"DEMON SEEDS" 

BY JON STALK

   In the near distance, a siren whined. Not uncommon.

   "There, that just about does it." Jessica Hunt wiped the sweat off her brow, flicked it to the fried pavement, and struggled to her feet. Behind her, her cat Martina scaled the concrete landscape, walking the edge of the curb precisely, without hesitation or apprehension. Jessica wiped her dirty hands on her jean shorts, flicking loose soil onto the sidewalk like dry rain.

   From behind the open windows, spewing from the CD player in her living room, Queensryche sang ‘Silent Lucidity'.

   In the background, the city clawed at the sky, columns of majestic silver needles poking through the thin, fair-weather clouds. The sun seemed closer today than it had been yesterday, an angry star hell-bent on scorching the third planet in its system.

   Martina moved slyly toward Jessica, rubbed against her dusty ankle. "Almost done, girl." Jessica said, patting the Tabby's head, her palms stained with freshly packed earth.

   Satisfied, she lifted a porcelain trough, placed it on her windowsill, poured a bottle of spring water into it. She repeated this, hydrating a second copper-colored trough, set it on her other windowsill. She took a step back, hands on her hips, admiration in her eyes.

   "Now all we need is plenty of sunlight, and water..." Jessica considered the sky, where the noontime sun seemed focused only on her. "We have all the sunlight we need. Now, we just need some rain..."

   New York City hadn't seen rain in almost a month, not since the Fourth of July. It was now the First of August, and local weather reports were predicting at least another week of hot sun, sticky sun - no precipitation in sight.

   While taking on a project such as sowing plant seeds amidst a sticky drought might seem off-beat to some, a waste of time to others, to Jessica Hunt it was just another means of protection in her battle against loneliness. Martina was her first line of defense.

   Ignoring her, the cat squeezed contentedly in and out of metal banister railings on the porch, snapping occasionally at the wake of her own tail.

   "Seems stupid to even plant these things now...but...well, we'll see." She opened a third bottle of Evian, gulped some, swished the rest in her mouth, and spat it into the gutter. "I guess our new pets'll just have to drink some spring water ‘till we get some rain again." She caught Martina, cradled her, thumbing the cat's whiskers. "So you be nice. No jealousy."

   As if obliging, the cat let out a small whimper, leapt from Jessica's grasp, and darted into the hallway of her two-story brownstone. Jessica smiled. "Be there in a second. Go ahead inside."

   Broom in hand, she brushed the concrete clean, hording loose soil, rogue seeds and empty packets into a neat pile by the stairs, knelt down and swept it onto a cardboard slab. The sun moved in closer. Again, Jessica wiped away sweat, amazed at how much had accumulated in such a short time.

   A shadow crept behind her, eclipsing the sun, driving her into an unusually cool shade.

   "Is the soil pure?" A voice said, startling her. It sounded as if the mouth from which it came was stuffed with cotton.

   Jessica turned to a gangly silhouette standing above her, its features black in the wake of the sun. "I'm sorry?"

   "The soil. Is it pure? As pure as your heart?"

   Rising to her feet, Jessica took a cautious step backward and studied the strange figure, which now took the form of a tall, skinny man with a gaunt white face, wearing a top hat and a long, black overcoat. Gray beard stubble grew in patches on his flimsy cheeks, leaving other patches as smooth as the cheeks of a child. Not one bead of sweat formed at his temples or above his red, skinless lips.

   "The soil?" Jessica didn't understand what he meant, could barely understand the words that came from his ostensibly overstuffed mouth. "I'm sorry. Not sure what you mean."

   Martina appeared in the window, hovering over one of the freshly sown troughs, and hissed.

   The figure stepped back, shot a glaring eye at the cat, then back toward Jessica. She noticed one eye was pale blue, and one was green, the color of emeralds. "Your seeds, the only way they'll grow is if they are sown into soil that is pure, from the Earth. Pure as your mind. Pure as your heart." He laughed, but it wasn't really a laugh at all because his lips didn't move.

   "I took the soil from my backyard." Jessica answered naively. She caught a glimpse of his hand from her corner of her eye, the tip of which stuck out of the sleeve of his coat. Only two fingers, the index and the ring finger, each of them sporting long, crusty fingernails. The skin on them seemed scorched; red and black, a creepy contrast from the pale pigment of his face. "Uhmmm, the man I bought the seeds from..."

   "Mr. Brown, the florist."

   "Oh, you know him? He said I should start seeing results in about a month, with plenty of water and sunshine."

   "As long as your soil is pure." The man repeated, again shooting Martina a pitiless glance. The cat was licking at the soil, lapping at it the way it would a fresh bowl of milk.

   "Martina! Scram!"

   "Brown, he knows his plants." The man croaked.

   "He seemed knowledgeable, yes. And he even threw in a packet of seeds for free. Said they were a rare breed. I can't remember the name, though. There was no name printed on the packets."

   "Nomads. I know them. The rarest of all plant life. Extinct when the world was young."

   Jessica was impressed. "You know your stuff, huh?"

   The odd man nodded, then again: "If your soil is pure as your heart..."

   "Pure," Jessica repeated, the word feeling unfamiliar on her lips, alien. "What do you mean, pure?"

   The man grinned, revealing a grille of hideously yellow stained teeth, small, like those of a child. His lips quivered, too frail to keep drawn. "Best of luck, my dear."

   The man tipped his hat, a whiff of stench-less air drifting between them, and continued on, taking with him the refreshing shadow of cool air with which he seemed to travel. Jessica watched him stumble along the sidewalk, limping along, favoring his left leg, looking as if he'd once suffered an unimaginable accident, one which had left him in permanent duress. Jessica felt sorry for him.

   He stopped, turned his head, glared at the troughs with two different eyes, grinning that same tortured grin.

   Martina hissed again, teeth showing, her ears pulled back in fury. The man turned away and limped to the corner, ultimately out of sight

   Weird. Jessica thought. But in the big city weird was just part of the landscape; every New Yorker's right and God-given-privilege was eccentricity, and now - in the new millennium - eccentricity was rarely questioned, and often admired.

   To be walking along a steamy tree-lined street in late August, the temperature a scorching ninety-eight degrees, the sun, angry and vengeful, wearing a top hat and an overcoat was not only eccentric; it was insane. Regardless, Jessica continued, hot, sweaty, happy; proud of her new accomplishment.

* * * * * * * *

   Awoken suddenly, she jumped up, panting, mouth dry, her body thrust into pure darkness, a pool of sweat beneath her. Droplets of perspiration found their way into her eyes, stinging her. Her lips, deserted by hydration, split when she tried to swallow.

   "What the..." 

   In the darkened distance, a cat cried.

   "Martina..."

   She'd seen him, the man with the overcoat and the top-hat, not sweating in the severe heat, his different eyes stalking her; his strained, quivering lips. ‘Pure as your heart...' he whispered, sipping from a goblet filled with fresh, cold blood. He gulped, revealed those childish teeth, stained and dripping red. ‘You just don't know, do you?'

   Then she awoke again, her mouth drier, her body saturated with sweat. The room was still dark, except for a trace of light coming from the living room window.

   A cat meowed in the darkness, leapt onto the bed. Jessica shrieked, incapacitated by the pounding of her own heart.

   "Martina! Scram..." She caught herself. It wasn't her way to curse at animals, and though Martina had sprung her heart into overdrive, Jessica simply stroked the cat's fur, reassuring the feline of her love and compassion.

   A siren whined from somewhere in the near distance. Not uncommon.

   "What happened to the air-conditioning?"

   She rubbed sleep from her eyes, turned to her alarm clock. Blank. The cable box: blank.

   "What happened here, Martina?" She stroked the cat again. Martina raised her tail in response.

   Another siren, this time clearly an ambulance. Not uncommon.

   Jessica leapt from the bed, hurried to the living room. Darkness engulfed the apartment, married to an abyss of disquieting silence. The living room cable box blinked nothing; the microwave and stove were the same. She picked up the telephone, thumbed the receiver and got more of the same horrible silence.

   "Of course," She said to the now invisible cat. "A blackout, in the middle of a heatwave. How uncommon."

   Unnerved, Jessica stumbled to the window, tried to open it. She yelped, drawing her hand back in horror. Holding her throbbing palm in front of her face, she was repulsed to find shadows of blood trickling down her arm. The window bit her.

   Flashlight. Bottom drawer, end table. She blindly fished it out, flicked it on, focusing the light on her hand. A gash, roughly the size of a nickel, oozed red and black from the center of her palm.

   Martina cried again.

   "I'm okay." Jessica called, queasy from the sight of her own blood. She knelt beside the end table, set the flashlight face up on the floor so that it cast an eerie dome on the ceiling, and found some paper towels. "At least I think I'm okay."

   After wrapping her hand, she pointed the flashlight at the window that bit her. Shattered glass pained the landscape. Jagged debris stuck out from the molding, protruding like shark's teeth. Through the open spaces came a spray of warm, cool air - if that even made sense at all - and what sounded like the rustling of twigs, or weeds.

   The other window was intact, Jessica learned upon inspection. She checked the paper towel wrapped around her palm, now soaked through with her own blood. She unwrapped it and hurried to the sink to wash the wound.

   Nothing. No water.

   "Blackout. Drought," Jessica thought out loud, almost cursing. "Martina, what's next?"

   Martina disregarded her, leapt onto the windowsill, her padded paws gaiting carefully around the specs of broken glass, and sniffed the dark trough of newly sown seeds, and newly grown...

   Martina hissed, howled, hissed again. Then, a sound Jessica had never heard her cat make broke the desolation, a sound that might have led Jessica to believe her cat was in heat if she hadn't herself had her spayed.

   "Martina!" Jessica tried the faucet again; not a single drop.

   The cat howled a long, elastic cry that was endless.

   "Martina! You're going to wake the neighbors."

   Jessica scaled her apartment the way a burglar would, tip toeing through unfamiliar terrain, swallowed in darkness except for the dimming light from the flashlight.

   "Didn't I just put new batteries in this thing?" Thinking out loud again. If not for talking to herself, Jessica's voice may have been lost to inactivity years ago.

   In the wake of the light, head moving wildly back and forth, tail shot straight upward, flailing vigorously, the cat seemed more like a stranger than the feline that Jessica had known for the past five years. Jessica snapped her fingers, clapped her hands, but the feline continued to ignore her.

   Nearing the window, the flashlight dim but steady, Jessica realized something was not right. Something was wrong. As she closed in, focusing on the window, through which she should have been able to see the street, Jessica noticed her view was obstructed what looked like a small jungle of dry branches, weeds and...hair.

   Hair. Sandy colored, dirty, flecks of soil sprinkling from it. Hair? Branches? Weeds? What the hell was going on? Brown didn't say this stuff would grow overnight. He said sun, and water. There was neither right now. 

   Still dreaming. Jessica huffed, her chest heaving inward and outward, her heartbeat pounding through her tee-shirt, her knees barely able to support her weight. ‘Wake up, Jess.' She closed her eyelids so tight she felt her eyeballs suffocating. "Wake up!" But all she could see was the man, sweatless in the mid-summer sun, top-hat brimming over his pale brow, different eyes protruding; that long, flowing overcoat...‘If the soil is pure, as pure as you are...'

   But it wasn't him. Her mind; that was it. Closed eyes - the darkness that exists behind eyelids - opens the dark corners of the mind, the places where monsters hide, demons rest, memories lie.

   Dark memories, cold memories; all coming back now.

   Martina howled again, long, tortured. Another siren in the distance, but of course that was not uncommon. What was uncommon was the sound of her name weaving through Martina's tormented wails, a phantom on the wind, three syllables into six, wavering...

   The branches shuffled, carelessly tossing loose soil onto the apartment floor, onto Martina, onto Jessica's bare feet. She jolted backward, flinched in pain. The soil bit her. She focused the light on her foot; nothing much, just a tiny spot of blood. Probably just small crystals of glass in the dirt.

   "Martina! Come on! Get down from there."

   Martina wailed in response, Jessica's name once again intertwined.

   Outside, timelessness prevailed, the only light in the city being that from an unconcerned moon above.

   "Jessica...Jesss-ica...Jessssssss-ica..." A hoarse whisper from a tormented soul. 

   The branches shuffled again, pushing sharp teeth of glass from the window frame into the apartment. Jessica now had a clear view of the trough, which looked like a miniature jungle of leafless trees and wild weeds, in the center of which rose something else from the soil... 

   Martina leapt down, hunched backwards into the corner, tail up, spine curled, and hissed. "What's going..." Before she could finish her sentence, Jessica felt something coarse wrapped around her throat. She tugged at it, her injured hand throbbing in pain, the other powerless against the flexible lumber that strangling her.

   The weeds grew before her eyes, swaying to and fro in a demon rhythm that was hypnotic.

   Choking, Jessica blinked in disbelief at the supernatural life before her. She squeezed the object around her neck, her hands stinging on its surface, and followed it with her eyes to the soil. A branch. She was being killed by a branch.

   Vines and needles poked through the skin on her neck, poking tiny holes in her skin from which tears of blood cried. Martina hissed, jumped onto the trough, dug her front paws into the soil, and bit at the base of the branch.

   As the cat tugged at the branch, she mounted her hind legs mounted on the hairy mountain that was slowly rising from the soil. Martina hissed and tugged and wailed and tugged until the trough fell through the broken window and onto Jessica's floor, sending a dusting of loose soil onto her feet, but otherwise remaining in tact.

   "Mar-tin-a." Jessica clawed at the appendage, but found she was weakening. Her eyelids fluttered, beads of sweat stinging them each time they opened. Outside the window, standing on the sidewalk, was the man in his top-hat and overcoat, smiling a wet red smile, holding a goblet of ice-cold blood at his waist.

   "As pure as you," He gloated and began to chant: "Rise, now, oh spirit. Rise now and take what is rightfully yours...what has taken you."

   The mountain of hair bulged from the soil, attached to a rotted cranium. A crack split the skull at the hairline, and huge white eyes bulged from within bony sockets. There were no pupils, no pigment. Decayed flesh hung in loose patches from its torso, an array of purples and blacks, blended together in a kaleidoscope of death.

   A corpse. A child.

   It rose from the soil almost comically, born from seeds that had been sown; born of the Earth, just as life had been.

   It reached out, grabbed Jessica's hands, pulled her toward it.

   Her eyes closed, opened, then closed again. From the corner Martina hissed, brave and frightened at the same time; altogether helpless.

   Then Jessica found sleep. Her body thrust forward, spilling onto the hardwood floor with a deafening thud. Her nose crushed against the surface, fresh blood spraying as if from a broken spout. Her eyes stared distantly at the wood before her.

   At the same moment, the lights flicked on, the clocks blinked 12:00 throughout the house; the stereo played ‘Silent Lucidity' by Queensryche

   The corpse tugged at her, descending back into the soil, into the earth from which it was born, taking what was rightfully his, what had taken him - whatever that meant. Soon the corpse would be gone...

   So would Jessica.

   From outside, the man drank from his goblet, laughing, spitting blood.

   In the corner, Martina lowered her ears, pressed her furry chin against the floor and let out one final, empty sigh.

* * * * * * * *

   "People upstairs say they saw something, but it was too dark to tell." Combs said to Stone, who was jotting something onto a piece of lined paper. Probably what Combs just told him.

   Stone twisted his mustache between his thumb and forefinger. "They say what?"

   "Just a guy limping away. Couldn't tell much more about him."

   "Crazy night."

   "Yeah." Combs agreed, took his hat, wiped sweat from the inside of the brim. "Blackouts bring out the worst."

   "I wonder if this is connected." Stone tugged his shirt, on which neatly formed sweat stains decorated his armpits and chest. "This and the guy they found three blocks away."

   Combs shrugged, his round face appearing childishly simple. "The guy they found buried alive?"

   "Yeah. The Florist."

   "You think so?"

   Stone didn't know.

   He knelt beside a cat which was cowered in the corner, underneath a broken window, stroked it. The cat hissed, batted him with a clawless paw. "Wish cats could talk. Would make our jobs a hell of a lot easier."

   "What do we do now?" Combs asked.

   "We get prints. Landlord says the current tenant here is a young girl named Jessica Hunt."

   "Jessica Hunt?" Combs looked dumbfounded. He'd heard the name before.

   Stone nodded solemnly. "Yep. Same girl."

   Combs's eyes widened. The sweat dripping from his pores made him look like he was crying. "You don't think...?'

   "Nah. That was seven years ago. It was an accident. The guy she hit was blind...and drunk to boot. Wandered onto the highway. Intoxication is automatic cause."

   "Yeah, I guess you're right. But what about the kid?"

  "She lost control." Stone spat, annoyed by Combs's endless questioning. "It was an accident."

   Stone loosened his tie, undid the second button on his shirt. "Focus on the apartment first, then worry about Hunt."

   "We gonna lift some prints?"

   "Tell you what bothers me," Stone knelt, pulled on a pair of latex gloves, rubbed one finger across a porcelain trough filled neatly to the brim with fresh soil, a human hand stuck out of the soil, as if reaching for something. "This thing sitting in the middle of the floor."

   Combs knelt, slipped on his own pair of gloves, caressed the porcelain tub of dirt, then pulled the hand from out of the soil. He held it up, studied it. Tendrils of muscle and flesh hung from the wrist, leading him to believe it was wrenched off, not chopped. "Think we'll be able to pull any prints from this?"

   Dried blood smeared the limb, caked in layers of red and black most heavily surrounding a small wound on the palm. "I guess we'll see."

   The cat howled quietly, a feline in heat. It went ignored.

   "Stone." A portly gentlemen stood in the doorway. The sweat stains on his shirt were almost identical to Stone's. "Got another witness out here. Say's he might have seen something."

   "A neighbor?" Stone set the hand on the soil.

   "I don't know. Weird looking guy, though, dressed in a hat and a long coat. Black, in the middle of a heatwave." He wiped sweat from his forehead and neck. "Christ, only in New York."

   "It's a weird city." Stone said, and walked to the doorway. The witness stood at the bottom of the stairs, pale faced, odd eyes glaring at him, looking almost as if they didn't belong to his face. Not a bead of sweat dripped from his skin. "You see something?"

   "Why yes." The man drank from a cup, grimaced, then swallowed the bitter liquid. "I saw everything."

   Now perched on the windowsill, the cat hissed, shrieked, her ears shrunk back.

   The witness limped to the step, leaned on the banister, grinned at the cat. He took another sip of fresh brew from his cup, and told Stone exactly what he saw.

   "Thank you." Stone said and reached out, nearly jumping back when he noticed the man's hand.

   "My apologies." One emerald eye glared at Stone, the other a pallid blue. "An unfortunate accident. I used to be a Plant Breeder."

   "A plant breeder." Stone said, retracting his own hand. "Sounds interesting."

   "It is." The man with the white face and different eyes said, then reached into the pocket of his overcoat, withdrew a handful of seeds. "These are a very rare breed. Nomad. They were extinct when the Earth was young. Here, take them."

   "Wow, thanks." Above him the sun was vengeful, yet a cool breeze met his face. It was refreshing. "Let me guess, water and sunlight, right?"

   The man grinned, his teeth just like a child's. "Just make sure the soil is pure. As pure as your heart."

   Stone held out his hand, accepted the seeds.

   In the near distance, a siren whined. Not uncommon.

---THE END---

Keyword: Jon Stalk Demon Seeds Horror

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Posted by Lifeless 2008-06-03 20:51:40 Amazing Excellent. The suspense built through the story was perfect. The creepiness factor is perfect. I am really freaked out, something that doesn't happen quite often, especially when I'm reading. This story is of a rare breed. Nowadays, the horror genre has become lost from where it started. (Where'd it start?-- check out Hitchcock) We no longer have suspense filled, nail biters that give little kids nightmares. Now we have throat slashing, gut spilling "horror" that just makes little kids puke (books and movies alike.) To make my point of this: Demon Seeds reminded me of why I got into this horror business. If I have nightmares tonight, or can't sleep, that just makes it better. This story will stay with me for a long time, and is a definite favorite. Please keep up the good work. FYI: You are officially my new hero! 5/5 + Report this comment

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