Hello Darkness Page 24

  Ben walked to the spot where he had seen Marissa standing and looked down at the asphalt. He scraped the toe of his shoe over loose pebbles. A drop of blood fell from his forehead and hit the street next to his shoe.

  The intersection of Main, Cedar, and Dawn was a hundred feet away from the accident. Ben ran the distance, wiping fresh blood from his face as he hugged the side of the street closest to the valley. Going right at the intersection would take him up Cedar to the peak of Mt. Hodges; straight would keep him on Main and lead him to the Sheriff’s Office.

  He turned left onto Dawn Avenue and ran down into the valley—toward his home.

  Ben looked straight ahead as he ran, expecting the demon to reach out from the shadows on either side of the road at any time and knock his head off his shoulders. He breathed more quickly from fear than he did from the physical exertion.

  The woods were silent all around; no insects, no rustling of wind through the leaves. The air was that of a tropical forest and not of the Colorado wilderness in winter. In the heat and humidity, Ben sweat freely as he made his way down the dirt road toward his house.

  He approached the large S-curve that marked the start of his long driveway and stopped.

  Something glinted sharply in the woods to his left. Through branches and between tree trunks, fifty feet or so from the dirt road, a small circle of light flashed at him and quickly disappeared.

  Ben took a step backward and the circle slowly reflected moonlight. He stepped forward and it blinked out again.

  He swallowed heavily and walked off the road, stepping as carefully and quietly as he could over the dead leaves and small branches that littered the ground.

  A part of his brain told him that if the demon wanted him dead he would be dead already. Another part kept showing him all of the possible ways he could be dismembered, tortured, and skinned alive.

  The circle of light flashed at him from the woods ahead. Ben stepped around a cluster of bushes and onto a small patch of open ground. The forest was dense all around, encircling the ten-foot area as if it were a small arena.

  On the ground lay a heap of smoking red-black flesh. The half-melted face of a large demon snarled up at the sky with a frozen mask of death, its jaw twisted horribly sideways to expose broken teeth and a bloody tongue. Its limbs had been broken and lay at odd angles over its flattened torso. Huge holes had been punched into its flesh—perfectly formed circles that sank several inches into the wet skin of the dead monster.

  Ben’s eyes drifted up the trunk of a large tree next to the demon’s corpse. A small circle of light glinted at him as he looked upon the face of Moses St. Croix.

  The preacher hung suspended from the tree a few feet off the ground. Moses had been impaled upon the jagged spear of a broken branch that protruded from the trunk of the tree. The sharp, splintered ends of the branch stuck out through the middle of his chest.

  The one remaining lens in his thin glasses flashed at Ben as he walked over and stood beneath the pastor.

  Moses’s arms were draped out to the side over other branches and his head rested back against the trunk of the tree, his closed eyes tilted slightly upward.

  Ben searched the small clearing. The sledgehammer was nowhere to be found. At the base of the tree below Moses lay his green satchel. Ben picked it up and felt the weight of the ancient book within. He slung the pack over his shoulder and turned to walk back to his house.

  Before he left the small clearing, Ben looked at Moses once more and stopped. The pastor’s left arm stuck out just like the right, but instead of the closed fist of his right hand, with his left Moses pointed off into the woods. Ben walked back and stood below the pastor, then followed the line of his pointing finger.

  Through a small hole in the forest canopy, Ben had a clear view of the church steeple in the distance.

  “I see it, Moses,” said Ben. “I see it.”

  John and Heidi’s RV was still parked next to the house when Ben entered the yard. He tried not to look at it as he hurried past and followed the porch around toward the backyard. In the corner, pressed back into the tall grass that lined the forest, waited the sad frame of the tool shed.

  Ben ran over to it and yanked open the door. He stepped in and waited for his eyes to adjust to the deep shadows.

  He saw garden rakes, a rusty handsaw, a dirty box of nails—nothing that looked like a weapon that could kill a demon.

  Suddenly the memory of him and Annabelle riding in the Cherokee flashed through his mind and he began to sing softly to himself, his voice shaking and barely a voice at all.

  “Celia, you’re breakin’ my heart,” he whispered. “You’re shakin’ my con-fidence daily…”

  Then he saw it.

  A long oak handle rested in a corner next to the door. Dark oilcloth had been wrapped around the head of the weapon. Ben lifted the heavy handle and pulled off the cloth.

  Small etchings covered the steel head of an axe. The curve of the steel at the honed edge flashed in the darkness.

  Ben walked out of the shed and froze in place.

  Inside his house, past the broken window of his dining room, on the far side of the dining table, sat a man.

  When Ben left the house earlier the table had been on its side, pressed against the intact window. Now the table and chairs were back in their usual places. The chandelier hanging from the ceiling was unlit. The silhouette of the man inside sat still and straight.

  “Celia,” whispered Ben as he walked slowly toward the house, gripping the axe. His eyes were wide and unblinking. “You’re breakin’ my heart…”

  He stopped halfway between the shed and the broken window. The man wore a sheriff’s uniform; a broad-brimmed hat topped his head and the glinting badge of the Falling Rock Sheriff’s Department rested over his left breast.

  “Sheriff Mills?” said Ben. He recognized the features of the man’s face from the picture at the station.

  The man at the table lifted his head at the name. He stood slowly, the chair on which he sat sliding loudly back across the floor. A beam of moonlight crossing the room illuminated his face and Ben stepped back instinctively.

  The man’s skin hung loosely on his skull. He had no eyes.

  His mouth opened slowly and he began to speak.

  “Please don’t kill me.”

  Ben turned to run but the thing in his house spoke again.

  “Please!”

  It was Tommy’s voice.

  Ben turned back and looked at the shadow of the man inside the house. It crawled up onto the dining table and slowly moved toward the broken window.

  “No, please!” said Tommy’s voice. “Mom…Dad…please…” His voice tapered off in a wet gurgle of coughing death. “Don’t kill me!” said another voice, that time an old man’s. It was joined with a hundred others, all begging not to be hurt or calling out for someone else. “What are you/please/oh God/nonono/Mommy!”

  The demon in the sheriff’s skin fell off the table and onto the broken glass covering the ground outside the house. It landed face-down and the skin on its back immediately split open along its spine. Two long, thin arms shot up out of the hole as if a sapling exploded from the ground. The arms grew and separated. Each clawed hand pressed down into the ground on either side of the sheriff’s husk and the demon began to emerge.

  Its head popped out of the long rip in the sheriff’s skin, the mouth open in a choking scream of fury.

  Ben raised the axe and ran at the monster. It pushed itself completely from the empty skin and turned to face him. Ben brought the axe swinging down and felt the head sink into the demon’s flesh. The monster howled and spat. The axe stuck out of its shoulder, the steel head sunk all the way up to the oak handle.

  The demon kicked Ben and he tumbled through the air. A brief second of night sky above and warm air rushing over his face, then a crushing impact as he slammed into the side of the shed. The flimsy aluminum sheet caved in and that side of the shed broke inward. The roof fell down
and smacked Ben’s head as he scrambled away from the shed.

  The demon spun in circles near the house, screaming and stomping as it tried to pull the embedded axe from its flesh. It rolled onto its back and its limbs broke in several places to rearrange themselves as it attempted to grab the oak handle of the weapon. Its flesh sizzled at the wound and black smoke snaked up into the air.

  Ben yelled and ran at the demon. He jumped into the air and landed against its bony torso, grasping at the axe handle. The demon snarled and twisted violently under his weight, then swung its head back over its neck and sank its teeth into Ben’s leg. Ben managed to hold on to the axe handle when the demon ripped him away from its body and threw him across the yard.

  Ben screamed in pain and the axe flew from his hands right before he hit the ground. He rolled to a stop and looked down at his leg. A thousand teeth had punched through his flesh around his knee. The wide jaw of the demon left ragged holes from the bottom of his shin arcing up to the middle of his thigh. Black sludge oozed from the wounds. The holes sizzled when he touched them and the punctures on the back of his leg felt as if they were caked with dirt.

  The demon whimpered like a dog on the far side of the yard and licked at the wound in its shoulder with a three-foot black tongue. It looked different than before, as if it had changed its shape. Its limbs were thinner and its torso curved sharply in the middle. Too many bones moved independently of each other beneath its thin flesh. To Ben it looked more like a long-legged spider than anything else.

  Except the face.

  The face had changed into that of a scared child’s. Its head rested on a long, thin neck which stuck out between two bony spots that Ben thought of as shoulders. Black veins lined the edge of the pale skin surrounding the face, creeping inward and running jagged through the flesh. The eyes were dead and black and the mouth bled sludge at the corners. The child’s face opened and closed its mouth and clacked its teeth together loudly.

  As Ben watched, the head sucked back into the torso and the face spread out to cover a large part of the demon’s body. The eyes grew like spilled liquid. The edges of the mouth extended around the demon’s torso until a long, thin line ran from one side of its body to the other. When the mouth opened, half of its torso hinged upward to reveal a bed of bones and black intestines.

  The mouth closed with a snap and its lips fused together. The demon groaned as a new head pushed out from its body. It was everything at once: man, woman, child, beast. Its wide mouth split the head in the middle and rose up at the edges in a wicked grin. The demon’s thick neck pushed the head out past two bony shoulders until finally the cracking of bones stopped and the demon let out a long, deep sigh.

  It saw Ben and moved across the yard quickly, loping toward him with a determined frown on its horrible face. The bones in its body shifted visibly under stretched flesh, breaking loudly and moving against each other with a grind that was like chalk scraping over concrete.

  Ben crawled to the axe and landed on top of it just as the demon fell on top of him. He twisted onto his back, gripping the axe near its steel head and slicing at the demon. He hacked at its skin as if he were hammering nails into its body.

  The demon snapped its teeth and wailed as Ben split open its taught, paper-thin flesh and exposed jagged, pale white bones.

  It rolled off him and spasmed on its back, limbs kicking wildly in the air. It reached out for the axe and its cold, long fingers closed over Ben’s left hand. It squeezed until the bones of Ben’s wrist and fingers snapped like twigs, then ripped the axe away and flung it far over the trees and into the forest.

  Ben rolled away until he hit the trunk of a tree next to the tool shed, then stood, holding his broken hand before him.

  The demon kicked in circles on the ground and black smoke spat from the wounds in its belly. Its head knocked into the ground and its teeth bit into the earth, sending chunks of grass and dirt spewing into the air.

  Ben turned and ran.

  He stumbled over bushes and grit his teeth as leaves slapped against the wounds in his leg. He dragged the limb like dead weight, using it more as a crutch since it wouldn’t bend properly at the knee.

  His hand felt light; empty. Ben looked at it to make sure it was still there, then tripped over a root and fell on his face. He lay on the ground, groaning, then pushed himself to his feet.

  He had fallen onto a thin trail that ran farther into the dark woods. Behind him, the trail seemed to go straight toward his house. But in the other direction—

  The steeple of The Last Valley Church jutted up from the trees, its peeling white paint shining in the moonlight.

  Ben ran away from his house, toward the church. Every step was a fresh bite in his leg, as if the demon were gnawing at him as he moved. His whole body shivered even though he was sweating from the heat.

  The demon crashed through the woods behind him and Ben ran faster.

  His injured leg pounded the ground with rhythmic thuds as he lurched forward. The trail before him thinned to a narrow gap, and then stopped completely. Ben stood there at the end of the trail, turning around in a panic and searching the dense woods as they rapidly closed in around him.

  The demon spilled out of the woods a little ways down the trail and scrambled across the ground to find its footing. It righted itself and saw Ben, then opened its mouth impossibly wide and screamed with the voices of a thousand dying victims.

  Ben plunged into the woods.

  Branches broke as he forced his way through the thick brush. The skin of his injured leg tore open against sharp branches. He fell down, then got back up, then fell again. He leaned against a tree as he stood up, then wiped dirt from his eyes and ran on.

  The demon was close.

  A tree snapped in half a few feet behind as the woods suddenly disappeared around him. Ben ran across an open field. He fell to the ground and lay there, too tired to go any farther.

  The demon stepped out of the woods and onto the field, then pulled back, screeching in pain. It pounded the earth with its limbs and scurried up and down the treeline, howling at Ben from the shadows. Leaves and branches exploded from the woods as it ran along the edge of the field. Its black eyes twisted in their sockets as the beast glared menacingly at Ben.

  He pulled the satchel over his head and tossed it aside, then breathed out in exhaustion and rolled onto his back. Above, the tall steeple of Moses’s church reached up into the sky.

  Ben sat up, grimacing at the pain that covered his entire body. He lifted his broken hand from the soft earth and looked at it for a long moment, then over at the demon thrashing violently in the woods. It stuck its head past the trees and screamed at him, then closed its eyes tightly and retreated.

  The screaming stopped and there was silence.

  Ben sat up straight and searched the treeline, expecting the demon to burst from the woods at any moment and rip him to shreds.

  A minute passed.

  Ben looked back at the church. Several steps led up to an old door. A glass display case was attached to the outside of the church next to the door, empty except for a few tacks pressed into cracked corkboard within. A large tool shed sat apart from the church near the woods, the sliding door pulled open to reveal a car half-covered in a blue tarp.

  Leaves rustled in front of him and Ben turned to face the woods.

  The trees stood several feet apart from each other—tall pillars at the edge of the field. The forest plunged into shadow between them, as if they represented a physical boundary for the moonlight.

  Silhouettes appeared between the trees, suspended several feet off the ground. Human silhouettes—shadows against shadow.

  They floated out from between the trees. As they were pushed out from the forest and over the moonlit field, the silhouettes became bodies, and the bodies were the dead citizens of Falling Rock. From one end of the field to the other, nearly a hundred torn corpses hovered over the ground in various states of dismemberment.

  Ben could n
ot describe the horrible feeling that gripped his soul. His mouth hung open in silence as his tear-filled eyes looked upon the dead.

  They floated over the ground, a row of corpses hung lifeless like meat in a butcher-shop window. Men and women—and children. Ben saw the uniforms of two deputies, the overalls of Hank Buckley—and little Tommy Bridges.

  Tommy floated in the center of the long row of corpses, directly in front of Ben. He stared forward, his blank eyes looking at the church.

  Next to him was Janet Hayes from the Sheriff’s Office.

  Beside her, Blake Halsey stared at Ben with dead eyes.

  And next to Blake was John. The bullet hole in his chest had been ripped open to reveal his ribcage and his lower jaw was torn off; it swung slowly from side to side as it hung down in front of his neck by a thin strand of flesh.

  Ben closed his eyes, unable to stop the sobs that wracked his body. He laid on his side and gripped the grass with his uninjured hand, screaming into the earth.

  “Benjamin.”

  The corpses spoke.

  He sat up and faced them. Their heads were raised and their mouths were open wide. All of them looked directly at Ben.

  “Benjamin. Come back.”

  He scooted back toward the church, pushing away from the forest.

  Tommy’s corpse floated farther from the woods.

  “You let me die,” he said. His jaw didn’t move with the words. The noise seemed to crawl out of his throat from the pit of his stomach.

  “You let me die, too,” said John. “You could have stopped him, Benjamin.”

  Ben stopped crawling away from the bodies.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Please forgive me.”

  All of the corpses spoke in unison; a chorus of the dead.

  “No.”

  The bodies slowly withdrew into the woods, pulled back into the shadows by their puppeteer.

  Footsteps in the forest—too light and soft to be the demon.

  Ben squinted past the trees as a silhouette appeared—just one—and stepped out onto the open field.

  “Marissa,” said Ben.

  His wife stood at the edge of the field near the woods, whole and complete—beautiful.