Ash tossed another log onto the fire, which he and Jake had finished re-lighting by the time he finished his explanation of what happened. "There's something out there, still..." He continued, looking at the others. Though he was helping, Jake remained skeptical the entire time, in spite of what he'd just witnessed. Bobby-Joe remained in a constant state of panic, being the weakest one of the bunch mentally, which caused Ash to worry about her chances of withstanding Demonic Possession. "That witch in the cellar is only part of it." Ash said. "It lives out in those woods, I think it always has. It's something that was brought back from the dead... and it wants to kill every single one of us."
"Jake please, can we just get outta here!" Bobby-Joe begged. Annie looked at her annoyed, and continued to bandage Ed's forehead. He'd been out of it most of the explanation, and she was actually beginning to get fed up with him. After all, Ed hadn't taken that hard of a hit, and she suspected that he might just be milking his injury so he didn't have to help. Not to mention that this guy Ash, whoever he was, seemed much more up to speed, and had to be something special if he was to be believed, and survived everything he'd told them sofar.
"Look nobody goes out that door, not until daylight!" Ash ordered.
"You listen to ME!" Jake said, grabbing Ash by his collar. The two looked as though they were about to fight, but a soft, singing voice interrupted everyone.
"Hush little baby, don't say a word,
Mamma's gonna buy you a mocking bird.
And if that mocking bird don't sing,
Mamma's gonna buy you a diamond ring." The voice sang.
Ash looked, seeing Annie's reaction, and knew EXACTLY what was about to happen...
"Remember that song, Annie?" Henrietta asked from inside the cellar door. She now looked exactly as she did the last time Annie had seen her, and Annie smiled, relieved to see her alright. "I used to sing it to you when you were a baby."
"Mother..." Annie said.
"Unlock these chains, quickly!" Henrietta begged.
Annie, so overcome with what she was seeing, instinctively took a step towards the cellar, but Ash grabbed her by the arm. She looked up at him, angrily at first, but saw that haunted look in his eyes... This had happened to him already. She looked down at the cellar again, right at her mother, whom she loved with every fiber of her being, and shook her head. "No..."
Henrietta's eyes welled up with tears. "You were born September Second. I remember everything about that night so well, because it was snowing." She said. "So strange, it would be snowing in September."
Annie shut her eyes, turning away. "That thing in the cellar is NOT my mother!" She declared, looking at the others.
Suddenly, Ed shot up from the couch and roared a loud, inhuman roar, his entire head stretching vertically and his mouth widening into a massive, tooth-filled maw. He wagged his tongue at Annie, who recoiled in horror and jumped back. Bobby-Joe let out a scream and Jake pushed her behind him defensively.
Ed floated up off the floor, his legs kicking out with glee as multiple voices bellowed from his throat, his lips and jaw not moving with it though, as if the voices were shouting from deep inside him somewhere.
"We are the things that were, and shall be again!" The voices said, giggling and chortling. "We want what is your's... LIFE! Dead by dawn, DEAD BY DAWN!" It screamed, then Henrietta began pounding up against the cellar door, chanting along with the chorus of "Dead by dawn!"
Suddenly, Ed floated across the room, his fingers wiggling at Bobby-Joe and he shoved Jake aside as he passed, then locked his jaws onto a clump of Bobby-Joe's hair. Ed then yanked a tuff of it right off her head in his teeth, she screamed, clutching her head in pain as Ed proceeded to swallow her hair like Spaghetti.
"You sonovabitch!" Jake shouted, grabbing him by the shoulder. Before he could do anything though, Ed's head spun around 180 degrees and his body followed suit a moment later. He knocked Jake's hand off his shoulder, then grabbed him by the face and flung him straight up into the roof, where he was knocked unconscious by the rafter above. He returned his attention to Bobby-Joe once more, after Jake fell.
In the corner, Annie cowered behind Ash, who was frozen in place, until suddenly in a burst of speed... He ran from the room and into the back hallway.
"Where are you going?" Annie demanded. "Help us, you fucking coward!"
Bobby-Joe backed up against the fireplace wall of the main room of the cabin, Jake shook his head, trying to jerk himself back to consciousness.
Henrietta, back in her Demonic form, banged on the cellar door. "Set me free!" She demanded.
Ed made his way toward her, grabbing hold of the chains, but before he could do anything more, the door to the main hallway burst open and Ash stood there with the axe. Ed spun toward him and snarled.
Ash didn't waste a moment, he sprinted across the small space, hefted the axe over his head and shouted a battle cry filled with fury and vengeance, swinging the axe one-handed diagonally.
The blade struck Ed's face and cracked his skull, cleaving off a corner of his entire head and sending it flying.
Ed clutched his wounded face, but Ash didn't give him a chance to recover, he raised the axe again, bringing it down on Ed's shoulder, driving him down to the floor, where he began hacking mercilessly at his limbs.
Behind him, Annie screamed in horror as she watched her fiancé being hacked to pieces.
"We live! WE LIVE STILL!" The multiple voices bellowed from Ed's mouth.
As Ash finally stepped back, panting from the exhaustion, Ed's hacked-up limbs fluttered and twitched on the floor, but his body was done-for. Ash glared down at it, he didn't know the man he'd just killed, so it was easy for him to just focus on it as striking a blow at the Evil Dead themselves. Annie though, she was taking it pretty hard. She cowered in the corner next to the desk and wept softly as Ash approached and placed his hand on her shoulder, trying to comfort her. She turned, looking up at him with tear-filled eyes, and Ash saw himself in her eyes... She looked like he felt, and he knew they were all in this together now.
An hour and a half later and the group had secured the cabin yet again. Ed's body was bagged up in a sheet and buried outside, along with Shelly, Linda, Scott and Cheryl, the last two of whom they'd also taken the time to bury, although Ash couldn't be certain which pieces belonged to who. Annie hadn't spoken to anyone since Ed had been killed, but Ash couldn't figure if she was in shock, or just thinking. Jake was doing all he knew how to do, which was complain and spit, as he struggled to keep Bobby-Joe calm; a feat which would have been tough for a man with even a FULLY functional brain.
"Look, I've had enough of this shit!" Jake finally burst out angrily. "This place is absolutely fucked, and we best git ourselves to some help!"
"Where you gonna go for that, slim-jim?" Ash asked, an irritation building in his voice.
Jake scoffed. "We'll take the trail!" He shouted, pointing in the general direction of it out the window.
"Oh yeah?" Ash asked, leaning against the window he was indicating. "What trail would that be?"
Jake furrowed his brow in confusion, then looked out the window to prove his opponent wrong, but found that he couldn't see the trail at all for some reason. He opened his mouth to speak, then just grunted.
"Like I said, nobody goes out that door 'til daylight." Ash repeated.
"You go to hell!" Jake shouted. "You done somethin' to that trail!"
"Oh I did? I snuck off while you were taking a piss and moved some trees around? Get your head out of your ass, you dumb hick!"
Annie stood bolt upright from the desk where she'd been sitting. "Shut the hell up, all of you!"
The others in the room fell silent, looking over at her as she fumed in their direction. She crossed the room to the fireplace, staring at the cracking and popping flames. "Fighting each other isn't solving anything, and the more time we waste doing it, the more time whatever is out there has, to plan IT'S next move."
Ash nodded. "Well, I'm sort of out of my league here, I don't know anything about this evil, or that book, so what would you recommend we do, boss lady?"
Annie thought for a moment, recounting the details she'd been sorting in her head before Ash and Jake's fighting had interrupted her. "You said you burned the book, correct?" She asked Ash, who nodded. "Nothing is left of it?"
"Nothing." Ash said. "Was the only way I could stop my sister and my friend from killing me, so please don't say that was the only way to stop this mess."
"It might not be..." Annie said, "but I don't know everything about Candaarian Rites either. I can translate them, sure, but the actual folklore of it all was my father's expertise..." She said, trailing off at the end of her sentence as she got slightly choked up. She hadn't really allowed herself to grieve yet for her parents' deaths, and knew it would catch up to her soon. She just hoped that they could get out of this alive first...
"Well he aint exactly around to help us, is he?" Jake scoffed.
"Well I was thinking about that..." Annie said, shaking her head at how stupid she what she was about to suggest was. "If the Demons that Candaarians wrote about really exist, then maybe all the folklore surrounding them was accurate too."
"How's that help us?" Ash asked, intrigued now.
Annie turned to him and crossed her arms. "We can hold a séance, try to contact my father and find out if he knew how to stop this thing once and for all."
"Worth a shot, but don't you figure he'd have done it himself if he knew how?" Ash asked.
Annie nodded. "Maybe he did, but died in the process, maybe you and your friends set it free again when you played the tape."
Ash nodded back. "Hell, it's got my vote, just tell me where to light the smelly candles..."
"Aw hell, this mumbo-jumbo bullshit's a waste of time!" Jake said, waving a dismissive hand.
"You got anything better, cletus?" Ash asked. Jake glared at him for a moment, but didn't say anything.
"Alright, lets get to work then..." Annie said.
A few minutes later, the group had gathered the necessary ingredients for their ritual. They'd dug around for all the candles they could find, drawn a circle in the floor, and sat in a circle around it. Jake and Bobby-Joe had even joined in, reluctantly of course, but with nowhere else to turn, they obviously didn't want to be left out.
Annie was flipping through pages of her father's notebooks, finding various translated texts and symbols for the ones she needed for the séance, and once she'd found the right ones, she began to chant the Sumerian incantations softly. Across from her, Ash felt a moment of hesitation, the last time someone had spoken this language around him, all his friends ended up slaughtered and his hand had tried to kill him... Though Annie seemed to be much more in-the-know about this hocus pocus than he and his idiot buddies, so maybe... just maybe, she could pull it off.
"Those spirits from beyond our plane, we call out for you to join in our circle this night." Annie said, having odd flashbacks to her high school years, hanging out in her darkened bedroom with her girlfriends. "By the rights of three circles coven, we ask for those that mean us help, and no harm, come to us. All together now." She said, then continued to chant.
As Annie continued to speak the words, the others joined in, soft at first, then as a group. After a few moments, the room seemed to darken a bit, even moreso than it had been before, and the doorknobs of the room began to jiggle ominously. They continued to chant, but looked around the room with fright each time something moved, as picture frames began to fall from their perches, shattering in the corner, drawers in the dressers slammed open and shut, ghostly footsteps pounded on the roof.
"Father!" Annie shouted. "Please come to us if you are there! RAYMOND KNOWBY, THIS IS YOUR DAUGHTER, ANNIE! HEAR MY VOICE AND COME TO US!"
Suddenly, a loud, shrill scream split through the cabin and a pair of hands materialized from thin air in the center of the circle. They were glowing silver-gray, and the group could see right through them, but the real shock came as a face followed, the face of Professor Knowby.
"Father!" Annie shouted over the noise.
Knowby's eyes were all-but invisible, black holes were all that remained, and his cheek-bones overshadowed the sides of his face. His lips looked cracked and dry, and he looked down at his daughter from above the circle. "Annie..." He said, his voice shaky, filled with pain. "I... I could not survive, I'm sorry..."
"I'm here, dad, it's alright!" Annie said, tears forming in her eyes. "We need your help though. The Demon you stopped is back."
"Yes..." Knowby groaned. "It is a dark spirit, and wants all of your souls. It took Henrietta, but I took my own life before it could claim me as well." He said.
"How do we stop it, father?" She asked.
"Your salvation... lies there..." He struggled to say, pointing a shaky finger behind Annie, at the side table by the door. She followed his direction, spotting the display case containing her find. "The pages of the book." Knowby confirmed. "You will be able to find the right passage. Recite it, save my soul..." He pleaded, then twitched crying out in pain. "And your own lives!" He shouted, then suddenly his head tilted back, and he let out another scream, which echoed deafeningly through the cabin, and a burst of light shot out from where he'd been. The candles and the fireplace were all blown out by a gust of wind, and the room was plunged into actual darkness.
A moment later, Jake lit a match, using it to ignite a lantern, which he held up. "Ever'one still alive?" He asked. The room remained silent, but the others all nodded. "Good..." He said, lowering it.
"Jake, you're holdin' my hand too tight..." Bobby-Joe said, but Jake looked down, confused.
"Baby, I aint holdin' your-" He began, but stopped, his eyes widening as his gaze went to her hand and she raised it. The others' faces all went wide with horror as Ash's possessed hand clamped onto her palm. Bobby-Joe screamed in terror, flailing her arm around to get it off. She thrashed her whole body and Jake jumped up to help her, but she accidentally knocked the lantern from his grip, shattering it on the floor.
Ash quickly jumped up as the others scrambled away from the fire. He snatched a towel from the kitchen counter and soaked it with water from the sink, then rushed back and slapped at the fire with the wet cloth until it finally went out. A moment later, the lights snapped on, thanks to Annie.
The group tried to catch their breath, looking around for Ash's evil hand, but found it nowhere in sight.
"Hey..." Jake piped up from the other end of the room. "Where's Bobby-Joe?" He asked. They all looked around again, but just saw the door hanging open...
Bobby Joe sprinted blindly through the trees, screaming for help, or just screaming in general depending on one moment to the next. She was snagged and scratched by tree branches, but barely noticed in her panicked state. Suddenly though, one tree root shot up from the forest floor, colliding hard with her ankle and she shot forward, slamming into a tree trunk. She cried out in pain, clutching her ankle, leaning on the tree for support, but recoiled when the bark of the tree moved under her palm.
She looked and saw a hideous face form in the wood, and the trunk itself split jaggedly as a fanged mouth. It growled hungrily at her and she screamed again, stumbling backwards in retreat. She almost fell, but caught herself on something, looking up to find that, in reality, she'd actually BEEN caught. A vine had wrapped around her wrist and yanked her back up, her feet just barely off the ground now as more vines shot in from all directions, wrapping around her limbs tightly. She screamed in horror, swatting at the attacking forest in vain, but soon, she was completely bound by the branches, her limbs stretched outward. She screamed so loud she felt her voice crack, but soon it didn't matter, as the vines began pushing into her mouth, blocking any noise from coming out, then she felt more vines shoving into the skin of her face, neck, shoulders, tearing off her clothing as well, plunging into her flesh all over. She felt the vines swirling around and up her thighs as well, felt them shove into her ears, nose, all her orifices.
The pain was so unbearable she almost didn't notice when the vines yanked her toward the monster tree, which grinned hideously at her, opening it's "mouth" in anticipation. Her eyes bugged from her head as the vines punctured her insides, and the tree swallowed her whole.