Authors: Bryan Smith
Tom looked at him across the hood of the car. “Well. What do you have to say for yourself?”
Mark matched his father’s stony stare. “Nothing.”
His father shrugged. “Okay.”
“
Okay?
Really? You sound like you don’t give a shit.”
Another shrug. “You’re right. I don’t. So you were in a fight. So what? I got in the same kind of trouble when I was your age. It’s meaningless. I’m out a hundred dollars, ten percent of the bond, but I don’t care about that either. It’s chump change.”
Mark laughed. “Chump change?”
Tom Bell shrugged into his suit jacket and straightened the fine material with his palms. “Yes, Mark, chump change. I make a lot of money by average-Joe standards. It’s the reason you have so many nice things, things most kids your age can only dream of having. All your little electronic gadgets. All the newest and latest and most expensive things. This may come as a shock, but most seventeen-year-olds don’t get a hundred-dollar weekly allowance. Point being that, yes, that hundred bucks was nothing to me. But there’ll come a time when I can’t coddle you any longer. A time when you’ll have to start making your own way in the world. Do you think you’re ready for that?”
Mark sighed more than once throughout this speech. It was exactly the sort of thing he’d expected to hear. “I think I’m ready to get the hell away from this goddamn police station.”
His father nodded. “On that we can agree. Let’s go.”
They got in the car and Tom drove them away from the Ransom police station, steering the luxury car through the center of the town’s small main drag. As usual, there wasn’t a lot to see.
“Where are we going?”
His father’s eyes flicked toward him, then went back to the road. “I have a bit of business I need to take care of. Mark . . .”
Mark didn’t care for the tentative tone of his father’s voice. It was how he always sounded when he was about to broach an uncomfortable subject. “Yeah, Dad?”
“I love you, you know that, right?”
Mark squirmed a little in his seat.
Shit. Here we go with the touchy-feely bullshit
.
“Uh . . . yeah, Dad. Sure, I know that.”
Tom slowed the car as they neared a traffic light. “Good. I’m glad.” He sighed. “Listen . . . son . . . there are some things happening you don’t know about. Things haven’t been . . . right . . . between your mother and me for a long time.”
Mark bit down on a bitter laugh.
No shit, Dad
.
Traffic was light and the light stayed red for just a few seconds. It turned green and they started through the intersection. “I had an affair with another woman a while back and, well, things all kind of went to hell after that. Your mom found out and I had to fight like hell to keep the marriage alive.”
Mark grunted. “Well . . . that explains a lot.”
“Thing is, son, I don’t think the effort was worth it. We’ve both been distant from you for a long time, mostly because of this situation I caused.” His voice became steadily more hoarse as he talked. Mark realized with growing alarm that his father was on the verge of a crying fit. “And I know how . . . how fucking hard it’s been for you. We haven’t been involved in your life and I’m so goddamn sorry.”
Mark’s eyes began to mist. “Dad . . . it’s okay. Seriously.”
Tom Bell gave a single, adamant shake of his head and stared hard at him. “No, son, it is not okay.” They turned down a side street that took them out of the center of town. They were out of the main commerce section of Ransom and were coming up on the small hospital and post office. There was another building farther down, a three-story thing that looked depressingly drab. Tom guided the Lexus past the hospital and turned left into the drab-looking building’s mostly empty parking lot. He parked in a slot near the front of the building and turned in his seat to look directly at his son. “Mark, I’ve felt lost for a long time. I even thought about killing myself a time or two, but now I’m glad I didn’t do that.”
Mark read the plaque on the wall outside the building’s entrance.
EVERGREEN ASSISTED LIVING FACILITY
“Uh . . . Dad . . . what are we doing at a nursing home?”
“That business I mentioned earlier. There’s a man I have to see here.”
Mark glanced at the sign again. “Who could you possibly have to see here? We don’t have any older relatives in Ransom. Um . . . do we?”
Tom shook his head. “No. I’m here to kill a man I’ve never met. His name is Luke Harper. He was the mayor of Ransom a long time ago.”
“Uh huh. Did you just say you were here to kill this guy?”
“Yes.”
“Right. That’s what I thought. Dad . . . have you lost your fucking mind?”
“Lost it? No, not really. It’s not entirely my own anymore, though.”
Mark was still chewing over the strangeness of that statement when his father reached across him and opened the glove box, taking out a handgun and a thick, sealed envelope. He offered the envelope to Mark, who took it in his numb, shaking fingers and stared wide-eyed at his father. The gun was an automatic of some kind. Mark knew nothing of guns, but it was clear this was no toy.
It’s not entirely my own anymore
. . .
His father really wasn’t acting like himself at all. And this thing about killing this stranger was pure craziness. Could it be that someone or something else was forcing him to do this?
A demon, for instance?
“Dad—”
“There’s ten thousand dollars cash in that envelope. The title of this car is also in there. I’ve signed it over to you.”
“Uh . . . I already have a car.”
“That old beater?” A fleeting smile tugged at the edges of his mouth. “Yes, a ride like that, a young man like yourself . . . I can see the appeal. But it is old and this car is new. I’m giving you something of value, son. Something you can use . . . something . . .”
“Dad, listen, seriously, you can’t do this. You don’t—”
“I can and I will. It’s nothing to me to kill this man. I’m doing it in service to Satan and to Andras.”
Oh, fuck
.
Oh, fuckfuckfuck
.
“Things are different now, son. I’m not the man I was. I serve a higher purpose now. A darker purpose. By the time I come out of this building I won’t really be your father anymore.”
Mark’s cheeks glistened. “Dad, don’t do this.
Please
. This Andras, we were the ones who let him out. It was a mistake. But we—”
“I know that, Mark. You and your friends did a great thing that night.”
“No. It was a bad thing. And we have to fix it. We—”
Tom laughed. “There is no fixing it, son. There’s nothing
to
fix. Please understand. Most of me belongs to Andras now. But while I’m away from him, his influence is a little weaker, maybe just enough to save the only person I still care about. Take that money and this car and get the hell out of Ransom.”
“What? Where would I go?”
“You can’t stay here. Your mother is with us, too. Go to Knoxville. My brother lives there. I called him before I bailed you out. You can stay with his family a while. And listen to me. This is my last piece of advice to you. This goes back to what I was saying about money. You play the role of the tough guy pretty well, but a lot of the reason you get away with so much at school and in this town is because of who you are. You’re a rich kid. The leather jacket, the long hair, the ripped jeans . . . it’s all just a disguise. Which is fine for when you’re young.” He leaned closer to Mark, those blue eyes drilling into him, emphasizing the point. “But be careful you don’t wear the disguise so long it becomes who you actually are. Get smart. Go to college. Accomplish things. Give yourself the tools to take care of yourself after I’m gone.”
Well, that sure had the ring of a
good-bye forever
speech to it. Mark shook his head. “No. Fuck this. I’m not letting this happen.”
He made a grab for the gun, but his father rocked him back in his seat with a punch to the jaw. The blow wasn’t delivered with full force, but it was enough to daze him for a moment. He heard a door open and slam shut. By the time his vision cleared, his father was already entering the building.
“Fuck. Goddammit!”
He got out of the car and staggered into the building. Inside the lobby, he saw a man in white clothes lying unconscious on the floor, blood leaking from a broken nose. The man had to be an orderly or worker of some sort, being clearly too young by decades to be one of the residents. Other workers were standing around screaming and pointing. Something jerked Mark’s gaze to the left and he saw his father running down the hallway. Tom Bell banged through a door at the end of the corridor and started up the stairway to the upper floors.
“Dad!”
Mark hurried after his father. A nurse came out of a door on the right and bumped him, throwing him off stride. He stumbled and went to his knees, cracking them on the hard tiles. He screeched in frustration and staggered to his feet again. Another man in white orderly garb grabbed him by a shoulder and spun him around.
The bushy-haired man was heavyset with a florid, jowly face. “Hey, kid—”
Mark popped him in the mouth. Hard.
The big man fell over, crashed into a cart containing cleaning supplies.
Like father, like son
.
Boom, out go the lights
.
More people were coming down the hallway. More men in white and a security guard. He couldn’t knock them all out and didn’t have time for this shit anyway. He turned away from them and continued down the hallway, banging through the same doors his father had disappeared through moments before. He vaulted up the stairs to the second-floor landing, heard screams from the other side of the closed door there. He pulled the door open and stepped into another hallway awash in pandemonium. Panicked old people in gowns were milling about everywhere, choking the hallway. A lot of people were crying and wailing.
Unfortunately, there was no time for delicacy.
Mark started shoving his way through the crowd. The wrinkled and frail oldsters cursed him and pushed back as he made his way through the corridor. He saw his father enter a room near the end of the hallway and stepped up his efforts, ramming his way through the ranks of the elderly without regard for any harm he was inflicting. He hated to hurt them, but he had no choice.
At last, he reached the room his father had entered. Tom Bell glanced over his shoulder as his son came stumbling into the room, a wide, mad grin stretching the corners of his mouth grotesquely.
“I should have known you wouldn’t do the smart thing and go. I’m glad, actually. You should be here to see this, to witness the glory of my ascension.”
Tom Bell was pointing the gun at the head of a very frail-looking old man sitting in a chair by the room’s only window. The man’s expression was blank, his eyes hollow and unfocused. He probably wasn’t seeing the gun at all, or if he saw it, his brain didn’t recognize it for what it was—the instrument of his death.
Mark started across the room. “Dad, please don’t.”
Tom squeezed the trigger.
It was
loud
.
The bullet punched a hole through the center of the old guy’s forehead. Blood and brain matter flew out the back of his head and splattered the wall behind him. Mark gagged, felt bile rise into his throat. He was dimly aware of more screaming from the hallway.
The old man’s body began to violently convulse. Mark couldn’t grasp what he was seeing at first. The guy’s head had been fucking
emptied
. His essence, whatever had made him Luke Harper, exmayor, was all over the goddamn wall. So his body shouldn’t be jerking like that, like a man riding the lightning in an electric chair. And, holy shit, what was this? The front of his gown was burning and starting to catch fire. A pattern formed, visible for just a moment. A pentagram.
What the fuck?
The old man’s head blew apart in an explosion of gore and bone fragments. Mark felt wetness splash his cheeks. A brief and brilliantly intense flash of light bloomed toward the ceiling from the space formerly occupied by the man’s head and flew into Tom Bell’s wide-open mouth.
Tom grinned again. “Good-bye, son. You really should leave now. Flauros is here.”
His body began to shake.
Mark had only a small inkling as to what was happening here. A demon had been inside the old man. A different demon, not the one they’d released.
And now it was inside his father.
He didn’t need to know anything else.
He backed out of the room in a hurry and started shoving his way back through the crowd. Hands grabbed at him. People tried to slow him down, ask him questions. He had to knock some of them down. He had no time for their questions and couldn’t stay here. He sure as hell couldn’t deal with the cops, who were sure to be on the scene within minutes.
Back in the Lexus, he started the engine and peeled out of the parking lot.
He could think of only one place to go. One possible sanctuary.
Keeping one hand on the wheel as he drove away at high speed, he dug his phone out of his pocket and called up his list of missed calls.
He hit the button to dial the unknown number.
Clayton Campbell answered on the first ring.
T
HIRTY-ONE
A monster walked the streets of Wheaton Hills that morning, enjoying the chance to really stretch its borrowed legs for the first time since the night of its release. The cool breeze carried with it a scent of burning leaves mixed with a ripe odor of decay. The latter emanated from the corpse of a dog slowly rotting in a drainage ditch at the far end of the street. Maggots squirmed in the dead animal’s various orifices, feasting on the bloated remains. It was the dying time of the year. The time when green gave way to brown, when the warmth of the sun yielded to plummeting temperatures and morning frost. The ominous pause before the deeper harshness of winter.
It was not possible to truly appreciate these things without a human host. Too many years had passed since the demon had known the joy of physical sensation. How incredible it was to
feel
again. Even something as simple as the texture of a blade of grass or crumbling leaf rubbed between his host’s fingertips. The feel of the wind on his face. Every little thing was a new revelation.