his heart race, and his blood to pump. “I’m done with it . . . we need to get used to the new normal.”

He was considering protesting, to ask her if she was absolutely sure, but it all became sort of fuzzy as her hands undid the buckle of his pants, and he found his own hands suddenly on her, frantically pulling her close as their lips locked hungrily together.

John believed that her intention had been to go back to what had been their bedroom, to finish what had been started, but things proceeded far quicker than they’d both likely anticipated.

At the moment, he’d found it incredibly unfair that he was wearing so much clothing, the effort of peeling away the layers taking away from the intense pleasure of their acts upon the floor of his office. He didn’t mind the hardness of the wooden floor, or the abrasiveness of the area rug around his desk; it all became part of the sensations of the moment.

Sensations that were absolutely incredible, and so very missed. After, they lay there on his office floor, naked and drenched in the sweat of their strenuous activity, listening to the sounds of the office— of the old house around them.

“Still awake?” he asked, pulling her closer and kissing her on the side of the head.

“Why?” she asked. “Want to go again?”

He laughed out loud, seriously considering the offer. It had been too long.

She rolled out from beneath his arm, sliding her naked body on top of his, and looked down into his face.

“That was good,” she said.

“Nice to know that we haven’t lost it,” he said.

She smiled at him. “Not at all,” she said, pushing herself up to sit astride him. “In fact, I think it worked on the very first try.” He wasn’t sure what she meant.

“What did?” he asked as he ran his hands down the sides of her smooth, muscular legs.

She ran her hands across her stomach. “Your seed,” she said, her intoxicating smile beaming down to bathe him in its radiance. “It’s taken root.”

“I don’t—” John began as she leaned down to him, her long black hair tickling his face and upper body as her lips hungrily locked to his. She broke the kiss with a throaty laugh, rising again to gaze down on him.

“It’s already growing,” she told him, her hands now rubbing across a stomach that suddenly appeared larger to him, and more pronounced. He instantly knew that something was wrong, noticing signs that perhaps his wife was no longer in control. He tried to throw her off, but her weight suddenly had increased threefold, pinning him to the floor. Thinking fast, he dredged up some powerful words of immobilization, words that would perhaps buy him some time to get away from the demons who had most likely hijacked his wife’s body so that he might do something to help her regain control and— It was if the demons sensed what he was going to do, a stinking stream of viscous fluid splashing down from her open mouth to cover his own, filling his mouth and sealing his lips closed so that he could not speak.

Could not utter the words.

She tossed her head back and laughed, her naked stomach growing increasingly larger, swelling from within.

He tried to fight her, to force her from atop his body, but he wasn’t strong enough, his efforts swatted away with little concern. “Look at what you’ve done,” she said in a voice that did not belong to her. “Look at what you’ve helped us do.”

Her belly was huge, the skin stretching before his eyes. He tried to speak, to wipe the viscous substance from his face, but it had become like some sort of rubbery solid, bonding with the skin of his face. He could no longer tell where the substance started and his own skin began.

“With your love,” she said, her fingers probing at the tight skin just below her protruding belly button, “you’ve given us substance . . .” The nails at the tips of her fingers had become long and yellow and sharp and they dug into the taut skin of her belly, ripping at the flesh.

“Shape . . .”

Her fingers had disappeared beneath the flow of blood, digging deeper as she tore at the skin, pulling the jagged rend that she’d made apart with both hands.

“Body . . .”

The skin of her belly came apart with a horrible ripping sound, and the contents of her insides spilled down upon his naked form. “You’ve given us life!”

Finger-length larva, awash in a stinking mixture of pus and blood, poured down on him. Even though he knew that he couldn’t, John tried to scream as he bucked wildly beneath her incredible weight. He could see thing things that covered his body, the thickness of their milky white undulating bodies, their all-too-human faces— mouths opened in high-pitched wails of hunger.

He saw his wife, stomach wound gaping wide, looking down upon him, and their newly born spawn lovingly, urging them to eat. And eat they did, as John Fogg silently screamed.

The terror from the one called Fogg was delicious, and the Lord God Damakus could feel his divine personage, cut by glass and punctured by gunfire, begin to heal.

And his mass begin to grow.

It hoped that the female’s horror would be just as delectable and sweet.

It was a gorgeous fall day, and Brenna had brought flowers and a balloon to the grave.

There was a part of her that thought the business of leaving things at the grave of a loved one kind of foolish—the person was dead, what would he care if she left something there or not?

But then there was the part of her that asked, what if somehow he actually liked the gifts?

So she brought flowers, and an Elmo balloon, just to be on the safe side.

Brenna stood over the plaque in the grass, reading her baby son’s name, and the date that he died, feeling that awful disconnect that she often did; that something very special was missing from the universe these days.

There were other people scattered about the cemetery, visiting with their lost loved ones, so she refrained from talking. She knelt down at the grave, tying the string of the balloon to the flowers, and set her offering down alongside the bronze-colored plaque.

Her psychiatrist said that it would be good for her to visit here, to sit and reflect on the past, and what had been lost. He said that it would better prepare her for the future.

Her child was gone, her husband was gone; all she had left was her job.

A chill ran down her spine, and she realized that she had been staring at her son’s name on the grave marker so intensely that her eyes now hurt, and her vision was blurry. Brenna looked away, blinking and rubbing at her eyes, and she noticed that it had become suddenly overcast, a surprisingly cool breeze now whipping over the graves.

She also noticed that the cemetery now appeared empty, and wondered how long exactly she had been staring at the plaque. She made a mental note to bring up the odd passage of time to her psychiatrist, just in case it might be something he should be made aware of.

Brenna had reached the point of her visit a little bit quicker than she usually did, when she’d reflected enough on the painful past, and the equally painful future ahead of her, and was preparing to leave when she heard it.

Soft and muffled.

A baby’s cry.

Brenna listened to the sound, processing the auditory information, ready to pass it off as the wind blowing through the trees, or the afternoon cries of some sort of animal, but there was nothing more distinct at that moment.

A baby was crying—her baby was crying. Beneath the cemetery dirt, from within the tiny white casket, her baby son was crying.

Brenna had no idea how it was possible, but there was no mistaking the sound. She knew his cry, distinct and special, a part of her that could never be forgotten. A cry that she hadn’t heard since that fateful Halloween night when . . .

She saw him inside her head, inside his crib, silent and still, the image as she continued to gaze at the grave marker morphing into a vision of him wailing within the coffin nestled in the embrace of the cold, dark ground.

And she knew right then that there wasn’t a question, she had to get him out. Her mind raced with the things that she could do, that she probably
should
do, like find someone who worked for the cemetery, or calling the local police, but what if there was some sort of time limit, what if this miracle—because that was what this was, a miracle—what if this special happening had an expiration time? What if she only had this moment . . . this now, to act? What if she waited, and did the rational things, and her son died again?