Sacrifice (2 page)

She pressed him firmly to the floor and waited. His own blood dripped back down onto his lips, cascading from the jet escaping his throat to dribble impotently down the shiny black vinyl of her chest. The taste of iron from his last blood slipped into his mouth and clouded his last shuddering sight as it pooled in his eye sockets.

“Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” she said with a smile, and licked a spot of blood from her pencil-drawn, smeared whiskers.

“Now you’re done.”

They’re coming.

The voice was in his head, but that still didn’t prevent Joe Kieran from answering it out loud. He was alone in the car, and in the middle of nowhere. Nobody was likely to hear.

“What the hell are you talking about now?”

Joe didn’t respond well to the occasional intrusions of Malachai, his indentured spirit. It wasn’t like the invisible demon ever meant him well.

“Who’s coming?” he asked. The irritation oozed from his tone.

The Curburide. Somebody is calling them. I can hear it.

“And I should care about this because…?” Joe asked, keeping his eyes on the road and his foot on the pedal.

He had miles to go before he slept. Nebraska was a long state. A long, uneventful, incredibly even-planed state. It played tricks on you, as the road unwound straight to the horizon, crossing and recrossing the damned Platte River, as if you were going in a circle, not a line. The Platte River was like the Styx—unless you were Charon, you could never escape crossing it.

Because whoever is calling them is strong. They can hear. And they are answering.

“So?” Joe asked. “What am I supposed to do about it?”

Nothing.

Joe watched the orange-fire tongs reaching low over the horizon, watched the light stretch and grab one last futile time before fading into a memory of sunset’s oblivion.

“Then why even bother to tell me?” Joe asked again.

Because I thought you’d want to know.

Joe didn’t say anything.

I thought you’d want to know that you don’t have very much time left to live.

The demon in his head began to laugh, louder and louder until Malachai’s invisible power manifested itself physically, cracking the Hyundai’s aging vinyl ceiling until it dripped dusty blood over his head.

Joe sneezed and shook his head in irritation. The demon had a penchant for the dramatic.

They’ll kill you and everybody you’ve ever known.

Images of Angelica and her daughter, Cindy, flashed before his eyes. He’d left them both behind in his flight from Terrel. It was Malachai’s fault that he had gotten close to each of them, and Joe’s fault that the two women had been brought back together, 18 years after Angelica had given Cindy up for adoption in a vain hope to save her child from the grasp of the demon.

Thanks to Joe, Angelica’s effort and estrangement had almost been in vain. But in the end, Joe had also saved both of them from Malachai’s enslavement. The demon had held an entire town in thrall, thanks to a century-old covenant. The creature had holed up in Terrel’s Peak, a cliff just outside of the seaport town, and demanded blood sacrifices every year to protect the townsfolk from an even worse fate—an incursion from the Curburide, a howling scourge of sadistic succubi that would have, if they’d had their way, fucked and flayed the flesh from every living being in Terrel. While Malachai had kept his bargain and protected the town from the Curburide, he had also struck a side deal to serve his own sadistic ends. A deal which would have resulted in Cindy’s death, had Joe not managed to uncover the demon’s real name and bind its service to him.

But in saving Cindy from the clutches of the demon Malachai, and also freeing Angelica, Joe had taken on an awful burden. The demon was now locked in servitude to him. The terms of the contract bound Malachai to Joe, and required that he do whatever Joe asked if he was to continue to have access to the earthly realm. One of Joe’s first commands had been that the demon would not harm him or those he loved. But Joe had no doubt that the spiteful creature would do its best to quietly put him in harm’s way, for when Joe was dead, it was unbound again. Free. It would then be able to swindle some other unwitting soul to strike a new covenant. One that would give Malachai all the advantages.

Part of him was ready to grant the demon its freedom. Part of him was ready to just lie down in the center of the road and wait for a semi to come along and cleave him in half. Let it all hang out.

Life hadn’t turned out the way he’d planned. Joe had landed a plum job at the
Chicago Tribune
right out of college, and had taken to big-city reporting like a hound to a rabbit trail. He loved uncovering city hall corruption. He had broken the story about the police superintendent and his connection to the Colombian drug lord, Anabi Urubu. In a matter of months, Joe had put together a network of street kids who traded all sorts of information with him. He’d put the bust on a school principal for child pornography, and gotten a city ward boss put away for his dealings with the mob.

Joe had taken to the game with relish, never realizing that his girlfriend, the woman he intended to marry, was also in bed with the wrong crowd. And one of his exposé pieces on corruption in the district courthouse had landed her in jail for graft and forgery. She’d refused to see him after her indictment, and his fervor for turning over stones had soured. He suddenly didn’t want to know what people hid in their bottom drawers and back rooms. He didn’t want to know who they saw after dark, down by the alley at 83rd and Halsted. He didn’t want to do anything but watch his own backyard. Play it safe.

Stay home.

The stories dried up, and his street network disappeared. It only took a couple missed visits to make those kids turn skittish and taciturn. One day, Joe went home from the paper, threw his clothes in a suitcase, his books and CDs and papers in a couple boxes, and got in his car and drove. He’d driven to the end of the world, the East Coast town of Terrel, right on the ocean. Ironically, in his desperation to escape the million minor sins of the big city, after only being in the tiny town of Terrel a few weeks he’d discovered a ring of murders that was bigger than any small-time crack dealer and welfare department grafter. He’d gone from mundane, selfish thievery to malevolence that transcended generations.

He’d lost a thieving girlfriend from his bed and gained a deadly demon in his head. Hardly a bargain.

The last bloody rays of sunlight faded without further conversation, and Joe’s world contracted to a thin ribbon of yellow-striped asphalt. He rubbed his eyes, squinting into the headlight-burned night, and decided to call it a day when a green sign flashed by advertising ogallala, 2 miles. He’d been on the road for nearly 12 hours, and it was time for a rest. He was humming a Creedence Clearwater Revival song when he pulled off the exit and headed for the center of town. The last place he’d gotten gas at hadn’t been big enough to call a “town” in his estimation. It had consisted of a graying general store that seemed more a giant moldering growth on the pavement than a planned structure, a Clark service station with orange, rounded pumps from the 1960s and a tilted rusting grain silo. It was essentially a crossroads where soybean farmers met on Friday nights.

He hoped that Ogallala would prove larger. It appeared as a bold spot on his Nebraska map, which was a good sign.

He was in the “downtown” area in minutes, and pulled up to a small brick façade that boasted in simple blue neon, brill’s. A Budweiser sign glowed in the window.

Joe killed the engine and stepped out of the car into the crisp night air. He hadn’t realized how stuffy the car had gotten until he stepped out of it with a groan of stiff joints. His stomach turned over and he realized that not only was he stiff, but he was starving. He pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped inside.

Brill’s was a good-sized bar, with two pool tables off to one side, and a long bar on the other. He could see the grill behind the bar to one side, and a healthy selection of whiskies, vodkas and gins against the center wall.

“Evening.”

The voice was heavy and husky, but friendly. It came from a big man behind the bar, moving out of the shadows and into the red glow of a Pabst Blue Ribbon sign.

“Hi,” Joe said, pulling up a stool at the bar. Only one other stool was taken. A thin, grizzled man nursed something amber over ice at the end of the bar.

“Quiet night, eh?” Joe offered.

The big man nodded, drying his hands on a stained white towel. Joe saw he’d been washing glasses in a small sink when he’d come in.

“Not much going on here on a Tuesday night,” the man said, and held out a hand.

“Frank,” he said. “Frank Brill. You just off the highway?”

It was Joe’s turn to nod.

“Then you’ll be wanting a meal and a room, yes?”

Joe smiled. “You nailed it.”

“I can handle the one; you’ll find the other about two blocks down. Prescott Hotel. Not a bad place for a night.”

Frank pulled a menu out from beneath the bar and set it in front of Joe.

“You can look at this if you want, and Jenny will rustle up anything from here that you want, but”—he leaned forward conspiratorially, after glancing over his shoulder at the double doors in the back of the grill area—“I’d stick with the hamburger and fries if I was you,” he whispered.

“Done,” Joe said, pushing the menu back. “Got anything on tap?”

“Miller, Bud, Coors,” Frank said. “What can I pull you?”

“MGD,” Joe said, and glanced up at the TV flickering above them in the corner. A female news commentator with overly red lips and smallish eyes was mouthing cheerily as footage of a black body bag being carried to an ambulance played in a small window next to her sickly happy face.

“You hear about this nutjob?” Frank asked, thumbing at the screen as he pulled a beer from the tap.

Joe shook his head.

“Third stiff they’ve found so far, and each in a different city.”

“New serial killer?” Joe asked, and took a healthy swallow from the heavy pint that Frank passed over.

“Apparently.” The burly barkeep shook his head and grimaced.

“If the murders have been in different cities how do they know it’s the same guy?” Joe asked. The beer slid down his throat and took away the imaginary dust of a day of travel.

“Same scenario in each place,” Frank said. “Real freak show. All three bodies have been found in hotels, in rooms rented by a woman with black hair. She apparently picks ’em up at a bar, brings ’em back, strips ’em and then slices their throats. The police aren’t saying what else she does, but it must be pretty twisted, because they’re saying each killing was done exactly the same way. When the second one happened, they knew immediately it was done by the same person. She’s cutting up more ‘n just their throats, I’d guess.”

Frank looked away from the TV and called to the back: “Jenny! Burger and fries up!”

“I’ve been on the road the past couple days,” Joe said. “When did this all start?”

Frank picked up a glass near the sink and started toweling it dry with the dirty rag he’d wiped his hands on a moment before.

“San Francisco,” he said. “A week or two ago. Then Phoenix. This one that they’re talking about was last night. Down in Austin, Texas. Poor schmuck still had some clown makeup left on his face from Halloween.”

“Creepy,” Joe said, and took another swig.

“Make you think twice about who you go home with after last call, that’s for sure,” Frank said, turning away. “Excuse me.”

The bar owner shuffled into the back with a stack of glasses, and Joe noticed the old man at the end of the bar was staring at him. The guy looked at least 65, with long silver-speckled black hair matted around his ears and collar. A two-day growth of beard salt-and-peppered his wrinkled, sunken cheeks. His eyes were black in the low light of the bar, but Joe could see clearly that the man was grinning.

“They’re coming,” the man said, head nodding vigorously. “Oh yes,” he said, getting up from his stool and moving quickly to the exit. His eyes never left Joe as his hands pushed the door open. “They’re coming.”

Joe’s heart leapt.

“Who’s coming?” he asked, but the man was already through the swinging door of the entryway. Joe jumped off his stool and went after the man, pushing through the swinging saloon-style doors and pressing his shoulder to the heavy wooden outer door that he’d come in through.

The air was cooler outside, and the handful of streetlights did nothing to blot out the velvet black sky awash with pinpricks of light. There were a couple cars parked on the main street, but the lights in the shop windows on either side of the bar were out, and there was no sign of the old man. The breeze tickled the hair on the back of his neck.

“Who’s coming?” he murmured to himself, and stepped back inside.

In his head, he heard only laughter.

Ariana stepped off the St. Charles Street trolley and sighed. It was a typically hot, sticky day, but she was right where she wanted to be. In the heart of New Orleans. The center of voodoo, albeit overrun with tourists. She stepped quickly across the street and into the welcoming neighborhood of the Garden District. She had some time to kill, before she found some
one
to kill.

Her steps clicked in staccato time on the uneven sidewalk. She had ditched her latex before leaving the hotel, but was still wearing her black spike boots with the more sedate blue jeans and a black tee. While you could wear basically anything in the Quarter without drawing a stare, Ariana did not want to draw undue interest here. She’d picked up a new latex bustier with plenty of useless yet intriguing chains and zippers at Dark Entry, a fetish boutique on Bourbon, and thought she might model it for the denizens of the Shim Sham club later to night. She’d modeled it for herself back at the hotel, and liked what she saw. Her thighs warmed at the thought of using it as bait to night. Thinking of having a man’s head nestled between her legs, unknowing of the sacrifice he was about to make, was all she thought about anymore. Which was funny, because initially, just a week before, she had never believed she could go through with it. She had trawled for weeks before finally acting. And then, just a week ago at the Cat Club in San Francisco, she’d found the perfect mark. She’d been at the club before, a curious wallflower enjoying the scent of withheld sex and unspent desire, but this time, she was there to participate. It was Sunday, and the leather-whipped crowd took over the club and acted like it was a Friday. They even staged a mini bondage demonstration on the upstairs level. The perfect spot for the man she needed to find, to begin her Calling.

She had read the passages over and over again. The ancient book was very explicit, but also very convoluted, its diction archaic and at times confusing. She wanted to get it right. There were incantations to say, and rituals to perform. Done out of sequence and the Calling wouldn’t be heard.

And so, after sitting at her kitchen table and reading the chapter on Calling a dozen times, Ariana had slipped out of her business clothes from another stale day at the bank, meticulously smoothing and hanging her blouse and skirt in the closet. And then, still clad in a black silk panty and bra set, she had reached into the back of her wardrobe, behind the camisoles and fluffy white blouses and conservative black and cream-colored jackets, and pulled out her tight black leather pants. They didn’t come out often, and she worried that she might no longer be able to squeeze her thighs into them. But she needn’t have worried. Ariana easily slipped one long calf into the long hole of a pant leg, and then stepped in with the other, shimmying the pants up high and tight around her pelvis, until she could barely breathe. Then she pulled a filmy black mesh shirt from the same hidden spot in the back of her closet, and pulled it over the curve of her black bra. The lace edging of the bra remained easily visible, but still somewhat obscured by the crisscross holes of the cotton top, and she nodded at the revealing, teasing effect in the mirror. Reaching into a drawer by her bed, she pulled out a silver-studded black leather collar, and matching wristbands.

From her dresser, she retrieved and draped a silver cross on a black string over her head, and then poked in a pair of skull earrings. She stopped in the bathroom on the way downstairs, and pulled a razor blade from between the Tylenol and the decongestant bottles. Slipping it into the zipped pocket of her leather pants, Ariana slid into the backseat of the waiting cab.

“Clubbing to night?” the cabbie observed, and she didn’t deign to answer.

“Cat Club,” she said. “On Folsom.”

He took the hint, and didn’t make further conversation, so she gave him a $3 tip when they got to the curb of the club.

The black lights made the white of her skin look blue, and Ariana danced in the half-empty center of the club’s downstairs, waiting patiently for the space to fill with more freakily garbed frolickers before she made her way up the dark stairs, into the bondage half of the evening. A gay boy in tight leather, waist chain and a mesh top gyrated wildly in one of the cages suspended 10 feet above the black paint of the converted warehouse dance floor. Across the other side of the space, two blondes in raven leather minis and matching bras did the shimmy and dip with each other in the second cage. You could almost taste the cherry of their lipstick.

Ariana stayed on the floor, quietly swirling and twisting to the gloomy sounds of The Cure and the industrial pound of Skinny Puppy. When the DJ announced the start of the fetish parade upstairs, Ariana blended into the crowd heading upwards, and then picked her spot at the side of the small stage. She watched as a brunette in a red mini and fishnet stockings bent over and exposed a wide, white ass to the crowd, while a dominatrix in knee-high black boots and a latex bodysuit twirled the strands of a spanking flail, and then proceeded to smack the brunette in smooth circular motions across her exposed behind. The woman grunted and called out at each slap, but when she turned her face towards the crowd, it was with a slack expression of ecstasy.

Ariana stepped away to order a coke at the bar and returned to watch a buff boy in a ripped T-shirt bend over for a workout by the dominatrix. She enjoyed watching him shiver and grip the restraints tighter with each ever-louder crack of the whip. His back soon glistened with sweat and angry red stripes covered his skin when he left the ring. A fat, balding executive type took his place, eagerly stripping down to a pair of white cotton briefs and letting his hairy white gut hang out as he bent over to accept the strap from the club’s master of discipline.

Ariana stifled a laugh and shook her head, waiting for the right man. He turned out to be already standing next to her. As the fat man on the stage screwed up his lips and rolled back his eyes at the attention, the fair-haired, blue-eyed guy beside her leaned over and whispered, “I could never embarrass myself like that in public.”

“Ahh,” she returned coyly, “but could you do it in private?”

He’d slipped a hand around her waist almost instantly, and suggested, “I could be convinced.”

That had been just a month ago. Ariana smiled as she walked confidently and alone down the sidewalk of the Garden District, remembering his first advances, and subsequent screams. He
had
been convinced. And she had paddled his ass red and raw with a rolled-up magazine, thoughtfully provided by the hotel, before she had drawn the razor across his neck and kissed him a bloody good night on the floor.

He had been her first, and he had been amazingly easy. He had allowed her to tie his wrists together, and had begged for mercy when she told him to get down on his knees with his hands behind his back. “Kiss my feet!” she had yelled when he started to look up at her.

He had thought it all a game until the spots of blood rained down on the toes. He was busy kissing, and the warm hint of something strangely amiss had made him ignore her commands and try to twist his head upwards to see what she had done. But by then it was too late. His jugular was spraying her calves with his life, and he trembled with shock and fear and confusion as she said the words:

“I call you in death, as you ravaged in life
I call you to breath, as you gasped for all strife
Your wants and needs I beg you fulfill
Your victims so near to suck and to kill
Break the veil
Come inside the earth to rule
Break the veil
Hold the heart that beats in each fool
Slip inside my mind and ride
I call thee, call thee Curburide.”

Was it coincidence, or had the hotel lights dimmed as she’d spoken those words, and drawn her razor a final time across his throat, in the midst of the circle of the 16 bones, and the 21 pebbles?

She couldn’t be sure of that, but Ariana
had
been sure that she’d felt the oily electricity of the Curburide’s feathery kiss on her forehead, as she leaned to kiss the blood from her first victim’s own lips, spotted like freckles across his face. He struggled no more and she mounted him only then, long after his spirit had fled. She rode him clumsily in a last homage to his burgeoning life, and in a calculated perversion to appease and interest the Curburide.

She’d gained their attention, she thought. But it would take more sacrifices to gain their trust. And feed their power. Ariana stepped quickly down 1st Street and admired the bougainvillea-covered brick walls and wrought-iron gates. She stopped before the long iron filigree that extended from the gate of one home, where a perfect pink rose hung on a thin, pale green branch, just in front of the gate’s black bars. Two red-bricked pillars flanked the gate and a flagstone walk led towards a beautiful collection of topiaries and flower beds. The rose seemed to guard the entrance, offering both beauty and the warning of thorns.

The mansions here were beautiful, de cadent, and she could almost taste the old money. She strode on easily from manse to manse, admiring the quiet formidability of them, the agelessness, the decaying porches and proud Grecian columns. This was old New Orleans.

Old, rich New Orleans. She breathed in the lightly scented air and smiled. Today, the rich. Tonight, the de cadent.

What a feast she would have.

Joe pulled down the covers of the old, flowered comforter and stifled a sneeze. He wondered if the sheets had been changed on this bed in the past three years. He could almost see the bedbugs crawling down to the foot of the mattress to escape the light.

He’d downed his burger and beer at Brill’s in record time, being the only person in the joint, and checked in at The Prescott, as Frank had suggested, just a few minutes shy of 9 p.m.

The hotel turned out to be a converted home, and the Prescotts seemed nice enough people, though Joe really didn’t want to sit a spell and chat in the parlor with them. After listening to Mrs. Prescott’s recipe for perfect piecrust, he excused himself and pulled the door of his second-floor suite shut, turning the old copper lock behind him. He didn’t bother to unpack his suitcase, except to pull out a tube of toothpaste and his brush. He wouldn’t be staying past the morning.

In bed, he followed every crack in the ceiling with his eyes, and counted the daisy blooms on the wallpaper next to him. But it didn’t help. He couldn’t get the words of the old man out of his head.

“They’re coming.”

You heard it here first,
Malachai whispered in his back-brain.

“So they’re coming, what am I supposed to do about it?” he whispered, the musty taste of old sheets tamping across his tongue.

Nothing at all,
Malachai soothed.
Nothing at all.

Joe considered. The spirit had stopped the incursion of the dream demons once before, if the journal of Broderick Terrel was to be believed. Joe had stood in the damp bowels of Terrel’s Peak and read that tome. Read of how Broderick had bargained with a demon named Malachai to stop the Curburide invasion and save his precious coastal town of Terrel, in exchange for one blood sacrifice every year.

“How did you do it?” he whispered into the black room. “How did you stop them before?”

With hate,
came the reply.
Hate…and blood.

Joe slipped into troubled dreams.