Deadtown (9 page)

The thing was hideous. Its skin was deep blue, and flames shot from its eyes. Its mouth bristled with teeth too long and sharp for lips to hide. It hunched over like an ape, its hands on the ground; its fingers and toes ended in nails that looked like daggers. I stared at the picture, fascinated by my own repulsion.
This
was the kind of thing I wanted to fight.

The words under the picture belonged to a language I didn’t know. Not Welsh—too many vowels. Definitely not English or French. Latin, maybe. Dad would know, but I didn’t dare ask him, because then he’d know I’d been looking at the forbidden book.

Almost idly, I sounded out the words. I don’t think I pronounced them anywhere near correctly. As I spoke, I visualized myself fighting this demon, wielding my flaming sword like Saint Michael himself. The blade whirled and flashed, rending the air with blinding speed. I visualized—I can admit it now, although I couldn’t for years—my father there, cheering me on, as I sliced the demon into little bits of barbecued ghoul.

One thing I’m sure of: I stopped speaking the words before I got to the last one. The book still scared me enough that I wasn’t going to read an entire spell from it out loud. Even though I’d gone to the library determined to conjure a demon so I could kick its ass, the power of that book had shown me I was still out of my league. I’d rebelled against my aunt by taking down the book. That was enough.

I put the book back in its place, making sure its spine was exactly even with the others. A cloud covered the moon, and the room felt dark and cold. I shivered, eager to get back to bed. I tried to hurry across the Persian rug, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. I moved slowly, like I was wading through a river of molasses. My heart pounded with the effort, but I couldn’t make any forward progress. The room felt even colder, and I wondered if I was coming down with something.

Too tired to take another step, I sat down in the middle of the floor.
I’ll just close my eyes for a minute,
I thought. But I was shivering too violently to sleep. Goose bumps rose on my limbs, on the back of my neck. My teeth chattered so hard they made my head hurt. What was wrong with me?

I heard a bang, like a door slamming, somewhere deep in the house.
Great,
I thought,
Aunt Mab. I’ll really catch it now.

Another bang, closer, then another. The banging grew rhythmic, a steady hammering. What
was
that? Why would Aunt Mab call in carpenters in the middle of the night? But the next noise wasn’t from a carpenter—it was a horrible, skull-splitting screech, somewhere between a howl and a scream, a sound of pain and rage and something else. The screech came again, and I knew what the something else was—pure, unremitting evil. Fear shot through me like a hundred arrows. I tried to get up, but my legs buckled, unable hold my weight. I stayed there in a heap on the floor, as whatever was making that noise screamed again. Right outside the library door.

I was crying, but I didn’t even have strength to wipe the tears from my face. “Please, God,” I said. “Please, please . . .” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Every prayer I’d ever learned had evaporated from my mind. All I could do was beg.

The door exploded, leaping from its hinges and shattering into splinters. A hot wind roared through the room, stinking of sulfur and rotted meat. The wind toppled the leather chairs, cycloned papers off Aunt Mab’s desk, hurled the desk itself into the far wall. It didn’t budge me, though. I squinted into the doorway and could distinguish, barely, a massive blue shape.

This demon made the one in the book look like a cartoon. It must have been twelve feet tall, because its head brushed the library ceiling. Jets of blue and yellow flames shot from its eyes. It snarled and snapped, showing hundreds of sharp, daggerlike teeth. It moved its head blindly back and forth, then locked on me, sitting there helpless on the floor. It screeched again, striking at the air with its ten-inch claws, and started toward me.

I screamed. The demon laughed and came closer.

Another step and the flames touched my arm. The pain was indescribable. Heat scorched me from the inside. Flames leaped across my skin, not singeing a hair. But inside my flesh was on fire, my blood literally boiling. I closed my eyes, the world nothing but an inferno of heat and pain and fear and screaming.

And then it stopped.

I looked up. My father stood in the doorway, brandishing Aunt Mab’s sword. The demon had turned to him. As soon as its eyes were off me, the burning stopped. But when it looked at my father, the sword burst into flame.

My father said some words I didn’t understand. Then he said, in English, “Difethwr, I banish thee back to the Hell whence thou came.”

The demon paused. It even staggered—I’m sure it staggered back a little. My father’s power weakened it. I wanted to laugh with triumph. My father would kill this hideous demon, and then he’d teach me how to use the sword. Together we’d become the invincible scourge of the demonic world.

The demon roared, and its eyes shot flames at my father. Dad raised the sword in a defensive posture, using both hands to hold it horizontal, deflecting the jets of flame. He stepped forward with great effort, as though he were pushing back a brick wall. I closed my eyes to utter a prayer of thanksgiving.

And then I heard the sound that has haunted my dreams for ten years. A quiet sound, not like the demon’s din. Half-gasp, half-moan, it came from my father. I opened my eyes to see him on his knees. The sword, its flame extinguished, slanted loosely in his hand, its tip resting on the floor. He was engulfed in a sphere of fire. Although the flame didn’t appear to hurt him—his hair didn’t burn, his skin didn’t blacken—I knew what it was doing to him on the inside.

He groaned and fell forward. The flames followed him, flattening and lengthening to encase his prone body. I screamed and crawled forward to help him, but I was afraid of those flames. I couldn’t force myself to go near them.

My father writhed, and now his screams mingled with my own. The demon was killing him, and I was too paralyzed with fear to do anything.

The flames that consumed my father’s body began to subside, until all that was left was a greenish flickering over his skin. He lay still. Desperate, I searched for some sign that he was okay—a twitching finger or a fluttering eyelid, the slightest rise or fall of his chest—but there was nothing. Nothing at all.

“Dad?” I stretched my hand toward him. “Daddy . . . ?” The burn on my arm hit me with fresh pain, worse than before. I screamed and crumpled in agony. Demonic laughter rumbled through the room. From my curled-up position, I watched twin jets of flame sweep across the carpet. Toward me. I closed my eyes and waited for their excruciating touch.

I wondered what it would feel like to die.

But the flames didn’t reach me. The deep, floor-shaking laugh faltered, then slid up, up, up in pitch into a scream.

I raised my head and looked.

The demon was on its knees, writhing in its own flames. Aunt Mab stood over it like an avenging angel. She carried a sword I’d never seen before; it was as long as Mab was tall, but she wielded it with ease and skill. The sword gleamed like pure sunlight and gave off a dazzling rainbow of flames. These held the cringing demon in a cage of light. Mab’s lips moved, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying over the thing’s screams.

Aunt Mab took a step forward, and the demon shrank into a tighter ball. Slowly, she took another step, still reciting the unknown words. The fiery sphere around the demon grew smaller, then smaller still. I couldn’t believe it. That huge, monstrous demon was shrinking. Still Mab advanced. Now the thing was the size of a doll. One more step and it vanished. Only a scorched spot on the carpet remained.

“Mab! You killed it!”

My aunt glanced at me with a single, decisive shake of her head. She bent over my father, laid a hand on his forehead, like a mother checking on a sick child. “Oh, Evan,” she breathed. She closed her eyes, for a moment looking very old and very tired. Then she crossed herself and straightened.

“No!” I shouted. I tried to stand, but still my legs wouldn’t hold my weight. I crawled over to my father and put my cheek against his. His skin was already cold. “No,” I sobbed. It was the only word in the universe.
No, no, no.

 

 

IN MY NARROW BEDROOM UNDER THE EAVES, I SAT ON THE bed and stared at the floor with its wide wooden boards. Aunt Mab had sent me there, saying to stay out of the way, that she’d handle everything. From my high window overlooking the courtyard, I’d watched a single police car arrive—no lights, no siren—followed by an ambulance. A few minutes later, a small black car disgorged a priest, who carried a heavy-looking bag. He paused on the doorstep and crossed himself before entering our house.

I tried to convince myself that the ambulance meant there was hope. But I knew it wasn’t true, and I wasn’t surprised when the ambulance men wheeled out the gurney with a sheet draped over Dad’s body.

I sat on the bed, numb. The world was divided into Before and After, as neatly and completely as if someone had split it with a butcher’s cleaver. Before, I’d woken up in this bed, and Dad had been alive. Before, I’d gone down to breakfast, and Dad had been alive. Before, I’d run up here to change out of the sweats I wore for sword practice, and Dad had been alive. The clothes still draped the chair where I’d tossed them.

I told myself I should put them away, but I couldn’t bear to touch them, as if moving them would make it real.

A glass of water sat on my nightstand. Thirsty, I reached for it. Before, I thought, when I’d filled up that glass . . . My hand dropped to my lap.

I was trapped in a world of After. Even if nothing in this room ever changed, even if I sat forever on the thin mattress, the eternal caretaker of Before, I could never get back there. This long night couldn’t last forever. The moon would move across the sky. The sun would come up. And so would begin the first day of After, the first day of a world without my father in it.

I knew that. Even so, I sat absolutely still, some part of me believing that if I didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t cry, I could somehow keep time from snapping the thin thread that connected me to this day. To my living father.

Soon, I heard Mab’s tread on the stairs. She rapped once on the closed door. When I didn’t answer, she rapped again and opened it.

I kept my gaze on the floor. I didn’t want to have this conversation, didn’t want it to carry me further into the After.

Mab didn’t speak. She sat next to me on the bed and patted my knee. Minutes went by. Mab sighed. She patted me again. “Your father . . .” she began.

At the sound of her voice, the last remnants of Before shattered like a funhouse mirror and crashed at my feet. Dead. My father was dead. There was no going back.

I howled with the pain of it and sobbed into my aunt’s shoulder. Mab didn’t respond, just carefully put her arms around me. There was nothing comforting in her stiff embrace.

“Victory—”

“Don’t call me that! Don’t call me that ever again. I killed my father, Mab—it was all my fault. I killed him!”

She pushed me back and held me at arm’s length, giving my shoulders a little shake. “You most certainly did not. He was killed by a demon of Hell. By Difethwr, the Destroyer.”

“You don’t understand! I summoned the demon. I got down your book—” I didn’t want to continue, but I forced myself to say the words. “And I spoke the spell.” Mab’s grip tightened on my arms. “I didn’t say all of it. I swear I didn’t. But the demon came anyway.”

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

I did. She interrupted only once, to ask me what I was thinking as I sounded out the words of the spell. When I told her, she shut her eyes and bit her lip, then nodded. I finished my story, and she nodded again, then looked at me. Her eyes were clear, and when she spoke, her voice was calm.

“Evan was fated to die at a demon’s hands. He knew that. He’s known it since he was your age, even younger. When he confronted the Destroyer, he knew exactly what was coming.”

“But I should have helped him! And I didn’t. I was too afraid of that fire. I couldn’t reach into it to get the sword because I couldn’t stand the thought of getting burned again.”

Mab looked at me sharply. “The Destroyer’s flames touched you?”

I nodded.

“Where?”

I held out my right forearm. It looked completely normal. It felt normal, too, except for an itchy tingling. “You can’t see it now. The demon was burning my arm with its eyes when Dad came in.” Mab pursed her lips as she ran her fingers over my arm. She shook her head and muttered something I couldn’t make out. My heart sank. She didn’t believe me. She probably thought I was lying to make up a reason for not helping Dad. Tears welled in my eyes.

My stupid arm didn’t even hurt anymore. Maybe I
was
making it up. Maybe I was so scared of the demon that I’d only imagined the pain. The tears spilled over.

Mab reached into her pocket, and I thought she’d hand me a tissue. Instead, she gripped my right arm and slashed a blade across the forearm. I saw the blood before I felt the cut. I stared at my aunt, openmouthed. In her right hand she held a jeweled dagger, its blade shiny with my blood.

Then the pain hit. Not the pain of the knife slash, although that stung, but a roaring, hot, fiery pain, like she’d stuffed burning coals under my skin. I screamed and twisted, but she wouldn’t let me pull away. Blood streamed from the wound, and from it rose puffs of yellowish steam that smelled like sulfur and rotting meat. The steam—billows of it—filled the small room, choking off my screams into coughs. The blood ran down my arm and made a sticky pool on the floorboards. Gradually it slowed. Mab’s grip remained iron until it stopped. Then she got up and opened the window, her figure vague through the yellow steam though she was only three steps away.