Halfway up the second flight of stairs he heard the woman’s screams and knew he was too late.
The faint blush of a breeze tasting him felt weary with the knowledge of death, its condition contagious.
Bill Stern cursed himself for a fool and took the last six steps three at a time. Any sixth sense he might have felt owed was conspicuously absent. Heart hammering, he paused to catch his breath and let his eyes accommodate the murk, his gradually sharpening gaze scanning the grim interior.
The door to her apartment hung open, twisted back grotesquely against its shattered hinges. It made him think of the cheap funfair thrill rides of his teens.
With every new step he took, his hopes fell another notch.
The slaughterhouse stench was overpowering. The wooden stake in his hand felt heavy, reluctant. His mouth was dry and the comforting taste of bourbon was gone. He wanted to slip back downstairs and put his hand back under the driver's seat again. That want, and the charnel house reek, made him feel like a trespasser in a mausoleum, a tomb raider and body thief.
“Don’t be a fool,” he hissed, pushing through the twisted splinters of wood and into Ashley Powell’s apartment. Stake in one hand, claw hammer in the other. Ready.
Standing just beyond the threshold Stern noticed three things almost instantly. First, the reinforcement of the smell; the air laced with the ferrous taint of blood. Second, the stains, red streaks like elongated footprints dragged between the kitchen and the lounge. Third, the noise. Coming from inside the lounge. Someone struggling to rise, knocking something over as their hand flailed out. A grunt, half male, half female, neither sexless nor yet any single sex, the grunt becoming a scream, becoming a woman’s scream...
He forced himself into taking another step. Four more to the door. He licked his lips. The hand clutching the stake was visibly shaking, the knuckles near-white with the pressure. Still the wood felt slippery in his grip.
One step...
Stern eased himself forward, praying silently to whatever God would listen.
Two...
The smell was stronger now, still sickeningly fresh. The stains on the carpet would take some shifting. He nearly laughed out loud at the stupidity of that thought.
Three...
He stood level with the kitchen entrance, facing a thickening mosaic of blood that outlined the shape of a body. The body was gone. There were only haphazard gashes of blood left behind to streak the floor and walls. So much blood it couldn’t all surely belong to the woman. Quietly, almost so quiet as to be silent, he heard the radio whispering out from the windowsill.
Even though it was close to being cold, Stern was sweating. Shifting the hammer to his left hand he wiped the right across his brow. God, he wanted a drink.
After, he promised himself.
Four...
He stepped around into the lounge doorway and saw the Christmas tree covered with its fine frosting of fake snow and its glitterballs reflecting miniature deaths in a thousand fragments across his eyes.
The woman was trying to stand. It was hard to see how she could, with so much blood leaking from her wounded flesh. Her legs were unsteady. She grabbed at the branches of the tree, brought the whole thing down on top of her.
Only then did he see the dead man, or rather the shell of the dead man lying on the floor, the face of St. Malachi’s angel from his nightmares staring up blindly at the ceiling. The wooden stake slipped through his fingers.
She was alive, it, the thing, the Jesus Demon, was dead. It refused to lodge in his mind. He looked at the woman, saw her wounds, knew that if he didn’t help she was going to bleed to death and soon. She lay there, her own eyes dancing with the shine of death approaching.
But he couldn’t move.