The Demon Senders (3 page)

“The devil speaks in rhythm and rhyme, always in time, while he’s planning a crime.”

I remember pointing out to my grandmother she was saying that phrase in rhythm and in rhyme and that I was wondering if I should start thinking she was the devil. She wasn’t impressed with me picking up on that little gem.
 

“You always need to be on guard,” she told me. “You’re special, Trevor and someday, you’ll know just how special you are.”

There I was, foot tapping along in perfect time, and he was just rambling on. I must have gotten that “scared as shit” look on my face and he must have noticed because he stopped talking and just stared at me. Big old fake teeth showing through his dry and cracked lips. I tried to ignore him but ignoring someone staring at you from eight inches away ain’t all that easy.

I was glad my foot stopped tapping but would have traded the tapping for him not staring and smiling at me.

“Something bothering you?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the road and adding a bit more pressure to the gas pedal. I wanted this strange son of a bitch out of my van as soon as possible and was willing to risk dying in a crash to speed up his exit.

“You figuring things out, Trevor?”

He did most of the talking since he sat his saggy ass down in my Astro and I was pretty damn certain I never told him my name.

“How’d you know my name?” I asked, really hoping he’d tell me I had told him (which I was pretty sure I hadn’t) or he read it on some piece of paper that was stuck in the cup holder.

“Come on, Trevor,” he said, moving his face even closer to mine. “You think I don’t know about you, what you do and who you do it to? Trevor, Trevor, Trevor. You and I have some agreements to iron out.”

He kept moving closer to me. By the time his last “Trevor” came out, I could feel his hot breath against my cheek. I know this is going to sound made up, but though I couldn’t smell his breath, it felt like what you’d expect the stink from a rotting dog would feel like against your skin: Hot, acidic and foul.

I don’t mind telling you, I was pretty nervous. Not sure why my grandmother’s words came slamming back to my mind but, there they were. I said, “Why don’t I just pull over here and let you out. I don’t think I’m comfortable driving you anymore.”

“You think you can get rid of me that easy? Wait a minute. You don’t know, do you?”

“Don’t know what?” I fired back. I was getting pissed at him and stopped caring about being a nice Christian. I wanted the fucker out and was going to find a way, no matter what it took.

“Why, you little cocksucker,” he said. “That explains a whole hell of a lot. You don’t know yet.”

I hit the brakes hard, sending his face slamming against the power dial of the radio. His head hit pretty hard, hard enough to knock his hat off his head along with his toupee. I wasn’t worried I might have killed him but knew a knock to the head like the one I just caused him could cause some serious damage. I’m not a violent guy, at least I wasn’t back then, so by the time I got control of the car and pulled it over to the side of the road, I wasn’t as scared as I was nervous about his head being busted up.

“Hey look,” I said after the Astro van was in park, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I think we’d both be better off if you just get out here. I’ll call a tow for you so you won’t have to stay outside in the cold too long.”

He got back to smiling, but, this time, he wasn’t smiling at me. He held that twisted smile as he reached up on the dashboard, grabbed his toupee and hat, placed them back where they belonged, then opened the door.

“You aren’t worth the risk, Trevor. Not yet, anyway. You ain’t the only one in this world you know, so don’t go thinking you’re special. You’ll figure it out soon enough, unless I can figure it out first. But like I said, we have some arrangements to work out, so I’ll be paying you a visit sometime soon.”

He got out without saying another word. He just shut the door and started walking back towards his broken down truck. I watched him from the sideview mirror but he disappeared into the darkness after only a few seconds. I put the van into drive, put my blinker on and headed back towards home.

I will admit to being very shaken from the whole encounter. I believe I drove for fifteen minutes before pulling over and walking around outside, partially to clear my head, but mainly so the frigid air would stop the burning sensation on the side of my face where his dragon breath had been cooking my skin.
 

After I gathered my wits, I got back in the warm van and finished the drive to my apartment. I finally got home, then sat in the van for maybe fifteen minutes trying to calm down. When I opened the door and the dome light came on, I noticed it. I saw it on the passenger’s seat.
His
seat.

It wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen a thousand times before. In fact, when I was younger, I used to have a collection of about five hundred of them. It was a pale colored feather, about five inches long and looked like it was recently plucked from whatever kind of bird flies around with five inch, pale colored feathers. Still, seeing the feather sitting on the passenger’s seat gave me a real bad feeling. Not about feathers but about where it came from and what it could have meant.

I started thinking the old man was weird enough that maybe he carried feathers around in his back pocket and this one just happened to fall out when his face was being slammed against my dashboard. Since I was pretty damn certain he hadn’t farted it out, I settled on believing the feather was an accidental drop off.

Turns out I was very, very wrong, but I’ll get to that later on. What’s important for you to understand is seeing that feather stressed my already over-stressed nerves. I kept asking myself what the old man meant by me not figuring something out yet and what the hell “arrangements” did he think we had to make? After sitting in my van for those twenty minutes, I noticed my body was shaking from the cold. Weird how you don’t notice things you normally would when your mind is trekking down paths it isn’t used to treading.

I live alone so I wasn’t concerned about waking up anyone as I trudged up my apartment staircase, banging the narrow walls with my guitar case and, I guess, intentionally making more noise than I normally would have. I knew I dropped the old man off a bunch of very cold miles ago and there was no way he would have been able to get into my apartment before me. But, I was sitting in my driveway for quite a while and, hell, who knows what that creep was capable of.

Turns out, the only thing my extra noise making did was to wake up my cat, Al. He met me at the door and was quick to display his dissatisfaction over being awoken so late. Al didn’t scratch me but did what cats do when they’re pissed off: He turned his tail and walked back into the bedroom.

Cats are like that, I guess. They care about their owners just enough to come out to see them but don’t feel compelled to get all goofy, start jumping up and down and demand they stick their tongue up your nose like a dog.
 

I put my guitar in the guest room I converted to a small recording studio, made a quick pass through the kitchen, living room and bathroom just to make sure it was just me and Al in the apartment, then headed into my bedroom. And that’s when I almost pooped in my pants.

Al was all curled up on his pillow (continuing his decision to ignore me) and next to him, on the other pillow, was the feather. The same damn feather I knew I left sitting in my van was now sitting all pretty as a picture on my pillow. I quickly turned around, ran down the stairs and out to my van. I didn’t bring the car keys but the sodium arc streetlamp across the road gave me just enough light to verify my suspicions: The feather was gone from the passenger’s seat and I was absolutely certain that I left the damn thing where I found it.

Phillip lay flat on his back. The rocky ground beneath offered no comfort, warmth or even the promise of steady support. The ground beneath him was simply there because it had no other place to be. As he lay, too terrified to move or to reveal his return to consciousness, Phillip Holstein could feel only two emotions: Fear and hatred. His fear was targeted at whomever or whatever had left him in the pile of mangled pain he was in and his hatred was desperately seeking a target. A place to call home.

He knew a roving hatred was like watered down whiskey: It had the right ingredients to deliver a result but was rendered weak by the additional pour. He had to target his hatred or the object of his fear would return to help him boil things down a bit more.

Henry? No. Henry was not a smart target for hatred. On the other side, Henry was certainly someone deserving of hatred but here, in the foggy, damp and strange realm, Henry was needed.

His torturers? Phillip could not replace even an ounce of the fear he felt for them to smuggle in some hatred. And he had no proof the tearing and drowning pain he had endured for three “rounds,” as Henry called them, were delivered by anyone.

Then on whom or where could he place his hatred?

As he felt the damp air around him begin to cool and shift in unpredictable currents, Phillip understood his delay had cost him. There would be another round. Another burning. He felt no hands on his body but could feel an already too familiar pulling of his skin. As if whatever was outside of him needed to stretch skin to work its way inside where it (they?) called their work office. A thought raced through Phillip’s mind, offering the briefest of reprieve.
“These sons of bitches are talented at their job. Better than I ever was at anything.”

It was then he knew. As the fog grew to within a single degree away from being pure, drowning water and the pain began to erupt, Phillip’s hatred found its mark.
 

The sound which was always in the background became the only sound he could hear. When he first woke on this side, the sound was nothing but a single instrument in a massive orchestra. It was unidentifiable and impossible to distinguish as being at all unique from the myriad of other sounds. But as he lay, his torturers pulling away and leaving their completed work alone, that one sound revealed itself.

Phillip pulled himself up and stood on legs so weak he feared they would collapse and send him crashing to the unforgiving ground. Thankful for their hold, he rubbed his thighs and brushed off the decay and muck that had gathered on them. He then stood and listened to the screaming laughter. It was so distant and came from no specific direction. Its echoes gone, he understood there was not an orchestra of sounds but just this one. Laughter or something driven by a different emotion, Phillip was unsure. But whatever it was and whoever was causing it was all he could hear.

He imagined the sound to be either the twisted laughter of a man whose mind had long since departed from sanity or the horrible screams of a soul too familiar with terrifying pain. He chose to believe the sound was laughter as believing it to be anything else was too horrific for Phillip to consider.

He risked movement and found that his strength had fully returned, allowing him to step as quickly and as confidently as he had on the other side. And though most steps ended with the pain of a foot banging against a rock or finding their landing covered with broken pieces from long since dead thorny branches, Phillip moved towards a somehow known destination.

He slowed his pace, not to reward himself a less painful trek but only to reserve his strength. It would be needed.

It took me a few days before things started to make sense. I tried to forget about the old man, the feather and it’s magical ways of relocating itself. Things were going well for me and I wanted to get back to doing what I could to keep my streak of good luck chugging along. I chalked the whole incident up to either a freakish reality or a drug induced hallucination. Not that I ever had problems at Shorty’s, but I figured it was just as reasonable to believe some asshole slipped something into my beer as it was to believe that what happened, really had happened.

By the middle of the week, I forced myself to burn the feather, bury the ashes and to get on getting on. As soon as the feather was gone, I started hitting local bars and taverns, looking for paying gigs. My success at Shorty’s gave me a whole lot of inspiration and me worrying about some strange old man —who probably wasn’t even real—was nothing more than me wasting that inspiration.

But the feather was real. I couldn’t deny or explain that away too easily. It was real when I saw it sitting on the seat in my van next to me and it was real when I put a flame to it. I figured if I was drugged at Shorty’s, I could have forgotten having picked up the feather someplace and, again in a drug induced stupor, convinced myself I had left it in the van and didn’t carry it with me into my apartment that night. Hell, I figured I saw the feather on the ground, thought Al would love to play with the damn thing, and brought it home to him as a present.

I was feeling pretty good about my explanation until I got to the fourth bar during my gig finding tour.

During the day, most bars are either filled up with lunch crowds, sales people avoiding making business calls, or are pretty much empty. That’s how things were at the first three bars I stopped in that day: Empty except for a few old men working hard at doing nothing but chasing a buzz.
 

When I walked into the fourth bar, things looked pretty much the same: A few people scattered around the bar, sitting as far away from one another as possible, their eyes lovingly caressing the glass of pain-reducing liquid in front of them. I walked up to the barkeep, extended my hand and went right into my well rehearsed pitch.

“Trevor Mac, local musician. I’ve played at a few area bars and want to drop off my demo CD for you to take a listen to. I know you have live music here a few days a week, and would like to talk with the owner about setting up a gig.”

“I’m the owner,” the barkeep said, his face glued to my business card. The fact he didn’t look up gave me pause. The card I handed him was one I designed and printed myself. There wasn’t anything special about it, except it was
my
card. I guess that made it special to me. “What kind of music do you play and how much you looking to get for a gig?”