Spermjackers From Hell Page 5

  …his utterance of something in a language she couldn’t name, and a voice even more strikingly unlike his own...

  …there was silence again, but for the rush-thump of her own pulse way too quick in her ears…

  …then the rustle and zip, presumably signaling that the danger zone was now passed.

  She checked via her phone first, as if the avoidance of direct eye contact would somehow make a difference—like dealing with goddamn Medusa—and once assured it was safe, shot Jake her best withering annoyed glare. He either missed it completely or really didn’t care; his attention was fixed on the basin at the center of the pentagram.

  Which now had, in addition to its already nasty stew of contents, Jake’s fresh contribution. Points for marksmanship; he seemed to have pretty well hit the target. Kind of a miracle, from what Beth understood of guys and their squirtguns—

  Her thoughts got no further, derailing in a jumble of shock.

  The basin.

  The pentagram.

  All the trash-talk they’d done, all the smirking and joking, about how wild it’d be if something actually happened…

  Never believing it. Never expecting it. Not for one second thinking any of it could be real.

  Knowing the whole thing was safe, secure, harmless, and stupid.

  But, then, holy shit.

  Holy fuck.

  Something happened.

  Something actually happened.

  Chapter Six: Reaction

  The candles burned a sudden bright clear blue-green like hissing jets of gasflame.

  The lines of salt ignited, tracing the symbols and sigils in racing gunpowder fireworks sparks.

  Everyone squeaked or shouted something or another—wordless outcries, exclamations, shocked obscenities.

  “Holy shit!”

  “What the fuck?”

  “Did you see—?”

  “How the hell—?”

  Devon felt his heart lurch like it wanted to shoot straight up through the top of his head. Beth jerked, heels clonking again on the side of the desk. Spencer recoiled so fast he might’ve given himself whiplash.

  Then, there was a general spate of weak, shaky, embarrassed laughter.

  “Jesus, dude!” Marty wheezed and thumped a fist on his chest. “Almost pissed myself!”

  “Ha, good one,” said Brendan, with an unconvincing attempt at nonchalance. “Nice trick, bro. You got us.”

  “Not funny,” Spencer said. “Sincerely, not fuckin’ funny at all.”

  “How did you do that?” Beth demanded of Jake. “Pyrotechnics? Chemicals in the candles and salt?”

  Jake didn’t reply. He stared with wide eyes at the basin, where a thick bubble had formed on the cloudy, congealed surface.

  “And, what, you put something under the dog-dish?” asked Marty. “A heating element or something?”

  “Uh, eew,” Devon said. “Enough, huh?”

  The bubble bulged. It swelled. It grew.

  Trembling, pent-up, eruptive. Like a big watery blister, a zit ready to pop.

  “If that slop bursts all over us...” Brendan said.

  “Yeah, no shit,” Spencer said. “Jake, knock it the fuck off.”

  Jake still didn’t reply, still only stared. His eyes were huge. His face was ashen, weird in the blue-green underlighting of the intense, hissing gasflame candles.

  “Jake?” Beth asked, sounding half-annoyed but half-worried as she slid off the desk.

  If he was putting them on, it was an Oscar-caliber performance.

  The bulbous, quavering, growing bubble resembled something from one of those thermal mudpuddles at Yellowstone. Sulfurous hot springs and simmering cauldrons of toxic sludge. Splurting and blorping in a flatulent cacophony of rotten-egg stench.

  And there was a whiff of that, too, wasn’t there? More than a whiff, mixed with other pungent, unpleasant smells. Sourdough starter, yeasty and teeming. The spunk-funk of cum and wank-sweat. A heavy and dark kind of blood-stink, girl-stink, secretive, cursed.

  Much more than a whiff.

  A downright reek.

  “Gah, phew!” Marty cried, waving a hand in front of his face.

  Getting stronger. Lingering in the air, warm and moist, musky, a permeating miasma.

  “What is that?”

  “Whoa it’s foul!”

  As the bubble got bigger. And bigger. An inflating, expanding, festering pustule.

  “Guys...” Devon said.

  “Knock it off!” repeated Spencer. “It wasn’t fuckin’ funny to start with, and—”

  “It’s for real,” Jake said, in a slow, sleep-dreamy tone.

  “Oh bull-fuckin’-shit—”

  “No, really, it is.” He blinked at them. He grinned. “It’s working. We did it.”

  “Guyyyyys...” Devon said again, drawing the word out into a nervous whine.

  The bubble had mushroomed far beyond the basin’s capacity, rising like a grotesque misshapen souffle. Or something hideously birthed from one of those As-Seen-On-TV egg-cookers, extruding in a spongy mass.

  And the smell! A gagging, gorge-heaving smell they could practically taste, could practically feel, like a scum, like a film on their skins!

  “Oh dude it stinks!” Marty urped and clapped a hand over his mouth.

  “Don’t you hurl, don’t you damn dare,” Beth told him.

  Bloated. Overripe. Gelatinous and slick with milky skeins, with ropy-wet reddish veins. An immense pregnant belly, straining, way past term. An udder, curdled and spoiled, about to explode from within. Shiny, infected boils needing lancing. Painful pus-filled pimples. Brimming, seething, volcanic.

  “She’s gonna blow,” Spencer said, with a sick note of fascination.

  “Better not; this is a new goddamn shirt!” Brendan said.

  “Stop it, Jake!” Devon pleaded.

  “I can’t.”

  Beth got in his face. “Quit screwing around!”

  “I’m not!”

  “Well then who the hell is?”

  Before he could answer, if he was going to answer, if he could answer at all, the bubble burst in a rupturing, horrible, noisome, squelching geyser.

  Doing a six-part harmony wail of disgust, they all flung their arms over their heads, trying to shield themselves. They spun, or ducked, or hunched in on their shoulders like desperate turtles.

  Oh, and the smell, the stench, the godawful reek—!

  But nothing touched them.

  Devon, peeking against his will and very much against his good judgment through the crook of a bent elbow, saw the gobbets and gouts of semi-coagulated fluid spew and roil as if channeled, as if confined in some sort of invisible lava-lamp chimney, some sort of glass-walled and weirdly angular cylinder…

  The pentagram.

  Where the salt outlines glowed like eerie crystalline embers, and the lengths of black yarn strung between the blue-burning candles looked spun from white fire.

  The glop from the bubble struck the inside of that unseen barrier with a gooshy patter of squishes and trickles and spongy clots, and began sliding downward in coursing rivulets and slimy snail-trails.

  It was, he thought, like seeing slushy rain or fresh bug guts on a windshield. Or when someone hocked a fat wet loogie on the other side of a windowpane. Or watching one of those sticky-gummy toy octopus things roll and slither-ooze its way down a wall or a mirror.

  More had struck Vault 420’s ceiling and showered back onto the floor in plops and drips and dribbles, but still only within the confines of the pentagram. Some landed on the underside of the basin, the big chewed plastic dog-dish having flipped entirely over at the force of…of whatever had just happened.

  He very gingerly lowered his arms. He risked breathing—when had he held his breath? he had no clue—and found that the godawful reek wasn’t so godawful after all. The worst of the stench had passed somehow, and what remained was much more bearable.

  Not even unpleasant. Almost familiar.

  Sourdough
starter, he’d thought a moment ago. Nasty on its own, when it was a foaming and fermenting lump in a jar…but, as it transformed…it became…something else…

  “Whuh—” rasped Spencer in a dusty croak. He coughed, licked his lips with a dry, lizardy sound, cleared his throat as if it hurt to do so, and tried again. “What the fuckin’ fuck?”

  “No kidding,” Beth said.

  Hesitantly, the others lowered their arms, raised their heads, and looked around at each other. Mouths worked, but nobody seemed to have anything else coherent to say.

  Whoosh, and darkness.

  The unnatural blue-green flames of the candles snuffed out. The sparkler-glittering salt crystal embers and white-fire yarn extinguished.

  All six of them cried out again, brief shrieks followed by cussing.

  Crazy, streaky, after-images sketched negative-color spiderwebs across Devon’s vision. The only other light source was the dimness of Beth’s phone, until Marty and Brendan, blundering around, managed to click on the clip-lamps in twin harsh brilliant bright cones.

  “Okay,” Marty said, like someone trying to muster his dignity. “How many of you jerks were in on that?”

  Spencer rounded on him. “The fuck do you mean, in on it?”

  “Sure you weren’t; this whole thing was your idea!”

  “Bite me! It was Jake’s brilliant-ass plan!”

  Brendan jabbed an accusing thumb at Beth. “Yeah, and hers to video the whole thing, make us look like morons! Internet sensation, my balls!”

  “Oh right,” she shot back, “and you just happened to find your dad’s dirty devil movies!”

  “I didn’t punk anybody!”

  “Me neither!” Devon said.

  And boom, they was arguing, protesting and denying and flinging wilder and wilder accusations.

  Except for Jake, who just stood there. Didn’t bust a gut that they’d fallen for his prank, didn’t try to defend himself, didn’t admit it, didn’t anything. Just stood there. Looking at the design he’d drawn on the shabby room’s cheap linoleum floor.

  Devon followed his gaze. The first thing he noticed was that the candles, once clean white pillars, were now just lumpy blobs the color of old, rancid lard. The lines of salt, also once clean and white, looked like the ashes left over after those Fourth of July snake pellets. Only little charred twists remained of the black yarn.

  The design itself, once precise, was a scuffed, scattered mess. Of the basin’s former contents, most of the spillage had already dried to a brittle crack-glaze, and the bigger clots resembled runny, discolored, underdone dumplings.

  “Hey,” Jake said. “Would everybody shut up for a second?”

  Several angry pairs of eyes turned his way. If he was about to apologize, the sullen sets of their jaws declared, it had better be pretty damn good.

  “We might have a problem.”

  “Bet your ass we do,” Spencer said. “I want to know which of you—”

  “We all did, okay? We were all in on it together, and it worked.”

  “Jake, Jesus—” Beth said.

  “How dumb do you think we are?” Brendan asked.

  “No, seriously, I mean it. You saw the flames change color—”

  “Yeah, from your rigged candles,” said Marty. “And we smelled whatever you put in the bowl!”

  “I didn’t rig anything. We conducted a real ritual.”

  “The fuck we did!” Spencer swept his arm in an arc. “You see any sexy naked demon chicks here?”

  Beth set her fists on her hips. “Or is that the problem? You think you summoned the wrong thing? Okay. What, then? Where is it? What’s the big deal?”

  He pointed at the dog-dish, which sat upside-down in the now-ruined pentagram.

  It moved. It rose and fell, and twitched, as if something was alive underneath.

  The others shook their heads, rolled their eyes, made exasperated noises, muttered stuff like “oh for fuck’s sake” and “dude, c’mon, let it go” and “enough already, okay?” and “you are such an asshole!”

  Brendan, throwing Jake a contemptuous look, kicked apart more of the salt-ash lines, bent over, and grabbed the gnaw-marked plastic.

  “What are you doing?” Jake reached to stop him but Brendan jerked away.

  “Getting it over with so we can go home,” he sneered. “It’ll be a fake spider or a rubber hand, oh ooh eek scary—”

  Whatever was under there shot out so fast as soon as he lifted the edge that they all jumped, then burst out laughing because it was so obviously some stupid prank joke after all, some wind-up toy or RC car modded to look like a weird gross slug monster with turquoise-glowstick waggling feelers and wrinkled folds of loose slimy skin and knobbly clusters of grapelike growths.

  Only, it wasn’t.

  Wasn’t a toy, wasn’t a prop, wasn’t CGI.

  And it went straight for Brendan.

  Interlude: Vignettes #2

  That was a rotten place to leave things hanging. Don’t you hate it when bastardly writers pull such manipulative tricks?

  What did it say in those Community Civil Readiness pamphlets? Oh yes, to proceed in a calm and orderly fashion. Which is, I’m sure, just what the guys will do. They’ll approach this surprising development with mature, appropriate, level-headed…

  Ah, balls, you don’t believe that any more than I do.

  They’ll totally panic and flip their shit.

  It’ll be great.

  Well, not for them. Especially not Brendan, who made the dumbest of all dumbass mistakes. Characters never do learn. You see it every time. They say stuff like “there’s no way anyone could have survived such a (fall/fire/fill-in-the-blank),” or they tentatively creep nearer the maniacal killer’s sprawled and motionless body, or they tell themselves something couldn’t possibly be for real.

  And when that snaps back to bite them on the ass, don’t we all kind of feel, as the song says, they had it comin’?

  The hapless dopes with no clue anything weird’s going on, though…the regular people just out there leading their lives…

  Sucks to be them, my friend. Sucks to be them.

  ***

  There are, of course, the Fairmont elite, as have already been touched upon. The winery crowd—Troy-fucking-Cahill of Cahill Cellars and his family, the Farcastles, the Vandivers, the silver-fox gay couple who own Le Prestige du Vin, others. And the hotel crowd—Sebastian Abbott, Cynthia-Lynne’s uncle, chief among them. You’d think he modeled his life after that oily bastard Ben Horne from Twin Peaks.

  They may—in fact, forget may, they certainly do—look down their noses and sneer at the likes of the Bodeans. Those people, they say. As if they, on their lofty mountains, are above and removed from any whiff of shame or scandal.

  Yeah, right. They’re just as bad. In some ways, they’re worse.

  Addiction is addiction, whether it’s home-labbed meth from a rust-raddled backwoods trailer or the first-class imported stuff. Abuse is abuse, whether it’s trailer-trash whaling on their sassbacking snotnoses in the Winston City Wal-Mart or Vivian Farcastle grinding out lit cigarettes on the wizened flesh of her bedridden father-in-law and blaming their Cambodian housekeeper.

  ***

  But, instead of the rich wine-snobs, let’s consider some of the ordinary citizens of Fairmont, who neither suspect nor deserve the crazy infernal shitstorm about to descend on their lives. When those lives have already not been untouched by various tragedies, difficulties, and losses.

  ***

  Let’s start with Beth’s mom, Suzette.

  She’s a stylist at Belle Salon. And, yes, whenever Beth tells anyone that, Beth with her spiky hair and grungy clothes and eyebrow piercings, she gets a Look: Your mom? A beautician? Your mom?

  Yet, there it is. Belle Salon is a nice one, too, catering to the tourist ladies who leave better tips. Which is important, because Suzette is a widow, a single mom without many other options.

  Her husband died—brain aneurysm, no warnin
g, just pop and thump down he went—when Andrew was three and Suzette six months pregnant with Beth. He’d been an artist, a freelance illustrator, which had been great for looking after the house and the toddler, but not so great in terms of, oh, say, income or insurance.

  His family, button-down professionals to a one, blamed Suzette for encouraging him to chase his dreams and wanted nothing further to do with her or the children. Her family, particularly her over-involved mother and busybody sisters, would have been only too happy to help…on their terms.

  So, there was Suzette, left trying to raise two small kids pretty much on her own, putting them first, struggling to make ends meet and provide them a loving home.

  You might think, well, no wonder Beth turned out the way she did. But Beth, for all of her surliness and attitude, kicks in most of her meager lock-shop paycheck to help with bills, despite Suzette’s wish she save up for college.

  It’s Andrew who’s the problem, sort of. Andrew, who never got over being alone in the house all day with his dead daddy. Andrew, who always had trouble in school, who needed counseling they couldn’t afford, whose first and only girlfriend dumped him for his first and only best friend.

  He hanged himself. Beth, then in junior high, found him. She saved him. Cut him down, did rescue breathing, kept him alive until the ambulance arrived.

  Beth herself, in the darker parts of her mind, wishes she hadn’t ditched her afternoon classes that day. Wishes she hadn’t been so quick and decisive when she opened the door and saw her brother’s dangling, twitching feet. Wishes she hadn’t had a jackknife in her pocket, or she hadn’t paid attention the day they learned about CPR.

  She wonders if her mother has similar thoughts.

  The horrible truth is that, sometimes, Suzette does.

  Andrew isn’t Andrew anymore. Andrew is a lump, a meatsack, a strange vacant-eyed beanbag of flesh. Almost a vegetable…except, vegetables don’t have random fits of wailing and groaning and flinging aimless arms around.

  They couldn’t take care of him, not at home, and even applying for assistance wouldn’t cover the costs of a full-time nurse. They had to send him away. To one of those places, those state-run grim places.