I watch him take an old bony finger out of a small silk pouch. The skin over the knuckle looks like a threadbare rug. He places it on the ground and it begins to writhe. It struggles this way and that, until finally, it comes to a rest, pointing at the wall to the west.

“Evil always wants to get back to evil. It’ll show us the way.” His voice is a low growl as he wraps his lips around the words and a terrible smelling cigarette at the same time. He plucks up the old rotten finger and drops it in the pouch. “It’s behind that wall Kid. Ready to do this?”

“Yeah.” But I’m not ready. According to this man that I hardly know, the thing responsible for my girlfriend’s death is in this basement. He feels along the west wall and finds a slight indentation and pushes. The wall swings inward, revealing a large dark room behind it.

Roy, the madman who I’ve already seen decapitate three people, puts on his large dark glasses and motions for me to put on mine, and walks into the room. I stay behind him. The beams of our flashlights leave too much to the imagination about what’s scurrying just outside of them in the darkness.

“Remember Kid, no matter what happens. No matter what you see. Just shoot the damn thing and don’t hesitate. These things take different forms. Dig?”

“Yeah sure.” He insists that those people he killed weren’t really people, but some terrible things that crawled out of a doorway from Hell that had been left open. Crazy as it sounds, I believe him. I grip the homemade gun he’s given me and I step to his side. His guns are cartoonishly large; handmade out of pipes, wires, and wood.

“Roy? What do these guns do?”

“Shhh! Look at that…” Roy’s light comes to rest on a small three legged Corgi sitting on the concrete floor. It’s adorable. Behind it, there are at least twenty dogs who look identical to the one in front.

“Roy, are you sure…” The dog is quick, but Roy is quicker. It runs toward him and he scoops it upward into the air with his boot. He levels the gun and pulls the trigger, filling the whole room with light and incinerating the small airbourne dog. The rest of the dogs start yipping and snarling and running at Roy, who starts firing like mad.In the burst of light, I finally see something else in the corner to my right.

“Damn it!” His voice is distant. I aim toward the corner. The thing is right in front of me. It has the face of my Sarah. She’s smiling with jagged yellow teeth. But the body looks like some large beast which has been turned inside out. It’s slithering closer. Flaming bits of dogs splatter around the room as I hold my gun fast and pull the trigger.

“Smile you son of a bitch!”