Covenant (24 page)
Authors: John Everson
“
Let us come to terms, and I will spare your girlfriend, and the
souls
,” Malachai begged.
“You will be mine to command?” Joe asked, hardly knowing what he was saying.
“
Name your terms
,” the demon barked back. The whirlwind in Joe’s head grew louder. He could hardly think. The demon’s voice wheezed aloud through the silent tension of the cave, its power bleeding visibly like poison across not only the damaged crystal center, but chiming away through the cave walls as well. The room was aglow with deadly blue power, but parts of it seemed to be fading, blacking out completely. Joe had struck the nerve in hammering at the center. He considered ignoring the demon’s request and finishing the job, hammering at the crystal until no light lit the cavern at all. But he had no assurance that that would stop the demon from killing and possessing again. Would the removal of its seat of power kill it, or only send it in search of new victims to replenish itself?
“
You have called me by name and I cannot possess you until a
bargain has been agreed upon. Name your terms
.”
“You will not hurt the people of Terrel anymore,” Joe called. He tried to think but couldn’t focus. What else should he require?
“You will do as I say, whenever, whatever I tell you.”
“
Those are your terms?
”
“Yes.”
“
Then I accept, and a new Covenant is struck
,” the demon answered, and the din behind His voice lessened somewhat. The blue glow began to fade from the cave walls, but still swirled and twisted amid the broken stones of the altar.
“
I am yours to command
,” Malachai said. “
And you are mine to
follow. Until your death, since you did not state another end time.
Guard yourself
.”
With that, the last bright glow of blue light winked out, an implosion of contentious energy, and Joe looked around shakily. The room still glittered faintly with an LED blue glow, but now its power seemed at rest, its light faint. A moan from the dim altar made him look to Cindy, but her eyes were closed and the sound wasn’t hers. It came from the ground.
“Joe,” Karen Sander croaked. Her eyes fluttered, then focused hard on his own. “Joe…did we win?”
“Yes,” he said, crouching beside her to put a hand behind her back, and carefully ease her up.
“It’s over,” he said. “
I hope
.”
There is nothing quite like a summer’s day near the ocean. The breath of salt mingled with the lilac-rich scent of budding flowers, the buzz of soaring insects, and an unclouded golden sun could make life taste like…honey. Or something. Joe looked away from the piercing blue of the sky to focus again on the casket beneath the red and white canopy.
Reality check. People were dead.
Cindy held his arm with both hands, but said little through the service. She’d said little for the past three days, asking only that Joe hold her tightly. He’d complied without question.
Rhonda stood at the back of the small gathering at the cemetery. She looked as if she wasn’t sure whether she should come forward or go home. Her grief was palpable. Joe would never say it to another soul, but it was her hands, possessed or not, that had caused this ceremony.
The minister stood before a wooden lectern and gave a speech suspiciously similar to the one Joe remembered from the funeral for Rhonda Canady’s son just weeks before.
There really wasn’t much you could add to the experience, he supposed.
“As she was in life, so she is in death,” the minister said. Joe thought it sounded like a threat.
Angelica leaned over and whispered in Joe’s ear. “What kind of a thing is that to say?” she complained, and Joe shook
his head, stalling her, wondering where the holy man was going.
The blue-green bruises from Ken’s abuse had turned to yellow near Angelica’s eyes, and her arm hung in a sling, heavy in its white cast. She’d broken it in her fall into the cold water of the underground river. The blue light of the chamber hadn’t signaled her death, as Joe had believed. It had been Monica’s soul that fed the demon that last time, not Angelica’s.
But how much of Angelica really remains alive?
Joe thought. She cast odd, veiled glances at her daughter and drummed her fingers absently on the heavy plaster on her arm. She hadn’t laughed or cried since leaving the hospital. Her eyes looked perpetually shell-shocked. Joe wondered if she would ever speak with a Gypsy accent again.
“Monica was a quiet soul, a woman always concerned with the good of others,” the minister continued. “She will watch over us all now, from where she is above.”
“
She’s not above, not really
,” Malachai whispered in Joe’s head. “
She’s with us now. Right here. Anything you’d like us to
do, master? Raise the corpse up in the casket, perhaps, give ’em all a
little scare?
”
“No,” Joe said aloud, and shook his head. Cindy looked sharply at him, then turned away. She knew who he was talking to. Was she jealous now that Malachai had claimed him as master? He had forbidden the demon from talking with her. Would she still want to see him, after the death and dust settled? He didn’t know how to ask. Could she live with the fact that he’d made love to both her and her mother?
Could he?
He wondered if he should ask Malachai to heal Angelica’s soul. Could he use the monster to achieve a good end, as Terrell had? And if so, at what price?
“
I am yours to command
,” the demon reminded. A sadistic hint of glee colored its tone.
Its voice hung like an anchor from Joe’s soul.
“Yes, I know,” he mumbled, looking at the broken mother on his left, the silent daughter on his right. The women he had unwittingly hurt, and now pledged himself to protect. Somehow, to heal.
At what price?
“I know.”
Goose bumps peppered Ted’s skin. The temperature dropped every step forward. The air swam with palpable presence, as if he was walking through a liquid current of clammy spider-webs. Ted shivered, but kept moving.
It had all happened down here. His sister Cindy had finally told him the story after he’d badgered her enough. A spirit had lived inside this cliff, a spirit that had killed and killed and killed again. It had demanded sacrifices from the town of Terrel for more than one hundred years. But now it was gone, along with that reporter from the
Terrel Daily Times
.
Ted had come, pressing through the dank, cobwebbed caverns, to see where it had all happened.
Once, these cold stone corridors had been the basement beneath the old lighthouse. Terrel had been a minor port, back in the day, and its lighthouse had stood high on the cliff above the town, warning errant ships away from the deadly pillars of stone gouged out of the bay like crippled fingers. The light house was long gone, but the stairs leading down into the cliff remained, hidden beneath a pile of remnant boulders and rotting beams.
Ted shone his flashlight back and forth, catching the watery glint of the cool gray walls on the right and left, its light sucked away into the endless black hole ahead. His narrow beam was swallowed by that blackness, but he continued on,
step by step, into the void. There was no sound besides the soft shuffle of his feet on the uneven floor, and the whisper of his jeans in motion. Ted had never felt so alone and cut off; at times, he had to remind himself to breathe.
The flashlight struggled to pry through the darkness, and then suddenly, Ted saw a reflection, an answering flicker, bounced back from the black. There was something ahead. He yearned to hurry up, to run ahead and see what was there, but forced himself to move slowly, carefully, panning the spot across the floor a few feet in front of him to make sure he didn’t trip over a rock and break a leg. He didn’t think he could crawl all the way back down the tunnel and up the stairs to the outside world. Even if he could, it wasn’t likely he could flag anyone down for help from the top of Terrel’s Peak. It was not exactly the center of town.
Heart pounding harder, Ted continued his slow, measured walk, occasionally flicking the flashlight up to eye level to look far down the path. The reflection grew with every step, a twinkling prism of blue-white light. The corridor walls narrowed. It tightened until his shoulders almost touched the rock on either side of him and he wondered if he was really just walking into a claustrophobic dead end.
And then the wall to the left disappeared, his flashlight meeting only blackness as he raised it up and down. He swung it to the right and there too the walls had disappeared. The air was even colder here, its taste on his lips salty and dead.
He brought the flashlight back to dead center and was almost blinded. The room exploded in a prism of sparkling light, reflecting off the object in the center of the cavern. The walls all around were visible now; more passages led to and away from this room.
This was it! He had found it! The chamber of crystal that his sister had described.
A pedestal—a rocky altar—of watery blue crystal rooted in the center of the room; it reflected his light in a blinding
feedback loop to the azure mirrors that cut into and out of the walls all around. It was like standing in the center of a gigantic geode.
Ted walked to the center and reached out to the crystal altar with his left hand. He stopped, inches from its glassy surface. Would a jolt of blue fire scorch him for his intrusion? This had been the seat of the demon’s power. Did any still remain, like a battery poised to spend its last electric jolt?
He tapped a fingernail on the cool, hard surface, but nothing happened. With his palm he traced the latticework of its surface. There were spots of darkness blotting out the window to the crystal’s core. Rusted, gritty spots led away from a deep dark stain near the center of the flat surface.
Dried blood.
Sacrifice and soul-binding had occurred here.
Ted stepped away from the stone and twisted, clockwise, admiring the sparkle and flash of the room. This was nature’s disco, and he the only dancer.
He grinned and moved to the edge of the room, peering into each corridor that led to places deeper inside the cliff.
His flashlight disappeared without meeting any reflection down the first two paths. They seemed endless. Then he found a side room. The corridor wound around the outside of the circular chamber, and ended in this half-hidden cubby. He walked to the end, and found a small ledge, like the surface of a desk. A look at its contents said it had been used for just that, once.
This was probably where the keepers of the old lighthouse had come to for safety during the fury of a North Atlantic storm, he thought. They would have stoked up the giant searchlight, trained its saving, warning beam toward the ocean and then crossed their fingers that any wayward ships could see it. And then, as the structure groaned and shivered in the treacherous winds, they would have fled to safety below. To here.
The shelf held a couple of old, small bottles, and what
looked like chicken feathers, in a pile to one side. In the center lay an old, rotting book. It was bound in reddish brown leather, and Ted could see without even flipping, that its pages were yellowed and mold-eaten.
The Journal of Broderick Terrel
it said on the cover.
He opened the book to a random page and smiled.
This
was what he had come for. This was why he was here. The script was faded and hard to read, but its import was clear:
“I have called a demon from hell,” the author had written in an early entry.
Ted set down the flashlight to shine sideways across the pages, and read on.
The rewards of a successful Calling are riches and hedonistic fulfillment
beyond any man’s wildest dreams. But the path to union with
the Curburide is long. He who chooses this path must be committed
to the Calling in both heart and soul; there is no turning back. To
waver on the path means not only death, but eternal damnation.
Once the Calling has begun, and first blood spilled, the Caller belongs
to the demons called Curburide. If the Calling is successfully
completed, they will also belong to the Caller—a mutual symbiotic
bond is forged. But if the Curburide detect weakness, doubt or insincerity
in the Caller before that bond is complete, beware…
—
Chapter One
, The Book of the Curburide
If the lights went any lower, the woman would have been indistinguishable from the shadows. She was dressed all in black.
All.
Even her hair was covered in a shiny skullcap ending in two pointy faux cat ears. The only skin showing was her face, but when lights flickered across the costume, her obsidian body rippled with dark reflection.
Ryan Nelson eyed the woman from heels to head and, without even realizing it, licked his lips.
Un-
fuckin’-believable
.
Four-inch stiletto-heeled boots merged seamlessly into glossy black bodysuit and arm-length vinyl gloves that showed every flow of flesh and muscle beneath. Not that she moved or flowed. He had been sitting next to her in the club for an hour so far, and had yet to see her do more than bat an eyelid.
The latex cat suit was not unusual. It was Sunday night— and more importantly, Halloween—in Austin, Texas, and a catwoman was the least of the odd sights he’d seen so far. Driven by the wild college crowd of the University of Texas, which nestled just blocks off the state capitol steps, the city had been forced to close off a several block stretch of Sixth Street, downtown Austin’s main drag. A wild mix of college kids and locals paraded down the asphalt, in costume creations
dredged from some pretty twisted and bloody imaginations. Mascara-smudged vampires leaned out of every open bar window as if this was Amsterdam’s red-light district. Ragged witches French-kissed bile-and gore-streaked corpses. And when they came up for air, they all peered over second-floor balconies to watch the parade of other homemade horrors on the street below. At least three “Sons of God” pulled giant wooden crosses behind them as they trudged down the street. Ryan was quite sure that the original walk that had inspired the Stations of the Cross celebrated in Christian churches around the world had not used a cross with handy tote wheels screwed into the base.
While there certainly were many costumes of greater extravagance, Ryan’s favorite so far had been an older woman. She had been dressed in ripped and mud-crusted rags. She’d walked along the crowded street with a rope tied around her waist. Hanging from that rope, with twine knotted tight around their tiny ankles, were a half dozen baby dolls. At least, he assumed they were dolls. From the smears of blood across their tortured, wrinkled faces, he wasn’t sure, and he hadn’t stepped close enough to confirm or deny the atrocity.
Early in the evening, he’d spent a couple hours shivering outside with the mob in the chill, unseasonable wind and laughing at the bizarre imaginations of his neighbors, until he finally left the street and slid into the comforting black confines of Elysium, an outwardly nondescript, black-walled goth club around the corner on Red River. His own facial white-paint and the pale threads in his black-and-white-striped hobo suit glowed electric blue-white in the black light of the club. As he passed through the entryway, a girl in a purple corset, torn fishnets and a bloody ax lodged in her skull caught his eye, flashed a red lipstick smile of appreciative recognition and yelled “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.”
He grinned back and bowed, appreciating her recognition, then moved to the bar where a blood-spattered cheerleader in a gold and blue ultrashort skirt poured him a Vampire’s Kiss.
The DJ was mixing ambient, ethereal Delerium as Ryan né “Beetlejuice” found a chair along the dance floor to wait for the evening’s band lineup to start playing. He took an empty seat next to the young “catwoman” and silently whistled his appreciation of her getup.
Over the next few minutes, as the disco ball and a couple of red and blue spotlights worked in tandem to swirl a mind-numbing pattern across the floor, alternating from psychedelic circles to swimming neon tadpoles, Ryan snuck looks at the silent feline. He wondered if she was with anyone. She seemed to be sitting alone, and wasn’t drinking. She stared straight ahead across the floor, without expression. Cat’s eyes.
Over the course of an hour, she didn’t uncross her legs or move the gloved hands from her lap. The black whiskers penciled on her cheeks didn’t so much as twitch. She was a statue, cool dark eyes trained at some point just above the floor. There, impossibly thin men both in drag and wearing tight leather pants with fishnet shirts along with uniformly chubby women in combat boots and pink or blue hair and various shredded bits of spandex, netting and twines of chain moved in a disconnected, colorfully jerky ballet to the beats.
“Wild night, eh?” Ryan said after a while, staring straight at catwoman’s face. Her expression didn’t change. She didn’t answer. He shrugged and sipped his blood-dyed drink, averting his eyes to the floor.
Murder Box, a local band, picked up their instruments at last, and Ryan abandoned his seat to get closer to the stage, nodding at the industrial guitar grind and bleating synthesizers as an Edward Scissorhands look-alike thumbed the bass, spiky black hair bobbing in time. A young goth girl wrapped in tantalizing curtains of gauzy black swiveled her bared hips and teased the audience as she fellated a microphone above the pounding beat.
After the set, he bought another drink and looked for a place to rest until the headliners came on, a Florida darkwave
act. He slipped between a variety of ghouls and black-clad, black-eyed patrons and found himself back again at the edge of the dance floor, at the same empty seat next to the catwoman.
He sat.
She didn’t seem to have moved.
“They were pretty good, didn’t you think?” he asked.
Her head tilted ever so slightly to almost meet his gaze, and then returned to face forward, still saying nothing.
Ryan drew up his death-clown charcoal-ringed mouth and sighed. Talk about ice-queens. But she was gorgeous, in an arctic way. It was one thing if she didn’t want to be picked up—he’d been there. But she could at least be polite. The more he thought about it, the more it steamed him. A simple shake of the head, the barest acknowledgement of his existence, would have been enough. Purely out of spite, he leaned over her shoulder and struggled to keep a straight face as he dropped a line patently designed to piss her off as much as her silence had annoyed him.
“Do you come here often?” he asked.
No answer.
Not even a flicker of response.
Ryan sighed and presently went back to watching the goth boys and goth girls pirouetting to the gloomy self-flagellation of The Smiths. The dance floor was slowly filling, as people began to elbow their way in closer to the stage, eager to be in place for the next set.
And then she spoke.
Her voice was cool, like her eyes, but her meaning was clear.
“Do you want to take me out of here?”
Ryan turned abruptly to face her. Had she said what he just thought he heard? For the first time, her face was actually turned toward him, eyes trained fully, unblinkingly on him, awaiting his answer. Her pale lips were drawn tight.
“Huh?” he said.
“I asked if you wanted to take me out of here?” she repeated,
her voice a delicate shard of deadly beautiful crystal, high-pitched and thin enough to break.
“Now?” he asked.
She moved, for the first time all night, stretching provocatively while running both black-gloved palms down the shining suit. Ryan stared as her black-gloved fingers traced the lithe ridges of her tightly visible rib cage and then reached down over the spread of her thighs. Her outfit groaned like the creasing of a tight leather couch as she stretched, catlike in her chair, and then opened both eyes wide to meet his growing interest.
“Yes,” she said. “I need to go. Now.”
It didn’t take him long to consider. Visions of his hand unzipping that tight vinyl flooded his mind. Ryan jumped to his feet. He bent and offered his arm. Catwoman smiled and nodded, gracing his forearm lightly with a cool vinyl finger. She rose with a slow but audible crunch. In her heels, she was as tall as he was, and in mincing steps she strutted next to him through the crowd of goths and out the doorway. From behind them, Ryan heard someone again call out “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.”
“I think someone just wished you away,” she said.
“Looks like it worked.”
“I’m just up the street, at the Marriott,” she announced.
“Cool.” He led her down the street, through the crowds of gaudy painted faces and gales of drunken laughter. Her steps clicked like sniper shots against the pavement, and she said nothing more until they had passed Stubb’s and some burnt-out ware houses and turned the corner to arrive at the Waller Creek bridge near the hotel.
In five minutes, he was trailing her up the stairs of the hotel’s rear courtyard, across the polished granite-tiled lobby, and up the elevator to room 618. She flipped a light switch, and Ryan saw that she had rearranged the room, piling the mattress and frame of one of the two double beds up against a wall.
A ring of what looked like pebbles littered the ground where carpet marks indicated that the deconstructed bed had stood not so long ago. Catwoman turned and pressed her face to his, drawing his breath out in a hard kiss. She stared wide into his eyes.
“I like the floor,” she said, and drew her tongue from his chin to his ear, biting briefly at the lobe.
“Why don’t you get out of those clothes, make yourself comfortable,” she hissed. “I’ll be right back.”
She disappeared into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. Ryan shed his hobo coat and tie, and kicked his shoes to the side of the bed. He sat down on the bed she hadn’t dismantled and waited, grinning expectantly when he heard the run of water in the next room. He imagined her coming out of the bathroom wearing only a towel, hair let down to flow in loose curls of raven gloss over bare shoulders.
His imagination was wrong.
She returned still fully clad in vinyl, still gloved and skull-capped.
She walked over to him, and planted one leg between his feet while handing him a warm, wet cloth.
“For your face,” she offered. “Can I take your shirt and pants for you?”
“Can I take your cat suit for you?” he retorted. She lifted her chin.
“Boys first,” she said, looking down her whiskers at him. “I’m shy.”
He laughed at that, but took the cloth and rubbed the character makeup from his face with vigorous wipes. Then he stood and unbuttoned his shirt and pants, letting them fall to the floor.
“And what do you keep in there?” she asked, nodding at the growing bulge in the pouch of his underpants.
“You don’t waste time, do you?”
She grinned, and touched a pink tongue to her upper lip.
“Do you want to waste time?”
He kicked his underwear off and stood naked, hands on his hips.
“Does it pass?” he asked, confident, though starting to feel a little uneasy. This was definitely a weird one. Would she be a frigid mannequin beneath him, or would she truly become a catwoman?
She nodded. “It’ll do.”
Hands behind her back, she circled him, inspecting. He shivered as a cool nail scratched down from the top of his neck to the crack of his buttocks. She slid close, kissed him with her entire body, wrapping around him like a coat from behind, biting at his ear, whispering as she pinched his nipples. Her hands slipped down to move between his legs, kneading and gripping at the flesh swelling with desire.
“I need your help,” she purred in his ear.
He moaned.
“I need a big, strong man to help me open the door,” she purred again, and he made as if to turn around. Her hand gripped tight and held him facing forward. “I need you to give it up for me,” she said, slowly withdrawing her hands. Then she wasn’t there at all, and Ryan felt a chill as her voice commanded, “I need you to stay right there.”
He rolled his eyes and continued to face forward, wondering if he should make a quick and apologetic exit. Catwoman really was some kind of freak.
Behind him she whispered something. Something he couldn’t hear.
“What?” he asked, but her voice didn’t pause.
He turned around and saw the woman had dropped in a crouch on the floor. Her forehead touched the ground and she mumbled and whispered to herself.
He felt a knot form in his belly and shook his head. In a heartbeat he’d made up his mind. Last straw.
Ryan began to step backward, noting the location of his clothes out of the corner of his eye.
Her head shot up at his silent retreat.
“Wait,” she hissed. “I need your help, I’m not done.”
“Well, I’m done,” he said. “Thanks for the memories.”
He reached for his shirt and she pounced, knocking him off balance and then pushing him to the floor on his back.
“Whoa,” he said, grabbing her by the shoulders to hold her back. “I don’t know what you’re into, but I don’t think I’m the right one for you tonight.”
She slipped her arms inside his and pressed her palms to his chest. She leaned in, breath warm and sweet against his face.
“You’re done when
I
say you’re done,” she said. Her words weren’t warm and sweet at all.
He pushed against the floor with his elbows and tried to rise, but then her lips pressed wetly to his and he hesitated, involuntarily responding to the force and erotic liquid heat of her touch. A cool finger reached around his shoulder to ruffle the back of his hair. He smiled and slipped his tongue between her teeth. And then something hurt as she drew that caressing hand around his throat…pressing deep with cold pressure.
Something pinched his throat, and a confusing alarm of ice and fire rang inside Ryan’s skull. Then the pain blossomed and he coughed at a tickle across his larynx…and then there
really
was pain…and warmth spilling out across his chest and shoulder. He tried to scream but Catwoman pressed his head to the floor and drew the second razor secreted in her palm across his neck from the other direction, severing his windpipe and vocal chords in one deep slice. A spray of blood spattered and beaded across her protective vinyl bodysuit. The pain was all-consuming and he struggled against her weight, but every movement was excruciating. The room blurred instantly. Ryan struggled to look at his killer one last time, his brain crying silently, “Why?”