The demon wailed a thousand voices of agony as it climbed the cement wall and perched itself in the upper right-hand corner of the cage, where it writhed and recoiled in fear and pain. “Stop! Stop! You
baaaaastard
!”
Thornton listened to the other demons in the room who were now awaking from their slumbers. He turned and gazed at the moving forms in the cages, the shifting shadows, the eyes glowing at him from within, like jackals in the night. The room grew suddenly frigid. The hair on his arms stood on end. His breath unfurled from his mouth in a cold hazy plume.
He gazed back at the cage. The girl-demon inside had collapsed to the floor, where she writhed like a salted slug, the eyes bulging grotesquely from their sockets. A string of gibberish sprung from her lips, interspersed by deep, croaky breaths.
“Who are you?” Thornton demanded.
“Fuck you, priest!”
He sprinkled more holy water upon the girl. She bellowed in terrible agony, a deep chorus of voices screaming the name of the demon inside her: “
Abbadon
!
Abbadon
!
” Like a springing insect, the girlish figure bounded up from the floor and crashed against the front bars of the cage, reaching her ravenous arms toward Thornton. He backpedaled from the filthy, groping fingers. The girl-demon bellowed, barked, snorted, her marred face pressing between the iron bars like a monkey at the zoo.
Thornton swallowed past the burning lump of fear in his throat, thinking back to the exorcism that he and Danto had performed on Allieb over twenty years ago. It had taken two men—one an experienced priest—over five hours to complete. And, although it had driven the demons out, it had not fully purged the soul of the demonologist, and perhaps the soul of Belial, from the boy’s body. Feeling a wave of sudden hopelessness, he half-heartedly sprinkled more holy water at the girl-demon, shouting weakly, “Be gone
Abbadon
, back to the fires of Hell from whence you emerged!”
The girl-demon hurled herself to the cement floor; somewhere inside her, a bone snapped. She writhed there in absolute pain, howling monstrously, choking, jerking spasmodically as hunks of bloody phlegm sputtered from her mouth. Thornton, vision swimming in a blur, cringed as her jaw cracked loudly, and then, in a horrifying display, de-hinged itself, forming an open maw one could easily fit a fist into. Her tongue slumped out in a limp heap, spilling saliva.
Yet, still, the words came, clearly defined in their hideous tone, despite her motionless lips: “The girl is mine, you fucking charlatan. Be gone!”
He dropped his gaze to the floor, wholly defeated; his efforts…they were utterly futile, he knew, and in spite of any valiant effort, would go unrewarded. The demon would persist, maintain its hold on the vehicle with all its power and might, for it realized the rewards of its labors would soon be attained: freedom from Satan’s domain in the bowels of Hell, with a place on earth alongside the throne of its new prince, Allieb.
Thornton realized his intentions to be noble—in theory, exorcising even one demon would very well prove itself successful in weakening
Allieb’s
war against Satan. But, given the time and energy and forces needed to accomplish such a daunting task, it made the idea impractical.
But, there was one other option. It was laying on a dark shelf in his mind, and was the reason he did not invite Danto or anyone else for that matter to join him in facing up to his son. Looking at the demon-child, and realizing there were others like her that would fight to the bitter end, he knew that no other alternative existed than to rely on one evil to defeat another.
Fight fire with fire
.
With a ghastly wheeze, the girl fell into a fitful slumber, eyes closed, thick mucus running from her nose.
Thornton capped the vial and placed it in his pocket, then paced away from the cage, eyes searching the floor as he rubbed his throbbing head. His brain…it felt as though it had begun to waste away, a feverish heat and clawing pain dousing his mind and body, despite the cold air.
A sensation of grasping fingers scratched on the surface of his brain.
Then, a voice:
Father
…
Allieb
.
Time was short; the demonologist had left his lair and was hiding somewhere nearby, waiting to commence with the drawing. Thornton moved away from the cage to the right side of a wooden rack. He gripped a black metal hook embedded in its grain, then leaned down to pick up a thick steel chain from the floor. He eyed the chain nervously, running the cold links through his trembling fingers, each one a sin waiting to be committed. With the chain looped around his hand, he staggered back to the girl’s cage in blinding silence, wobbly from the conscious sin he was about to commit. He gazed at the slumbering demon, then turned around to survey the looming basement.
In the other cages, glowing eyes stared back at him.
Slowly he removed the hook key he’d taken from the nightstand in his room. Gripping the chain in his right hand, he slipped the key into the lock on the girl’s cage. From behind, a chorus of growls emanated, like a tribe of baboons howling over the presence of a nearby hunter.
The blood howled in his veins, filling his ears with a numbing deafness; he screamed in an attempt to fill his soul with an overwhelming sense of detestation, of hatred. As the weakness in his body ascended into hate-filled strength, he flung open the door to the cage, raised his strengthening arms, and brought the steel chain down onto the head of the girl demon.
Her wasted body flung sideways and slammed against rear wall, spilling an obscene trail of blood on the floor. A deafening wail erupted from her unmoving jaw, a monstrous bellow of pain and torture and defeat, as impending death fell upon the twitching vehicle that held the demon
Abbadon
.
The only way to defeat evil is through evil itself.
Fight fire with fire
.
In a mad state, Thornton leaped at the girl. He brought the chain down on her skull, again and again, crushing it into a soft mass. Behind him, the demons howled in a fury, all of them thrashing against their cages, an obscene ensemble performing their hellish symphony. The cacophony beat against Thornton’s ears, and he dropped the chain and fell to his knees before the girl’s twitching body, hands pressing against the sides of his head. The demons continued wailing. The agony sliced into him, like heavily-hammered nails, his skull feeling as though it were being chiseled away from the surface of his brain, clawed hands reaching from within to take hold of an unexplored world.
And then, abruptly, the demons ceased their wicked chorus, bathing the cellar in complete, menacing silence.
Still in the cage, feeling the hot threading seep of blood against his knees, Thornton pulled his hands away from his head. He opened his eyes. Tasted bitter blood in his mouth, licked his lips nervously as he surveyed the quiet basement. A few feet away, the cadaver wheezed as putrid gasses made an escape.
The red light was still aglow, faintly igniting the shadows within the cages, and the reflective gleam of their watchful eyes. The sounds that had saturated the basement moments earlier had completely ceased to exist: the fits, the growls, the snorts, the roars. Not a single breath could be heard. Thornton stood, paced hesitantly from the cage, wondering,
What did I do? My God, what did I just do?
With a hard, nearly impassable lump in his throat, he stepped deeper into the basement, passing additional cages, and the glinting eyes from within that followed him as he went by. As he moved forward, the red light strengthened, glowing strongly from the cinder wall at the opposite end of the cellar. The air felt suddenly dense, as though congealing. A harsh, death-like odor materialized. Thornton stopped, stared hypnotically at the crimson radiance, eyes ferreting out a faint gray form taking shape at its core. His gaze shifted briefly toward the two closest cages beside him. He locked eyes with one demon—a bald, middle-aged man—pressed against the bars, hands stretched out, fingers groping the air just inches away from his face. It opened its toothless mouth and produced a catlike hiss, tongue darting in and out swiftly.
Thornton turned away from the demon and refocused his sights upon the dark gray shadow developing inside the red light.
In his pocket, he fingered the vial of holy water.
In his head, a scratching sensation, and then, a familiar voice:
That won’t help you against me, father.
He shuddered, realizing his unconditional defeat, knowing that the only way to save Bev
Mathers
, Thomas Danto, and Rebecca
Haviland
, was to separate himself permanently from them; that, Allieb had known all along his father had severed his trance, had “switched sides,” so to speak. But, had also seen no threat in his father’s knowledge of the drawing of the thirteen demons, and that no matter who Thornton recruited in a battle, it would prove as no threat; that, despite this lack of threat Thornton represented, he would still pay a dire price for his betrayal.
But now, Thornton had killed one of the vehicles, thereby releasing
Allieb’s
hold upon one of the demons. Unless all thirteen demons were absorbed by Allieb, then a threat
would
exist for him. With no vehicle to lock in
Abbadon
, Satan could easily retrieve his demon soldier, fuse its strengths with His own and strike heavily against Allieb upon his he drawing of the remaining demons into his body.
Thornton closed his eyes and recited a silent prayer to God. When he opened them, the red light had vanished. He stood in the pitch black—a darkness rivaled in its silence—feeling the sinister gazes of the demons upon him.
And then, from behind him, a deep, throaty voice, more animal than human: “Father…”
Thornton darted around. Standing there, bathed in the piercing yellow glow of his eyes, was Allieb. He’d grown even more monstrous since Thornton’s last encounter with him in the attic. Thornton gazed helplessly at the beast that was his son, at the straggled matting of hair covering his head; at the skeletal limbs jutting stiffly from his emaciated torso, now covered with thick, scaly skin; at the swelling abdomen and the eight horrid nipples wriggling from it; at the short supine tail that swung lazily across his bare buttocks; and then, back to his eyes—eyes that shifted to observe the man standing miserably before him.
Thornton moved to speak; the words failed to burrow past the mound of fear in his throat.
Allieb stepped forward, now eye-to-eye with the man who adopted him over thirty years earlier. The demonologist snorted like a horse, the gush of putrid gas spilling from his lungs nearly unendurable. “Who is your God?” he asked Thornton, his voice deep, strident, demanding.
In a quick flick of the wrist, Thornton removed the vial of holy water from his pocket, flipped the rubber stopper off with his thumb, and splashed the entire contents on Allieb, shouting, “
The Lord Jesus Christ, is my God! Damn you to Hell!
”
A hellish din ensued, the demons, rattling against their cages furiously, deafening howls chorusing together into the shriek of a thousand hurricanes, Allieb himself raising his arms high, a blinding glow of red light emerging from behind his broadening body, a roar gunning from his lungs, deep and colossal, hitting Thornton like a tangible force, knocking him to the ground. Allieb, panting, towered over Thornton, his thick, scaly skin oozing where the holy water had struck him, bloody and seeping with pus. He grinned a mouth rife with black stumps for teeth; eyes sharp, yellow, reptilian, peering vindictively down at him.
“Does your God approve of your conspiracy with the Devil, dear
father
?”
Thornton remained on the ground, lips trembling, reciting a silent prayer:
Dear Lord, please deliver me from this servant of evil
…
Allieb laughed. In the cages, the demons mimicked his mirth—a symptom of blind adoration. “Your soul is mine, father. Or, shall I say, that of
Abaddon’s
.”
Allieb raised his arms. From behind, the door to the cage of the dead girl slammed open, then closed, then open. With a screeching fracture, it tore free of its hinges and flew across the basement, colliding with the cinder wall. With a quick thrust of his claw, the demonologist grabbed Thornton by the neck and pulled him close to his grinning maw. A thick string of hot spittle fell upon his cheek.