The Demon Barker of Wheat Street Read online

 

  I frowned. Stop. Don’t go any farther. I’m coming to join you. In fact, go back.

 

  She couldn’t hear Oberon’s thoughts yet, since she was still about six years away from getting bound to the earth. Grab her by the shirt or something. Pull her back. Don’t let her go.

  I spent a few seconds trying to think of how to beat the imp without a kerfuffle until I realized it wasn’t trying to prevent my escape. All I had to do was act dumb and walk out. Picking up my sandals, I did precisely that, vowing to return later. Once safely outside, I sprinted around to the front of the tent to have another go.

 

  Don’t let her go! I’m on my way.

 

  The line at the front of the tent was just as long as when we entered—perhaps longer. The barker, I saw through magical sight, was actually a full-fledged demon. The huge man at the door taking money was an imp, so the barker was the boss. His words came back to me: Guaranteed to harrow your soul. Reap what you sow. And then, in writing, an offer to choose hell. I couldn’t afford to wait in line again.

 

  Can’t you stop her?

 

  That didn’t sound like Granuaile at all. She loved Oberon every bit as much as I did. Only one thing could explain her behavior. Oberon, she’s under a spell. These are demons at work. You have to stop her. Knock her down and sit on her if you have to.

  Oberon weighed more than she did. He could keep her pinned.

 

  Normally demons smell so bad that it takes a herculean effort to keep your lunch down. I shot another look at the demon barker but saw no one violently ill in his vicinity. Neither the man at the entrance nor the girl at the exit had set my nose twitching.

  They’ve sewn themselves up tight in human bodies. Have you got her?

 

  I’m going to dissolve your camouflage and hope the sight of you helps. You have to stop her, Oberon.

  I dissolved his spell and then triggered camouflage for myself, which would allow me to slip past the imp at the door.

  However, nothing happened.

  “Oh, no, not now, Amber,” I said, and then reached through my tattoos to speak directly to the elemental of the central Great Plains. Speaking was a relative term; elementals don’t speak any human language but rather communicate via emotions and images. My recollections of such conversations are always approximations.

  //Demons on earth / Druid requires aid//

  Amber replied immediately, not even pretending that she didn’t know I was around. //Query: Demon location? / None sensed//

  //Demons here// I replied. //My location / Demons using wood to mask presence//

  The bloody barker hadn’t been insecure about his height; he needed the stilts to make sure the earth never twigged to his presence.

  Demons were usually the responsibility of their angelic opposites, but I’ve run into them more often than I would care to. The problem with them from a Druidic perspective was that they kept trying to hijack the earth’s power to open and maintain portals to hell, draining life in the process and endangering the elementals. Aenghus Óg’s giant suckhole to the fifth circle, for example, had destroyed fifty square miles in Arizona. If there was a gateway underground here, Amber should have felt it.

  //Query: Power drain in this area?// I asked.

  //Yes / Intermittent//

  //Demons responsible// I said.

  Amber’s judgment and sentence took no time at all. Her anger boiled through me as she said, //Slay them / Full power restored//

  //Gratitude / Harmony//

  //Harmony//

  Had I the time, I might have shed a tear at that—or celebrated with a shot of whiskey. It had been far too long since I’d shared a sense of harmony with Amber—because these were feelings, after all, not mere translated words, and it was impossible for either Amber or me to lie about feeling harmony. But I had an apprentice and a hound in danger of going through a mysterious unholy orifice, as well as another mystery to solve: since the demons obviously had some kind of portal down there, how were they hiding it?

 

  You’re a good hound. We are totally getting you some gourmet sausages for this. Keep her down. She’ll apologize later.

  I cast camouflage successfully this time and melted from view. It didn’t make me completely invisible when I moved, but it was good enough; no one would be able to see me in time to react well.

  Except perhaps the demon barker.

  “You, sir! What do you think you’re doing?” He was staring right at me, even though I was camouflaged and still. Damn it. I didn’t have a weapon, either. Since stealth didn’t seem to be an option, my only hope lay in speed and some martial arts. I bolted for the entrance and the barker shouted, “Gobnob! I mean George! Stop that man!”

  The imp’s name was Gobnob?

  “What man?” the hulk said as I whisked past him. Apparently only the demon could pierce my camouflage. Advantage: Druid.

  Indiscreet shoving was necessary to get past the line of people and down the stairs. I heard lots of “Heys” and “What the (bleep)s” as I endangered ankles and hips.

  “Sorry,” I called. “It’s an emergency.”

 

  Grab her pants leg in your teeth and pull back hard. Don’t let her get traction!

 

  Go after her and protect her!

  The first bizarre “orifice” was ahead. An imp in a human suit was stationed there and charming people much the way the little girl imp was at the exit on the “heaven” side, except that this fellow was telling people, “You can’t wait to get through the next doorway after this one.” That’s why Granuaile and the rest of them kept going even when they heard and smelled something awful ahead.

  It was time to put a stick in their spokes.

  There wasn’t any need to think about it: Amber had ordered me to slay the demons, so I was going to do it. Before I passed through the gross doorway, I placed one hand on top of the imp’s head and the other underneath his chin and jerked it violently to the side, snapping his neck.

  As he crumpled I yelled, “Go back! They’re killing people in here!” The “What the (bleep)s” multiplied, and I hoped for their sakes that their sense of self-preservation would win out over curiosity. They were quite confused because they hadn’t precisely seen me kill the imp, but they did know that something had gone horribly wrong and someone had been severely injured. Some of them pulled out cell phones and dialed 911, and at least a couple expressed a loud desire to get out of there and headed back up the stairs.

  The orifice was wet and smelled fishy and I had to sort of slither through it, since it was a slit cut into a quivering wall of protoplasm; I felt squeezed out through a pastry chef’s frosting gun. Dubbing it the Anchovy Gate due to its odor, I decided, for my own sanity, no
t to dwell on whether its substance had been secreted or shat or otherwise spawned from unsavory origins. It was a kind of gelatinous, semitranslucent slab of dead lavender sludge that filled the space completely from floor to ceiling, a tight sphincter sealing one environment off from another. Its function was clear: Without the protections it provided against smells and sound, nobody would want to continue onward, for the stench on the other side of it made me gag and the howls of people dying ahead filled me with fear for Granuaile and Oberon.

  What’s happening? I asked my hound.

 

  Nonsense. I can still hear you.

 

  Almost there.

 

  Everyone ahead of me had been charmed. Their need to get through that next gate was the call of a siren. If the first one had been the Anchovy Gate, this was the Needle Gate, I suppose. It was designed like those tire-shredding devices; you were fine to go through it one way, but try to back up and you’d be punctured with slivers of steel.

  Still, whatever was happening on the other side, people were opting for the needles and trying to push backward through the needles, getting cut up in the process. Pelting through the charmed victims until I reached the gateway, I drew on the earth’s power for enhanced speed and strength—bindings that essentially improved the efficiency of my neuromuscular system and prevented fatigue.

  The Needle Gate was a mass of hinged, bloody steel spikes, doubtless constructed in chunks and then assembled here like the tent and the rides and everything else. The metal didn’t burn my skin—in fact, it was quite cool, as one might expect metal underground to be. The fabled temperature of hell wasn’t in play here; the horror of it was.

  I pressed through the clacking hiss of needles and came through low onto a killing floor, rolling out of the way of a desperate middle-aged man whose face was streaked with snot and tears and spattered with blood. He tried to stick his arm into the gap in the gate I’d just vacated and wound up puncturing it on all sides. The needles must have had wee barbs on the outer sides so that as one passed through the gate they wouldn’t snag; but once you tried to back up, you’d be not only stabbed but hooked. There were at least a dozen other people crowding the gate, trying to get out as I was trying to get in, and some of them had caught their hands and arms on needles in their desperate attempts to escape, so now they could either tear free or remain stuck, but either way they had pain to deal with on top of their terror. Two people—a man and a woman—had been pushed into the needles by accident or design and were now wailing in agony, unable to win free. It looked like others, in the frenzy of their fear, might be more than willing to tear them lose forcibly or even use their bodies to wedge the gate open if it meant escape. Thankfully, Granuaile wasn’t one of those crowding around the gate.

  Oberon? I’m through the door.

 

  I squeezed through a couple more rows of panicked citizens and emerged into an abattoir. The floor was cheap, splintery wood laid over the earth. The ceiling was surprisingly high—we had descended deeper than I thought. The reason for the height lay at the far end of the room, which was about the length of a high school cafeteria: ghouls had stacked bodies nearly to the top and were adding more rows of fresh kills, presumably for later consumption. A demon with a scythe was supplying the freshness, and right then he was after Granuaile.

  He wasn’t the actual grim reaper but a demon that had assumed the likeness; enough people associated a robed skeletal figure with hell that it made sense for a demon to take that form. It was certainly working on the psychological front.

  The reaper had on the iconic long black robe but had pulled back the cowl, exposing the rictus of a merciless white skull. Tiny fires blazed in his eye sockets, and he appeared competent with the scythe, whirling it around by the little handle halfway down the shaft. Granuaile was leaping over or ducking under his swings, and losing steam, but she would have been dispatched long ago if she hadn’t trained the last six years with me in tumbling and martial arts.

  Oberon had quite rightly concluded he couldn’t be a dog in this fight; he was barking and trying to distract the demon but otherwise staying out of range of the scythe.

  Like many long weapons, scythes are fearsome if you’re right at the arc of their swing. But they’re slow and cumbersome to wield, and if you can get inside that arc, you have a decent chance to deal a debilitating blow to an ill-guarded opponent.

  Back me up, buddy.

  I charged the demon and went for a slide tackle that would have made Manchester United proud. I dissolved my camouflage as I moved so that Oberon could see me, but unfortunately the demon also caught this in his peripheral vision. If he was anything like the barker he probably could have seen through it anyway, but my abrupt pop into view triggered a reflex action. He leapt over my slide and landed astride me, raising the scythe high above his head to harvest my dumb ass. With his eye sockets cast down at me, he didn’t see Oberon coming.

  My hound—a buck-fifty and all muscle—hit the demon square in the chest, bowling him over. Oberon’s momentum caused him to trample the demon and keep going, which was just as well, because the reaper rolled and regained his feet with a backward somersault, still holding on to his weapon and facing me.

  Well done, Oberon. Stay behind him but don’t charge. He knows you’re back there. Growl and keep him nervous.

  The reaper advanced on me, swinging his weapon in a weaving pattern that forced me to backpedal. But once I had the timing of it down, I lunged inside the blade following a backswing and turned my right forearm to block the shaft, continuing to spin around to the left so that I could ram my left elbow into his teeth. Seeing that stagger him, I followed up, shoving the heel of my right palm as hard as I could underneath the reaper’s jaw. The skull, bereft of convenient muscles and tendons to anchor it firmly to the neck and shoulders, popped clean off, and the flames died in the sockets.

 

  This isn’t done.

  I checked on Granuaile. She was breathing heavily and looked exhausted but didn’t look wounded.

  “You okay?” I asked. She nodded in the affirmative right as a chorus of roars erupted from the far side of the abattoir. The ghouls had just realized I’d killed the reaper, and their rage was answered by a new wave of screams from the carnival goers. A few stragglers had poured in during the fight and the nightmare set before their suddenly cleared minds was of the brick-shitting sort.

  Ghouls are unclean, since they feast on the dead or on bits of the dead and get exposed to all sorts of filth and disease. Conveniently, they’re immune to infection and poison, but wild ones like these weren’t terribly worried about spreading such things around. Their fingernails—which should probably be classified as claws—are coated with all sorts of virulent shit. One scratch would probably spell a death sentence without a source of high-powered antibiotics nearby. Of course, if a ghoul is trying to open you up with its claws, the likelihood of you living long enough to die by disease is small.

  Back in Arizona, there was a small group—or I should say a shroud—of ghouls that had learned how to blend in well with the population. They were incredibly handy lads to have around because they made bodies disappear and cleaned up scenes that would be difficult to explain to local authorities. Most paranormal communities rely upon such shrouds, for obvious reasons—they were key to keeping humans oblivious and believing that the only predators out there were other humans. Antoine and his boys drove around a refrigerated truck and were able to pass for human so long as they didn’t get too hungry. They were also quite scrupulous about waiting for people to die on their own before eating their bodies.

  These ghouls weren’t in Antoine’s class, however. If Antoine’s shroud went to Harvard, this shrou
d was illiterate. Savage, gray-skinned, black-toothed, and covered in viscera, they looked only too willing to kill their food if the reaper couldn’t do it for them.

  “Take the scythe,” I told Granuaile. “I will throw them to you off balance. Finish them or else get out of the way.”

  “Ready,” she puffed, and nodded at me. She looked ready to hurl; the smell of death and sulfur was inescapable. But she could handle the scythe; I’d been training her primarily in the quarter-staff, and she could adapt some of those moves.

  I approached the shroud, wagering that since dead bodies rarely fought back, they’d be rather unskilled fighters that depended largely on their strength and claws to win the day. There were eight of them, though, and I doubted they would politely wait their turn to take me on one at a time. The wood flooring that concealed the demons from Amber also cut me off from drawing any more power; I had to fuel everything on what I had left in my bear charm. Perhaps a gambit was in order.

  The laws of Druidry tend to frown on binding animated creatures, and it’s impossible to bind synthetics and difficult to mess with iron. But apart from that, anything goes. The flooring wasn’t nailed down—they were simply plywood sheets atop the dirt. I created a binding between the middle of one sheet and the denim jeans of a body halfway up the stack on the far wall. Normally this would make both the jeans and the plywood fly to meet each other, but since the body wearing the jeans was crushed underneath so many others and couldn’t budge, it was only the plywood that was free to move. Once I energized the binding, the plywood flew up and back to the wall and, functioning like a giant bookend, mowed down a couple of ghouls on the way, though without doing them much harm. More importantly, it left some exposed earth where I could access more energy.

  I stepped into the space, felt the earth replenish me, and set myself in an aikido stance. The shroud of ghouls saw the challenge and charged me.