The Hollow Ones(64)

“The boy…he was mad, he went insane…”

“Or, and we’ll never know, the demonic spirit occupying him might have jumped into you. Taking the form of a law officer is almost as good a disguise as that of a six-year-old boy.”

Solomon shook his head. “There’s no demonic spirit. You need to shut up.”

“I did not kill a boy, as I showed you last night. The boy was no more. We were too late, the demon had swallowed him whole. I released him from its grip after death. It was the best I could do.”

Solomon’s gun shook a little from emotion. “That boy called for you. When I first came to this godforsaken town and visited him in that room where his scared family had chained him to a bed. He asked for you. By name!”

Blackwood nodded, looking at the ground. “I know.”

“He summoned you!”

“Did he? Do you think he wanted me here? Or did he fear me?”

Solomon’s eyes widened. “Fear you?”

“The boy is a pawn in all this. An innocent victim.”

Solomon shook his head, needing Hugo Blackwood quiet. “Are you a goddamn demon?” he said. “With all those tools and potions, and the chanting. What are you?”

“I am a man with a difficult job to do.”

Solomon nodded harshly, for no good reason. “If you’re a man, then you can stand before a judge and plead your case. You put me in this thing, right beside you.”

“You saw it last night—”

“I don’t know what I saw,” insisted Solomon.

Blackwood said, “There are things that exist beyond the rule of law.”

“No, there aren’t. Not in this county, this state, this country. The taking of a life is murder. Call it self-defense, call it unpremeditated, that all comes out in the wash. I am no different from those behind the lynchings in town, black and white. Except that I am a sworn officer of the law. I took an oath.”

“Your job, as I understand it, is to uphold the laws of the land by protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty.”

“And I can’t cover up a murder. No matter how strange, no matter how…distasteful.”

“The boy was already lost,” said Blackwood. “But there are other lives still at stake here. He was an innocent…an instrument through which a spell was being cast. He’s a victim, but he is not a victim of us. Don’t you want to stop whoever did that to him?”

Solomon resisted Blackwood’s argument, having promised himself he would not be swayed by anything this murderer said to him.

But he thought of the boy’s mother, his brothers and sisters. He thought of facing them, trying to explain what happened. Solomon fought the tears that threatened to squeeze out of his eyes.

Solomon said, pleadingly, “He was only six goddamn years old.”

“I know,” said Blackwood. “We have to find whoever set him loose. He didn’t shake off those chains around his wrists and ankles.”

Solomon exhaled deeply, remembering the image of the chain lying on the storage room floor, the manacles unlocked. “Then…who did?”

Blackwood said, “Who else had access to the house and that key?”





2019. Englewood, New Jersey.



Yoan Martine went about the house smashing things until he was exhausted. He sat down on a sofa cushion he had disemboweled with a knife.

Even the mpangui would not help him. Yoan let him walk away. No one could cleanse him now.

What to do? He had nowhere to go. Nowhere in this world.

He was pulling at his hair when the great noise of a sudden crash outside took the air away from the room. The power was out. Yoan jumped to his feet and ran to the door.

Outside, diagonally across the bend in the street, a late-model white Infiniti had smashed head-on into a parked pickup truck with such force that it had driven the truck onto the sidewalk and cracked a telephone pole, the top two-thirds of which now lay over the Infiniti. The driver lay flat on the collapsed front seat, bloody, dead. A live wire sizzled on the street like an asp. The Infiniti had to have been traveling upward of fifty miles an hour in order to inflict that much damage, a speed unheard of in this residential area.

Nfuri.

Yoan looked around. The spirits were invisible, but still one looked for them, it was human nature. What would the taking feel like? he wondered.

Nothing happened at first. He retreated to the front step of the house and sat down, weeping, to await his fate. He cursed himself for the mistakes he had made—for the desecrations he had sought—for the blasphemies he had performed. Between vomit-like, throat-heaving sobs, he looked openmouthed at the sky.





Obediah sensed the spell of protection, recently cast at the entrance to this place. Its magic had dissipated, but a trace of the incantation remained, showing the entity it was at the right place, on the right track.

The grave robber sat on the brick step tearing at his hair. The man awaited his possession, was resigned to it. Almost—welcomed it.

This angered Obediah. The entering was violent, the takeover traumatic. The grave robber submitted with a terrible scream that faded into a groan.

Obediah took the man, stood. Walked back into the house. The destruction inside further incensed the entity, for whom destruction was its essence. It walked to a mirror, centering the grave robber’s face between the cracks in the glass. It took the man’s hands with their long, filed, pointed fingernails and began scraping at its face.