|
|
DEMON CLEANER Part One: Dreams Turn to Nightmares ... written by Amygdala
She swallowed back a bolus of humid bile and tried again to grip the hilt of the knife, all too aware of five scrutinising pairs of eyes observing her every movement. An anaemic smile flickered across her lips as she wrapped the palm of her hand around the blade. Scott leaned forward, his chiselled features enshrouded in the shifting shadows.
"Do it!" he growled, his faintly malevolent eyes narrowing into slits.
Clarissa breathed in and attempted to squeeze down on the blade. "I-I can’t do it, Scotty!" Her whining tones resonated throughout the confines of his darkened room, squealing echoes of his mounting impatience. "Please don’t make me do it!"
One of the four acolytes gave a sarcastic snort and the girl felt her cheeks redden. Opposite her, Scott had reached boiling point.
"Listen to me, you stupid bitch!" he spat, his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles had blanched. "I need the blood of a virgin and I’ll get it one way or another, comprehend?"
The girl nodded, tears stinging her eyes. Shame, fear, maybe even a perverted sense of excitement all conspired to distort the sensation of pain slashing its way across the palm of her hand. Vague thoughts gushed into the numb void - thoughts of family, of aspirations, of her love for the boy now salivating as her blood ran down the knife and onto the carpet. She was going to faint, could feel abyssal unconsciousness open up within her ...
... and I’m dreaming - dreaming I’m falling to the ground without so much as a scream to cushion the impact. I know I want to scream because it’s there in the back of my throat, strangling me. There’s a dull thud followed immediately by a wet cracking noise. From the sudden metallic taste of blood in my mouth, I’m guessing I’ve broken my nose.
It seems like I’m lying there for a small eternity, totally unaware of anything other than darkness smeared with my gore. Yet, I feel safe, warm - want nothing more than to curl up within this uterine night and go to sleep. But the voices start to worm their way into my cosy world, all harsh and cruel. Sharp words and sharper actions shake me out of my coma and drag me back to a reality I want no part of.
Shapes filter through the fugue, phantoms that gradually manifest into the faceless, cowled figures of my assailants. One of them, though, is bareheaded ... he’s looking at me with a hint of knowing sadness ... do I know him? A part of me feels reassured upon seeing him but I can’t place his face at all. Confused and concussed, I can’t even offer up a verbal protest as I’m hauled to my feet and forced to walk over to the middle of the room. On the floor there’s a rough circle chalked onto a square of wood. Black candles sit upon each point of an inverted pentagram daubed within the circle, tiny tendrils of grey smoke mingling with the overpowering aroma of frankincense hanging heavy on the air.
The familiar stranger grabs my arm and holds it out over the circle. He’s speaking but I can’t hear his words - all I can hear is the splash of liquid upon an unyielding surface. Drip, drip, drip ... insanely rhythmic it follows the beat of my heart almost to a tee. It’s only when the boy lifts the knife above his head that I remember the gaping laceration to my hand.
Everything seems so surreal, like the events are unfolding outside of time. There’s no actual sound outside of me, only the impression of sound. This is exactly how I always imagined drowning to be - sinking, floundering in a nonsense world of hallucinations and barbed psychedelia. And I’m staring into the stranger’s malicious eyes and I can see his intentions snared in his dilated pupils. The knife in his hand cuts through the stagnant atmosphere, propelled by a psychotic shriek lost to the disturbing silence. Then, it freezes in mid-air inches from my body. I’m looking at the point, I’m studying the tiny flaws in the blade now defined by my blood. I’m considering how to use this unexpectedly fortunate hiatus to my advantage. It’s going to be okay, I know it will. Like all good heroines, I’ll escape at the last moment and then I’ll wake up from this nightmare.
Then, time imposes itself on reality and the knife buries itself in my chest.
Shock vibrates through my ribcage and into my perforated heart. Metal grinds against splintered bone as my murderer tears the knife free. There are tears in his eyes but I can’t tell whether they’re for me or for him. I’d cry if I could but instead I’m spluttering on my own blood and fighting for air. My chest feels heavy - I think the bastard punctured a lung! - and I’m falling again, falling with a deflated, pneumatic wheeze that started as a scream.
I’m lying sprawled over the circle, gagging and choking and trying to make sense of my life. All the things I should have done, the places I wanted to see, the people I’ve never met. God, my parents! I’ll never say goodbye, never tell them just how much I love them. Reality oscillates in fading waves, an ebbing tide of feeling running away with every feeble pulse of my heart. The five are surrounding me, exchanging what I can only hope are guilty looks. I gaze up at my killer and witness his expression flicker from arrogance to contrition and back again.
So difficult to think ... I can hear a choir singing in my head ... can see a swirling vortex opening up above me. Is this an angel coming for me? If it is, why am I so scared? I want to move away from the light but I’ve become transfixed by it. Out of the corner of my eye, the sanguine puddle fed by my wounds starts to seethe and boil. Effervescent geysers of blood erupt into hissing columns of steam - a thin mist that seems to coalesce before my eyes. The five are dropping to their knees and I see my killer’s features consumed by a terrible, gnawing fear.
And the light turns black and I’m suffocating in it, flailing against the unseen horrors that move within its confines. Squat, reptilian things that smell of corruption and festering death, whose thoughts are raw and putrid. They’re touching me, are laughing at my terror. For the first time since my ordeal began, I start to scream ...
" ... no!"
The scream still ringing in her ears, Emma woke to find herself thrashing amidst a tangle of bed sheets, perspiration pouring down her body. For a second, the woman forced herself to linger in the horror of her nightmare then, as the feelings of despair became too much to bear, she rolled over and turned on the light. Breathing heavily, she performed a quick examination of her person but, finding none of the wounds inflicted on her in her dream, laid back down and tried to calm her almost hysterical thoughts.
"Just a dream," Emma reassured herself. "Just a dream."
Before she could react to her team-mates’ warning cries, the flames had totally enveloped her. Monet St Croix, usually the picture of cool, collected calm, collapsed to the floor and proceeded to pound her frustration into the concrete.
"Way to go, Ms Perfect," Jubilee sneered, barely able to contain her glee. "Toasted by a total loser like Pyro!"
With holographic flames still flickering around her form, the young Algerian slowly, deliberately rose to her feet and fixed her adversary with a steely glare.
"I think we can dispense with the inferno now," she growled, lifting her eyes towards Cassidy. "Strangely enough, I do believe I’ve got the message."
A static groan announced the cessation of the evening’s danger room session. Six teenagers breathed a collective sigh of relief as the warehouse and its three deranged mutants melted into the normal, sedate gymnasium. Jubilee popped a wad of gum in her mouth and adopted her usual cocky pose.
"Are you gonna get it, M!" Out of the corner of her eye she could see Cassidy approaching them, a lecture forming on his lips. "Man, does Banshee look pissed ... "
So angry, indeed, he couldn’t wait to reach his students before the shouting started.
"Mother of God, Monet - what was all that about? Ye should’ve gotten yerself out o’ that situation before it even came to a confrontation!"
The young woman lowered her eyes to the ground, an ugly glower contorting her face. Undaunted, her tutor continued his harsh assessment, his every word flaying her all-important pride. By the time he requested an explanation for her slack behaviour, her voice quivered with repressed anger.
"I apologise for my lack of concentration monsieur but I did not sleep at all well last night." Tears glistened in her dark eyes as she struggled to compose herself. "And I feel ... I’ve felt uncomfortable ever since."
She folded her arms across her chest and lifted her head up high as if in challenge. Cassidy studied the determined, almost grim, expression on her face and forced himself to ease up. A big, warm grin spread across his lips as he clapped her on the back.
"Aye, well, you can’t be expected to be one hundred percent every day, can you? Go on and sling your hook, all of you. And well done."
Jubilee punched the air, uttered a triumphant yell and raced for the exit, mumbling something derogatory about Monet as she left. The others slowly ambled out after her, Monet careful to ensure she remained a good few paces behind her colleagues. Shame did not sit well on her and failure suited her even less, both stripping away the veneer of pompous conceit she had so carefully erected around herself to reveal the fragile little girl beneath. As her friends dispersed along the various corridors of the school, she made her sad, dejected way into the grounds, hoping to lose herself in the chill of the October night.
She sat beneath a tree and observed the swollen moon clamber up the star-spattered sky, her shoulders shuddering beneath the caresses of a frosty breeze. Despite the cold she felt somehow uplifted, free of the oppressive sensation that had lingered within her since she’d woken from her dream. Monet frowned as she struggled to remember its content. A trace of a scream, an intense feeling of evil, a glimmer of hope crushed under foot ... .
(You felt it too, then.)
Monet whirled around, fists primed for a fight. Jonothon, his eyes wide with surprise, stepped out of the shadows and raised his hands in surrender.
(Bloody Hell, girl! Not too edgy, eh?)
The young woman muttered a curse in French and threw herself back down on the ground, turning her head away from the newcomer. "The trouble with this place is no one ever respects the need for privacy." Monet eyed the leather-clad youth with her customary disdain before adding: "I had hoped that if anyone felt the urge to check on me it would be Everett."
Undeterred, Jonothon lowered himself down beside her, his tight clothing groaning in protest. For a moment, they sat in silence, casting their eyes across the silver-splashed, frosting grounds. She felt his sense of relief as he relaxed back against the tree trunk, recognising it as the exact replica of her own ease the moment she had left the building. With only the slightest of hesitations, Monet started to relate her feelings of discomfort and suspicious anxiety to the man she had barely spoken two words to since her ‘transformation’. He listened with mounting apprehension, explaining once she had finished that he had experienced almost precisely the same perceptions. The girl shivered and grasped her companion’s hand, inching closer to him as she did so.
"Can I tell you something?" she whispered. "Something in total confidence?"
He nodded, perhaps a little too wary of her sudden proximity to him.
Monet tried to smile but the expression floundered beneath an embarrassed whimper. "I’ve never admitted to this before but I’m scared. I’m scared, Jonothon and I don’t think I can hold it together ... ."
She was rooting for a scrap of reassurance, searching for a little of his cynical confidence, maybe even wanting the scant comfort of his touch but he stared behind him at the stone facade of the academy and felt dread, arachnid feet scuttle across his cerebral cortex. Spectral hands plucked a discordant riff on his taut nerves, laughing as he succumbed to the horror seeping out of the walls. Closing his eyes, Chamber wrenched his hand free of Monet’s grip and buried the remains of his face in his knees.
(Yeah? Well, love, you’re in good company ‘cos I’m shittin’ my pants, too!)
Jenkins hated his job. Clearing up after a bunch of snotty little rich kids was hardly a career for a man of his years but therein was the problem; what kind of work could a 58 year old ex-construction worker with a slipped disc possibly expect to get? He consulted his watch and sighed, imagining the lecture his harpy of a wife would subject him to when he got home. What did she care that Frost was paying him overtime to do a few essential maintenance jobs? The elevator shuddered to a halt and he gathered up his tool kit, moaning as pain bit into his lumbar spine. Not for the first time that day, Jenkins kicked himself for spending so much of his wages on the sauce when he should have saved it for retirement. If he had, he’d be sitting at home right now, watching TV and drinking beer and not getting ready to repair some stuck-up brat’s heating.
Stepping out onto the landing, Jenkins was assaulted by a terrible, bone-gnawing cold. He pulled his jacket tight around his rotund figure and shivered into the fleece lining, picking up the pace as much as his rheumatic legs would allow. No wonder Frost had deemed this an emergency! If one of these boarding school brats so much as got a sniffle, their parents would probably sue her ... . Warmed by his bile, the repairman stopped outside the nearest door and slid a key into the lock.
"Hello," he warned as he pushed the door open. "Scott Keith? Ms Frost has given me permission to come in and check your heating. Are you decent?"
Probably taking drugs, he thought uncharitably as he entered the darkened room. Aren’t they all, these days?
His breath misted before his eyes, particles of ice glistening in the dull light from the landing. Jenkins paused on the threshold, old eyes straining to see through the crushing blackness within. There was a horribly familiar stench to the room that prevented him from going any further - an odour that whisked him back to his childhood and a stolen visit to the city morgue. A smell of corruption kept on ice, of decay wrapped up within frozen skin. The hairs on the back of his neck rose to attention, as stiff as his fingers groping through the stygian gloom for the light switch.
Let there be light.
Jenkins felt his world lurch around him. He fell to his knees and scrabbled for a handhold to sanity, colouring the gore-soaked floor with patterns of steaming vomit. Looking at the charnel pit around him, he knew the nightmare had only just begun.
Cassidy raced across the campus towards Emma’s private quarters, suppressing the urge to save time and use his sonic scream. It was panic rather than fatigue that beaded his forehead with perspiration - a panic that hammered out one question upon the inside of his brain: what if those poor children had been killed by one of Generation X’s many mutant enemies? This was something he’d discussed with Frost time and time again but she’d always dismissed the idea. He hoped to God they wouldn’t regret their decision to open up the school to ‘normal’ kids ... .
He reached her door and pounded a frantic beat. The sound of movement within - footsteps padding up the corridor.
"Emma!" he hollered through the barricade. "For God’s sakes woman, what’s keeping ye?"
"I understand patience isn’t a word in your vocabulary - " Emma began, as cold as her name. When she opened the door and saw Cassidy’s face, her rebuke shrivelled in her mouth. "My God. What’s the matter, Sean? What’s happened?"
He pushed past her with uncustomary ill-manners and marched into her lounge, helping himself to a large measure of Whisky. Frost, concern knitting her brow, slipped her hand across the glass before he could take a drink.
"Tell me what’s going on, man!" she demanded in full White Queen mode. Fear cracked her voice as she added: "It’s the students, isn’t it? Something’s happened to them! Oh Sean, not the students, please!"
Cassidy picked up the bottle and swigged from that instead, his eyes never leaving Emma’s. "You’re right - it’s about the students but not the ones you care about!" Another shot of alcohol to kill his pain. "There’s been a murder, or a suicide pact or something - five boys and a girl. Jenkins found ‘em in a room in the boys’ hall ... "
He was talking to her but she’d stopped listening almost immediately. A cool, fluttering sensation of poisoned wings scraped against her telepathic perception - a wraithlike memory of imprinted horror. Emma gulped on the glass of whisky and remembered last night and her dream. A dream of dying.
End of part one
