Demon Frenzy (Demon Frenzy Series Book 1) Read online

  DEMON FRENZY

  A NOVEL BY

  HARVEY CLICK

  Also by Harvey Click

  Demon Mania

  The House of Worms

  The Bad Box

  Magic Times

  Text copyright © 2014 Harvey Click

  All rights reserved

  Original cover art by Keith Draws

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Contents under pressure. Keep away from flame. Do not drive or operate heavy machinery while under the influence of this product.

  For my wife, Rose

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 1

  The sun was sinking behind the hills to the west when Amy reached Blackwood, and the little town, which had no streetlights, was already fading into darkness. Lights gleamed in the windows of some of the houses, but at least half of them were dark and quite a few were boarded up. She saw no one on the sidewalks as she drove south on Birch Street, and when she reached the stop sign at Main Street she saw no one in the one-block downtown to her right. There were lights in the windows of the barber shop and the two bars, but the drugstore and hardware store were already closed.

  She sat at the stop sign for half a minute, wondering if she’d see some sign of life. Finally a shiny new red pickup came cruising up slowly from her left without headlights, and as it drove through the intersection she thought she recognized the round bland face of one of the Blevin boys peering at her from the passenger side.

  The truck parked half a block past the intersection and, yes, the two portly men who got out and headed into Shawn’s Saloon were almost certainly the Blevin twins, who had made grade school and high school unpleasant for any of the smaller boys they could get their hands on.

  Amy drove through the intersection. There were a few cars parked at the small grocery store on her left, and a woman came out the door pushing a shopping cart. The run-down single-pump gas station on her right was open, but no one was buying gas, and the few houses beyond it were all boarded up.

  The rusty one-lane metal bridge that crossed Wade Creek to Wellman Road rattled and swayed as she drove across it. The two-lane state route that had brought her into town was narrow and pitted, but Wellman Road was even narrower and more pitted, just wide enough for two vehicles to pass if each one stayed very close to its own crumbling berm.

  She drove slowly along the twisty road through the darkening hills for about five miles, and then turned right onto Ebbing Road, which had never had a sign to mark it. The narrow, winding single lane hadn’t seen a fresh load of gravel for a long time, and it was so badly washed out in places that she had to tap the brake every few seconds to keep her small Toyota from bottoming out.

  There were lights on in the Ebbing house to her right, and a large dog ran out to the road to bark at her car as she drove past it. The next house, about a quarter mile ahead on her left, was where the McCalls used to live, but now it was vacant with its windows broken and the tin roof collapsing in the middle like the sagging back of a worn-out horse.

  After another quarter mile the rutted road dead-ended with Billy’s house sitting dark and forlorn on her right. Surrounded by old maples and pines, it was a narrow two-story with clapboard siding that hadn’t been painted since she was a child. She pulled into the long cinder driveway and shut off her car, but for a while she couldn’t make herself get out. She hadn’t expected Billy to be home, but she also hadn’t expected the place to look quite so gloomy and foreboding.

  At last she got her purse and her big flashlight from the passenger seat and stepped out. She heard a coyote yipping in the steep wooded hills that started where the road ended, and a moment later she heard another one answering it way off to the north. The small barn to the right of the house had lost its two sliding front doors, and when she shined her flashlight in she saw the old John Deere tractor, which had already seen plenty of use before she was born, but there was no other vehicle.

  She climbed onto the rotting front porch and knocked, knowing that there would be no answer. She tried her key and was relieved to find that Billy hadn’t changed the lock, and then was doubly relieved when she reached inside for the light switch and the single bare bulb on the living room ceiling actually came on.

  She stepped inside, shut the door and called Billy’s name a couple times, but the house maintained its silence. The air stank of old cigarette smoke and something sour like spoiled milk. The same purple sofa that her parents had bought when she was a child, its stuffing now showing in several places where the upholstery had worn through, sat against a pale green wall that had taken on a brownish tinge from many years of cigarette smoke and general grime.

  In front of the sofa was the same battered coffee table she had grown up with, now strewn with empty beer bottles, a plastic bag of marijuana, and an ashtray with a half-smoked joint resting on one of its lips as if it were getting ready to dive into the pile of Pall Mall butts. The same cheap stereo system that Billy had bought as a teenager sat on a homemade wooden shelf filled with CDs. The only thing in the room that didn’t look worn out was a flat-screen TV against the front wall.

  She stepped into the dining room and switched on the old chandelier above the table, which was littered with skin magazines, beer bottles, and an unwashed plate with a fork and knife beside it. The bedroom where her parents used to sleep was off the dining room to her left, and she switched on its light to see that her parents’ bed now gave rest to coats, several boxes, and an old TV set that slept on its side. More boxes and junk cluttered the floor.

  When she turned on the kitchen light, something suddenly squirmed under the table. It was a long blacksnake that slithered swiftly across the old linoleum and slid under the hutch.

  Amy loathed snakes even though she had grown up around them; as a girl she had been terrified of the poisonous copperheads that hid under logs or pieces of scrap tin, afraid of the water snakes that sunned themselves on the creek bed, sometimes two of them writhing together in an ugly pulsating gray ball, and disgusted by the blacksnakes that somehow found their way into the house. For nine years she had been living in the city, where she had seen no snakes, and now it took her a long moment to find the courage to step into the kitchen.

  There was some mail unopened on the kitchen table, including an electric bill. She opened it, saw that it was two days past due, and shoved it into her purse, intending to pay it tomorrow so the lights wouldn’t be shut off. The postmarks on the mail were all at least two weeks old, and eleven days ago was when Billy had stopped answering his phone. There was no mail delivery on this road—one had to drive to the post office in town to collect it—so he must have driven to town and returned with his mail shortly before he disappeared.

  The window above the sink was open, humid breeze billowing the yellowed curtains, and she doubted Billy would have left a window open if he had intended to be gone more than a few hours. She closed it, even though the house was stifling, because she was nervous enough without having to worry about
someone crawling through it.

  She dreaded going upstairs because it was possible Billy was lying dead in one of the bedrooms. Possible but unlikely, since his pickup truck was gone. The first bedroom was his, and she smiled faintly when she opened the door and switched on the light to find an unmade bed and dirty clothes heaped on the floor: this was the way Billy’s room had always looked.

  The room that used to be hers was down the hallway past the bathroom, and she was surprised to discover that it wasn’t heaped with junk. In fact, it looked exactly as she had left it, the bed neatly made and a hairbrush and comb that she had left behind still on the top of her dresser beside a framed photo of her and Billy standing beside the barn when she was twelve and he was thirteen. The room even looked as if Billy swept it once in a while; there weren’t cobwebs in the corners or dust balls on the bare wooden floor.

  She wondered if he had kept the room clean in hopes that she would pay him a visit, and she felt ashamed that the last time she had done that was six years ago when their parents had died in a car wreck. But at least she had stayed in touch. She had called him every week, usually more than once, even though he had sounded less and less friendly as the years went by and he sank deeper into his drugs and alcohol and secrecy, especially regarding his no-doubt illicit means of earning a living.

  It was even hotter up here, and she was tempted to open the bedroom window, but a distant rumble of thunder told her that it would be raining soon. Before she went downstairs she stepped into the bathroom and tried the hot water faucet. The water ran rusty for several seconds, then cleared and eventually became warm. Good—she needed a hot shower after her long drive.

  She went back to her car to get her suitcase from the trunk and the two bags of groceries she had bought on the way. It was fully dark now, and she had forgotten just how black darkness could be in the country with thick clouds hiding the moon and stars.

  What had been a hot breeze earlier was picking up into a wind strong enough to rustle the trees and moan a mournful song through the broken windows of the barn. The thunder in the north was moving closer, and she smelled rain coming with it. The coyote yipped again, and this time it sounded much nearer, somewhere in the backyard.

  After she came in and was checking the front door, making sure it was locked behind her, she realized her hands were shaking. Even though she had spent her first eighteen years in this house, it now felt eerie and unfamiliar, somehow made sinister by the absence of her brother.

  Before she entered the kitchen she looked carefully to make sure the blacksnake wasn’t curled up in a corner somewhere, but apparently it was still hiding under the hutch. She stamped her feet on the old linoleum, hoping to frighten it enough to make it stay there, and set her groceries on the table.

  A bouquet of stenches greeted her when she opened the refrigerator: spoiled milk, two spoiled sausage links nestled on a bed of spoiled macaroni and cheese in an uncovered bowl, an opened package of spoiled baloney beside it. She poured the milk down the drain and sealed the other mess in a plastic grocery sack with a twist tie, since there was no garbage disposal. There was no garbage collection out here either, so in the morning she would have to take it to the refuse pit behind the house.

  She felt a little less shaky after eating a ham and Swiss sandwich and some grocery store potato salad, but her nerves were still on edge. The wind was strong enough now to rattle the old windows, and the thunder rumbling in the north had moved closer. She found a corkscrew in the silverware drawer, opened her bottle of Chardonnay, and carried it to the living room with a water glass because she couldn’t find a wine glass.

  She was swallowing her first sip when thunder crashed overhead, making the whole house shake, and instantly a hard rain came pounding down on the roof. Another thunderclap, and this time the lights flickered. She swallowed half a glass of wine in two big gulps, hoping that the electric wouldn’t go out.

  But it did, with the next thunderclap. The darkness was impenetrable; she couldn’t even see the outlines of the two front windows until a brilliant flash of lightning illuminated the night. And then the storm unleashed its full fury, thunder like a barrage of cannonballs shaking the house and a fusillade of lightning painting the front yard a ghastly white, branches blowing frantically as if the torrential rain was driving the trees mad. There was an ear-splitting boom as a bolt of lightning hit a tree across the road, and then the storm moved away to the south, leaving behind it a steady rain.

  With a loud pop, the lights came back on. Amy saw that her brother had left an unopened pack of Pall Malls on the coffee table, and she regretted that she had stopped smoking a month ago. The thunder was like a bass guitar thrumming in the distance now, the kind you heard rumbling from a car full of gangbangers.

  She was listening to it when she thought she heard something upstairs. Something like soft footsteps, like a large dog or coyote padding along the hallway, its nails gently tapping the bare floor. It was probably just the dying wind playing tricks, but for a full minute she listened without moving a muscle. She refilled her glass and drank it quickly.

  The bottle was half empty now, but she didn’t feel any calmer. The half joint in Billy’s ashtray wouldn’t be any help; though she had enjoyed marijuana when she was a teenager, she had given it up several years ago because it had started making her feel paranoid and anxious, and she was feeling enough of that already.

  She hoped a hot shower would help her relax. She carried her suitcase upstairs, laid it on her bed, and undressed. The rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, so she opened the window a few inches, and the wet breeze felt cooler and cleaner now.

  Though she wasn’t a vain woman, she liked to look at herself in a mirror when she was naked to make sure she wasn’t putting on weight or growing a mole somewhere. Everything looked fine; she was twenty-seven years old and still as slim as she had been in high school, her tummy flat and her smallish breasts as firm as ever.

  As she turned to look at her butt she heard a faint rhythmic huffing, like a dog panting somewhere nearby. Maybe the coyote had taken shelter on the little back porch—but the faint noise had seemed to come from somewhere upstairs—upstairs and nearby. She listened closely and heard nothing but the soft rain.

  She opened the suitcase and got out shampoo and her bathrobe. It was unlikely that Billy would return while she took her shower, but she didn’t want to step out of the bathroom naked and find him standing in the hallway.

  The battered bureau at the end of the hallway still held towels, as it always had, and though the one she took was a bit threadbare it smelled clean. She locked the bathroom door behind her and opened the window a few inches to let out the steam. Water ran rusty from the showerhead for a moment and then cleared, and when the temperature was right she stepped into the old claw-foot tub and savored the pleasure of feeling the sweat and grime of a long, troubling day washing down the drain.

  She towel-dried her hair, slipped on the bathrobe, and returned to the bedroom. She was about to get her hairbrush from her suitcase when she decided to use the old one on the dresser, the brush that she had used countless times during high school.

  She sat on the wooden chair in front of the dresser and saw herself again as a high school girl as she brushed her short brown hair. It had been longer then, and often her face had sprouted a few pimples in those days, which she had always tried to cover with skin-colored cream only to see that they were still glaringly visible hours later in the harsh florescent light of the high school restroom.

  Memories pushed their way into her mind like a throng of restless ghosts, each one trying to shove the others aside in its eagerness to be remembered, most of them dull and unhappy and not worth being remembered, old desires and crushes and disappointments, high school dances that somehow always turned out to be awkward, dates that were even more awkward, long dreary evenings and weekends stuck here at this house in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do, her father drinking beer and her mother sitting in gloom
y silence while he told pointless stories that he had told a thousand times before.

  She put down the hairbrush and tried to smile at herself in the mirror, but the effort wasn’t entirely successful. She told herself that she was a different person now, that she was making a good life for herself many miles away in Ohio, that the loneliness of childhood was far behind her, but it was hard to believe that as she sat here in her old bedroom.

  She was tired but too anxious to sleep, and the half-empty bottle of Chardonnay downstairs sounded appealing. After she put on her blue cotton pajamas and her moccasin slippers, she removed her blouses from the suitcase so she could hang them in the closet. They were already on hangers, and she was holding them in her left hand by the wire necks as she opened the closet door.

  The thing crouching in the closet was larger than a Rottweiler, but it wasn’t a dog. It looked more like a dwarfish naked human with slimy gray skin and skinny arms that had claws with long black nails instead of hands. Its head was big and bald and its face was something from a nightmare, tiny red rat-eyes and jagged dog-like teeth in a huge grinning mouth.

  It licked its teeth with a pointed gray tongue and flexed its claws.

  For a moment she was too terrified to move. Then she heard the clatter of hangers as the blouses she had dropped hit the bare floor, and then she was racing out of the bedroom and down the stairs as fast as she could run.

  Amy was a practical woman, and even as she ran down the stairs she remembered that her car keys were in her purse and her purse was in the kitchen. The long blacksnake slid out from beneath the table as she grabbed her purse, and a moment later she slammed the front door behind her and was running through the drizzle to her car.

  Chapter 2

  As Amy drove back to Blackwood, her headlights barely penetrating the wet darkness, she was in too much of a state of shock to think about what she was going to do next. She only knew that she wanted to get away from the house and the thing inside it. Its slimy gray face was as clear as a photograph in her mind, the long teeth gleaming with a glistening string of saliva hanging from the grinning mouth. Certainly it was no animal that had ever been seen in any zoo on earth, but if it was human it was so grotesquely deformed that it scarcely deserved the name.