E

By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris

The pain in my head was like an electrical short that caused a lamp to flash wildly and spark and smoke. Except eventually a fuse would blow, the lamp would fall dark and quiet. The pain in my head sputtered on and on. Sparks of it danced where my left eye had been until 3 a.m. A hole was there now, stuffed with gauze. A deep hole, felt like it tapped the base of my brain. My hands stayed tight on the steering wheel.

Doodlebug in the backseat had taken some of the rope into her hands. Was twisting it compulsively. Maybe the texture appealed to her. Rough, scratchy, anything that might break through was good. She hadn’t spoken in hours. 

Slats in the passenger seat turned the map, tucked his long flat hair behind an ear, adjusted his glasses. He was the smart one. The bookish one. Doodle was the surviving artistic one and I was what? Fun at parties? Belief that Slats knew what to do was the only thing gluing us together. Gluing me together.

He looked out the Fairlane’s windshield as if some landmark might help him find his bearings. There were no landmarks. Only the flat green farmland of the Central Valley, mile by mile. 

He rotated the map again. It was fifteen years old, so we’d been getting disoriented, the roads having changed a lot since 1956, but we kept doglegging our way south and east, south and east. A year ago I’d bought the car used, cheap, from a white-haired lady in Berkeley, and a week later bought the map used too, from a starving kid on a blanket on a sidewalk on Haight. A sunny, cold day last summer. Peri was with me and she bought a partial deck of tarot cards from the same kid. She’d turned the cards into decoupage on a wooden panel that hung in the Center Ring, which was what the four of us called our living room, in that glorious apartment that we called The Circus, where so many good times were known. I wished I was back on that cold sunny afternoon, buying that map with no idea lives would ever depend on it.   

Peri was dead. Back in The Circus. Five times I’d checked for a pulse, snapped my fingers in front of her open eyes. I kept checking even though her throat was ripped out, until Slats handed me a coffee he’d brewed and said, “We gotta move, Joe.” 

We drove out leaving Peri where she’d fallen. Feet in the kitchen (where he’d brewed the coffee), head in the hallway, bead curtain hanging over her navel. Well, first we put down towels, so her blood wouldn’t seep through the floor and drip into the apartment below. When we went back, we would have to deal with Peri. And Jurgis. We had not liked Jurgis, who lived above. But we had not wanted him torn to pieces. His upper half on a couch, twisted in its ceremonial robes. Lower half on another couch, in black socks and white (red) JC Penney jockeys. There were other pieces but those were the big ones.

Doodlebug had not lifted a hand to hold the coffee that Slats held out to her. 

I wanted it to be a dream. Right now Peri was sitting on the couch sucking on the hookah. Jurgis was next to her, doing Jurgis things. Clipping his toenails, eating our tuna salad without asking. The stuff that had so made us want to fuck with him. 

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” I said over the wheel.

Slats looked at me like he hadn’t expected me to try being funny. I didn’t realize it was a funny thing to say until that look.

I shrugged and said, “The needle is tapping E.”

He nodded. 

“Fresno’s coming up. Pick a place on the outskirts.”

I nodded.

He reached to the backseat and put a hand on Doodlebug’s knee, shook it the way you might to reassure a child. 

“You hanging in there, Doodlebug?”

She stared blankly.

“We’re about to stop. If you need to pee.”

I picked a dead-looking Phillips 66 right on Route 99 before town proper, where the air was still dusty and smelled like cowshit. I’d been at the wheel since 6:30, in the dark. It was coming up on 10:30 and I needed food, and more coffee. 

The attendant was a dull-looking guy about thirty, sunburnt inside his pinstriped white uniform, which had motor-oil handprints on it. He went to the rear where the tank was and made a lot of noise unscrewing the cap. I winced at the clunking around. The car bounced as he jabbed the pump in. He wandered off once it was going.

Slats and I sat with our doors open. Wincing, he put his right leg outside to stretch it, test it.

“No better?”

“Nope.”

We were pretty sure it was a fracture. That’s why driving duty fell on me, even down one eye.

Slowly the pump churned toward sixteen gallons, bell chiming periodically.

“Hey Doodle,” he said. “Why don’t you go get us some Cokes from that vending machine? Doodle? Julie?”

She looked at him, and for the first time since Peri died I saw her eyes draw a focus. She looked at him, and seemed to be thinking about what he said. About the task of getting Cokes. Whether she could manage it. We both stared at her, watched her start to return to us. I felt the first tremor of relief all day, and I refused to show it because it was so fragile. I didn’t want to grin like an idiot only to see the life fade right back out of her eyes. 

I was watching her so closely, I noticed her attention shift off Slats to someone else.

It was a mom and a boy. They’d just got out of a hideous old DeSoto and the mom was towing the boy toward the office. Maybe he had to pee. She looked mad about it. This plump Fresno mom in gingham. It occurred to me the kid should be in school. I bet there’s a story there, I thought — and that did seem funny. I wanted to tell Slats. 

That’s when we heard the first bang.

From inside the trunk. 

The thing we’d locked in there had woken up.

We all froze. The three of us. We all happened to be looking forward at that point, at the mom and the brat, and so when the first bang happened we all were staring at this lady and that’s how we froze. The look on my face must have been — all the terror I’d felt back in The Circus. All right back with me.

The lady stopped, mid-drag of the kid. Looked with unease over the hood of the Fairlane, in through the windshield at us. Took in each of our faces, in turn. The boy, confused, half-looked too. She had heard the thump from the trunk — maybe — or why look? She’d heard. That was bad.

We all hung suspended in this moment. Fresno mom, the three of us. Waiting to see what it meant.

Another thump rang from the trunk. Loud. Unmistakable.

The woman squinted. Her eyes roved over the car, not sure where to settle, flitted back in panic to my missing eye, to Doodle’s slack face, to our long hair, every detail unsavory in her eyes—

Slats shook off the paralysis. It had to be the disgust on her face that enabled it.

He clowned right into the hippy role. “That’s right, lady!” he yelled. “Stop the war! Off the pigs!”

He began to punch the roof of the car. Drum both hands on it. To cover the noise from the trunk. 

The lady scowled. She marched away, then abruptly turned back, nearly swinging her kid at us. She looked like she might be about to give us a piece of her mind.

That clicked it for me. I leapt out. Which scared her. I’m a biker-looking dude on a good day and I was missing an eye. She yelped and ran for the office, pulling her boy. But I was headed the other way, to the back of the car. I yanked out the fuel pump, spilling gasoline, I flipped up the handle to shut it off, screwed the cap back in with shaking hands. It was unnerving to hear the banging so close. In the front seat it was almost as if I’d been distant from it. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, I thought. I wedged a five-dollar bill into the steel frame that held the glass over the pump’s gauges. That would cover it — we hadn’t even got to twelve gallons.

I ran back to the driver’s seat and we took off fast, or fast for a Fairlane, bouncing where the station lot and the street met in a dip, the whole car creaking like a mattress, now the blows in the trunk coming fast and powerful. As if the thing back there meant to punch its way through the sheet metal.

Maybe it could. 

The pounding continued as 99 rolled through Fresno. It got louder. Faster. You could hear the size of those hands, and the rising frenzy of the thing. It wanted out.

“What do we do?” I asked Slats. My voice cracked.

“Keep going. Don’t stop.”

Doodlebug started to cry.

“It was my idea to summon it,” she said. “This is all my fault.”

Slats was quick to reach for her. But he couldn’t get to her. Couldn’t touch her. She was a girl who liked touch. We were all just friends but I’d collected about a million hugs from Doodle. She’d hug you for cooking pasta. She’d high-five you for getting up to change the channel. She’d put her legs up across yours if you sat next to her on the couch because she just liked touch, and he couldn’t get to her because he’d pulled his leg back inside too fast, and it was awkwardly placed now. He patted his own seat back, as if to comfort her with the rhythm.

“We all did it,” he said. Against the rhythm of his pat, thunder rattled on the underside of the trunk lid. “No one’s to blame. No one could have guessed this stuff was real.”

This stuff. Black magic. Spellbooks Jurgis kept in a locked glass case. He’d drop in at The Circus, brag about what intellectuals he palled around with at the Church of Satan. About how we were dupes of false ideas. About the ecstasy of ritualistic sex — could we even handle it? He doubted it. It all felt like lies. Doodle suspected Jurgis was a virgin. Peri thought he hated women. Me and Slats mainly considered him a mooch. The goal was to call his bluff. That was all. The gag went great, too. We timed it right. A “summoning” from one of his books. He walked in just as we pitched the chant to a crescendo. His reaction was priceless. Better than hoped for. A wild, shrieking panic. 

“What are you doing?” he’d cried, diving spastically to knock over the candles.

The four of us had fallen on our asses laughing at him.

Then at 3 a.m., we’d been awakened by a noise. 

An intruder. A guest we had invited.

It took another forty miles past Fresno before the relentless, thundering blows finally tired to a patter, an occasional flare-up, long stretches of nothing. Then nothing. 

Doodlebug cried again, in relief. 

“We should memorize our parts,” Slats said. During its banging, he’d been flipping through a couple of books. “So there’s no mistakes when we get there.”

There was something called “the hell circle.”

“Okay,” I said, “walk us through the plan.”

We had agreed to the plan before we drove out. But it had been hard to concentrate on his explanation of it in an apartment with two corpses and that thing knocked out and tied up. 

He nodded and tapped Jurgis’s black magic book.

Jurgis had explained, in a stammering rush, that our joke ritual had opened a temporary one-way door. A thing from the netherworld had stepped through, and the door closed. Now we had a problem, because banishing was not as easy as summoning. Our only chance, being amateurs, was to cast the banishing spell in a place where a door to the netherworld stood permanently open. Unholy ground.

For the spell itself we had a velour bag of wooden tiles that clacked and rattled. We’d drawn symbols on the tiles. On the unholy ground inside the hell circle we had to lay the thing down and place the tiles around it, and chant, and cut our hands, and bleed on the tiles while chanting. The more voices joined in the chant, the more hands shedding blood, the better the chances the spell would shove that thing back where it belonged. “Four of us,” Jurgis had said confidently before he died, “should be enough.”

It was Slats, not Jurgis, who knew where to find unholy ground. He was always reading. New Age, ancient wisdom, UFOs, ghosts. And he remembered a chapter in a book.

“According to Reitmeier, the Indians had a problem with evil spirits stalking this desert. It’s all preserved in oral tradition, which says they traced the evil spirits back to this one origin spot. Which they named ‘the leak in the good home.’ Reitmeier studied their tales meticulously, and he concluded the spot was essentially a revolving door to the spirit realm. To a bad neighborhood in that realm. And the Indians solved it. They built this circle of blessed rocks to surround it. That hemmed in the evil spirits. There was no way to close the door, but the Indians built a fence around it.”

He tapped the cover of the Reitmeier book, Ancient Truths.

“The fence broke down, partly, when the white man showed up and discovered silver in the area. A railroad spur got built straight through the center of the circle. Incredibly disrespectful. And it weakened the good magic, and led to a lot of death until the mining company shut down that spur. But it helps us.”

“How?” I said.

 “Because they don’t rip up old rails. Defunct or not, that rail still crosses the road. So when we see it, we stop. We hike along it — straight to the hell circle. We would never find it otherwise.” He read to himself for a while, then said, “And yeah. The Indians laid so many blessings on that rail spur, to patch up their circle, that now nothing supernatural that’s on the rails can leave them. Not easily, anyway.”

“So we tie the thing to the rails?”

“No, we do the banishing ritual. But if we park on the rails, the thing can’t break out.”

I nodded. It made my head hurt.

Doodle said, “You trust this book? Completely?”

“Absolutely,” Slats said. “Reitmeier’s not a von Däniken type, where he throws in a ton of chaff with the wheat. He’s on the level, like Castaneda, but more so, if you can believe it. He approaches the supernatural like a scientist. He spends most of his book discrediting legends. He is incredibly dismissive. So when he verifies one, you can take it to the bank.”

He held up the Reitmeier book and turned it like the queen waving to a crowd. It was a hardcover an inch thick. The dust jacket showed a phantom hovering over a Gothic mansion, lightning forking the sky. It did not look scientific. More like a children’s book. At least the author photo had Reitmeier in tweed.

He traded the book for the map, trying to keep Doodle engaged, now that she had come back to us. He waved his hand over an empty beige span east of Barstow, north of the Mojave, south of Death Valley. 

“The hell circle is in here,” he said. “We take Route 466 through a town called Yermo. Then — just start looking for a road north into this area.” 

The area was traversed by no road big enough to make the map. An expanse of nothing at all worth noting, land without a single point to it. By the scale, it was an hour across. More than an hour, if whatever road we did find was bad. Which it would be.

“You think we’ll find the circle before sunset?” I asked.

“No,” Slats said. “Maybe.”

In the rearview I watched Doodle fade abruptly.

“You get some rest,” I said. 

It hurt to talk, but it felt worth saying. All I wanted was to be nice to my friends. To show them love.

We didn’t talk for the next hour. We didn’t even say anything when the pounding resumed inside the trunk. This time it acquired a steadiness. A reliability. The thing battered the lid for about five minutes, fast, like a hail storm on a tin roof. Then slow for five minutes, like a drumbeat for a dirge. Then nothing for fifteen to twenty minutes. Then it would start over at fast. 

That was how it went, all the way until 2:30, when we were out of farmland and into the Mojave, and the fuel gauge was again tapping at E.

Slats consulted the map.

“There’s a town in ten miles.”

As if in response, the thing broke its silent stretch to give one terrific thump. Doodle looked like she might be sick. 

“The town is called Mojave,” he added.

“Not exactly inventive,” I said. 

We drove another minute, listening to the pounding rise to a crescendo of blows. It must have vibrated the backseat because Doodlebug was shaking. Then I realized she was crying. 

I touched the wad of gauze jammed into my socket. Wet again. It needed to be changed.

There were no other cars. Hadn’t been for a while. 

I slowed us down, rolled us to the shoulder.

“Stopping?” Slats asked.

“We can’t pull into an Arco with that banging. Anyone will think we kidnapped someone. We’re the Manson Family. Look at my eye. Your leg. We’ll get stopped. Then what?”

He nodded. The car crunched the gravel of the shoulder. When stopped, we all sat still. The thing fell quiet too, as if waiting to see what might develop. 

As soon as I cut the engine, those massive hands resumed their cacophony.

“Ready?” Slats said.

“Nope,” I said. “Let’s just get it done.”

We both got out. There were no cars. The desert was a flat stretch of gravelly sand, scrubby knee-high bushes polka-dotting it all the way back to dirt-pile mountains. I ground my teeth against the endless banging. I opened the back door and took a shovel and a pickaxe.

“Why did we stop?” Doodle asked in a daze.

“We have to knock it out,” I said. “So we can get gas. Out cold.”

She got out of the car too, clasping a shovel in slender fingers meant for paintbrushes, soft-lead pencils, joints. Not weapons.

“I’ll help.”

Slats grunted and winced as he limped. We arrayed ourselves around the wildly thumping trunk. Dents had risen. I wondered if we should say a prayer. A real Christian prayer, call down Jesus and Mary to guard us. At least to take us to heaven if we blew it. I held the keys out to Doodlebug.

“You pop the lid. Then run straight back, get the hell out of the way.”

“Wait. Your protections,” she said. “Check them.”

We had scoured Jurgis’s books after he died, found “protection” words in Latin, Greek, Aramaic, Sanskrit. Had written them on our bodies with ballpoint pens, with a black permanent marker. My chest said one thing, my back another, my knuckles, my belly. She pulled up our shirts to verify the ink hadn’t run in sweat, checked her own. 

We got into position, Slats and me, implements raised. 

With pained slowness, as if reaching to touch a stove she knew was hot, Doodle aimed the key at the trunk’s lock. 

It occurred to me, as she neared the keyhole, that I might be about to lose my other eye.

She put the key in, she cranked it a turn and jumped back.

The lid opened an inch, bobbed there — we didn’t breathe — and then it was slammed upward, and the thing rose to her knees from the trunk bed. That curved body, savagely female form — but the inhuman face, I couldn’t ever look at that again. I didn’t dare raise my eyes that high. The body was still clad, absurdly, in the cotton nightshirt we had pulled over it when it was out cold in the apartment — a try toward decency, toward wanting it to be human instead of what it was—

Up came its enormous talons. Loose from the ropes we had tied so tight. One vast claw raked toward me in a wide haymaker. I lifted my pickaxe shieldlike and yelped and shrank. I went spinning with the effort of dodging. 

The world felt narrow and dim with one eye. Like I was fighting an enemy I couldn’t see at all. I heard a squelch. The sound of a heavy soap-foamy sponge wrung out while washing a car. I knew that meant blood hitting the ground. The creature’s, I hoped, as I found a way to use the momentum of my spin to bring myself all the way around with the pickaxe, to swing that heavy steel poker back up around and fast — faster — angling through the air toward the spot where I thought the thing was. I couldn’t see ahead of the point. I could see only my hands on the wooden handle. At the last split second, it occurred to me that I was about to plant the pick right through Slats. Through his head.

Then it went into a head. Hers.

The creature’s, thankfully. It — she — was reaching for Slats I think, and intercepted the blade. The point broke through the side of her head as easily as a spoon breaks through a soft-boiled egg that’s sitting on its comfy little breakfast-table stand. The point popped out the other side of her head. In the splat of hot blood, the scattering of gore, she clenched those talons to the sides of her head, she pulled at the steel.  Massive talons. Larger than her head. She pushed at the pickaxe as if trying to push off a hat that was too tight. Struggled. Head hooked on the blade. When I shook the pick, she shook.

“Slats!” I yelled. “Finish it!”

It was Doodle who stepped in. Swinging her shovel as if to beat a rug on a line. She swung again and again, smashing the flat of the blade into the hands, bashing them until they were shattered, were jelly, until they dropped from her head, limp.

“Okay,” I said. “Good.”

She stopped, panting. 

She dropped the shovel and ran away from the car.

I angled the pickaxe so the thing slid off it, into the trunk. I leaned over it. Pushed its limbs to make sure all parts were back inside the heptagram we’d chalked onto the trunk bed. I lashed the rope back around the wrists — but Slats was our knots expert.

“Slats, get up here!”

I glanced back. 

He sat cross-legged on the shoulder, head dropped forward, chin to chest. Shirt and pants a glistening sheet of dark red. Sitting in a pool of more of that. 

My friend Henry Morgan Slattery was dead. 

It wasn’t like Peri where I’d checked five times before it felt real.

I looked back at the thing. I could swear the ragged hole through its head already appeared to have neatened up, at the edges. That’s how it had gone the first time we killed it, in the apartment. It had healed so fast — but so slowly, if you watched, you couldn’t be sure it was happening. It healed like raw clay smoothing itself over a simple mistake.

The stench. Its blood smelled like a raw outhouse shit.

I spit on it and slammed the trunk, and without pausing to think, I took hold of Slats under his armpits and dragged him back off the road. 

There were no cars. Maybe God was with us just that much. He let there be no cars.

Doodlebug had only run twenty yards. She stood with her arms at her sides.

“Doodle,” I called as gently as I could, as urgently as I could. “We can’t take Slats with us. Help me.”

She helped. Face as blank as it had been the first half of the day.

We didn’t bury him deep. We didn’t want to spend time. When we went back to the car, she sat up front. I worried the car might not have enough gasoline to start — but it did, and five minutes later we pulled into the self-serve island at an Arco, town of Mojave.

I wasn’t sure how anything was going to go, from here. Maybe two of us was enough to do the job.

“Want to get us something to eat over there?” I said.

She nodded. 

“Wait,” I said.

I used my sleeve to clean her blank face. I spoke to her tenderly as I did. I doubt she heard a word. Maybe the tone helped. I wondered if she’d remember the words to the chant. If she could even speak. I wondered if we would ever give Slats a proper burial, or if he would become a missing persons file. I wondered if after this, we were going to go live in Mexico under fake names for the rest of our lives. I wondered if summoning up one demon meant you never could get rid of hell. If once they heard about you down there, they would feel an interest and pursue you for the rest of your time.

I watched her cross the street as I gassed the car. A hamburger shack with an outdoor counter. She didn’t so much cross as drift toward it. I didn’t think about Slats. I thought the demon had already ruined everything — already won. But I hoped I could find the correct road, and the rail crossing, and the hell circle. There was an hour until sunset. 

I watched Doodle at the counter, waiting for an employee to appear. She was the only customer. It was a desert town, lots of space between the buildings and the people. Not much of either in sight. Buzz of a single-engine plane overhead, invisible in the clouds. Clouds were assembling. It was windy up there. It was going to be a dark night. I wondered if out here the clouds were on hell’s side. 

The pump pinged. I slapped the handle up and put the nozzle back in its rest. Fetched the gas cap from the top of the pump where I’d set it, screwed it back in. Closed the hatch over the cap. Softly, in case banging the hatch would wake the creature inches away from it.

I sat in the car and from the rear floor I retrieved the shoebox we’d filled with first-aid supplies before heading out. Pulled the old gauze out of my eye socket and rested it on my denim knee. A clotted mass, wet and heavy, red with blood, orange with pus. I cut a clean length of gauze. I got fingerprints of dirt and sweat on it. I could smell gasoline, so that was probably on it too. I used the rearview to see what I was doing as I fed it into the socket, pushing it back, back. There was so much room there. In my head. So much empty space. 

Someone approached and I looked up, hoping it was Doodlebug with a white bag of cheeseburgers.

I emitted a sound when I saw it was not her. Like a gurgle through a slashed throat. Sound of shock and dismay. As if my need for it to be unreal was strong enough to strangle me.

It was a dead man. Crossing the street. A shimmering anatomy of rot. He came on in languid high steps, like a show horse, like showing off, shedding fibrous flesh, pustules popping, a long forked tongue dangling from his mouth and wrapped around his own cock as he walked. A mouth of broken triangular teeth and eyes of fire. Wings at his back, decaying wings — spreading.

Then gone. In a blink. A figment.

Not a figment, though. I could smell him, as the wind picked up. Blew the air that he had walked through to my face.

I stood. I realized this was what it meant to be near the hell circle. The two-way door. What it meant to have called up one demon. It meant you would see more. The other ones called up in rituals, and the ones who’d broken through the circle, all the demons who walked the world near the door to their home. It meant the Indian blessings were not airtight or the white man’s violations were too thorough. Evil broke through, and dwelt here. The thing in the trunk would have allies, out here. 

The burger shack. Doodlebug — my friend Julie Garten. A cook had appeared. His back to her, he flipped burgers. A policeman had appeared too, standing beside her. Blue uniform. His black-and-white boat, outdated Galaxie, parked beside the shack. 

She was trying not to look his way as he spoke to her conversationally. Even across the highway, his body language told me here was a cop getting suspicious. Or concerned. He kept talking.

Come on, Doodle, I thought, come on back to us. Be cool with this cop. Don’t be blank. Turn on that charm I know is yours. 

Then, finally, she faced him — and even in profile I saw the stress break through, take over — for a split second. Before she went down. Like a sandbag. Dropped to the macadam.

The cop jumped in surprise when she fainted. Grabbed his hat to pin it in place while he jumped. He was in a whole different movie.

Then he crouched to help her, and yelled to the cook, who dropped his spatula, headed for a phone.

I made a quick decision.

I dropped the clotted gauze into a trash can and went inside to pay for my gasoline, casually. I came back out in something like slow motion and got into the car. Its door shut with that happy thunk, as if to communicate all was well. 

Nothing was any good.

If they put her with me, they would see my eye. The bloody tools on the backseat. Slats’ wallet in my pocket. They would pop the trunk and release a demon.

I started the engine and, calmly, I rolled the old Fairlane with its freight of murder and doom back onto the road. I proceeded in slow, orderly fashion, in case that cop or any cop buddy of his happened to glance my way. And in orderly fashion I got moving back along the road to the hell circle.

Twenty miles later in the middle of nowhere with the sun low, the air turning yolky, I started to believe the cops weren’t about to show up on my tail with sirens blaring.

I started to believe I would make it to the hell circle. Started to wonder if I would succeed there, before dying. Started to wonder how I could succeed alone.

I wasn’t alone, of course. As I glided past Barstow toward Yermo, as clouds massed into a smothering blanket, the banging inside the trunk resumed.

The end