A Demon Lady With Love

A Demon Lady

With Love

(A Demon’s Playground Novel)

By J. David Phillips

Copyright

Copyright 2017 by J. David Phillips

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used on any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for quotations in a book review.

Printed and distributed as an ebook in the United States of America

First published, 2017

Summon The Wraiths

1116 Greenbay Rd.

Southport, NC 28461

Or correspondences can be sent to the author at:

summonthewraiths@gmail.com

Credits And Acknowledgements

First, to my family. My mother who instilled in me a love of reading. My father who paid for all of the books. My son who always provided me with more laughs as a child than I ever deserved. My daughter who always has been and always will be the first inhabitant of the Playground. Connie McCrummen, Rodney Hassler, and Ron Layne. These three people define what is best about our education system. Karen, who will forever be my very own infernal minion of darkness. And to the faculty, staff, and student body of South Brunswick High School and Middle School. You are beautiful. Shine on. All of you listed above.

Table Of Contents

Foreword

Chapter One: I Scream Of Genie

Chapter Two: Accountant Dracula

Chapter Three: Down Into Darkness

Chapter Four: What Is Normal Anyway?

Chapter Five: The Times That Try Men’s Voles

Chapter Six: God For Harry, England, And St. George

Chapter Seven: A Hearse Is A Hearse, Of Curse, Of Curse

Chapter Eight: Clean Up On Aisle One

Chapter Nine: Why It Sucks To Be A Succubus

Chapter Ten: Strange Things Go Bump In The Night

Chapter Eleven: Hyding In Plain Sight

Chapter Twelve: Like Bait On A Hook

Chapter Thirteen: Sometimes You Should Just Stay Inside

Foreword

There’s a place just on the other side of nightmares called the Playground. You probably haven’t heard of it unless you’re well off, a powerful magic user, or you’ve been seriously screwed over. I know, because my name’s Jack Pittman, and I got sent here against my will.

This place exists outside of your universe, but it’s all around you.

Only, to get there you have to do some serious heavy moving with the machinery of reality. The Playground always exists one second behind you, or maybe one atom’s width away. Look around you. Have you ever wondered what happens with all that space once reality is done with it?

I’m here to tell you it’s used for something else.

I don’t think you’re ready to know what for, either. Not if you want to be able to go home and sleep well. The universe is filled with all kinds of marvels and wonders. Hamlet once told a friend of his, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. That’s Shakespeare, by the way. He had the right of it. If you haven’t read him yet, you need to turn your damn Facebook off and start reading.

Some of his plays, the ones where supernatural things step into our world and meddle in the affairs of men, are kind of an early warning radar. I think the guy has been here before. Evidently he made it back.

Most people don’t.

That’s because the universe is also full of bad dreams and walking terrors.

I’m sure you’ve heard of things like alien abductions, Bigfoot, the Jersey devil? They’re all from here. So are werewolves, banshees, wraiths, vampires, and all sorts of things that slither out of dark recesses and creep forth into the night to feed on the unsuspecting.

The playground is a place where demons, monsters, mages, and the power hungry left the world you and I were born into to carve a little niche of their own. They wanted to be left alone to make a safe haven for themselves so they could feed in peace. Once you take one step out of phase and enter this realm, everything changes. There are no frenzied mobs of torch waving villagers to chase boogey men away or come to your rescue. The powers that dwell here made an agreement a long time ago. Each one has its own principality. They guard these jealously.

The real mischief is that most parts of the Playground seem to have an order of sorts. It’s better if nothing riles up the herd too much. In fact, most of the people living here don’t know the whole truth. But if you wind up here and step out of the pen, then woe to you, stranger. For the most part, ancient wards and powerful seals at the edges of the Playground keep things from slipping out into your neighborhood.

And you better pray that they stay put.

Because if they don’t, you’re what will be on their menu.

Sit back and pay attention to what I have to say; it might just save your life. My name is Jack Pittman. This is my story. I hope you take notes.

Chapter 1

I Scream Of Genie

Dying really sucked.

That’s right. You heard me. I said dying sucked.

The night it happened to me I was sneaking across the golf course to see my ex-girlfriend. Something was bothering her and guys like me have a Knight-To-The-Rescue complex where toxic girls are concerned. I knew I shouldn’t have been walking through the dark woods at eleven o’clock at night. Not for somebody who had dumped me three months earlier for a pre-law school student who had . . . what was it that her mother had called it?

Oh yes. Prospects.

I on the other hand had the projects.

Her mother (and every one else living in the country club) seemed to have it in for me, which was why I had to sneak through the woods that separated my trailer park from her manicured paradise as a buffer zone of sorts.

They thought I was trailer park trash.

Liz constantly told me we were too different. Maybe her family’s distaste for me came down to the fact that my family ate hamburger helper for dinner on paper plates and sipped coke from red solo cups. Families like hers ate in dining rooms where wainscoting was the norm and food came with French subtitles like chateaubriand and coq au vin. The first time I had dinner with her family and asked what we were eating, I thought they cleared their throat at first.

I suspected there was something more to it than that, though. But I had never been able to put my finger on it even from the start. Social events with them were just tres magnifique. Describing how it felt to be around them is hard. Have you ever been in a crowded room when someone farted? I never felt like the person passing the gas.

I always felt like I was the fart.

Liz’s mom nearly threw a party that she was shut of me after my graduation. I was too poor for anything but a no-name state school and Liz never lost a chance to brag about her acceptance into Duke. As I snuck out of the woods and onto the open sea of smoothly cut grass, I had to ask myself, why did she want to take time out of her sorority dreams for a guy like me who was a slow ride to nowhere for her?

I just need to talk about something, she told me in an agitated voice over the phone an hour earlier.

I lied to her. I’ve got something important to do. I just didn’t feel like being her diversion of the moment because she didn’t have anyone else to occupy her attention.

"Jack, please. This is big."

Was it the inflection in her voice that changed my mind or the fact that a part of me still had feelings for her? A cynical sort of person might think that it was the fact that she was a one hundred fifteen pound platinum blond with piercing blue eyes and a perfectly shaped B-cup breast line that was perkier than a debutant on crack.

I didn’t get a chance to find out, though. As I came around the ninth green, I caught the unmistakable glimmer of something highly reflective by the edge of the rough. I had to be pretty observant whenever I was on the course because every time security saw me, the first thing they did was chase me with clubs brandished like war hammers, modern versions of yuppie Vikings in lime green polos and (I kid you not) watermelon pink khakis.

Lucky for me no country club denizens of Jotunheim came berserking across the green in frenzied hordes. Something did catch my eye, though. A brass colored object winked at me in the starlight.

How odd.

I slowed and stopped. This golf course was kept about as immaculately clean as a music diva’s bed sheets, and by the end of each day the country club grounds looked as virginal and pristine as Miley Cyrus when she was still Hannah Montana. Which meant someone must have dropped the thing afterhours. Curious, I walked over to it, and when I got close enough I saw that an antique oil lamp sat upright and polished like a well-tended museum piece on the flat expanse of closely cropped grass.

People didn’t just drop something like this on the ninth green. As I drew closer I suddenly became certain that all was not as it should be on the ninth hole of the Holly Downs Country Club golf course.

Looking around, nothing stirred. Not even the crickets trilled their nighttime serenade from the cover of manicured shrubs. All around me the night wrapped the world in a dark, humid, and still, July blanket. Something nearby waited to pull the cover back and spring out at me.

I felt it there, waiting.

I was afraid of the thing on the ground, but I ignored my instincts and reached down to pick the lamp up. As soon as my fingers touched its smooth surface, I winced. The thing was cold. So cold that it burned my fingertips. As I quickly drew my hand back, my fingers brushed against its surface, drawing from it a disconcerting shriek. I fell back as gouts of angry, almost liquid-like smoke billowed out of the lamp’s fluted top.

All thoughts fled from my mind as I sat too dumbfounded to move. I knew I should have backed away, but all I could do was sit there on my butt with my mouth hanging open catching flies while the lamp vomited its contents into the air. The vaporous cloud swirled maddeningly before me, spinning and elongating around and around in concentric rings like a coiling snake composed of the stuff of a nightmare gas.

A great light flared suddenly and I screamed, shielding my eyes with my arms as the blinding flash sizzled its way past my eyeballs and into my skull. I do not remember losing consciousness and falling over, but when I came to, my head was ringing like struck bell.

I inhaled the sweet scent of recently cut grass and immediately noticed a silver light glittering above my body. I sat up, looked at the source, blinked and rubbed my eyes.

Then I blinked again.

And rubbed my eyes again.

And said something no one should ever say around their grandmothers, kindergarteners, or nuns. Ten feet above my body a disco ball spun merrily, scintillating rapidly enough to induce an epileptic seizure.

A chipper baritone chimed at me with a relaxed drawl that was so southern it could have seasoned a pot of collard greens like freshly fried fatback. Well hello there young fella!

Holy hell, I gasped without thinking. I died and went to the seventies. Indeed, floating in front of me was a short man dressed in a poorly fitted Elvis wig—the kind you see on tacky Vegas street performers. He sported a cheap white polyester suit covered in rhinestones throwing off an effect nearly as psychedelic as the disco ball. Mom was right, I said in amazement.

Come again, son? Stop cryin’ like a hound dog and make a little sense for the King, alright?

Sh-she told me that I was going to clog up my arteries and die like my Papaw if I kept eating fast food. I just thought I had more time before that happened.

The stranger guffawed and slapped his knee. You ain’t dead yet, little man!

That made sense. It explained why I hadn’t seen my life pass before my eyes. So . . . um . . . what’s going on? I choked out as I stood up and brushed myself off. I moved back warily, because there was something about the man aside from his felonious disregard for the law of gravity that I did not like. Who are you? WHAT are you? Some kind of genie or something?

The man gave me a sly smile, the