The Devil Dances (2 page)

About a year ago, I’d begun teaching Vivian the rudiments of the Craft. So far, she was an apt student, and that was saying a lot, since I was never exactly a very good teacher to anyone. “I think that’s prudent, don’t you? Better she contain it than lose control of it.”

“Just be careful.” She reached across the counter and touched my cheek. “I care about you. You
know
that.”

I smiled up at her complacently. “I’ll close the shop. You go on up. And stop worrying,
Mom.
” I gave her a wink as I finished checking out the last customer of the night. After that, I turned on the alarm system and went to lock the door.

By then, it was well past midnight, the witch’s hour. The night was unseasonably warm, and a gravid harvest moon coasted slowly over the tree-laden hills of the Lehigh Valley mountain region. I stood on the doorstep for a few minutes, my thumbs in the pockets of my jeans, breathing in the piney air and wood smoke from the homes that were just beginning to turn on their wood stoves for the night. I watched the Strip as the shopkeepers slowly turned off their lights and closed up their restaurants and little curio shops all up and down the street. In a place like rural Blackwater, they rolled the streets up well before one in the morning.

I’d moved here seven years ago, after retiring from the NYPD. Blackwater was the town where I’d been born, where my mother had been born, and her mother before her. I was what they called a
townie
—I had Blackwater in my blood—yet I was as much an outsider as the New Yorkers who regularly drove up here on the weekends to camp out and fish. I’d never really felt like I belonged here. Honestly? I’d never felt I belonged anywhere. But Blackwater was the closest thing to a home that I could claim.

I thought of that Moody Blues song,
You Can Never Go Home Again
, and I wondered if they were right. We all know about those creepy, closed-up New England communities that don’t want to give up their secrets, the out-of-the-way small towns that get talked about on the evening news because something spectacularly weird happens, Stephen King-style. Someone goes missing, never to be heard from again, or someone commits some heinous, unimaginable crime that rocks the foundation of what it is to be human. Well, I was living in one of those small towns. I came from one of those small towns full of darkness, secrets, and history. And I didn’t know how Blackwater felt about me, frankly.

“I don’t know what I’m searching for, I never have opened the door. Tomorrow might find me at last, turning my back on the past …” I muttered, even as I became aware of a presence stumbling toward me in the dark. I didn’t have my gun on me; generally speaking, the patronage at Curiosities, though odd at times, never really got that out of hand. But I did have the athame in my boot, the one that could literally eat holes through angels. When the Heavenly Host wants your head on a pike, you pack heat appropriately.

I had it in my hands in the spare few seconds just before the dark, faceless figure collided with me. I saw a young, frightened face, a shock of stringy hair, and wild, wounded eyes. I realized then that what had fallen upon me was no angel. It was just a frightened young man—a boy no more than nineteen, by my guesstimation.

“Hold up. What’s wrong?” I clutched his shoulders to keep him upright, but the boy made grunting noises and just clawed at the front of my pullover.

I dragged him inside the shop just as he folded in on himself and began to convulse like an epileptic. I knew enough to get him on the floor and on his side so he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit, but his body began to thrash violently, and it wasn’t long before he sprang out of my arms and landed on his back. I held him down to keep him from doing any more damage to himself. Under the lights of the shop, I saw the look of abject terror carved into his young face, the lines drawn around his gaping mouth and bulging eyes.

An electricity pulsed off him, a kind of psychic residue I didn’t associate with normal human beings. In that moment, his flesh seemed to turn translucent and I saw vines of black magick twining beneath it, crawling over his face and body like the claws of some unseen monster. I tried a quick spell to counteract whatever curse he was under, but whatever had him was strong—one of the strongest magicks I had ever seen—and soon pustules formed on the surface of his skin like little erupting volcanoes, and his eyes and mouth filled with blood. It poured from his nose and ears, and from every other orifice, creating a dark, oily slick beneath his suffering, convulsing body.

I held him down amidst all that blood, my heart ticking wildly in my throat, and said, “Who did this to you? Tell me his name.”

It was over too quickly.

The boy made a low moan before his skull clunked back on the floor, his eyes staring sightlessly up at the ceiling where a series of kitschy antler chandeliers were swaying and buzzing as the lights suffered under the power of the sudden, unexpected magickal load.

By then, I was covered in the boy’s blood. It gloved my hands up to the elbows and had drenched the front of my shirt. It took me three tries to dig out my cell phone and thumb in 9-1-1, not that it was going to do the boy any good at this point. I hadn’t killed him, but I knew I was in for a long night of questions down at the police station by Blackwater’s Finest.

So my hometown was about to throw some new weird shit at me.

Well, there goes my relaxing Friday night out.

yphilis?” I said into the speaker attached to the wall of the local coroner’s office.
On the other side of the glass partition separating me from the sterile operating theater, Derrek Hambly, Blackwater’s one and only coroner, nodded as he removed his surgical mask and went to wash up at the big, stainless steel sink at the opposite end of the room.

“I ran the test twice. It came back syphilis,” he said. “And I hope you appreciate me doing this on a Saturday afternoon. My wife ain’t going to put out tonight if I don’t take her to this fancy new steakhouse down in Cherry Hill that she found. They serve New York strip steak there, you know. It’s hard to get a good strip streak in these parts.”

I wondered how Derrek managed to eat steak after carving up various citizens of Blackwater all day, but whatever. I leaned against the glass and said, “You sound more and more like Gordy the Ghoul every day, you know that, Derrek?”

“Aw, does that make you my Kolchak?” He toweled off, and one of his assistants came to wheel the body away to the refrigeration unit.

“I don’t have a straw fedora.”

Derrek grinned. “Now I know what to get Nick Englebrecht for Christmas.”

He started pushing against the door leading out of the operating theater, but I held it shut. “Tell me about syphilis,” I prompted.

“No.”

“People don’t actually die of that anymore, do they?”

Derrek sighed. “They do in Third World Countries.”

“I mean here. Now.”

He stopped struggling to open the door. Derrek was short, bald, and slight. I had six inches on him and more than forty pounds. Rumor had it he’d spent a generous amount of time being locked inside his locker in high school, courtesy of the jocks. He wasn’t going to win.

“Nada,” he finally relented.

“Tell me more.”

“Nick …”

“Information, or no pussy or steak for you tonight.”

He sighed with exasperation. “Syphilis affects about twelve million people a year, almost all in the developing world—which leads me to believe he was from someplace else, maybe South America, though it’s hard to even be sure what race he is through all the cankers. The disease presents itself in four states—primary, secondary, latent and tertiary.”

“Tertiary being dead.”

Derrek gave me an impatient look through the window. “Pretty much. Your boy was
very
tertiary. Probably infected at birth. But, lucky for you—and whoever else he’d been with—he wasn’t infectious at the time of his death.”

I leaned against the door and stuck my hands in the pockets of my yellow Dick Tracy coat. “Why do you say that?”

“Syphilis takes at least fifteen years to develop, and he was on his way out for a while now.”

“He didn’t look that bad when I first saw him.”

“You didn’t notice the cankers all over his body?”

I
had
noticed them but only after he was dead—huge, suppurating sores that had practically obliterated the boy’s once-handsome features—though I hadn’t bothered to mention that to anyone on the scene. Not to the police, Derrek, or even Ben Oswald, whom I considered a friend, one of my few. There was no point in overcomplicating my already complicated life.
Yeah, Ben, I’m pretty sure it was magick that killed that boy and exploded his blood all over the floor of my shop. How do I know? Oh, I’m the Prince and Heir to Hell, and my dad and this town are always throwing weird shit at me. I’m used to it.

You see how that sounds.

Derrek went on to explain how the CDC was dropping by later today, just as a precaution, but they, too, were convinced that it was just a case of your garden variety Third-World-Country Syphilis run amok in the body of a promiscuous young man. In our modern era of AIDS and unprotected sex, I could see their point, I suppose.

“You didn’t notice his condition? I mean… really?”

“It was dark.”

Derrek gave me a droll look. “And you claim to be a psychic detective.”

I stepped out of his way. “I claim no such thing.”

Derrek stepped out of the operating theatre and rolled his eyes as he reached for his coat on the hook by the door. “If you couldn’t see what kind of terrible condition that boy was in when you found him, then you need glasses, Englebrecht.”

I ignored his ribbing and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Back up a moment. You said something about him being with someone. As in sex?”

“A preliminary examination of the rectum indicates that he’d had sexual relations at least a few times in the last twenty-four hours, so yeah. He was having sex. A lot of it from the tears in the rectal lining. Why anyone would have sex with a kid with tertiary Syphilis, I have no idea. It leaves me wondering about the state of the human race, you know?”

“Very curious,” I agreed.

He threw his hands up. “This whole town is curious, Englebrecht.”

“Enjoy your steak and pussy,” I told him as he walked out the door.