Devil's Creek, page 3
Nobody.
She eased to the center of the doublewide, where she could see down the short hallway.
At the very end, Verlo’s bedroom door stood open.
Her fear shot higher. She wanted to run into a corner and hide until everything had passed. But a nagging worry kept her from following her instincts: Verlo.
Fillmore Schwartz had said the Angel of Death never came for the old or sick, but for those who, by rights, should not die. Verlo, a hearty youth in his early teens, fit that description.
She couldn’t, in good conscience, not check on him at the very least.
She forced her feet forward. Her instincts screamed at her to run, to hide, to leave this house. To leave Devil’s Creek. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears.
Step by step, she walked down the hallway, until she stood a few feet from Verlo’s bedroom door. She looked in.
The twin-sized bed stood against the far wall. A long mound raised the covers where the boy lay sleeping despite the pounding storm. Erika almost breathed out in relief. But the sensation of dread remained. Something still wasn’t right.
Was Verlo dead?
Her first impulse was to wake Axel, but she didn’t want to look like a fool if her apprehensions proved false. After a few moments’ hesitation, she advanced into Verlo’s bedroom.
Lightning blazed through the windows, shredding the darkness like an insane strobe. Erika found herself blinded alternately by brilliance and darkness. Somehow, the experience was worse in this room than in the rest of the house.
Gradually, her eyes adjusted.
The tall figure in the corner remained still, a shapeless mass that blended with the shadows. Even before Erika realized it was there, she stopped. The whole room pulsated with deep forboding that turned her joints soft. She stared at it, praying it wasn’t what she thought it was, and knowing it was anyway. She held still, like a rabbit freezes when it senses danger, with the crazy notion that the threat would fail to notice her and pass on.
She watched the apparition, for how long, she didn’t know.
Then a tense whisper crept out of her mouth:
“Why are you here?”
No answer.
She couldn’t bring herself to repeat the question, too afraid to speak further and knowing she had been heard the first time. Whether it answered or not was its own prerogative. Without speaking a word or moving an inch, it had established with sheer presence who controlled the situation. Erika, not the Angel, was the intruder here.
Besides, the question was ridiculous. She knew why he was here. Why else would the Angel of Death be standing in this room? But still, why? Why Verlo? Why an innocent boy?
The Angel moved out of the shadows toward Verlo’s bed, with no perceptible walking action, as if he glided a bare inch above the floor. She saw the black cloak that hid his entire figure. A deep hood kept his face – if he had one – hidden in darkness. He stood over Verlo, bending over him as if studying the slumbering youth.
Erika wanted to step forward, to reach out in protest, but the cold terror kept her welded to the spot. Her voice came as the barest squeak:
“Why him?”
The Angel straightened. The hood turned toward her.
“Why?” she repeated. Her tongue felt glued to the roof of her mouth. “What has he done?”
Without sound, the Angel spoke.
She heard no words either with her ears or in her head. He just looked at her, and she understood the empty blackness within the hood as if reading the expression on a face.
The Angel had come to take Verlo, not because of something he had done – but because of something he would do.
Thoughts of future events paraded through Erika’s mind. She didn’t see them actually playing out, but rather knew of them in the way she knew of things she read in a newspaper. She was remembering – only remembering something that had yet to happen.
Verlo, now a boy of only thirteen, would grow up to become a vicious killer. Nine women and five children would die horrible deaths at his hands. They would die by means of a hunting knife that, at this moment, lay in a box under Verlo’s bed. He would scatter their dismembered corpses all over the state. The hunt for their killer would last years, involving the best crime detection experts available, but in the end he would elude capture. Verlo Krass would never face justice.
Erika reeled under the shock, a mental blow that almost overwhelmed her terror at standing not ten feet from the Angel of Death himself. Verlo . . . a psychopathic murderer . . .
The Angel had come, not to arbitrarily deal out death, but to save lives.
The Angel’s mission was not one of terror and destruction, but of order and preservation.
Erika stepped back, even more scared of getting in the way. Not only would she be interfering with a supernatural being, but she would also be trying to allow unspeakable acts to play out in the future. But still . . . she couldn’t get past Verlo’s youth. Though she now knew what sort of adult he would become, her eyes still saw a boy sleeping in his bed, blond hair splayed out around his head like a halo.
The Angel watched her for a while, as if deciding whether she would try to stop him, then turned back to Verlo. He stood over the bed for a long time. Then he leaned forward. One arm, long sleeve draping off it like a curtain, reached toward the boy. Erika saw a finger extend, long, narrow, like a distorted skeleton’s.
Erika turned away and closed her eyes. She couldn’t watch . . .
A hurried step from behind startled her, and she opened her eyes again, turning.
An old man, stooped, dripping rain, his thin white hair clinging to his head like spiderweb, glared past her at the apparition in Verlo’s room.
“Stop!” Fillmore Schwartz’s voice snapped like a firecracker amid the rumbling thunder.
The Angel of Death lifted his finger from the boy’s forehead and straightened, facing Fillmore.
“I saw you coming here.” The old man raised a shaky fist. “I saw you coming, and I won’t let you do it again! You stole Maribeth Nelson from me. She should have been mine. She was mine! I won’t let you steal another soul. Not again.”
The Angel of Death remained tall and silent, a black silhouette against the lightning. With a slow turn of the dark hood, he looked down at Verlo, then back at Fillmore.
Erika also looked, and drew in her breath.
Verlo lay in his bed as if still asleep, eyes closed.
But somehow, even from across the room, Erika knew he no longer breathed.
The Angel stepped back into the shadows.
“No!” Fillmore rushed to the bed, felt Verlo’s neck for a pulse. Then he whirled. “NO! Not again! Not again!”
But the Angel was gone.
Fillmore screamed his rage at the ceiling.
Erika remained frozen in the doorway.
* * *
MORNING ARRIVED clear and quiet. Aside from the puddles, the flooded creek, and the scattered debris, one would never have guessed at the previous night’s chaos.
Axel, devastated at the sudden and inexplicable loss of his son, mourned in his trailer house. The locals cut away the tree that had fallen across the westbound road and pulled Axel’s crushed pickup aside so someone could drive out for help. Verlo’s death left many of the Devil’s Creek residents scratching their heads, but others only nodded in the near-smugness of having been right all along.
An ambulance arrived within the hour to carry Marlys away.
Since the grieving Axel was in no condition to complete the work on Erika’s car, she paid one of his neighbors to locate the replacement alternator in the junkyard and install it in her car. Her revived Taurus now stood parked outside the Devil’s Creek Café with her suitcase in the trunk. She had just opened the door, poised to get in.
Fillmore Schwartz sat on the café steps, watching a group of men clear branches and trash off the street. His grey eyes peered out from under the brim of his battered felt hat. His fists lay clenched in his lap. “He always does things that way. He always takes someone who shouldn’t go. Someone with a future. He’s a thief. A thief in the night.”
Erika started to tell him of what the Angel had revealed to her in Verlo’s room last night, but decided against it. How would she relate it without sounding completely insane? Also, she realized, if Verlo had been taken because of deeds he had not yet committed, what did that mean for Maribeth, Fillmore’s old love? Fillmore would never believe her. So she chose to say nothing on the matter.
“I’m sorry your first taste of Devil’s Creek was so poor,” Fillmore said. “It’s really a nice little town. You should come back sometime.”
An electronic ring from her purse made Erika jump. She pulled out her cell phone. Miracle of miracles – she’d finally found a signal. The caller ID read SEAN. She said goodbye to Fillmore and got into the car.
“Thank God,” Sean said when she answered. “Are you okay? I’ve been calling you all night.”
“I’m fine.” She pulled into the street and rolled westward. “I got stranded in a little town called Devil’s Creek. I’m just leaving now.”
“Devil’s Creek? My dad and I hunted up there once. We ate at the café a couple of times, but there was this old guy who hung out there that gave me the creeps.”
Erika hesitated, then launched a guess. “Fillmore Schwartz?”
“Come to think of it, that was his name. How did you know?
“I met him.”
“Holy cow – really?” Sean laughed in disbelief. “That guy must have been ninety when I was there thirteen years ago.”
“He gave you the creeps?”
“Good grief, yes. He was always complaining about how something had been stolen from him. But you know what really got me?”
“What?”
“I asked him what was stolen from him, and he looks me right in the eye and says, ‘A soul. But I just got a replacement.’ Bizarre, huh?”
A slow coldness slid across Erika’s flesh. “Thirteen years ago?”
“Yeah, about that. Why?”
“That . . .” Erika’s voice caught. “That was when Verlo Krass was born. Oh my God . . .”
“What?” Even over the phone, Sean sounded puzzled. “What’s wrong? Who’s Verlo Krass?”
She looked in the rearview. Fillmore Schwartz stood in the middle of the street, watching her leave. Ice sluiced through her.
“Erika?”
“I’ll call you back.”
She hung up, gripped the wheel with both hands, and accelerated, intent on escaping Devil’s Creek.
THE END
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Paul Maitrejean, Devil's Creek
