The Last Customer (15 page)

She only hoped that there was nothing to report.
 
That everyone was safe

If she went to the police station, what she had to report wouldn’t fly well. Logical law enforcement would find her statements silly. They’d probably take her to the hospital for drug testing and she would only embarrass herself. Nothing would come of it. The danger lurked in another plain of existence.

           
Again, looking both ways, she proceeded down Main Street. The town limits ended in two miles. After that, she’d be engulfed by the back country.

At night, the dark hills, forest and cornfields frightened her. The countryside was scenic in the daylight. This part of the country—the Midwest—was picturesque. That was putting it modestly. The rolling hills, forest and scattered towns were breathtaking. She could drive from sun-up to sun-down. But at night, the darkness served as a nest for evil dwellers. Evil took pleasure in the night’s blackness. The ugliness of the world could walk amongst the living, at night, while the innocent rested in a vulnerable state.

For many years, Donna walked with the dark. Her youth had passed her by. She had nothing to show-for it, except bad memories. Memories she’d forgiven herself for many years ago. Sure, there were days when she wished that she could have her youth again. There were a million things that she wanted to say to her young, stupid, self. Once in a while, she fantasized about how life could have been if she’d chosen a different path. She could have been a better student, a better daughter, a better person. One of the most difficult hurtles in her life had been forgiving herself for what she’d done to her parents. In her late teens, she’d dropped out of school. She was addicted to drugs: cocaine, crystal methamphetamine and heroin. If you could name it, she was doing it. Her friends were into wicked things. They took pleasure in the pain of others and found it humorous. Their behavior was demonic. If she were to guess, most of her youthful associates had probably ended up in jail, or they were dead. It took an act of God to bring Donna into the light. For a time, the darkness had consumed her.

           
Ronald and Denise Shaney were wonderful parents. Donna was an only child due to pregnancy complications. Her mother had only been able to produce one child. Donna was
it
. Together, Denise and Ronald spent countless hours loving, educating and being
real
parents to Donna. They’d have done anything to ensure that she turned out good. But Donna’s curiosity for new experiences got the best of her, at a young age. She’d lied about her addictions and hid them well. Her parents believed her lies throughout most of her high school years. But around the end of her junior year, the wall of lies began to crack. Her parents were smart people. They
intuited
that there was a problem and they’d sent Donna to rehab. She’d been willing, but it hadn’t helped. She was sober for a few months, before the temptations and the outright fun and romance of the drug culture rediscovered her fancy. She indulged in drugs again—a lot of them, enough to make up for lost time. Her parents turned to tough love. They kicked her out of the house. The decision was a gamble. As it were, throwing her out allowed her the freedom to live amongst the underworld. Soon she was homeless. She didn’t even know that she was a transient. She traded certain
favors
to support her habit and in trade, she was able to reserve a spot on the ratty couch of a drug den, in an unfavorable part of town. She didn’t leave the couch. She would smoke methamphetamine and snort cocaine, day and night. She performed her duties with the owner of the house. On a few occasions, she had had to perform with the landlord’s friends. As long as she had her drugs—her reason for living—she was okay with giving her body away. Her soul had diminished into the darkness and her body became an empty vessel. It became the meaningless space that something most unsavory found as a vehicle for destruction and with her body, the demon entered the plain of physical existence.

When the demon possessed her, she thought she was dying. At first, it felt like she’d overdosed. Her skin began to burn. Inside the eye of her mind, she saw herself falling down a dark hole. She tried to grab on to something, anything, but found nothing. Her grip was slippery and there was no net, nothing to catch her. Although her skin burned, her guts felt icy. Every organ in her body was hard and frozen, which hurt worse than the burning. Her screams went nowhere. For days, she remained in a constant state of pain. The owner of the house she’d been staying at threw her into a dumpster, in the back alleyway, with the help of a few friends. They’d had enough of her babbling and her fits. The rage that she displayed didn’t flow well with her cohorts. They had to get rid of her.

She had no recollection of how she’d gotten out or how she’d made it to her grandmother’s house. After the exorcism, her grandmother explained how she’d been discovered. But it didn’t matter. She remembered nothing and nothing clicked.

Her grandmother barely recognized her. Apparently, she’d gotten out of the dumpster and was wandering the streets when an old acquaintance—of her grandmother’s—from church, saw her. He’d contacted Silvia, who took her home. At one point, when her cousin had come to visit, she’d nearly devoured her baby. There was no recollection of that either. It wasn’t until Gardner exorcised the demon that the pain stopped, and when she emerged from her dark hole, she was sober. For the first time in years, she thought clearly. Thinking soberly, she received clarity to many things. Like the fact that she hadn’t talked to her parents in four years. She got a hold of her father and he’d explained that her mother had passed away three years prior. Denise Shaney had suffered a massive heart attack. Given her father’s distant tone and subtle anger, it was clear that he placed the blame on Donna, and she accepted it. She put the people she loved in a state of emotional hell for her own selfish desires, now, she had to live with it, and she did.

Eventually, she forgave herself and moved on to a more fulfilling life, with Leslie Gardner.

           
Now, coming to the end of Main Street, she saw headlights emerge in the distance. They loomed like two small flashlights waving in the dark. The car moved fast. It barreled past the red stop lights. Donna was shocked by how fast the car was coming. It traveled at the velocity of a machine gun bullet.

Focused, she squinted in the rear-view mirror, trying to make out the vehicle. Red and blue lights flashed on top. She felt relieved. It was the police. They must have been headed to the scene of an accident. The flashing lights swirled across the Main Street buildings.

           
She pulled off to the side of the road in order for the squad car to pass. But it didn’t. It pulled off to the shoulder and slammed into the back of her jeep.

           
She was jolted, violently, forward. She smacked her head on the steering wheel. Her forehead took the blunt force and a blinding white light seized her. She wasn’t rendered unconscious, but she was dazed. The skin below her hairline tore down the center and stopped at the bridge of her nose. She bled immediately, the tear in her skin spewed dark red fluid. It stung when it seeped into her eyes. It blinded her. The stream of red continued its flow until it dripped onto her tee-shirt, painting it crimson.

           
Shaking badly, she fumbled for the door handle. He fingers slipped from it. Her grip was weak and she couldn’t bend her fingers. Finally, she was able to grab on, shoved the car door open and spilled out onto the gravel.

With trembling knees, she crawled toward the road. Besides the pounding headache, pain, and disorientation, confusion now set in.

Why had this police car crashed into her?

           
Donna Gardner slowly lifted her head. A man stood before her. He was young, but something about him was beyond his years. Then she realized that she was staring into the face of evil.

2

The demon stood beside the police cruiser door. His feet set firmly on the gravel. He turned from the desolate fields back to the downtown area, a short distance away, and then walked toward the smashed jeep. Excitedly, Sammael rubbed his hands together in succession. He wanted to desecrate this woman before him. He’d waited a long time for this. He didn’t know what atrocity he wanted to commit first.

It was breathtaking, casting his eyes on the woman that he’d returned from the pit of eternity to torment. He wanted to pick her up, smile at her, hold her, violate her and then tear the skin from her flesh. He imagined her, skinless. The eyes of a human wearing no skin was a treasure—
maybe later.
He’d waited decades for this moment. He would remain patient.

Thirty years ago, Gardner had forced Sammael out of Donna’s body, and he’d been
sent back.
He didn’t like being
sent back.
It had only happened on a few occasions. With Donna it was different. He’d been so close to killing her. If he’d spent another few seconds in her body, she would have met death at his hands and Sammael would have gone back to his thrown of despair, triumphant. He would have watched Donna burn in the lake of fire.

Sammael had come back from the
dark place
many times. He’d tortured many people and many souls. But with the Gardner’s it was personal. There was a special kind of discomfort he wanted them to feel. Possessing Donna’s body had been pleasant, evilly satisfying. He’d enjoyed molesting her insides and before he was exorcised, he’d begun grinding Donna’s flesh into eternal pain. Her body had screamed in searing agony. Then he’d been ripped away, sent back to the
dark place
. It was unexpected and it had hurt. Being cast out of Donna brought Sammael deep despair. It angered him and now, he wanted to eat her flesh while she watched.

           
Grabbing her arm, he dragged her toward the police cruiser. She fought him, digging her fingernails into the soft flesh of his wrist. Her other hand shot forward and hit his mouth. She grabbed his lower lip and pulled. Sammael felt warm blood trickle down his chin like juice after biting into fresh fruit. The skin inside his mouth tore sideways. He didn’t care. He would be inside of Donna’s body soon. The body—that he wore now—would be dead. Its owner would burn for eternity.

           
Donna had been an easy target thirty years back. But now, she was different. She was hitting him, defending herself. She was placing value on her life, something she hadn’t done all those years ago. She continued ripping his lip open. She had spirit, which had been absent in the past. Her human strength was no comparison to the supernatural ability that he possessed, but it was impressive. Lifting her arm upward, her body followed and her feet dangled in the air, nearly a foot off the ground.

           
“What’s going to happen is going to happen, Donna.
You
fighting
me
won’t get you anywhere. And you tearing my lip off will only hurt the poor degenerate that I stole this body from. You of all people should know that.” Sammael laughed while shaking his head. “
Jee
-whiz, Donna.” Then he launched her against the car. The side of her head crashed, hard, against the rear quarter panel. The metal dented. A streak of blood remained above the wheel-well. Donna dropped to the ground like a heap of bricks. She was out cold. The top half of her body slumped over her legs as if she were stretching. Blood and saliva dribbled from her mouth.

           
Sammael went back to the police car, opened the back door, picked Donna up by the arms, dragged her forward, and tossed her into the back seat.

The fight in her had been impressive.

Sammael placed the palm of his hand on Donna’s forehead. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. He wanted in. He needed in, and now was the time. He pushed with all of his might. Trying to penetrate the pores of her skin, he hit a wall. He was blocked. Something was wrong. He couldn’t possess her.

A sorrow sunk in. The Unholy One wasn’t allowing Sammael to
take
her. He continued trying to sink into her flesh. He failed. Sammael wasn’t often denied possession.

Maybe he should just torture her and then kill her.

Obviously, he’d been able to harm her, physically. He’d knocked her unconscious. But he wanted to live in her skin. Living in her body was the only subjection that would suffice. Killing her wasn’t enough. He wanted to possess her, but he couldn’t. Sometimes he was allowed to harm the host and sometimes he wasn’t. The forces at work determined the outcome, not he. He didn’t like to think about the two forces making the rules because he had no control over the choice. He only enjoyed carrying out the work he was tasked with, and right now, he wanted to work.

           
Sammael jumped into the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition and punched the gas. The cruiser spat gravel in every direction. Pebbles and small rocks kicked up beneath the undercarriage of the car. The small rocks pattered against the chassis like a hail storm. Turning the radio dial to what the human’s called
Hard Rock; Sammael
wondered what sinfully pleasant things Jezebeth was conducting with the others—with Gardner.

All of this was for Gardner. Sammael wanted to seek his revenge, and rake havoc on the living. He could taste his vengeance. The taste was sweet, but it tormented him. He hadn’t been able to take Donna and Sammael couldn’t think of anything more rewarding than confronting Gardner while wearing his wife as a costume. The best way to antagonize Gardner was to take his wife’s body and he couldn’t—not yet anyway. But he would try again.

           
Looking into the rearview mirror, he saw oncoming headlights. More blue and red lights twirled brightly in the darkness.

           
More fun!