Demon Jack (10 page)

“Yeah, me either,” I said, leaning forward and resting my elbows on the back of the pew in front of me.

She stared at me for a long time, a silence not entirely awkward settling between us.

“I can’t hear the voices in here,” she said.

“What’s the deal with that, the voices I mean?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“I don’t know... You’ll think I’m crazy or something,” she said.

“I just broke you out of a psyche ward where a guy with glowing eyes wanted to kill you. I jumped out of a three story window. I’m pretty sure that qualifies me as crazy in some, if not all, books. You’re in good company.”

She smiled. It was a simple, innocent gesture but it served to chase days of weariness from her face. It was probably the first time in days she’d been able to smile.

“It started after I was struck by lightening,” she said.

I raised a brow.

“I’m serious. I was six, I lived on a horse farm. It was a hobby of my father’s, the horses I mean. He did something with the government and computers. Anyways... I was running around the fields, just... you know... being a kid, chasing bugs or something stupid like that. Next thing I know. Wham. Struck by lightening. It wasn’t even cloudy out.”

“Damn,” I said.

“So, I get struck by this lightening, and I wake up... I don’t know how much later it was but I start hearing these voices. Quiet at first, one or two, then the closer I got to the house there were more and more. Just... voices everywhere and they’re all telling me different things at the same time and it was so loud and distracting that I just couldn’t focus.”

Lucy paused, drifting for a moment in thought.

“Long story short, I felt like I was crazy. Next few months were horrible. I tried to tell my parents what I was hearing and I was whisked off to every shrink and head doctor they could find. They marked it up as a psychosis and threw a bunch of pills at me, locked me up for a week here, a week there, so they could run tests.”

I winced as I settled back, my ribs shouting in white hot protest.

“So, I go to these shrinks, and they just keep medicating me or locking me up when the voices are getting worse right? But I’m starting to sort through ‘em, learning to ignore them a little. Enough that I’m able to actually spend more time at home than in hospitals. Then I started actually being able to hear them. I mean, I heard them all the time, but I mean I could sort them out of the noise and they tell me all kinds of things like where things I lost are, what happened to my cat Chippy. My dad ran it over. He told me it ran away, by the way. That my mom is sleeping with one of the horse trainers. Just, all kinds of things.”

“Better the trainer than the horse I guess,” I said.

She laughed and I could feel tiny shivers racing over my skin.

“Yeah, well. Eventually, I started asking names from all these voices. I checked them. I wanted to know if I really was going out of my mind. I was probably twelve at the time and had been going through this for years. I started smoking pot, which calmed them down a lot. Anyways, they were people, real people. Dead people. Since I was smoking pot, my parents thought I was doing other stuff and threw me in a couple of rehabs. I think they sort of...started to like it, like it was something they could brag about. Does that make sense?”

“I guess?” I said.

“So, that’s it.”

“So you’re a medium?”

She looked down and shrugged.

“Guess that’s one way to put it,” she said, staring at her feet. “What about you, what’s your story?” She looked back towards me, staring at my face.

“No story.”

“Well, I told you, you can tell me now.”

“I saved your life, I think I’m fulfilled on the obligation scale.”

“I still want to know,” she said.

“I’m just some poor bastard who made some stupid decisions.”

“That’s everyone. Stop being evasive.”

I quirked a brow and looked at her. She was persistent, I had to give her that.

“You don’t give up huh?”

“Nope. It’s part of my charm. So c’mon. Out with it.”

“There’s not a lot to say. Pops was a drunk, mom died when I was a kid, left home when I was around fourteen after getting my ass kicked one too many times. I ended up a ward of the state a few times, and that’s that.”

“What are they? The scars I mean.”

“You want the truth? Honest to god’s truth? It makes your story sound completely sane in comparison, fair warning.”

She nodded.

“Alright,” I said, thinking over where to start. I had never told anyone where I’d gotten the scars, or what they had meant. Apparently, with so many people being able to just read them now it didn’t seem like I needed to keep it a secret. Still, the thought of talking about it made me nervous. Lucy watched me in silence, here eyes settled on me, and I realized that I did want to tell her.

”I, uh, I died.”

“You look pretty healthy, all things considered.”

“I look like crap.”

“Yeah. You do,” she admitted. “So how did you die?”

“Drugs.”

“So what happened then?”

“That’s an even longer story. Long and short of it, I don’t have a soul. Well, I do, but I don't. It's complicated.”

“You made a deal with the devil?” she said with a chuckle. I must have looked pretty serious. She caught a glance of my face and her smile vanished.

“Close enough.”

“And that’s how you were able to do what you did in the hospital? Fight like that?”

“Yeah. It’s got its up and downs. In here,” I made a motion to the church, “I’m frail and like everyone else. All the aches and pains, the addiction, it all comes back on Holy Ground. Oh, and there’s a demon riding piggy back on my soul. Well, she’s a part of it, I... It’s like I said, complicated.”

“And that's it? You're only draw back is you can't go to church? Sign me up,” Lucy said.

“That, the fact I'm going to Hell with no chance of redemption, and there's a lot of nasty things that are looking for me and Alice both.”

“Like?”

“Death.”

“Death?” Lucy asked, quirking a brow.

“Yeah, he doesn't take kindly to being cheated.”

She put her hand over mine. Her fingers were cool, gentle. For a moment, I tensed. Affection isn’t something I do well. I slowly withdrew my hands sliding them into the front pocket of my sweatshirt.

She looked down at the floor for a long, pensive moment before turning her attention towards the front of the church.

“So why did you come to the hospital anyway?”

“Honestly?”

She nodded.

“Because I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.”

Lucy looked towards the front of the church, her eyes settling on the murals behind the pulpit. Jesus and the Last Supper stared back at her. For several minutes a silence hung between us.

“Can I ask you something?” she said finally.

I shrugged.

“Were you really going to leave us there, earlier I mean?”

“If I thought-” I paused. I wasn’t sure, in retrospect, why I didn’t. “I don’t know,” I said finally.

She nodded slowly, her face tightened for a moment and she looked on the verge of tears. She sighed, and turned back to me.

“I think I get it,” she said quietly. “What’re you going to do now?”

“I’m going to get the hell out of here and track down our green eyed friend and have a long chat with him. See if maybe I can get myself unfucked.”

“You think you can?”

“I can be very persuasive.”

“I noticed,” she said. “So when are we leaving?”

“We?
We
aren’t.
I
am. You should go get some rest or something.”

She flinched at the unintended harshness in my voice. On that same note, I didn’t really want to have her tagging along. She was safer here. For some reason, I didn’t really want her to get hurt.

“Oh, yeah, you’re right,” she said with a sigh of resignation. “I should probably stay here, I’m pretty sure I won’t bother anyone. I mean, it’s not like I get obnoxiously loud and giggly when I’m over tired or anything.”

I leveled her with a blank stare.

“Or that I’ll have to make a huge production of you leaving. I mean, you saved my life, I feel like I’d at least have to say good bye and shed a few tears before you go off to face down the scary monster type thing,” she added, meeting my eyes.

I blinked in disbelief.

“Are you hustling me?”

“Me. Never. I mean, I’ll do what you told me. Stay and get rested up, maybe when I wake up I can find Maggie and we can have girl time. It’ll be fun, hell it’ll be a riot,” she said with a grin.

This was a bad idea.

“You’re not gonna leave me a choice in this are you?”

A really bad idea.

“No chance in hell.”

Then again, maybe I could use her. If she could talk to the dead like she claimed, maybe I could dig up something someone else had missed by talking to one of the victims through her, assuming she wasn’t full of shit. Either way, I knew exactly where I was going to start.

“God damn it, alright.”

Her grin widened.

We left the church about an hour later, through one of the side emergency exits. We didn’t see Maggie or the Holy Men the entire time, nor did they show up during our less than daring escape. We walked the streets in silence, cutting through empty lots and back alleys towards the building where Essie had attacked me. As we walked, the city turned uglier around us. High rises and glass gave way to gang tags. The stripped husks of cars lined the street like the discarded shells of long dead insects. By the time we reached the neighborhood where the building I had killed Essie was located, the occasional late night dog walker had turned into the late shift drug dealer, and brown stones had given way to tenements and crack houses.

It looked the same as it had the night before when I had been arrested. There were the same two stories, forgotten and surrendered to the ravages of time. Looming and silent like an abandoned fortress, the building’s shadow stretched over the street in a thick black pool. The majority of the windows were boarded over. The ones that weren’t stared out like empty, hungry eyes. There was a sense of wrongness about, as if something alien had settled into the area and begun to spread invisible tendrils into the neighborhood around it.

The hospital probably carried the same vibe now.

“What’s this place?” Lucy asked, huddling down into her sweater. She looked like she was trying to shrink away from the building’s facade, to hide her self from its presence.

“The thing that went after you, went after me here,” I said, nodding towards the building.

“What happened?”

“It didn’t go well for it,” I said quietly. “Or my friend. Or me for that matter,” I added in a hushed breath.

She nodded. She didn’t question or push, just let me say it without comment. I was sort of grateful for that.

“That medium thing, can you talk back to them?”

She nodded.

“They can hear us,” she said, “normally I mean. It’s just... It’s a one way channel unless you’re lucky enough to get struck by lightning.”

“C’mon.”

The buildings interior was worse than the outside. That sense of wrong was heavier here, something almost tangible and tactile. It was a repelling force in its own right. Lucy was sweating, despite the chill in the air. She kept her head down as she walked, a step behind me, her eyes sliding out of focus. She shook her head as she went, like she was trying to clear a rogue thought from her consciousness. Just the air here made it feel like wading through molasses, it was so heavy with malicious intent.

We stopped a few feet from where I had killed Essie.

“There’s a lot of noise here,” Lucy said after a long moment. Her eyes had taken on that strange out of focus look, as if she was staring through everything. Her pupils dilated almost frighteningly wide as she looked at me. She looked terrified, overwhelmed.

“Anyone named Essie?” I asked quietly.

She lowered her head, whispering Essie’s name over and over again.

“Yes,” she said, her voice pitched to a soft whisper. “Yes, there is.”

Chapter 8

Lucy kept staring off into nothing. The only sounds were our breathing and the thumping of my heartbeat. Shadows seemed to ooze over everything, painting corners and angles in pools of darkness. There had been massive skylights overhead at one time, but the glass had long since broken. Thin strands of moonlight shone through in beams of bluish white, giving an eerie counterpoint to the darkness. It didn’t make it in the slightest bit any less disconcerting or ominous.

To put it in plain terms, the place gave me the creeps.

“Can you ask her-”

Lucy held up a hand, cutting me off, keeping her eyes focused on some distant point that I couldn’t see. I fell silent, shoving my hands in the front pocket of my sweatshirt.