Madisonville Murder, Part 13
Breaking the Pact
Need an earlier part?
By the time we’d finished searching the park, Gavin was breathing a little more heavily than usual. I was outright panting. But our efforts had been in vain. Trying to catch sight of an invisible kid from a distance in the dark had never been a real possibility.
If we’d ever gotten close enough, we might have been able to hear his running footsteps, but the only shot we had at that was when Ben first broke away from us. We were too surprised to act as fast as we should have. Once he put enough distance between him and us, we had no hope of tracking him without magic. And Virginia, the one person who might have offered that kind of assistance, wasn’t about to help us find him. Anyway, I couldn’t trust her anymore.
“He could throw himself in front of oncoming traffic, on purpose this time, and drivers wouldn’t even see him,” I said, forcing the words out between breaths.
“If he’d really wanted to do that, he’d have done it already, and it would probably have been close enough for us to hear the crash,” said Gavin. “The survival instinct is strong. It doesn’t prevent all suicides, of course, but in a lot of cases, it pulls hard enough to balance someone’s despair.”
“Let’s hope,” I said. “But we can’t assume Ben’s survival instinct can actually win that tug-of-war permanently, especially since he knows he’s actually dead already. We have to find him.”
“We watched him for a whole school day,” said Gavin. “But I’m not sure we identified any best friends he might run to. Even if we had, without names, we couldn’t find them.”
“We have to try his house,” I said.
“We will,” said Gavin. “But first, we need to work out what we’re actually trying to do. Suppose we find Ben and convince him not to kill himself. Then what? Are we abandoning our plan to get Dr. Curtis to renounce his pact with Satan? Because the moment he does that, Ben is dead, anyway. Well, more obviously dead.”
I stopped walking and stared at him. “You sound just like her.”
“I hate her methods,” said Gavin. “But she’s not wrong. If we stop Dr. Curtis from hurting any more young people, Ben will die. Now that he knows what he is, maybe that’s the best thing for him. What kind of life could he have now?”
I didn’t want to agree with Gavin. I wanted to stop Dr. Curtis and save Ben. But was there a way to do that? If I understood magic better—and actually had some—maybe?
Or maybe if a miracle occurred. This was one time faith in God might have come in handy. But I just wasn’t there yet. And I had to wonder how an omnipotent and all-loving God could allow such horrors to happen in the first place.
“Let’s get to his house,” I said. “Maybe a way to work this out will present itself.”
My words sounded hollow, even to me, but Gavin didn’t object. That’s the kind of friend he was.
I was so turned around that I couldn’t even remember where my car was, but we were pretty close to Ben’s house, anyway. So we just walked—or staggered, in my case—toward a resolution I dreaded to think about.
The street lights hadn’t been repaired yet. Nor had the porchlight at the Curtis residence. But we couldn’t slip in as we had before. Without Virginia’s magic, we would be reduced to knocking on the door.
Even through the closed drapes, I could tell that the living room was well lit up. The presence of a relatively new and shiny Lexus in the driveway confirmed that the doctor was already home. But was Ben? Since he was too young to drive and had walked to school, there wasn’t a car to indicate his presence.
We walked cautiously onto the porch. The door was slightly ajar, and I could hear voices inside.
“Ben, you need to calm down.” That had to be Dr. Curtis. The voice was warm and reassuring—but with just a hint of panic.
“Calm down! I’m a walking corpse, and you want me to calm down!”
“I think we’re past knocking,” said Gavin, pushing open the door and stepping inside. I followed him, wishing I could be any other place but here.
“I’m sure there’s a rational reason why you’re hallucinating—” began Dr. Curtis. He stopped abruptly when we stepped from the hallway into the living room.
Curtis looked very much like his portrait, except that his eyes had a wild look in them, and his hand were shaking slightly, despite his otherwise calm demeanor. Ben still looked like a corpse, though he now had a frantic expression on his face.
“Who are you, and what are you doing here?” asked Dr. Curtis, eying us with an expression somewhere between suspicion and fright.
“We’re here to see if we can find a way to save your son from the consequences of your actions,” I said. I wasn’t sure where the words came from, but they were suitably vague to do justice to my impossible dilemma.
“Get out of my house!” he said, pointing to the door as if we could somehow have forgotten where it was. Ben looked even more frantic than before. His eyes ping-ponged back and forth between us and his father.
“Cynthia Jenkins is dead because of what you did,” said Gavin. “How many more teenagers have you victimized by trying to turn them to Satan?”
“That’s…that’s ridiculous. I’m calling the police.” The doctor pulled out his cellphone. His hand shook even more than it had before.
“Can you help me?” asked Ben, his eyes focusing on Gavin and me. He hadn’t seemed to hear what we’d said about his father, but he’d heard what I said about him.
I looked into his teary eyes. I wanted to give him some comfort, but lying to him would just make everything worse in the long run.
I was saved from having to answer by the appearance of a couple of demons who must not have been Hell’s brightest. They materialized right in front of Ben, who screamed, fell backward and tried to crawl away from them.
Both had shadowy bodies and glowing red eyes—the standard-issue demon look. They had murder in those eyes. But this was exactly the kind of encounter we were used to. If anything, I felt a little insulted that Satan thought he could beat us with such second-rate minions.
Without giving them a chance to act, Gavin dropped his baseball bat out of his sleeve and smashed one of them in the face with it. They had become solid enough to take us on, so that approach worked, particularly when the blow was delivered by someone with Gavin’s faith.
I pulled out my vial of agrimony as fast as I could and splashed the other demon with it. Though not as effective as holy water, it smoked as it disrupted his magic.
As Gavin’s demon fell backward, he pivoted quickly toward the other one, smashing it in the face before spinning back and delivering another strong blow to the first one. I tossed some agrimony on the first one to weaken it further, then shoved myself in the direction of the second one, hoping the rowan-dill mixture around my neck would be sufficient protection. Against such low-level demons, I wasn’t really worried.
Instead of following through on his threat to call the police, Curtis stood there, open-mouthed and pale. He’d already been thrown off by Ben’s meltdown. Judging from his reaction, I doubted he’d had demons come to his rescue before. And he certainly didn’t know what to make of us.
I wasn’t physically formidable enough to beat the demons the way Gavin did. But I made a quick herbal circle around the second one, constraining his movement until Gavin was done with the first one, who was shrieking and flailing around but not really doing anything effective to defend against Gavin’s relentless bat.
“Ben, what are you doing?” asked Dr. Curtis, his voice shaky.
It wasn’t good strategy to take my attention off the demons, but I had to at least take a quick glance and see what was happening.
Ben must have been able to get back and his feet and slip through the dining room and into the kitchen. He was standing in the doorway, with a sharp-looking carving knife in his hand. Tears slid down what was left of his face.
“I…I wanted to believe that I was…just hallucinating,” he said. “But then…those things came, and I knew it was all true.”
“This is not what you think—” began Dr. Curtis.
But Ben was in no mood to listen to his father. Instead, he looked at me with an expression on his face that froze my heart in my chest. “Even Captain Kirk couldn’t save everyone.” Then, with more agility and strength than I gave him credit for, he thrust the carving knife into his chest in a single blow.
Again, time slowed down for me. Ben’s blow might not have been an immediately fatal one. He missed his heart, as many people probably would under similar circumstances. But perhaps he willed himself to die. Whatever might have caused it, the demonic energy simulating his heartbeat flashed for a moment like a supernova and then winked out. Ben crumpled to the floor as the residual demonic energy flowed away from out of him like sparks rising from a crackling wood fire.
Maybe it was the tears in my own eyes, but I thought I saw something else rise from his body—his soul, I supposed it had to be. He looked like a glowing white version of the kid in the portrait, no trace of death still clinging to him. He smiled at Gavin and me before vanishing. He hadn’t looked at his father at all.
The demons vanished in a literal puff of sulfurous smoke. Judging by the agonized look on Dr. Curtis’s face, he knew he was no longer bound to Satan, who hadn’t fulfilled his part of the bargain. I had no doubt Satan would try to renegotiate, but I had a feeling the doctor wouldn’t fall for it again. At least, I hoped he wouldn’t.
I supposed we should have stayed and comforted him. That was what a good Christian would have done—but I doubt being a good Christian was something I would ever be accused of. My former religion teachers would have backed me in that assessment. Anyway, I couldn’t even look at the man who had led other teenagers to death and damnation, even though he had done it to bring his son back.
Gavin, who was a good Christian, followed me out as I left without a word. We were halfway down the block when Dr. Curtis started wailing.
My tears started flowing again—but not for him. I thought about all Ben had been and could have become. And Cynthia. And everyone else in this miserable situation.
“It will be all right,” said Gavin. “We can go back to Alma and try to reach Cynthia again. As Satan no longer has Dr. Curtis to protect, we have a better chance of getting through. We can help her find peace. That what we started out to do, right?”
Yeah, he was right. Even Virginia had been right. But I couldn’t let go of my grief for Ben, a boy I hardly knew—and then only when he was already dead.
The local newspaper carried a story the next day about Dr. Curtis’s suicide. Oddly, it said nothing about Ben’s—but perhaps his body had disappeared. Before I left, I hadn’t looked back to see if it was still there. But as far as the outside world was concerned, Ben had been alive. If his body wasn’t found, people would assume he still was alive. Yet the article didn’t mention him at all. I didn’t know quite what to make of that. There wasn’t even the customary single line about Dr. Curtis being survived by a son.
But considering all the strange things I’d witnessed, that was far from the strangest. I tried to put it out of my mind.
Bizarre as it was, Gavin and I went to the funeral, dressed in our Sunday best. I supposed I wanted to make sure Dr. Curtis was really dead. Since it wasn’t an open casket funeral, I couldn’t even get that satisfaction.
The graveside service was well attended, though I noticed no one in the right age range to be one of Dr. Curtis’s current patients showed up. That didn’t surprise me at all.
As the coffin was being lowered into the grave, I had one of those experiences of time slowing—only this time, it seemed objectively real. I looked around, and no one was moving. Had Satan somehow managed a way to trap me in some kind of temporal anomaly? My heart started beating faster.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. As far as I could tell, it was by a finger rather than a claw, so I turned around.
Standing right behind me was Ben, looking just as he had in the family portrait, complete with mischievous grin. Despite myself, I jumped.
“Thanks, man,” he said, just as if we were high school chums and I’d just given him tips on how to win the heart of his crush. “I don’t think you would have realized this on your own, but you and your friend gave me the courage to do what I needed to do.” He looked in the direction of his father’s coffin. “Even though it didn’t work out in the way I expected.”
He looked so solid that I couldn’t help myself. I poked him. As far as I could tell, he was solid.
“Careful, I’m ticklish,” he said, chuckling in a way I found both reassuring and confusing.
“Are…are you alive?” I asked. I knew it was in some ways a stupid question, as he hadn’t been alive in some time. But if he were, that would explain the lack of reference to his body in the news story.
“Reality is a lot more complicated than you give it credit for,” he replied, doubling down on his mischievous grin.
“In what ways?” I asked.
He laughed heartily. “Leave it to you to want to ask philosophical questions at a time like this!”
“You sound as if you know me.”
“I do—now. But I’m not supposed to let you lure me into a conversation about the nature of the universe, so I won’t. I just came to tell you not to grieve for me. Things turned out for me as well as anyone could expect. Continuing to live that fake life would have been much worse.”
“It’s hard for me to grasp that,” I said.
“There are worse things than death,” he said, solemn for just a moment before reverting back to his I-don’t-have-a-care-in-the-world persona. “You know that much from experience.”
I thought about Amanda, and a tear slid down my cheek.
“None of that!” he said in mock outrage. “I’m supposed to be cheering you up.”
“And you have,” I said. “But I can’t just turn off my emotions.”
“I know,” he said, nodding slowly. He put his hand on my forehead. I was surprised, but I didn’t pull away. The hand felt warm—and very much alive.
“Now that you’ve saved Cynthia and me, you need to forget all about us. There is a concern that too much dwelling on these particular events might deflect you from your best destiny.”
The agnostic part of me became suddenly nervous. “Who is concerned?”
“Nice try,” he said. “But there are some things you have to discover on your own. For now, you will forget me and everything connected to me unless you need to remember later for some reason.”
“But I don’t want—” I began.
A bright flash blinded me momentarily. When I opened them, I was in bed, with the morning sun streaming through my bedroom window.
I felt as if I’d been dreaming, but the details slipped through my mind like sand slipping through my fingers. Something about pacts with the devil, I thought. Given what my life was like, I wasn’t surprised that I dreamed about them from time to time. At least, this time, it wasn’t a nightmare.
I thought there had been something about a dead boy, too—dead but yet somehow alive. That was weird, but the more I thought about it, the less I could remember.
The details didn’t really matter, anyway. I needed to get up and get moving. UC Merced’s fall semester would begin in just a couple of days, and Gavin was helping me move into my new apartment.
As is often the case, the story ended differently than I thought it would when I started. Though I love reading all kinds of horror, as a writer, I suppose I lean more toward cozy horror. For me, that was a revelation, since only recently, I was laughing about the very idea of cozy horror. Anyway, in the spirit of cozy horror, I leave you with before and after pictures of Ben. (Yes, the photographer’s model is the same person in both.)
Next week, I start a new serial, Ivy League Illusions, so stay tuned!
Madisonville Murder is related to the Soul Salvager trilogy. (The action falls between the prologue and chapter one of the first book.)
Everywhere and Nowhere: Explore Fantastic Worlds is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
(Subscribers receive a certain number of free ebooks, depending on which tier they select. See https://billhiatt.substack.com/about for details.)
A breathtaking finish! As you can see, I could hardly wait for this installment to arrive. Thanks for another great story.