The Devil Dances (16 page)

“Fuck it.” I lit a cigarette. I checked my pockets for loose Gummi Bears without lint on them. It wasn’t a solution, but it was a quick fix.

As I approached the edge of the property line, which doubled as the edge of my protective magickal barrier, I decided I had better put my personal stuff aside and get my shit together. I leaned against an old sycamore tree and dug out my phone, hitting speed dial.

“Nick,” came Morgana’s voice. She sounded a little surprised to hear me.

“Hey. How are things going? Anything new with the shop?”

“Going well… and the usual. Sheriff Ben came by to invite you to some powwow he and his Shawnee friends are attending, and Mrs. Bailey dropped in to pick up her arthritis medication. They wanted to know where you were.”

“You told them?”

“I said you ran away to join the Amish, but they didn’t believe me.”

I guffawed. “How’s Anton holding up?”

“He loves the shop. I may get rid of you and take him on full time. He doesn’t smoke or eat the candy, and he’s a lot more fun to be around.”

“Oh, come on, you can’t say having the Prince of Darkness around the shop isn’t fun.”

“Fun… and generally very dangerous,” she reminded me.

“Malach hasn’t shown up, has he?”

“Haven’t seen hide nor hair.”

We made idle chitchat for a few minutes before she dropped the bomb. “Is everything all right out there in Amish land? Are you well?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I’ve been off my game, frankly. I’ve been thinking about you all day. And last night I dreamed about you, Nick. It wasn’t good.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Morgana…”

It took a little more coaxing on my part before she gave in. “I dreamed I went to a party, and when I arrived, you were there to greet me. You kissed my hand, but your eyes were all wrong. They weren’t your eyes, and there were serpent tattoos moving on your skin. You introduced me to a woman sitting on a red sofa. You called her The Queen. Then you introduced me to another man I couldn’t see clearly, and this man you called Therion. You said I was welcomed to the Feast of All Saints, and after your two companions had knelt down to you, very formally, we sat down and started consuming all these screaming infants floating in a stewpot. Then I woke up.”

“Jesus… okay,” I said. “I have no idea what that means.”

“Neither do I. But I was terrified the whole time.”

“Is this one of your dreams where everything is distorted and symbolic, or is it more literal, do you think?”

“I have no idea, but I’m worried about you, Nick. I’m worried you’re in over your head.”

“Who, me?” I told her, trying to make light of the situation.

“I’m serious, Nick. I have a bad feeling. The Divine you’ve been speaking, these dreams… I feel like something important is going to happen to you, and soon, and it’s going to change you. I wish I could be there to help you.”

“You know me, Morgana. No matter what happens, I will
never
change.”

“I hope not. I like you sloppy, smartass, and non-evil.”

I smiled at that. “Look, there’s a reason I’m calling.” I started filling her in on things while I began trudging through Mulberry Grove, leaf litter and branches crunching under my boots. It didn’t seem nearly as scary and impenetrable during the day, and having Morgana on the line bolstered my courage. It was like having backup while going into the lair of a potential suspect.

“I thought you were there searching for why that young man died. Caleb?”

“I’m sure that’s tied into this somehow.” I told her about little Sarah’s possession, and about the mysterious pregnancies.

“Do you really think this is demonic in origin?”

“What else could it be? An angel?”

“Angels and demons are technically the same species. One simply lives in a state of Grace while one does not. What’s to say some group of angels isn’t behind this?”

“Angelic possession?” I scoffed. “Angelic impregnation?”

“Why not? The accords that protect humans from angelic interference have been removed with the vacancy of the Throne. What’s there to say the Hosts haven’t fractured, that maybe there are radical sects that are trying to birth a new Savior? And what better place than a secluded Amish community to launch their jihad?”

She made some very good points. “But these girls are so young, so innocent. It’s immoral, disgusting, repulsive…”

“You’ve dealt with sociopathic angels. What’s your point?”

I grunted in acknowledgment.

“Look, I’m not saying it’s angels specifically, only that you need to leave yourself open to plenty of possibilities. Just because it barks like a dog doesn’t mean it’s a dog. I think after all you’ve been through, you know that. Let me consult with Anton. He has more experience with esoteric theology. He used to teach in college.”

“Sounds good.”

We wished each other well, and I promised Morgana I would consume no screaming infants, nor get any serpent tattoos while I was away, then hit the END button, which was just as well. The forest had thinned out considerably, and I was now standing in a manmade clearing at the edge of a huge valley that was almost perfectly round, like a natural bowl carved into the earth.

Frankly, I expected a legendary bad place to
look
bad, ominous. Instead, there was a lushness here that was nearly obscene in its intensity. The grasses were an almost electric green, the heads of the wildflowers so huge they drooped and nodded in the summer breeze, the fruiting bushes—blackberry, mulberry, gooseberry among them—frighteningly sumptuous to behold. I walked to the edge of the incline where the ground sloped away, glaring at everything suspiciously, even the perfectly chosen azure of the cloudless sky above. The grove felt warm, inviting, exciting. Refreshing. It looked less like a real forest clearing and more like an artist’s rendering of a fairytale landscape, the kind where you expect fairies with gossamer wings to be flitting from flower to flower and unicorns to be grazing in mirrored ponds of water.

In short, I hated it. And deeply distrusted it.

I stopped and looked down. The grass was more tramped down here, and the wildflowers sparser, like a place often visited, often used. A black Swartzcopf
kapp
lay snagged on the bountiful branches of a wild rose bush, and further on, some kind of woman’s undergarment. Down the slope of the vale, a few hundred feet away, an intricately carved, obviously manmade stone altar was sitting bright, white, and surreal in the middle of all the lush greenness of the grove.

Well, I thought, things are just going to hell, aren’t they?

I approached the altar carefully. It was made of smooth, white, Grecian marble and shaped a little like an overlarge cradle. The cradle-piece was supported on the back of a huge, expertly detailed stag caught in mid-leap, head down, antlers extended, so real-looking I half-expected it to move. From the antlers hung a set of Greek pipes, similar to the kind that Brownswick, my faun familiar back in Blackwater, favored. I wondered if these were the pipes that Vivian had heard played last night when she’d been sleepwalking.

I snapped some pictures of the altar from different angles with my camera phone with the intention of emailing them to Morgana and Anton. Then, not exactly being the wilting violet type, I approached it. I measured the height of the cradle with my hand and compared it to my own height. It came to about chin-height on me, not too tall for me to reach. I scrabbled my way up onto the altar to better examine it, both on a physical and spiritual level.

There were old and varied bloodstains ingrained in the marble, but not the kind you normally associated with, say, a Mayan altar of sacrifice. These were streaks of blood, not splashes. I touched an old stain and a detailed vision hit me with the power of a migraine. Suffice to say it entailed little Sarah screaming, terror-stricken and in pain, in this very spot, while some great, unseen creature loomed over her, thrusting violently into her helpless little body. The impact made me shirk and fall from the cradle like I’d been sucker punched. I dropped to the ground on my hands and knees while the whole altar groaned in agony and I clawed at the ground to get as far away from it as I could.

The ground lurched beneath me, rippled like the hide of a displeased animal, and I dropped to my side, sort of bundling myself up as I turned to glare at the altar. Steam rose off the stone where I had touched it, and in that steam I saw the dull, barely-recognizable features of a coarse male face, its mouth wide open and gaping as it screamed in mortal agony. It stared at me with beady, virulent eyes, and again I jerked as if someone had punched me in the gut, hard and fast. It was an especially painful, but obvious Keep Out gesture, but even crawling away through the dirt didn’t ease the dull, throbbing ache, and five minutes later I was still cursing and shaking like I had a bad fever.

“Fuck,” I said, as I retreated all the way to the tree line and huddled against the bark of an old maple. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I didn’t know what hurt more, the angry power of the unseen entity, or the visions it had fucked into my mind. I clutched my head and seriously thought about clawing at my skull to get the visions out, but that would be silly and unconstructive. I thought about that old Internet adage:
What is seen cannot be unseen.
Fuck, yeah. But this was far worse than anything I’d ever seen on the Internet, and that was saying a lot.

I sensed a presence beside me. I nearly jumped out of my skin, but when I glanced over, I realized my dad was sitting in the low branches of a flowering magnolia tree. “Jesus-fucking-Christ, you scared the shit out of me!”

“I saw Jesus Christ recently, in a biker bar at Sturgis,” my dad said as he studied the altar from afar. “But he wasn’t fucking anyone, which was a shame. There were some pretty hot pieces of ass in that bar, and what’s the point of being on vacation if you can’t get a little pussy?”

“Are you here for a reason, or just so you can bum more cigarettes?” I realized then that my life had reached a new low. The Devil was sitting with me in a haunted grove, and I was sighing with relief, thankful that it wasn’t something really scary. How sad is that?

He plucked out his tin of Dunhill cigarettes to show me he’d remembered them this time, then proceeded to light one by looking at it. Nice trick. “I figured you might need some help with this.” He indicated the altar with the self-lighting Dunhill. I once asked him why he smoked the world’s most expensive cigarette, and he told me it was because he was a man of wealth and taste, at least according to Mick Jagger.

“I don’t need your help,” I said petulantly. Just to prove it, I climbed to my feet, swept the dust off my coat, and took a few vindictive steps toward the altar. This time, the altar reacted to my affront, and when I was only a few feet away, a long scratch opened up on my cheek from some invisible assault. I couldn’t see the weapon that had dealt it, but I sure as hell could feel it. I flinched and withdrew, putting out a hand in defense. Immediately, another scratch opened up, bright, wet, scarlet, this time on my palm, as if someone had cut me with a sharp kitchen knife. I jerked it back. “
Je
-sus.”

“Finished?”

“What the hell is this?” I stared at the rivulet of blood pouring from my wound.

Dad sighed, took the handkerchief he always kept in his pocket, and wrapped it around my hand. It was pretty obvious to me that I wasn’t getting any closer to the altar—not before being flayed alive, anyway. “What do you think?”

“Not demonic, or I could touch it.”

“But not godly because God is dead.”

“On vacation,” I reminded him, taking my hand back.

He shrugged. “It’s an altar to an Old One.”

“Cthulhu? Yog-Sothoth?”

He gave me an exasperated look.

If I wasn’t in so much pain, I might have enjoyed that. I might have laughed at his irritation. But the truth was, this wasn’t funny. I knew what he was talking about. Well, kind of. Ol’ Lovecraft, with his many-tentacled gods and doorways to the stars, hadn’t been too far off the mark.

Long ago, when I’d first started working the Craft under her tutelage, Morgana had instructed me in some of the older polytheistic theories, the stories of ancient, pre-Earth gods who had fought for dominion over the universe. In those old tales, all had fallen at the hands of the One True God, whose army of angels had successfully vanquished the others—kind of like Napoleon overrunning his enemies. After his victory, God locked those lesser, defeated gods away in suitable earthly—or unearthly—prisons, then re-formed the universe to fit His own vision of time and space. Thus, that whole thing came about with the “making everything in His own image, etc., etc.” That was the story, anyway, but I didn’t always put a lot of stock in stories. I mean, they’re called
stories
for a reason.

“You think this is an altar stone to some pre-Earth deity?” I said.

“I don’t
think
, Nick. I know.” He crossed his long legs and gave me what I had come to think of as his Emperor Ming look. “Before Lucifer ruled the underworld, he was a general in God’s army, the greatest warrior archangel that God had ever created. Don’t you think he would know something about this?”