The road to death was not straight and narrow, but winding, downhill, jagged, and unpaved. Death came thrice for Mia Allen. It took awhile for it to settle in. The first came from inward evils—a drug overdose leaving Mia dead for minutes—but the second came from outward evils. It was meant to be a place where she could get away, a quiet, secluded cabin in the middle of nowhere where Mia could go cold turkey while surrounded by family and friends. She had the hopes of kicking her heroin addiction once and for all that trip, but for one to cast away an evil, one had to make themselves vulnerable to new evils. A book of the dead, a few whispered words, it didn’t matter how it happened, but evil came for Mia and her friends that night. Her heart stopped again, this time an attempt by her brother to wash away the evil that clung to her, but when she came back there wasn’t much left to come back to. She defeated that evil, the creature in the blood rain, but Mia was the only one that walked away from that cabin—scarred and missing a hand. She escaped death for the second time… but that was all the past. This is the story of the third and final time, how death caught up to Mia Allen.
SUMMER, 2018
Furniture flung across the room, smashing into bits against the walls as the doors ripped free from their hinges. Mia stood in the center of the studio apartment—shotgun in her one good hand and chainsaw attached to her one good stump—while Dottie, the current final girl she was tasked with protecting, clung to her leg and kept her head down. Dottie screamed as the creature with the pale white face and dark top hat skittered across the ceiling, its long black trench coat trailing behind it like a tail.
“Deep breaths, lady.” Mia’s eyes tried to track the creature as it crawled circles above them. “Mama needs her focus.”
The screaming and the floating furniture and the supernatural whositwhatsit on the ceiling were all major distractions, but Mia didn’t let it bother her. Her focus was steadfast. She had been in this evil hunting, survivor saving, business for five years now. It was all old hat by this point. She yanked the puller and revved the chainsaw before aiming her boomstick up at the ceiling, and she counted to three. The countdown didn’t really mean much, but it added to the dramatics of it all, which was something Mia had learned to get behind over the years.
“Three…”
BOOM!
The shotgun coughed up hell and struck the critter creature in the back. The thing dropped down from the ceiling and landed at Mia’s feet. There wasn’t a second of hesitation. Mia swung her other arm around and brought the roaring chainsaw down on the creature’s head, splitting it in twane. The monster shook and twisted and fought, but it was stuck in the chainsaw’s teeth now, and Mia let her weapon feed. It chewed the thing up until it was nothing but shreds and bugs that crawled away out of the husk, and just like that… the furniture fell to the ground and the room went quiet. Evil was gone… for now.
“What the hell was that?” Dottie cried, still clinging to Mia.
“You had yourself a Babadook,” Mia holstered her shotgun and wiped Babadook grease off of her face. “Don’t worry, you’re safe. For now. They always come back, though. If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook. I suggest therapy. That seems to be the best way to deal with these things.”
“I don’t understand,” Dottie said. Mia was already moving toward the door. “Who are you? What is this?”
Mia let her silence answer her back. There wasn’t a good answer anyway, and like that she was gone.
That night in the cabin changed Mia for the better. She lost everything, her brother, her friends, her hand, but some things were better off lost. She lost her addiction as well—never touched the brown sugar again—but when something’s lost, something else can be found. Mia had a purpose in life now, something to keep her going, and that purpose was kicking evil in its useless ass. So that’s what she did, it’s what she dedicated her life to. City after city, evil after evil, Mia hit the road cutting down nastiness where ever she found it. It was a rough life, a lonely life, sure, but it was hers, and she was free. She missed most of what she lost in that cabin, but she wasn’t sure if she would change her new life for anything in the world.
This sentiment would be tested later that night.
After the whole ordeal with the Babadook, Mia went to a local bar to unwind for the night. She wasn’t a drinker, she didn’t touch the stuff, but a bar was a nice, loud place where she could go where she didn’t have to be alone and where few would notice the odd bloodstain here and there that usually coated her clothes or skin. It was a small, hole-in-the-wall sort of place just south of the Canadian border. There were about a dozen or so people inside, but no one paid Mia much attention. One local asked what happened to her left hand, and the bartender seemed curious as to why she was only drinking a Diet Dr. Pepper, but once she made it clear through her grim looks and silence that she wasn’t in the answering mood, they left her alone. It was a perfect night.
Mia was on her third Dr. Pepper when someone took a seat on the stool beside her. She didn’t pay the new face much mind, but when the bartender came by and asked the new woman what she was having to drink, and the new woman waved her off and said she wasn’t thirsty, Mia looked over and saw that this new woman was staring right at her, waiting for and expecting her attention. She had a pale face and long, flat hair. It looked like she had been through some sh*t back in the day. It was the same look Mia couldn’t get rid of.
“Can I help you?”
“You’re her, aren’t you?” the woman asked, her voice small and nervous “They call you the King?”
“No,” Mia said, “That’s the other guy. Similar story, wrong hand,” Mia held up her stump to sort of wave her off. It didn’t work. “You got trouble that needs fixing?”
“My troubles been over for a long time,” the woman said, “Same as you, Mia Allen. Our stories wrapped up a long time ago, but I think we can fix that.”
Mia turned on her stool. “What are you getting at? Who are you?”
“My name’s Brigitte,” she said, “Brigitte Fitzgerald. Like you, I went through some sh*t a while back. Like you, I lost someone close to me.”
“Condolences,” Mia turned back to her Dr. Pepper.
“What’s lost can be found again,” Brigitte said, “My sister… your brother.”
Mia stopped herself mid-sip.
“You might want to watch yourself, Ms. Fitzgerald,” Mia warned. “You keep David’s name in your mouth and you’re liable to choke. I don’t know who you are and I don’t know what happened to your sister, but where my brother is there’s no getting him back. He’s locked away real safe, hurting forever but out of my reach.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Brigitte went on, “Everyone thinks Hell’s this untouchable place, that like Orpheus, it’s impossible to travel to some place so dark to rescue someone we love without it consuming us. But it’s not impossible, Mia. I found a backdoor.” Mia’s eyebrow raised at this. “There’s a shortcut, through the Nef dimension, it’s a doorway to hell, one that opens both ways. I can pay you… I can pay you a lot, actually. It’s what you do, you save people from evil, right? So why should the ones we failed already be beyond saving? Why should you save other people’s family but not your own?”
Mia reached up with her good hand and touched the circular buckthorn necklace she wore around her neck—the last gift she ever got from her brother. She thought about his suffering every day since she lost him, but she moved on a long time ago, she did something good with what she lost. Could she double back on that now?
“Please,” Brigitte continued, “My sister Ginger, she doesn’t belong down there. Neither does your brother David. You’re my last hope, Mia. I’ve talked to everyone in our situation, everyone who I thought could do it… Tommy Jarvis, Cassie Hack—they all turned me down, but you’re different. You’re like me. They didn’t have someone stuck on the other side, too. This isn’t just about Ginger or David… it’s about everyone, everyone stuck in hell who doesn’t belong there. You want to play hero… so be a hero.”
Mia finished her Dr. Pepper and looked at Brigitte Fitzgerald. “Where’s this door?”
THREE DAYS LATER
A hand exploded out of the quiet dirt. There was no grave there, no body recently buried, just an open patch of field in a clearing somewhere that had remained simple and undisturbed for decades if not centuries, but a hand clawed out from under the grass and mud, and it reached toward the storm clouds that gathered in the night sky above. The hand took root of whatever it could grab and it yanked itself free, pulling up the body it was connected to. Mia Allen gasped for air as she rose out of the undugged grave—naked as the day she was born, her hair its natural shade of red, and the hand she had lost on that horrible night at the cabin attached to her wrist again. She coughed up worms and dirt and rolled over to her side where she began to shiver as the first drops of rain fell from the storm above. Her mind was paralyzed with the fear she just escaped, scenes of Hell playing over and over again under her eyelids whenever she had the nerve to blink. She couldn’t shake it, she couldn’t move, and the only thing she wanted was death.
By all definitions of the word, the journey down to Hell was a grand failure for Mia Allen. She found a way back, sure, but she was not whole, not in the ways that mattered. When she returned to the earthly realm, she whole physically. The scars she had from before were gone, the handprint burned into her leg was gone, and the hand she lost was hers once again; but the cost of all this was far too great. David was left behind. Everyone else she went to save was left behind. Mia escaped because she thought it was her only option, but after experiencing torment as grand and as bold as Hell, she found that the real world was too foreign now, and she wasn’t sure she’d survive the shock.
Time worked differently down there. Although only a few days passed on Earth, it was months in Hell. A day in Hell would be enough to break someone, but months… it left Mia shattered. She wasn’t able to pull herself away from the hole in the ground she crawled out of until well after the storm passed and she was wrinkled from the rain and caked in mud. When she got up, she didn’t have plans on how to fix what she had broken, she didn’t have the drive to go out and help someone else in need. She was empty of all that. All she had was pain, and a desire to make it all go away.
The first taste of heroin she retreated to after that only teased the idea of making the pain go away. It wasn’t enough. Maybe there weren’t enough drugs in the world to make the pain Mia felt now go away, but it didn’t stop Mia from trying. The fact that she lasted until the fall was a minor miracle, and came down to the fact that Mia was too incapacitated from her experiences in the underworld to fetch enough drugs. When she overdosed for the second time, there were no friends to help her, no doctors to bring her back. She died a nobody, and this time she died forever. When her body was eventually found, she was taken to a morgue as a Jane Doe, and thrown in a cold box on a snowy night.
It was impossible to say whether Mia escaped her torment or merely returned to it, but if she did return to Hell maybe it was a blessing. There she could be with her brother, and friends, and everyone else who didn’t belong. At least there she knew what to expect, and she wasn’t cursed to live a life of normality with the knowledge of the true horrors that were out there. She did have a regret, however, a regret that all the good work she had done since the cabin was over now. She was dead but it didn’t mean that evil stopped. Her last hope, as her shriveled mind ate itself during the course of her overdose, was that someone else would pick up where she left off, that someone would continue to do her work.
She of course had no way of knowing that her hope would be answered, and that the very night that her body was brought into the morgue, another survivor from another set of horrors would come stumbling in with a body full of knife marks and a desire for a second chance to do some good...
