Sarwat Chadda - Devil’s Kiss

Billi wanted to leave, but she looked into the girl’s eyes and saw the life burning fiercely within. The girl wanted to do something other than just wait in the dark.

‘Hi… Rebecca.’

Rebecca let out a long breath, then with great effort sucked in a new lungful. Her skinny body trembled under the sheets.

‘Are my mum and dad here?’

‘No, I’m sure they won’t be long, though.’

The girl started crying. Her head jerked slightly and her tears bubbled then trickled down. There was hardly any sobbing, just a short feeble panting sound. Billi looked around the room and found a box of tissues. She passed Rebecca a handful. She watched as the girl limply lifted them and the effort to wipe her face exhausted her. The damp tissues floated to the floor.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Rebecca. ‘I’m afraid.’

Billi didn’t know what to say. Comforting the sick was work for Hospitallers, not Templars. She just stared at the way Rebecca’s skeletal chest rose and sank. She could see the ribs beneath the white nightdress.

Rebecca turned to face her. Her focus settled on the silver crucifix round Billi’s neck. ‘Do you believe in God?’

Did she? Billi touched the cross out of habit. She’d spent half her life praying to Allah, the other half to Jesus. She’d asked her dad early on how she should pray. Arthur’s answer, for a Templar Master, had been a heretical one. He didn’t know, and thought God, whoever He was, probably didn’t care.

‘I… suppose.’

‘Why?’

Billi looked at the dying child, at how her brittle fingers gripped the sheets. ‘I guess… there has to be a reason why the world’s the way it is. A reason why -’ she listened to the terrible sucking noise as Rebecca fought on – ‘a reason why bad things happen.’

Rebecca closed her eyes. ‘My mummy never used to pray -’ her breathing setting into the shallowest, quietest ripple – ‘but she does now, all the time.’

‘Billi?’ Kay’s head appeared round the door. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere -’ He looked at Rebecca, eyes widening. He came in and grabbed Billi’s arm.

‘Leave. Now.’

‘What is it?’

‘We’ve got to tell Arthur,’ said Kay. He was already backing away, dragging Billi with him. He was terrified. His eyes darted into the corners of the room, into the shadows.

Billi tugged her arm free. ‘Stop freaking. What is it?’

Kay looked like he was going to run. Instead he took Billi by the shoulders and turned her round, facing the sick girl. He stood behind her and covered her eyes with his hands. Billi felt their coldness on her eyelids.

‘What are you do-’

‘Look.’ He separated his fingers, letting the sight slowly filter in. Billi blinked as the cobwebs of reality gently tore apart.

The lonely child sat shrivelled in her bed wrapped in shroud-white sheets and gazed at her with maggot-filled eye sockets. Things wriggled under her tissue-thin skin. Grotesque skeletal flies sat feeding off dripping, oozing flesh, and rank odours and putrescent vapours wheezed out of the girl’s lungs. The child breathed through an opened mouth lined with yellow teeth loosely bound to decayed, blackened gums, and her slime-coated tongue hung limp over her white lips.

‘No,’ Billi whispered, backing away from Kay, shaking her head free of the hideous image. She stumbled out of the corridor, fighting down the bitter, metallic bile climbing up her throat. Kay caught up with her and pulled them both through the doorway into the stairwell. Billi leaned against the wall, teeth clamped together, and waited for the nausea to pass.

‘What is it? What’s happening to her?’ She’d never seen anything like it. She couldn’t remember anything like this in any of the old manuscripts, the old Templar diaries. Kay squeezed her, his chest touched her back.

‘I don’t know.’ He turned back towards the door. ‘But I think this is only the beginning.’

Billi called her dad while Kay got the teas. They’d found a greasy spoon cafe off the high street, empty but for some old guy with a beard stirring his coffee endlessly and muttering at a blank spot on the wall. Faded posters of Caribbean beaches and white Alpine mountains decorated the walls, corners curled and ochre from cigarette smoke. She couldn’t get through; the phone went straight to messaging. She’d finally got Percy. He’d told them to sit tight; he was on his way.

When she went back in Kay had the teas and a bun waiting. He clutched the mug tightly, but his fingers still trembled.

‘You OK?’

He smiled weakly. ‘Been better.’

‘What’s happening to her?’

‘It’s a sickness, a disease, attacking her through the Ethereal Realm. Those… flies are slowly eating her soul. I could see her aura, but it was barely there. Once they’ve done it the body will just die.’

‘Can’t you do anything?’ she asked. Her stomach twisted at the memories of those flies. Kay didn’t even look up.

So the little girl was going to die, and there was nothing they could do about it. Billi thought about her, just lying there blankly gazing at the ceiling. That was how it was going to be, a small, pointless death and her last memory, the one she took with her to the grave, was going to be of a light bulb in the ceiling. Maybe Arthur would know a way to save her. Hold on, hadn’t she read somewhere that people could live, even without their souls?

Kay’s eyebrows arched, sensing her thoughts. ‘Without her soul it’s better that she dies, Billi.’

She tried not to think about the little boy from her Ordeal, Alex Weeks.

Kay leaned across and tilted her chin up gently so that she had to look at him. ‘Billi, without a soul we lose that one part of us that’s divine, the Breath of God. The path of the soulless leads only to damnation. Only the vilest, most evil person would consider it.’

‘Or the most desperate.’ Billi couldn’t get Rebecca out of her mind.

‘Without a soul, a void is left that creates a terrible, endless hunger. One they’ll try desperately to fill…’

‘With blood,’ Billi finished for him.

Kay nodded. ‘The taste of a person’s soul lingers in their lifeblood, in their flesh. The Hungry Dead feed on that. It sustains them for a while, but the taste is never enough. Then they kill again. And again. Each time, the soul they briefly sup on becomes less and less sustaining. The worst are reduced to eating corpses.’

Vampires. Nosferatu. Lamia. All cultures had their own name for them, the Hungry Dead. The Templars used the old Arabic word.

‘Ghuls,’ said Billi. ‘You think Rebecca will become one of the Hungry Dead?’

Kay shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, you need to choose to surrender your soul to become a ghul, that’s clearly not what Rebecca’s doing.’ He frowned, mockingly. ‘But don’t you pay any attention to Occult Lore? Balin must be pretty disappointed.’

‘You must offer your soul, willingly, to someone capable of consuming it, an Ethereal. It’s usually a devil, and it then passes some of its own essence into the now soulless body. It’s not an easy transfer. It takes a lot out of the Ethereal. Even a single trade can weaken one for years. That’s why these sorts of deals aren’t that common. Otherwise devils would be creating ghuls all over the place.’

‘So you sell your soul. For what?’

‘For wealth. Power. Immortality.’ Kay stared out of the window. ‘Nothing important.’

Billi looked at his reflection, half lost in the darkness beyond.

‘How can you stand it?’ she said. ‘To see such things?’ She’d been shaken badly, but Billi knew even the horror she’d witnessed was a faded and weak image of what was really happening to the girl. Kay would have seen it ten times more clearly. If that was what his gift gave him she was thankful she wasn’t an Oracle.