Demon Read online

  Half an hour later, Barney Magee, town wino and well-known panhandler, staggered into the Salvation Army and signed the pledge to become a teetotaller.

  2

  Lori hung the Dreamcatcher over one of the brass knobs on the end of her bed, then lay back on the patterned duvet and put her hands behind her head.

  Her bedroom was a shrine to Chesney Pace, a Barbee look-alike who at this very moment was not only top of the hit parade but had three other records ‘bubbling under’. Posters of Chesney covered the walls. Chesney looking cute. Chesney looking coy. Chesney pouting, smiling, posing, prancing like a human version of My Little Pony in pink stilettos and skin tight jeans. Postcards of Chesney decorated the mirror over Lori’s dressing-table. She’d even made a collage of photos and clippings from magazine interviews which she’d mounted on a cork notice board and pored over when she was feeling particularly bored. Like now..

  Lori knew everything there was to know about Chesney Pace - from her education to her weight (100 pounds soaking wet – arghh) to her family background to her first kiss (at fifteen with soap star Wayne Torrence) to what she allegedly had for breakfast. If a Fairy Godmother had suddenly appeared and offered to grant Lori’s greatest desire it would be that she could turn INTO Chesney Pace. Or someone like her. Someone beautiful, rich, successful and admired.

  She levered herself up and moved over to the dressing-table, comparing herself unfavourably with the golden girl on the mirror. Chesney, blonde and sassy, slim and sexy in a cut off top that exposed a midriff as flat as a pancake. Lori, mousy and pale, overweight and lumpy in a dark skirt and a voluminous T shirt designed to hide, but destined merely to advertise, the roll of fat around her middle. She sighed, pulling her lank hair up into a pony-tail, sucking in her cheeks, narrowing her eyes into what she imagined was a mysterious face. If only...

  Lori’s ambition was to get away from Cactus County in general and the town of Backwater Ridge in particular. Becoming a pop star seemed the only way out. A part in the high school musical would be a step in the right direction. This year they were doing a retrospective of ‘The Wizard of Oz’. Lori wanted a part the very worst way. Then someone might notice her. A talent scout. A record producer. Sweep her away to the big city. Turn her into a household name. A superstar.

  The only drawback was – Lori couldn’t sing to save her life. The plum role of Dorothy would undoubtedly go to Tracey Barnes, the school sex symbol, who also happened to be dating Perry Johnson, the boy next door, on whom Lori had an enormous crush.

  The sound of Perry’s gate latch had Lori on her feet and over to the window in two seconds flat. She knocked on the pane and he looked up and waved before disappearing up the driveway. She craned her neck to watch his retreating back, the way the muscles in his shoulders moved, the little curl of blonde hair at the nape of his neck. Not until the screen door slapped to, did Lori give up the hope that he might turn round and flash her one of his heart-stopping smiles.

  Then her mother called her supper was ready and she turned away from the window and went downstairs to eat.

  It was cold chicken and salad again, her Dad, Ted, devouring his in front of the television, an opened can of beer in his fist, two more stacked beside him. For all the notice he was taking of his meal, he might as well have been swallowing cotton wool and corn-plasters. Her Mom, Marge, rushing out to work as short-order waitress at the local drive-in, was yelling through the window to her brother, Ted Jr, who was making a lot of racket with the dog out in the yard.

  “I think I might audition for the school musical tomorrow,” Lori said to nobody in particular.

  “What for?” snorted Junior, slamming into the kitchen, the dog panting behind him. “You gotta voice like a corncrake.”

  He threw a chicken wing to the dog, grabbed a coke and joined his Dad on the couch.

  “How many times have I told you not to feed that mutt at the table?” said Marge, shooing the animal out again and following after. “Bye all,” she shouted over her shoulder. “Be good.”

  Lori looked down at the limp lettuce and pale, unappetising chicken. ‘Be good.’ Like there was an option? Sometimes she wondered if she was invisible.

  Miguel Coyote, filling up at the service station, asked the owner, a surly man in dirty overalls, where was the best place in town to get a meal?

  The owner, who gloried in the name of Pearly Gates, had been viewing Miguel with suspicion ever since he’d driven into the fore-court and all through the half hour that he’d lovingly washed the dirt off his motorbike. Pearly made change and directed him to the drive-in where Marge Morrison worked.

  “Best place in town,” he said. “Only place in town, tell the truth. Down Tumbleweed, second on the right. Can’t miss it.”

  Miguel thanked him and rode off down the street. Pearly waited until the Honda rounded the corner. Then he put in a call to the local Sheriff.

  “Rube,” he said, hitting a passing beetle with a squirt of tobacco juice. “We gotta biker in town. Looks like a half breed. Thought you might like t’have a word?”

  Marge was behind the counter, polishing glasses when Miguel came in. Customers were thin on the ground but Barney McGee was there, newly bathed and wearing the second hand skirt and trousers that the Salvation army people had doled out to him. He was drinking a Seven Up and telling anyone willing to listen about his ‘experience’.

  “I seed everything in my time,” he was saying. “From pink rats to purple people eaters, but I never ever seed nothing like this...”

  Marge smiled at the newcomer and laid a paper place setting and a drinks mat in front of him on the bar counter.

  “What can I get you, son?” she said.

  Miguel ordered a burger and fries.

  “Drink?”

  “Pepsi light, please.”

  Marge scribbled the order on a pad, shouted it through the hatch to Don, the short order cook, thought that the boy had nice manners, even if he was a breed. Not too many people said please and thank you these days.

  Barney swivelled round on his stool and fixed Miguel with a blood-shot eye.

  “A big fat kind of snaky thing,” he said. “The colour of puke. But with eyes all over its body. And I says to myself, I says, Barney, if this ain’t your final warning, I don’t know what is. This has GOT to be the demon drink. In the flesh. And if you don’t give up the sauce, that blamed thing’ll be haunting you for the rest of your blamed life – not to mention your blamed after life.”

  He shuddered dramatically at the memory.

  “Take a breath, Barney,” Marge said. “You’ll give the customers the heebies. Not to mention putting them off their food.”

  “That’s OK,” said Miguel. “Nothing puts me off my food. Besides, it sounds like a good story.”

  So Barney, delighted to have a captive audience for once, launched into his tale all over again. About the old woman. About the dustbins. About the transformation. And Miguel, tucking into his dinner, looked more and more interested as the unbelievable story unwound.

  Back in Lori’s room, the sun was going down behind the low ridge from which Backwater got its name. The evening was cooler now, the heat of the day levelling off into a crisp desert night, the sunset mellowing the stark white adobe houses into a pale luminescent gold.

  Lori had opened the window before she went down to dinner. To let in a bit of fresh air. And now something nasty was slithering over the sill. A blindworm with a pattern of scales which, from a distance, almost looked like eyes.

  It hung for a moment on the lip of the ledge before falling on the carpet with a dull plop. Then it undulated across to the bed, slid up the leg to the ornamental brass knob at the top and insinuated itself into the centre of the Dreamcatcher, where it proceeded to melt into the web-like structure at the centre and disappear.

  In the drive-in, Miguel Coyote listened with rapt attention to Old Barney’s ramblings and asked him to repeat his story once more, sparing no detail.

  Barne
y was only too willing to oblige. He embellished the narrative each time so that his remembered encounter was becoming more fantastical with every telling. He’d just got to the bit about the eyes again when the Sheriff came in and plonked himself down on an adjacent stool.

  “Barney, you old soak,” he said, jovially. “What happened? You fall in love?”

  Rube Watson would have been shocked if anybody had called him a racist. But he prided himself on keeping Backwater Ridge trouble free by discouraging what he called ‘undesirables’. He did this by warning them in advance, in the nicest possible way, of course, to get out of town. And stay out.

  Ignoring Barney’s meanderings, Rube took off his hat and, wiping the sweat from his forehead, gave Coyote the once-over before he gave him the third degree.

  “Stopping long, boy?” he said, mildly.

  “Maybe.” Miguel, sensing trouble, refused to be drawn. “Maybe not. Haven’t decided.”

  “My advice?” said Watson, his tone sharpening a little. “Don’t. Folks round here don’t take to strangers. Or bikers. Or...”

  “Or what?” said Coyote, daring him to say it. “I thought this was a free country?”

  “Did I say any different?” Rube raised his bushy eyebrows into his ginger hair-line. “Just a suggestion is all. Hell, I’m only the Sheriff – what do I know? But Backwater Ridge is a quiet town. Ain’t nothin’ here that could be of interest to your kind.”

  Coyote smiled bleakly, slid off his stool and called for the cheque.

  “His too,” he said, nodding at Barney.

  “Six fifty,” said Marge, totting up the bill.

  Miguel counted out a five and three singles.

  “Keep the change,” he said. Then without another word, he turned on his booted heel and walked out of the diner.

  Lori wandered into her room and plonked herself on the bed, escaping from her beer-swilling father, poisonous brother and the wrestling on the TV.

  The Dreamcatcher dangling from the end of the brass bedknob, swung lazily in the cool evening breeze, weighing her up, judging just how much amusement this rather pathetic specimen was worth. Corrupting humans was almost as easy as ‘shooting fish in a barrel’. So much unhappiness. So many frustrated dreams.

  The car incident has just whetted its appetite. It had been a ‘taster’, an hors d’oeuvres before the much longer, more enjoyable, main course and, hopefully even desert, offered by this chubby young teenager.

  “Hey kid.” Barney Magee followed Miguel Coyote out into the parking lot and grabbed his sleeve. “Thanks for the hand-out. Not too many people would have thought of that round these parts.”

  “My pleasure,” Miguel mounted up. “Want to do me a favour?”

  “If I can”

  “Want to show me where you saw this...demon drink?”

  “Be glad to.”

  “Hop on.”

  Barney climbed onto the back of the bike and wrapped his hands round the biker’s waist. Then they took off.

  Peering at their disappearing tail-light through the diner window, Rube Watson bit his lip and shook his head in despair.

  “Old fool,” he said. “Now what’s he up to?”

  Barney directed Miguel to the alley where he’d seen the apparition, pointed out the dustbins, indicated where he’d been sleeping.

  “Durndest thing,” he said. “I know it musta been the DT’s. And yet it seemed

  like it was really happening. Just before it occurred, I remember sitting up and seeing Marge’s daughter Lori, going by.”

  Looking at the Dreamcatcher, silhouetted against the darkening sky, Lori fancied

  that the inner web of woven cat-gut looked remarkably like a face. Straight nose, slit eyes, mouth set in a sneer.

  ‘Fancies’.

  Her Mom was always scolding her about her ‘fancies’.

  “Time you grew up,” she was won’t to say. “You’re far too old now for all that nonsense.”

  Lori knew it was nonsense. Or at least a trick of the light. Still and all it DID look like a face. And not a particularly nice one either.

  She closed her eyes.

  She was suddenly sleepy. Better get some rest. Tomorrow was a big day. She was going to audition for the high school musical - whatever anybody else thought. She was going to get the part of Dorothy. She was going to be rich and famous. And then she was going to show them. Her mother and father and her pest of a brother and Perry and horrible Tracey Barnes and everybody in Backwater Ridge. She would well and truly show the lot of them.

  Slowly Lori drifted off and, still wishing on the full moon that had newly risen behind the low hills, she began to dream....

  3

  She is on-stage. Singing. She is wearing a wonderful silver outfit, covered in spangles. The band is phenomenal. Two guitars, drums, synthesiser and a stonking front line of three trumpets, four trombones and five saxes. They sound like liquid silk. Any one of the three glamorous girl backing singers, swaying in time to the rhythm, could be a soloist in her own right.

  But the spotlight is on Lori. And the applause, when the song ends, is hers alone, the audience in the packed auditorium on its collective feet, chanting her name... “Lori, Lori, Lori.”

  She moves into the wings, exhilarated by the adulation. The audience doesn’t stop. “Lori, Lori. Lori.”

  A young man in his twenties is standing backstage. He is tall and slim, with slicked back blonde hair and dark glasses. He is wearing a snakeskin jacket and a string tie with a diamond scorpion at the throat. He takes Lori’s shoulders and turns her around. “Get back out there babe,” he says. “They can’t get enough of you.”

  Lori takes her bow, drinking in the ecstatic faces, the hands reaching up to touch her, bathing in the glow of celebrity.

  She is a star. And it feels wonderful.

  Then she is back in her dressing-room. She is Lori, but not Lori – the reflection in the theatrical mirror, surrounded by lights, is almost luminous. A thick, shiny waterfall of highlighted hair, sparkling eyes outlined in kohl, cheekbones emphasised with pearlised powder, soft shiny lips.

  The man in the snakeskin jacket is looking over her shoulder. His voice in her ear is sensuous, seductive.

  “You like this, Lori?” says the voice. “You like being a star?”

  “Oh yes,” says Lori. “Oh yes.”

  “What would you give if this were real, Lori, if this wasn’t just a dream?”

  “Anything,” says Lori.

  “Anything?”

  “Anything!!” she says.

  And she means it.

  4

  Lori rose early, fired up by the dream and determined to do her best at the auditions. She washed her hair and had a shower and put on her best jeans and a yellow top that didn’t make her seem too ‘curvy’. Then she went to look out of her window at what promised to be a glorious day.

  The young biker from the previous afternoon was parked on the street corner opposite. He was sitting very still. He was looking directly at her window.

  Lori drew back, startled. What was he doing? What did he want? She peered through the curtains and waited for him to go away.

  But he didn’t go away.

  “Good-looking kid, ain’t he?”

  Lori jumped. Her Mom had come in quietly, to change the linen on the bed, and was now looking over her shoulder.

  “Nice manners, too. Served him last evening at the diner. But don’t get your hopes up. The Sheriff has already given him his marching orders. You still going to the auditions?”

  Lori nodded.

  “Best you don’t get your hopes up about that either,” said Marge, resignedly. “Life is just full of disappointments.”

  Next door’s screen door slammed and Perry came striding down the adjacent drive wearing chinos and a green check shirt the same colour as his eyes. He hopped into the red roaster his Dad, who worked for one of the big oil companies and was hardly ever there, had bought him for his last birthday.

&nbs
p; Lori whirled and hurtled down the stairs.

  “Gotta go,” she shouted.

  “But you haven’t had any breakfast,” her Mom objected.

  No reply.

  Just the sound of the front door opening and closing as Lori rushed out to beg a lift into school.

  “Don’t suppose she’ll drop dead from lack of nourishment.” Marge muttered, as she stripped the cover off the duvet and threw it in the linen basket. “Enough puppy fat there to keep her going for a month of Sundays, poor kid.”

  She spotted the Dreamcatcher - unlooped it from the bed-knob, turned it over in her hand. Where had that come from, she wondered, stoking the fluttering feathers and smiling a secret smile? It certainly took her back. She’d had one just like it herself, in the time before time. When all the world was young and she’d still had dreams of her own.

  Miguel Coyote watched as Lori ran out and spoke to the boy behind the wheel. He leaned over to open the door for her and she hopped in. Then the roadster swung out of the driveway, tooting and missing Miguel by inches.

  He raised his head and sniffed the air like a wolf on the scent. He knew it was around here somewhere. He’d smelled the traces last night in the alleyway. No mistaking it. Still quite strong. Sulphur.

  Putting the Honda into gear, he pressed the gas pedal and took off after the car.

  Perry dropped Lori at the school gate, where Tracey was waiting for him. She cut Lori dead, swinging her cloud of red hair back from her almost perfectly oval face (hate hate) and making some snide remark about people with no talent wasting everybody’s time.