An Apple for the Creature Read online

  Bird alone remained where he was.

  The audience cried out in fear.

  “Hush,” said the demon, and every voice was stilled. Their mouths moved but there was no sound. People tried to get out of their seats, to flee, to storm the doors; but no one could rise.

  Ben Franklin chuckled mildly. He cocked an eye at Trey. “This performance is for you. All for you.”

  Trey stared at him, his mind teetering on the edge of a precipice. Davidoff, as silent as the crowd, stood nearby.

  “At the risk of being glib,” said the demon, “I think it’s fair to say that class is in session. You called me to provide knowledge, and I am ever delighted, as all of my kind are delighted, to bow and scrape before man and give away under duress those secrets we have spent ten million years discovering. It’s what we live for. It makes us so . . . happy.”

  When he said the word happy lights exploded overhead and showered the audience with smoking fragments that they were entirely unable to avoid. Trey and the others stood helpless at the edge of the circle.

  Trey tried to speak, tried to force a single word out. With a flick of a finger the demon freed his lips and the word, “How?” burst out.

  Ben Franklin nodded. “You get a gold star for asking the right question, young Trey. Perhaps I will burn it into your skull.” He winked. “Later.”

  Trey’s heart hammered with trapped frenzy.

  “You wrote the script for tonight, did you not?” asked the demon. “Then you should understand. This is your show-and-tell. I am here for you. So . . . you tell me.”

  Suddenly Trey’s mouth was moving, forming words, his tongue rebelled and shaped them, his throat gave them sound.

  “A careless magician summons his own death,” Trey said, but it was Davidoff’s voice that issued from his throat. “All of the materials need to be pure. Vital essences—blood, sweat or tears—must never be allowed within the demon’s circle for these form a bridge between the worlds of spirit and flesh.”

  The big screens suddenly flashed with new images. Anthem. Typing, her fingers blurring. The image tightened until the focus was entirely on her fingernails. Nibbled and bitten to the quick, caked with . . .

  “Blood,” said Anthem, her voice a monotone.

  Then Jonesy spoke but it was Davidoff’s bass voice that rumbled from her throat. “A learned magician is a quiet and solitary person. All of his learning, all of his preparation for this ritual must be played out in his head. He cannot practice his invocations because magical words each have their special power. To casually speak a spell is to open a doorway that might never be shut.”

  And now the screens showed Jonesy reading the spells aloud as Anthem typed.

  Trey closed his eyes. He didn’t need to see any more.

  “Arrogance is such a strange thing,” said the demon. “You expect it from the powerful because they believe that they are gods. But you . . . Trey, Anthem, Jonesy . . . you should have known better. You did know better. You just didn’t care enough to believe that any of it mattered. Pity.”

  The demon stepped toward them, crossing the line of the protective circle as if it held no power. And Trey suddenly realized that it did not. Somewhere, the ritual was flawed beyond fixing. Was it Kidd’s sabotage or something deeper? From the corner of his eye Trey could see the glistening lines of tears slipping down Anthem’s cheeks.

  The demon paused and looked at her. “Your sin is worse. You do believe but you fight so hard not to. You fight to be numb to the larger world so that you will be accepted as a true academic like these others. You are almost beyond saving. Teetering on the brink. If you had the chance, I wonder in which direction you would place your next step.”

  A sob, silent and terrible, broke in Anthem’s chest. Trey tried to say something to her, but then the demon moved to stand directly in front of him.

  “You owe me thanks, my young student,” said the demon. “When the late and unlamented Mr. Kidd tried to spoil the results of your project by altering the protection spells, he caused all of this to happen. He made it happen, but not out of reverence for the forces of the universe and certainly not out of any belief in the larger world. He did it simply out of spite. He wanted no profit from your failure except the knowledge that you would be ruined. That was as unwise as it was heartless . . . and I paid him in kind.”

  The demon nudged the heart on the floor. It quivered and tendrils of smoke drifted up from it. Trey tried to imagine the terror Kidd must have felt as this monster attacked him and brutalized him, and he found that he felt a splinter of compassion for Kidd.

  “You pretend to be scholars,” breathed the demon, “so then here is a lesson to ponder. You think that all of religion, all of faith, all of spirit, is a cultural oddity, an accident of confusion by uneducated minds. An infection of misinformation that spread like a disease, just as man spread like a disease. You, in your arrogance, believe that because you do not believe, there is nothing to believe in. You dismiss all other possibilities because they do not fit into your hypothesis. Like the scientists who say that because evolution is a truth—and it is a truth—there is nothing divine or intelligent in the universe. Or the astronomers who say that the universe is only as large as the stones thrown by the Big Bang.” He touched his lips to Trey’s ear. “Arrogance. It has always been the weakness of man. It’s the thing that keeps you bound to the prison of flesh. Oh yes, bound, and it is a prison that does not need to have locked doors.”

  Trey opened his eyes. His mouth was still free and he said, “What?”

  The demon smiled. “Arrogance often comes with blindness. Proof of magic surrounds you all the time. Proof that man is far more than a creature of flesh, proof that he can travel through doorways to other worlds, other states of existence. It’s all around you.”

  “Where?”

  The screens once more filled with the images of Maori with their painted faces, and Navajo shamans and their sand paintings; medicine men in the remote Amazon, singers from among the Bushmen of Africa. As Trey watched, the images shifted and tightened so that the dominant feature in each was the eyes of these people.

  These believers.

  Then ten thousand other sets of eyes flashed across the screens. People of all races, all cultures, all times. Cavemen and saints, simple farmers and scholars endlessly searching the stars for a glimpse of something larger. Something there. Never giving up, never failing to believe in the possibility of the larger world. The larger universe.

  Even Bird’s eyes were there. Just for a moment.

  “Can you, in your arrogance,” asked the demon, “look into these eyes and tell me with the immutable certainty of your scientific disbelief that every one of these people is deluded? That they are wrong? That they see nothing? That nothing is there to be seen? Can you stand here and look down the millennia of man’s experience on Earth and say that since science cannot measure what they see, then they see nothing at all? Can you tell me that magic does not exist? That it has never existed? Can you, my little student, tell me that? Can you say it with total and unshakeable conviction? Can you, with your scientific certitude, dismiss me into nonexistence, and with me all of the demons and angels, gods and monsters, spirits and shades who walk the infinite worlds of all of time and space?”

  Trey’s heart hammered and hammered and wanted to break.

  “No,” he said. His voice was a ghost of a whisper.

  “No,” agreed the demon. “You can’t. And how much has that one word cost you, my fractured disbeliever? What, I wonder, do you believe now?”

  Tears rolled down Trey’s face.

  “Answer this, then,” said the demon, “why am I not bound to the circle of protection? You think that it was because Mr. Kidd played pranks with the wording? No. You found every error. In that you were diligent. And the circles and patterns were drawn with precision. So . . . why am I not bound? What element was missing from this ritual? What single thing was missing that would have given you and these ot
her false conjurers the power to bind me?”

  Trey wanted to scream. Instead he said, “Belief.”

  “Belief,” agreed the demon softly.

  “I’m sorry,” whispered Trey. “God . . . I’m sorry . . .”

  The demon leaned in and his breath was scalding on Trey’s cheek. “Tell me one thing more, my little sorcerer,” whispered the monster, “should I believe that you truly are sorry?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Should I have faith in the regrets of the faithless?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I . . . didn’t know.”

  The demon chuckled. “Have you ever considered that atheism as strong as yours is itself a belief?”

  “I—”

  “We all believe in something. That is what brought your kind down from the trees. That is what made you human. After all this time, how can you not understand that?”

  Trey blinked and turned to look at him.

  The demon said, “You think that science is the enemy of faith. That what cannot be measured cannot be real. Can you measure what is happening now? What meter would you use? What scale?”

  Trey said nothing.

  “Your project, your collection of spells. What is it to you? What is it in itself? Words? Meaningless and silly? Without worth?”

  Trey dared not reply.

  “Who are you to disrespect the shaman and the magus, the witch and the priest? Who are you to say that the child on his knees is a fool; or the crone on the respirator? How vast and cold is your arrogance that you despise the vow and the promise and the prayer of everyone who has ever spoken such words with a true heart?”

  The demon touched Trey’s chest.

  “In the absence of proof you disbelieve. In the absence of proof a child will believe, and belief can change worlds. That’s the power you spit upon, and in doing so you deny yourself the chance to shape the universe according to your will. You become a victim of your own close-mindedness.”

  Tears burned on Trey’s flesh.

  “Here is a secret,” said the demon. “Believe it or not, as you will. But when we whispered the secrets of evocation to your ancestors, when we taught them to make circles of protection—it was not to protect them from us. No. It was us who wanted protection from you. We swim in the waters of belief. You, and those like you, spit pollution into those waters with doubt and cynicism. With your arrogant disinterest in the ways the universe actually works. When you conjure us, we shudder.” He leaned closer. “Tell me, little Trey, now that your faithless faith is shattered . . . if you had the power to banish me, would you?”

  Trey had to force the word out. “Yes.”

  “Even though that would require faith to open the doors between the worlds?”

  Trey squeezed his eyes shut. “Y-yes.”

  “Hypocrite,” said the demon, but he was laughing as he said it. “Here endeth the lesson.”

  Trey opened his eyes.

  --13--

  Trey felt his mouth move again. His lips formed a word.

  “Username?” he asked.

  Anthem looked sheepishly at him and nibbled the stub of a green fingernail. “You’re going to laugh at me.”

  Trey stared at her. Gaped at her.

  “What—?” she said, suddenly touching her face, her nose, to make sure that she didn’t have anything on her. “What?”

  Trey sniffed. He could taste tears in his mouth, in the back of his throat. And there was a smell in the air. Ozone and sulfur. He shook his head, trying to capture the thought that was just there, just on the edge. But . . . no, it was gone.

  Weird. It felt important. It felt big.

  But it was gone, whatever it was.

  He took Anthem’s hand and studied her fingers. There was blood caked in the edges. He glanced at the keyboard and saw the chocolate-colored stains. Faint, but there.

  “You got blood on the keys,” he said. “You have to be careful.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is magic and you’re supposed to be careful.”

  Anthem gave him a sideways look. “Oh, very funny.”

  “No,” he said, “not really.”

  “What’s it matter? I’ll clean the keyboard.”

  “It matters,” he said, and then for reasons he could not quite understand, at least not at the moment, he said, “We have to do it right is all.”

  “Do what right?”

  “All of it,” said Trey. “The spells. Entering them, everything. We need to get them right. Everything has to be right.”

  “I know, I know . . . or the program won’t collate the right way and—”

  “No,” he said softly. “Because this stuff is important. To . . . um . . . people.”

  Anthem studied his face for a long moment, then she nodded.

  “Okay,” she said and got up to get some computer wipes.

  Trey sat there, staring at the hazy outline of his reflection. He could see his features, but somehow, in some indefinable way, he looked different.

  Or, at least he believed he did.

  Academy Field Trip

  DONALD HARSTAD

  Don Harstad is a retired deputy sheriff who lives in Elkader, Iowa, with his wife of forty-eight years and two foundling beagles. Don is the author of several novels, including Eleven Days, Known Dead, The Big Thaw, Long December, and Code 61. This is Don’s first short story, as well as his first venture into the paranormal. He found both experiences to be thoroughly enjoyable.

  On Monday, June 7, 2006, a special one-week course began at the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy at Camp Dodge, just north of Des Moines. The course dealt with “Intelligence Techniques for Gathering Information from Nontraditional Sources, in Relation to Unusual and Unfamiliar Criminal Activities.” The course, as with all the intelligence courses, was by invitation only. There were three instructors and eight experienced officers as students.

  The three instructors were Agent Benjamin Young, Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation; Special Agent Norma Jensen, Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Deputy Sheriff George Bauerkamper of Dubuque County. All three had been involved in intelligence investigations regarding unusual crimes, and all had at least fifteen years in law enforcement.

  —

  The instructors and students assembled in a small classroom that was set some distance from the basic classes, and began precisely at 0900.

  Agent Young began. “Okay, okay, hold it down.” That got a laugh, as the room had been quiet. Young leaned on the podium, and said, “Okay. I know all of you. I don’t think all of you know these two,” and he gestured toward the man and woman behind him. “Norma there is with the FBI. George here’s with the Dubuque County Sheriff’s Department. They’ve done this type of investigation. They know their shit. That’s why they’re here. George busted a funeral home that was involved in necrophilia.” That drew a couple of snickers. “Not quite what you might think,” said Young. “George . . .”

  The deputy stepped to the podium. He smiled. “Thanks, Ben. This wasn’t a case of some undertaker boinking a stiff,” he said. “This guy was pimping dead folks.”

  He had their attention.

  “It was a joint task force, the undertaker in question being in central Iowa. I was fortunate enough,” he said, with a wry grin, “to have one of his customers living in my county. This undertaker, he’d been renting the bodies to a group of necrophiliacs. Six in all. When he’d get their preferred sort of corpse, he’d make a couple of calls to the ones whose, ah, criteria had been met by the recently departed, and get five grand for an hour. Alone. With the deceased. Specials went for upwards of twenty-five thousand dollars for a night.” He stopped, and glanced around the room. “Anybody want to guess what a special was?”

  Nobody moved.

  “A special meant that he’d deliver the departed to your home, and make the pickup when you were done.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” said the Cedar Rapids officer.

  “Getting information on thi
s dude was kind of interesting,” said George. “We’ll be discussing that later.” He stepped back from the podium.

  “Norma . . .” said Young, indicating it was her turn.

  “The one I’m going to share with you,” she said, stepping forward, “involved a man we referred to as the ‘Tour Guide,’ who scouted, obtained, and provided various resorts for the use of several cults in the Southern states, who practiced fun things like pedophilia, demonology, and cannibalism.”

  “Nice,” said the woman detective from Iowa City. “Dealt with fraternities, did he?”

  That got a laugh, including from Norma. “I think mostly they were the parents of the frat rats,” she said. Another laugh. “Getting intel on him was a real challenge. Not even his clientele knew who he was, and almost none of them ever saw him. Payment in cash, at a dead drop.” She smiled briefly. “No pun intended. Anyway, never the same place twice. Never even the same city. I got to travel lots and lots for that one.”

  “Okay, then,” said Ben. “And to tie it in, I was involved in both investigations. So, now you’ve got an idea of what we meant by unusual. Anybody working on one of those right now?”

  Nobody was.

  “That’s a relief. So, then we can concentrate on these cases. Okay, first of all . . .” He handed a stack of papers to the officer at the right front. “Pass these back. It’s sort of a syllabus, but we’ve kept it pretty vague. Understandably.”

  “First thing we do,” said Young, “is define the scope of the investigation. That changes a lot as you go. Then the geographical area, because of jurisdictional stuff. Then describe the offense as well as we know it, and describe any participants or other involved parties. That changes, too. Then we target the weak links, and go for them. Start the dominoes falling, until we get to the top. Just like all intel investigations. Always simple, always easy, and always successful, right?” That was the last laugh of the morning.