Dead Souls (43 page)

Oh God…did I really see him? Or…or was it my tortured mind, teasing me with hopeful games? Damn it! Help me, please!

As Ed and Judson held his other hand against the wood, Mrs. D., her neck wound gaping and seeping like a bloody maw, pressed a nail against his exposed palm.

Mary raised the hammer.

And then something incredible happened.

Mary froze, her hand still perched in the air, poised to strike. Her partially missing mouth chattered and then she wailed the agonized shrieks of a thousand
hellbound
voices. A bloody, seeping patch appeared between her filthy, sagging breasts. Punching out from the center of the spreading wound came the point of a thick nail, twisting, rotating, jerking up and down like a hatching beast. The hammer fell from her grasp and clunked on the hard ground, kicking up puffs of dust and grit.
 

A pitch-black shadow, as dark as a flood of crude oil, shot out of her mouth and settled up into the hidden recesses of the loft.

Her body collapsed to the ground like a dropped burlap sack, dead and useless.

Behind her stood Henry
Depford
, one hand doused with gore, the other gripping the pouch of nails. His eyes were dark empty orbs, devoid of conscious thought and reason, working solely on instinct and the will to complete his own life-long task.
Not unlike the
Conroys
. In the pallid light, Johnny could see a ring of violet bruises around his neck, deep and brutal where his former wife had burrowed her cold, dead thumbs.

Moaning incoherently, Ed staggered away from the crucifix across Johnny's line of sight, his rot-blackened arms raised toward Henry, the soul within his disintegrating body primed to murder him for this sudden aggression perpetrated against his family. Henry stepped back. Quickly, he rifled through the pouch and yanked out a nail, and in a continuous swooping motion, drove it home, right into Ed's still heart. Ed froze, eyes bulging, arms sticking out like dead tree branches. He opened his mouth hideously wide, and in deadly silence vomited a black, writhing,
ectoplasmic
cloud that leaped up into the rafters of the loft. Like a grotesque slug, his body writhed for a moment, then collapsed to the ground in a cold motionless heap, alongside his wife of thirty years.
 

Somehow calmly and quietly, Henry gazed to Johnny's right, and like an archer prepping to fire another arrow, removed another nail from the pouch. Johnny thumped and shrieked, shuddering beneath the cold bloody hands still gripping his body. Pain darted from his hand through his chest like a charge of volts.

Like earlier, Mrs. D. had proved herself the quickest of all the dead people. With a rage-filled shriek, she lunged forward and went for Henry, hands at once grasping his neck. Henry shrank back. The pouch dropped from his hand and
thunked
on the ground. Together, they buckled down and struggled against each other in a cloud of dust, Henry fighting for his life, Mrs. D, her soul.

Andrew Judson, holding Johnny from behind, released him and slowly staggered around the crucifix, seemingly aiming to assist Mrs. D. There was a sudden wail of anguish from the bloody battle, followed by a revolting ripping sound. Johnny, sucking in a cloud of putrid dust, closed his fingers over the bloody head of the nail and twisted his pierced hand back and forth in an effort to loosen it from the crucifix. Through tearing, agonized eyes, he watched as Mrs. D. rolled off Henry, her midsection oozing sloppy blood over his hand as continued twisting and grinding a nail deep into her heart. Her body twitched, shook, and flailed. Her throat swelled out like a balloon, and then her mouth ripped open and vomited a black-shadow soul up into the dark loft. Her body went immediately motionless, her open wound glistening in the seep of misty dawn light filtering in though the open doors.

In eerie silence, Henry, lying on his side, reached for the pouch. Johnny screamed in agony and pulled furiously against the nail. It budged slightly, but not so easily—the gushing blood from his hand caused his fingers to slip against his grasp. From above, the bird squawked loudly, and often. Henry crawled forward, his fingers brushing against the leather sash of the pouch. The pouch opened. A single nail slipped out.

Judson leaned down and grabbed the hammer that Mary had dropped. The bloated fingers of this right hand curled around the bloody handle.

Henry rolled onto his back, unnaturally silent despite the looming threat.
He isn't panting
, Johnny thought with horror.
Oh God, no…

Johnny bucked and thrashed, digging deep down into the darkness of his fortitude and unearthing a final burst of energy to scream and wrench his blood-soaked hand against the nail driven through it.

The nail loosened from the wood.

Judson, the hammer now gripped in his hand, swung it over his head and down. With a deafening crack, it connected squarely with Henry's forehead. Henry slammed down on the ground, a pool of blood gushing from his collapsing skull. Dust rose about him in a cloud.

Judson turned and faced Johnny. He
grinned
. Terrible lines of pus dripped from his lips to the ground. Maggots churned in the meat of his face.

He raised the hammer.

For a second, just a second, Johnny had stopped thrashing. But then the panic in him rose in full force again, giving him the will to make one last ditch attempt to yank the nail from the crucifix. His hand poured blood; he could feel it, could
hear
his flesh tearing.

He gazed at Henry, now twitching…now moving.
He wasn't dead! Or…was he?

Seemingly unaffected by the blow Judson delivered, Henry popped up, looking like a grisly jack-in-the-box. His skull was
caved
into a half-moon shape to which hunks of spattered brain clung. He reached out and clawed at Judson's legs, teeth exposed with lunatic aggression. Judson, mere seconds from delivering Johnny an incapacitating blow that would allow him to be crucified, tripped over Henry's reaching grasp.
The soul within doesn't know,
Johnny thought quickly.
The rest of family, they have been saved from evil. They have been sent to heaven, via the fifth nail. But this one here, it does not know…

With a shriek, Johnny tore the nail out of the crucifix. He buckled forward, five and a half inches of nail and splinters protruding from the back of his hand. Blood splashed out everywhere, on his bare chest, his legs, the ground. He back up against the crucifix and twisted his hand around, palm against his chest—his
scar.
Andrew Judson fell forward. The nail sunk into his exposed heart like a warm knife into butter.

The dead man trembled against Johnny, face wilting like a flower in a microwave. It released a gaseous breath of decay and dropped down and out of sight. Johnny crumpled down on top of him, his nailed hand ripping free of the blackened heart. There he remained for a few endless seconds, hyperventilating
 
and not knowing how he could still be alive. He nearly passed out before he twisted his head up and peered at Henry
Depford
. The man was sitting up, grinning at Johnny, the front portion his head gone. Johnny could see the raw brain within, swelling like a hideous tumor.

Johnny knew.
He saved your life once before…

"Eddie?" he coughed, his voice a wounded whisper.

The dead thing that was Henry
Depford
nodded once, then collapsed to the ground in a lifeless mound of cold, bleeding flesh. A thick mound of white ectoplasm oozed from his mouth and nose and soared up into the loft.

Johnny rolled onto his back in a dead faint, exhausted and fatigued and unable to move. His eyes stared unwaveringly toward the loft where the souls of the Conroy family and Eddie Carlson departed to.

The bird was there, laying on the loft's edge. It was dead, coated in maggots, its clawed feet sticking up in the air like withered flags of surrender.
Evil has left it…

Johnny closed his eyes and lay there amid the corpses, the only survivor in a religious war that nobody could win. The sun rose up over the Conroy house, its gentle warmth providing little comfort to Johnny as he slipped into the embracing arms of unconsciousness…

…and here he dreams of the Golden pain, of all the images that haunted his dreams while growing up. This vision, he knew, would be final—his last confrontation with the horrors that eventually brought him to
Wellfield
, placing him into a lead role in the war of good vs. evil. At last he finds the strength within to shun the growing light and the searing attack of the brand that left him scarred for life. The pain fades. He peers ahead, and sees another light. This one is softer, less invasive. A white figure emerges from it stands before Johnny. It is Eddie Carlson. In spite of the soft white light that envelops him, Johnny sees that he is wearing a football jersey, and has a helmet tucked firmly beneath his right arm. He is completely unscarred, as if he'd never had the deadly misfortune of confronting Benjamin Conroy.

"Thank you," Johnny whispers.

Eddie nods, and smiles warmly. His eyes twinkle beneath the light enveloping him. "It was my destiny, to not just save you Johnny, but to save Elizabeth, Faith, Daniel, and Benjamin as well, not from death, but from an eternity of pain and anguish in the afterlife. It was the goodness of God that beckoned me, allowed me the honor of bestowing upon the Conroy family His forgiveness of sin. I have heeded His word, Johnny. And now, my job is done." The apparition smiles warmly. "Johnny, please, see to it that evil never returns to
Wellfield
again…"

The apparition fades. Johnny steps forward, heart breaking with thankfulness, and horror. He realizes: Eddie Carlson wishes for me to continue his work. God's work. As he paces forward, he can hear his footfalls on the ground, thump…thump…thump. He shudders with sudden fear, and then is abruptly stopped in his tracks by a pair of dead, bloated hands that grab his shoulders.

A voice whispers its hidden terror in his ear: "
Johhhnnnny
…"

He startled awake, screaming.

A body leaned over him, a dark silhouette before dawn's bleeding light. Its hands grabbed his shoulders, shaking him.

Johnny screamed again, eyes bulging.

Again, the voice: "Johnny, Johnny. It's all right now. I'm going to help you."

Still in a panic, Johnny squinted. The person above him came into view, like an angel from a dream. Carl Davies, Henry
Depford's
former deputy—the man who'd picked him up and brought him to Henry's home. He was hunched, as pale as parchment, his hands warm wax against Johnny's bare shoulders.

"What in God's name
happened
here?" He was surveying the carnage with wide, vacant, unbelieving eyes.

The pain filtered back into Johnny, and he groaned, unable to utter a single word.

"You be quiet," Carl said.

Then, without another word, just as Henry
Depford
did to baby Bryan Conroy—to
him
—seventeen years earlier, Carl Davies scooped Johnny up in his arms, and carried him away from the Conroy house, once and forever.

October 18
^th
, 2005

10:30 AM

A
t ten-thirty AM on October 4
^th
,
Wellfield
experienced its first flurries in a winter that was forecasted to be one of the worst in the last twenty-five years. The winds whipped about Main Street, stealing away the last of the leaves still clinging to the elms lining the sidewalk outside the courthouse.

Inside the brick walls of the courthouse, Johnny sat in a room with the mayor, the current sheriff (a man by the name of
Tibbs
that looked remarkably like Henry
Depford
), his deputy, and five serious-faced men that were introduced as lawyers.
  

"And one more right here," the balding, middle-aged man to his right instructed.

His hand cramped and itched painfully beneath the bandage, but Johnny signed his name anyway. How many dotted lines had there been? A hundred? Two? This was promised to be the last one. He dropped the pen on the cherry wood desk and gazed at Mr. balding-middle-aged. What was his name again? Baker? Barker? He'd been introduced to all of them, some more than once, but couldn't remember any of their names. Loss of short-term memory seemed to be an ongoing problem.

After a three week stay at the Glendale Hospital two towns over, Johnny returned to
Wellfield
. There been the damage to his hand. Two broken ribs. A concussion. Internal bleeding. Loss of blood. Nothing wholly life-threatening, but nonetheless worthy of a few weeks' healing time. A plain but pretty female psychologist named Dr Allis spent the final ten days of his stay with him, ultimately diagnosing him with generalized anxiety and post-traumatic-stress-disorder.

Carl Davies had been very generous in allowing Johnny a place to stay until he was granted permission to leave town. The mayor was anxious to get the land into
Wellfield
ownership—the
Orono
businessmen were already lined up, the ink wet and ready in their pens. The Greens Community Homes, which were scheduled to break ground next month in the northeast end of Conroy's land, would divert the press's attention from
Wellfield's
stigma of another mass murder (at the same location as the first one seventeen years earlier, no less). The Mayor had been able to pull a few legal and financial strings, clearing Johnny of any wrongdoing, as long as Carl Davies was willing to vouch for him, which he readily did.