The car is empty. I wave my hand and wait for Hollett and Nariko to catch up. They crouch next to me at the rear of the Magnum and look inside.
Empty. There’s barely any dirt on the floorboards, let alone any evidence as to what the lovers are planning. Nariko reaches in through the driver’s side and switches off the headlights, then we close the doors. Darkness reigns again. We wait a couple of moments, letting our night vision return, then we slide around to the front of the car.
The first body is lying an arm’s length away from the Raptor. He has the fair hair of a Reese, but I can’t identify him. His body is a flat wet mess. He looks like an islander that King Kong picked up and squeezed in his fist. Hollett kneels down by the man’s head, careful not to put his knee in anything sticky. He’s breathing has gotten rough. I’m not as shaken up by the state of the corpse as I once would have been. It’s not the first time something unknown squashed a man in this town.
“Carter,” he whispers. “Good lord, what did this?”
Carter Reese. Calvin’s older brother, Clive’s oldest son. This isn’t going to go over well back at the homestead.
“It was Kenta,” Nariko whispers.
“What did he do to him?”
“He used a Gauntlet. One of father’s bestselling products. He charmed a welder’s gauntlet to use projected force that mimics the movement of the wielder. He used it to pick this man up and crush him.”
“Damn. Your dad doesn’t mess around.”
“He never has.”
Looking past the flat wet mess I’m able to pick out more bodies in the darkness, all scattered, none standing. None of them have been pulped like Carter, but they’ve all felt violence tonight, quick and brutal and final. A quick tally brings the total to six, two per car. Checking their faces with my light I count four Reeses and two Gamagori. Hollett and Nariko pull out their phones and call their respective chiefs. The conversations, from my end, are dark, heavy whispers. They finish quickly, and we somberly look over the carnage the kids have left behind them.
“We would do well not to make the same mistake they did,” Nariko says.
“What’s that?” Hollett asks.
“Underestimate them.”
“That was never going to happen.”
I nod agreement. We move past the bodies, looking for a trail. It’s not hard to find. The kids didn’t even try to hide their tracks, four feet leading up the driveway towards the house. We follow in the same wedge as before.
The house is a ruined hulk with a crippled portico, sagging at the corners with a roof like a tired wet sponge. Once upon a time it had been a respectable, two-story Country French style home, with a steep roof and stone walls that, where they’re still standing, look remarkably sturdy. The roof has crumbled into the house in most places under the ravages of time and the elements, the broken windows looking like the battered eyes of a punch-drunk prizefighter. Being this far away from the town has kept the vandals away, but time has done what punk kids couldn’t.
We approach the house in a V-shape, myself and Hollett in front and Nariko a step behind us in the middle. Now that we’re in the open I can see their weapons. Hollett has what looks like a three-inch thorn lashed to an eight-inch rod of wood with leather straps. Nariko has a matte-black blade in each hand; short, chisel-bladed tanto knives.
We check it out, even though we can tell at a glance that they haven’t been in there. The windows that are still there are broken, giving plenty of space for us to see inside. It looks like half a century’s worth of dust, dry windblown grass and animal droppings laying on the floor like carpet. Nobody’s been in that house for years.
“There’s a barn around back,” Hollett whispers. We clear the corner of the house, careful not to get separated, and see what the barn has in store for us.
The roof of the barn collapsed long ago, jagged beams sticking menacingly into the night air like fangs. It took half the barn with it, making the whole structure lean drunkenly to the left. It looks like a pigeon landing on it might be enough to finish the slow-motion demolition Nature’s been inflicting on it.
What once might have been the path up to the barn has been consumed by the untamed yard, but the double doors are plainly visible. The weight of the collapsed wall has crumpled one. The other is wide open. We split up, Hollett and I approaching from the left and Nariko from the right. My flashlight reveals the weeds and dirt have been churned up in a wide arc on the open side. The door’s been forced open, violently, most likely by Kenta and his father’s glove. I find a chink in the decaying wall and look inside.
The interior of the barn is every bit as wrecked as the exterior. The collapsed roof has become a sea of jangled wooden planks and rusty nails, letting in enough moonlight to show us what’s happened to the floor. Not all of the warped boards came from above. A section of the floor twenty feet across has been pulled up like a potato skin under a giant vegetable peeler, floor rubble and barn rubble mixing happily together. The space laid bare by the removal of the floor was once hard-packed earth, but a bulldozer couldn’t have done a better job scraping it away. The space it once filled in the floor is obvious – there’s a great, gaping circular hole in the ground.
We line up at the barn door in our triangle. It feels weird, working with other people like this. Most of the time my assignments for the Aegis had me going solo, or at least taking point over a bunch of civilian subordinates and conspirators. Most Envoys showed an aversion to parterning up with me. I understood their reactions. I’d been something they had to work around, an additional problem to solve. It didn’t ruffle me too much. I’d gotten used to it. Now I’m working right alongside magical practitioners, and I’m not sure how I like it. Relying on others doesn’t come naturally to me.
Nariko, Hollett and I slip inside and fan out, approaching the hole from three directions. In the layer of dust around it I can make out two trails of footprints, one large and sneakered and one smaller and booted. One trail leads into the pit, one out.
“They went in here,” Hollett says, pointing to the tracks on the side of the hole nearest the front door.
“And they came out here,” I point out, indicating the other set of footprints.
“They are gone, but we know where they are going next,” Nariko says. “The town. After that we have no more clues. We must get there quickly.”
“They came here first for a reason,” I say. “I’d like to know what it was.”
“We have no time…”
“I hate to admit it,” Hollett says to Nariko, “but he’s right. It’ll only take a minute to scope this place out, and if they picked something up here that they’ll be using against us we stand a better chance against them if we know what it is.”
Nariko is still silent, but now it’s not a relaxed silence. It’s a slow boil in a covered pot. I peer down into the hole, but the darkness is absolute. “Anybody got a light?”
Hollett crouches next to me, one hand digging in a jacket pocket. He draws out a flat disc the size of a silver dollar, presses down on its top, and drops it in the hole. A moment later a stark white glow rises, casting a pillar of light that hits the ceiling like a spotlight.
“Must be nice,” I say, looking back down. The light is painfully bright to my unadjusted eyes, but after blinking for a few seconds my vision clears. Then I look back at him. “Not magical. Where’d you get it?”
“You should know better than anyone, Ian. The world isn’t all about magic.”
When I’m no longer seeing spots, I take a closer look at the ground in front of us. The hole looks like it punches through at least three feet of soil before it opens up into what looks like a cavern underneath the barn. Altogether it looks like about a fifteen-foot drop. The floor of the cavern is all I can see, but it looks natural. No type of construction that I can see, but best of all no movement.
“Looks clear,” I say.
“Then by all means,” Hollett says, gesturing politely towards the hole.
>
“Scared to go first?”
“Nearly always, when I don’t know what’s waiting for me. I’d have been dead long ago if I hadn’t been scared once in a while.”
“Think I’ll put that one on a T-shirt.” I stand up and look around the shattered floor for something that’ll get us down safely. There’s a coil of decades old rope that crumbles into dust when we touch it, the remains of an old wooden ladder that is too rotten to hold a child, and that’s about it.
In the end the three of us have to go back to Hollett’s van, where he keeps a fifty-foot length of black nylon rope as part of his emergency kit. I’ve seen weirder things in similar kits. Hell, I keep some odd stuff in my own. Still, part of me does wonder what experience he’s had that makes him keep something like that close at hand.
We head back to the barn and find a corner post that, upon testing, seems likely to hold us if we go one at a time. I don’t even suggest one of them go down first. Playing the sacrificial lamb seems to be part of my penance for starting this wheel in motion. I holster my gun, take a careful grip on the thin, braided rope, and let myself down into the hole.
The cavern air is thick with old moisture, heavy and musty with the cloying odor of wet earth. The cavern itself is irregularly shaped – a natural, not man-made cavity in the earth. At some point, though, man got involved. The floor is uniformly flat and even, and the ceiling matches. Louisiana’s soil is notoriously wet, so the fact that this cave has a ceiling at all makes me think that magic went into its construction. Good thing I didn’t touch it, or it might all have come down.
At first I think that all that was done was a little leveling off, but a closer look shows me that what I took for naturally occurring imperfections in the walls are in fact flat sheets of dusky rock neatly embedded in the damp clay walls like wood paneling. I can’t tell what kind of rock they are, but they’re so flat and evenly edged that it seems impossible that they were done without precision power tools and I’m certain that this cave hasn’t felt fresh air for several lifetimes.
Looking closer we can see that the rock panels are emblazoned with shallow carvings. Shapes and pictures. Odd hieroglyphs. They cover every available inch of wall space and bleed out into the floor and ceiling. I can make out Latin, Hebrew, Celtic and Egyptian influences, mixed in with Native American, Aztec, Russian and even Aboriginal. Even though I’m not fluent with the languages, I’ve seen enough spellcraft to recognize the workings. A lot of magic went into the construction of this chamber. A lot of it, and none of it amateur.
At my call Hollett and Nariko come down the rope. I show them the hieroglyphs.
“Masking spells,” I say. “A hell of a lot of them.” I take out my phone and start taking pictures. I snap a dozen or so, then set it back in my pocket.
“Someone didn’t want this place to be found,” Hollett agrees. Nariko slides along the walls like a ghost, reading the inscriptions.
“Any clue what the kids were looking for? Maybe it wasn’t an object they needed, but something in these spells.”
“They found what they wanted,” Nariko says from the far side of the room. Hollett and I rush over.
She’s kneeling by a large hole in the floor, about eight feet long and roughly rectangular. It’s deep in the sodden Louisiana earth, but its depth isn’t what stands out. We can see fossilized wooden timbers and chunks of pulverized, glittering rock in a shattered mess at the bottom of the pit.
“What’s that look like to you?” Hollett asks.
“A grave,” I say. “Something was buried here and sealed away by someone who knew his business.”
“More than someone,” Nariko adds. “The carvings are in different handwritings. These were done by at least six people.”
“A tribe,” Hollett says. “This was done centuries ago by the look of it. Long before the Mayflower landed. This is a damned archaeological site.”
“But what the hell was it?”
“Their journal had a lot about vampires in it. Are you sure there aren’t any? Bloodsuckers, I mean. Throat biters, like in the movies.”
“You’ve been around as much as I have,” I say. “And you’ve worked the dirty side of the street. Have you ever seen any quote real vampires unquote? Heard of any?”
He shakes his head. We look at Nariko, who also indicates no.
“Nothing like that’s ever been recorded,” I say. “Not by your side and not by mine. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but until I see one I’m not going off and stockpiling garlic.”
“Better to be over prepared than under.”
“Unless you’re preparing for the wrong thing.” Nariko nods at that.
“Well, whatever it is, they have it.” Hollett stands up. “We have to get to the second site.”
“Hold on a second,” I say. I take out my flashlight and aim it down into the grave. Something has caught my eye on one of the shards of petrified wood. I slide around to the other side of the hole, and I can see it clearly now. It’s been sliced neatly down the middle, but enough of the mark remains for me to identify. It’s the same hieroglyph I couldn’t identify in Celeste’s journal, carved into the centuries-old timber. I point it out to Hollett and Nariko.
“Still don’t recognize it,” Hollett says, and Nariko shrugs. “What about you?”
I don’t, either, but something about the symbol is sticking in my brain like a fishhook. I’ve seen it before, I’m certain of it. The surrounding characters are so much gobbledygook, but the big one, the main event… it’s right there, at the periphery of my memory, like the lyrics to a childhood song that I can almost get right.
“Shit,” I mutter. I rise to my knees. “Well, whatever it is, they’ve got it.”
“Now all we need to do is find out what it is,” Hollett says. “We know where they’re going, but we don’t know what they’re going to do with it after that.”
“Or how they’re going to get it there,” Nariko adds.
Her words hit me hard, and a quick look at Hollett’s face says he just came to the same realization I did. We break for the rope at the same time.
“What’s going on?” Nariko calls after us, breaking into a run.
Hollett beats me to the rope and starts flying up it hand over hand while I explain it to Nariko.
“Her car,” I say. “They need it to get to town. They haven’t left yet. They’re still here.”
Then, just as Hollett reaches the top of the rope I hear a sound that might be a woman’s voice. A second later the barn over our heads collapses in a violent crush, the dry and weathered timbers flattening as if under a titan’s heel. There’s a storm of rubble as a wave of debris floods through the hole in the ceiling, smothering Hollett’s light disk and kicking up a pressurized fog of dust and mold that floods the room, choking me and filling my eyes with pinpricks of pain. In the darkness I can feel the earth above us moving as something huge scrapes across its surface, shoveling more of the barn down into the hole on top of us. After half a minute of chaos it stops abruptly, leaving only the sounds of the wreckage settling.
When I cough my lungs clear and let the tears wash my eyes clean I’m surprised that I can see. Then I notice Nariko, who escaped the deadly avalanche by flattening herself against the wall. She’s got a powerful little flashlight that falls short of lighting up the whole cavern but is bright enough to see the column of rubble that reaches from the floor up out of the ceiling.
Hollett is gone.
Ten
Nariko’s on her feet and breathing, so I brush past her to get as near as I can to the place I last saw Hollett.
“Hollett?” I call out, edging around the pile of crumbling beams. Nariko helps me out by aiming her light so I can walk without tripping. I try to see through the wreckage, yelling out his name again.
For a moment the only sound is the debris settling on itself, boards shifting, dust pattering down like rain. Then I hear the son of a bitch’s voice.
“Over here,” he calls back, c
oming out from behind the pile. He’s dusty and his right forearm is trickling blood, but there doesn’t seem to be anything life threatening wrong with him.
I go over next to Nariko and share her wall, feeling my heart rate start to come down. He stumbles over until he’s standing next to us.
“I thought she had you for a second there.”
“For a second there I thought so, too.” He brushes dust off his face and spits off into the darkness.
“That was her voice?” Nariko asks. She’s never met Celeste.
“Yeah, that was her.” Hollett joins us on the wall. “But she doesn’t have the kind of power to pull a building down, even one as rickety as this barn.” He kicks a piece of desiccated 2x4.
“That must have been Father’s glove,” Nariko says.
“I have to get one of those.” Hollett looks over the rubble. “Any good thoughts?”
“Simple,” I say. “We clear the hole and go up through it.”
“Wish I’d thought of that. Any more specifics?”
I pull my own flashlight back out of my pocket and start inspecting the ceiling. It doesn’t look like the collapsing barn did any damage to the hole we came down through, but it’s completely clogged with rubbish. I climb up the mountain of debris, each board I step on threatening to upend and send me to hell under a fresh avalanche, but eventually I reach the ceiling. I gently prod at the jumble of rotting boards that are choking off our egress, but I can’t see anything past them. I slip and slide back down to the floor and address Nariko.
“I can’t make out how much crap Kenta piled on top of the hole. I don’t suppose you have anything like that glove of his, do you?”
At first, she’s studying the column of disjointed boards and packed earth too intently to answer me. Then she climbs up the pile much more nimbly than I did and touches what look like random planks and beams. When she finds what she’s looking for she comes back down, never taking her eyes off the last place she touched. She finds an area of floor that suits her, and only then does she speak to us.
No More Devils: A Visit to Superstition Bay Page 9
