FICTION | MASHUP | FANTASY
A Hell of a Revelation
Part 10 of A Hell of a Bedtime Story — Director Fletcher is about to learn that some things are too hard to stomach, even for her.
Frankenstein Foundation for Paranormal Research and Weaponisation, somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle
“I will make you pay for this, hoo-man!”
Director Fletcher looked down at the demon lord, pretending to fidget absentmindedly with her amulet. Resembling the hideous claw of an ancient horror forged from black metal, it looked like every jeweller’s nightmare and contrasted her formal and meticulous attire like Gulliver the Lilliputians.
She smiled mischievously and bent forward to touch the demon, delighting at its clumsy attempt to escape her grasp.
“Touch me? You will not dare! No one ever has … wait! NOOOO!”
Drath’tar Xozath could not resist releasing a satisfied groan when Director Fletcher scratched him behind his tiny fluffy ears.
“Who’s a good little hellhound, huh?”
The demon lord’s eyes spoke of menace and hatred, but Drath’tar Xozath was trapped in a puppy’s body whose instinct was to expose its belly for a gentle rub. The director took a few more seconds to pet the possessed dog. It was hard to resist the soft fur, even for her. The puppy was, after all, as irresistibly cute as the amulet was hideous.
A pretended cough pulled her out of her hypnotic state. She felt slightly dizzy and confused. Had the demon lord found a way to work seductive powers through the dog?
She’d have to be more careful from now on. Director Fletcher hid her initial confusion the way she knew best and snapped at the agent, who had been foolish enough to attract her attention.
“I hope you are here to tell me you got it to work, Coulder?!”
“Yes, ma’am! We completed the scan. As you assumed ….”
“Predicted.”
The man gulped audibly when her comment cut his sentence like a sharpened, polished scalpel.
“As you predicted, ma’am,” he corrected himself, “Several incidents occurred, all within the area you defined around the campus. And ….”
“And?”
“… uh … we just had a spike in activity in a residential area. Something is going down there … and it’s big!”
“Get the team ready and meet me at the hexagon. It’s about time our little puppy went for a walk.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
The man in the smug suit saluted, but he lacked confidence. Instead, he stared at the puppy for a few seconds too long, exposing his fear. Recognising his mistake, he quickly left before his boss had time to put him in his place.
“That weakling will be the first I devour,” the puppy announced, “I’ll make you watch, b*tch! What? … Wait! NOOOO!”
“Who’s the b*tch now?”
The puppy wriggled and tried to bite her hands in a feeble attempt to prevent its fate. The woman’s expression was as menacing as the demon’s eyes when she closed the zipper of the dog purse and turned the little window toward her face.
“Who’s a good little doggy?” she said mockingly, “You are. Yes, you are!”
Director Fletcher congratulated herself silently for trapping the demon in a she-dog. It offered plenty of opportunities to torment this monster from a dimension that enslaved its females and used dark magic to rid them of free thinking.
She left her office with a confident stride, her head held high, while the demon released profanities and threats. Then, the unlikely pair reached sliding doors locked with a keypad. An unremarkable sign marked it as the entrance to the Hexagon Transportation Unit. The puppy became restless when the doors opened.
“What is this …?”
The sudden wave of cosmic energies made the tiny canine shiver and stop mid-sentence. If a puppy could display a dumb expression, this was it. With a silent whimper, it looked at the enormous hexagonal platform in an even larger hexagonal room. The walls and floors were covered with arcane symbols and bits and pieces of human and demonic artefacts connected by weird devices and cables.
“Those are the pillars of Mujax!” the puppy said sheepishly, “Magic from the Gateway Dimension should be impossible for you to control?!”
“Magic,” Director Fletcher snorted, “What is magic but the science we can’t explain yet?”
She shook the dog purse and lifted it to her face again. Unable to resist the puppy’s instinct, Drath’tar Xozath whined silently.
“My job, little doggy,” she said calmly while ensuring that every word could be understood as a threat, “is to turn magic into science that can be understood and reproduced… and … weaponised! I have no idea how you ended up in my facility, but you are nothing but my newest tool. If you cooperate, you’ll have a purpose. If not ….”
Her heavily-armoured field unit arrived just in time to leave the threat hanging in the air. Instead, she walked onto the hexagonal platform first and gestured to the team with her free hand to take positions around her.
“Eight ready to beam up, Scotty,” Agent Coulder joked, immediately regretting it when his boss’ gaze met his eyes.
“Control,” Director Fletcher said, “Prepare to portal us to the submitted coordinates. Afterwards, standby for the extraction or to supply backup troops.”
“Yes, ma’am,” a voice said through a speaker attached above the doors.
“Engage.”
At first, nothing happened but the slow emergence of a sound that resembled a buzzing bee. Then, the platform and the walls turned into a spectacle of lights that formed mismatched pieces like a kaleidoscope.
Eventually, they combined into an enormous portal resembling light shining through frosted glass. Director Fletcher saw the vague shapes of a small house and garden. Patches of darkness moved around on the other side, and there were flashes of bright light.
She commanded the field unit’s lead troopers to move forward before she followed with the rest of the team and the puppy in its dog purse. According to regulations, the troopers had secured the area behind the portal and aimed their weapons at a group of people huddling together in front of the house.
Three of them, a woman and two kids, crouched behind a second woman shooting what looked like a ray of light from her forehead at a shadowy creature lunging at her. The monster burst into little red cinders that quickly dissipated.
With the last monster destroyed, silence suddenly settled over the scene, and the woman protecting the group faced Director Fletcher, no doubt assessing how much of a threat the new arrivals were.
“You will refrain from using your … ray gun,” the director said while her unit spread out around the garden, “Then, put your hands behind your head and ….”
“MOMMY??!!!!”
Director Fletcher gaped in surprise when one of the kids stormed toward her. She had time enough to command her people not to shoot before her son Tommy bumped into her. Despite the speed of events, she had seen the tears on his face and the bleeding scratch marks on his legs.
The last thing she felt was her grip loosening around the dog purse and how she suddenly lost her balance. She had no time for further commands or an evaluation of the situation. Director Fletcher didn’t even feel her face hitting the asphalted road. Mercifully, blackness engulfed her moments before the impact.
The unexpected vision of her son’s impending death had been too much, even for the infamous Director Fletcher.
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This is a response to Jonathon Sawyer’s Monday Mash-Up №21 and partially an hommage to Bradan Writes Stories’ satanic cat.
Prompt #1: Someone bumps into you on the street,
and you have a vision of their impending death! -> 2 points
Constraint: A buzzing bee (1 point)
Constraint: An ugly piece of jewelry (1 point)
Constraint: A hexagon (1 point)
Constraint: An irresistibly cute puppy (1 point)
Hardcore Constraint: A Kaleidoscope (2 points)
Literary Device: The demon/puppy uses a few anastrophes (5 points)
Tally 1 point
Sum: 14 pointsOh my gosh! The suspense is killing me!
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