Sacrifice (18 page)

“Did you ask Malachai about it?”

“Yeah. He gave me the usual Malachai dodge. Maybe tomorrow, you can keep your ghost eyes open?”

“ ‘K,” she agreed. Her voice was slurred with sleepiness. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled for cigarette-smoking priests.”

Joe didn’t answer, and in seconds he heard the deep sighs of sleep in her breath. He rolled over and stared at the dark wall beyond the bed. What was beyond that darkness? he wondered.

What would come through if the Sunday Slasher completed her call?

From the far side of the room, his fears were answered by a snore.

“Whoa,” Alex exclaimed. “That’s it, isn’t it? The bridge. It’s huge!”

“That’s it,” Joe said, eyes on the toll sign. “And they’re going to rape us to cross over.”

The Golden Gate Bridge stretched out ahead of them, a monstrous span of reddened steel crossing from the north stretch of Route 1 into the legendary city by the bay. They’d been driving for hours, taking turns at the wheel after each rest stop. Joe could feel the heat from the engine seeping through the floorboards. It made his feet sweat. But now the breeze from the San Francisco Bay slipped in through the windows and he felt a chill.

Alex straightened in her seat and peered out the window.

“I can see a sailboat,” she announced.

“I imagine you’ll see more than one.”

“Is the prison on that island out there?”

“No,” he said, handing over five dollars to the toll-booth attendant. He dropped the change in a cup holder and eased forward to cross the long bridge into the city. “Alcatraz is on my side, I believe.”

“The Sean Connery movie was filmed there, wasn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Can we go?”

“On one condition.”

She gave him a cross look and folded her arms. For a moment, despite the fake black hair, she was the “15-year-old” hitchhiker as Joe had first seen her just a few days before. “What?”

“Find us some ghosts today who are willing to talk. We need some info.”

“Deal.”

“And until then…” He broke off as the road shifted and wound down a steep drop and reemerged from beneath a viaduct to a blur of trees and tall gabled houses.

“What?”

“Get your eyes on that map! How do we get downtown?”

After missing a turn and ending up near the wildly diverse tie-dye district of Haight-Ashbury, Alex and Joe finally negotiated the up-and-down streets of San Francisco to arrive on Market Street.

“There’s a cable car!” Alex enthused, and Joe smiled.

“We’ll take one to the dock when we do the boat ride to Alcatraz,” he promised. “Now…about the Marriott?”

“Dead ahead!” she said. “Should be on the right. Is that it, up there?”

She pointed, and Joe looked up to catch a glimpse of the familiar tripod architecture of the art deco spire that demarked Marriott’s across the country. Moments later he’d taken a right, slipped around the block and into the parking garage of the mammoth structure.

“Let’s hope they’ve got a room for us,” Alex said, mouth agape at the line of cars awaiting the valets to park them.

Joe pulled as far up the curved entry road as he could and put the car in park.

“Let’s hope I can afford a room for us here,” he said.

After taking a receipt from the uniformed valet, they entered the lobby and started towards the long check-in counter. Alex grabbed Joe’s arm.

“Can I be your sister this time?”

He grinned. “What’s a matter? I’m a lousy dad?”

She made a face.

“Okay, okay. Here you can be my sister. But if we have to go to Arkansas, the only safe thing is for you to be my daughter. Course, on second thought, even that might not be…”

She punched him. “Just go.”

“Room 1104,” Joe announced, stepping away from the counter. “That okay with you, sis?”

“Only if it’s got two beds.”

“Nope, just one cozy king. We’re family, remember?”

“Then you’re in the bathtub,” she said, shifting her backpack up higher on her shoulder.

Joe shook his head and smiled. Then the smile slipped away and he leaned closer to her ear.

“See any ghosts?”

“You want me to do this now?”

“No, we can dump our stuff first,” he said. “But do you see any?”

Alex looked hard at the spaces between the milling, noisy mix of walking, talking, sitting and cell-phoning people in the lobby. Milky shapes twisted and wound in between the chairs and sofas and milling people. As she stared, those steamy blurs became more distinct, and some turned to look back to meet her gaze. She shivered.

“Yeah, they’re here. Plenty of them.”

“Good. Then let’s freshen up and then come back here and make some friends!”

One of the silvery forms separated from a crowd at the Fourth Street door and faded in and out as it crossed the lobby towards them. They stepped into the elevator, and the long-eyed form slithered through the closing doors like a puff of shimmering smoke.

“Joe?”

“Yeah?” he said absently, punching the 11th floor button.

“We’ve got company.”

The elevator shivered and then rumbled upwards, as Alex stared at the ghost who’d shot through the lobby to follow them.

“Hi,” she whispered.

The ghost flickered at the sound of her voice, like an electrical current with a bad connection. Its eyes were the deepest ebon, and Alex could see the outline of a tie around its ephemeral neck. Its body was a charcoal blur, but as she stared into its eyes, its face grew more distinct. A caterpillar puff rose from above both of its abysmal eye sockets, and the smoky fuzz of a white beard faded into nothing from its chin. When its lips opened to speak, she saw the buttons of the elevator wall in the space between.

“They’re coming!” it said faintly.

“Who?” she said. “Who is coming?”

“The evil ones,” it hissed, and then faded, like a smoke ring in a spring breeze.

Alex put a hand on her chest to still the pounding in her heart. “Shit,” she murmured as the elevator rattled to a halt and the doors opened.

Joe put a hand on her shoulder. “C’mon,” he urged, pushing her out onto the carpet. “Let’s find our room, and you can tell me what just happened. But don’t faint on me first. You look white as a ghost.”

“That’s because I just saw one,” she breathed, willing her eyes to stop bulging. She could feel her whole body pounding with blood. “And I’ve never seen one like that before.”

Joe pulled open the dresser drawer and dropped his under wear in.

“Which drawer you want?” he asked.

“Whatever one you’re not using,” she called out from the bathroom, where she’d begun disassembling makeup and other sundries from her backpack. “Wouldn’t want you seeing your sister’s underwear now, would we?”

“Still wearing Care Bears?” he taunted.

“Ha,” she called. “Thongs, baby, thongs.”

“You get the top drawer,” he called back. “You’re right. I don’t want to see those.”

“ ‘Fraid of cooties?”

“And butt cracks,” he agreed.

“Chicken.”

“Born and bred. Now can we get a move on before we lose the light? I’d like to see some of this city before the day is over.”

The door to the bathroom closed as Alex yelled. “Be out in a minute.”

“Or an hour,” Joe murmured, and stood at the window looking out at the city. He could see the sprawling convention center to one side, and the brilliant blue of the bay in the distance. A freighter, probably inbound from the Orient, bobbed on the horizon. “Now that’s a view.”

They stepped out onto Fourth Street and turned right to head to Market. People slammed past them in a continual rush of heedless pedestrians.

“Stay close,” Joe warned, and Alex grabbed his shirtsleeve to keep from being separated.

“Ever been to a big city before?” he asked, as they stood at the corner of Market, waiting for the light to change. Alex’s fingers were sharp around his arm.

“No,” she said quietly. An old bum wearing a stained green winter coat brushed past them, and she wrinkled her nose. “Are they all like this?”

“In some ways,” he admitted, and stepped out onto the street to cross with the traffic.

“Wow,” was all she said.

At Alex’s request, they stopped in a Tower Records and Joe agreed to pick up the latest Green Day CD for her. Then they walked up to Union Square Park and sat on a bench as the sun’s rays began to turn from gold to bronze. Pigeons stepped proudly across the sidewalk, daring the darting pedestrians to step on them. The stupid birds almost never flew, only bobbed their heads and hurried forward or sideways to keep from being stepped on.

“See any ghosts?” Joe said when they’d been settled a minute.

“Maybe,” she said. “But I’d rather look at the palm trees.”

“Ghosts,” he insisted. “We’re here for a reason.”

“What if someone sees me talking to it?”

“In this town, you’ll blend right in,” he promised. “In case you haven’t already noticed, there’s a crazy person babbling to himself on almost every corner here. And anyway, aren’t you supposed to be able to talk just with your mind?”

“Yeah,” she admitted. “But sometimes I forget.”

Alex looked over her shoulder, across the green square of the small park. The telltale sparkle of spirits flickered on the next park bench, and across the square. But one flicker was even closer. She stared at it, and like a blooming rose its form opened to her inner eye.

The ghost nodded politely at her, whitened hair adrift in a breeze of supernatural direction. “Hi,” Alex murmured, struggling to keep her lips shut and to speak with her mind only.

The spirit did not smile, but still acknowledged her greeting with a bowed head. He seemed to be wearing a long black coat that hid any details of his form. Only the thin, drawn lines of his long face were at all clear to her.

The spirit crossed the walk and stood before her. “You can see me,” it said. Its voice was like chocolate and vinegar; sweet and pungent at the same time.

“Yes,” Alex said. “Have you waited here long?”

“A week or a year,” it said. “What’s it to me?”

“So you know you’re a ghost?”

“Of course,” it said, its voice sharp now in her ears. “Do I look like a twit?”

“No, no,” she insisted. “But…many ghosts don’t even know.”

“I know I’m dead,” it said. “And I know I haven’t been called. And I know that you are here looking for a murderess.”

“You’re not going to say ‘they’re coming’ and disappear on me, are you?”

The spirit smiled, its mouth a pink line of amusement against the darkening twilight of the busy street behind it. “No,” it promised. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“See something?” Joe asked, oblivious to her conversation.

“Shhhhh,” she insisted and turned her attention back to the ghost. “Waiting?”

The faint form nodded. “I heard his cries that night when she took him. And I heard her prayer. I knew that if the evil ones were called, someone else would hear, too. I hoped that it would be sooner.”

“We came as fast as we could.”

“She’s long gone now,” the spirit said. “But her evil lives on.”

“How?”

“The rift,” the spirit said. Its head nodded slowly, a blurring mix of the shadows of moving cars, tourists and hustling businessmen eager to get home after a long day at work.

Alex struggled to keep her lips closed, as she mouthed, “The rift?”

“She killed to open a rift for them. And they found it.”

“Where?” she breathed. “How?”

“Room 255,” it said. “You have to close the door before they come through.”

“How can we close the door?”

“Stop her before she makes the final sacrifice. If she succeeds…nothing you or anyone can do will send them back. If all the doors are open, all the Curburide can come through.”

“Should we close the door somehow at the hotel?” Alex asked.

The ghost shook its head. “Stay away from the door or your very soul will be in danger. She is the key.”

“Who?”

“The nun.”

The ritual of the Calling has three aspects. Early sects of Curburide worshippers performed sexually charged sacrifices in prayer circles comprised of 16 human bones (representing the 16 aspects of hedonistic perversion that are most appealing to the demon) and 21 stones (representing the 21 levels of hell beneath the earth to which the worshippers may be damned if their sacrifice was found unworthy). These rituals were designed to garner specific favors from a Curburide demon (such as the fertility rite performed by the early Gaelic druid sect).

Individuals also may perform a joining rite which could allow a Curburide demon to temporarily come through to this realm by cooperative possession of the Caller. A successful union between priest and demon can bring the priest great power and the demon the freedom to ravage this plane—something for which all Curburide inherently yearn. The violence and unpredictability of the Curburide makes such Callings extremely risky for the Caller, however.

There is a third type of Calling, and it is the most dangerous of the three. This Calling is the hardest path, but provides the Caller with the ultimate power, and revenge. It was attempted unsuccessfully by Helladius in the 3rd century, to punish the Roman emperor for his banishment. This Calling involves “dedicating” one’s homeland to the whim of the demons, by performing five ritual sacrifices across the breadth of the land. Helladius followed a very specific mapping and timing ritual for his sacrificial path, but it is unclear whether this has a true impact on its success. Because the key part of the ritual involves opening a doorway to this realm for many demons, the final sacrifice must be of someone who has already experienced possession. This pre conditioned vessel…

—Chapter Seven,
The Book of the Curburide

“It’s my wife,” Jeremy explained to the white-smocked nurse behind the counter. “She fell the other day and it’s been hurting her ever since. I think she might have busted a rib.”

The nurse barely looked up from her computer screen. “Got insurance?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Blue Cross.”

“I’ll need to make a copy of your card, and your driver’s license.”

As he pulled both from his wallet, she reached down and retrieved a clipboard, already preloaded with a patient information form.

“Fill this out and bring it back up when you’re done.” She couldn’t have sounded more bored. Jeremy thanked her and took the board back to where Ariana sat on one of the orange vinyl waiting room chairs. There were a couple dozen of them spaced around the carpeted area beyond the white tile hall that led from the nurse’s station into the heart of the hospital. About half the chairs were filled with crying children or desperate adults. He handed the clipboard to her.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” she whispered.

“Should,” he said. “Not like they keep pictures on file. And by the time the claim gets into the system…we’ll be a hundred miles away.”

“Shhhh,” she said, looking around nervously. A black woman in a blue floral house dress sat across from them, stroking the head of a child. Her girth seemed to extend beneath the armrests of the chair to serve as a cushion for the boy, who looked about eight or nine, and had been coughing since they’d walked into the ER waiting room. Jeremy found himself wishing they’d sat somewhere else. He didn’t need fuckin’ pneumonia on top of everything else.

Two chairs down, an older man sat stiffly and watched the nurse’s station. He held a washcloth over one eye. Jeremy didn’t know what color it once had been, but it was now a rich shade of saturated crimson. He wondered how long the man had been bleeding here. And if they weren’t immediately taking him…

“Bernard James?” the nurse called, and the old man staggered to his feet.

“Thank God,” Jeremy mumbled as the man teetered to the nurse’s station where a blue-coated man waited.

“Hmmm?” Ariana looked up from filling out the form.

“Thought they were going to let him bleed to death out here.”

“What’s my birthday?” Ariana asked quietly.

“April 26, 1969.”

“Maiden name?”

“Secks.”

She laughed. “You’re kidding, right? Your wife’s name was S-E-X?”

“No, S-E-C-K-S. Might as well have been sex though. Sheila Secks—S.S. First Mate of the
S.S. Whore
.” His voice began to rise. “Good old fuck-every-dick-on-deck Sheila Secks.”

Ariana elbowed him, and Jeremy saw the black woman was watching them.

“How do you feel?” he asked, changing the subject.

“Hurts like hell.” Her breath caught just a bit as she said “hell.”

“I don’t know if there’s anything to do for it,” he said. “But I know we need to make sure it hasn’t punctured a lung or something.”

“You can wait here, Mr. Bruford.” The nurse pointed to the chairs on the wall in the hallway. “We’re going to take her in for an X-ray now.”

Jeremy leaned forward and kissed Ariana on the cheek. “Good luck, honey,” he said.

The corner of Ariana’s mouth crinkled, and she raised an eyebrow at him, but said nothing. The nurse led her through the double doors into the radiology lab and Jeremy sat down to wait. His stomach was starting to knot up. Maybe this ruse wasn’t such a great idea. After spending an hour in the outer waiting room, they’d been brought in to see a doctor. Jeremy guessed him to be about 45 or 50; there were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes when he smiled, and though he still sported a thick mustache and a full head of black hair, both were generously sprinkled with silver. He wore bifocals, and as Ariana/Sheila told him of how she’d been carrying a big load of laundry, and then missed the top step of the stairs, he kept peering at Jeremy over the top of the frames. With the flat of a thumb, the doctor traced the purpled and yellowing line around her left cheekbone that no amount of makeup covered.

“And you hit this—” he looked over at Jeremy for an instant, his eyes stern—“on the stair? On the rail?”

Ariana had shrugged, and then winced from the movement. “I don’t know. It was all so fast.”

The doctor had nodded. His voice remained very quiet. “Well, we’ll just take an X-ray of those ribs and see what’s going on there.”

Jeremy could imagine the conversation going on between the doctor and his nurse. “He beat the crap out of her,” the doc probably said. “How many times do these women have to ‘fall down the stairs’ before they march out the front door?”

He wondered if they would call the police. His stomach churned, and Jeremy bent forward to still the acid. Damn…maybe this little charade had been a bad idea. He had worried mainly about the identity theft aspect of slipping Ariana through the X-ray machine under the guise of his wife. But if the hospital reported it as a domestic abuse situation…it could be the end for both of them. He didn’t know if the law now called for them to do that, if there was any suspicion. On the other hand, if she really was hurt…he knew she could be bleeding inside. She needed someone to look at her.

The speakers overhead demanded that a Dr. Aruba report to room 343, and the traffic of nurses and carts through the hallway in front of him seemed constant. A technician wearing a white hospital smock—at least he assumed that’s what the guy was—pushed through the double doors where the doctor had led Ariana.

All he could do was sit here and wait. And think about the morning. And last night. And the night before.

The whole situation was surreal. Just a couple days ago, he was an ordinary, miserable working stiff sitting at a bar, hoping to drown out the unavoidable knowledge of his wife’s cheating with an unhealthy dose of alcohol. An image of Ariana, accepting a drink from him came to mind. It seemed so long ago. He had never before picked up a woman at a bar while married to Sheila. And God, what a price he was now paying for the transgression. Not that Sheila had gotten away scot-free with her adultery. He remembered her body as it lay there this morning, cold and gutted. Purple and red gobs of flesh arranged around her head in a hellish halo of grue. Her once pink, perfect nipples replaced by ghastly red slashes. Her eyes staring blankly at the ceiling in frozen agony, her face spattered and smeared with her own blood.

She had paid. And strangely, Jeremy found that he felt no remorse. The beating he’d given Ariana had opened the floodgates of hate and resentment he’d built up over the past few years. He’d tried for so long to repress it, giving her excuses. He’d told himself that she still loved him, but needed more. The humiliation that he was apparently a lousy lover had kept him in a pit of depression that grew deeper with every night that she announced she was “going out with the girls” or “working late and leaving the kid to stay over at Ma’s.”

And then, when the anger surged, he’d remind himself of his daughter. He didn’t want her growing up in a broken home.

Jeremy laughed out loud at the thought, and then looked up to see if anyone had heard. The nurse at the oval-walled station just down the hall continued her typing.

How was his daughter going to cope now? Her mother had been brutally murdered, and her father was about to become number one on Florida’s Most Wanted List. Fuck.

He’d called Sheila’s mother and asked her to pick up his daughter after school again today, because they were both working late. Doris had agreed, and then handed the phone over.

“Hi, Daddy,” Amy Lynn’s tiny voice came on the line. “We had ice cream last night. Did you have ice cream?”

“No, sweetie,” he’d said and was instantly overcome with the memory of the last thing he’d tasted the night before; the iron of his wife’s blood warm and thick on his lips as he pumped his cock between the gore-smeared thighs of Ariana. “No ice cream for Daddy.”

“Maybe Mommy will let you have ice cream to night?” little Amy Lynn asked, genuine concern in her voice.

“Maybe, honey, maybe. You be good for Grandma, okay?”

Tears welled in his eyes as he remembered her last words to him.

“I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you too, pumpkin,” Jeremy whispered to the empty air in the hospital corridor. He knew he would never see his daughter again. And someday, when she was old enough to understand, she would be glad of that, and would despise him.

When the doctor finally reappeared, holding the door open for Ariana to walk slowly through ahead of him, Jeremy was quietly crying.

“Jeremy,” Ariana called to him, and he quickly brushed both hands across his cheeks. He held up a finger and feigned a sneeze, and then dug quickly into his pocket for a tissue as he stood. Pressing it against the corners of his eyes to blot the water, Jeremy blew his nose, and struggled to clear his face of emotion.

“What’s the good word?” he finally asked.

“Rest,” the doctor said. “She’s pretty beaten up, lots of bruising, and a hairline fracture on the lower left rib. There’s nothing we can do for that; it just needs to heal. I’d like her to stay off her feet the rest of this week. She’ll have some problems lying down, so she may need to sit a lot. Do you have a recliner?”

Jeremy lied.

“Good. Set her up in that with a good book or two. She’s going to spend a lot of time there the next week or two.”

“Should we wrap it or something?” Jeremy asked.

The doctor shook his head and led them to the nurse’s station. “I’m giving her some codeine for the pain. As long as she keeps from any strenuous exercise, it should heal naturally, without causing any further damage.”

The doctor wrote out a script and handed it to Ariana. “Stay off the stairs,” he said pointedly, and then looked at Jeremy. “You were lucky. The next time, it could be a lot more serious.”