Virgil stared at the dancing flame of a candle on his
nightstand while he tried to stay awake. He had made plans to sleep in shifts
with Lucy to make sure the candles didn’t start a fire. The kids both lay
horizontally across the foot of the bed, and they clung to each other even in
their sleep.
He glanced at the clock, though it
only confirmed that he had another half hour to sit through before his shift
ended. A sarcastic part of his mind admitted that it was far more likely that a
banshee would show up right after he’d drifted into a nightmare than it would
for the creature to arrive while Lucy was enjoying her visit in dreamland.
He shook his head at the thought.
He’d set himself up for nightmares. No, he’d volunteered for them. He’d even
broken a few laws to find more nightmares to keep him awake. Still, what he’d
learned could possibly make the difference in saving his family and neighbors.
He tried to console himself that the safety of his family was worth the
nightmares, but it seemed to him that he finally understood the true meaning of
the saying “ignorance is bliss.”
A shadow near the door caught his
attention, and he stiffened when he saw it flow across the floor near the most
dimly lit areas. He leaned over to grab two of the candles from the nightstand
and got up before he moved to the door. Lowering the candles down over the
shadow, he saw it puff up and away from the carpet before fading, but he
suspected the banshee was far from done trying to sneak in past the light.
Somewhere nearby, a screech began
to pierce the air.
Lucy woke up, asking, “Virgil,
what’s wrong?”
“Stay on the bed,” Virgil said.
“Get some of the candles in hand and pull the kids in close.”
“It’s in the house?” Lucy whimpered.
He nodded. “All of you should hold
a candle close to you. This thing is able to slip through dim spots, but it
turns into smoke under direct light.”
He lowered a candle to send away
another tendril of black smoke when the screams began. He grimaced but forced
himself not to think how likely it was that the couple screaming was Derrick
and his wife Judith. Another tendril crept in at the side of the door, and he
dispersed it while he tried to remember if Derrick had any kids or not. The
screeching faded without any child screaming. He assumed that they didn’t.
Virgil heard someone knocking on
his front door, and he groaned as he shook his head. “Lucy, grab the
flashlights from the drawer! Hurry!”
“But it these things drain—”
“We have to try!” Virgil moved to
clutch both of the candles in one hand while he took one of the flashlights
from his wife. He gestured at the door with the light. “All right, I want you
to open the door and flick your light on as soon as it’s wide open.”
“All right,” Lucy agreed quietly.
Virgil wasn’t surprised to find
the figure outside his door. It looked very much like a thin man wrapped in a
cloak, but something about the way in which the cloak flowed around the figure seemed
unreal. Red eyes opened to watch him, and a hissing voice spoke. So nice of you to invite us in.
Virgil hadn’t really heard the
voice. Rather, he felt it as a sensation inside his head. He took a step back,
realizing that Lucy had frozen. She was unable to think, let alone operate a
complicated device like a flashlight.
Virgil shook his head, his voice
thick as he said, “I’m not inviting you in, asshole.” He flipped on the switch
of his flashlight and gasped at the loud screech that came from the creature
before it dissipated.
The pounding on his door became
frantic.
“Virgil, don’t go out there,” Lucy
whined. “It’s still here in the house. I know it.”
“Yeah, I do too, but eventually,
it’s going to go for the targets outside.” Virgil turned at the sound of his
door being kicked down. There were many footsteps, and well before he saw
anyone, he could see a bright light that filled the stairwell.
Tony sighed the moment he saw
Virgil. Grinning with relief, he waved at his kerosene lantern and finished climbing
the last few steps. “I’d forgotten that I bought this for our camping trips.”
Virgil nodded, waving for him to
come closer. Behind him were two other husbands, Brad Mitchell and Richard
Maddox, who followed very closely behind Tony. Virgil gestured toward the men
and smiled wanly. “This is all that remains of the bravest men?”
“No, everyone else is outside
waiting for you. These are the only ones brave enough to still walk into a
house where they just heard—” he stopped himself as a screech filled the air,
and a moment later, it was joined by a chorus of screams from the men outside.
“Damn,” Virgil muttered, glancing
at his family with an uncertain expression. He didn’t want to leave them alone
even with a room full of candles. But whoever had survived the attack was still
standing in the open.
The screech faded, and the problem
was solved for him as four men ran into his house and up the stairs in a full
panic. Virgil let them rave for a minute before he whistled to silence them.
“How many did you lose outside?”
“Three.”
Virgil turned his flashlight on
the man who spoke, and he nodded a greeting as he recognized the block’s single
retiree, James Huxley. He dropped the flashlight and said, “Right, so I guess
you saw which way the banshee came from.”
“Yeah, it slid right out of your
front door. I’d barely had time to point at it when it sprang off of the ground
and...”
“What?” Virgil asked.
“I dunno,”
James said, his voice filled with anxious tension. “It was kind of like
watching oil being poured over them. They screamed and dropped, and then
the––the banshee just evaporated.”
“Okay, first, we need to move
those bodies out of the street,” Virgil said. “After that, Tony and I will go
over to Derrick’s house to check if anyone survived, but I’m not holding out
hope.”
Virgil walked around the other men
to descend the stairs. He went to the kitchen and turned on the light, moving
to the cabinet under the sink to fetch his wife’s rubber cleaning gloves.
The gloves were too small for him,
and they threatened to break when he pulled them on. But he had no intention of
touching any of the bodies directly. Fearing that the gloves could split under
stress, he grabbed a set of plastic grocery bags from under his kitchen sink.
He stuffed them into his hip pocket and turned around.
Virgil noticed the squeamish
expressions of the other men, and he knelt down again to start passing out
bags. No explanation for their use was needed, and before he had finished, most
of the men were tying the bags over their hands.
No one spoke as they worked to
move the bodies into Derrick’s garage. Virgil knew the police wouldn’t be happy
to have both of the crime scenes altered, but he was beyond the point of
caring. He suspected that when the police showed up, they wouldn’t need to bother
with gathering clues anyway.
Virgil took off the gloves and
carefully folded one over the other to throw them away in Derrick’s trash can.
He glanced at Tony, who only nodded a confirmation that he was ready before
they went into the house.
Both bodies were peeled, but
Judith was still breathing.
Virgil stared at the pulpy, red
body as the skinned woman moved to drag herself out of the bedroom. Turning to
regard Tony with a sickened look, he said, “If you want to stay clean, you’d
better leave now.”
“What?” Color seeped out of Tony’s
face as recognition came to him. “Hey, you aren’t going—”
“If we call the hospital, they’ll
hold her body for the two days it takes this thing to gestate, and then there
will be another banshee coming back here to finish us off.”
“Virgil...damn.” Tony looked down
at Judith’s body and took a deep breath. “How will we do it?”
Virgil thought about it for a
moment before he grimaced. “We’ll have to burn her.”
“No, man, that’s—”
“Tony, she’s already dead. The only
thing moving her is the monster in her womb. I know for a fact that exposure to
light doesn’t kill these things. It just makes them lose their form. If we want
to kill this thing, we have to burn her.”
“How?”
“We’ll put her in the tub and find
something flammable. If there’s nothing in the house or the garage, we’ll
siphon their car and use gas.” Virgil bowed his head to check Judith’s progress
while he tugged a pair of grocery bags from his pocket. He finished covering
his hands and still got no response. Casting a frustrated glance at his
neighbor, he leaned over to grab the ankles and roll the body over.
He had already accepted that
Judith was dead, and he didn’t bother to be gentle. Stepping backward toward
the bathroom, he dragged Judith by her legs. He checked behind himself often to
avoid having to watch the arms of the body flailing as the monster inside tried
to get away.
Every time he looked up, he found
Tony glaring at him, as though he were somehow failing to respect Judith. But
there was no point in arguing, and he remained silent while he moved into the
bathroom and flipped the body into the tub. It landed hard, splattering blood
all over the inside of the tub and eliciting a sickened groan from Tony.
Their search for fuel ended in the
garage with a can of pain thinner. Virgil sent Tony outside and returned to the
bathroom. He took a deep breath and held it before he started to pour the
thinner over the body. It writhed weakly while the mouth opened in a series of
panting whimpers, and he tried not to think about how convincing the monster’s
act was as he walked out of the bathroom. He moved to the kitchen and tore a
paper towel down from the roll mounted above the sink. Lighting the paper on
the stove, he returned quickly to the bathroom to drop his mini torch onto
Judith’s body.
Even though he stepped back, the
rising fumes of the thinner blasted a fireball up and out of the tub. Virgil
fell back and shut his eyes, crying out in pain. His hand flew to where his
face and neck were singed, and he tried to stand up before the creature in the
tub shrieked loud enough to pop both of his eardrums and drop him back onto his
knees.
Clamping his hands to the sides of
his head, he got up and ran out of the bathroom with his head down. Just
outside the front door he collided with Tony, who took hold of his arms to stop
him. Virgil looked up at his neighbor, but for the longest time, he heard
nothing of what Tony said.
Virgil muttered that he’d been
deafened and sat down on the steps of the front porch.
Minutes passed before he heard
Tony ask, “Hey, Virgil?”
“Yeah?” Virgil frowned at the way
his voice seemed muffled inside his head.
“Are you okay?” asked Tony.
“No, I really don’t think so.”
Virgil hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward the front door. “The guy who
called me a prima donna is dead, and I had to set his
wife on fire. I’m pretty sure that I killed the banshee inside her, because
that screech was much louder than...” Virgil looked around at the door then
glanced down at the lantern. “Tony, get everybody over to my house now. Tell
them to bring every last candle with them.”
“Why, what are you thinking?”
“Think hard, okay? What would you
do as a parent if you’d just heard one of your children put to death?”
Tony didn’t say a word before he
dashed away from the porch. Virgil nodded to himself and got up to run back to
his house. Within minutes, the living room and kitchen were full of people.
“What’s going on now?” Lucy asked.
“Just get ready for the worst,”
Virgil whispered to her before he stepped up onto his coffee table and clapped
his hands. “Okay, this may just be a false alarm. I’m praying to God it is, but
I’ve just killed an infant banshee, and I’m sure you all heard it scream before
it died. It screamed loud enough to deafen me, so I suspect its parent will be
bringing some help here for revenge.”
“Wait, then why are we all here
with you?” Richard asked. “Maybe you ought to go sit alone in a room with a lot
of candles.”
Virgil stared at him. “Have you
missed the body count today, Richard? You think tossing me outside is going to
appease the banshees and make them go away? Look, everyone blaze a candle, and
start picking out rooms. We’ll have this place full, but we’ll also have it
full of light.”
“And what if that doesn’t work?”
Richard challenged angrily.
Virgil thought about it before he
shrugged. “Then we’ll all die.” |