Chris Holm - The Wrong Goodbye

“Yeah?”

“I could sure as hell use another beer.”

“So what’s the plan?” Gio asked, once I got Roscoe settled down.

Gio and I were in the midst of a convenience store feast, polishing off the last of the junk food we’d picked up that morning and washing it down with lukewarm beer. Truth be told, it was making me kind of queasy —or maybe that was the thought of what I was about to do.

“The plan?”

“Yeah —like, are we goin’ in guns blazin’, or what?”

“Last I checked, Gio, we didn’t actually have any guns.”

“You know what I mean. Whaddya use to take down a demon, anyway? You stake ’em or some shit? Hit ’em with holy water? There some kinda prayer you gotta say?”

I shook my head. “None of that stuff works.”

“Then what does?”

“Aside of a mystical object designed specifically to kill a demon? Pretty much nothing.”

A pause. “You got one of those?”

“Nope.”

“Know where we can find one?”

“Nope.”

“So what the hell’re we gonna do then?”

“ We’re not going to do anything. You’re going to stay here and babysit Roscoe, while I go out there and see what I can find out.”

“So lemme get this straight: I’m supposed to sit here on my hands while you go pokin’ around a demon crack-house fulla scary monsters that want you dead with no strategy, no backup, and no weapons of any kind?”

“Yup.”

“Actually, you know what? My end of this plan don’t sound half bad.”

“You sure?” I asked. “Because it’s not too late to trade.”

Gio laughed. I took a pull of beer, and wished that it were something stronger.

“Listen,” I said, “there’s a damn good chance I won’t come back from this–”

“Aw, come on, man, don’t talk like that.”

“– and if I don’t, you let him go and then you run , you hear me?”

But Gio shook his head. “No need, man. You’ll come back. And Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“Make sure you come back.”

Plumes of red-brown dust billowed outward from beneath the Caddy’s wheels as it barreled through the hilly landscape north of town. I hadn’t seen a paved road in over twenty minutes, and the steering wheel struggled against my grasp like a living thing. Storm clouds gathered over the mountains to the east, blotting out the rising moon, and the breeze was thick with the heady scent of creosote resin —a sure sign of coming rain. As darkness descended over the desert, my world shrank to whatever was illuminated by the jitter of my headlights as I jounced along the uneven dirt drive.

Even with my map, I damn near missed the entrance to the box canyon. A stand of cottonwoods obscured its entrance, their thick foliage creating the illusion of a solid mass of rock when really it was cleaved in two. But something in the way the breeze disturbed the leaves gave me pause. A rock shelf should have sheltered them, but instead, they whipped about as though they were in a wind tunnel —which, upon closer inspection, they were.

I ditched the car behind a thicket of tamarisk and plunged into the canyon. Lightning flickered in the distance, providing snapshots of the world around me. The entrance to the canyon was maybe twenty yards across. The canyon floor sloped downward, dense with scrub brush and mesquite, and strewn about with massive hunks of rock. A narrow ribbon of dirt, more trail than road, wound through it all, and disappeared into the nothingness beyond. And, without so much as a flashlight to guide my way, so did I.

Mindful of the fact that the darkness that enveloped me would provide me little in the way of camouflage to the keen eyes of any watching demons, I clung to the edge of the trail, taking shelter among the underbrush. It was slow going, and I stumbled more than once, tearing the knee of my suit pants and scraping the hell out of my palms. An hour in, the rain began, plastering my hair to my scalp and my clothes to my weary, borrowed frame, but I pressed onward, grateful that the noise of it would serve to mask my stumbling gait.

Eventually, the ground began to rise, and above, the pitch-black shadows of the canyon walls gave way to the softer purple-black of storm clouds. A smell like rotten eggs hung in the air, mingling with the scent of desert rain. My pulse quickened, and I scanned the darkness for any sign of sentries or booby traps or the like, but as far as I could tell, there weren’t any. Doubt crept in, and I wondered if I’d been wrong in coming here —if I was wasting my time chasing down a flimsy, dead-end lead as all the while the clock ticked down to Nothing.

No. Dumas was here.

He had to be.

It was the graveyard I discovered first: several dozen simple wooden crosses encircled by a low iron fence, and jutting at odd angles from the uneven canyon floor. They’d once been painted white, it seemed, but a good long while out in the desert sun had seen to that; now they looked as gray and dead as the bones they served to mark.

Beyond the graveyard sat a smattering of squat, stone ruins, built upon a series of rock terraces carved into the crook of the canyon, and linked by a winding set of stone steps. The smaller outbuildings scattered at the bottom of the incline were reduced to just a couple crumbling walls, but the large main building that presided over them was largely intact —and its windows flickered with candlelight.

Looked like this was the place, after all. I wished like hell I had some kind of weapon; all of the sudden, this plan of mine didn’t seem like the best idea.

I scaled the steps, noting as I did the iron bars that still graced the framed-out, glassless window holes of the ruins that I passed. The bars seemed somewhat out of place on the windows of a hospital —not to mention, this campus was way too small to have required such a large cemetery on its grounds.

That’s when it clicked for me. What I was looking at. The town historians could call this place a hospital all they wanted —but this far out of town, with bars on every window and a goodly cache of bodies in the ground?

This place was no hospital.

This place was a sanitarium.

Isolated. Reinforced. Impossible to escape. A prison in which to stash the terminally contagious, so that the healthy people of Las Cruces could go about their days unburdened by any worry about suffering and death. Once upon a time, I sold my soul to Walter Dumas to keep my Elizabeth from winding up someplace just like this. It’s only fitting that I’d find him here tonight.

As I approached the base of the main building, I abandoned the easy going of the stairway in favor of the rocky slope beside it. I skirted the building at a crawl, freezing every time I slipped and sent a cascade of pebbles pattering to the canyon floor, listening for any evidence I’d been spotted.

But that sign never came. My approach, it seemed, was undetected. And as I circled the building, a hand against the coarse stone wall to guide my way, I discovered something. Or, rather, I discovered nothing —a patch of even deeper black within the darkness that enveloped me, a void where a wall was supposed to be.

I felt around. It was a hole in the foundation, big enough to accommodate a man. Provided, of course, that the man in question didn’t mind sucking in his gut and squirming under a clutch of wobbly rocks held in place by the barest hint of crumbling mortar, and each large enough to squeeze the breath from his lungs should they dare to fall.

Lucky for me, I was just such a man.

I tried feet-first, but no dice —the hole was maybe three feet off the ground, and once I stuck my legs inside, I couldn’t reach anything to push off of to propel myself inside.