Dead Thing Ascendant
Compendium 2020 – Story 42
by Andrew Hawnt
Author's note: This story returns to the world of my 2011 novellas DEAD THING and FOR THE FALLEN. Why? Because I miss those characters and want to finally complete the trilogy in 2021.
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It had stopped raining just before Lisa had arrived at her dad's headstone. Thank heavens for small mercies, she thought as she made her way through the neat rows of stones that filled St Barnaby's graveyard.
She laid the flowers she'd brought with her against the stone and added a blank notebook and a pack of pens beside them. She always liked to think dad had something to scribble his notes in. The groundsmen probably took them away as they had always gone each time she visited, but she wanted the feeling of a regular tradition to her visits, as her life had been anything but traditional.
Patrick Lambert, the stone read. We never said goodbye, and we never will.
“Happy nine years, dad,” Lisa said quietly. “It's nine years to the day that everything went crazy and you, me, Amy and the guys did all the fighty stuff against a demon and saved the world. It's a bit shit without you here to celebrate it with, but I like to think you're out there somewhere still, listening to my thoughts. Bloody psychics,” she said with a sad smile.
“I know you would've liked me to stay with the Paranormal Division, but after you died I just couldn't hack it. You got stuck in a coma after a psychic war and never came out of it. I never stopped hoping, you know. I never lost faith that you'd pull through until you didn't. You were Patrick frigging Lambert, you see. The most powerful psychic agent the division had. You could do so much stuff that I thought holding back death would probably turn out to be one of your tricks as well.”
She watched an elderly lady place flowers on a far older grave a few rows away, cross herself and then walk slowly back to the gates. Lisa looked back to her dad's name.
“I wanted to talk to you, dad. Well, as close as I can manage, anyway. I pushed my psychic abilities down after what happened to you. I managed to lock them away after some training from the Division. I needed the headspace. I got a normal job with normal people doing tedious things, but those things were comforting. The thing is...”
She pulled an old ID card and lanyard out of her coat pocket and stared at it for the millionth time. She looked younger in the picture. Her hair was very of its time and didn't have the touch of a grey sliver at the left side. It had been a different age. A different her.
“The thing is, something broke through the block I'd put on my abilities last night. Something major. I... I wanted to know if it was you or not. I heard a voice tell me to come here today. It said I needed to be here. With it being the anniversary of the big day, I figured I should listen to it and come. If my dad was coming back, then I wanted to be here.”
Lisa realised tears were streaking down her cheeks. “But you're not, are you? I shouldn't have got my hopes up. I forget that sometimes the space between the living and the dead gets a bit fuzzy and things can leak through. That's all it was, wasn't it? I'm just being silly. I turned my back on the Division, on Amy and the boys and the work, shoved my powers away and tried to be normal. Well, I can't, can I? I'm crap at it, dad. I know now that I should never have quit. It's not what you would have done. I'm going to ring the Division today and see if there are any openings for lapsed agents. You never know.”
She blew a kiss at the stone and turned to leave.
Sudden cold. A spike of pain in her temples. The cascading feeling of a psychic block collapsing in her mind. She clamped her hands over her temples, grimacing in pain and staggering back and forth until the feeling began to subside,. As she opened her eyes, she saw the last tendrils of a dark space sealing shut behind a spindly humanoid form. She regained her footing, squeezed her hands into tight fists, and fought back the previously suppressed tide of torment that was desperate to push forth after being held back for so long.
Her vision cleared, and before her stood a thing of stolen human parts and the demented influence of the dead realm. The Otherside.
The thing had been waiting there all along. Somehow. Lurking in the air of the graveyard. She knew it. By the look of it, the creature, or at least parts of it, had once been one of the ground staff. Tattered overalls hung in blue shreds over its distorted torso and elongated limbs. Parts of it looked as though they had been reclaimed from corpses around the place. The hands ended in curved claws. Its face was split in half down the middle, the two halves of gory skull wrenched open to reveal a gigantic thrashing tongue lined with teeth, its tip ending in a claw-like pincer that snapped at her face the moment she faced it.
Lisa screamed in anger and moved back to avoid it, tripping over her father's stone. The thing swung at her with its lethal claws, a dark green mist seeping from it as it climbed over the stone and lunged at her again.
“Desssspoilerrrr,” the Dead Thing hissed. It swung again, but Lisa rolled away. She was slower than nine years ago, but still had the moves. The creature's legs had been broken in several places and augmented with what looked like remains of other people from around the graveyard. It stank and dripped and oozed and cracked as it stepped over to her in its makeshift vessel.
Dragging herself upright, Lisa's thoughts turned to the old lady. I have to get her out of here, she thought. Before anything else happens, I have to know she's safe.
The distraction cost her precious moments, and the thing pounced, shoving her to the ground with a heavy impact. She tried to move, but the thing had straddled her now and was way stronger than it looked. Blood and bone fell upon her in thick gobs, and the razor-edged claws grew closer and closer to the veins in her wrists while the grotesque tongue licked her face with sticky glee. The tongue itself seemed to be giggling.
I can't get this thing off me, she panicked. Dad, if you can hear me, I'm sorry. I can't get to my powers any more. I don't know how!
“Ruiner. Ssspeaker of lies. Ssslave to your sssecret life. Abomination. You reek of ssssoulssss for me to consssume.”
There was nothing else she could do but open the floodgates. Let it all flow again. She willed the protective sigils in her mind to break, and as they shattered into wasted psychic energy, the full force of her pent-up influence roared through.
It's been too long. I can't control it. I can't!
The storm within her grew, raising a wind around both her and the dead thing that lifted the two of them into the air, locked in combat. They thrashed against each other six feet off the ground, the surrounding chaos that was leaking from Lisa's mind and into the space around them being eagerly lapped up by the monstrosity that had attacked her. Its foul tongue lapped at the air as its claws dug into her limbs.
No, get out of my head! My memories are mine!
The dead thing burrowed into her psyche, starving for the anguish that had been released. It would end its hunger and then it would grind her body into pulp.
Lisa lost her grip on the world around her, and the battle shifted from cold graveyard to the dark void of her own mind. She had been there before, and it had been a place she never wanted to return to. When you were so sensitive to mental energies, your mind became a battleground at the best of times.
Just as the dead thing wanted it.
They hung in the void together, entwined like a violent caricature of two lovers. Lisa's essence was weak here, trapped in the horror that she had worked so hard to subdue. She saw it all. The death of her mother, an agent of the Division herself, during the incident that had become known as the Cataclysm. The corpses of friends. The corpses of civilians. The horror that the darkest beasts of the Otherside had wrought against her. All around them swam the blood that had been spilt throughout her life, and the creature wanted every scrap of it for itself.
Your cowardice betrays you, the thing mocked as the ethereal version of its mangled form thrashed at the representation of Lisa's body. Just as you betrayed your father by turning away from your calling when he needed you the most. He died because of your inaction, Lisssa Lambert! The great man himself, Patrick Lambert, the scourge of the Otherside, killed by the apathy of his own child!
Lisa knew it was overpowering her. She knew that all of her struggles with life since turning away from the Division had been for nothing. There was so much loss and despair and pain for this thing to consume that once it had drained her, it would be almost unstoppable.
Almost.
Instead of fighting to pull it away from her, Lisa pulled the beast closer. Jammed its claws deeper into the mental projection of her physical body. The void around them raged with myriad depictions of her own screaming face. If it wanted her pain, she would give it so much that it's damned head would burst. She knew only too well what would happen.
Go on then you bastard, take it all. Take every bit. Take away all of the mourning I did. Take away all of the battles I had with myself. Take all of the nightmares, take all of the screaming I heard all around me for so long from so many people. Take every bit of the suffering that filled my mind from all angles. Take it all and savour every bit of it. More. Take more. More! I'll never run out! I'll never stop! I'll... never... stop... fighting!
The void returned to darkness and they hung in it for a terrible moment. Lisa had poured everything that she had hidden into the thing, and still it hungered for more. She needed one last push. One last shred of hope. One more thing to push her abilities back to where they had once been.
I won't forgive you, came a distant voice in the dark. Because there was never anything to forgive.
Impossible and wonderful.
Dad had been both.
Lisa filled her essence with that voice, that link to what had gone before as well as what existed beyond life. She remembered earlier battles, including the fateful moment she had seen her father fall to the ground in a secret archive while battling a chilling demon. Lisa had been left alone to face it, but her parents, severed from the mortal plane, had been there to push her on.
With renewed energy, she directed the full force of her mental strength at the beast.
New shapes formed in the void. Screaming women and men, children with hollow eyes, skeletons and raging gaseous apparitions, dragging the creature back, tearing its form apart, shredding its skin, crushing bones, flaying its obscene tongue, bathing it in the collective fury of a graveyard filled with sorrow and love in equal measure. In brutal outrage, the dead reclaimed their limbs.
The psychic thread that ran through them all and Lisa granted her that one moment of euphoric contact with the soul that had once inhabited her father's body.
One moment of belonging. The thing she had craved for so long.
I missed you.
The darkness broke apart, and Lisa's boots met the cold, damp grass of the graveyard. Ashes surrounded her, falling gently and mixing with the first wave of gentle rain. She pushed outwards with her influence for the first time in years, and let the sensation flow through her. She was far from being a top-level Psi, but her abilities were more than formidable. It would take some time to hone them again, but she knew that there would be ample chance for that. Especially with the presence that tingled at the edge of her reawakened senses.
She turned just as the black van came to a halt at the cemetery gates.
Of course they would detect this with their gadgets, she thought with a smile that widened as the van door opened and a familiar redhead in an impeccable black suit disembarked.
“Agent Lang,” Lisa said.
Lang nodded a greeting. “Lambert. Been a while. We've been looking for you. Care to fill me in on the last few years? There's a seat in the van.”
Lisa glanced back at the ashes that had settled behind her, then to her father's headstone.
The notebook and pens were gone.
She smiled and turned back to Lang. “Is this a social call, or is it a ruse to rope me into helping you with some world-ending horror that needs dealing with?”
Lang shrugged. “Could be both,” she said, returning Lambert's smile.
Lisa went to the vehicle. The rain was worsening, but she'd had worse days.
© Andrew Hawnt 2020
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About Compendium 2020:
Compendium 2020 is a project from author Andrew Hawnt that consists of 52 original short stories, flash fiction stories and vignettes given away for FREE in 2020. Featuring science fiction, fantasy, horror and more, this began as a personal quest and due to the weirdness of 2020 has become an ambition to provide free distractions for anyone who needs them.
About Andrew Hawnt:
Andrew is based in Nottingham, England. Known for his music journalism career, comics writing and film critique work, Andrew is a prolific writer and is the author of a growing stack of books, including the cult hit VHS Ate My Brain. He made the movies The Demon And I and The Demon And I: Birthrite completely in lockdown with cast members filming their scenes remotely, and new films are coming.
Andrew is also the creator and presenter of the YouTube shows Planet Hex, Turn One Shock and the VHS Ate My Brain series as well as the video versions of the Compendium stories.
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© Andrew Hawnt 2020
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