James Swain - Shadow People

“All right,” he said.

“You’ll work with Munns and make the girl come out?” the voice asked.

“I’ll try.”

“That’s not good enough!”

The dead women began to tear away at Ray’s flesh.

“I’ll do it!” Ray screamed.

They stopped eating him. Ray shut his eyes, and tried to wish this nightmare away. Opening them a moment later, he found that nothing had changed.

“Is that a promise?” the voice asked.

“On my mother’s grave,” Ray said.

“We’re going to hold you to that.”

“I said I’d do it,” Ray said. “Why is this woman so important to you? Is there a reason?”

Jucko brought his face within inches of Ray’s. His breath reeked of the rotted architecture of an evil man’s soul. “The woman is meaningless. It’s Peter Warlock we’re after. Warlock is trying to save Rachael, and will travel from New York to come to her aid. That is predestinated, and there’s no changing it. When Warlock arrives in your little town, he will have an FBI agent with him. That is predestined as well. The agent will arrest Munns, and you as well if you’re not careful. Your job at that point will be to stay out of the way. Understood?”

“Why? What will happen?”

“What do you think will happen, you stupid little man?”

Ray shook his head, his thoughts clouded by fear. The teeth of one of the dead women began to gobble his ear and he shrieked in agony. “Please! Spare me!”

His ear was being torn from his head. The other dead woman tried to rip a hunk of flesh out of his cheek. He screamed and struggled but could not free himself from their bony grasp. The dead man standing in front of him lowered the torch onto the top of Ray’s head. Ray felt his hair catch fire, and knew that this was the end.

As if by magic, the torch extinguished itself, throwing the shed into darkness. The dead women stopped eating his face. They seemed to just melt away, and Ray brought his hand up to touch his unscathed head. Behind him, the sliding door slid open on its own accord and filled the shed with sunlight. Jucko’s headless body lay on the floor, his head a few feet away, while the footlockers were propped against the wall, the corpses of Munns’s victims still inside.

None of it had been real.

It didn’t matter. Ray was still terrified. The elders had tapped his innermost fears. They knew what scared him, and had used those fears to turn his soul inside out. Locking the sliding door behind him, he hurried across the parking lot to his van. Munns sat in the passenger seat, listening to a Marilyn Manson CD on the sound system.

“Where you been?” Munns asked.

“Shut the hell up.”

Ray stared through the windshield at the road, thinking hard. He would have to concoct some reason to draw Rachael from New York. He’d always been good at making up stories, and supposed it wouldn’t be too hard to come up with a convincing lie. The hard part would be to get Munns to call Rachael, and make her believe him.

Ray glanced at his passenger. Munns was humming along to the music. He did not appear the least bit upset by what he’d done. Munns rolled up his sleeve and began to scratch the skin around the tattoo of Surtr holding the severed head of Peter Warlock. It was one of Ray’s best creations, the colors so vivid it almost looked alive.

“The skin is burning,” Munns explained.

Of course it was burning. The skin always burned for the new recruits entering into hell. The hard part was that it never stopped burning.

“Change of plans,” Ray said. “We’re going to get Rachael to come out sooner. We need to come up with a story that she’ll believe.”

“Why? What’s going on?” Munns asked.

Ray hesitated. How did he explain what had just happened in the storage shed? The words had not been invented. Even if they had, he was not sure he would have uttered them.

“It’s a long story,” the tattoo artist said.

Peter cabbed it back downtown. He’d dodged a bullet, but had a feeling that this was not the end of things between him and Holly in the romance department. Holly was in love and she was also a witch. That was a recipe for disaster if there ever was one.

The last person on his list was Snoop, never the easiest person to track down. Once Peter found his assistant and gave him the five-pointed-star necklace, he’d go home to Liza and apologize for not calling. Perhaps a quiet dinner, or a foreign movie at an Upper East Side art house would do the trick.

He sent his assistant a text, and told him they needed to meet up. Snoop wrote back to say that he was setting up a pop-up club at Jobee, a Taiwanese restaurant on Howard Street. Did Peter want to join him? Peter wrote back that he did, and gave the cabdriver the address.

Pop-up clubs were the latest rage. All across the city, party promoters were setting up velvet ropes and plugging in turntables in dim sum parlors, Midtown office spaces, strip clubs, school playgrounds, even Laundromats. At midnight, these unassuming spaces were transformed into trendy nightclubs, complete with snarling bouncers and a line of partygoers stretched halfway around the block hoping to get in.

Snoop liked to work pop-up clubs because they were great places to meet women. The fact that the clubs weren’t legal added to the thrill. Jobee, his newest venue, was located just north of the fake handbag district on Canal Street. The cab pulled up to the door, and Peter hopped out.

Jobee’s front door had a paper menu taped to it, and the house specialty, Taiwanese Oyster Pancake, caught his eye. It was the only restaurant in the city that served the dish, and he decided to take some home to Liza as a surprise.

He went in. The restaurant’s interior looked like a cyclone had hit it. A waiter was shouting into a cell phone, asking the police to hurry. Tables and chairs were turned upside down, the kitschy paper lanterns swung wildly from the ceiling. He cursed under his breath, knowing he was too late.

He hurried to the back of the restaurant. There, he found Snoop slumped in a chair. His assistant’s head sagged on his chest, and his eyes were tightly shut. The only thing moving were his legs, both of which twitched uncontrollably. The restaurant’s owner and a cook knelt beside Snoop, trying to rouse him. Behind the chair stood the party promoter, a Russian named Boris from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Boris was telling the waiter not to call the police, and the waiter was ignoring him. It was not a pretty scene.

Peter took the last five-pointed star from his bag, and fitted it around his assistant’s neck. He had no idea if this would do any good, but he gave it a try. Snoop’s lips started to move. Peter leaned over and put his ear up next to his assistant’s mouth, listening hard.

“Peter, is that you?” Snoop asked.

“Yeah,” Peter said. “Did that thing take you away?”

“Oh, man, this is crazy. One minute I’m in the club, the next I’m at some crazy guy’s house on the side of the hill, and he’s trying to run me down with his car.”

“Are you still there?”

“I ran away from him. Trying to find my way to town, wherever the hell that is.”

“I need to get you out of there.”

“Can you do that?”

“I’m going to try.”

“Great. Here he comes in his car. He’s got a gun-he’s trying to shoot me!”

Snoop’s feet began to tap the floor as he attempted to run away from Dr. Death. Only Snoop wasn’t going to succeed, just as Liza hadn’t gotten away, nor Peter himself. Dr. Death had a home field advantage, and was going to shoot Snoop if Peter didn’t act quickly. Rising, he quickly hustled the owner, cook, waiter, and Russian promoter out the front door.