TWENTY SIX
***
Lenore watched Jason fall and screamed. Then she screamed again as the stricken sheriff grabbed at her leg from where he had fallen.
"Run," gasped Jason, then closed his eyes and was silent.
Cowles again licked the blood from his knife. Lenore rushed past him, screaming, and the demon laughed. "Run all you like, sweetheart." She turned in time to see Cowles stab Jason again, then kick him hard. Jason’s blood spilled, mingling with the bloodstains that were already on the floor. It must be Sean Rand’s house, she realized with terror. This was where the monster was born.
Lenore ran up the stairs and out of the house, into the mist, crying.
Then she stopped and looked back. The mist eddied, allowing her to see the house clearly for a moment. It was dark and ominous, the power that had been born of a child’s fear infecting the happy place like a malignant tumor.
Lenore squared her shoulders…and went back in. Jason was still down there. Dead, perhaps, but still down there.
She went in, and went down into the basement. Back into Hell.
Cowles was not there. Jason was, though, his mouth bubbling blood as he tried wretchedly to breath. His life was ebbing, his wounds clearly fatal.
"Go," whispered Jason when he saw her. She shook her head.
The sheriff’s eyes closed. She wept.
"So touching," said Cowles, and she spun to see the rapist standing at the foot of the stairs behind her. He flicked an imaginary tear from his eye. "True love conquers all," he said. Then he glanced at Jason’s still form. "Or maybe not."
He touched his crotch, massaging it, and Lenore felt like vomiting. But she didn’t. She held herself back from the precipice of panic into which she wanted to throw herself.
She reached down. Took Jason’s gun from his slack fingers. And she faced her fear.
She tried to raise the gun with trembling hands. The rapist laughed, and as he did his skin went slightly transparent. She caught a glimpse of something reptilian and vile and knew that to be raped by this creature would be far worse than anything she had ever imagined possible. She would be violated not by a human who had lost his humanity, but by a demon that had never had such experience at all.
Then the laugh ended, and Cowles was a man again.
Lenore felt like the gun weighed a thousand pounds. She couldn’t hold it up. She lowered the barrel, and Cowles laughed that hideous, mutated laugh of his. "You can’t do it," he chuckled. "Too afraid. Besides, even if you could," and here he gestured at the gun Lenore held, "no bullets."
Lenore closed her eyes, trembling, waiting for the end to come. She felt Cowles grasp her hand.
But wait! It wasn’t Cowles, it was Jason! She looked down and saw the sheriff put something in her hand. It was the bullet. The golden bullet that he had shown her and Albert earlier: the one that was the remains of the bullets that had killed the sheriff’s family.
She loaded it quickly. She had taken some gun training after her first encounter with Cowles, and though she had never completed the course, she still remembered how to load and chamber the bullet.
She looked back at Cowles. The man was no longer smiling. Something was different.
Lenore aimed the gun at her fear. And she smiled.
"No," whispered Cowles.
"You don’t scare me," she said with disgust. And pulled the trigger.
Light speared out of Cowles as the bullet hit him. He bled, but it was not blood that seeped from the wound. Rather, he oozed light. He fell to the ground, and as he fell Lenore once again glimpsed the creature beneath Cowles; the demon of her fear.
This time, she knew, Cowles would not miraculously resurrect. He was gone.
She threw the gun away and leaned down to Jason. She put his head in her lap and brushed the blood away from his lips. "Don’t leave me," she said.
Jason’s eyes opened. Just a crack, but even as they dimmed Lenore could see that something about the sheriff was different. Something had changed.
He was happy.
"Gotta go," said Jason.
He closed his eyes.
Lenore wept.
And Jason died.
***