The Devil's Beat (The Devil's Mark) Read online

  He'd had to pry his considerable expenses out of his money manager, Tony's, fingers. He thought sourly about how difficult it was to get anything at all out of Tony. Tony wouldn't even tell Max his net worth. That would have to change soon.

  In any event, Tony had finally wired the money to Max. As Max looked around, that money didn't show. The crust of dirt was gone from the floor, but the sub-flooring was still stained and warped. The house still smelled nasty. And the walls beneath the flood line were still covered with peeling wallpaper, dirt, and mold stains that nothing would get out. On top of that, he had noticed that some of the walls looked like they were termite-ridden. At least he hadn't seen any rats.

  The thought of the amount of work that needed to be done exhausted him. He put his head back tiredly and let his eyes wander over the intricate patterns of the ceiling tiles. He'd been told that they were made of tin. The amount of work that had gone into this house's construction was staggering. His eyes came to rest on one loose tile over the card table. It was free on three sides and hung by a single corner. That seemed a bit dangerous to him, and he noted with excitement, it also seemed like something he could actually deal with.

  He stood up on the couch and then stepped up on its arm and from there to the card table. He gingerly tested the table to see if it would hold his weight. It was a bit wobbly but seemed likely to hold. He stood on the table carefully, his legs straddling the toolbox with the skull. The skull cranked its eyes up, vainly trying to see Max standing over it. The skull, with its desiccated flesh, wasn't particularly expressive, but now, to someone with a good imagination, it might have looked slightly worried.

  The ceilings in the house were all ten feet, but on the table, Max was able to reach the dangling tile. He grabbed it and gave it a tentative tug. It didn't budge. He pulled a bit harder. It still didn't move. He gave it a harder yank, then harder still. The tile came free in Max's hand. He hadn't quite prepared himself for it and overbalanced. He put his foot back to catch himself, and the table collapsed underneath him. Max flailed but had no chance. He went down hard, taking the tile and the toolbox with him. He wasn't around to see what happened next.

  When Max awoke, he hurt. He had sharp pains in his head, his hip, and his right arm. He groaned and struggled to get his eyes open. When he finally succeeded, he let out a scream and tried to throw himself back away from the hideous face that was staring at him from ground level. He swatted at the face in terror and scrambled back as the head bounced away. When tried to put weight on his left hand, excruciating pain ripped up through his arm, and he fell back to the floor. He curled into a semi-fetal position and cradled his arm.

  Distance from the head and the pain had a damping effect on his panic. He was still in the music room, the walls were flickering from the light of the television as it babbled on, and he had a host of new pains. Even those pains took a momentary back seat to his shock at the sight of the head, which was still spinning slowly on the ground a couple of feet in front of him. It was Old Bone, but it had changed. It had more flesh on it. Instead of a mummy skull, it looked more like an anatomy picture where all the skin had been stripped away showing the red muscles and white tendons. There were even some patches of skin. The skull wobbled to a stop, facing Max. Max struggled into a sitting position while Old Bone looked at him out of lidless eyes that were now not just desiccated white orbs, but had a brown iris and a grayish black pupil.

  Max's attention was drawn away from the skull when he unconsciously put his hand up to his head and touched the cut there. He yelped at the unexpected pain and drew his hand away. It was covered in blood. He looked down at where he had woken up. Head wounds were known to bleed profusely, and his had not tried to buck the trend. There was a puddle of blood there. It had pooled away from him toward where the head had landed. Where the head had been, there was a circular spot clear of blood. The clear area was actually considerably bigger than the head. It was decidedly odd and a bit chilling as he contemplated what might have been taking place while he was out.

  To test his theory, he searched around for the bra. When he found it, he went over to Old Bone, and gingerly picked it up using the bra cups as hand protection. He tried to ignore how the eyes kept trying to follow him. He took it over and set it down in one of the areas where the red liquid was rapidly being absorbed by the wooden flooring. He stepped back to watch.

  The blood under and around the head started reversing direction. It oozed back out of the wood and started forming small beads. Soon the beads grew and started rolling to the contact point of the neck and floor. Once there, they were absorbed into the neck. It wasn't a quick process, but he stared at it with gruesome fascination. In a nightmarish time lapsed and reversed vignette, he watched as each little bead of blood absorbed seemed to fill out the head a little more. It was a bit like the special effect used when the liquid Terminator pulled himself back together. Max's gaze was interrupted when a sluggish stream of blood from his head wound flowed across his left eye.

  He cursed and grabbed a towel that had been Old Bone's nest. He gingerly brought the towel to his head. As he pressed it there, he found his gaze resting on Old Bone itself. He walked over to stand next to the head and then he tilted his own head over Old Bone and squeezed his saturated hair onto it. A few crimson drops landed on the skull and were absorbed right into it. He didn't know if he was fascinated or disgusted. It was sort of like his father's piranha. It split the world into two groups. When people found out that his father fed it live goldfish, there were two reactions: “Oh cool!... Let me see!” and “Oh gross!... Let me see!”

  Whether it intrigued or grossed out, it certainly grabbed your attention. Max wanted to continue his experiment, but common sense and pain caught up with him. He was bleeding, broken, and he needed to get himself to a doctor. He patted his head gingerly with the towel and tried to wipe off the majority of the blood from his hair, neck, and face. When he was done, he dropped the soaked towel and painfully wrapped another over his head like a turban. He'd never thought about it, but clearly, one-handed Sheiks had it tough. He did the best he could, which was not terribly good, and then grabbed his bra-pads, picked up Old Bone, and put him on the couch facing the television.

  “Sorry about that Old Bone. I don't mean to keep tossing you around like a soccer ball. I have to get to the hospital and get this taken care of. You're looking better though.” As an afterthought, he placed the blood-soaked towel next to the living anatomy demonstration watching him from the couch. Who cared if it ruined the couch? He could get another. He said, “Here, maybe you can suck on this while I'm gone. Hang tight, I'll be back tomorrow.”

  He left the music room, entered the dark main hall, and limped to the front door. It seemed like more and more places on his body were hurting. His hand had started throbbing fiercely, and he had bruised or torn something in his hip. Just as he was reaching for the door, he heard footsteps on the stairway behind him. With a rush of adrenalin, he quickly hit the light switch so he could see. As soon as he flipped the switch it crackled and popped, then a line of fire sprouted from the wall at the base of the stairway behind him where one of the floor lamps had been placed.

  Max panicked, hit the light switch again, and plunged the hall in darkness once more except for the weak but growing light coming from the wall fire. He frantically tried to remember where he kept the fire extinguishers the electricians had forced on to him. He kept glancing anxiously back at the flames which would have provided some illumination if looking at them hadn't kept ruining his night vision.

  In his personal darkness, he stumbled around and tried to find an extinguisher. His foot finally and painfully found the one by the stairs. He had to grope for it on the ground, but he finally managed to grab it with his good hand.

  Max limped towards the spreading flames. When he was close enough, he discovered that one handed fire extinguishing required a bit more thought than the two handed variety. The first problem was pulling out the pin. He couldn'
t pull on it without pulling the canister over. Meanwhile, the fire grew, licking up the wall toward the high ceiling. Cursing and freaking out, he finally managed it by sitting with his legs around the canister to brace it while pulling on the pin.

  When the pin came out, he stood back up triumphantly, raised the heavy extinguisher, and discovered, painfully, that he couldn't aim it at the fire. The handle itself was not designed to allow easy pointing and his broken hand couldn't grab the dangling hose.

  The heat of his cursing didn't actually add to the growing flames, but it should have.

  He was just trying to get his arm under the hose, when the temperature around him plummeted. The extinguisher was ripped violently from Max's hand. In shock he saw it fly into the air, point its hose at the fire and let loose. The cloud of extinguishing stuff immediately started to choke the flames. The spray back splattered and seemed to surround the extinguisher in a white cloud.

  Before he could even wrap his head around what he was seeing, he heard a wailing scream coming from somewhere below the floor. Max jumped back as smoke started pouring from the cracks. Instead of spreading out like smoke was supposed to, this smoke stayed together and rocketed towards the extinguisher. The extinguisher turned to point at the on-rushing cloud and let loose. It blew through the cloud and right onto Max.

  Max screamed and ran towards the front door. The extinguisher smashed into the wall next to the door, sending pieces of plaster flying before it fell to the floor with a clang. Max brought his automatically upraised arms down and looked stupidly at the extinguisher now laying innocently on the floor and not showing any inclination to fly at his head again. His attention was drawn back to new screams behind him. The first screamer had been joined by another. This one was higher pitched.

  It took a moment for Max to make sense of what he was seeing; two formless clouds of white vapor were whirling around each other next to the burning wall. They would occasionally rush together and then apart. From time to time one of them would fly across the room only to stop, reverse its course and rejoin the fray.

  In the midst of the screams, Max could occasionally hear words.

  “Adventuress!”...”Ass!”...”Cheap strumpet!”...”Piss-proud nancy-boy!”... “Clap infested quim!”

  Max found he couldn't obey his instinct to run. He was over-ruled by the sheer strangeness of the scene in front of him.

  The fight seemed to spread out through the room. Suddenly hammers, lamps and anything else not nailed down were flying through the air between the two. Each object would fly through one or the other of the clouds to no evident effect. Some of them

  whizzed perilously close to Max and smashed into the wall or the door behind him.

  He was so engrossed in the fight that he didn't even flinch.

  As the battle raged, the temperature in the room continued to plummet. Max's ragged breath came out in clouds. There was frost growing into ever-larger patches on the walls. The frost finally closed in on the flames, and despite the flames’ valiant struggle, the frost finally consumed the last of them. The flames died down and so did the fighting.

  Finally, one of the clouds of mist fell to the floor amidst the sounds of feminine anguish.

  The pain in the voice threatened to break Max's heart. It was laden with centuries of grief. The crying mist coalesced into the translucent, glowing, white form of a woman, in an elaborate antebellum gown, abjectly weeping on the floor. The second cloud paused above her.

  Max was still too stunned to move, and he watched the scene for what seemed like hours but couldn't have been more than a minute or two.

  “Oh piss...,” said the floating cloud. It settled down next to the woman and formed into another glowing white figure. This one was a handsome man dressed in a fine suit from the same period. He knelt over the woman with his back to Max. He reached down and stroked her glowing white hair. It was hard for Max to tell, but the man's suit looked like it had a large hole in the back.

  “Oh, how could you? How could you try to destroy Belle?” sobbed the fallen woman.

  “Come, Annette, let me take you to your room,” said the man. He gently picked her up off the floor. “You are making a scene in front of our guest.”

  “Oh my dear!” said the woman as she looked toward Max with wide eyes. She dropped her face in her hands and started sobbing again.

  Without a further word, the two faded from sight as he carried her up the stairs.

  All Max could do was stand there and gape. Just what he needed, two insane ghosts.

  Southern Comfort

  Max was parked in front of the small county hospital and struggling to get out of his car. He had to reach around with his good hand to open the door, and he hurt in so many places it was hard to move. He finally got out and hobbled in. He recognized the nurse behind the reception counter. She had been there when he had needed patching up from his first encounter with the house. Her long dirty-blonde hair spiraled down to her shoulders in coquettish curls that just begged to be played with. She was short, moderately curvy and looked quite crisply professional in her white dress.

  He walked up to the counter. “Excuse me.”

  The nurse looked up at him, and her gray-green eyes grew wide at the sight that greeted her. Max's makeshift turban had bled through in places. The hair that hung out below the turban was coated in blood, as were his clothes. On top of this was a coating of fine white powder. He had managed to smear some of it off his face, but it stubbornly stuck in his eyebrows and to his torn clothes. The powder and blood had mixed in places to form a reddish-pink plaster, which clung tenaciously to his clothes. On top of that, he was hobbling with one hand cradled up against his chest and reeked of smoke. She quickly recognized him. The last time he had been in, he had been covered with blood as well.

  Her southern accent was charming but subdued. “Mr. Faust! Dear lord, what happened to you?”

  He considered her with blue-eyed misery, “I wouldn't even know where to begin...”

  “You poor dear!” She bustled out from behind the counter and escorted him into the small emergency area behind the counter. Max, having forgotten her name, was grateful for the name badge she wore.

  He said, “Thanks, Alice,” as she guided him to a small area surrounded by curtains and sat him on the bed. She admonished him to stay put as she hustled out to get the doctor – or perhaps the men in the white lab coats.

  After a few long minutes of painful waiting, Alice came back with Doc Bob. Doc Bob looked like he was about eighty going on dead. He was thin and as wrinkled as a thumb soaked in a bathtub too long. He saw Max and said with his heavy southern drawl, “Well boy. What have ya done gotten yerself into this time?”

  Doctor William Hodge, a.k.a. Doc Bob, had fixed up Max's head last time. Max found himself drawn to the older man. Despite his appearance, he had an easy, relaxed manner and firm, steady hands. His bright eyes and kind smile finished up the package nicely.

  “I, uh, had an accident.”

  “I figured that out myself, boy. Ya look like you got in a fight with the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Always gotta watch out for them happy little fat fellas. More often than not, they're meaner than a viper with a toothache. Mind giving me the particulars?”

  As he talked, he was busy taking off Max's towel and delicately examining his scalp. He handed it to Alice without slowing down.

  Max sighed. “I was trying to pull off a loose ceiling tile when I overbalanced and fell. I busted up my hand and cut open my head.”

  “And how'd you come by the bake-sale look and the fire-sale smell?”

  Max figured that in this case the truth, but not the whole truth, would do. “I was just leaving to come here when one of the electric boxes caught fire. The wall the box was in went up quickly, I had a bit of a tough time using the fire extinguisher with only one hand, but the fire's out now.”

  “Boy, you're just a bag full of bad news, aren't ya? Let's see what we can do for ya.”

  The Doc and
Alice sewed Max back up. Watching Alice's kind face when her attention was on her work was a pleasant diversion for Max. When they were done, Alice left and came back with a hospital gown and offered it to Max. “Hon, I hate to send you off looking like an extra on Night of the Living Dead. We don't have any shirts, but you could wear this instead of that filthy one you got on.”

  Max waived her away, “No thanks, Alice, the upholstery in my car is probably as ruined as it can get. I'll get by.”

  “All right, it's your car. Are you sure, you can drive, Mr. Faust? Doc says you got yourself a bit concussed.”

  Max started to nod and then thought the better of it. He just said, “I'll be fine Alice, I've got a room nearby at the 'Quaint and Charming Dixie Motel.’”

  She laughed. “I guess if you can joke, you're not that far gone.” She looked at him and met his gaze for a moment. Max realized that it had been a frightfully long time since a pretty woman had looked at him like that: like he was a human, not some trophy or god. It felt nice.

  Not for the first time, he noticed that Alice was a nice looking woman—the type he used to notice before stardom hit. Her dirty blonde curls complemented her kind gray-green eyes. She wasn't flashy, but she had a pleasant face and smiled easily. She had a single dimple on the left side of her mouth to complement the smile. He didn't realize he was staring until Alice blushed a little and looked away. He looked away as well. “Thank the doc for the patch job and thank you for your kind concern.”

  She looked back at him, smiled again. “Just part of our southern hospitality, Mr. Faust. Come back any time.”

  He smiled back ironically. “I hope you won't consider me a poor guest if I say that I'd rather not.”

  She laughed again. “I hope you don't think me a poor hostess if I say, I'd rather not see you again.”

  He raised his eyebrows and gave her a sad face.

  She blushed. “I mean, not here. I'd rather not see you here in the hospital. I mean, I'd love to see you somewhere else, I mean, I don't want to see you hurt. Oh, quit smiling at me like that you, evil man! You know what I mean.”