
Part III: King of Terrors
The Infernal Machine
Chapter 13: Less Than Zero
Content warning: This story contains explicit content and supernatural sex that may offend some readers. All depicted characters are 18 years or older.
Click here for the full list of chapters.
The only thing they found were clothes.
Barbara knelt and lifted a black-splattered jacket sleeve off the lobby floor, her fingers pinching the cuff to avoid touching the gunk and her face scrunched up as she braced herself to inhale the stench. She closed her eyes for a quick sniff, then opened them with a puzzled frown and drew in a deeper breath. The sleeve crumpled back across the carpet.
“It’s oil,” she announced. “At least, it smells like oil. Like a gas station.”
“How could someone turn into oil?” David asked.
“I don’t know.” Barbara wrapped her arms around herself and took a step back from the empty business suit. “Oil’s made of dead things…”
David took in the sight of the dim, flickering foyer and the oil-splotched clothes scattered about the beige sofas. He aimed a sideways glance toward the reception desk as they passed it: a crumpled dress draped the swivel chair and a familiar pair of horn-rimmed glasses lay beneath it. He shook his head and followed his older sister toward the elevator lobby.
“Where do we start?” he asked.
“If they were doing the same thing as yesterday, eighteenth floor.”
“They told you that?”
“Not exactly,” she said with a wan smile. “But I paid attention when we took the elevator. Fancy suite or not, they were holding me captive.”
The floor shook, and its dull throb rose into an earthquake shudder through the walls, then into a raspy shriek within the heart of the institute, somewhere high above. Glass shattered, the foundation settled an inch beneath his feet, and one of the fluorescent ceiling panels popped and sizzled into darkness. David swallowed and looked at Barbara.
“We don’t have a keycard for the elevator,” he said. “Maybe we could find one if we looked, but I’m thinking stairs are the safer bet here.”
“These boots were made for climbing,” she quipped.
And they ascended the half-pace stairs, each concrete landing flickering hazy red beneath an emergency exit sign. The building shook and plaster dust rained again and again through the darkness beyond the steel railings. David strained to catch the faint roar beneath each tremor, and just once made out the boom of a shotgun overhead. They only happened upon a single set of clothes in the stairwell, a security guard’s blue shirt and dress pants lying in an inky puddle between the ninth and tenth floors.
It occurred to David on the seventeenth floor that the stairwell door might be locked from the inside. Then another turn, another half-pace climb revealed that he could have spared himself a few seconds of quiet panic. The entrance stood empty; the door had fallen from its frame.
So had almost every other door on the eighteenth floor.
They searched each room. A conference room, a break room, then a shadowy control room with polished white walls and an array of flickering, error-riddled computer screens. Barbara nudged David and pointed at the shattered tube that formed its hub, stretching from floor to ceiling.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“That’s it. But there’s nobody here now…”
He noted the black splatter that coated the workstations and broken glass with a tight frown, and turned from the doorway to study the corridor. They’d now searched every room along the outer wall, every door that’d been smashed open. He hadn’t seen any rooms along the inner perimeter at first glance: only now did he catch a metal glint amid the white drywall, the tell-tale break in the baseboard. A pair of steel double doors marked the only entrance to the floor’s interior space. They hadn’t stood out because they were the only ones that hadn’t been torn from their hinges.
“Let’s give it a try,” he said to Barbara, then twisted the locked knob and pounded the door with the side of his fist. “Anyone in there?”
A rustling sound behind the door, frantic whispers debating one another, and David pounded harder. The doors clicked and swung open.
Barbara gasped and shoved past David: the first thing he saw was his sister grabbing Sophie in a hug. Sophie’s arms wrapped around Barbara’s back, her head buried against her shoulder. “I was so scared they’d done something to you,” Barbara whispered. “Are you okay?”
“What are you even doing here?” Sophie hissed in Barbara’s ear.
She pulled back from their embrace, her arms hanging loose around Sophie’s waist. “Told you we’d be back for you.” Her smile gave way to a nervous giggle, and she pulled Sophie into another tight hug.
David glanced about the rest of the room. It spanned most of the eighteenth floor, a dim, sprawling atrium with a low false ceiling pitted with sunken spotlight fixtures. It could have been a museum, right down to the check-in desk with its flashing monitor and the dozens of display cases that filled the dark interior space. This one contained a music box topped by a toy ballerina, and that one held a frayed leather-bound journal. Another glass case held a silver locket, and the one beside it housed a familiar pink smartphone, its screen caked in dried blood.
And he found what he was looking for, a tall, imposing man in an expensive black suit, now sitting in a leather office chair with his hands hanging limp between his knees. The man looked broken. His eyes hadn’t even lifted at the sight of the newcomers. That was a start, but not good enough.
“Michel Delanne,” David called out. He’d held himself back yesterday from greeting the institute director with a sucker punch. It’d have been satisfying but pointless and violent, a dramatic gesture that accomplished nothing except appeasing his righteous anger. He was better than that.
David yanked Michel from the chair and punched him.
“So this is where you keep the merchandise,” David snarled. “When we’re done here, I am going to burn every last one of these things.”
“David Hansen,” Michel muttered with a bleary glance, indifferent to the purple bruise spreading across his left cheek. “You really are the world’s most tenacious ghost hunter. Where’s your associate?”
“If you mean Isabel, she’s out there keeping that thing you set loose busy.” David grabbed Michel’s collar with both fists and yanked him back up from the chair, his face an inch away. “What the hell did you people do?”
“David, please stop!” Sophie shouted. “He didn’t know about this!”
Barbara pulled back from their hug without letting go, arms loose and soft gray eyes searching Sophie’s features. She cradled Sophie’s cheek with her left hand and guided her face back to lock eyes with her.
“Didn’t know what? Sophie, what is all this?”
“He wanted to bring back Mama. I didn’t know that was the plan. She died when I was young, and he thought he could combine the way he brought me back with how we brought you back, and… it didn’t work.”
“What happened?”
“Something came back. It looked like Mama for a moment, but it wasn’t her. It killed Nicholas. We only made it here because he distracted it.”
“What was it?” David asked, letting Michel drop back into his seat and stepping closer to join the pair. “What are we dealing with?”
“I don’t know.” Sophie’s voice quivered. “It called itself king of terrors.”
Barbara pulled Sophie closer, coaxing her head against her shoulder, stroking her hair and kissing the top of her head. Sophie was taller, but she slumped forward into Barbara’s arms to let the slight auburn girl hold her, to rest against Barbara’s chest. Barbara glanced at her brother.
“That’s a Bible verse,” she said. “We learned about it in Sunday school.”
“So it’s the Devil?” Sophie asked, her voice muffled.
“No, not exactly. The king of terrors is Death. With a capital D.”
Sophie’s arms tightened around Barbara’s waist and Barbara rested her cheek atop Sophie’s head. David took a step back from them and then turned away to run his fingers through his hair, to heave a long, low sigh. His eyes unfocused and settled on the computer monitor, then blinked and sharpened as a shadowy figure stood and rounded the desk.
“It can’t get into this room because of the shielding,” Melissa said as she stepped into the dim pool of light. “So it’s been tearing the rest of the building apart. Hi, Barbara. Hello, David. Nice to see you again.”
David scanned the science director’s face as she approached, her tight bun and gold glasses. Her expression matched the detached calm of her voice; only her streaked makeup revealed that she’d been crying.
“It’s been doing more than that,” David said. “Have you looked outside?”
“No, we don’t have any windows. Why?”
“Because it’s literally another world out there.”
“I see,” she said, after the slightest pause, an unconscious shudder that he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t already been so focused on her features. “You should come take a look at this readout. You too, Barbara.”
Melissa circled back around the desk, letting one lazy hand trail the surface as if she were adrift in a rowboat. David moved to join her, then Barbara stepped beside him, one arm still around Sophie’s waist. The three of them followed Melissa’s gaze to the computer screen, to shuffling rows of numbers and a black map of Seattle overlaid with yellow lines.
“Fast numbers are bad,” Sophie told Barbara in an undertone.
“At least they’re going up?” Barbara asked.
“No,” Melissa said, “they’re going down. This is the ley line readout for the city of Seattle, and right now it’s less than zero. The system’s using absolute values because we didn’t think negative numbers meant anything.”
“Yeah, well, the more you know,” David muttered.
“At first,” she continued, “I thought the building itself had fallen into a sort of negative bubble. Like the rest of the world’s fine, and we went down the rabbit hole. Except now you’re here, so this isn’t a rabbit hole.”
“It’s turning into a sinkhole,” he said. “But why just the three of us?”
“My guess is you’re metaphysically heavy. These numbers are trying to climb back to zero, and Barbara’s a big positive. But it’s only getting worse. Other people are going to start falling in, then the whole city.”
“It won’t stop there,” Barbara said, “will it?”
“No,” Melissa replied, “it won’t. I think Helene Delanne was long gone to wherever it is people go when they die. Trying to bring her back dredged up something else instead. ‘Death with a capital D,’ if you like.”
“So how do we fix this?” David asked.
“Balance the equations. When we brought Barbara back, it took the power output from the tri-state area to make the numbers add up. We didn’t do that this time because we didn’t think it would be necessary. Helene was only supposed to come back as a ghost. But here we are…”
Barbara gave Sophie’s waist another squeeze and stood on her toes to kiss her cheek. Then she let go and turned back toward David, her freckled face pale and luminous against the glow of the computer monitor.
“You have to exorcise me,” she said.
“Barbara, I can’t…”
“We knew it would come to this someday,” she insisted. “If I still have that much energy inside me, doesn’t that mean sending me on can fix this? Maybe that’s why I’m still here. Maybe this is my purpose.”
“If you’re a revenant, exorcisms don’t work the same way for you.”
“Revenant?” Melissa repeated over his shoulder.
“Yeah, your Lazarus trick came with some serious bugs.”
“So how do exorcisms work?” Barbara asked.
“The stories say we’d need to dig up your original body, cut off your head, remove your heart, and then burn the rest for good measure.”
Barbara blanched and glanced down. “Oh.”
“But you can exorcise me.”
David looked past his sister to Sophie, her face almost white against the flatscreen glow behind the desk. Her high cheeks and raven hair receded into the shadows to leave her wide dark eyes and pensive frown.
“Sure, if you‘re ready. Once we’re done here…”
“No,” Sophie interrupted, “I mean, you can exorcise me and that’s how we fix this. Barbara has all this energy inside her that can’t be released, but I’m just an ordinary ghost. So she can give it to me instead.”
“Okay,” he murmured, “but wouldn’t you two just switch places?”
“Not right away,” she replied. “We’ve seen it happen, it takes time.”
The clack of the keyboard drew David’s attention to the computer, and he watched as Melissa typed in a quick string of verification codes. A new schematic image flashed across the screen, this one a vertical blueprint of the whole skyscraper. Instead of floors and rooms, the diagram showed machinery and wiring, circuits spanning the whole building.
“I can monitor the local energy flow from here,” Melissa explained. “If it’s released and then Sophie disappears before the transfer’s finished, it won’t have anywhere else to go except back into the ley line.”
“Equation balanced,” Sophie concluded. “We’re back to zero.”
She turned away from the group to walk among the glass cases, a slender silhouette amid the soft glow that illuminated each display piece, each of the Delanne Institute’s haunted keepsakes. David watched her move from one case to the other, and she returned with her arms full; she handed the pink phone back to Barbara and turned to offer him a drawstring hoodie, its tattered green fabric blackened by a crust of dried blood.
David glanced from the jacket to the black hoodie she wore, the one he’d assumed was just a moody fashion choice. And he understood.
“This is what I’m bound to,” she said. “You can use it to exorcise me.”
He caught another subtle movement out of the corner of his eye and glanced back to see Michel leaning forward in his chair, listening to their discussion with newfound interest. The director’s eyes dodged the rest of the group to focus on Sophie, and his face fell again as he spoke.
“All these years bringing you back, and all I did was destroy you both.”
“Papa, stop it!” Sophie snapped, and she marched across the room to him. “You haven’t destroyed either of us! That thing wasn’t Mama. She’s still safe, and I’m going to go be with her now, like I was supposed to be.”
“Supposed to be? I let her die, and then I watched you die…”
David felt a brush of his sleeve as Barbara stepped beside him, and he gave her a questioning glance that lifted back toward the pair. She caught his eyes with a frown and shook her head; he nodded and listened.
“You were there for me when I died,” Sophie said, and she crouched down to her knees to look Michel in the eye. “And then you went and did something very stupid which spoiled that, but it’s still true. Papa, the last thing I said to you was an awful lie. So can I tell you my last thoughts instead?”
“You were in shock,” he sighed. “Confused.”
“I was in shock, but I wasn’t confused. There wasn’t any pain. My first thought was that you’d died. Mama died, and now Papa’s gone too, and both of my parents are dead because of me. Then I looked over at you, and you were fine. You were crying and worried, and your eyes were red and cheeks wet and you looked so alive. I was relieved. Everything was okay.
“That was the thought I was carrying with me, before you pulled me back. It’s the same thought I’ll carry with me now. Je t’aime Papa.”
Sophie grabbed her father’s hands and leapt to her feet, lifting him from the chair so that he stood as high above her as she stood above Barbara. And she flung her arms around him in a hug. Michel stood frozen for a moment before his hands found her shoulders, and then he squeezed her back and stroked her hair as she buried her face against his chest.
“Je t’aime,” he whispered, the sound carrying across the room only because of the utter silence that had preceded it. And he looked down at her face. “I’m coming with you, Sophie. I’ll be there for you again.”
“You were already there for me,” she said with a shy smile that met his eyes. “That’s what counts. Besides, the next part’s going to be… personal.”
Sophie stood on her toes to kiss his right cheek, then stepped back and took Barbara’s hand with a soft squeeze of her palm. She lifted their clasped hands together. “It isn’t something I’d want my father watching.”
Michel peered at the two girls, eyes squinted and brow furrowed, and he gave a sudden, snorting laugh. He glanced away with a blush.
“Je suis bête,” he said. “Barbara isn’t your friend. She’s your lover.”
The man’s gaze shifted to Barbara, and David watched him study her from head to toe, as if taking in the sight of her for the first time. Despite their earlier confrontation, despite being greeted with a punch, only one person in the room truly existed for Michel. Now that number had doubled.
The director’s lips lifted into a small, unpracticed smile.
“I would’ve been proud to call you my daughter,” he told Barbara.
“Um, thank you?”
“He means daughter-in-law,” Sophie whispered, and she turned back to the computer desk and their science director. “Where should we go?”
“Well,” Melissa said, “the equations contain eleven dimensions and they’re all flipped upside-down, so… let’s just say up? The rooftop?”
The foundation shook. Another low, rumbling tremor rattled the walls as the lights flickered, keeping time with a raspy carrion shriek far above. Barbara looked up at the shuddering ceiling, then back at David.
“Twelve floors,” she said. “No biggie. Be back soon.”
She took a step toward the double doors, her left hand still holding Sophie’s right palm, then paused as Sophie hesitated by the desk. Sophie’s dark eyes drifted from Melissa’s stoic frown to David’s shy smile, then lingered on her father’s thoughtful gaze. She offered the room a sheepish wave.
“Adieu.”
Click here for the next chapter!
Each week I’ll be posting a chapter from the Dreadful Desire erotica series, a collection of taboo, sometimes forceful — but never degrading — sexual fantasies. You can find links to my Medium stories in this handy compendium…
And now there’s a Dreadful Desires novel! The five-part supernatural romance The Fallen Sky is available in an omnibus edition that contains the complete erotic fantasy adventure. You can find it on Kindle and Smashwords!