The Demon of Montreal Read online

  Definitely going to smoke a whole pack.

  She hauled the body another foot and quickly, before time slipped away, untethered her rope from the ankles, then unbuckled the belt and began removing the trousers. She hated this part and was always waiting till the last minute before doing the honors.

  She worked quickly yanking off the pants and then the underpants. She tried not to look at the flaccid penis that hung to the left like some undercooked sausage amidst a tangle of wiry hair. The smell of his pubic regions wafted up in a cloud of cheesy stale urine and she repressed a gag.

  Off came the shirt, the T-shirt. And finally glasses and rings. She refused to do anything with the diamond earring.

  She stood back blinking off the image of the body’s hairy, naked belly and fat crowded thighs.

  The monster’s head lolled about on neck sinews that were too weak to support it for any length of time and crawled, droop-headed, to the dead man.

  Abby winced. I really hate this part. She always told herself that she wouldn’t watch this part and she always did.

  The beast’s swollen hand and many-jointed fingers reached for the morsel before it. A fingernail, little more than a hook of keratin, aimed for and found an eye socket. Abby stiffened. She thought she might faint. Practicing careful motions—too careful-seeming for such an ogre—the beast plucked out the eye in a wet burp of flesh. Quite like uprooting a plant, it tore a string of roots with it.

  Abby’s vertigo kicked in.

  It brought the eye and its dangling garland to its rotund and deformed face where it planted the bloodied seed in a field of pulpy flesh. She heard the suction of acceptance.

  Abby suffered another bout of infirmity when the monster repeated the action with the second eye. Completing the task, the Thing blinked the eyes—all of them—each one out of sync with the other, like shorted out Christmas lights.

  Now for the main course.

  The monster leaned back on its ballooning knees to expose in full its torso to Abby. This made her want to scream, cry, laugh and go insane all at once. The center of the beast, lined with multiple rows of jagged teeth, supported a mouth the size of a Volkswagen Jetta.

  Pearlescent slime dripped from its many fanged teeth. The belly-mouth champed in some defunct pattern programmed long ago by its perverted genetics. A musty haze roiled from its cavernous depths and filled the chamber with the humidity of its breathing. She wondered if the thing experienced thought in any known sense, or if it just reacted out of blind instinct.

  Knobby fingers pawed greedily at the naked man meat, almost caressing its haunches romantically. Feet first, the beast loaded the morsel into its cruel stomach orifice. Abby cringed at the crunch of bone and drooling puddle of blood that formed beneath it.

  The teeth gobbled up to the knees, then thighs. Each bite made the whole monster undulate as if, Abby thought, it partook in coitus.

  God, no.

  The teeth sank into meat of the upper thighs. “Keep going, keep going.” She whispered.

  Another bite.

  Another.

  Abby chewed a fingernail.

  Monster teeth clamped below the flopping penis.

  “Come on!” Abby squealed, nearly jumping. “Eat the fucking thing already!”

  The edges of the mouth shuddered, its teeth locked into dripping flesh…

  “Come on!” she shouted it. “You can do it!”

  …and stopped.

  “Shit! Shit, shit, shit.”

  Abby stood back and squared her jaw to it. Tried to figure something else out, knew she couldn’t and gave up. It was useless. She’d have to unplug it like she did every other time.

  “Just a garbage disposal,” she said, stepping towards the body, placing her hands on the cooling shoulders. She leaned into it. “Just like a fucking garbage disposal.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Abby wasn’t much of a sleuth-although she’d reported on a co-worker to the workers comp insurance once—but she’d always considered herself to have a natural inclination for such work, and if she’d been together at all in her previous life, she might have pursued it.

  Oh, the things she might have done had she not been so royally messed up. Oddly though, she was doing it now. It seemed almost as if she had died that night in the Christ Church Cathedral. Everything about her human life had changed including her disposition. The agony inherent in the demon—she had to stop thinking of him that way—the tone of misery so prevalent in Simon seemed to counterpoint with her own, resonating and so offsetting her depression.

  Even though together they murdered—killed—the purpose brought with it a legitimacy. If she descended to new lows, she did it willingly and with the belief that the greater purpose would manifest. Yes, she walked a line, a very fine line that placed her outside of societal mores.

  Why not?

  Out there, on her own, she was as good as dead anyway. She’d already proven that. Natural Selection had decreed it: the organism called Abigail Winston was not built for survival in the modern world.

  So that night in the Christ Church Cathedral, that night when she’d been taken into the arms of a man made demon, her ethos had expanded, broadened to encompass a wide variety of fringe.

  What’s the crime after the law is made obsolete? Freedom or damnation, the effect is the same.

  She sat at the bar of Le Sexe Machina in Montreal’s red light district. The place was all about the girls, of course—all strip clubs were—but this one catered to the more illicit class of Quebec’s famed Sin City. It wasn’t just bare breasts, it was everything and more, shaved, waxed, pierced and tattooed too. Oh, the pornography of the place. Backstage gave rise to more than voyeurism. Le Sexe Machina was a one-stop full service shop.

  Abby ordered two drinks. She would touch neither, of course, but props were an important part of this game. Any lone woman in a dance club was asking for trouble. Having two drinks sweating condensation side by side invoked the illusion of company.

  The bartender placed two martinis down in front of her on separate napkins. She swiveled about to view the patronage. The club fostered the usual restaurant type atmosphere, the flashing lights and a whole lot of lust-filled idiots. The number of lay-women for the night seemed a little on the low side, some nights they nearly outnumbered the guys. Jealous girlfriends perhaps, making sure their men didn’t wander home on the heels of a harlot.

  Abby let her eyes drift to the stage. She’d gotten past the point of being grossed out by the exhibition. She’d gotten to where she could admire the goods from an esthete’s point of view. Some of the girls were darn good at their show, but the spectacle didn’t conquer and hold her attention like the bozos down on the floor who needed a napkin to wipe up the drool. She never got the fantasy that she would like to get up there and do her own number. She didn’t like to get naked that much.

  The fare for the night was by and large, status quo. Her eye passed over the front row of jocks quickly. None too special and all of a brand: horny and obnoxious, their potential for violence mitigated by their girlfriends and Catholic upbringings.

  She perused the next class—the pervs—mostly guilt-ridden versions of her father, brandishing vacant stares of lechery and contemplated adulteration. That did gross her out. White collar sinners those.

  She looked further and her eye caught something between pervert and jock. Her mind produced the word ‘greaser’ though the usage was outdated. Thug maybe. Bully. No, those monikers weren’t quite right. She had it, there on the tip of her tongue… convict. Yes, he looked like an ex-convict soon to go back to the slammer unless she got to him first. Scruffy-haired and black jacketed, he wore a look that said ‘dumb as dog shit’.

  Another sentiment bloomed—boredom. Stale and blunt-edged monotony. She had grown tired of the side-street criminal, the
rapist, the vandal. Murderers when need be, but none too bent on it. Not fascinated with it, just merely ‘lost sheep’ as her grandmother might say. The multiple offender, the type she’d been cleaning off the streets for the last month and a half, she could read those types. Seen enough of them now, eliminated enough of them—indeed, grew infamous from it. Old hat.

  She passed, looking for the next class up. She wanted something with roots, a criminal with an organization, power, influence. She wanted a crime boss. She wanted a mobster.

  Montreal was home to a wide variety of ethnic outlaws including a rich heritage of Italian Mafia. Years and years ago, Montreal had been host to the likes of Vincenzo Catroni and Nicolo Rizzuto, crime bosses competing for right of propriety to traffic drugs in Canada’s high profile metropolis.

  Abby had studied a bit of this, being the only history of her hometown that ever interested her. Nowadays the mafia just wore a cleaner suit and moved sixteen floors up. Their hands were every bit as dirty as at any other time in their history.

  And Abby wanted to score one. It would take time. Probably didn’t have enough, but if she could find a family…jackpot! A wave of surrealism shot her in the temple. How far am I going to go with this? Where am I going with this? She thought of Simon, her life and her would-have-been suicide.

  Did anything matter? Maybe the value she’d placed on life was…overrated? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe a hundred things and none. Maybe just a big fucking who gives a crap and be done with it.

  Help the demon. Build the beast. Save the world. Did any of that even follow a logical sequence, or would she just wake up one day, a body count as long as her arm with no demon, no beast? Just her—a crazy, delusional psychopath who should have slit her wrists when she had the chance because they were going to get her in the end with lethal injection anyway.

  Abby knock it off! It sounded like Trisha. She shook her head and blinked. She’d been staring at her target for several seconds now. Yes, that was the one she wanted—the gentleman in the back, on the couches, the bald one. The one patting the waitress on the ass with chubby, cigar-toting fingers.

  Yes.

  * * * *

  Waiting made her tired. The music, the naked girls, the slobbering boys, all a blur of sight and sound. She longed to sleep beneath the city, in her little surrealist’s hideout, the restless Simon milling about in the next chamber with the machinations of divine madness.

  The mafia man ran two sausage-fingered paws over the flopping flesh of a dancer, before standing and making leaving motions. Abby was on it, following through the bodies and lights, to the rear exit where the fat man headed. Her heart beat fiercely. She did not want to lose him in the crowds, a thing too easy to do, especially in a poorly lit dance club.

  She weaved through the sweat and dollar bills, trying not to appear hurried. The suit walked through a doorway near the restrooms. Abby followed to a hallway. This would be the worst part. Two people in a narrow hallway didn’t leave much room for anonymity. She’d play it cool and wait until he got to the end, then sneak to catch up.

  It didn’t work. He disappeared nearly as soon as he stepped in. She peered down the length of the hall, but couldn’t find so much as a swath of Italian wool to lead the way. Her eyes couldn’t adjust to the lighting fast enough. She was tired, missing things perhaps. She trotted down the corridor.

  She heard the opening and closing of a door somewhere after a turn, prompting a full on run. All she needed was a license plate number. She could get a trace and an address, using a couple of dollars stolen from the last victim’s wallet, and from there, she could stake out the house and verify the mafia connections. Then Simon would do the rest.

  She reached the door and shoved her way through it—a fish stinking alleyway, a grease-stained lot and a heap of garbage. The broad back of a suit coat walked free and easy out into the clear night beyond.

  She stretched her legs to catch up and heard the scream.

  Now, most screams had a way about them. One didn’t just ignore screams, especially when late at night in a dimly lit alleyway. Perhaps in a former life, she would have. Not tonight.

  Abby’s new vocation sought to rectify a structural flaw in the overall scheme of things and judging by newspaper coverage, she’d been doing a damn good job of it. Police had their hands tied in so many ways by the courts and the System. Abby didn’t to prove guilt, she just needed to act. It meant the scream stopped her dead in her tracks.

  The prospective mobster slipped away and Abby turned to care for her usual fodder. She ducked into the stinking shadows and slunk her way through the piled up garbage bags and slop covered dumpsters. The scream had been swallowed, remade into a muffled strangle.

  She glimpsed bodies twining and knew the nature of things. She felt that sharp sting in her heart, the adrenaline surge that meant she was close to making headlines again. She peered around the next row of trash.

  Bare legs kicked aimlessly beneath hard knees and booted feet. She crept closer. Have to do this right, carefully, slowly. She could see now. A round, white ass below a cut of black leather, two high heel-shod feet curled around it.

  Have to get closer.

  The man stood upright, pants pulled down, pelvis pumping like a steam engine. She recognized him. The deviant from the club, the ex-con she’d spotted and passed over. Damn it, I should have kept my eye on him from the get go!

  The perp pinned the girl down. He clamped her mouth shut with one hand and held her arms with the other, meanwhile working her over on a pile of black-bagged rubbish.

  “Teach you a lesson,” he grunted. She whimpered under his finger clamp. Blood trickled from her nose, tears from her eyes.

  One boot ground into a soiled diaper, the other into a rancid banana peel. He shoved her down with his punishing crotch.

  “Like it? Sure you do. Now beg for it!”

  Abby closed the distance.

  Probably the stripper had come out here to have a smoke and the thug had been waiting in the shadows. Now, here she lay, nubile princess of the stage, getting raped on a heap of rotting fish and baby shit.

  She swallowed bile as she inched closer. The nature of this business made her view life from all kinds of odd angles. Witnessing, from two meters, an actual rape as it happened was unimaginable, but this was the world she walked now. The price of the vigilante.

  The dancer moaned, not lust, but pain. The naked halves of the thug’s ass flexed as he thrust deeper.

  “Fuckin’ whore!” He knocked her a good one upside the head.

  The death knell bloomed inside of Abby. The simplistic beauty of it dawned all over again. No further evidence, no burden of proof. Just her, and him, and God.

  “Hey fuck face!”

  The perp turned a fearful expression, caught cock-in-the-cookie-jar. He whirled around, shoving the girl same time so that she slid to the ground behind a heap. One hand rooted around in his jacket pocket. Abby knew what he fumbled for, and she was better prepared.

  Two thin wires shot like holiday tinsel. Abby felt the small electrodes connect with solid flesh, but her aim had been off at the start, a nervous flinch perhaps, the direction of wind, or a sinister bout of luck split the wire as it traveled forth so that one hook spiraled straight into the T-shirted chest of the thug while the other line dipped like a curve ball. Even Abby winced as the needle-tipped electrode impaled the pink head of the perp’s now semi-flaccid penis.

  Poetry and justice shared something of a perfect union at that moment.

  A short-lived shriek and the man went to ground, twitching and drooling through a mouth that gasped like a guppy.

  Abby didn’t waste precious moments contemplating the ramifications of a stun gun applied to male genitalia. She leapt forward and squatted near his jerking head. The dancer scrabbled over bagged trash.

  “Go!” Ab
by commanded, sending the dancer scurrying off her garbage pile and down the alley way, garbage-stained, bare-assed and bouncing-breasted, her high heels clicking on the urine sprayed tarmac.

  Abby anchored her fingers into the perp’s hair and pulled back a fistful of loose strands. More than enough. She pocketed the plunder and yanked on the electrodes oblivious to inflicting permanent damage.

  She stood, her legs feeling powerful under her and lunged. Her feet, set on flight, betrayed her as fingers curled around an ankle. She slammed down hard, hands and nose skinning on the putrid pavement.

  She must have screamed, raking her fingertips over the dirt and filth. The perp had gotten to his knees and managed to stuff a sodden finger into the waist of her jeans. He yanked back, skidding holes over her knees.

  “Fuck!”

  Warm, greasy fingers dug under her waistline. Blood poured from her nose, dripped hot and salty over her lips. She spat.

  “No!” She was losing her edge.

  The fingers yanked again, harder, probing and digging down. He pulled her toward him, the strength of his sex in full swoon now with bait so close to hook.

  “Bitch!” he gurgled.

  Her body scraped on stone, her jeans lost their hold on her thin figure, baring the tops of her buttocks to the cold air. She spit.

  No, this cannot happen! No!

  She flipped about to face the attacker. The fleshy plump of her lower back burned as it scraped. The stun gun was useless, but her arm wasn’t. She threw it. It bounced off the thug’s left temple, its purpose accomplished. He paused long enough. She kicked, connected with his solar plexus and bought another instant.

  She scrambled to feet, gulping draughts of blood. The thug sprawled.

  Her legs carried her through the ally and out into the open air boulevard where she faded into the drunken crowds. She ran until she couldn’t and then made tracks to the defunct storm sewer off the Sainte Lawrence River.