White Hot Voodoo Lightning

He should’ve been out by now, Roy thought as he checked his watch again and grunted loudly into the dark cab of his truck. He laid his meaty hand on the horn for one... two... three... four whole seconds. When he saw no movement in the house’s dark windows, he cursed, leaned across the seat bench, and cranked the passenger window down. The cats and dogs falling from the sky were making their way inside and, though he didn’t take particularly fastidious care of his vehicle, something about the seat getting wet on top of being late really pissed him off something nasty.

“Lloyd!” he called out the window into the rainy night towards his friend’s house—his friend’s curiously darkened house. “Goddammit, Lloyd! Quit yankin’ yer meat and get your ass out here!”

A lightning flash across the sky, followed two seconds later by a wall of thunder. Roy checked his phone fully expecting the status of his bars not to have improved since he checked it twelve seconds ago, but, funny enough, they were back. Maybe it was the lightning, Roy thought. He dialed Lloyd and held the thing to his ear and waited. It rang once… twice… three times… four… five… si—

“This is Lloyd. But if I owe you money, this is Joe. Do your worst at the beep…”

Beeeeep.

“Fuckin’-A, Lloyd!” Roy shouted. The seat bench was getting real soaked, and when Roy threw the phone down beside him it sent up a little spray that might as well have been Lloyd spitting on him. He laid on the horn again, then followed up the long wail with a few scattered honks for good measure before he noticed something in the house through one of the windows that made him stop.

A twitchy, flickering beam of light, crossing from the left of the house (the direction of Lloyd’s bedroom) to the right (in the direction of the living room and kitchen). The blueish light looked as if it might have come from somebody holding a flashlight.

Power’s out, Roy figured. Grunting, he reached for his glove box, rifled through its contents—his badge, his 38 Special, and a not-so-neatly-folded white hood before finally finding his LED flashlight. He gave it a test click before turning up the collar of his Dickie’s jacket and stepping out of the car and into the downpour.

~

Two nights before, when the worst storm of the year (according to television weather lady Maya Lupin) was still a drizzly front that might or might not pass before the weekend, it was Lloyd who was waiting on Roy in a police cruiser during a routine traffic stop.

Lloyd Hickum wasn’t a cop, but he was a cop’s best friend, and when that cop was Roy McDonald it meant you could ride along just as much as you pleased, which for Lloyd was whenever he wasn’t clad in his utility belt and driving around in his electrician’s van or opening someone’s wall sockets and poking around. They only had to be on the hush-n-under about it, in case Roy got shit from the big brass, or Cap’n Copper as Lloyd liked to joke. Roy never found that as funny.

“What now, we callin’ ICE?” Lloyd guessed giddily when Roy stepped back to the cruiser with an out-of-state I.D. in one hand.

Roy held out the California license and asked his friend, “This look legit to you?”

“No,” Lloyd said without looking. Roy grunted, began typing the card’s information into the computer laid open on his center console. “Gimme that thing.” Lloyd snatched the I.D. and turned it over a couple of times, bent it, scratched his nails at it. “Gabriella Ruiz?” He threw it back onto the driver’s seat. “A Mexican with a California license driving a car with Texas plates? Just take her in now and hold her ‘til you find out what’s up!”

“It’s her freaky-deaky passenger I’m concerned with.” He glanced up at Lloyd, “He’s twitchy. Avoiding eye contact.”

“Mexican?” Lloyd asked, to which Roy nodded. “Where the fuck’s his I.D.?”

“Didn’t have it. Driver—his sister, I guess—said they were headed back to their parents’ to grab his papers before going to see a movie.”

“Yeah-fuckin’-right.”

Something Roy didn’t much care for appeared on the computer screen. “The I.D. checks out,” Roy sighed, drummed his sausage fingers on the butt of his service Glock.

“There’s gotta be somethin’.”

Roy considered, turned to his friend, said, “Plates don’t come back in her name. Last name, sure, probably her parent’s… but we don’t know that for sure, do we?”

Lloyd threw up his hands, “No, we sure as hell don’t. And it would be unresponsible for us to make such a ‘sumption, wouldn’t it?”

Roy grinned but waited. This was the part Lloyd didn’t appreciate—the build-up. Roy said it was kinda like foreplay. Making his stop wait in the car and sweat it out while he decided if he was going to give them that ticket or handcuff them or pull out his gun or test their sobriety or just let them off with a warning and a little underhanded threat.

Lloyd groaned as Roy stepped away from the cruiser talking into his walkie about where everyone was going out for drinks at end of shift, making it look as if he were calling in for backup. And maybe he would. Lloyd loved it when five cruisers showed up to a routine stop for no particular reason other than just to fuck with somebody. Big show of force kinda thing. That’s what he really wanted to see, and, noticing movement through the rear of the car they’d pulled over, two heads turned to each other and arguing, he wanted it even more. So, without waiting to see how long Roy’s foreplay would drag on he grabbed the cruiser mic and shouted, his reedy voice booming into the night at the idling Hyundai in front of them, “Looks like y’all are in some deep shit! Them plates came back stolen!”

And, before Roy could reach in and stop him, “We’re callin’ the calvary!”

“Lloyd, you dumb bitch, what’s the matter wi—” but that was all Roy had time to say, because just then the Hyundai’s passenger door swung open and a young man ran out, jumped over the hood of the car, and zipped into the night. Gabriella scrambled to unbuckle herself, and, screaming after her brother, leaped from the driver’s seat, which is when Roy reached for his holster.

~

The front door was unlocked, but Roy hardly noticed, nor did he seem to notice how still the house was upon entry. It was, however, loud—a hundred fire hoses beating the house in a roar of water, not to mention the occasional crack of lightning and booming of thunder that pierced the constant drum. All he was thinking was that Lloyd was making them late, and Roy did not like being late to rallies. So’vabitch prolly couldn’t hear my horn if he was trine to, Roy thought. He didn’t consider then that this very principle—of sound lost through the chaos—went both ways, but he would very soon.

He clicked his flashlight on, its intense blue beam piercing the darkness like one of those bolts of lightning that were flying across the skies just then.

“What the hell’s going on, Lloyd? You been in here twelve fuckin’ minutes.”

He swung the beam across the messy room, illuminating nothing he hadn’t seen before—cheap furniture, crusty stained carpet, a scattering of gun and porno mags. “Rally gets goin’ in five minutes. Five! It doesn’t take twelve to take a shit and grab your whites from the closet!”

Roy moved deeper into the house where he caught a whiff of something that made his neck hairs prickle. After another couple of sharp sniffs, he could swear he smelled gunsmoke. He moved the beam of his flashlight back and forth in front of him, aimed at the ceiling, checking for any subtle opaqueness in the air, but saw nothing. Still, the smell was unmistakable. There’s some bad math goin’ on here, he thought, Somethin’ just ain’t addin’ up.

“Lloyd?” More concern now. If his friend had fired a gun in the last twelve minutes, things must not be as peachy as they appeared to be. And how had he not heard it? Another bright flash and hard boom of thunder punched through the constant barrage of tumbling buckets against the cheap roof of the bungalow house and answered Roy’s question. Plus he’d been laying on that horn and yelling his head off, not to mention that the roof of his truck made the rainfall sound like stones against corrugated tin, and with his window down it was no wonder that—

Creeeeeak…

Roy whirled in the direction of the sound, behind him from the corner of the room. But all he saw was an old ratty recliner with what looked like tangles of clear rubber wire and cobwebs draped over it and dangling onto the floor beside an open toolbox. Fuckin’ slob, Roy thought as he turned back toward the hall in the direction of his friend’s bedroom and continued on. Suddenly he’s in cop mode, his thick mustache twitched beneath his nose because there’s something not quite right about this whole deal and he can feel it now. He took one more step and flinched when he heard a crunch beneath his boot. He shone his blue beam of light down to illuminate a broken picture frame, Lloyd’s mother’s face looking up at him through shards of glass. He moved his light around the opening of the hall and saw more broken frames, and then, turning his light to the left and into the humble living room, two broken plates.

More lightning, more heavy metal thunder.

“Lloyd?” Roy called out, quiet this time, “Lemme know where you’re at, brother…” but the air left his lungs before he could really get out the last of the sentence because when he redirected his flashlight down to the end of the hall he saw it—an axe, laid flat near the open bathroom door, and a pistol laid beside Lloyd’s body. His very still and very silent body.

Roy sucked in air, stunned.

“Lloyd!” He sprang to the body and knelt. Inspecting his friend, he could see no blood. Not even a bruise. He slapped Lloyd’s scruffy face hard. “Wake the fuck up, Hick!” But Lloyd’s skin felt luke at best and, worse, clammy. Roy released the pistol's clip—empty. Or maybe spent? He scanned the floor for… there they were. Shells. “What the hell happened?” How had he not heard the shots? Surely the pop of gunfire he would’ve picked up on.

A crack of thunder shook the place and the gunsmoke smell was strong here. Roy stood, panicked now, and noticed a flickering light reflected on the glass of a framed confederate flag hung three feet above Lloyd’s body there at the end of the hall—a flickering light coming from somewhere behind him—like from the seat of that ratty recliner…

~

“Stay where you are!” Roy bellowed, charging at the girl, Gabriella Ruiz, who was halfway out of the Hyundai and halfway in it. “Don’t you move!”

“Domingo!” she hollered after her brother, who disappeared around the corner after throwing back one more terrified glance at the police cruiser and at the big, bull-chested cop standing beside it. But his sister’s desperate cries could not make him stop. “Vuelve!”

Lloyd didn’t hesitate, didn’t wait for command or instruction. He simply jumped from the passenger seat of the police cruiser and took off into the night after the boy, letting out a high-octane whoop from his bright and smiling face, as if he were chasing a rowdy calf with a lasso.

“I got this one, Roy!” he called back as he rounded the corner after Gabriella’s brother. “I won’t let ‘im go!”

Two very strong thoughts wrestling for dominance in Roy’s head: Chase after his friend before he did something stupid or stay with the driver before she did something stupid. But when the jittery Gabriella seemed to lunge back into the car and fumble with something (ignoring his direct command to stay where she is and maybe even reach for the gear shift to take off?) the decision was made for him.

Stop her.

“I said STOP!” He shouted, unholstering his gun.

“No!” the girl shrieks, “Are you dumb?”

At least that’s what Roy thinks he hears her say, because Officer Roy McDonald doesn’t know that what she actually said was “¡Ayúdame!” which means Help me! and sounds a little bit like Are you dumb, if that’s what you had it in your head to hear.

“What the fuck did you say?” he barked at the girl, who just then pulled something long and black and rectangular but also possibly gun-barrel shaped out from the car, which is when Officer Roy McDonald’s knee-jerk instinct sent a blaring red alert to his spring-loaded arm. He brought up his pistol and fired it before the girl could turn completely around.

BLAM!

The girl screamed as the car door window she was standing in front of shattered into a million pieces and she dropped her cell onto the asphalt. Roy blinked in surprise, and maybe a little bit of relief, but the break in chaos only lasted a moment before he charged at her again, telling her to “Turn around and put your hands behind your back! Now!”

A continuous stream of Spanish and tears poured from Gabriella while she did as she was commanded. Roy re-holstered his firearm, yanked her up, and slammed her against her own car. He cuffed and dragged her away from the still idling sedan and back to the cruiser as he called out into the direction that freaky-deaky kid and Lloyd ran off to.

“Hick! What’s your position?” But he gets no reply, from either. “Hickum!”

“Please!” Gabriella shouted, trying to turn and face Roy. She was fighting the cuffs now. Curdling, was what the cops down here said when somebody they’d bagged started flipping their lid about it, started going bad. Gabriella was beginning to curdle. “We’re not criminals! Domingo is sick!” Then in Spanish, “¡Necesita tomar sus pastillas!”

“My ass,” Roy grunted in response to both assertions, ignoring the last thing she said, whatever it was. But there was no stopping her, this twenty-something whose head came up to Roy’s nametag and probably weighed a whopping hundred pounds sopping wet. Gabriella was pulling like a wagon ox and Roy hated her for it. “Stop moving!”

“¡Déjame ir!”

She twisted and pinched Roys finger in the chain of the cuffs and he squealed reactively. Squealed like a hyena. “You stupid fuckin’, border-hoppin’ bitch!” he roared, and now that they were out of the view of the front-facing cruiser dash-cam, he slammed her up against the SUV and thrust his knee up into the back of her leg.

He reached to open the rear door to throw her in when a high-pitched scream—a banshee wail— reached their ears and they both went still. After a second of stunned silence, the levy behind Gabriella’s eyes finally broke and a flood of tears is released down her reddening cheeks because she knew what that scream meant, knew because she’d heard the wail bursting from that throat only once before 8 years ago when their families options had run out and her father made the financial decision to bring one child and leave the other behind-- a decision on who would come and start a new life in America early and who would stay behind for another (as it turned out) seven years.

“Domingo!” she howled. Even after Roy’s kick she’d stood her ground, but it was that scream that finally sent her to her knees.

“Shut up and get in the car!” Roy was hiding very well the fact that he was nervous about what might have happened with that freaky-deaky kid and his hot-headed friend, about what might have caused that banshee wail somewhere in the night around that street corner just some yards away. When Lloyd came stumbling around that very corner a few moments later unaccompanied, all Roy’s thoughts could do were race.

“Hickum,” Roy grunted, “Where’s the kid?”

“He’s took care of,” Lloyd said flatly as he came around to the passenger side of the cruiser.

“Hey! Look at me, Lloyd!” Lloyd does. “What the hell happened back there?”

Roy didn’t notice Lloyd was shaking until he was four feet from him, panting. “I said he’s took care of, McCopper…” Lloyd fumbled with something, slid something into his pants pocket. Maybe. But his trembling hands betrayed him, and he missed. There was a delicate clattering, and Lloyd stared down at the thing he’d just dropped, his expression dumb and eyes glazed, a far-and-away, drunk sort of stare.

“What the fuck was that, Hick?”

“…my prize, I figure. For my civic duty done, and all that.” His voice was just like his stare. Far-and-away. He bent down and retrieved the little, fragile thing—the gold necklace with the dangling crucifix at its end. At the sight of it, Roy’s stomach falls into his guts. The girl, Gabriella, unleashes a tearing cry, a cry that could make glass shatter, and now she really is curdled.

“¡Monstruo!” she mule kicked, putting a sizable dent in the door of the cruiser. Lloyd quickly shoved the necklace into his pocket and came around to the driver’s side. Roy lifted the girl up by her cuffed hands, the snap of her breaking wrists going unnoticed, even by her. She’s too busy trying to turn and face this man, her captor, and his gangly friend with the bright red baseball cap. “¡Arder al infierno!”

Lloyd reached for her feet but she pedaled her leg out and landed her heel into his left eye.

“Agh!” Lloyd yelped as he fell backward. “GodDAMMIT!”

Roy flung the girl like a duffle bag into the side of the SUV, the rear window spider-webbing with a high-pitched crinch beneath her face. He yanked her away and gave her a good shake before she was able to get purchase with her legs. She half turned to finally face this hulking man with the bristly-boar mustache on his dumb pink face, and hock a thick wet wad right into his face. She couldn’t help but let out a small chuckle when she saw it jiggling and dancing from his thick nose, tangled and clinging to his cop’s mustache.

Roy’s vision went gray and fuzzy, like the TV used to do when he was a kid staying up way past his bedtime and all the programming ended. His heart pounded and his veins throbbed with furious adrenaline and his movements were fuelled by blind, hateful rage and nothing else at all.

Before his voice-tearing growl could escape through his teeth the Taser was already out of its case and pressed against Gabriella’s neck. The girl’s eyes bulged, her body went rigid and her toes turned in, one of them even started tapping against the street. Her last dance. Roy held the thing there against her neck for three seconds… four… five…

“YOU STUPID FUCK!”

Ten seconds… twelve… fifteen…

The skin beneath the bright blue electric current was beginning to darken, beginning to char…

“GO TO HELL…”

Twenty seconds… twenty three and then he dropped her.

“Where you people belong.” Roy finished. He looked down at her, wiped his mouth clean of the loogie, smeared the remaining gunk onto his black pants.

Lloyd, still on the ground, looked up at Roy.

“Goddamn, McDonald…” he exhaled, then released a wheezy chuckle. “What now?”

Roy knew this would be a long, tangling night, But he also knew that he'd be able to get out of this. He’d gotten out of worse tangles before. A fringe benefit, he called it. He looked from the body, smoke snaking out of her ears, then to Lloyd. “I have gloves in the glovebox. Put ‘em on, help me get her into the car. Then take me to the kid and don’t touch anything else.”

~

Roy whirled in the darkened house to face whoever was behind him. He’d seen a figure reflected in the glass hung at the end of the hall where Lloyd’s body lay cock-eyed and unmoving. But there was nobody behind him. Not a person but a thing. A tangled, veiny-looking thing that was… standing?… from the recliner in the living room. That mess of wires, those roping cobwebs, were glowing an electric blue like

the business end of a Taser

bolts of rippling lightning. And then it began taking its horrible, final form. Some of the rippling lightning bolt things collected themselves into limb-like segments, gatherings of pulsing light-veins shaped like arms and then like legs and then like a head, where the real horror lay, because that’s where the biggest mass of stuff was, all moving together into a swollen, blue-purplish bright tangle—but not a tangle really… no… more perfect than a tangle… a maze—of light.

Roy could only stare, his thick legs turned to feckless stumps and his fuzzy lips hung dumbly on his stunned-stupid face. A rancid whiff of ammonia rose into Roy’s nostrils and for a moment longer than he cared to accurately recall much later in the hospital, he believed he might have pissed himself. He would never know that what he smelled in that terrible moment was actually coming from Lloyd’s urine-soaked Carhartts. It would be another three whole minutes until Roy wet his own pants.

“Stay away!” Roy cried out to the thing standing in the darkened living room down the hall. The glowing thing made of rippling electricity that was now standing like a person. He reached for his belt only for his fingers to grasp diddly-shit nothing, because he wasn’t on duty and his revolver was back in the glovebox of his truck, tucked cozily beside his white Klan hood.

“G-G-Get back!” he stuttered. He didn’t dare take his eyes off of it, whatever it was, but he was a sitting duck. Unarmed. But not out of options…

The axe, he remembered, and shuffled his feet around to try and locate it. Nowhere beside him, nowhere behind him. He chanced a quick flick of his gaze down to the floor. Three feet ahead of him, three feet closer to this… this thing.

Now all he had to do was get his damned legs to move.

One step… two… and shivering now. He never shivered. He’d had knives pulled on him, he’d been shot at, chased perps down crowded city streets at pedal to the medal speeds. But when this humanoid looking shape opened two, nuclear-blue eyes and started advancing, it took everything in Officer Roy McDonald not to scream and cry.

“Please!” He begged, but the thing did not listen. The flashlight slipped from Roy’s sweaty-slick hands and he reached down, fumbled for it, instead wrapped his shaking fingers around the handle of the axe. He came up swinging wildly, aimlessly. “Stop! Go away!”

But the thing did not stop.

“I’ll kill you!”

It was close now, close enough for him to strike with the heavy blade, and so Roy McDonald reared back and took his swing.

He hit it in the leg, but the axe blade kicked back at him—recoiled—as if he’d struck the rope of an electrified fence. “No…” He stumbled backward, back further into the dark hallway in the direction of his friend, who he knew somewhere deep down in his mind was really dead.

“Oh God…” he muttered before turning-heel and bolting into the nearest doorway, slamming it shut behind him. Locking it.

He still gripped the axe, pressing his other arm against the flimsy wooden door. He could hear it, actually hear the thing, whatever the hell it was, getting closer. It made a deep, cavernous hum—a buzzing, radioactive sort of sound that made his molars ache and his manhood shrivel up into his pelvis. When he saw its light start spilling in from beneath the door he backed away, holding his axe up in front of him like a shield instead of a weapon.

Around him was Lloyd’s bedroom. A sty of a place. It smelled of sweat and mildew and stale Cheetos in this room, and there was a rat trap in the corner beneath the window with an old kill still stuck between its wood-and-wire maw.

But it's the posters looking down on Roy that made his skin crawl. They never used to before.

A tacked up 18”x24” of Robert E. Lee, grimacing down on him. Detached from his terror.

A taped poster of the 45th prez, grinning ear to ear, giving Roy two thumbs way up!

And a framed portrait of Adolf himself, sternly looking off somewhere, away from the quivering heap in the center of the room. Above the portrait, a swastika. Beside that, the holy cross. And hanging next to all three, Lloyd’s whites, the ones he’d come in to get before they both left for the rally. Two full canisters of gasoline and torn rags were already waiting in the back of Roy’s truck just outside.

The axe felt immense in Roy’s meaty hands, too heavy to carry. His body was telling him to run, go now, drop the stupid fucking thing and get the hell out of dodge! Instead, he turned and made for the window, refusing to drop his only weapon, and drove the axe head through the glass.

Or, at least he tried to. Because Roy and Lloyd had installed bullet proof glass into their homes two years earlier, as well as cameras above their doors and windows and some spikes beneath a false garden in their backyards. All part of their suspicious nature, their distrust of everyone.

“Shit!” Roy swung at the glass again, and again, and then again. It cracked, but never broke. “Break, damn you!” He gave it his all, and it did bend outward into the night, but it never fell from its steel frame, never shattered into a hole he could crawl through.

The hellish noise was at the door now, the knob rattling. And then Roy remembered the other security addition he and Lloyd both had installed—gun-rack headboards.

He leaped for the bed just as the door exploded inward, revealing the whole of the thing in all of its otherworldly abhorrence.

Roy opened the hidden drawer, a Remington shotgun dropped into his accepting hands, and in a blink he was sitting up, facing the monster. Aiming.

He howled. Fired.

An ear-shattering gun blast… A blinding flash of neon blue…

But the thing still stood, unharmed, unphased, and still advancing.

“NO!” he cried. He tried firing again, but the guns single shot was spent. Damn you, Lloyd. He threw the gun at his pursuer, but it fell short a foot and a half. “Leave me alone!” There were tears flowing like rivers down his pink face now, and he was shaking like a leaf in a powerful winter gust. “Please just leave me alone!”

The thing that looked like walking ripples of lightning was upon him now, reaching out to… to what, throttle him? Crush his skull in its blue-purplish veiny fingers? Rip out his eyes and feed them to him? When it was finally within kissing distance a memory struck Roy, one he remembered wholly and clearly in the split second before the horrid thing made contact with his skin.

Five years previous, he’d been called to the Natural History Museum where some folks had been making a scene protesting the ungodly teachings of evolution and raging against the unholy desecration of human bodies put on display for all of their women and children to gaze upon. They protested to make known that science was the enemy of tradition, good faith and of God Himself. Lloyd had been one of those protesters. When Roy and a couple other sympathetic officers saw what those folks had been there at the museum to do, they guided several of the protestors (Lloyd included) to the back entrance where they could sneak in to mess with the displays before they were cleared out. Roy had followed Lloyd in and had been stupefied at one display in particular—that of the human nervous system.

The mind-numbing intricacy of all those veins and tubes—and what to Roy looked like spiderwebs—made him stop cold in front of the display case that day. Stop and stare for a whole half minute before Lloyd called him out of his stupor and further into the building.

Sitting up in Lloyd’s filthy bed with the storm of the century raging outside and the blue lightning creature just a whisper away from his face, Roy remembered that day at the museum, and, with dizzying clarity, realized what this monster thing looked like.

Just like that thing in the glass case that had entranced, and, secretly, scared him.

Which is when it touched him.

First, it was the back of his leg, as if a mule had kicked him there, and he bucked in pain, wincing. Second came the stinging in his wrists—cold against his skin, cold like metal, and then he swore he could hear a dull crunch just below his thumbs, punctuated by a sudden pang… but maybe that was just the thunder raging outside. He opened his mouth to cry out when a sharp and stinging pain rippled through his mouth. Groaning, gasping, he convulsed.

The third and worst of the agony struck him then.

A scorching, electric-knife kind of agony stabbed into the side of his neck. His eyes bugged out like golf balls in their sockets and he clamped down on his tongue, severing it at the root. It landed with a wet thwap on the grimy bed sheets as his limbs tensed and went rigid. His head was thrown backward, bent at an unnatural angle but he couldn’t move it, couldn’t even think, could barely see the pain was so great.

And it didn’t stop. It just. Didn’t. Stop.

The thing, the nuclear-veiny monster, stared at him coldly with eyes that were all light. All-seeing but also unseeing. Acid hot and also frigid, emotionless cold. Its webby finger was touching Roy’s cheek and he felt the pain, the divine pain, in every inch of his body, especially in his neck, which was starting to feel like it was cooking beneath his skin.

And that’s when Roy McDonald’s bladder finally gave out, releasing hot urine into his pleated khakis. The creature held its touch—its gentle caress—for twenty-three seconds whole, until one last limb-ripping bolt of pain exploded in his leg (pain like the strike of an axe) and a barbed-wire punch struck him in the hip (a strike like a gunshot) finally releasing Roy from the torment.

When it did let him go there were no marks, no burns or bruises, no tears or cuts, no gore or mess. The pain was all subsurface—a firework show of anguish across Roy’s latticework of nerves. He collapsed unconscious onto the crusty bedsheets of his dead friend’s creaky mattress and released an undignified fart as he slipped into what would turn out to be a two-day coma.

He was discovered in a state, a hair's-breadth from the black iron gates of the afterlife. There was a foul stench filling the entire house, mainly emanating from Lloyd’s decomposing corpse at the end of the hall, but also from the load of shit Roy had deposited into his piss-soaked pants when he’d blacked out. It took investigating officers a whole ten minutes before they identified the jerky-looking thing in Roy’s lap as his tongue.

They also thought he was dead, until a diligent EMT noticed a weak but present pulse.

When Roy finally awoke from his death-like sleep he wept for a day entire, eventually breaking into wild thrashing fits of (freaky-deaky) screaming before his doctor, four nurses, and fellow officers had to restrain and sedate him. They heard him say nonsensical things, gibberish things that (sounded like rabid mumbling without the most of his tongue) gave them all chills and made them break out into cold sweats. The officer’s who’d found him (and who had gone to visit him only a couple of times) asked to take time off of work afterward. They had been so shaken by being with Roy, by listening to him. What happened to this brick wall of a man? What could have done this? What had he seen?

The things Roy said (or tried to say) and scribbled on notepads eventually got him locked up in what Roy would’ve called the cracker house, but what most just call the loony bin. A couple of his cohorts came to his defense (unsuccessfully) claiming that there had to be more to the story than just a cop who’d snapped. But what Roy himself had attested to had not helped his case.

He used pen and paper to describe it—the creature, as he called it—as it felt when it touched him. He described it like describing pain. He called it white-hot voodoo lightning, and he would never be the same because of it.

~

The creature, finished with Roy now, stood and turned, stepped gracefully out into the hall, past Lloyd's cold corpse, and then into the living room, through the front door, and finally out into the turbulent storm. There in the rain and beneath the flash of dazzling lightning, its light dimmed in its web of veins and tubes and nerve-wires, until the light was gone. It was almost invisible in the downpour that night, even beneath the street lamp and bulb-flash bursts of lightning in the sky. You could walk past within two feet of it and never notice, as it was meant to be.

It spied a small round face framed in the bottom half of a big window from across the street. The face of a young boy, eyes bugged, the whites visible even through the curtain of rain fifteen yards out from where the thing stood. The boy stared for an eternal few seconds. Unmoving.

Uninterested, the creature turned, facing right down the dark street.

It paused… waiting… feeling…

Then, methodically, it walked into the night, because it was not finished. It never was and, terribly, never will be. It is always, and it is done here for now.

Onto the next.