Incubi

silver glare.

Jack squinted. A door.

He nosed the Remington into the gap. A dark stairwell led down.

Veronica’s down there.

He opened the door fully, took a step—

“Holy fuck!” he shouted, and squeezed off another round.

A second cloaked figure had lurched out of the doorway and grabbed the shotgun barrel. Ginny wasn’t kidding when she said this fucker was big. He was huge, and worse, he’d taken the shotgun blast full in the gut and didn’t drop. The guy’s hands grasped the barrel and slide: Jack couldn’t feed the next round.

Then the figure chuckled, levered upward, and tore the Remington from Jack’s hands.

The fuckers must be wearing vests under the getups, Jack thought. His heart slugged when the figure broke the slide off the gun.

“Gilles vaz too merciful,” the German said. “He gave you a chance to leave. I vill not.”

“Fraus Herren,” Jack muttered. He shucked the Webley and stepped back. “The false man.”

“Nein. I am more real that you could ever know.”

Careful, Jack warned himself. If they had vests, he’d have to go for a head shot, and that would not be easy with this big, top-heavy revolver.

Marzen lowered his hood and smiled. He withdrew and identical black dagger — a dolch, Jack remembered — and ran his finger along the cutting edge. Blood oozed from the German’s fingertips, and on his own forehead he christened himself, drawing a crude inverted cross.

“I vill cut off your skin. I vill dig out your eyes and eat them. I vill feed your insides to my god.”

“This is a gun, dickbrain,” Jack pointed out. “It shoots bullets. That little nail file you got doesn’t mean shit to me. I’ll shove it up your ass after I blow your head off.” But then he thought: What the hell am I waiting for? He cocked the Webley and sighted down on the German’s head. Marzen didn’t move — he just stood there, grinning. “See you at your autopsy, pal,” Jack said, and squeezed the trigger.

The glass room shook at the big pistol’s report. It sounded like an ash can going off. There was one good thing about the Webley: when it hit, it hit like a runaway truck. The big hot-loaded.455 caught Marzen in the throat and blew him down the stairs. The dolch clattered after him.

How stupid can guys be? Jack wondered. They’d both just stood there and let themselves be shot.

“Jack, what the—”

Jack twirled, aiming the Webley.

Ginny screamed.

“Goddamn it!” he bellowed. “I told you to wait!”

She stood teetering. “I was scared. I heard shots.”

“I just got done killing those two guys. And there’s one more to go. Khoronos.”

“Jack,” she faltered. She held the Smith snub by the edge of its grip. The dried blood on her legs looked like tempera paint. “I told you, they’re not men.”

“Get out of here, Ginny. You’re delirious—”

“They’re devils.”

Jack stared at her. The dock bum had said the same thing. Devils. He pointed to Gilles’ corpse. “See that, Ginny? It’s not a devil. It’s a dead man. There’s another dead man downstairs.” He threw her the keys to his unmarked. “Go down the road and wait in the car.”

He stepped over Gilles’ corpse and headed for the opened mirror panel, but she rushed after him. “Don’t leave me alone!” she pleaded.

He turned, infuriated. “Get out! I got no time to—”

— but what he saw as he turned paralyzed him. He saw Gilles’ corpse lying behind Ginny. Then he saw the corpse…get up.

“Look out!” Ginny was in the way; he couldn’t shoot. Gilles’ hand snapped over her shoulder, grabbed Jack by the collar, and threw him to the floor. Jack heard the Webley slide out of reach.

Ginny’s screams sounded like screeching tires. Jack rose to hands and knees, and looked up. Gilles had straddled Ginny on the floor, clamping her neck down with one hand. These guys aren’t wearing vests, Jack realized. The Frenchman’s cassock hung open, showing meaty shotgun craters. And there was something else—

Ginny screamed and screamed—

My God, the thought poured across Jack’s mind.

He was not looking at a man now, he was looking at a nightmare. The Frenchman’s hand seemed cloven, taloned. And his face—

Sweet Jesus…

— was no human face at all. It seemed barely a face of any kind. Spheric yellow eyes glinted from the malformed cranium. The huge mouth protracted, full of teeth like cracked glass. Two stubs jousted from the runneled foreskull.

A devil’s face, Jack thought.

The Webley had slid across the room, and he didn’t see where the Smith had landed. All that lay between himself and the thing that was killing Ginny was…

The dolch. It glinted blackly just feet ahead of him.

But Jack thought he was going to be sick as he crawled for it. Ginny’s machinelike screams burst out of her throat, flaying the air. They sounded mindless. The thing that had once been Gilles unhinged its wedged jaw. The bezeled teeth shimmered. Jack’s hand landed on the dolch, and he lurched forward just in time to see the gaping maw close completely over Ginny’s screaming face.

Her fists and heels pummeled the glass floor; her body twitched like electrocution. Teeth ground against bone and blood poured as the thing ate Ginny’s face off her skull, like someone eating the icing off a cupcake.

Then a black forked tongue extracted the lidless eyes…

Jack plunged the dolch into the thing’s knobbed spine.

Its howl blasted him across the room. Then the room exploded. Jack covered his head against the rain of glass, squeezing himself into a corner under the avalanche of sound — a tremor like a thousand screams in unison, which rose and rose—

And then stopped.

Then: silence. Like the silence after a bomb going off.

Jack opened his eyes. Ginny’s bare feet twitched a few more times, then she died. Jack did not look at the sloughed red mask of bone where her face had once been. And the thing—

The obscenity in the black cassock was Gilles again. He lay skewed across the floor, dead.

Jack did not reckon this madness. Glass slivers slid off his back as he rose. He picked up the Webley and headed down the stairs.

They were narrow and dark. They turned at what must be the first-floor landing, and suddenly he detected light. It wavered dimly. Candlelight, he realized. The basement.

And he knew what to expect.

Marzen would be waiting, slightly more or slightly less than human.

* * *

The words turned about her head like quiet birds—“Pater terrae, per me terram ambula”—and then yes she thought she saw a bird a beautiful black bird rising like light from a chasm and something else even more beautiful rising behind it and then she heard more words smoking words I am Baalzephon, Father of the Earth. Be one with me and my minions, my love. Be with me forever.

The man made of flames took Veronica’s hand and kissed it.

* * *

Jack picked up the German’s fallen dolch on the first landing. Again, he did not even attempt to sew reality into the madness he’d witnessed. Perhaps he was mad himself by now.