Paul’s paralysis broke. He backed away toward the door, then ran through the rain, ran to his Mustang. He stabbed the key into the ignition, slammed his foot down hard on the gas. His tires squealed, kicked up gravel as he raced onto these country roads. He had no idea where he was going, had no plan in mind. He only knew he couldn’t stay in that house another second. Looking at that invitation was like watching water whirling into a drain, but it wasn’t water slipping away, it was his future – all of his dreams, all of his hopes, all of his love spiraling down into darkness. And his mother was happy about it. From the look on her face he was surprised she hadn’t done a little dance.
The Mustang sped along. How fast it had been going, Paul could not say. He hadn’t been paying any attention. His mind hadn’t even been in the car. All of his insides slipped down, sank into his right foot, gave it weight, gave the car speed.
He’d somehow made it to Route Six. The Mustang hit the crest of the first hill and went airborne, flung his guts and organs back up into place. The car landed with a violent thud and Paul’s mind and body reunited. It hit the second hill and went airborne again. This time, when it landed he gave the steering wheel a panicky turn, sent it off the road and into the black cast-iron stove that seventy-year-old Alice Truman used for a mailbox. The stove sent him to the opposite side of the road. He went into the drainage ditch and the Mustang rolled over ... the roof caved in ... rolled twice ... the windshield exploded into shards ... rolled a third time ... and then the world went black.
He awoke feeling strangely cold. It was June, tropical heat, and yet he’d been freezing. The Mustang lay upside down and Paul hung suspended from his seatbelt with blood in his face. He wiped it away with detached interest, then looked out his passenger’s side window. The roof of the Mustang had folded like a tin can. Where the window had been, a pair of wrinkled, metal lips now curled into a smile full of jagged crystal teeth. His eyes turned lazily to his driver’s side window. Corn grew down like green stalactites. He reached up and tried to find the latch to his seatbelt.
“Paul.” Not a single voice, but a choir ... a group of voices singing his name.
He wiped a handful of fresh blood from his right eye and looked again through his window, swinging back and forth as if doing some acrobatic trick in a sling. He saw the shadows between the stalks move, uncoil – saw eyes like embers burning in the darkness.
The demons.
They were coming toward him.
Paul screamed; he reached up, tried to find the latch that would set him free. It should’ve been there, but he couldn’t find it with his hands.
“Thank you,” said the many voices speaking as one.
Fire. He heard the crackle of flames – just as it sounded on his sound effects tapes, like someone wadding paper into a microphone. Fluid had pooled below Paul on the floor – the ceiling! – of the Mustang. It might have been gasoline. He thought he remembered smelling gas. But if it had been gas, wouldn’t the car have just blown up? Whatever it had been, it burned; tongues of red-hot fire licked his back, bathed it in heat, burned his shirt and the flesh beneath it.
Paul’s screams grew louder. He saw activity in the corner of his eye, saw slithering scales, saw fluttering batwings. Sharp, yellow fangs smiled at him like the jagged glass of the passenger window and there were voices – voices calling out his name.
The creatures were all over the Mustang now. He heard them crawling across its exposed underbelly, heard them scratching at the metal, laughing, mewling in victory at the prize it held for them.
“Thank you,” they told him again and again. “Thank you.”
I’m in Hell, Paul remembered thinking. I thought I’d won the Wide Game, but I lost ... I’ve lost everything and the winners have come to collect.
And then he was gone.
If it had been one of his movies, he would have used a slow fade to black. It was the language of film. Everything got fuzzy and the screen slowly grew dark. The reality of it had been closer to a jump cut. He was in the car, the demons all around him, and then he wasn’t. He was in an ambulance staring up at Robby. Robby looked frenzied. It reminded Paul of the day Sean fell. It reminded him of the Wide Game.
There was something strapped to Paul’s face. An oxygen mask. It smelled funny and there was a horrible moment when Paul thought he might vomit.
“Paul, can you hear me?” Robby shouted at him. “Blink twice if you can hear me?”
Paul blinked twice.
Robby nodded. “You were in an accident. You’ve got a gash on your head and your back got cooked just a little.”
He might have said more, but Paul had drifted back into unconsciousness. Later, Robby would tell Paul that he’d heard him screaming into the oxygen mask – things like, “I should’ve let them take the bitch” and, “I should’ve killed her in the shed when they asked me to.” Paul remembered nothing of what he’d said; all he could remember was the pain.
That Paul’s back had been “cooked just a little” had been a grand understatement. His back had been barbecued. For the rest of that long summer, Paul’s mother had applied two different medicated ointments to it throughout the day and covered it in gauze. She hadn’t said a word about the accident, hadn’t discussed with him what had happened or punished him in any way. Perhaps she thought he’d suffered enough. Burns as severe as his had been never really healed, after all. They just stopped oozing and scarred over, leaving a lasting reminder.
In addition to his back, a sliver of glass from the windshield had found a new home in his scalp. It had taken a dozen or so stitches to close the gash left behind when the doctors removed it. Of course, it could have been worse. Robby told Paul that, if he hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt, he would have been thrown out the windshield and the car would have rolled right on over him. If that had happened, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would have scratched their heads and gone home. Game over.
Paul also might have burned alive in his car had Alice Truman not called Robby and the Harmony Fire Department to his aid. He’d called some weeks later to thank her. Insurance paid for her new cast-iron stove mailbox. Why she used a cast-iron stove to this day Paul still had to wonder.
He’d also thanked Robby for his help, told him what he’d seen that night, asked him if he believed it.
“If you want me to tell you you were so out of it you imagined the whole thing, I will,” Robby said when he’d finished. “You might have just heard us working on your car to get you out.”
“That’s not a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.”
“After what we’ve been through, after what we’ve seen, I don’t think I can give you one. All I can tell you is that, when we got there, you were alive but unconscious in a burning car, and you were alone.”
Paul nodded and they were silent for a time.
“Look, Deidra was a fucking bitch for leaving,” Robby blurted out at last. “And inviting you to her wedding? What the fuck is that? I think she was lookin’ for you to pull a Dustin Hoffman and carry her off.”
He’d probably been right.
Paul had taken his half of the golden charm from around his neck and thrown it in the shoebox where he kept Deidra’s letters, notes, and cards. The wedding invitation was thrown away. His mother had tried to tell him he needed to send a gift, said to just ignore it was impolite, but there was nothing he could send. He’d already given her the greatest gift he had to give, and she obviously didn’t want it.
That fall, Paul had gone back to Stanley University as if nothing had happened. But there were still times, when he caught a glimpse of his scars in the mirror, that the night he rolled his Mustang came to visit his memory. He’d think about the blood, about the flames. He’d think about a demon reaching through the broken driver’s side window, touching his chest with its cold claws ... forced to withdraw at the last possible moment in frustration.
A demon with dark, yellow-rimmed eyes that glowed like headlights in the rain.
r /> Paul became aware of the water soaking his head and his eyes flew open like pulled blinds. I’ve fallen asleep at the wheel, he thought. I’ve crashed again and now I’m wandering around in another rainstorm with a concussion. He shuddered and rapidly blinked his eyes. A hot mist billowed all around him, obscured everything. Oh, God, his mind cried. I’m in the fog! I’m in ...
Steam.
The water was hot. He looked up and saw a metal shower nozzle protruding from the haze like a Martian death ray, blasting him with heat. It wasn’t a rain shower but a bathroom shower, and it was scalding.
Paul cringed and moved out from under the stream, groped through the haze, tried to find the handles that would turn off the water. He found them and began madly flipping, turning off the hot water and dousing himself in liquid ice before finally killing the spray entirely.
He looked at his naked body, his skin red from the hot shower. Next, he threw open the white plastic curtain and scanned the room. The mirror was a sheet of frosted glass. Blue-gray tile lined the walls. A brass sculpture of jumping dolphins sat on the marble sink, glistening with condensation. Above the toilet hung a wooden sign that read: If You Dribble When You Piddle, Be A Sweetie And Wipe the Seatie.
His mother’s bathroom.
Paul chuckled. Frightened as he was, he had to laugh at the situation. He stepped from the bathtub and onto the linoleum, shivering at the drop in temperature. No towel had been laid out for him, only his clothing tossed on the floor. Still disoriented, he opened the cabinet under the sink. The towels were there, just as his mother had always kept them. He yanked one free, nearly toppling the whole stack, and dried himself. When he was no longer dripping, he wrapped the towel around his waist, scooped up his clothes, and opened the door.
The hallway was dark. With the exception of the gentle whir of air conditioning and the insane ticking of the grandfather clock downstairs, the house seemed totally quiet. Paul crept down the hall, saw a line of light painted beneath the door to the guest bedroom where he and Mary slept. He opened the door and walked in, trying to look normal, knowing that it wasn’t possible under the circumstances.
Mary lay on the left side of the bed, he saw her crescent beneath the sheets, but he couldn’t tell if she was sleeping. A light burned on the bedside table and the hands on the clock pointed to one. Had she stayed up waiting for him? She’d told him to go after Deidra, to talk to her, but had she been wondering if he might do more? Had she been worried, at least subconsciously, that he might not come back to her?
Paul had placed the bassinet next to his wife’s side of the bed, and Megan now laid there in peaceful slumber, her mouth jerking into a smile then relaxing. God, how he longed to know what she thought. What joy filled her dreams?
Paul moved to the dresser, folded his damp clothes before going to the window. When he pulled the curtain back, he saw the Jeep in the glow of the porch light. The front was not smashed in. The fenders weren’t dented. The tires weren’t flat. The windshield seemed flawlessly in place. If he’d hit something on his way home, it didn’t appear to have left its mark.
Robby had been right about Paul’s car crash. He had wanted to die, just as Nancy had, just as Mick had. He’d tried to kill himself and they had come for him. Had Robby not dragged him free, not stopped him from dying ... from committing suicide, they would have taken him straight to Hell and he would never have met Mary, would never have become a father to two beautiful children, would never have known what it meant to truly be alive.
Slowly, he turned to face his wife. He felt warm all over. Not from the heat of the shower. He felt warm because he was ashamed. “Mare? You up?”
“Yeah.” She rolled over, propped her head in her hand. Her eyes were not accusing. Her face showed no anger or jealousy of any kind. He noticed she wore the Tweety Bird nightshirt he’d given her for Mothers’ Day. “You okay?”
Paul nodded, then slid his hands across his wet hair and clasped them behind his neck, his thumbs touching the soft ridges of scarring on his back.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
She held out her arms to him. “Come here.”
He dropped the towel and went to her, naked and scared. She held him in her arms and kissed his forehead. He laid his head on her breasts, the breasts that had nurtured his son and now kept his daughter happy and smiling into her fist at night. He heard the beating of her heart beneath them, muffled but steady, and, God only knew why, filled with love for him. They lay in silence for a while.
“You deserve so much better than me,” Paul said at last.
“I don’t want better,” she whispered, then chuckled. “I don’t know if that sounded right.”
“If you wanted to leave me, I’d understand. I wouldn’t blame you in the least.”
“Did you sleep with her?” Mary’s tone was businesslike. She knew the answer.
Paul’s head jerked up, his eyes locked with hers. “No.”
“Did you talk things out, move past what happened?”
He thought of his conversation with Father Andrew, his confession, and the absolution he’d received afterward. “I think so. As past it as I’ll ever get, I guess.”
She smiled. “Then why would I want to leave you?”
“I don’t know ...” He felt his throat tighten. Tears ran freely from his eyes, soaking her nightshirt. “I’ve done things, before I met you, horrible, ugly things ...”
Mary wiped the flowing tears from his cheek. “You’ve done nothing but show me tenderness and love since I’ve known you. I couldn’t ask for a more loving husband, or a more caring father for my children. What’s past is past, for both of us. You’re my future and I don’t want anything more than to love you.”
And then she kissed him, deeply, passionately. She rolled onto him, and she did love him, gently, slowly. They bit their lips, muffled their sounds so as not to wake Megan from her dreaming. And when they had finished loving each other, Paul told Mary he loved her and she told him the same.
It’s over at last, he thought, then drifted off to sleep with his wife held snugly in his arms.
Epilogue
The shadows in the bedroom seemed to writhe, to recoil. As Paul Rice slept his first good night’s sleep in ten years, they slithered grudgingly from the corner, robbed of their victory. The shades oozed across the room, pausing a moment over Megan’s bassinette and her innocent, slumbering form. She stopped smiling into her fist, squirmed, and flung her tiny arm out as if to fan a mosquito from her ear. The dark shapes retreated from the house, made their rounds through Harmony, hovering over all the other bassinettes, all the cribs, keeping their full count. The shadows smiled at the possibilities, the clean slates waiting for their mark, then they joined the darkness within the field of corn that swayed in the distance. There they would sulk and plan, waiting for their next opportunity to play.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to: my family, especially my wife, Stephanie for their never-ending love and support; Stephen Zimmer, my editor, Amanda DeBord, and the entire staff at Seventh Star Press; Matthew Perry for his always amazing cover art and illustrations; Kitsie Duncan, Chris Jay, and everyone at Darkrider Studios; Nikki Howard, Ericka Barker, and Meg Banta for their inspiration, and, most of all, their continued friendship; my pre-readers: Dione Ashwill, Sara Larson, David Lichty, Marc Morriston, Natalie Phillips, Ryan Tungate, and Chris Vygmont, for critiquing draft, after draft, after draft; all the Indiana Horror Writers; and, of course, my faithful readers everywhere.
And thanks to the following individuals for their guidance and their support, both personally and professionally: Julie Astrike, Clive Barker, Louise Bohmer, Maurice Broaddus, Gary A. Braunbeck, Myrrym Davies, Tim Deal, Kitsie Duncan, Bob Freeman, Fran Friel, J.F. Gonzalez, Jerry Gordon, Bill Hardy, Kyle Johnson, Brian Keene, Michael Knost, Alethea Kontis, Debbie Kuhn, Michael Laimo, Tim Lebbon, Tom Moran, Dale Murphy, Kelli Owen, Rex Scott, Katrina Shobe, Jason Sizemore, Lucy Snyder, Brenda Taggart, Douglas F.
Warrick, Wrath James White, Rhonda Wilson, Nora Withrow, and Brian Yount.
About the Author
Michael West is the critically-acclaimed author of Cinema of Shadows, Spook House, Skull Full of Kisses, and The Legacy of the Gods series. He lives and works in the Indianapolis area with his wife, their two children, their bird, Rodan, their turtle, Gamera, and their dog, King Seesar.
He has made certain there are no cornfields near his home.
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Now Available from Seventh Star Press, H. David Blalock’s
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Why do bad things happen to good people? Simple. In the ancient war between the Angels of Light and Darkness, the Dark won. Now it is the job of an undercover force simply known as The Army to rectify that.
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