The Demon Senders (8 page)

I risked another step closer.

He cupped his right hand, dunked it in the water then raised it to his mouth. He was drinking water that was sure to be crowded with bacteria. And not just once, he repeated his hand cupping and drinking activities five or six more times.

I caught a quick glimpse of the side of his face when he turned it a little to lap up whatever pond water his hand was still holding. I’d never seen that guy before in my life. He didn’t look like what I expected a demon to look like, however. He looked like a man down on his luck, maybe recovering from a long night of Boon’s Farm drinking and was too sick and hungover to realize he was sitting and drinking from a pretty disgusting looking (and smelling) pond.

Before I raised the rock over my head, I took a careful glance around the pond. Last thing I wanted was for someone to see me walking up to an old man, holding a rock above my head. Actually, that wasn’t the last thing I wanted. What ended up happening was actually the last thing I wanted.

I must have stood behind him, rock in the ready position for at least a full thirty-seconds. I stole a quick glance behind me to see if Rachel was standing close by or to see if anyone had come up behind me. I was alone. Just me and the pond drinking man, whom, I was eighty percent sure was a demon I had to send back.

But eighty percent isn’t a hundred percent.

I paused a bit too long and my mistake was set in stone.

When I turned back towards the man, he was staring up at me. His look was a mixed smile and sneer.

“Put that fucking rock down, Trevor. You have no idea what the fuck you’re doing here. Drop it.”

His voice was steely cold and gravelly. It sent a weakening chill across my entire body. The rock, which weighed no more than five or six pounds, suddenly grew too heavy for me to keep holding it above my head. My arm started shaking and my grip, jeopardized by all the sweat pouring out of my hand, lost all strength.

I dropped the rock harmlessly to the ground. It made an odd
thunk
when it hit the damp, moss covered ground and its weight caused it to sink into the ground a good inch or two. The ground should have been frozen and the
thunk
sound should have been more along the sharper sound rocks like to make when bouncing off something hard. That
thunk
, for whatever reason, stuck with me. I can still hear it clearly. I guess that sound became my life’s theme song. Just a
thunk
. A sound of a falling rock onto what should have been rock hard, frozen ground.

“That’s better, Trevor. That’s much better,” he said.

“How, how do you know my name?” I tried to sound commanding but my shaky, whisper-thin voice denied my intention.

“You and I,” he said as he began to stand up, “we’re on the same team.”

“You’re a freaking demon,” I charged, almost embarrassed by the accusation as soon as the words left my mouth.

The man stood straight up, maybe a foot and a half away from me, and smiled. “Mac, you aren’t really buying all that shit someone told you, are you? Tell me you don’t really believe in demons and in your role in the whole ‘good versus evil’ thing. Come on, tell me you don’t believe that shit.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I believe.”

“Who put that crap into your head?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. My surety percentage dropped from a high of eighty percent down to around fifty percent. After all, what Rachel had told me was so fantastic, who could blame me for not buying in? Sure, there were signs something was different about me my entire life, but making the jump from crows following me around to me being a demon sender, suddenly, at that moment, when I had to decide either to kill someone or not, the jump was way too much of a leap for me to take.

I also didn’t tell him Rachel had told me everything for two reasons: One, if things went badly, I didn’t want him to know I wasn’t alone. He might go looking for Rachel if he was able to take me out of the picture. And secondly, some tiny voice inside my head told me to never mention her name to anyone. Ever. I only tell you about her since, well, it doesn’t really matter anymore.

“Listen, Mac. You may not remember, but you and I have met before. Long time ago, when you were still a kid. Think back, you’ll remember.”

“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” I said, though entirely unconvinced of my statement’s accuracy.

“You were seven years old,” he continued. “You were having a spell with nightmares. Kept you awake most nights. Ring a bell?”

It sure did.
 

When I was seven, I had a two or three month stretch when I hardly got any sleep. There was this recurring nightmare that greeted me every time I did fall asleep. Same dream every time.

I was walking, alone, in a harvested corn field that ran alongside a very dark and very long forest. In my dream, the forest was always on my right hand side and my head was cocked towards it. Not sure if I was keeping my eye out for anything that might come charging out towards me or if I was looking for something I had lost. It didn’t matter because nothing ever came charging out of the trees and I never found anything I had lost.

In the dream, I kept walking until the path I was on turned rocky. As I kept walking, the rocks turned into boulders I had to climb over. At one point, the forest still on my right, the path turned into a stream. I followed the stream for a stretch. After a dream-minute, I saw my mom sitting on a boulder, looking down at a very small, very narrow pool of water. I started to walk up to her when she turned towards me, looked me in the eyes, then smiled. She stood up and jumped straight down into that little pool of water. I rushed over and only saw her left hand sticking up out of the water. I knew it was her left hand because of the wedding ring I clearly saw on her ring finger.
 

Her fingers were splayed open, as if reaching for something. I fell to the ground and grabbed her hand and started pulling with all the strength a seven-year-old could muster. I remember all I could see of my mom was from her elbow up. Deeper than that, the water was a murky gray that prevented any light or vision.

I grabbed her hand and pulled, only to have her hand slip from my grip, like she was being pulled down by some force deep in the dark water. She reached up her hand again, I grabbed it and pulled with everything I had. As she was pulled down again, her wedding ring slipped off her finger and into my hand. I pulled my hand out of the water and just stared at her ring sitting in the palm of my hand.

Her hand never came back up again.

That dream kept me from even wanting to go to sleep for several weeks before my parents took me to a doctor. In keeping with the secret agreement doctors must have, he referred us to another doctor who, in keeping with the code, sent us to yet another doctor. It was the last doctor who suggested my parents bring me to a therapist. A head-shrinker was in my immediate future.

I have no recollection of what the head shrinker said to me or how he made the nightmares end as quickly as they did, but I did remember his face. And I remembered it when the guy at the pond told me he’d seen me before.

“You were the doctor who got rid of my nightmares,” I said. “But how…”

“I remember every one of my patients, Mac. Every one. And I remember I helped you out. Stopped those haunting dreams from coming, didn’t I?” He didn’t pause for an answer. “They were about your mother drowning, weren’t they? Those dreams you kept having.”

Something smacked me into awareness all of a sudden. “What did you do to make those nightmares stop?” I asked.

The man looked a bit nervous with my question. As if he was hoping I wouldn’t have asked that question. “Mac, all that matters is that I helped you out. Now, if I was whatever someone told you I was, why would I have helped you?”

That smack of awareness brought something else to my forefront. People age in all different ways. Some people’s bodies and looks fall apart as they get older and some hold it together remarkably well. But this man, whom I hadn’t seen in around twenty years, hadn’t aged a day. He looked exactly the same as he did when I sat in a brown leather chair in his office, all those years ago.

“What did you do to make my nightmares stop?” I asked again. This time my voice was chock filled with confidence and certainty. He must have sensed my sudden change and realization because his face changed in a flash. The half smile half sneer he had on when I first saw him, dropped the smile part and turned into a hundred percent sneer.

Then, what I needed to push me closer to a hundred percent certainty happened. The man’s face went all sorts of hazy right in front of me. Not so dramatic that he started to morph into another person, but enough for me to know. It went hazy in a flash then the haze sort of swirled like what you’d expect to see if someone’s face turned to liquid and a hurricane was passing over.
 

I didn’t hear the noise like I heard the thunk when I dropped the rock, but there was a
click
that sounded somewhere in my brain. Like the sound an old fashioned wall switch makes when the circuit it controls is opened. Everything instantly made sense. From the crow following me around and starving itself to death, right up to Rachel telling me I was a sender and a part of the never-ending battle between good and evil. I was different. Special, and I was the last one to see it. That creepy old guy I picked up that night knew it right away. I knew, as soon as that
click
sounded, that both creepy old man and the hazy-faced bully in the bar, they hated me almost as much as they feared me. And this guy, this doctor, he was terrified of me as well.

“You little fuck ball,” he snapped.

“What did you do to make my nightmares stop?” I needed to know what he did though I had no idea why I needed to know. And my asking that stupid question over and over again brings us to my first mistake.

<<<<>>>>

He coiled back, cocked his arm and sent his fist flying directly at my face. He had at least four inches of height on me and his reach was longer than I expected. I saw the punch coming and lurched backwards to avoid taking the blow. His punch missed completely and the force he used to send the punch flying made him lose his balance. He stumbled towards me, giving me the perfect opportunity to throw a haymaker of my own.

My aim was true and I caught him square in the jaw. His head snapped hard to the left, his knees buckled and he dropped to the ground. I jumped on top of him, pinned his arms beneath my knees and gave him another straight shot to his nose. His nose cracked like any nose should when it meets blunt force trauma, but not a single drop of blood came out.

He was still conscious and was squirming to get away from me. I remember thinking demons should be a hell of a lot stronger than this guy was. After all, they’re the spawn of Satan. You’d think the old devil would at least give his spawns enough strength to handle a guy my size.

I landed a few more blows just to make certain I had the old guy dazed enough. My punches didn’t seem to be doing all that much damage which, at that point, kind of concerned me. My percentage meter climbed up over ninety-five percent certainty when I saw there wasn’t a mark on his face, even though I had landed at least five good, solid punches. To get my meter up to a hundred percent, I reached over and dug up the rock I had brought to the party and slammed it down onto his forehead.

It shocked him, that I can tell you, but it didn’t cause any damage and didn’t knock him out.

It hit me right then and there: I was kneeling on top of a demon.

I quickly pulled him up towards me, wrapped my arm around his neck and swung my body behind his. I crouched to my feet and started to drag him to the water. He clawed up my arm pretty good and did his best to worm his way out of my grasp, but, again, he was lacking in the strength department.

I got a few feet into the freezing cold pond when I stopped. He was making some grunting noises and was still twisting his body and digging into my arm. I let up my grip, just for a second, and asked him, again, what he did to make my nightmares go away.

“I took them from you,” he said in a snarl so evil my stomach immediately twisted in a fit of nausea. “I took a part of your soul in exchange for ending the nightmares.”

That pissed me off. I didn’t know how much soul I had but I was none too pleased this son of a bitch had taken some of it. “Give it back or, by God, I’ll kill you right here and now.”

“Too late.” His voice had morphed into more of a growl, deep, dripping with hatred. More animal than human. Then I noticed the stench. A fetid, foul smell of decay. It filled my nostrils and burned my eyes. My stomach had enough and vaulted everything I had eaten that day out of my mouth and into the pond.
 

“You’ve been spread all over the fucking world now, Mac. We all know about you.” His voice was horrible and getting worse with every syllable and the horrible smell seemed to have grown stronger. Like the old man’s breath in my Astro Van, this stench was hot. Oily. I could feel it covering my skin, lining my nostrils and coating the inside of my mouth. “You’ll never be left alone.”

I plunged his head under the water.

He kicked his legs and flailed his arms as I held him trapped beneath the water.

He ripped at my arm again, still, I held him pinned beneath the water.

He released several bubbles of air, each releasing another dose of that horrible odor when they reached the surface and I kept him submerged beneath the water.

His body grew calmer, then still. I vomited again, the smell not dissipating and I kept the man restrained beneath the water. I felt his body go completely flaccid and then I felt it slowly melt away.

He was gone.

I stayed in the pond for several minutes, feeling around the bottom for his body. I found no trace of him. I knew I hadn’t let him go; he was taken from me.

It took me a full ten minutes to collect myself before I started to walk back to the car. That smell wouldn’t leave me and my short walk back to Rachel was interrupted a few times by rounds of stomach wrenches. My system was empty so the heaving produced nothing more than a few ounces of bile and perhaps an ounce or two of pond water I must have swallowed.