Burning Hearts

By R.J. Parry

Sometimes you need to let the demons run free.
Sometimes the devils are helpless.
Sometimes the most evil thing on earth is us.

Forget what you thought you knew about evil.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Apr 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543489941

R.J. Parry

Richard John Parry had many other lives before he started writing. He was a Royal Navy sailor then a call centre manager and then a postmaster. He now lives in a small town on the border of Durham with his wife and children. His dreams are all nightmares. The demons have flown, and his devils and monsters he’s sharing with you.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The Blame Game

Everything was his fault. No matter how he looked at it, he was to blame. He hadn’t helped; in fact, he had only made things worse, a whole lot worse, depending on your point of view that was. There was a demon on the loose and he had been the reason it had been allowed to escape. He had helped rescue a small girl from a place worse than Hell but in doing so he had sacrificed two other souls to a heinous fate: the girl’s mother and another innocent man. But he had at least rescued the girl so it wasn’t a total failure. It was however only one small victory in a shit-storm of failures. Not only had he failed, but during his failings he had been associated with a couple whom the police believed to be part of some satanic serial-killing cult. In truth, they had been nothing of the sort but it was true that the police had every right to believe that they were all homicidal lunatics. The others he was associated with had, after all, both killed while under the influence of a demon, a particularly aggressive demon. He avoided the police at all costs but didn’t know how they operated. He was a stranger to the good old UK and, as a six-foot-eight American, he stood out like a turd in a swimming pool. It had been months since the night he had let the demon slip through his fingers: three months in fact and, he had discovered, the town of Sedgeburg was not exactly what you would call normal.

Howard was a demonologist, at least that was the label the modern world had given him. In more primitive days he would have been called a witch, a warlock, or a wizard. He preferred to think of himself as practitioner in the wonderful sciences. The wonderful sciences were what would often pass for magic in the distant past. It was the demons of the old world that had taught mankind the secrets of fire and chemistry. They had guided early man into the wonder he is today. Howard had spent decades collecting information on how to communicate, fight, and ultimately defeat these same demons when one of them stepped out of line. This included how to send them back to Hell and how to destroy them, or incapacitate them, at least. The first thing you needed to be able to do as a demonologist, if you were to fight the demon, was to find the damn things in the first place.

Howard was sat in the back of a Ford Transit van that was serving as a temporary home. He had a mattress that he could pull down to sleep on and a small bench that he could work at when the mattress was folded out of the way. The inner walls of the van were covered in maps of the area that had various lines marked on them that Howard used to indicate the direction the demon was in. The problem was he could tell what direction the demon was in but not the distance. Howard ascertained the demons direction with a set of thirteen crystal balls. When twelve crystals were arranged in a circle the thirteenth crystal would indicate the direction of the demon; this was known as a scrawing ritual. What Howard had to do was find the direction of the demon with one ritual and then, before it could disappear, he had to drive the van to a second location and repeat the scrawing ritual to get a second point. The two lines from each ritual would cross and where the lines crossed would be where the demon was.

He was repeating a scrawing ritual for what seemed like the thousandth time since he had freed the demon Vultmus into the world. Howard had thirteen crystal balls of all different colours that he laid in a circle, like the numbers on a clock, on a wooden board that held them in place. The outer twelve crystals created a ring of energy. The thirteenth crystal ball was placed in the centre of the circle. The way the scrawing crystals worked was simple: Each crystal had been infused with the essence of different other-worldly creatures or items. The central crystal would roll in the direction of the corresponding item you are trying to find. The crystal he placed in the centre of the ring this time was ruby red and the sunlight shone through it like blood. The red crystal had been forged using demon blood, giving it the red hue.

Howard placed the demon’s crystal in the centre of the circle and the crimson crystal started to role in a south easterly direction. Howard turned to a map and plotted a line, from where he was, in the direction that the ball had rolled. The line crossed with another line he had drawn only twenty minutes earlier. He had created a cross where the demon was. After weeks of only ever getting one positive reading from the crystals at a time, he had finally made a positive reading that he could use to start his hunt. The problem with this demon, he believed was named Vultmus was that he didn’t know anything about it.

This should be where you are. he said, to no one but himself. He looked at the lines on the map. They crossed in an area that was mostly residential housing in a less than prosperous part of town. If the demon he was looking for was there, then it would not go unnoticed. He bundled his crystals back into their bag and set off to find the demon Vultmus. Finally, the hunt was on and even though the demon seemed benevolent, and as yet had not harmed anyone, it didn’t mean that Howard didn’t have to contain it.

Howard was well aware that some demons were as quiet as a church mouse and, as such, harmless. Until he was happy that the demon was no threat to the people of Segeburg or the rest of the human race he could not, with a clear conscience, let it run loose. He had decided to stay in the UK till such time as he had things taken care of. Also, he was not one hundred percent sure he would not be taken into custody if he was found trying to leave the country.

Howard drove the van to the street near to where the lines had crossed. There was no sign of anything out of the ordinary. There was no one screaming or running in terror from the monster as is the traditional response to seeing a demon. It was much easier to hunt a demon that went around biting people’s heads off, they were easier to trace. The kinder, friendlier demons were sometimes impossible to track.

He repeated his scrawing ritual and the blood red crystal was as still as a corpse. Mother Shit. Howard punched the inside of the van realising he was too late again. The demon was gone.

Vultmus the Demon was able to step into and out of our reality as easily as we can cross a road. It was impossible to track something that could vanish in the blink of an eye. The one time Howard had seen Vultmus was when he had escaped from the Hell-like world of the Neatherim. The demon had waved politely to Howard and then shimmered out of existence. Howard was aware that some high-level demons could create sub dimensions but it was incredibly rare. This is a power that is akin to a devil not some low-level demon. This demon was turning up like a jack-in-the-box, taking a look around and then vanishing without any motive or reason that Howard could ascertain. Also, it seemed to leave no evidence of its ever being there. That was about to change.

The stem of all Howard’s frustrations was that he didn’t know how on earth he was going to deal with this thing. All other demons are documented and, therefore, he could research their weaknesses. The demon Sitri was driven by lust and was easily trapped with the promise of sexual conquest with a demagogue. King Bael had been bound to iron coins and trapped between their parameters, or confined with salt. This was all information he had learned over the years from his extensive collection of books and from other demonologists. When it came to Vultmus there was not a single word in any of the ancient books he had studied. The only thing he could make from the name Vultmus was that is very roughly translated as ‘faceless’. This was an accurate enough description of the creature. In the few seconds that he had seen the beast it had, in fact, no facial features at all. Its eye sockets looked like they had never been there. Its nose was non-existent, and where its mouth should have been was an expressionless scar that looked like it had tried to cut itself a mouth and the wound had kept healing. It had been dark at the time and it looked like its body was a mass of extremely long arms, six in total. But Howard could not be sure, it could have been more. You faceless little son bitch. Howard was trying his best to calm back down. He realised he had an unnecessarily tight grip of the steering wheel and he released his grip and tried to relax. He couldn’t drive when he was this upset. It was at that moment that he realised he was better off not driving anywhere and staying where he was. One thing he was sure of was that the demon had been present here for at least twenty minutes, if not more. There may be a slim chance that it might return. The scrawing crystals were set up and, if the demon returned, he would be close by to try and commune with the thing, or fight it if need be.

Howard pulled down his mattress, careful not to knock his crystals flying around the floor, pulled the curtains over the windows and lay down. His tall frame was not designed to live in such a small, cramped space but he didn’t have the cash to spend on hotels and he wasn’t sure if the local police would be looking for him still. He lay down with his head almost underneath the driver’s seat and he tried to get some sleep. Howard was not going to get any sleep tonight, or for the next few nights.

Just as Howard was midway been asleep and awake he heard the unmistakable sound of police sirens. The sound got closer, echoing through the metal walls of the van, and then a screech of breaks as a car jerked to a stop next to him. He expected the door to his van to be yanked open and policemen to wrestle him to the ground, putting him in handcuffs, but after a few seconds he realised they were not here for him. Howard peeped through the curtains of the van to see if he could ascertain what was happening. Another police car arrived from the opposite end of the street and it was closely followed by an ambulance. Howard could see that he was not the only curtain twitcher. Most of the houses on the street had a nosey parker looked through one window or another. One of the policemen was advising everyone to return to their homes. Whatever had happened here was something they didn’t want anyone to see.

If the demon was present the authorities wouldn’t have sent the police; they would send the army, or whatever was the British equivalent of homeland security. If they had only sent the police, Howard would have thought they would have sent more than just two squad cars.

The presence of the police is to deal with whatever the demon has done Howard surmised. They must not know what they are dealing with. The paramedics went inside the house, leaving the ambulance with its light still flashing. There was only one police officer outside the house and he was being pestered by two scruffy looking kids in football shirts who were rattling off questions in his direction so fast he didn’t have the time to think, let alone answer them. The two boys, who had ignored the policeman’s requests to go home, seemed to take turns thinking up more complex and stupid questions to ask the young officer. Who’s in there then ay? Is some bugger dead? Has he had a stroke? Is the woman who lives here on drugs? Is she a prozzie? Does your head go right to the top of that hat?

The young policeman grew impatient with the boys and shooed them away. The two lads ran off, chuckling to themselves. The two snot-nosed hooligans in training had been the adequate distraction Howard had needed to get out of the van and make himself scarce. If someone had been killed, raped or attacked it was only a matter of time till someone came looking into his van with questions he couldn’t answer. Eventually they would realise who he was and that would be a trip to jail for a long interrogation where, if he told the truth he would be locked up in the local nuthouse.

Howard walked slowly, and with as much of a ‘don’t look at me’gait that he could muster. As a tall man, he stood out like a sore thumb. He hunched up as much as he could in an attempt to look more nonchalant. He got to the end of the street and turned out of the line of sight of the police officer. He was confident he had not been spotted but he looked behind him just to check he was not being followed. The policeman was again being harassed by the small boys with the football. One of them had picked up a piece of dog shit with a crisp packet and thrown it at the policeman. The policeman gave chase with a brown stain running down the side of his otherwise shiny helmet. You can’t catch us you stinking pig. I can smell pig shit. The boys ran in circles as the young policeman went dizzy trying to catch them. Get back here you little bastards, the policeman shouted after them, as they ran off waving their arses at him. Howard watched as the pantomime was acted out in front of him. What a lovely neighbourhood, he said, smiling to himself. Howard had no way of knowing this, but one of those boys would have a part to play in catching Vultmus the Demon in a way he would never have expected.

Howard didn’t like leaving the van there with the bulk of his equipment and supplies inside but it was a necessary sacrifice. The windows were covered and hopefully, in a few days, he would be able to return and gather his things. The question that Howard now had to answer was this: what had happened in that house and was it related to the demon? Finding this all out was going to be easier said than done.

Another police car drove past Howard, this time the sirens were off. Behind the wheel was a blond policewoman that looked familiar to Howard. It was the same police woman he had given the slip to three months earlier. Time to make like a tree, Howard said to himself as he started to walk away.

CHAPTER TWO

Scolder

It had been an eventful few months for Jenny. She had been the sole survivor of the worst attack on a metropolitan police station since the Victorian era. There had been almost two hundred police men and women murdered that day leaving nothing behind but carnage and death. Twelve lunatics had attacked the station armed with swords. The attackers had come early in the morning, catching the officers off guard. Jenny had not only survived the attack but had incapacitated several of the attackers and taken others into custody. She had killed several attackers using their own swords against them. Jenny had become a legend in the police force throughout the country. People looked at her like she was Bruce Willis and Chuck Norris all rolled into one. The fact that Jenny was a mere five-foot-six woman with mousy blond hair did not stop people looking at her like she was some kind of superhero.

She had received the obligatory medal and promotion that came with surviving something like that. Her superiors would have had her on the cover of magazines and talking to TV and radio presenters for the rest of her career if she had let them. Like Howard, Jenny was all too aware that in Sedgeburg you didn’t only have the common, garden variety evil of mankind to deal with; there were other powers at work, much darker than the darkest part of a man’s soul. These dark forces were, hopefully, all in Jenny’s past and she had assurances that things should be returning to normal. She was wrong.

She had been receiving anonymous emails with information that would lead to finding just the right piece of evidence to lock up a rapist or child molester. Even the odd murderer had been caught because of the anonymous emails. The emails were signed with the name DIVINUS. The word was Latin and meant super human or god-like. The premise being that the person sending the emails was omnipresent and could see everywhere. The emails had not been sent to Jenny directly but she had been placed in charge of following up the anonymous tips and if possible find out who the mysterious Divinus was.

The irony was she knew exactly who Divinus was. He had helped her out of a hole on more than one occasion and was the reason she had survived the attack on the police station. He had also helped her survive an attack when twenty-something gun toting human traffickers and drug dealers had crossed their paths. They were stories for a different time. Ever since Jenny had met Divinus her feet had never seemed to touch the floor. She had managed to make him promise to keep his big nose out of police affairs but he just couldn’t help himself if something bad were to happen and he had done nothing to stop it, hence the emails to station.

Between Jenny’s miraculous escapes and association with the Divinus case she had gained a reputation for being involved with the stranger cases that happened in Sedgeburg. The younger officers might look at her like she was a female Dirty Harry but the older officers mocked her and would whistle old TV themes as she approached. Mostly the Twilight Zone or the X-Files. Her annoyance at this childish behaviour had only made them do it all the more and, not wanting to come across as a big baby she had just had to put up with it. The worst of the whole ridicule was that they had given her a nickname. Jenny was not sure what brain child had come up with the name but, if she ever found out, they would be receiving a swift kick to the balls the next time she got them alone. Scolder. That was her stupid, childish name. It was a mixture of both Moulder and Scully from the X-Files and the name had a brilliant second meaning as she was in a constant state of correcting or disciplining junior officers. Scolding them, to be precise.

Jenny had noticed an increase in peculiar cases since the station massacre. This could be because they seemed to assign her all of the out of the ordinary cases or it could just be that there was lots of crazy shit happening recently. Her current unsolved and open cases involved a mass death at several swimming pools that was being blamed on a faulty or tampered with batch of chlorine mixture but Jenny believed there was more to that case than there appeared. A spate of unexplained heart attacks had happened in the city centre and even with the help of Divinus highlighting potential criminals, the crime rate in Sedgeburg seemed to be at an all time high. Unsolved crimes with no logical motive seemed to be common place and there had also been a rise in accidental deaths.

Jenny had been at the station piling through yet another mountain of paperwork when she got a call from dispatch saying, They have another strange one for you Jen. Jenny passed what work she could to a constable and headed to the scene. Jenny might have noticed the tall American, who was doing his best to hide, when she drove past him but she was distracted by the sight of a young police officer being taunted by two small boys. They were running around backwards while the officer was desperately trying to catch the two yobs in training while they laughed at him. When they saw another police car arrive, the boys turned tail and ran, now that they didn’t outnumber the young policeman. Jenny scowled disappointedly at the young policeman that she vaguely recognised from the station. He had, what looked like, chocolate dripping from his helmet but when she got close enough she could smell that it was not a piece of fruit and nut as she had first thought. Jenny was just about to reprimand the young officer further, to scold him, when another officer burst out of the house and vomited into the street, covering the young officer’s nice shiny shoes. The young officer stood with shit smeared on his head and vomit on his lower legs and shoes and wished he had taken another line of work.

Jenny did recognise the new arrival as a sergeant whom she had worked with for a number of years. Sergeant Mathews was a chauvinistic little whelp as far as Jenny was concerned. He was not far off retirement and the only reason he had been promoted to sergeant was because, after the Sedgeburg PD massacre, there had been a vacuum of positions to fill. The same argument could be made for Jenny’s promotion. If twenty senior officers hadn’t been killed in the massacre she could still only be a PC. Frank Mathews had just about finished spilling his lunch on the pavement when Jenny put her hand on his shoulder. Are you able to give me a briefing, Frank, or will I have to find someone with a stronger stomach? Jenny said this half mocking, half serious. Frank got to his feet, trying to maintain composure. Let’s brief you on what we know so far. Only if you think you’re up to it Frank, I don’t want to put you out.

Frank tried his damnedest to not think about what was inside the house as he spoke. We received a call stating there had been an explosion of some sort; the caller was panicked and confused; she believed her boyfriend had exploded. There were no other reports of an explosion otherwise the area would have been swarming with an anti-terrorist response team. By the time we arrived on scene, the victim was claiming her son had been killed in the blast as well as her boyfriend. Frank led Jenny inside. I’m no explosives expert but I know that it wasn’t any bomb that did whatever happened in there. Forensic are on their way; try not to touch anything. Where is the woman that reported the incident? The second unit are upstairs taking her statement.

The ambulance crew exited the building. There is jack shit for us to do here; we have other calls to get to. Frank nodded to them as they passed him. What do you mean nothing to do? Jenny enquired. We can’t do anything for that poor bugger. Jesus himself couldn’t bring that one back to life. With that, the paramedics got into their ambulance drove away.

Jenny went to enter the room. She looked at Frank. Are you not coming? You wouldn’t get me back inside that room for a month off work with paid leave. Fanny. Jenny mocked Frank as she left him standing in the hall. He had mocked her on a number of occasions and she enjoyed being able to return the jape now she had him at a disadvantage. Frank Mathews wouldn’t be taunting her anymore in future; if he did, all she would have to do is remind him of when he lost his lunch at St Leonards Street. Jenny entered the room wondering what could have been so bad that it had made the weak-stomached Frank up chuck so quickly.

The ambulance crew were correct in their assessment: it was a coroner that was required not a medic. The coroner wouldn’t need a bodybag for the remains but a bucket, half a bucket to be exact.

The first thing she noticed was that everything in the room seemed to be a deep red, bordering on brown. The blood was beginning to dry and the floor was sticky. Jenny recalled the massacre at the station. There had been alot of blood then. She had slipped in the clotted blood and almost got herself killed. She stood still, not wanting to lose her footing and, also, she didn’t want to go trampling over the evidence. She stood in a wedge-shape of clean carpet that must have been sheltered by the door when whatever happened had happened. She looked around at the blood-splattered mess. The coppery smell of pennies filled both her nose and mouth. There seemed to be small pieces of bone stuck in the walls all over the room. Just above the mantelpiece there was a picture of a woman and a small boy that had, what looked like, a rib sticking through the glass. As she further surveyed the room more body pieces became apparent: fingers, an eye and part of a penis. On the window there was a section of the victims face stuck to the glass like one of those kids throw and splat toys. Just the nose and the empty eye socket were recognisable.

Still haunted by the memory of the station massacre she took pictures for evidence to take her mind off the new horror before her, concentrating more on the act of taking the pictures than the content of the pictures themselves. During the massacre, she didn’t have the time to stop and look around as she had a dozen armed lunatics to deal with but now she was calm and she was here to observe as much as she could. On the fire place there was an eyeball that looked like it had been chewed up and spat out. The other eye was unseen behind the television. The television was still playing away to itself. Blood drying to the plasma screen as Tellytubbies danced around unaware of the horror they were talking through. There were skinned fingers sat in a row on one of the sofa cushions like they had all jumped from the hand together. Blood dripped from the walls and ceiling and large pieces of meat that looked like mince fell to the floor around Jenny, like soggy, red hailstone. What looked like a piece of liver was stuck to the wall and was making a slow slip to the floor. There was not a single recognisable body part bigger than a finger besides the charred centrepiece to what looked to Jenny like some gruesome work of modern art.

Sat in the dead centre of the room was a burning, black heart. There was no fire as such but the heart’s ventricles were still pumping instead of blood the heart was pumping steam, red steam, as though the blood had boiled from the inside and the body and had exploded under the pressure. Jenny had expected a foul smell coming from the room but, besides the coppery tang of blood, the only smell was of the charred heart that sat in the room. A centrepiece, willing the eye to look at it. Jenny watched the heart, still beating, for around thirty seconds, unaware of how it could still be functioning, when the beating finally stopped. The heart ceased its beating and then deflated with a farting sound that would have been comical under normal circumstances. Jenny continued taking pictures and one thing that she observed was that, of all the body parts that she could make out, none of them looked like it came from a child. Whatever had happened here there was no sign of a child being involved. Thank heaven for small mercies.

Frank had been correct in his assumption that there had been no explosives used. There were several tell-tale signs of explosives; the smell being the first. Cordite, and other explosives, smelled like rotting eggs. Plastic explosives had a sweet smell, almost like marzipan. There was no smell of either or any signs of detonation. The only smell that filled the room now was the meaty smell of the burning heart. Jenny knew that the forensic team would find no explosives present. So, what had caused this man to explode? Old cases of spontaneous human combustion had all been disproved. Not only had police forensic teams discovered that most cases had been accidents but two different episodes of CSI and an episode of Myth-Busters had covered the phenomenon; even if hey weren’t true there had never been a proven case of spontaneous human explosion. Another thing Jenny was 80% sure of was that the forensic team would find no trace of a second body in among the carnage. It was hard to estimate how much of a mess you could make if you spread out a body like thin jam but there was no sign of a second contributor.

Jenny thought she had photographed everything of note in the room when she noticed a blank spot on the wall where the blood had missed. The cast off where the blood had been sprayed, from whatever had caused the man to explode, had been blocked by something or someone. Whatever had happened had happened recently, no more than a few minutes before Frank and his young partner had arrived. So, who had left the impression on the wall? The clean spot on the wall looked like it could be the figure of a man, except for the fact that the figure looked like it had four arms and must have been on its knees. Jenny looked at where the figure must have been standing if it had been responsible for the masking of the blood. She expected to see footprints in the blood, or boot prints. The blood had been very much flowing freely when the body had exploded. The shapes more resembled hands than feet, big hands with unnaturally long fingers. The remaining blood had filled the void where the hands had been but they were still a very definite hand shape and not footprints. Jenny inwardly cursed herself for not noticing the masked area and the handprints when she first arrived on scene. She may have got a much more detailed picture of the prints. The strange thing was beside the fact that whoever had been present had been standing on his hands yet still seemed to be standing upright, that there was no trail where they had left the scene: only two handprints. None of this made sense at all. The only thing that Jenny was sure of was that this was another case that, most likely, had other worldly connotations. She would not and could not call