Thomas Sniegoski - In the House of the Wicked

The barn was empty, nothing but the lingering aroma of magick in the dusty air, too faint to track. “Damn it,” he snarled in frustration.

He walked toward the smoldering wreckage of the farmhouse and surveyed the remains. Something wedged beneath a section of wall caught his attention. He reached down and pulled away plaster that disintegrated in his grasp, to reveal a charred skull nestled in a pile of ash. Pulling the remains from the rubble, he gave the skull a shake, loosening the soot that clung to it. The skull was far heavier than it should have been, and as Remy ran a finger along the jawline, he came to the realization that it was not composed of bone, but from some sort of stone.

Or clay.

He gazed at the grinning skull for a moment, then pulled his cell phone from his pocket and placed a call.

“Yeah, it’s me,” he said into the phone. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I think I might need some help.”

The jet-black limousine cut through the rainy Detroit night, tires hissing as they rolled across the water-covered blacktop.

From the backseat, Algernon Stearns gazed out at the dilapidated ruins that had once housed businesses but now were just empty shells, reminders of what had been.

Shadowy figures watched from doorways as the luxurious vehicle drove past. Stearns could feel their eyes, their hungry eyes, starving for just a morsel of what he had.

With that thought, his own body began to ache. Every part of him, right down to the individual cells, was suddenly awake, demanding to be fed. Calling it hunger did no justice to the agony; it was so much more than that. He had learned to live with the pain but not to ignore it, for to do so was to suffer beyond words.

Stearns looked at the crumpled piece of paper in his hand, then leaned his head against the cool, tinted glass of the window, allowing his eyes to follow the ascending numbers on the storefronts.

“Right here, Aubrey,” he announced, tapping the glass with the diamond ring he wore.

The driver obeyed at once, slowing the car and pulling over to the curb in front of a particularly dismal-appearing structure. The driver exited the vehicle and moved around to the rear passenger’s door, holding an umbrella in one hand as he opened the door with the other.

“Thank you, Aubrey,” Stearns said as he stood and breathed in the humid air of the nearly deceased city.

“Shall I go with you?” Aubrey asked, closing the door.

“No need.” Stearns eyed the building before him. “I should be fine.” He felt a tremor in his legs brought on by the hunger, and hoped that he had the strength he would need to accomplish what had brought him to Michigan on such an ungodly night.

“Very good, sir,” the driver said. He shielded Stearns from the rain as they walked toward the front entrance of the building, then promptly turned back to the limousine when Stearns gestured him away.

There was a filth-encrusted buzzer on the side of the metal door, and Stearns tentatively raised a finger. Deciding that he wouldn’t be making contact with it long enough to catch something contagious, he quickly pressed the button.

How many of these kinds of visits have I made over the years? he pondered as he waited. He looked back to the car and saw that Aubrey still stood with the umbrella, observing his progress. His driver was one of a kind. He had actually passed away from pancreatic cancer a year ago, but Stearns wasn’t about to let death stand in the way of twenty-five years of excellent service. Good help was so hard to find; a simple spell of resurrection had saved Stearns the trouble.

A sharp click interrupted his musings as the door popped open about a half inch. Stearns gave his driver a nod as he pulled open the door and slipped inside the building.

It was dark in the entryway, lit by only a single bulb from an emergency light; its partner had burned out. There was a door below the emergency light, and Stearns moved toward it, careful to avoid the dust-covered pieces of office furniture that had been left in the hallway.

Is that where Daphene is waiting?

Stearns had been searching for his former lover for quite some time and had begun to believe that she had met an untimely end, when she had reached out to him. She had learned of the murders of Desplat and Montecello and feared the future for herself. They had arranged a meeting, and here he was.

Stearns stopped short just before the door, encountering one of the largest rats he had ever seen. He considered grabbing something from the floor to throw at it, but the way it looked at him-unwavering as it balanced on its thick, gray haunches-was almost as if it were studying him.

Verifying him.

Seemingly satisfied, the rat turned its large, hairy body toward the door that opened with an offending buzz.

Stearns stepped through the heavy door and began to follow the rat down a series of concrete steps. Wall-mounted emergency lights tinted the stairway an arterial red. They descended three levels, the already damp air growing more fetid with the nearly choking smell of urine.

As he reached the last step, the rodent darted quickly away into a patch of darkness. Stearns could not see what waited beyond it, but knew that was where he needed to go.

Cautiously, he entered the shadow. Something smelling of mildew brushed against his cheek, and he recoiled, then carefully reached out to touch what seemed to be velvet curtains. He pushed them roughly aside and entered another passageway. The rat was waiting for him and turned to scamper through an open doorway at the far end of the short corridor, where a flickering light in the room beyond beckoned.

A sudden spasm of pain nearly sent Stearns to his knees, reminding him of what he needed. He took a deep breath and managed to right himself, using the damp cinder-block wall to steady himself as he made his way toward the room at the end of the hall.

The air grew heavier with the stench of mold and piss, and there was also a sound. He could not place it at first, but when he was finally able to discern the squeaks and growls of multiple rats, an image started to form inside his head.

An image that became reality as he stepped into the large, underground storage room.

The floor was a sea of writhing, furry bodies. Everywhere he looked there were rats, thousands of them, crawling atop one another, some lashing out with snarls and hisses, some busily grooming themselves as if wanting to impress a suitor, some just attempting to scurry from one area of the floor to another, others simply waiting for who knew what.

Stearns was both disgusted and fascinated.

“Is that you, Algernon?” a woman’s voice asked from somewhere in the room.

“Daphene?” he called out, moving farther into the room, trying not to step on the living carpet at his feet.

“I’m so glad you were able to come,” the woman said.

And with those words, the rats seemed to part like the Red Sea before Moses, revealing a hunched figure sitting in a wheelchair at the far end of the space.

Stearns had expected to see the same vivacious woman with whom he’d shared numerous sexual liaisons over the many years they had been alive, perhaps a bit older, given the time that had passed since last they’d seen each other, but still with the same hungry vitality for life she had always possessed.

But the closer he got, the more disturbed he became.

For sitting in the wheelchair was a swollen wreck of a woman, her obscenely fat body straining against the material of the drab, short-sleeved dress she wore. Her arms were pale and flabby, like unbaked dough; her legs were a mess of blue veins crisscrossing beneath mottled, ulcerated skin. Her slippers were split at the sides, unable to contain the flesh of her puffy feet.