The Devil's Own

== THE DEVIL'S OWN ==
=== by Tom Olbert ===
Published on Short-Stories.me 2010
Jeremy’s
flesh crawled at the unmistakable sound of immense claws raking across the
wooden roof tiles. In the midnight darkness, shadows danced across the bare
wooden floor in the flickering light of an oil lantern.
His sister
Alison screamed and clutched at their mother. “Hush, both of you,” their father
whispered sternly, and blew out the lantern.  Jeremy crossed himself as
the room went pitch black.  Alison’s scream was muffled, apparently by
Mother clamping a hand over her mouth.
“Hush,
child,” he heard Mother say in a quieter whisper still, terror showing in the
faintest quiver of her voice.  The hair stood up on Jeremy’s neck at an
ungodly sound, like a thousand snakes slithering across the roof.  And, a
low, muffled clicking.  Shotgun blasts shattered the darkness. 
Jeremy’s heart froze.  His father and two neighbor men were briefly
illuminated in the flashes as they fired at the ceiling.  Alison’s screams
intermingled with the inhuman shrieking that penetrated Jeremy’s heart.
He shut his
eyes tightly and prayed.  He had the coldest feeling that no one heard.
*****
At dawn’s
pale light, the villagers gathered in stunned silence in the damp morning
chill, around the half-devoured remains of their slaughtered animals. 
“What have we done to bring this on ourselves,” old pastor Stephens said in a
horror-stricken whisper, the others muttering under their breath.  “Ours
has always been a God-fearing village.”
Jeremy
shivered, a tremor passing through him as he tried to shake off the lingering
terror of the night before.  After the horror of waking reality had faded
into the seemingly endless night, his sleep…what little there was…was no more
peaceful.  He had been haunted by childhood nightmares of iron dragons and
fire from the sky.  We deserved this, he asked himself, something
rebelling inside him at the thought.  Even the pastor admitted
doubt.  Were not all the answers there in his precious book?  He knew
such thoughts were forbidden, but…he felt solid foundations he’d long trusted
weakening beneath him. 
“Jeremy,
are you well?”
He started
at the sound of the girl’s voice.  Stephanie.  Lovely as ever, her
pretty brown eyes showing concern.  Her presence brought the promise of a
smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.  As always, her closeness
brought a light tingling to his chest and a cloudy haze over his vision. 
Though it felt foolish, even sinful in the wake of the hellish atrocities the
village had just suffered, it was a welcome touch of humanity that brought
warmth flowing back into his veins.  He pulled himself tall and straight,
hoping to impress her.  “Yes, are you?”
She
nodded.  “We hid in our root cellar.  They killed two of our cows,
but hurt none of us, thank the Heavenly Father.”  She stepped closer,
drawing her shawl about her shoulders.  Her breath was white steam as it
touched his cheek.  He felt warm.  “I was worried about you.” 
She smiled, sweetly.  He felt himself blushing as he worked up the courage
to reach for her hand.  The night before had taught him how brief and
fragile a thing life was, how precious every moment.
There was a
harsh commotion, his neighbors shouting.  He looked up and saw the
stranger in the black frock coat and wide-brimmed hat riding into the village
on a finely-groomed black stallion.  A hush fell over the crowd as the
stranger reined his horse to a stop.  He touched the brim of his hat and
surveyed the villagers with cold grey eyes.  Heads bowed, eyes averting
from the stranger’s fearsome gaze.
A lump
formed in Jeremy’s throat as Stephanie nestled behind him, softly touching his
arm.  They both knew full well this man was an inquisitor from the Church
Directorate.  Jeremy crossed himself and clasped her hand.  May God
protect us, now.
*****
Jeremy coughed,
covering his nose and mouth against the choking stench of the bodies in the
fire.  He stole a fearful glance, his eyes tearing in the smoke. Men with
kerchiefs around their faces pushed the bodies of the slain into the fires with
pitchforks.  Human flesh blistered and roasted in the crackling
blaze.  He looked away, feeling sick.  “God casts out the Devil’s
own,” the Inquisitor shouted, holding his gold cross aloft, its metal glinting
in the firelight.  The flames illuminated the Inquisitor’s gaunt, pale
face.  His voice was strong.  Unlike the gathered villagers, he
seemed unaffected by that awful stench.  His eyes were cold as the stern
gray sky, showing not a tear, despite the cursed black smoke blowing through
the crowd, black ashes fluttering down in a horrid rain.  Jeremy felt a
revulsion, a hatred rising inside him like the flames.
As Jeremy
looked away, he saw the next of the condemned being dragged to his fate in
ropes by the villagers.  He could barely recognize the man as the old
miller, Ezekiel Corbin.  Jeremy averted his eyes in revulsion from the
once-man’s hideously distorted and wildly asymmetrical face.  Black
lesions swelled from what had been flesh and bone.  Curved fangs and
mandibles protruded from under peeling, rotted human flesh.  The man’s
shirt had been torn open by his captors, revealing flesh turning black as coal,
the nubs of tentacles writhing horribly. The poor wretch growled and sputtered
in a voice no longer even remotely human.  The villagers howled and shrieked
hatefully, pelting the wretched creature with stones.  His face was
smashed open, grayish blood spurting from the wounds as the half-human thing
staggered in half-consciousness, pulled toward the fire.  Jeremy winced,
feeling the pain of those wounds.  Would anyone choose this, he wondered,
blinking back stinging tears, his gut twisting.
“Let all
whom would consort with the beast know…the true servants of the Lord shall
smite thee without quarter or mercy!” the Inquisitor shouted, waving his holy
book.  “By these flames, our land is purified of this hellish evil!”
Jeremy
could stand no more.  His head swimming, he staggered from the crowd and
smoke, feeling faint and sick.  He leaned against a tree and breathed
deeply, wiping cold sweat from his face.  He feared he might be ill. 
He started, a soft hand on his shoulder.  Stephanie.  “Come with me,
Jeremy,” she whispered urgently in his ear.  “Let us get away from
here.”  Her eyes pled with him, though he needed precious little coaxing. 
She took his hand and led him away.  They left the village, making their
way into the surrounding woods.
Where, it
was said, lived the demons.
*****
The meadow
overlooking the brook was a peaceful, beautiful place.  Jeremy smiled and
sniffed the sweet fragrance of a pretty wildflower he’d picked, the sun
breaking through the clouds, blue sky appearing.  Stephanie giggled,
child-like as she playfully nuzzled his ear.  It was like a beautiful
dream.  Or, was it the waking of reality, the nightmare of the village at
last left behind?  He felt more free than he’d ever felt before.
He
pretended to protest as she removed his hat and ran her slender fingers
playfully through his hair.  “Jeremy…” she whispered, kissing him lightly
on the cheek.  “Have you ever ventured down there, beyond the river’s
fork?”
The
question sent a cold pang through his stomach, but he took care not to let her
see his fear.  “No.  I’ve had no reason to.  Why?”
“The
forbidden place.”  She said it with an enticing hint of wonder as she
looked off down the river, her face snuggling beside his.  “If the elders
and the Church Fathers don’t want us to go there…might it be the path to
freedom?”  He fought to repress a shudder as he looked off at the shadowed
forest path leading down the hillside into the dark caves beyond.  An evil
place, it was said.  Some said, the very threshold of hell itself. 
But, the mention of freedom stirred some long-hidden longing, tucked away in a
dark corner of his gut the pastor would have called a hiding place for sin.
“No one’s
ever come back,” he said quietly, his throat constricting.  He cursed his
wretched fear.  He did not want to appear a coward in her eyes.  But,
everything he had ever been taught, either by his parents, or in the school
house…indeed, every fiber of his being it seemed, filled his body with a
paralytic, icy cold at the mere thought of that unholy place.
She gently
turned his face to hers, her hands on his cheeks.  “I have.”  She
said it with a cold smile, her eyes penetrating with a dark knowledge beyond
her 15 years.  He felt an icy chill spread through him.  He began to
pull away.  “Don’t,” she said gently, softly stroking his face.  “I
could never hurt you.  You know that.”  She slowly removed his jacket
and began unbuttoning his shirt.  His head pitched and swayed in the soft
breeze, his eyes clouding over in a light haze, the birds distantly chirping in
the rustling branches.  The fear and the passion battled inside him, the
passion drowning the fear.  He surrendered to the one thing he could
trust.  His love for her.  He didn’t protest as she lay upon him, her
sweet lips upon his.  His fingers played through the softness of her
loose, wild hair.
He
smiled.  He had never felt so alive.
*****
He awoke
with a start, in darkness.  The sun had all but set.  Only a dim,
smoldering red line marked the tops of the trees.  The first faint stars
were already peeking out.  He looked about, frantically, in the shadows,
picking up his hat and coat.  Stephanie stood silhouetted by the river’s
edge, the sunset turning the rippling waters burning blood red behind
her.  “We should go,” she said coolly, buttoning the bodice of her
dress.  “Our parents will be out looking for us.”
His heart
pounded in fear as he clumsily buttoned his shirt and pulled on his
jacket.  He imagined he must look like a disheveled scarecrow.  His
face flushed hot.  “What are we going to tell them?”
She stood
there looking at him, her face hidden in black shadow.  “We’re not going
back to the village, Jeremy.  We can never go back.  Not now. 
We have to go there.”  She pointed down the river.  To the forbidden
place.  He felt his face go cold.  Dear God.  Was she mad? 
Or…was she…  His teeth began to chatter, and his whole body to tremble as
she started slowly towards him.  He wanted desperately to run.  But,
his feet were anchored to the earth.  Some unseen power bound him to
her.  The coldness running through him was supplanted by warmth as she
drew close.  The last rays of the sun slipped below the tree line,
darkness closing in.  He could not move.  “Come.  My love.” She
said, her hand touching his face.
He
recoiled, his blood freezing at the feel of leathery flesh against his cheek
and the tips of sharp claws ruffling his hair.  He heard the fabric of her
dress tearing as multiple writhing tentacles extended, brushing his arm. 
A familiar clicking sound came from her unseen face, a soft slurping sound
intermingling with the gnashing of curved fangs.  He screamed and ran
blindly into the night.
His mind
was a wash of gray shadows, branches whipping his face, the rasping sound of
his own labored breathing filling his ears.  A cold prickling ran down his
spine, as though something were closing in from behind.  “God, forgive me
my sin,” he whispered under his breath, his brain numb with fear. 
“Heavenly Father, protect me…”  He tripped, crying out in sharp pain, his
ankle twisting.  He groaned in pain as he tumbled down a steep incline,
stones battering his sides.  He scraped his forehead as he slid into the
dirt.  He gasped, whimpering as he struggled to rise, his head
swirling.  He looked around, now completely lost in pitch-blackness. 
His hand touched something.  The rough bark of a tree trunk.  His
face was streaming with sweat, his heart pounding, his lungs pumping like twin
bellows.
Branches
cracked in the woods behind him.  He started, then heaved a grateful sigh
of relief as he heard the approaching voices of men and saw smoky shadows
dancing through the faint orange glow of torches.   His heart leapt
as he discerned the angry but welcome voice of his father.  “Father,” he
shouted with joy, as best as his strangled voice could muster, and staggered
toward the torchlight.  “Over here.  It’s Jeremy.”
“Son?” 
He soon found himself facing his father, and surrounded by neighbor men, all
with torches.  He smiled, weakly.  He had never been so happy to be
facing the prospect of a lashing, now so close at hand.  God had spared
him, in spite of his sin and foolishness.  He silently recited a prayer of
thanks, and vowed he would never again stray from the teachings of Pastor
Stephens or his parents.  His heart grew cold, the blood draining from his
face as the Inquisitor stepped from behind his father, his penetrating eyes
like gray-silver glass reflecting the torchlight.
“Out for a
late stroll, are we, young squire,” he asked coldly, fingering his crucifix.
A lump
formed in Jeremy’s throat.  He looked at his father.  His father
looked more fearful than Jeremy had ever seen him, licking his lip and glancing
nervously at the Inquisitor.  “Good sir…” he said in an uncharacteristically
submissive voice.  The Inquisitor raised a hand, and Jeremy’s father
turned his head down, wincing in obvious pain.  Jeremy’s knees turned to
putty.
“Step
forward into the light, young sir,” the Inquisitor ordered, beckoning with his
finger.  Jeremy had to force his legs to move, his feet seemingly weighed
down with massive iron chains.  “Raise your right arm.”
Jeremy
hesitated, staring into the man’s face.  “S-Sir?”
“Raise your
right arm, I said!  Into the light, that I might see.”  Puzzled,
Jeremy did as the Inquisitor commanded.  The men all gasped in horror,
drawing back and crossing themselves.  Even Jeremy’s father.  The
Inquisitor raised his cross and said something in some book-learned tongue only
churchmen knew.  Frightened and confused, Jeremy looked down at his
arm.  His heart turned to ice.  His brain froze in horror.  The
flesh of Jeremy’s hand had turned to a leathery hide black as coal.  The
fingers had elongated to twice their former length and now ended in curved claws. 
His second and third finger had fused into one.  In the torchlight he
could see that, under his loosened shirt cuff, the black rot of the mutation
was spreading up his arm.  Dear God, no.  “The Devil’s poison has
claimed another!  Kill him!  Burn the evil from his bones!”
Jeremy’s
heart throbbed as the men surrounding him circled like rabid jackals, broad
smiles crossing their stubbled faces as they brandished ropes and knives. 
“No!” his father shouted.  “You cannot take my only son!  He can be
cured, I tell you!  Can not the love of our family and church exorcise the
devil’s touch?”
“He is one
of the Devil’s own now, man,” the Inquisitor said sternly.  “The fire is
his only salvation.  Do not interfere, or you too will face my
judgment!”  The sharp bite of a horsehide rope cut into Jeremy’s throat as
he was seized from behind.  His head spun with pain as he felt ropes
biting into his arms, cutting off his circulation.
“No!” he
heard his father screaming as Jeremy was bound to a tree.  “Get away from
him, you murdering heathen!”  He attacked like a madman, slashing at the
men with a sickle.  One of them stepped up behind him and thrust his arm
forward.  Jeremy saw his father’s head snap back, a grimace of pain on his
face.  His father sank slowly to his knees.  The man behind him put
his boot to his back and pushed him faced-down into the dirt, pulling the
bloodied knife from his back.  Jeremy choked on a strangled scream. 
Another man howled in joyous hatred as he lifted an axe over his head and swung
it toward the head of the fallen man on the ground before him.  Jeremy
averted his eyes as he heard a softly muffled crack, followed by harsh,
guttural laughter. He sobbed, tears streaming down his face.  What had he
done?  His sin had brought his father to this.  Why had God condemned
an innocent man for the sins of his son?
The men
began gathering kindling and stacking it around the base of the tree, piling it
over Jeremy’s feet. He grit his teeth in anger, his wrists straining against
the ropes.  He glared in hatred at the pale, death-like figure of the
Inquisitor.  “Damn you!” he screamed, rage rising from his gut, the wood
creaking against the ropes.  “Damn you all to hell!!”
“Burn him!”
the Inquisitor shouted.  The torches drew close.  Then,
stopped.  The laughter and obscene chatter of the men stopped cold. 
The men looked around, fearful expressions on their faces as their eyes scanned
the rattling, creaking boughs above.  From the darkened upper branches
came a familiar slithering sound and hungry clicking.  The man closest to
the tree moved slowly back, raising his torch.  He screamed as something
reached down and seized him.  His torch fell and ignited the wood at
Jeremy’s feet as the man was pulled off the ground, his feet dangling in
mid-air.  One last scream as the man’s legs jerked and hung still.  A
spray of blood splattered across the grass and across Jeremy’s
shirtfront.  The blood hissed and sizzled as the fire roared to life,
circling the tree.  In the firelight, Jeremy saw the black tentacled things…shapes
unimaginable.  They moved so swiftly, living black shadows.  Their
claws and fangs flashed like knives in the firelight, disemboweling the
screaming men, tentacles pulling them up into the trees.  A strange sense
of wild animal titillation raced hot through Jeremy’s blood at the
carnage.  He felt a part of him was dying, the rest eagerly becoming part
of the wildness of these God-forsaken woods.
Jeremy
roared in pain as his clothes caught fire.  He strained in rage, the ropes
catching fire and snapping like thread as his limbs found surprising
strength.   Jumping clear of the fire and pulling off his burning
coat and shirt, he turned and found himself staring straight into the face of a
demon.  If it could be called a face at all.  A gaping, sucking,
diamond-shaped black maw of bloodied fangs and clicking mandibles, brimming
with human gore.   Astonishingly, he felt no terror.  No
revulsion.  Only a mouth-watering hunger.  He gasped and drew back in
fear as the creature before him burst into flames, screeching its inhuman death
rattle.  Jeremy shielded his eyes from the flames, and saw the Inquisitor,
the gold cross brandished in his hand.  The crucifix glowed like golden
fire, a radiating beam of light like the rising sun emanating from it. 
The Inquisitor’s face was cold as ever as he turned, the light from his
crucifix like a fiery sword cutting down the demons, their bodies burned to
ashes.
Jeremy’s
teeth clenched in rage.  His hatred for the man rose like a roaring fire
within his breast.  Not only for his father’s death, it seemed.  But,
for something else within him for which he had no name.  Something
primal.  He picked up the axe that had killed his father.  The blood
on the blade’s edge glistened bright red in the firelight.  As the
Inquisitor turned to kill another demon, Jeremy lifted the axe over his head
and swung with all his strength, hacking off the man’s arm.  Jeremy
gasped. From the severed arm of the Inquisitor came not the splatter of blood
Jeremy had expected.  But, a wild crackling of white sparks, like
lightning.  Jeremy stared agape as the arm fell to the forest floor, the
hand still clutching the crucifix.  He couldn’t believe his eyes. 
Silver and copper wires and flashing crystalline gems filled the arm, like the
stump hanging from the man’s shoulder, now also sparking and smoldering. 
A choking stench, like molten metal on a blacksmith’s forge reached Jeremy’s
nostrils.
He could
only stare in wonder at the Inquisitor’s face, even now still and cold and calm
as the surface of a lake in the moonlight.  “Thy sin will destroy thee,”
he intoned, holding his bible aloft.  Jeremy screamed in blind rage and
horror, smashing the axe blade against the man’s face.  The ring of metal
surprised him.  Jeremy’s heart stopped, the axe dropping from his numbed
fingers.  An extraneous layer of dead, bloodless pale flesh peeled away
from the Inquisitor’s face.  Beneath it, a grotesque metallic skeletal
mask glittered silver in the firelight.  A shattered glass eye ball fell
away, revealing a hollow metallic eye socket, red light burning behind it like
a smoldering coal.  The Inquisitor…or the thing that had taken his
shape…staggered wildly about like a drunken man.
Jeremy’s
eyes darted about in the firelight, fixing on a large stone.  Acting on
blind instinct, Jeremy lifted the heavy rock and smashed it with all his
strength into the back of the Inquisitor’s skull.  Another, more potent
explosion of crackling white lightning blinded him.  The Inquisitor’s head
cracked open, revealing still more flashing glass lights and sparking silver
wires.  The bible fell from his hand, smashing open against a rock. 
Jeremy stared at the book that was not a book.  More smashed bits of metal
and…a small silver-metallic cylinder, vibrating as if with a life of its
own.  A voice, cold and inhuman, emanated from the strange object. 
“Sat-link established.  Off-world star net spacefold wave upload. 
Unit 27 report.  Status, experimental Earth re-creation environment
*****77013.  Report.”  What devil’s tongue was this?!
Another
voice boomed from the pulsing red light emanating through the jagged hole in
the back of the Inquisitor’s head, as he lay faced-down on the forest
floor.  “Experiment non-viable.  Human gene matrix unstable. 
Genome of indigenous intelligent species reverting to original state. 
Cannot correct.  Nanobot strains ineffectual.  Experiment
failure.  Experiment failure.  Experiment…”
Jeremy
could stand no more.  He raised the rock and screamed in a mad rage,
bringing the rock down hard on the back of the Inquisitor’s head.  One
last explosion of white sparks, and the voice was gone.  The red light
faded to darkness, and Jeremy was alone.  He breathed heavily, his eyes
rapidly sweeping the dark forest in the waning firelight.  Must get
away.  That was his only clear thought.  Must get away.
He ran
through the woods.  Somehow, not blindly, as before, but with an unseen
force guiding him, as though with clear purpose and direction.  He felt
himself growing stronger by the second, the last of his clothes shredding and
peeling away.  If was as if something weak and false was peeling away from
his soul as well, something older and stronger stirring to life inside
him.  He felt his limbs growing strong and agile, carrying him swiftly and
easily through the woods, the forest floor racing beneath him as he leapt from
tree to tree.  He could see in ways he never could before, the darkness no
longer a veil.  Shimmering, ghostly shades of reddish amber illuminated
every rock, tree and gulley as he made his way down the forest path toward the
river fork, down the hillside toward the caves.  The forbidden
place.  It no longer frightened him.  As he approached the cave
mouth, he felt only a sense of comfort and safety.  Of home.
As he
crawled down into the subterranean caverns, his claws scraping across stone, he
felt the last struggling vestige of the lie dying within him.  False
beliefs and feelings created by an unseen multitude of tiny machines swarming
through his blood.  It was all dying as his true self emerged from its
long sleep.  In those last few moments of the transition, the false
emotions, the true race memories of his kind and the demon intelligence of the
alien machine all came together as one.  The nightmare images that had
haunted his false childhood came flooding back.  Across the black pit of
space, he saw the evil machines rise on columns of fire from the world of their
creators.  A distant world called Earth.
A world
destroyed by the greed and hatred of a race long dead.  A race called
humanity.  Their last surviving leaders, seeing the end of their world was
at hand had sent their thinking machines across space to shape other worlds
over in their image. The machines saw other life only as raw material to be
molded into their masters’ form, so their life could go on.  Not as it had
truly been, but in the purest form their minds had craved it to be.  What
had been Jeremy remembered the machines descending on the world of his true
ancestors, like iron dragons raining fire from the sky.  They had devoured
the land and his kindred, breaking down their living mass and re-shaping it
into the false world they had created from the dreams of the dead.
He found
himself in the steaming, sulfurous caves of his breeding hive.  The sweet
odors of mating filled his olfactory organs.  The shadowy recesses of the
cavern thrived with the writhing tentacled masses of his copulating
brethren.  In the center of it all, she waited.  The hive
queen.  She who had chosen him above all others.  He approached her,
in awe of her beauty. Even now, it emerged from beneath the dissolving cocoon
of her own false identity.  The face that had been Stephanie’s was melting
into a blackening, gelatinous mass of tissue, mandibles cutting through
constraining layers of rotting human flesh.  Her tentacles slithered
lovingly across the many egg pods even now pulsing with fruition.  And,
across the mound of human bodies on which she and her copulating drones fed.
“Come to
me, sire of my brood,” she called enticingly, her many clawed limbs opening to
receive him.  “Come to me, and add your essence to the hive.”
Overcome
with desire, he answered her call, and they were one.
Category:Olbert
Category:Short-Stories.me