Scabs by Wrath James White

claimed that he could evoke Satan with his music. Lisa had listened to her mother torn between skepticism and fascination. She’d always believed that music could be powerful, even magical.
    “Had that old Jazz musician stumbled on to something?”
    Lisa bought his album and learned each song. She studied each note and played them whenever her mother wasn’t around. She’d even altered them, spiced them up, added notes, layering melodies upon melodies until the songs had become even wilder and more chaotic. Playing the songs frightened and exhausted her. Yet they excited her beyond words. She quickly became addicted to them. She played them every chance she got, adding to them more and more, composing an entire symphony of songs that sounded like the screams of dying stars. She would often collapse sweating and hyperventilating after attempting one of the corybantic compositions. Sometimes the room would spin, sometimes she would see things, horrible things, like the things in the room with her now. The things eating her family.
      So she had played Jazz for the devils and they had come to her, but they didn’t attack as she had thought they would. They sat and listened.
    They filled the room, the yard, the street as far as she could see out the shattered window. They were legion. Evidence of their carnage was everywhere bleeding down into the storm drains. She could hear the screams of her neighbors echoing from all directions. Death was all around them. No escape anywhere. So Lisa played. She went from Jazz to ragtime to Beethoven and they sat swaying as if mesmerized.
    The sky looked as if it were on fire. The clouds were black like coal smoke and the stratosphere was aflame with dark reds and brilliant oranges. The sun was nowhere to be seen and a black moon had replaced the normal silvery one. The smell of burnt flesh was overpowering yet Lisa could see no flames anywhere on the ground. The heavens were the only things burning. Lisa imagined she could hear angels screaming.
    “What has happened?”
    Lisa stared at that terrible sky for long moments as her fingers tickled a dirge from the ivory keys. She knew now what had happened. She was witnessing the end of days. Hell had come to earth.
    Lisa’s mother tip-toed through the hypnotized beasts, through the puddles of blood and gore, over to the piano stool and sat down beside her.
    “Keep playing,” she whispered in Lisa’s ear and so she did. She played Mozart. She played George Benson. She played Elton John. She played Carl Orf. Music flew from her fingertips and colored the air. It masked the scent of death, the sight of blood and bodies and the hideous fanged creatures with bellies full of her relative’s flesh and marrow. Lisa played until her fingers grew numb and her forearms cramped. She played until the pads of her fingertips cracked and bled.
    She studied the demons’ features as they listened entranced by the music. Their eyes were large and went from the front of their faces all the way around to the sides like a pair of wrap-around sunglasses. Their skin was red and black like the turbulent sky above them and looked wet, but that may have been from the blood they had recently bathed in.
    The creatures looked both human and reptilian, like a cross between an adolescent and a Salamander. Their mouths were full of yellowed fangs streaked with gore as if they’d brushed them with road-kill and their breath stank of fetid meat like an abattoir. The tallest one stood only five feet. Tusks, antlers, and horns that looked as if they’d been stolen from other animals and grafted on by a surgeon in some bizarre sort of body modification protruded from their faces and heads. Some of them even had extra limbs, human, animal, and other, that had also been surgically attached. Some even had extra heads…human heads that stared mournfully from their shoulders without saying a word or cursed and screamed in an endless diatribe of hate. Lisa shuddered trying