Dark Exodus

  Many of the boxes had started to move, to tip over, spilling their contents. There were even more newly animated taxidermy animals coming to join the fray.

  John stared in disbelief at the variety of species.

  “Frogs?” he questioned aloud. “Who the hell stuffs frogs?”

  “The guy who lived here obviously,” she said with a sneer, telling him that there was likely some sort of connection between the girl and Fritz.

  Something to keep in mind.

  The stuffed frogs, mice, weasels, and something that looked as though different animal parts had been sewn onto a body, making a kind of Franken-animal, were converging on them now. John was considering a spell of conflagration but didn’t want to burn the entire structure to the ground, when the young woman stepped in front of him.

  “I’m tired of this shit,” she said.

  “Okay, so what are you doing?”

  “Handling it,” she said, and he didn’t know what she meant until he felt the sudden movement of cold air within the stuffiness of the garage. He could just about make out the shapes of something—ghostly—moving around her.

  “All right, guys,” she said, talking to the swarming apparitions. “You enjoyed doin’ the raccoon, so take care of these other shits as well.”

  John watched in wonder as the semivisible shapes flew about the room, encircling the animated animal bodies, lifting them on cold currents of air, invisible claws and fangs tearing them to pieces.

  It was one of the damnedest things he’d ever seen in his career investigating the paranormal; at first he thought it might have been some form of poltergeist activity, but the more he watched, the more details he paid attention to, he began to understand what this young lady was in control of.

  And it was truly awesome.

  The stuffed animals, as well as the fleshy creatures that animated them, were decimated in a matter of minutes by the invisible entities.

  “Good job,” the girl said, seeming to acknowledge the presence of multiple beings.

  “How many?” John asked her.

  She looked at him funny.

  “Ghosts. How many are around you?” he specified.

  “Right now there are five,” she said. “Doesn’t mean that there aren’t more. There are always more on the periphery that I can’t see.”

  “What are they?” he asked, suspecting what they were but wanting her to tell him.

  “Dogs, cats, gerbils, hamsters . . . there are even fish occasionally,” she explained.

  “Pets?” he asked.

  “Spirits,” she told him.

  “Fascinating,” he said, and truly meant it. “Mostly pets, but I’m guessing . . .”

  “Yeah, there are other animals, too,” she explained. John noticed that she was petting something that he was unable to see up around her shoulders. “Squirrels, chipmunks, frogs, raccoons, rats, snakes.”

  “I get the picture,” he said. “And you can somehow control their spirits?”

  “I don’t know if ‘control’ is the right word,” she said. “I just ask them to do stuff, and they usually do.”

  Something moved on the ground amidst the torn stuffing and fur.

  “I’ll get it,” she said. “Daisy, go get ’em,” she said to something close to her.

  “No, wait,” he said, and held up his hand. “I think I’d like this one alive.”

  He looked around, finding a jar and lid, and approached the taxidermy animal’s remains. With a finger, he carefully moved the sawdust guts around until he found the fleshy demonic creature that had possessed it.

  “Those things are nasty,” the girl said.

  “They are nasty,” he explained, picking it up by its pinkish tentacle and quickly dropping it into the jar. “One of the few demonic life-forms to actually attain corporeal form on this plane of existence.”

  “And that means?”

  He looked at the thing as it angrily squirmed about the bottom of the jar. “That means that most demonic creatures are spirit-based, needing the forms of others they possess in order to attain physical presence, but somebody who knew what they’re doing gave these little bastards substance.”

  “Oh,” she said. “These things have bodies of their own.”

  “Yeah, they do now,” he said. He was scanning the workshop again, looking for something sharp, something with which he might scratch the glass of the jar that contained the demon.

  There was a small Phillips head screwdriver on the worktable, and he snatched it up, scratching at the glass.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Protective wards,” he said, concentrating on the specific shapes. “Should keep it inside the jar until I can see if it has anything important to tell me.”

  He looked up from the jar to see that she was looking at him funny.

  “What?” he asked.

  “What the hell is that thing going to tell you?”

  “It has the potential to tell me quite a bit, actually,” he said.

  “It doesn’t even have a fucking mouth,” she said with a sneer. “At least I don’t think it does.”

  “No,” he said, admiring the thing as it squirmed about the bottom of the jar. “But somebody had to summon it in order for it to be here. And that information is likely somewhere inside it.”

  He looked at her again, to see that she was smiling at him.

  “Do you approve?” he asked.

  “I thought you were full of shit,” she said.

  He cocked his head, unsure of what she meant.

  “I’ve seen you on TV, with that wife of yours,” she went on. “I thought it was all bullshit.”

  “Oh really?” John said. “Nice to know that I could change your mind,” he said to her.

  “Yeah,” she said, a crooked smile forming on her face. “Nice to know that you’re not full of shit.”

  • • •

  Caroline Ryland was dying.

  It was her heart. At ninety-three it was just worn-out.

  She was lying in a bed at the Blessed Mother Mary Nursing Home, the place she had called home for these last twenty years or so of her life. It had been a sad life, tragedy and unhappiness seeming to follow her through the majority of her existence.

  The pain had begun at the very onset of her life, when she was born dead—stillborn, they believed. Her young parents had been devastated, desperately holding on to the tiny, newborn corpse, as doctors and nurses tried to take their little girl from them.

  Imagine their surprise when the baby screamed with life. The young parents had been blessed after all; a higher power had chosen to bestow this child with a gift.

  A curse was more like it.

  Caroline lost both her parents in a car accident when she was no older than six. Without any other family, she was taken by the state and put up for adoption. After some time, the Crestfield family took her in, and it was with them that she found some semblance of love—before a house fire claimed the entire family when she was thirteen.

  Even as she lay on her deathbed, Caroline was still haunted by the memory of that night, the thick smell of smoke, the cries of her brothers and sisters as she stood on the lawn, watching the big old house burn. She had no recollection as to how she’d gotten out of the house; she’d simply awakened to find herself lying on the grass and the house ablaze.

  And why had her hands smelled like the kerosene her new father always kept in a can in his basement workshop? She’d never learned the answer to that question.

  The life that followed was even harder. Because she was a teenager, she was never again considered for adoption, and the fact that she had lost two families to terrible accidents made her a bit of a pariah within the system.

  It was like death followed her, she’d heard some of the other girls at the orphanage sa
y.

  Eventually, she left state care and went out into the world on her own. She found a job doing piecework at a factory and managed to earn a halfway-decent wage, enough to afford a small apartment of her own. And then things really began to look up for her when she met Roger Whitehall at a weekend dance that her friends had convinced her to attend.

  They’d fallen in love almost instantly and were married in less than a year. The memory of her beloved Roger made her smile. She wondered if he would be there to meet her when she finally crossed to the other side.

  Roger . . . and Rose, their daughter.

  Rose.

  Caroline pulled her boney knees up tighter to her chest. She wasn’t dying fast enough to escape this memory . . . this pain.

  Rose had been her everything . . . their everything. Caroline had often called her their little angel because how could something so very beautiful actually be of this world?

  Rose had died in her sleep. The doctors labeled it crib death.

  Caroline must have been sleepwalking that night, for she’d awakened in Rose’s room, standing beside the crib, finding her baby motionless, a pillow resting on her face.

  Caroline remembered not wanting to lift the pillow, to see the horror and sadness of what lay beneath. It was her husband who had lifted the pillow, coming in to look for his wife, and finding . . .

  He’d taken his own life less than a month after Rose had left them, leaving Caroline so very alone.

  She had considered ending her own existence as well, but she hadn’t had the courage. What if what was waiting was worse than what she was leaving?

  So she’d lived, if one could call it that, working at the factory day in and day out until retirement. And then she’d had ample time to dwell upon the sadness and the pain of her life.

  Drinking had helped a bit, allowing her to pass into oblivion for a few hours, but the pain was always waiting when she woke up.

  The drinking had wrecked her health, and when she’d no longer been able to care for herself, she was sent to the Blessed Mother. The place had been old and a bit run-down even then, but they’d looked after her. Just last August, she celebrated twenty years at the home. They’d had cake and ice cream, and as far as days went, it hadn’t been all that bad, until the heart attack.

  It was sort of a bad joke around the nursing home—poor old Caroline, she can’t catch a break, they’d say in hushed whispers as she sat in a wheelchair in the middle of the hallway. She’d even heard one of the nurses say that it was only a matter of time.

  And the nurse had been right. The very next day, she was too weak to get out of bed, and the day after that, her chest had begun to fill with fluid.

  Caroline knew that her time was up, that soon her pain would end, but she still feared that what was coming next would be no better than what she’d had.

  That it would be worse.

  She lay in her bed, each breath heavier than the last, feeling her strength slipping away. Soon—very soon—she would not be strong enough to breathe at all; and then it would be over.

  And then Caroline realized that she was afraid to be alone; she wanted someone with her when the inevitable end came. Mustering what little strength she had left, Caroline reached for the call button attached to the railing on her bed—but her flailing hand somehow knocked it loose, and it clattered uselessly to the floor.

  That’s just how it is, she thought with a sigh as she accepted her fate.

  And breathed her last breath.

  • • •

  But as Caroline Ryland died, something else began to live.

  Something that had been part of Caroline since that very first night. Something that had used the body of the dead newborn as a passage into the world of man, where it took root and nested. No one had ever suspected that a being of the infernal had grafted itself to her soul.

  But how else would one explain the misery of poor Caroline Ryland’s existence?

  The demon that had become part of her had needed pain and sadness to grow, and the removal of Caroline’s parents was just the fertilizer for that soil of misery. The years of heartache had been intoxicating for the demon spawn. It had always been there, waiting for moments when Caroline’s happiness might abound, then stepping forward to snatch it away. How easy it had been for it to take control as the human had slept.

  The older the host became, the more refined the taste of her sorrow became. And there was nothing quite so delicious as the emotions caused by the loss of a child and the death of a mate by his own hand.

  The pleasure had been orgasmic and had carried the demon for many, many years—but now its time had come.

  And as the demon waited for its moment, it couldn’t resist causing one last bit of misery for the dying woman, making her hand spasm as she sought company, leaving her alone as her eyes gently closed on a lifetime of pain.

  • • •

  Brenna Isabel wasn’t quite sure what she’d expected when she accepted the special liaison position between the FBI and the mysterious organization known as the Coalition.

  But going through hundreds of thousands of files and random pieces of information searching for . . .

  What was she searching for exactly? Elijah, the leader of the Coalition, really hadn’t been all that specific. He just smiled a kind of creepy-ass smile and said he believed that she would know it when she saw it.

  What the hell was that supposed to mean?

  “Okay,” she muttered, sitting slumped in her desk chair. She reached for another old file from the stack on the corner of her desk. Inside was a report from a zoo in Michigan about four chimpanzees that had cut themselves and used their own blood to paint strange symbols on the walls of their habitat before ripping each other to pieces.

  She leaned forward, studying the symbols in the photos. Over the last few months, symbols similar to this had been appearing all over the world in some of the most bizarre places as well as crime scenes—usually involving murder.

  Taking the photos of the symbols from the old file, she pushed her chair back, placing them on the scanner and putting the images into the computer to run against a database of symbols that had been collected by the Coalition over the time the organization had been in existence.

  She was under the suspicion that the Coalition had been around for a very long time, under many different names. The name “Demonists” was the one that she’d come across in some folders even older than the ones she was currently going through. She guessed the name might have been a little too over the top for more modern sensibilities even though it wasn’t too far off.

  She thought of the last case that she’d worked on before being asked to join the Coalition and what she had witnessed and experienced. She’d always been aware that the world was a strange, and dangerous place, but after seeing what she seen . . .

  Brenna was very glad that something like the Coalition existed and was grateful for the aid from paranormal investigator, John Fogg, and his wife, Theodora Knight, who had been crucial to her investigation and its eventual outcome.

  The database finished comparing the chimp symbols to any it had on file but found no connection to anything else, making it necessary to add these new symbols, as well as adding a description as to how they came to be, to the Coalition files.

  She closed the file and set it in another box on the other side of her chair, where the other sixty or so files that she’d gone through since lunch had been placed. All were filled with the same bizarre kinds of information.

  A quick glance to the time posted on the bottom right-hand corner of her computer screen told her that it was past quitting time, and she looked down to the files she’d been reviewing to see that there were only three left.

  “Just these last three, and I’ll call it quits,” she said to herself, reaching down for the next file, when there was a knock at the door. br />
  The sound surprised her and made her jump. Since being moved into her new office in the basement of the building, she hadn’t seen much of anybody, usually coming in early in the morning to find the boxes of files for her to review already there.

  She hadn’t a chance to say come in, when the door swung open, and a man with incredibly wild and curly hair, pulling a handcart loaded high with boxes, backed in, singing at the top of his lungs. She could hear how loud the music was playing through the earbuds stuck inside his ears.

  He didn’t even realize that she was there and let out a kind of screaming squeak when he did.

  “Sorry!” he screamed, to be heard over the music playing.

  “It’s all right,” she answered.

  “What?” he asked her.

  “I said it’s all right,” she said again, only louder.

  He continued to look at her funny before pulling the buds from his ears.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “I thought you’d already gone home.”

  “So you’re the little elf that brings the folders when I’m not here.”

  He looked at her, answering her in a totally deadpan manner.

  “I’m not an elf,” he said. “I work for Records.”

  “Yeah,” she said with a nod, guessing that a sense of humor probably wasn’t all that necessary working for the Records Department.

  The man seemed nervous that she might start talking to him again and took the bull by the horns.

  “I have some new files for you,” he told her, moving to unload the multiple boxes by her desk. “They came in this afternoon.”

  “Wonderful,” she said, as he began to stack the full boxes of files beside the almost empty box that she had nearly finished.

  Seeing what still awaited her took the wind right out of her sails, and she stood up from her chair.

  “All right,” she said, talking her suit jacket from the back of her chair and slipping it on. “That looks to be my cue.”

  The man was leaning over the stack he’d made, placing another box atop it, when he looked down into the other box and the three remaining folders inside.