A Friend of the Devil Page 7

  “You talked to Dr. Thoran today?”

  Abel nodded.

  “I told him you said you were going to be sleeping. Did I lie to him?”

  Abel looked at his closed bedroom door. “No. I’m going to sleep. Haven’t had a cup of coffee in three hours.”

  “How long are you going to sleep?” Geoffrey asked, showing he knew what the plan was.

  Abel smiled again.

  These people here all thought they were doing good. That by making him sleep, they were doing the Lord’s work. Wasn’t that always the case, though? Weren’t those who had killed the people now haunting him also convinced of the same?

  Hell might engulf the world, but humans would be the ones to invite it—and they’d be grinning the entire time, telling themselves they were doing the right thing.

  “I’ll sleep as long as I can,” he answered. “That’s all I can guarantee you, Geoffrey.”

  He looked at the orderly, truly wishing he could give him more. The man was only concerned, but the two of them lived in very different worlds. Different realities. Neither could do anything for the other, because neither believed the other’s reality existed.

  “Okay,” Geoffrey finally said and nodded. “I’m working the night shift tonight, so let me know if you need anything.”

  “I will,” Abel said.

  Geoffrey nodded once more and then walked down the hallway, leaving Abel alone to face the room he dreaded. Abel looked at the doorknob for a second, then turned it and stepped inside.

  The lights were off, and as Abel closed the door behind him, exhaustion came in one large wave—soaking him completely in mere moments.

  The dead weren’t here, not in this room. They were waiting, though. He could almost feel them, even now. Their anticipation was rampant, their need consuming.

  In a way, Abel pitied them. It wouldn’t stop; they wouldn’t rest until he was dead. And if he Abel ever decided to have children (which, of course, he wouldn’t)? Then the dead still wouldn’t be allowed to rest.

  They and he were trapped in this horrendous, never ending game.

  Maybe they enjoyed what they did to him. Or maybe they had no choice. Maybe they were forced the same as he.

  Either way, they waited now, and the time for sleep was near.

  Abel didn’t go to his bed, though. Not yet. He wanted to consider Emi Laurens just a bit more. He walked to the chair next to his bed. It was old with a high back, but comfortable. He sat down and turned the table lamp on next to him, the only illumination in the room. His blinds were drawn and Abel looked over at his bed.

  He dreaded it, though it truly had nothing to do with his problems. If he stayed away from it long enough, the dead would come anyway. The bed was simply a vehicle that the dead used. If it wasn’t available, they’d find another.

  Emi, he thought. Focus on her.

  If he saw her again tonight, he would know that something was happening. The dead didn’t just show him people; they showed him things that would hurt him. And like Abel, they didn’t lie. It was somehow beneath them. Perhaps they thought it too similar to the people that had murdered them.

  And what if you do see her? What then? That’s what you need to consider.

  What are you going to do about it?

  Nothing.

  Absolutely nothing.

  Abel wasn’t bringing her into his life, no matter what. If something had targeted her, something not of this world, then she would have to deal with it. If he tried to help somehow, Abel would only bring more pain.

  You did this, though. If something is happening to her, or is going to, then it’s your fault. You’re really just going to deny responsibility?

  Abel shook his head, his thoughts so intense that he didn’t even realize it.

  He wasn’t denying responsibility. He was simply refusing to—

  To what? To help?

  No. He was refusing to bring more pain to Emi. What could he do anyway? He couldn’t even solve his own problems, and he’d had 34 years to do that. He wasn’t going to be able to help Emi even if he wanted. No, his curse—his goddamn disease—only brought pain to people. It only brought destruction. It only brought death.

  Abel’s thoughts kept going, picking up speed like a locomotive, obliterating any other thought that tried to lie down across its track.

  Finally, he nodded, confident in his decision. If he saw her again tonight, he would do nothing. If the dead kept showing him Emi, then that was fine. That part of his life, the part with relationships, was over. Forever. He couldn’t help her, nor would he try.

  Another nod and then Abel Ease turned the light off next to him.

  He sat frozen in the darkness, not wanting to get in bed, but knowing the sooner he did, the sooner it would be over. Anything to keep the Ambien away. The eight hours of prison.

  A few minutes passed, and then Abel stood. He lay down atop the blankets—his clothes still on—and stared up at the ceiling, hoping that sleep would stay at bay for at least another hour.

  He managed to last about 30 seconds, and then exhaustion took hold. He fell into the dead’s darkness.

  Abel stood in between two people, though they hung from a thick pole that ran across the top of the room. His father was on his left, his sister on the right.

  They hung from their broken necks. Their stomachs were slit and their intestines spilling down their bodies; Abel could hear the blood dripping to the floor beneath them. He didn’t look at either, though he knew their eyes were fixed on him. Glazed things that would follow him wherever he went. Dead, but yet alive. Dead to themselves, but alive for him.

  Abel remained still.

  To move in these dreams was to invite more horror. The best he could hope for was to simply wait, and hope the dead never came. That his deceased father and sister now staring at him would be all they had in store, at least for tonight.

  Abel stood in the middle of a large warehouse. It was dirty and rusted, as if no one had been inside it in a long, long time. It was different than the usual places the dead brought him. Most of the time, they dealt with either Sunny Acres or somewhere they’d died. A concentration camp, or one of the showers inside it.

  This was neither.

  Abel had never seen it before.

  Decrepit machines sat in front of him, and a large assembly belt snaked around the floor, unmoving and forgotten. Hooks hung from the ceiling. He thought it might have been some kind of meat packaging plant, at one point.

  Abel heard his breath entering and exiting his mouth, the only other sound besides the steady patter of his family’s blood.

  Finally, he heard the sound of footsteps echoing off of the high ceilings, and Abel closed his eyes. Someone else was here, and had he thought that he might not have to face something tonight? Hope was the silliest human emotion. The most detrimental, always whispering its promises for something better, but disappearing under reality’s harsh light.

  The footsteps grew louder.

  “You should look,” his sister whispered from above him. The words were quick, as if someone might hear her talking and she desperately didn’t want that.

  “Don’t close your eyes, Abel,” his dad whispered, sounding like wind moving through tall grass. “Look. Look. Look. Look.”

  Abel opened his eyes.

  It was Emi. She was walking toward the middle of the warehouse where a group of hooks hung.

  She stopped, standing beneath them, and looking up. She raised a hand as if to feel them, but paused, her body suddenly frozen in time.

  “She’s going to touch them,” his sister whispered harshly.

  Another man walked into view, crossing the warehouse’s floor. He wore a long, black jacket, but nothing underneath it. The wind created from his steps blew it back somewhat, revealing the bone thin body beneath, his penis the only fatty tissue on him.

  Emi didn’t turn as the man approached, keeping her hand just beneath the rusty hooks.

  Abel’s own hands were
clenched into fists, his teeth grinding against each other. He couldn’t yell, couldn’t move at all—not if he wanted to remain as hidden as possible.

  Yet, his nails clawed into his fists, hating every second of this. His father and sister were dead, but they deserved the curse that had killed them. The woman in front of him, she deserved none of this—no more than Nurse Fecker had.

  Abel wouldn’t scream, though. He wouldn’t say a word to the dead man approaching her. He would not call attention to himself under any circumstances, and if that made him a coward, so-fucking-be-it. Emi wasn’t real, and he was. He would have to wake up with these memories.

  The dead man reached her, his jacket blessedly covering up his body as he came to a stop.

  Abel’s father and sister were silent, both of them understanding the same thing as Abel. To speak now was to invite unimaginable terror.

  The man had come from Emi’s left, and Abel stared as a woman came from the right. She had no pretense of modesty, her body completely naked. Abel didn’t pay attention to her, his eyes finding Emi again. The man hadn’t moved, hadn’t touched her at all.

  He was waiting for this new woman.

  Tears were in Abel’s eyes. He didn’t understand this. He didn’t know why they were showing him Emi, nor why they were waiting.

  Let her be, he thought. Please, just let her be.

  The woman arrived, stopping very close to Emi. Her face was inches away, her cheeks drawn in and looking hollow.

  The woman reached forward, her bony finger hovering just above Emi’s outstretched arm.

  Don’t touch her. Don’t touch her. Not her. Please.

  The man on the left opened his mouth, stretching it wide and revealing black, molded teeth. He held it open, silent for a few seconds, and then a great ripping scream flew from his mouth, sounding like something inside of him was pulling apart—wet and painful.

  It echoed off the walls, filling Abel’s ears.

  The woman turned her head and looked at him. Her eyes were black, pure ink. She said nothing, only stared for a second, her mouth opening slowly too. Her teeth weren’t rotten, though. They were pristine, yet filed down to sharp points like a shark’s.

  Her left hand, the one not hanging just over Emi’s arm, stretched out and pointed to him.

  She held it there, her finger extended.

  Then, her hand dropped at the same time her head turned. The man’s scream echoed off the warehouse’s walls, whatever was ripping apart inside him apparently unending. It sounded as if blood would spill over his lips at any second.

  The woman’s mouth stretched wider, and then she paused, but only for a moment.

  When she did move, it was faster than any human should have been capable of, as if at triple speed.

  The dead woman didn’t so much as bite as consume. She tore into Emi’s neck, ripping a fist sized piece of flesh out in one gulp. She didn’t pause though, but simply swallowed the flesh as her teeth continued chomping down.

  Emi finally did something besides stand there. She screamed, her voice high and shrill, meeting the dead man’s terror next to her with ample energy.

  The woman continued feasting. Bite. Swallow. Bite. Swallow. Biteswallowbiteswallow.

  Emi’s voice abruptly stopped as those razor sharp teeth shredded her vocal chords.

  It was then that Abel found his own voice. It was in fine form.

  Abel and Emi

  1990’s

  She was 11 years old when she met him.

  She didn’t know his name, though she’d seen him at school a few times. They never had the same class, but they were in the same grade. Each grade level had four separate classes, and in sixth, they still hadn’t been put together.

  Emi didn’t have the time or mental capacity to worry about anyone else in her grade. Not that she wasn’t smart enough to do that, to meet everyone … Only, at age 11, she had other things on her mind.

  She had other worries.

  The day that Emi Laurens met Abel Ease was an absolutely awful one, but that fit well with their relationship. At the worst times, they were there for each other, mainly because there weren’t a lot of best of times. Not for them.

  The rain was coming down heavily, pouring as if God himself was crying. Emi hadn’t cared, had hardly noticed, actually. She was walking down the road, a main one, her hair wet and sticking to her face. She was crying at least as hard as the falling rain, though the water washed the tears away as soon as they formed.

  She walked like this when things got bad at home. She left and just walked, her parents never even considering where she might be. At 11, Emi knew more than she should. She knew things that her classmates probably wouldn’t know for years and years. She knew what domestic violence was, even if she didn’t know the term. She’d seen her mom slap the hell out of her father, seen him turn around and do the same to her. She watched them both bleed, and then the next morning, act like nothing happened.

  At 11, Emi knew what it meant to be on a binge.

  Your father’s on another of his goddamn binges.

  A binge meant you got really, really drunk, and when you came home, you fought.

  Emi also knew manipulation, even if not the actual word. Because while her father might go on binges, her mother wasn’t too far off. Daddy left the house for his, but to Emi, it seemed like Mom did her binges at home. And when one or the other got on one, they manipulated Emi. They tried to make her feel the other parent was to blame … for lack of money, for the heat being turned off, for everything. Emi thought—despite their manipulation—that both might be to blame.

  Emi knew what it meant to be silent about these things too. She knew a silence that other people couldn’t possibly imagine, none of the kids at her school and maybe none of the teachers either. Silence created loneliness, an infinitely deep well that Emi had fallen to the bottom of—yet, the silence kept things the same at home.

  And as insane as that sounded, it’s what Emi wanted more than anything. She wanted to keep everything the same at her house. She didn’t want her mother or father leaving, didn’t want anyone speaking the dreaded D word—divorce. That, above all else, was to be avoided. The silence made sure that her house didn’t change, and so she kept it. No matter what.

  On the day she met Abel Ease, her father had come home from work reeking of alcohol. Emi understood the difference between beer and liquor—at least when it came to their smell. She thought she could tell the difference nearly as well as her parents, and she found real pride in that. Her father came home, though, and this time it was liquor. (Which meant he hadn’t gone to a bar after work, but instead snuck drinks at work. Her mother called it a flask. Emi hadn’t seen one of those yet.) The fighting began almost immediately, because her mother hadn’t exactly been sober the entire day. Emi had gone to her room, but in a single story house with thin walls, it did little to hide the words when they started getting really loud.

  Emi had put on her headphones and plugged into her portable CD player, but even that couldn’t stop the sound of the shaking walls.

  She’d looked up and took her headphones off, wondering if it would keep happening or if they would cool off. Wondering if one of them would throw the other again.

  BOOM.

  The whole house shook, like an earthquake was hitting South Carolina.

  The tears came then, flooding her eyes and then her face before she could even stand up. Emi went to her window, not daring to track through the house and see her parents laying into each other. She could deal with the screaming; she dealt with that multiple times each week.

  It was the violence that hurt her.

  She climbed out the window and dropped to the ground beneath. The mud splashed up on her tennis shoes and the rain drenched her almost immediately. She turned around and closed the window. Most likely, her parents wouldn’t check on her, but if they did and found she’d left the window open, there’d be hell to pay.

  Emi started walking, not caring where
she went, but generally following the same path. Out of her neighborhood to the main road. A half mile there, and then a right into another neighborhood. She’d cut through there until she found the main road again, having looped around, and then she’d find her own neighborhood at the end of that. She’d do it over and over until the sun went down and her feet hurt. She wanted to walk until her parents were passed out, one on the couch, the other on their bed.

  She turned into the second neighborhood, and how many times had she walked this path before? A hundred? A thousand? Probably somewhere in between those two numbers, but she’d never seen Abel Ease outside. Only at school, and she’d never paid any attention. There’d been nothing striking about him, nothing to draw her to him.

  Yet that day, they were the only two people out in that torrential downpour.

  A car drove past her, moving slow, its headlights on. She was looking at her feet as it passed, hearing it sloshing water.

  “Nice day for a walk.”

  That was what he said, and Emi would never forget it, not as long as she lived. Despite everything that came after, those words stuck.

  Nice day for a walk.

  She’d almost ran over him. She’d been walking on the grass right next to the curb, and he’d been sitting on the curb. Emi was staring at her feet the whole time, and when she heard his voice, she stopped abruptly and looked up.

  He held a small pebble in his hand, and was staring at her, his eyes squinting to keep the water out of them.

  “I came out for the sun,” he said. “It’s got Vitamin D.”

  Even then, at 11, Abel’s sarcasm was decades older, far more advanced than anything Emi had ever thought of. She only stared at him, stunned and not fully getting the joke. She hadn’t thought she’d see someone, especially not in her path … but there he was.

  “Where ya going?” he asked.

  Emi reached up and wiped at her eyes, not thinking that her tears were camouflaged by the rain.

  “Nowhere.”

  “Hey, me either. Wanna go together?” Abel asked.