Shadow Zone - Part 4 - Pentagrams

Your ear itches but your hands are tied. There is a raging hangover hammering behind your eyeballs, but you've got bigger problems on your hands. Which are tied. You try to squirm and move your hands but whoever tied the knots knew what they were doing. The gangster is sitting in the middle of the two pentagrams. One where Nancy Negative's dead body lies and the other where you're tied up. This has all the makings of an epic shitfest. The candles burn brighter as the gangster turns up the volume of his chants. The pressure in the room drops and your ears pop as a wind picks up. There are shadows moving in the corner of your vision but when you turn your head to look at them, they are gone. 

The chair on which you are tied up slides to and fro, then there is a pressure on your legs and shoulders. Ghost fingers, light as winter sunlight touch your cheeks and a whispered kiss traces your lips. It feels like love and it feels like death.

Her arms are warm around your neck.

"I've waited for you," she whispers.

"You're dead. "

"Was, my darling, was. Now, I will use your soul and her body to come back to life."

"My soul is mine."

"We'll see to that claim very soon, love."

Her face flickers like a TV screen trying to show a picture on a very bad signal. She is still a beauty, just as she was the night she died. For a moment, you're temped to give away your life so that her beautiful face can grace the earth again. She flickers again, and through the emptiness, you see Nancy's body slowly spinning in the pentagram. A piece of bloody brain falls from her skull and makes a sound like a jam loaded piece of bread hitting the floor. You swallow bile rising from your throat.

"No. My soul is mine."  

Nancy's body now floats in the air, her arms and legs splayed wide open, and the wound in her head slithering with remains of what was once her brain. Everything slowly slips into a dream like state. The candles take on sound and color and burn like miniature suns, the red lines of the two pentagrams slither and snap at each other and somewhere far to your right, there is a crash and a loud boom. It rattles your brain inside your skull and suddenly the pressure on your legs is gone. There is no one sitting there anymore and there are no more ghost kisses on your lips. 

 

Someone is untying your hands. A familiar face. The girl from the docks who was in her transparent shirt looking for business. She has a shotgun hanging from one shoulder and she is saying something to you but you can barely make out the words like Nancy…hoodoo shit…the body. Nancy's body is back on the floor. The pentagrams extinguished. The candles give off a strange scent from the slow smoldering wicks. The gangster is nowhere to be seen. But you know where he will be. The map of this place is clear in your head from the one previous visit. The bedroom is the clearest destination in your head.

 

"I'll borrow that," you croak to the girl and take the shotgun off her shoulder. The gun is loaded and there are six shells taped to either side of the barrel. More than enough for what you're about to do. You stumble and feel your way up the stairs, the shotgun pointed in front of you like an old man's accusing finger. There are blood drops on the floor and they lead to the room where you're going.

 

You kick open the door and half stumble and half fall into the room. The gangster is lying on his bed. The rotten and dug up body of his daughter lies by his side. A wide gash on his head it leaking blood that has stained the pillow. There is an overpowering smell of perfume and incense in the room but even that can't hide the decay that is lying on the bed with the gangster.

 

"I-I loved her. I had t-to bring her back." He babbles, but it's just bullshit of a different color to you. They should have never killed Nancy. They should've never woken the ghosts of those who were gone.

 

"You were not the only one who loved her," you tell him and shoot him point blank in the face. The sound is loud in the room and it hurts your alcoholized brain. You pick bottles of perfume from the tables in the room and start breaking them on the floor, the drapes and the walls of the room. After that, the room only needs a sight of your lighter and it's on fire. You drop the shotgun on the floor and walk out of the house. The girl you once loved, now just a shell, left burning in the building. 

 

It's still raining outside, alight drizzle now, when you light up a cigarette and start to wait at the corner of a street for a new accident.