8:10
Sally drove the Volkswagen nervously down Royal Gorge Blvd. The light sprinkling of lazy snowflakes that had begun earlier in the day had grown into an unforgiving barrage of icy pellets. The wind roared through the trees, carrying its frozen message to the reddening faces of those who dared step outside. Packed snow and ice covered the road from one side to the other.
They were coming up on Ninth Street. On the corner a dark colored sedan sat quietly up against a telephone pole. The passenger door had been crushed and the window broken into tiny chunks of cracked glass that lay on the seat and floorboard. Blood from the driver’s face and arm was smeared and frozen to the steering wheel. With the window gone the storm was now free to enter the car and swirl about the man inside.
Three people had pulled off to the side of the road to see if they could help. A woman was running over to the Loaf –n- Jug station to call 911. She slipped and almost fell twice as she hurried across the darkening parking lot.
A tall man opened the driver’s side door. It popped and creaked. He kneeled down to peer inside. The occupant was laid over onto the bucket seat on the other side. His face was resting in a pile of shimmering little pieces of what was, until very recently, part of the windshield.
He wheezed loudly. The warm fluid was gurgling in his throat with each breath. His chest had collided with the wheel and bounced into the dash. One of his ribs had been broken and jammed into his left lung.
The cold slickness of a leather glove was felt on his numbing hand. The stranger was leaning over him. He told him that an ambulance was on its way. He told him that everything was going to be all right.
Half-conscious now, he heard the voice as if it was in a long tunnel. It felt distant and distorted. He could not answer the tall man. He was suffocating. Blood was filling his lungs quickly. His eyes were wide now. His body shuddered violently as it struggled for air. He knew the ambulance would not make it in time. The accident played over in his mind in slow motion as he gasped.
The necklace was around Jack’s neck and lying on his chest. The buzzing filled his ears as he became disconnected with the flesh. His spirit vibrated up and through the roof. A distant siren could be heard behind the howl of the wind. It was six blocks away.
The stranger could do nothing as he watched the man drown in his own blood. Jack saw flashing lights approaching. Sally slowed her car down as they passed by the totaled vehicle.
They big white van with siren blaring pulled into the parking lot. Five people now stood around the crashed car and pole. The canopy light of the gas station blinked alive and little sparkles of glass and snow lit up the pavement.
Jack did not wonder if anyone had gotten hurt in the crash. He could see what all of the others could not. A smoky puff and them a brilliant blue-yellow haze rose up out of the buckled metal of the sedan. It hovered above the car in the florescent light. Jack saw it float up into the darkness above the roof of the gas station. It paused momentarily to look back down at the accident and the people below. That moment passed quickly and it turned back to the night sky. It dashed away, into the storm and it was out of sight in just a few seconds.
Jack looked down at the sheriff deputies’ car as it stopped along the curb. The EMT was over the body. He would try to revive the man for almost ten minutes before giving up. He didn’t know that the soul had already soared up into the storm. Only Jack knew that.
What lay inside the blue car was just an empty shell of tissue and bone. The former owner was well beyond the blizzard snow. The mundane world had been washed away. He was entering the astral plane.
He was not coming back.
8:11
“You open this door, you fucking bitch!” Linda screamed, heaving her body at the closed door. Stacey said a silent prayer in the shadows.
Please God, help us.
She watched to see if the woman who had attacked them was going to be able to break through. It had taken every ounce of Stacey’s strength to pull the dresser onto its top. She hoped the barricade would hold.
Christopher felt the rock solid pressure behind him. It started at his neck working its way down his spine and across his shoulder blades. With his spirit pushed forward, standing halfway out of his small body, he turned to see the source of the pressure. His physical and astral eyes saw the dark room behind him and the churning, crimson power at the same time. With a final shove, the boy fell into the air in the middle of the room, floating above his mother. He tried to cry out but the control over his mortal body fell away too quickly. His panic was heard only in the spirit world.
Killien took over the flesh before it could fall to the floor. The huge mass condensed itself into the six-year-old, straining into a black, almost solid energy. The muscle and skin vibrated against the entity it now contained. Blood flowed from the mouth and eyes as sweat poured. He looked out over the bedroom with Chris’s vision. The joints in his elbows and knees ached at every movement. The vertebrae in the spine felt like rusty blades, carving their way through the tissue in his back. Violent strands of astral electricity danced powerfully around the flesh in jagged flashes.
Stacey, lying on her stomach watching the barricaded door, was completely unaware of what was in the room with them. Her son hovered above, crying. He yelled, desperately trying to tell her that she had been wrong. There were such things as monsters. There was one right behind her.
Christopher’s spirit looked down at small body that now moved without him in it. His astral self screamed for her help. She couldn’t hear him. There was no communication between the two dimensions they occupied.
The six-year-old fingers shuffled through the pencils in the cup on top of the desk. He found a nice, freshly sharpened one and pulled it out. Then Chris’s eyes searched the floor. A black boot with a thick heel lay on its side under the bed. He knelt down and slid it out, looking at Stacey. She was still watching the door. He smiled at her with bleeding gums and clenched teeth.
Holding the sharp point above the center of her back he said, “Hello, mommy.”
With the heel of the boot, he hammered it in. The pencil drove deep into the muscle. Stacey shrieked, rolling over. The floor met the yellow painted wood and snapped it in two. The weight of her body pushed the remaining length of it inside.
She gasped in horror looking up at the grin Christopher’s face was sending her. His dark eyes looked sunken in the sockets, surrounded by pale skin. Bloody drool hung in sticky strands down from his mouth.
She knew it was not her son she was seeing. It was the thing that had taken her husband. It had stolen Jack’s body, and now somehow it had stolen Christopher’s. The monster had infested her baby and there was no doubt in her mind.
It meant to kill her.
8:12
It only took a few minutes for astral Jack to reach Penrose. He raced to his house frantically, hoping that he would beat Killien there.
Oh God, let my family be all right.
When he arrived, he realized his hopes had been for nothing. The nightmare had already begun. His wife lay writhing on the bedroom floor, hurt and bleeding. Linda pounded furiously on the barricaded door and his son Christopher hovered above all of it, crying.
Oh God, no.
Stacey desperately pulled at the carpet trying to crawl away. With every move her body made her impaled back blasted her with agony. Killien found a pocketknife in the drawer of the desk. His small fingers pulled it open. Turning back, he walked to her. The back of her shirt was soaked with a large dark stain.
He raised the blade up above her neck. Jack’s soul screamed.
Stacey, turn around! Please!
“My sweet mother, your time is up.”
Stacey turned and saw the flash of the blade coming. She rolled over to dodge it. The wrenching pain in her back made her scream. The sharp graphite and wood went deeper. She shoved at her son’s body and it went reeling to the other side of the room against the wall. Killien knew that even in her weakened state, she was still larger and much stronger than the body he had possessed. It was time to go perform the ritual.
He stood up on the trunk in front of the window and pulled it open. With the screen kicked out he bent down and jumped out. He landed shivering in the freezing snow. Killien pushed the six-year-old to his feet and ran around the house to the front porch.
Jack followed, ineffectually blasting at his son’s body. The concentrated power inside was like an iron wall. It sent Jack ricocheting across the yard. Christopher’s face smiled up at him.
“I knew you’d come, Jack. You’re just in time. The fat lady is about to sing.”
Killien opened the front door and entered.
8:13
Sally lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. She’d been driving for forty minutes and she was only halfway there.
The blinding snow made the sky look like space. She imagined the scene in Star Wars when they hit light speed. The millennium falcon’s windshield filled with bright streaks as it buzzed away in a flash. She only wished she could go that fast now.
The needle on the speedometer was sitting on twenty. Even that was too fast to be safe. It was hard to tell where the highway ended and the ditch began.
A pair of headlights was coming up behind her. A spinning yellow gumball flashed above them. It was a snowplow. She watched as it got bigger in her rear view mirror.
“You’re goin’ a bit fast, doncha think?” she said out loud.
It was clearing the right lane, the one she was in. The blade on the front of the truck created a huge wave of slushy snow, fifteen feet in the air. It came up fast, changing lanes. When it blasted past the Volkswagen the wave of muddy slush covered Sally’s windshield.
“Fucker!” she yelled, quickly reaching for the wiper lever.
Her foot pressed onto the brake pedal and the bar began to slide.
“Shit!”
Her cigarette fell into her lap. It glowed bright orange between her legs. She turned the wheel to try to control the slide and reached down. The end of her finger touched the burning tobacco.
“Aaah!”
The tires went over a big patch of ice and the Volkswagen swung sideways.
“Noooo!”
Pumping the brakes did little good as the car continued sliding around in an uncontrollable circle. When it finally came to a stop the car was turned completely backwards and the driver’s side tires were in deep snow. Sally gently pushed the accelerator. The tires had nothing to grab hold of. They spun in place.
The plow truck driver hadn’t paid any attention. He kept driving. Jack’s body was spiritless in the passenger’s seat. There were no other vehicles in sight. Sally sat facing the wrong direction.
She was all alone.
8:14
Oh God, what have I done?
Jack’s own selfishness had begun all of it. His wife lay bleeding and his son possessed and it was all his fault. If he only had his mortal body he might’ve been able to stop it, stop Linda from performing the ritual. But Sally hadn’t arrived yet. She was still somewhere out in the storm. Even if he was in the flesh, Killien had power over him too. One thing was certain. Killien had thought the plan out well. But there was one element he’d had no control over.
Linda.
Jack followed down the hall to where they were. She lay unconscious on the floor. Christopher’s body was screaming at her.
“Get up you stupid bitch!”
Jack couldn’t stand the words come out of his son’s mouth. He saw the tourniquet and the blood. She had been shot. She wasn’t dead though. In shock maybe, or just passed out, but not dead. He could see her breathing.
Killien couldn’t perform the ritual on himself. The only person who could was an old woman with a bullet in her leg and possibly dying. He was steaming.
“Wake up or I’ll kill you! Whore!” With a hard slap across her cheek he yelled, “Fuck!”
The small face with the dark eyes turned around to confront Jack.
“She’ll wake up. You’ll see,” he smiled, “But even if she doesn’t, I’ll have you to play with…” the voice became a raspy howl, “…for the rest of your miserable life!”
Killien’s energy jumped out of Chris and the boy’s body slumped lifelessly to the carpet. The power was like a huge shadow of electricity with long ribbons of anger whipping behind it. The center glowed blood red, snapping its static charge.
It lunged forward, tearing at the weaker spirit. It felt like jagged claws in Jack’s ethereal nerves. He cried out in pain for none to hear. None but Killien, who was pleased and dug even deeper. Jack could only shudder at the paralyzing voltage stabbing his astral spine. He struggled to break free but the vapor was everywhere. The amperage of hate was not just a physical pain, but it was also brimming with an emotional Armageddon.
Twenty years of pure, unhindered Hell was pouring out of Killien.
Jack was its destination.
copyright ©2002 Brian Holtz
All rights reserved