The Demon of Montreal Page 6

  Chapter Thirteen

  Simon sat with Merlin beside him. A candle guttered in the corner where it made shadows rise and fall like monsters.

  “Harder,” said Merlin.

  “Errgh!” Simon dropped back, sweat glistening on his skin.

  “You give up too easy.”

  Simon waved Merlin away. “I couldn’t do anymore than that,” he gasped. The room was hot now, a fetid mingling of heat and scum.

  “Focus,” said Merlin and waved a hand at the match stick that lay on the floor. “Focus the mind, eh boy? Your thought…the essence of whatever you think you is!”

  Simon studied it. A malformed dowel tipped with a drip of hardened white film. Made by the magician himself no doubt, but how? He pushed the thought out. No… just the matchstick…concentrate on the matchstick.

  “Sit up, come now, you sloppy and…ugly.”

  Simon sat up, cross legged and spread his hands. He closed his eyes. One, two, three… he visualized the object, the substance of it. His mind opened to the chemicals of the thing, their molecular connection. He could see them, see them, see them…

  Light flared. Sulfur stung his nose.

  The match flared, unassisted.

  He collapsed. His muscles ached as if he’d run a mile. Sweat made hairy, wet furrows on his chest.

  Merlin squealed. “Oh, now this be cause for much fun!”

  “Water.”

  Merlin passed him a wooden bowl, which he drained in three easy gulps. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t see how this is going to get me out of here.”

  “Little then large, small then big, yeah?” said Merlin. “Impatient lout.”

  “At this rate it’s going to take me years.”

  “We’ll see,” said Merlin.

  “What do you mean, ‘we’ll see.’ I want to get out of this Godforsaken Helllpit before I die, you hear me!”

  “Yes, yes, yes. I know and you will,” he whined. “Magic takes time to learn, time and practice. Not nearly as easy as losing your mind, huh?”

  “I told you, I didn’t lose my mind.”

  “No? Why else you in the booby hatch?”

  “I didn’t!”

  The man tried his patience, but he’d also become a friend and he could not truly disdain him.

  Merlin folded his hands. “No sense in reliving the past. I teach you tricks, I teach you magic and when the time comes, you’ll know how to use it. So, sit up and do it again.”

  Simon leaned forward, an effort to assume the cross-legged posture. He was tired, his muscles and mind weary.

  “And then,” said Merlin, “again and again for as long as it take, fool!”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fifteen months passed, though no one would have been able to record time in any calendar sense. The number of shaves, lashings, sulfur baths—anything but calendar days, for inside the Longue Pointe House for the Insane days had a habit of being swallowed whole by the ever present darkness.

  Simon Kadoza’s skill had grown in those passing months. Merlin had taught him more than making matches burst into flame, more than hoisting plates and bowls with his mind, more than viewing at a distance, so much more. But many of the lessons—the best of them—were not understood by the neophyte, hidden as they were deep within the unrealized potential of the magic, waiting for that catalyst-moment.

  Merlin knew the time had come. Light the fuse and let well alone. If he’d done his job, the pieces would tumble like well-placed dominoes. If he hadn’t, they’d simply scatter like buckshot and all would be doomed anyhow.

  He woke with a clear conscience—the clearest—for tonight he would prepare the world for the Beginning of the End, a mission of holy purity, an onus that needed purging. He worked in his cell with a spring in his step and a lilt in his song-humming throat.

  A plate of mush slid under the door. The nun-wardens were making their rounds, doling out their idea of dinner. He had not eaten the stuff for longer than he cared to remember, snacking on mice and beetles for their lean protein, and sadly, better taste. He marveled at his own naked body in the candle light of his cell. Bone angles jutting up under thin skin, knees and elbows all knobby points.

  He counted his ribs, all eleven of them. Then gazed with some indifference on his testicles that seemed to hang down lower and lower each passing year. Given another year they might even stretch down to his knees. He did not care. None of that mattered now.

  The nuns had passed. He heard the clanging of the door at the end of the hall. They would not make another round until morning. It meant old Merlin could do what he pleased. It meant he could scrunch his flapping legs and arms into new and unconsidered positions and slip out the door wicket, freed like some delirious mole into the twisting tunnels where men howled or cried or masturbated until their hard cocks dripped blood, saltpeter notwithstanding.

  The women too, taking out their agony and despair in ways that would sicken any rational, less seasoned creature. A bloodied broom handle and gored pillow casing sometimes the only evidence left behind of those terrible methods. Yes, Merlin had seen it all, a menagerie of horrors, peeking through the doors or watching from the quiet corners where no one should have been.

  He had tricks, a great many of them. He had as many tricks as he had professions, some legitimate, some insidious, all from a life time of learning. His tricks kept his spirit entertained, his mind occupied. Being free to walk the halls and slip from one place to another showed him a whole other world inside the madness.

  Yes, Merlin was a magician, but more: he was a chymest, a contortionist, a thief, and above all, a priest. That last vocation is why he alighted to the deed tonight.

  His cell took on the air of a mercantile shop, stacked with burlap bags and tin pots. In the center an elaborate connection of jars and glass dishes hung together over tiny hills of melted candles.

  A certain youthful delight swooned inside him at the thought that he might actually pull this caper off.

  He opened the stew pot he’d filched from the galley. The contents had been fermenting in the corner for weeks. Scum caked the edges of the metal plate covering it. A terrible reek erupted once removed. He choked and repressed a gag.

  Rancid urine filled to near brim.

  Merlin’s stealth brought him many items to facilitate his many tricks. Common bleach, boiled down to crystalline form, made a mean explosive. Distilled piss yielded white phosphorus. Together with a dollop of glue made matches. The combinations of seemingly innocuous compounds to create sinister reactions were infinite.

  Tonight he would need more than a handful of match sticks, for tonight he would perform his most elaborate trick yet: make this whole boobie hatch disappear. That took some doing and a healthy recipe.

  He lit the candles, all twenty five of them and before long he had the many vials and jars boiling and hissing with his collected and aged piss. The smell was overpowering, like tar and ammonia, but he’d smelled worse in these halls. Last time it had taken two weeks before the wardens discovered the decomposing body in its cell.

  While he distilled the liquid, he poured out the contents of twenty eight bags of stolen sulfur into a gunwale-gray, zinc bathtub he’d managed to purloin from the women’s side three months ago. Sulfur baths were a common treatment for the seizure and psoriasis ridden. It was nothing for Merlin to steadily raid the storage piles over a year period, saving up a great wealth of the compound.

  He chuckled softly as he filled the tub with sulfur, careful to spread it evenly from one end to the other. The tub lay as long as Merlin stood tall with a depth of nearly two and a half feet. Quite enough for his uses.

  Next he sprinkled in a layer of bleach crystals ground to fine powder. He’d managed to save up a crock of it over the recent months since he’d found his protég
ée, Simon Kadoza. One had to be careful when storing potassium chlorate distilled from bleach, very careful. Evidently he’d done well because it had never detonated.

  The hours passed, and he waited and watched the bubbling urine drip through the ad hoc jungle of bottles and jars. They were blissful hours that made his heart tap with delight as he imagined his long-deliberated plan coming to fruition. Somewhere near the first dew of dawn, the last of it slid down into the collecting pots, a faint yellow glow resonating within.

  Carefully, reverently he spread the waxy substance over the powder bedding inside the tub until an even layer covered it much like a three tiered wedding cake, Merlin thought.

  He emptied three buckets of glue, added in the molten candle wax and with a purloined broom handle, stirred the mixture like some lunatic chef, until it thickened into a murky sludge.

  It took him longer than he expected and already he could sense the oncoming break of morning. No time to let it harden properly. He’d have to move quickly now, no distractions. Total business.

  Nimbly he latched onto the door of his cell and climbed to the open wicket where he passed through, and dropped down outside. Inserting a slender wire into the door lock, he fished about for several moments and listened for the dry click.

  It came and the door swayed inward with a groan. His bare feet padded across the floor, his swinging testicles flopping from thigh to thigh. The next sequence would test his mettle and was the part that his small, pliable body was least suited for. Thankfully, he had only a few more hours to suffer this pathetic human condition. He would make due.

  Pushing the tub from his cell down the hall, he walked the final leg of the journey. The metal scraped against the floor in eerie, wrenching tones and already he could hear the inmates stirring from their drugged slumbers to wonder at the event outside their rooms.

  Merlin pushed hard, his back straining, sweat dripping. His balls seemed to shrivel and suck up slightly, a sensation that made him smile a from ear to ear. A wicket opened to a man with a leprosatic sore where his nose should have been.

  “What’s that you up to now, Merlin?”

  “Gonna wash away all my sins in this tub.”

  “Wise that.”

  Merlin dug in his toes and pushed that tub with every ounce of his hunger-wasted strength.

  It took old Merlin forty five minutes to push his chymest’s bomb to a crank-operated lift three halls down. He sighed with relief as he slumped down the wall and heaved in labored breaths.

  He’d worked too hard. He could feel the strain of it in his too-heavy beating heart.

  “Oh no,” he said, clutching his chest, “not yet you don’t. Not for a long while.”

  He forced himself to stand, knees rattling, testicles wobbling, and finished pushing that tub onto the wooden floor of that lift.

  He stood then for a reflective moment, his eyes glossing over in the dim beginnings of dawn, staring at his bathtub piss-bomb. The years he’d spent inside the asylum all crashed through his mind, waves of memory and nostalgia like the coagulating foam of the deep blue sea.

  Ah, the sea…what he wouldn’t give to feel that again, just once, just for a few select moments he’d like to dip his toes into the clean, cool water of the sea. Wash away the years, the age…the death.

  He closed his eyes and smiled a true smile, for the journey was near its end. Perhaps the hardest part was yet to be endured. Perhaps the easiest, but it held true it was the last, and he was thankful for that.

  Death—an end, mayhap, a beginning more like. Perhaps he’d get to swim in those salty, blue waters again after all. He traced his fingers over his chest in the shape of a cross and said, “Terra ut terra , cinis cineris ut cinis cineris…pulvis ut pulvis.” Earth to earth, ashes to ashes…dust to dust.

  Then he loosed the lift crank, sat his skinny ass and low hanging balls down into that slimy muck and rode it down, down, down. Wind whistled and whipped about his face as he plummeted through the shaft.

  A sudden shock bit into him as he sank, now at the end, unable to turn back, worried that his calculations were somehow off, that he’d overlooked some small but vital detail.

  Alas, he quelled his fears because above all else, this was meant to be. He knew that. Believed that to the bottom of his being.

  He sailed down into the depths, down into the boiler room directly below Simon Kadoza’s cell and lit not one, not two, but thirteen piss-boiled matches. In the final moment of that flare of sulfur and flame so strong not even the wind of his descent could extinguish it, his eyes glimmered and he had one tranquil thought before the tub and all its contents exploded into a thousand bits: I’m coming home.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A thunderous boom jolted him from sleep, but this was not thunder. The rumble had been sudden, followed by the echoes of subsequent disasters. The scent of it had already begun to invade the floors above it. Yes, Simon thought, above it, because the crash had happened somewhere in the stifling bowels of The Longue Pointe Crazy Hotel.

  Panic-driven epinephrine flooded his bloodstream. He felt his brain squirm inside his skull. Not thunder. Fire!

  The thought of Merlin jumped to his mind. His skin flushed as sweat glands pumped salt water. The heat, it was rising inside the cell, wasn’t it? Yes, coming too fast and noises, lots of misplaced noises. The sound of metal on metal, the hissing of steam, the groan of machine.

  He stood. The darkness had never seemed so thick. He lunged toward the door he knew was locked. He shoved the wicket open to a row of heads peeking out like taxidermy, his captive brothers with their wild, bewildered eyes. Terror—sheer paddy wagon terror—clamped down around his throat because all of them were locked inextricably inside those little rooms. Those little ovens.

  “Merlin!” He shouted into the restless maze of halls and doors and staring eyes, setting off a flurry of screams and cries from the madmen. “Merlin!”

  Surely the fool lingered somewhere in this hellhole, surely he came even now to release him with his matches and lock picking tricks. Wasn’t this the moment he’d spoken of? The catalyst?

  “Merlin!”

  But the response was only that of clashing metal, and men and women wailing into the night. He dropped inside his cell, slid down the door and grabbed his head between his hands. The temperature vaulted above human tolerance, his skin was slick and his tongue parched. He thought of Hell and that eternal burning he’d always known he deserved.

  He thought of Julia, his Julia and their two beautiful babies, who he’d failed to save from the house-fire. His beloved Julia, mother of his children, savior of his soul. Tears soaked his face, slid down his neck.

  The heat spiraled to apex, screams tore from ragged throats. He longed for that skinny imbecile to clamber in through the door wicket with his rotting-toothed grin and pointless magic tricks to lead him out and away. Forever.

  The truth of it pricked him. Somehow he knew Merlin was already dead. Consumed like a human candle wick.

  The second explosion came, thudding through the walls and floor, resonating in the brick and mortar. The second dwarfed the first. Shouts echoed through walls, warnings from Sisters to block the doors, release the patients and a dozen other incoherent declarations that melded into a confusion of intentions and words.

  The fire prowled. Simon could hear it, a dragon with the very fury of Hell wound up in its substance, devouring everything living and dead.

  Glass shattered somewhere.

  Shrieks beckoned.

  The heat radiated, his room was a stew pot over a bonfire. Sweat drenched his body, dripped to a pool on the floor. Soon, he knew, his body would cease to produce liquid and he’d dry up like a raisin. The pain would come, the suffocation, the agony. The burning.

  Smoke suffused under his locked door like great silken clouds, colorless in the
darkness. Everything was always so damn colorless in that awful darkness. He choked and coughed. Coughs he knew, once started would never end. Not until he expired, a dried out peel of humanity.

  Now, he thought, I will pay. Now I will die as she did, cooked alive in my own stench. He bawled the last of his grief. He let it all drain out with horrible, unheard wails.

  He could not cease the coughing. The metal door grilled his skin. The strength to resist was lost on him. Heat blisters popped. Nerves radiated pain. Muscles locked on bone and thrust him away, but where? Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from that flesh eating heat.

  Orange flame licked over the threshold of the door, curling demon tongues that could already taste his roasted flesh, slithering out to lick and dine and drink his boiling blood.

  Heat caught his eyes, peeled the lids back and fried the corneas dry. The porous tissue of his eyeballs poached like breakfast. He burst to flame.

  Screams gurgled in a mush of flesh. Skin carbonized and cracked like a spit-roast sow, hair burned clean, scorched his scalp. Blood bubbled up as the flame burned down.

  Death laid claim. Death as he had always wished for it, death the private mistress he’d waited for all these long and dread filled nights. Not some high class prostitute he’d pay to impersonate his dead wife, but death. This was the whore he’d long sought. The dark cunt he’d wished to court.

  Consciousness ebbed to cellular level.

  * * * *

  Death had masters too, as the man once known as Simon Kadoza would discover.

  He, his body, or the essence of his being—which one never determined—stood up, stood to face the black smoke and yellow flame. The meat of him was cooked for sure, blackened like Cajun Catfish. His living brain puddled in his skull. Yet, two charred and desiccated orbs lay on the grimy floor. Still he could see the carbonized pupils, forever dilated in the frozen terror of death. He closed a fist around them.

  He stood. He saw. He calculated.

  The lessons of his master, his teacher, his father Merlin bloomed anew in his spirit. His mind was a fluid and facile thing, the sluggishness of human frailty siphoned off from reincarnation.