Patrick W. MarshHappy Halloween! Enjoy my Horror Story “Demonland”
He’d tracked it across the entire countryside. It wasn’t easy. He could only find its footsteps at night when there was enough moonlight breaking through the clouds. A luminescent rip in a bag of grain. When he first started hunting them, he could read their prints along trees, roads, houses, pillars, castles, and even kings and queens as they slept. Recently, they had gotten better at hiding them. They weren’t overtly unique compared to other tracks. They looked like horse-marks, only narrower, as if their feet had been stretched in some bestial torture chamber.
The thing he was hunting was the laughter in the well, the shadow in the lantern light, and the devilry scratched in every underworld text.
The trail ended in a city on the edge of the continent where the sea met a mile-long stretch of docks and piers. It was called Largo. It was a mix of medieval and modern machines. Steam powered trains dissected the city in bridges and tunnels. They constantly spit exhaust into the sky in mechanical puffs. Large mansions, with glowing stain-glass windows gobbled-up the streets. Every homeowner wanted their wealth to rival a cathedral.
This opulent merchant town was a great host for this parasite to burrow into. Money and superficiality were the perfect breeding ground for this monster. The hunter didn’t even have to wait for night to know it was here.
He’d been hunting them for the last ten years. When he was child, he was taken into the mountains by some elders. They showed him how to fire a silver bullet into the nozzle of a wine bottle. They showed him how to recognize their demon teeth dangling out from the sea of faces in a busy marketplace. But most of all, the training in the highlands prepared him to kill humans, since they were almost always made to be puppets.
The hunter was tall, blond, and blue-eyed. He wore a black ministry robe to avoid being mugged on the highways. His gun, an oversized pistol with a small steam engine built onto the handle, was tucked beneath his robes. His bullets needed the steam-burst velocity to hit his prey, which could run up the side of a building and leap across the roof in just three blinks of the eye.
It was during the day when he arrived in Largo.
The sky and air had the crisp coolness of being next to the sea. You could taste salt around you and in the clouds. Largo was a remarkably clean city, with hundreds of ordinances and curfews to keep the cobblestones free of people and things. When he arrived in the city, he immediately went to the pub to eavesdrop. After a few hours feigning one pint of ale, he heard rumors of a little girl, the daughter of a famous art dealer, who was so talented at painting she could make anything in the world look beautiful.
He knew where his prey would be.
The girl and her family lived in the largest house in Largo. It was a high point on the brown, shingled horizon. When he arrived at the home in the afternoon, he knocked on the door with the metal tip of his gun. It echoed throughout the house. Nobody answered. The windows were dark and almost dusty. No servants had been around in some time. After a few more minutes, he picked the lock and shuffled inside.
The house was freezing, a byproduct of his prey. There were no candles, torches, lights, or mirrors in the home. Every giant room was stale and cobweb friendly.
After hours of looking, he noticed some light peeking out of the basement door at the back of the kitchen. He clicked the safety on his gun. The latch was supposed to be silent, but the cold air made it snap. Something heavy shifted in the basement.
He pushed the door open with his left hand. He had a slight quiver to it. Despite the years of hunting, he was still nervous when in the belly of the monster. The stairway stretched ahead of him with a single lantern beaming. A curled and captured sun. He shuffled down the stairs quietly; making sure his boots weren’t colliding with the lips of the steps.
He walked and walked.
Each time he thought he reached the bottom of the stairs and corresponding door; they’d spread out again in a plunging tunnel. The light wouldn’t change either. It was locked in this illusion. He sighed. The trap was triggered. It already knew he was here. He pulled out his silencer, a small steel barrel with secret language etched on it and tightened it around his muzzle. He fired one burst into the evading door. It split open. A chunk of phantasmal ice. Threads spilled out, along with a black mist. He protected his face with his sleeve and sat back down. In a few seconds, the real door appeared. A bit of blood beneath a scab.
He smiled to himself.
Beyond the door was a hallway with pictures along it. Lanterns divided each picture. On the other end of the hallway was an orchestra of growls and snorts. Two shapes were scurrying and running into each other. They were on chains, which were spiked and blood wet. The metal snapped with tension as the two forms sensed his presence. He fired once, dropping the first face in the gloom. The other creature crawled onto the wall like a cockroach. It dived at him. He fell back avoiding the charge, throwing the figure over him. Claws and teeth thrashed for his face. He closed his eyes and thought of the mountains. The rocky air stopped him from panicking as his nose and lip split-in-two. He fired his gun into the space above his chest.
The misshapen tornado went still.
He coughed blood and stood over the two forms. The lanterns started to die behind him. There were voices in the pictures. He heard music playing, and a little girl laughing. He wiped his face. They were the girl’s parents, he was sure. They’d been skinned and remade, only with strips of string instead of veins running through their bodies. Their faces were rotted. Clothes mixed with skin. They were half-finished dolls.
He couldn’t look at them for too long.
The hunter did not want to waste any more time. The traps and obstacles were mounting. He charged down the hallway. The various paintings of different landscapes along the walls came alive in waves, bolts, fires, and winds. A splash of water knocked him off his feet. Lightning scorched his shoulder in a curled bolt. Fire burnt hair along his neck. Gales blistered his eyes in random, invisible walls.
How many traps had it left for him? What was so important? What was it protecting?
After a few more painful moments he was through the hallway door. It opened to a massive studio, with a vast window looking out onto the water behind the city. A giant stage, armored with art supplies and sketches sprawled across the room. At one end of it, a little blond girl with a red beret painted furiously over a man-sized canvas. The girl didn’t even notice him. She was filthy and thin. On the other end of the stage, was his prey.
It looked like a man, especially with the gray hood and cloak hanging over its broad form. The cloth was pulled tight. There were spikes and miscellaneous points behind it. The monster was hunched over, thanks to its hoofs and inverted knees. Its face was pale and long. A curtain of fangs dangled from a wide grin. It had two red eyes narrowed out over where its nose would be.
They had no eyelids.
He pointed his gun at it. The girl didn’t turn around. She was too afraid to look anywhere.
“Can it wait, human?” A voice in the room spoke. It was a low and deep devil-echo. It spoke telepathically. It had too many teeth to manipulate a tongue.
“Why?” he replied, squinting one eye at the demon.
The creature shrugged its hideous body.
“Because even I would like to look beautiful,” it said.
It is TRADITION that I share Demonland on Halloween. I have been doing this on and off for years. This is one of my favorite stories, and it fits the mood of the holiday effortlessly. I love sharing it. Demonland is from my collection of short stories Monsters, Monsters, Everywhere. Everything about this story is very much me as a storyteller. Monsters in situations with emotional complexity and human motivations. Yup, that is me alright.
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