Hellhound on My Trail (4 page)

“Holy, holy, holy,” Mike said cheerfully. A few more sips of whisky, he thought, and he’d forget the Baal Zavuv, forget the Hellhound, and even, for a little while, forget Chuy. Maybe he’d even forget that he’d wanted to kill himself.

“That’s right,” Eddie agreed, “they
sing
. They sing in the New Testament … in the
Jesus half
, too. Luke two, ‘and suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. And Job says the morning stars sang together, and the sons of God shouted for joy.’”

“Fine,” Mike agreed. He didn’t care about any of this stuff. “Angels sing.”

“So when angels get cast out of Heaven,” Eddie continued, as if he was trying to coax Mike to an obvious conclusion, “what do they do?”

Mike scratched his head. “They rap?”

“They don’t sing anymore,” Twitch explained.

“They can’t even
hear
singing,” Eddie added. “They can’t hear
any
music. Music is Heaven’s gift to the angels, and when they rebel, they lose it entirely.”

Mike didn’t think he’d had enough whisky to make him stupid, but he still couldn’t put his finger on the thread. “Jim’s not an angel,” he repeated.

“Jim won’t speak, because he’s worried about being heard by the angels. The fallen angels.” Eddie nodded encouragingly at Mike, like this all made sense. “But he can sing all he wants.”

“But you guys all talk.”

“Oh, the Fallen aren’t listening for
us,”
Twitch said reassuringly. “Or for
you,
Mikey. You can talk all you want.”

This wasn’t a hospital, Mike thought. It was an insane asylum. “Don’t call me Mikey,” he said, a little sullen.

Eddie nodded. “Almost there,” he said. “Better get loaded up.” He knocked the glove compartment open with his knee and produced a box of forty-five caliber shells, which he passed back to Mike. “Come with us to stick it to Satan. Or stay here and get stuck. Still have the bouncer’s pistol?” he asked.

For an answer, Mike produced the pistol and started loading both clips.

“What happened?” Adrian sat upright in the back seat of the van, shaking his head.

“You fell asleep again,” Eddie grumped.

“Ah, but first you and I saved the day, big boy,” Twitch elaborated, smiling in a beguilingly feminine way. Mike sipped the last of the whisky, dropped the bottle into the rubbish heaped around his own ankles, and tried to think of an inoffensive way to confirm that Twitch was a woman.

“Remind me, next time I need a wizard,” Eddie complained to Jim, “to pick one who ain’t narcoleptic.”

“I’m not narcoleptic,” Adrian said, straightening his tie.

“Oh yeah?” Eddie was unconvinced.

“I’m cursed.”

“With what?” Eddie asked.

Adrian looked down at the singed knees of his suit. “Narcolepsy,” he muttered. “But only in moments of great stress.”

“Right,” Eddie agreed. “Only when it counts.”

“Why are you cursed?” Mike asked. He tried to keep images out of his mind: of Chuy in the basement of the burnt-out school, Chuy getting high on the weed Mike had scored, Chuy and the girl, Chuy cut to ribbons and bleeding to death.

Chuy in Butcher’s, taunting him.

“I stole something,” Adrian muttered. “I’m not proud of it, but it was the quickest way to get where I needed to go. Faint heart never won, et cetera.”

“Or in other words,” Eddie summarized, “you’re a thief, as well as a narcoleptic.”

“As well as a wizard,” Adrian said. “Besides, if I was the kind of guy who followed all the rules, I wouldn’t really fit in on this team, would I?”

“Touché,”
Twitch admitted the point. Mike thought Jim’s eyes in the rearview mirror looked like they were smiling.

“We’re here,” Eddie said, and Jim pulled over. The van was still going five or ten miles an hour when he threw it into Park. Mike nearly fell over as the Dodge ground to a squealing, protested halt.

Mike would have been reluctant to get out of the van, but with Twitch and his (her?) batons pushing him from one direction and Adrian shoving from the other, he had no choice. He yanked open the van’s side door and went out gun first, looking for the Baal Zavuv, the Zvuvim, or the Hellhound.

He landed a bit wobbly on hard-packed dirt and heard … crickets. Overhead, a lid of a million brilliant stars fell screaming to the horizon, where it clanged off the staunch silhouetted shoulders of the hills and buttes of New Mexico. Other than the starlight, and the light from the Dodge’s headlights, the night was pitch black.

“Where’s the town?” he asked. “Is this all there is?”

The headlights glared yellow on a building. It was a simple brick-shaped rectangle, two or three stories in height, with some kind of a dome on top. The light reflected on many colors in the glass of the high windows. Some of the windows, anyway; as Mike looked, he could see that a lot of the glass had been smashed out. The woodwork around the windows’ frames looked chewed to splinters, and the double-wide door to the building was gone.

Not open … gone.

“I guess now we know why the Hound showed up before the Baal,” Eddie said slowly. “The Baal came here first, ahead of us.”

“The question is why the Baal and the Hellhound got here at all,” Twitch noted. “I thought we traveled under the famous wards of obfuscation.”

“So did I,” Eddie agreed.

“You can complain about my work,” Adrian said bitterly, dropping out of the van onto both feet, “when you can do better. He who is without sin, and so forth.” He held a green metal three-gallon gas can in one hand, and it sloshed when he moved.

“Are we too late?” Eddie asked Jim, who stalked around the front of the van with his naked sword in his hand.

Jim shrugged and went into the building. Eddie followed him, and Twitch.

BETH RAZ NIHYEH
, read a bronze plaque beside the front door, over a single row of characters that Mike guessed were Hebrew; he’d seen them before, anyway, on Bar Mitzvah programs.

“What kind of place is this?” he asked.

“A synagogue,” Adrian said.

Mike pointed at the gas can. “You always carry gasoline into synagogues?”

“This is Dudael,” Adrian told him, as if that were an answer. He set the can down, spat into the palms of his own hands to slick back his hair, and then picked up the can again. “Where God ordered the archangel Raphael to imprison Azazel and all the other rebel angels.”

“Azazel?”

“You know him better as Satan. Lucifer, if you want to be formal about it.”

“What?” Mike almost dropped his pistol. “What are we doing here?”

“Jim’s looking for something,” Adrian said. “Something in the nature of a family heirloom, you could say.” He shrugged. “I suppose you can go back, if you want.” Then he disappeared into the building, too.

Mike didn’t wait; he jogged in close on Adrian’s heels, gun gripped firmly in one hand and the fingers of the other wrapped in the tangle of trinkets on his chest.

The last thing he wanted right now was to be alone in the darkness with Chuy.

***

Chapter Four

“Wait!” Mike called, stumbling through the door. “What’s the Left Hand?”

He found himself in a little antechamber, like a cloakroom or a small lobby, and Adrian had already passed through and gone ahead. Mike stopped to look around and let his eyes adjust—light came in from other chambers, but this entry hall was unlit. Mike had been in more than one synagogue, and here he expected to see, once his eyes grew used to the dimmer light, some kind of social space. Like a board, with community notices, maybe, or items relating to the congregation’s history, or ads for used cars.

Instead, the room was stark and bare. Off to his right, the chewed-to-bits remnants of a curtain hung over a dimly lit stairway climbing up. Ahead of him was another doorway containing double doors, one of which hung askew on a single hinge while the other lay flat on the floor. Both doors were heavy hardwood affairs, carved with spiral patterns of square Hebrew letters, the bottom of each had been painted gold. To either side of the doorway stood a single stone pillar, smooth and plain. The pillars ended before the ceiling and had nothing on top of them. In the middle of the lobby sat a square block of stone, waist high, that looked like nothing so much as an altar.

“It’d be nice tonight,” Mike grumbled out loud to himself, “if just
one thing
turned out to be
normal.”

He kicked himself forward through the door and found himself several paces behind Adrian. The narcoleptic wizard stood beside the can on the floor, shaking a cramp out of his fingers.

“What’s the Left Hand, though?” Mike asked the organ player.

“Ask Eddie that stuff,” Adrian said, picking up the can again and huffing slightly from the effort. “I’m the guy you ask when you need to turn invisible or curse someone with the plague.”

“You saying you don’t know?”

“I’m saying it’s not my job.”

“Right,” Mike muttered, and then he looked around inside the synagogue proper and momentarily forgot his question.

Most of the building was a single long, tall room. Rows of pews had once run from the doors up to the front of the room, Mike could tell, but only a few of them were still standing. The rest looked like they had been run through a wood chipper, their stuffing and covering fabric resting on top of the shattered and splintered hardwood like a coverlet of snow over a junkyard. A mezzanine story full of similarly destroyed seating ran around the back half of the room, and around the entire second-story wall, evenly spaced, were tall stained glass windows, many of them smashed out completely. Mike couldn’t see well, but he could see because a few incandescent bulbs had survived the general devastation and now shed weak yellow light on the wreckage.

Mike limped up the hardwood floor along what had once been a central aisle among the pews. The walls below the mezzanine and under the windows, he now saw, were hung with long curtains like tapestries. It was hard to see very well in this light, and the tapestries looked faded, but the images he could make out woven into their fabric were weird and old. Angels fought with dragons; serpents threatened a throne sitting on top of a cloud; angels were chained and thrown into a pit.

Thud.

Mike heard something and jumped. He looked around, not sure what it had been. The entire band was ahead of him, but the noise had come from his left. He looked and saw nothing moving. Rats in the walls, maybe. He shook off an involuntary shiver and continued looking around.

The ceiling overhead was carved and painted, and the cloudy throne was there, too, surrounded by twelve images that Mike at first assumed were the Zodiac. Then he actually managed to make out a few of the faded, unlit signs and saw a ship … another was a deer … a third was a tree branch, and then Mike shook his head. He didn’t believe in the Zodiac any more than he believed in the lottery, but he was pretty sure those signs weren’t in it. He wrote it off as one more oddity in an already very odd night, and focused back on where he was going.

At the front of the pews and to one side, a platform, like a pulpit with its own stairs, stood astride two steps that climbed to a low dais in front; the pulpit had been gnawed to a misshapen stump. An iron candlestick lay knocked to the ground before the pulpit, its seven arms carved like flowering branches. Beside it were the two shattered halves of a table.

Beyond the pulpit, there was a human body. He was an old man in a dark blue suit, with gray hair and beard, his feet and shoulder jammed against something that forced his knees and head into the air. He was pinned onto the lid of a big wooden chest with what looked like a wooden stake, pushed all the way through his torso and into the wooden container beneath. Death was always ugly, and Mike had seen his share, but he’d never seen it this ugly, or weird. He couldn’t see blood anywhere, despite the gaping hole in the man’s body. The chest underneath him had two sphinxes carved into its lid, facing left and right away from each other.

The old guy was still moving, though not very much. He muttered something inaudible, just a gasp through twitching lips—

and his skin bubbled. It crawled, and jumped and wiggled like it was loose over the body it covered, and something small, a thousand small somethings, were crawling all over underneath it.

“Jeez.” Mike stopped just inside the gnawed-down pulpit and stared. “Vampire?”

“Worse,” Twitch shook her head. “Rabbi.”

“Is he alive?” Eddie asked. The five of them stood around the man, several steps back.

Adrian set down the can and whipped a clear glass lens from his suit pocket. He squinted through it at the man in the suit. “No,” he said. “But he isn’t dead, either.”

“Will he talk to us?” Eddie asked. The guitarist held his shotgun at the ready and kept looking around the mezzanine.

“Sure he will,” Adrian said. He put away the lens, unscrewed the cap of the gas can and began to back around the man on the chest, pouring a trickle of gasoline on the floor as he went. The petroleum stink snapped Mike out of his reverie.

“How did you lose the last bass player?” he asked. “Speaking of … you know … all the crazy stuff I’ve seen tonight.”

Jim walked away from the circle of conversation. He kicked over large boards in the shattered wreckage of the pews and looked around and behind things and generally searched.

“We didn’t lose him, big boy,” Twitch said. “We know right where he is.”

“He died.” Eddie’s wandering eye snapped spastically in its socket and he closed both his eyes briefly, taking a deep breath.

Mike gulped and tightened his grip on the pistol. “Drug overdose?” he asked hopefully.

Eddie shook his head. “Impaled on his own bass.”

“Stand back or get gas on your shoes,” Adrian warned. “I need a perfect circle.”

“Or what?” Eddie asked. “You might fall asleep?” Jim put a restraining hand on Eddie’s shoulder.

“No pressure, Adrian,” Twitch said soothingly.

Mike stepped back and watched Adrian finish his circle, then light it with a matchbook he extracted from his pocket. Flames rose from the circle of gas, and when Adrian waved his hand over them, they rose even higher.

“Anyone know the rabbi’s name?” Adrian asked.

“Feldman,” Eddie supplied the answer.

“No true name? Not even a first name, that’s it, just Feldman?”

Eddie looked at Jim, who was poking around the ruined stump of the pulpit. The singer shrugged and nodded.

“That’s it,” Eddie said. “No sweat, for a man of your talent.”

“Makes you feel better about the tambourine, though, don’t it?” Twitch asked Eddie. There was a mischievous glint in the drummer’s eye. “The whole incident with the bass, that is. I mean, when was the last time you heard of a tambourine player murdered with his own instrument?”

“A tambourine could be sharpened,” Eddie said sourly.

“Murdered?” Mike asked.

“Of course,” Eddie snapped. “What kind of idiot would it take to impale
himself
on a bass guitar?”

“If there were such an idiot,” Twitch observed, “he’d surely be a member of this band.”

“What’s the Left Hand?” Mike asked again.

“Don’t worry about it,” Eddie said. “I’ll tell you later.”

“It’s easy,” Twitch said. “At the Judgment, everyone gets sorted. They’re either on the Right Hand of God—that’s really, really good—or they’re on His Left. That’s terrible. And people who have the Left Hand on them already in life, why, they’re damned. All this, of course, pertaining to humans, and other folk who are judged.”

Mike strained to listen to Twitch’s voice, trying to fathom his (her?) sex so hard, he almost missed the words Twitch said. “Are you—” he asked, about to guess
a woman
, but then he caught the significance of some of Twitch’s words. “Do you mean I’m
damned
?”
He knew that he was damned, had known it his entire adult life, but it wasn’t anyone else’s business and he wondered how Jim could possibly see that. “And do you mean some people
aren’t
judged
at all
?”
he asked. “What does that mean? And why would Jim want to rescue me just because I’m … because I have the Left Hand on me? What is he, like a priest?”

“Jim has a grudge,” Eddie said.

Jim kicked the candlestick, hard; it banged loudly against the floor.

“Against what?” Mike gripped the pistol in his hand, the sheer solidity of the gun an antidote to all the insanity he was seeing and hearing around him. He could feel the weight of his various charms and holy symbols at his sternum, too, but got very little comfort from that. “Against damned people? Against saved people?”

“Against Hell,” Twitch said. “Eddie told you. We’re sticking it to His Lowness.”

“Shut up,” Adrian growled. “I don’t jabber at you when you’re trying to find the groove, do I? Do unto others, well, you know.” The short man straightened his tie, and then waved both hands over the circle of flame, fluttering the fingers of one hand while clenching his other in a fist.
“Per Osiridem te invoco, o Feldman, ad nos veni!”

The twitching increased. Mike thought he could see individual mites under Rabbi Feldman’s skin, like rapidly migrating blisters. He arched his back, pushing off the chest with his heels and shoulder blades, and lifting his body on the spike that pinned him.

“What’s wrong with him?” Mike whispered to Eddie, who stood closest to him. “Is that a disease?”

“Shush,” Eddie said.

“More like an infestation,” Twitch whispered back. She picked up the gas can and held it ready, but ready for what, Mike didn’t know.

“Careful,” he suggested. “We don’t want to burn the place down.”

“Not yet,” Twitch agreed.

“Veni ad nos!”
Adrian repeated. He was making the same arm and finger gestures, but they were getting faster and faster and he looked frustrated.
“Tavo lanu, Rabbi Feldman, bashem hakodesh!”

Feldman’s arms twitched and his legs trembled, like a breakdancer with only one move, and not a very good one. The wooden spike kept him pinned, but his mouth opened and shut fiercely now, so hard Mike could hear his teeth
click
.

Adrian wiped sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. Mike did the same, in sympathy, but the cracked brown leather of his jacket smeared the sweat around rather than wiping any of it off.

“Veni!”
the wizard shouted. Veins stood out in his temples and in his wrists, like dancing snakes, and his face was bright red. “
Veni per Yahweh Sabaoth! Per Yahweh Sabaoth Luciferemque te jubeo, veni!”

He stamped his feet and the circle of flames raced skyward with a huge
BOOM!
—

And then Adrian crumpled to the floor, and the flames snuffed out.

“Huevos,”
Mike said, though he wasn’t sure why. The dying of Adrian’s magical fires made the room, if anything, slightly more normal.

“Did you hear that?” Twitch asked. She set down the can and started walking across the room, turning her head this way and that as she went. The horse’s tail protruding from the seat of her black leather outfit swished as she walked, and Mike couldn’t help watching it for a few seconds, until he remembered that he wasn’t one hundred percent sure Twitch was a woman.

Mike jerked his gaze away.

Then he remembered the
thud
he had heard earlier.

“You mean the explosion?” he called to her (he hoped). “I think they heard that in
Dallas.”
She ignored him, peering behind pews and turning over stray boards to look underneath them. “Could be rats!”

Jim returned to the group around the rabbi. He and Eddie stood over the body of the Rabbi Feldman, who continued to writhe spastically. Mike joined them. There was a bad smell about the body that he recognized, though he couldn’t immediately place it, and its mouth seemed to be full of something black. Like caviar, he thought. Someone had stuffed the rabbi with moving caviar.

That stank of rotting meat.

“What’s with Twitch?” Mike asked. “She thinks she heard something.”

“Horses have great hearing,” Eddie said dismissively. “You’re right, she probably heard a rat.”

So she was female, then. Mike shot a guilt-free glance at Twitch’s tail again. Then he realized what Eddie had said.

“Wait a minute,” he tried to rewind the conversation. “Horses?”

The guitarist ignored him and talked to Jim in low, urgent tones. “Are you sure the name isn’t just a coincidence?” Eddie asked him. “For all I know,
Dudael
is the Hopi word for
Chlamydia.”
He looked around at the shattered synagogue. “Though Heaven knows it looks the part,” he said.

The big singer took the rabbi’s right hand in his own and turned it palm-up. The old man had a tattoo on his right wrist, bright and black like he’d gotten it recently, and shaped like a candlestick with seven branches. Jim and Eddie exchanged a look.

“We don’t have much time,” Eddie said. “If that Baal Zavuv found this place before, it’s sure as hell on its way here now.”

“Let’s just leave,” Mike suggested.

“Do something useful,” Eddie snapped. “Wake up Adrian, maybe.”

Mike had just enough booze in him not to take offense. “What kind of thing are you looking for, Jim?” he asked as he crouched over Adrian’s unconscious body and slapped the other man in the face. “Maybe I can help.”