The Devil's Equinox

by John Everson

  Regina stood to the side of the divan. She’d drawn something out of her handbag. It looked almost like a small doll, he thought, noticing that it seemed to have two arms and legs as she held it to her lips and spoke something that he couldn’t hear over the volume of the room.

  His blood suddenly felt on fire as it never had before and Regina faded into the background like smoke. Austin saw the room in almost a skein of raw color. The girl beneath him was a fuzzy shade of passion red, the walls beyond were only shadows of another place. There was a burning in his throat where he had swallowed the host, and the fire from his center seemed to spread, emanating to his hands and spine and most of all, his cock. Which only wanted to bury itself into the very core of this woman.

  He did his best to answer the primal need growing more and more violent inside him. He could feel dark, angry electricity throbbing in his bones now; with the release of his passion, he seemed to be feeling the release of all civil inhibitions. The room grew indistinct around him as his thoughts became strangely savage. He’d never felt this way before, drunk or sober. He thrust and ground against the nun beneath him, and she cried out as he did – the first real sounds he’d heard from her all night, despite all the knife cuts – which only drove him to faster and harder motions.

  Regina came closer and knelt at the head of the divan, coaxing him to continue his descent into dark passion with wicked whispers in his ear. She held the dark doll in one hand as she urged him with violent words to spend himself in the girl. And then as he drew near his orgasm, she held the blade up to the nun’s flushed throat.

  “She is your sacrament,” Regina whispered. “Take and eat.”

  With that, she drew the knife over the woman’s throat and a splash of blood suddenly hit Austin’s face. The girl shifted and shook beneath him, and Regina pressed the knife into Austin’s hand.

  “She is yours now, every heartbeat is yours.”

  Austin didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. But he could barely think coherently now regardless. His head was awash in a kaleidoscope of color. Every flash brought a strange, powerful ecstasy. The girl beneath him was bleeding on him, all over him thanks to the wounds that others had made, as well as the cut in her neck. And yet somehow the smears of crimson across his chest and arms and face didn’t faze him, but rather, turned him on more.

  His heart seemed to pump faster than it ever had; he could hear it like a jackhammer in a tunnel as his hips moved. The girl’s blood beneath him oozed like oil, coating them and making their congress ever more fluid. It was the most amazing, psychedelic, erotic moment he had ever experienced. For a few seconds, there was nobody else in the entire room but him and the bride, her luscious naked body a gift for him to suck and bite and eat and love all at once.

  Regina was whispering things in his ear. Words he didn’t understand. And then English phrases too. “Take her. Do it. Her life is yours.”

  He wanted to slow his motion, prolong his orgasm, but he couldn’t hold back. Austin held the knife close to the girl’s neck as he drove himself harder inside her. The blade pressed down on her skin as he felt his own rush build. Blood streamed out along the knife’s edge and he felt a horrible excitement build as it did.

  He screamed out at the end, unable to process the intense build of emotions and adrenaline and pure pleasure. He was lost in a place he had never imagined. Lost in blood and perversion. Something had changed his brain and he couldn’t, didn’t want to fight it.

  The girl beneath him was no longer matching his thrusts, but Regina’s face hung just above the girl’s eyes. “Don’t stop,” she insisted. “You are one with life and death in this moment.”

  He couldn’t close the loop in his brain with what that meant in that second, but he didn’t stop. Couldn’t have stopped if he’d wanted to.

  Austin fell away from the girl finally, coated in her blood and completely drained and sated in every way. His limbs hung at his sides like lead weights. “Oh my God,” he whispered. “What did we just do?”

  “Drink this,” Regina said, holding his head up until the edge of a metal goblet touched his lips.

  People encircled the bed, and lifted and moved the bride away, carrying her to somewhere Austin didn’t see. He collapsed back into the spot she’d occupied. His tongue was thick and his mind barely able to track what was going on around him. Regina pressed him down to the divan, and straddled him presently, teasing his still-erect member with the down of her own sex. She kissed him, and he surrendered to her tongue. He felt barely conscious, but the heat of her mouth woke him again.

  When she pulled back, she whispered, “You are one of us now. You have sacrificed to Satan.”

  “Sacrificed?” he whispered, his heart constricting in fear. His voice seemed like it came from far away. “She’s not dead?”

  “We are all more alive than ever,” Regina answered. Her words confused him.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “I never wanted anything like that before. It was like I was someone else.”

  “You let the Devil inside,” she said. “It’s the moment of transcendence that we all come here seeking. You’re a true member of Equinox now.”

  “So…no more blindfold?” he asked. He had just fucked a masochist almost to death in a bloodthirsty haze and that was the thought that came to his head.

  “No more blindfold,” she agreed. “You have seen, you can’t unsee. You have taken blood. You can’t untake. You are part of Equinox now.”

  “That was ... amazing,” he breathed, remembering the completely paralyzing impact of the orgasm. “And … wrong,” he added, as he remembered the spurt of the nun’s blood at the end. “She’ll…be okay?”

  “There is no wrong in Club Equinox,” Regina said. “We all come here by choice. We all leave here forever changed.”

  “You didn’t answer…” Austin said. He could feel his tongue slurring.

  “I wanted you to be with me in this life,” she said. “I hope I wasn’t too fast in bringing you here.”

  He could see the troubled look in her eyes and the image of blood faded from his mind for a moment. She had brought him into the most secret of inner sanctums. He wasn’t sure now that he wanted to be here, but everything was strange in his head. He didn’t want her to be upset with him.

  “No,” he said. “…wanted to be with you.”

  She smiled faintly, and shifted her hips slowly against him, working him up again. “I really need your help, Austin,” she said. “Will you help me?”

  He nodded drunkenly. “Yes, anything for you,” he said. His body moved but no longer seemed under his control at all.

  She raised herself up on her arms then, so that her full weight was now driving down on his hips. Her breasts shook as she moved above his face.

  “Anything?” she asked. There was a tremor of something deeper than sexual need in her voice.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “Anything.”

  In the back of the room, the drummer still played, but his beats were almost inaudible as Austin stared into Regina’s eyes. He could not see anything beyond her; the world had constricted to be her and her alone. But it was increasingly difficult to focus on her. The edges of her face began to swim and flutter. And then she asked him a question.

  “Would you give me your baby?”

  He smiled and tried to move harder inside her. But he couldn’t even feel his lower half. His whole body was strangely numb. “I will… make a baby with you,” he whispered. He wasn’t sure if he could do that now, however. His lips didn’t move right and there were colors leaking across his vision. He felt as if he might slide down an angry rainbow into an ocean of winking stars at any second. He had given his all to the bleeding girl. Thinking of her made him smile and for a moment, he lost track of the woman he was with. His mind was swimming in a strange haze of pleasure.

  “I don’t wan
t to make a baby,” Regina breathed, looking down on him with eyes lit bright. Seeing her eyes brought him back to the moment. She was still somehow using him with short rhythmic hip motions. “I want your baby. I want Ceili. I want to bring her to the club for the Devil’s Equinox. It only happens once every dozen years, and we need a child for the ceremony.”

  Austin wasn’t sure what she meant, but through the haze, he felt a sudden strong intuition that it would not be good for Ceili. He moved his mouth and at first nothing happened. A moment later the words appeared.

  “No,” he murmured. “I can’t let you have Ceili. This isn’t … a good place for babies.”

  His words were a terrible slur, but Regina clearly understood him. Because when he finished speaking, her mouth split into a smile as wide as a shark’s.

  “You said you’d give me anything,” she said. “I want you to give me Ceili. You’ve let me take care of her these past few weeks, and now I’m like her mother.”

  Austin shook his head. The room spun when he did. “I don’t think so,” he slurred. “Not for here. Not for this.”

  “Give me your baby,” she urged again. “Say you will.” She ground against him low and slow now, her lips just inches from his own. He realized that he could not feel her legs, though he knew they were still on top of his own. She watched his face with an eerie concentration.

  “No,” he said. “You can’t ... I wo’ let you brin’ her here.”

  “I thought you’d say that,” she said. “But I wanted to give you the chance. I know you haven’t had enough time here to understand and to give her freely, and the ritual would work better if she was given freely. But…we don’t have enough time for me to make that happen. I wanted you to agree to do this voluntarily. If you were really part of Equinox, you would. But it doesn’t matter. I claim Ceili tonight in exchange for granting your wish.”

  “Wish?” he mumbled. He could barely move his lips.

  “Your wish that your wife was dead.”

  With that, she suddenly levered herself off of him, and stood next to the divan, smiling sadly. “I really did want this moment to be different,” she said.

  And then she walked away from him. Austin tried to sit up, to follow her. To stop her. And realized then that he couldn’t move. At all.

  His arms, legs, neck…they were all heavy as concrete blocks.

  He couldn’t move a muscle.

  “Regina,” he tried to call. But his throat only made a weak hiss.

  He tried to turn his head to see where she’d gone, but the orange flickers of the candles only twisted in the shadows on the ceiling above him. His eyes focused briefly on those, as he realized the heat of his passion had suddenly grown grave-cold. Whatever she had given him to drink after he’d been with “the bride” had done something…

  The lights grew dimmer and dimmer in his eyes. And finally went out.

  Chapter Eighteen

  There was ice in his brain.

  Or maybe it was steel. A blade pressing right behind the base of his neck and up and in. Austin was aware of the feeling for minutes before he was fully awake. It colored his dreams, though the content of those faded as soon as he opened his eyes. Ice in his head. Ice on his body. He was cold.

  Austin opened his eyes and knew immediately he was not where he should be. The ice in his brain instantly turned to pain as he blinked and turned his head. The room swam into focus and he realized that he was lying on the floor in what appeared to be a warehouse space. The ceiling looked a hundred feet away, but on the one side he could see large pallets stacked with boxes all along the corrugated metal walls.

  The events of the night before suddenly all came back and he blinked hard, trying to put the room into full focus. This was not where he had been last night.

  He pushed himself off the floor and shards of glass seemed to fall across the inside of his head, scoring the naked folds of his brain. He groaned and looked around, propped up on one arm.

  He was lying naked on the floor of a large warehouse. A pile of clothes lay to his left and he reached out and lifted the pair of jeans. They were his. And the lump of his wallet was still in the back pocket. He checked it and his money and credit cards were still there.

  Small favors.

  His skin was covered in goose bumps and he shivered slightly in the early morning cold. Austin reached over to grab and pull on his underwear and socks as he considered the situation. He’d been abandoned in a strange place after being drugged by his girlfriend after holding a knife to a girl’s throat in a sex club. And her last words had been to threaten his baby girl.

  Austin’s heart leapt. He’d been out all night. And Regina had been the one to bring in the babysitter – another member of Club Equinox.

  He swore out loud and slipped one foot into his jeans. He had to get home. He feared what he might find there. A lot of emptiness.

  Shit.

  Austin pulled the shirt over his head, moaning as the ice knife moved back and forth in his brain. Whatever had been in that drink…or ‘communion’ was brutal.

  He sat down again to pull on his shoes and then took a deep breath and walked toward a door to the right. There were loading bay entrances on one wall, and a small white door to the right of them. He moved in that direction, groaning with every step. He felt like hell.

  When he turned the knob on the door, he found himself stepping into a wide-open faded asphalt parking lot. Austin walked outside. The door clicked shut behind him as he blinked hard against the glare of the sun. It was still early morning, and the air held the heavy scent of dew and dawn. He turned away from the orange globe and looked instead at where the boundaries of the parking lot were. The place had a silver metal fence that ran around the perimeter, keeping the bushes and trees of an old neighborhood at bay. He had no idea where he was.

  Austin walked along the structure to the front of the building. As he passed the corner, he saw that he was in one section of a long industrial complex. The structure went on and on, with nondescript gray siding the only constant. Doorways with address signs and small branded logos interrupted the building at regular intervals.

  He was probably somewhere along the railroad tracks, he surmised, since that’s where most of the industrial complexes in Parkville were built. Warehouses that led along the tracks and on out of town.

  How far was he from the place that held Club Equinox?

  Impossible to guess. Maybe close. Or maybe they’d dumped him on the other side of town.

  Either way…he had to get home.

  Austin began walking down the driveway toward the street. He reached into his jeans and found the hard rectangular lump of his phone.

  So, they had even returned that to him. He pulled it out and thumbed it on. He pulled up Google Maps and saw that he was just a mile or so from the center of town. And then he looked up a taxi. He needed to get home. As soon as possible.

  * * *

  On a Saturday morning, Parkville was pretty quiet. The cabbie had picked him up within fifteen minutes of him calling, and Austin said nothing on the short ride home. All he could think about were the words that Regina had said a few hours before.

  “I claim Ceili in exchange for granting your wish. Your wish that your wife was dead.”

  He pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet as soon as the cabbie hit the entrance to his subdivision. “The one with the gray shutters, there on the right,” he said, as they pulled onto his street. He pointed toward the driveway and the cabbie turned in slowly. The meter said $12.60 as they made the turn but Austin wasn’t going to wait.

  “Keep the change,” he said as they came to a stop, and dropped the bill over the front seat. He was out of the cab and punching in the entry code to the garage in less than thirty seconds.

  The house was completely still.

  He walked through the kitchen and into
the family room. The couch was empty. Regina wasn’t there, as she almost always had been over the past month.

  There was no journal sitting next to the old bronze base of the light.

  Austin didn’t spend any time on the lower level; he ran to the stairway and vaulted up it. When he reached the landing, he turned left and pushed through the half-open doorway into Ceili’s nursery.

  It was empty. Just as he’d known it would be.

  Austin stared at the white cotton blanket and the empty brown eyes of the teddy bear that lay discarded next to the silent pillow and began to cry.

  Regina had taken his baby.

  His head was throbbing, but he shook it anyway as the tears streamed down his cheeks. What did they want Ceili for? What could he do to get her back?

  He took a breath and forced himself to stop staring at the empty crib. She wasn’t there. But was Regina nearby still?

  He ran down the stairs and out the front door. If the neighbors were watching, they must have thought he was crazy as he vaulted up the steps to the old house next door. The door was dark blue, with a small window in it, but it was covered with a curtain. He couldn’t see inside.

  He rang the bell and banged his fist on the door over and over again, but there was no answer. As he had known there would not be. Regina had stolen his baby girl; she wasn’t going to answer her door and say, “Hey, what’s up?”

  Austin walked away from the old house and stared up into the curtained vacancy of the upper-story windows. He could feel the tears streaming down his cheeks, but he couldn’t look away. She’d taken Ceili.

  She’d taken his wife and his baby from him.

  Austin felt his legs give out, and he sat down on the white concrete sidewalk in front of the house next door and began to bawl.

  * * *

  “Where is he now?” the Irreverent Mother asked, carefully placing an unlit black candle in a canvas sack.

  “He’s back in his house,” Regina answered, wrapping the ceremonial candelabra in a small towel and adding it to the bag. They were packing up Regina’s secret altar, now that there was no further need to occupy the house. Everything she needed for the Devil’s Equinox was at the club now. It was hard to believe that she could count the time until that long-awaited night in hours rather than months and weeks. She had been preparing for this time literally for years.