The Devil's Equinox

by John Everson

  The older woman nodded and set down the increasingly full sack to stand on one side of the altar. Regina took her lead and moved to the other side, and together they lifted and began to fold the black silk that had covered the table beneath the candles.

  “We have a problem,” the Irreverent Mother said.

  “What do you mean?” Regina asked.

  “Jilli texted me while I was on the way over here. You know she’s been translating a grimoire of Felida de Seantia.”

  Regina shrugged and folded an end of tablecloth silk over. “She is all about researching Felida’s life.”

  “She ran into something this morning in the grimoire that might impact our ceremony.”

  Regina stopped moving and looked hard at the Irreverent Mother. “Like what? Felida was an Elementist. Her coven would never have gone near rituals like the Devil’s Equinox. She worked with herbs and calling forest spirits. Not in our wheelhouse at all.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. Apparently, Felida’s coven did attempt a Devil’s Equinox ritual… and it failed.”

  “Seriously?” Regina asked. She looked confused for a moment, but then rolled her eyes. “Even if it’s true, I’m not surprised she failed. Felina was all about herb and nature spells, not rituals like this.”

  The Irreverent Mother shook her head. “That’s what we always thought. Because that’s what she became known for. But… she wrote at one point about the Equinox ceremony she attempted. And how they failed – she said because they did not have one of the child’s parents there to perform the sacrifice.”

  Regina paused in her folding.

  “We need to bring the father back to Equinox.”

  Regina shook her head angrily. “He’s not going to agree to be part of the ritual, so he’s useless to us,” she complained. “We have what we need. I tried to seduce him into being a part of it, a part of us. But… there just wasn’t enough time to bring him all the way along.”

  The Irreverent Mother said, “I know that you hoped that he’d be swayed by temptations of the Letting Go ceremony and the taste of the Devil’s communion last night. At least long enough for him to fall into that moment of weakness and give the baby to you of his own free will. But you knew going into it that this was a longshot at best. I agreed that taking the child was a reasonable course, but…after what Jilli has translated, I’m not sure that we can do this successfully without him at least being present. It sure seems like we have more chance of success if the father is present at the Equinox. There may be an aspect of complicity that is part of what draws the power.”

  “I can invoke the ghost of the mother,” Regina said. “I already gathered her hair and blood so that I could call her if I wanted to. I thought it might be amusing to have her witness what we do. Her anger may add fuel to the spell. I even have a spell that could fully incorporate her in the end, if the ritual goes the way I think. I could make her my servant, with no ability to say no.”

  The Irreverent Mother frowned. “I like the intent, but I don’t know that a spiritual witness will help in His eyes. I think we need the father to be there, in the flesh, even if he doesn’t raise the knife. And we might be more sure of success if he was the one to spill her blood.”

  Regina said nothing for a minute as she took the silken covering from the other woman and stowed it in the bag.

  “He’ll never agree to do it,” Regina said. “I haven’t had enough time to make him one of us.”

  “When he is faced with two bad choices, and neither of them is desirable, he’ll choose the lesser of the two evils,” the Irreverent Mother said. “He must be made to see that Ceili’s sacrifice is the lesser of two horrible evils, and the best course for both him and her.”

  Regina considered. “That’s a tall order,” she said. “But you may be right.”

  The Irreverent Mother smiled. “I’m always right when the subject is about doing wrong,” she said with a grin that dripped of wickedness.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The police made him feel very nervous. But he had to call them. His baby was missing, how could he not? But once they began swarming his home, Austin felt as if he’d made a mistake. There was one, Detective Wolff, who seemed to be heading up the team; he asked Austin all of the questions. He arrived at the front door within ten minutes of Austin calling the police. Wolff carried an old-fashioned notepad and had a head of curled, silvering hair. He was no stranger to the force, and his eyes looked both sad and tired as he ran through his litany of standard questions. But as Wolff rattled off a list of ‘where were you at the time of the crime’ and ‘who was the babysitter you left in charge’ kind of questions, Austin felt increasingly uneasy.

  At first, he figured they would accept that Regina was the prime suspect. But as he spit out answers to all of the questions, he realized that his own motives sounded sad and pathetic. He’d let a relative stranger move in with him right after his wife died, and he’d given her the charge of his child, even letting her hire the babysitter, so that they could go out to a club and ‘party’ on a Friday night. What must they think of him? Did they believe him at all?

  When they asked him the location of the club, he almost choked. Could he really say that Regina had blindfolded him? What did that make him sound like?

  “She wanted it to be a surprise,” he said, after stumbling over his tongue. “I didn’t realize what this place really was.”

  “Had she taken you there before?” the detective asked.

  Another quandary. Did he admit that last night had not been the first night he’d been to Equinox? He didn’t want to be caught in a lie. But he didn’t want to tell the truth either.

  “Yes,” he said. “But she never took me deep inside the club to the place we were last night.”

  “Did she blindfold you before?”

  He nodded. “She said that once I wasn’t just a visitor, that she could take the blindfold off.”

  The detective looked at him quizzically. “And you didn’t think this was unusual?”

  “It seemed like a game, so I played along.”

  The detective nodded and wrote something on his pad.

  One of the other officers walked up then and tapped Wolff. “Excuse me,” the detective said and got up to confer with the other cop at the side of the room. Austin couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he did hear the detective say, “Really?” in a rather surprised tone. Austin’s attention perked up; maybe they’d found something out about Regina that would help.

  Wolff’s face said otherwise. The detective returned and sat down across from Austin and simply stared at him for a moment. Then he asked, “When was the last time Regina had you over to her house?”

  Austin shrugged. “Never, actually. She always came here.”

  “You never went next door to pick her up for a date?” the detective asked. “She never had you over for dinner?”

  Austin shook his head. “With the baby, she always came here. That’s how we got to know each other – she was babysitting Ceili every day.”

  “Did you ever see her go into the house next door?”

  Austin frowned. He didn’t understand where Wolff was going with this.

  “I’ve seen her there over the hedge.”

  “Have you seen her go in or come out of the house?”

  Austin racked his brain. Had he? “Yeah, I think so. I’m sure I have. Why are you asking?”

  “Because, Mr. Everett, nobody has lived in that house for the past seven years.”

  Austin said, “I know it was empty most of that time. But then Regina moved in.”

  The cop shook his head. “We checked with the bank. It hasn’t been sold or rented. We’ve also just sent an officer inside. He says the place is mostly empty. There’s a front room couch and a few other furnishings left from the previous owners, but that house has been basically empt
y since a baby – Carolyn Jones – disappeared seven years ago. The parents claimed the infant was kidnapped, but the Joneses themselves disappeared a few days later. The case is still listed as an open homicide investigation.”

  Austin frowned.

  “Did you know about that case, Mr. Everett?”

  “No,” he said. “We just moved in here last year. The neighbors told us that that house had been vacant a long time. But then Regina showed up and said she was living there….”

  Wolff shrugged. “The house is actually still on the market,” he said. “We checked. Someone put the For Sale sign in the garage, but it’s still listed with the realtor.”

  Austin wasn’t sure what to say. It sounded ridiculous. He was sure he’d seen Regina go back there before she’d basically moved in with him.

  “Is there anything else you can tell us about her, to help us try to trace her? Anything personal she might have left here with you? She left no personal belongings next door.”

  “I’ll look,” Austin said. “She has clothes here, upstairs, but really that was about it. She didn’t fully move in with me.”

  “Though she was sleeping here.”

  Austin nodded. “For the past couple weeks, yeah.”

  “Did she talk about her family or friends…did she say anything that might give us a lead on where to look for her?”

  Austin struggled to think. What did he actually know about Regina? The silence drew out as he thought about all of their conversations.

  What did he know about her?

  Nothing.

  Where was the club she’d taken him to?

  He didn’t know. He realized he sounded like a nutjob.

  After more questions that Austin could not answer, the detective finally stood up and handed Austin a business card. “We’ll be back in touch soon,” he said. “In the meantime, call me if you think of anything – anything – that might help us find her.”

  Minutes later, Austin was standing on his porch, watching Wolff get into a squad car as two other officers closed the door to the house next door and returned to their own car.

  His head was pounding. There was a weight on his chest that felt as if it were crushing his lungs. He took deep breaths to try to force it away, but it did no good. He felt sick and helpless and completely alone.

  Austin slowly went back inside the house to get a drink of water. He saw Ceili’s bottles in the fridge and tears immediately began to leak down his face. He went back to the couch and sat down to really let out his pain. His baby was gone and there was no way for him to find her.

  And then he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket.

  There was a text notification. From an unknown number.

  He clicked it open, and a photo suddenly took up his screen. It showed the stark image of a girl with wide-open eyes…and a wide-open neck, where her throat had been slit. There was blood all over her neck and chest. At the far left of the frame was Austin’s shoulder and face in profile, looking down on the girl in an expression of orgasm. He was clearly on top of the girl, who appeared dead. The text accompanying the photo was short and heart-stopping.

  I think the police would be very interested in this. Don’t you? I wouldn’t call them again if I were you.

  Austin began to cry in earnest.

  Chapter Twenty

  He knew the search would be fruitless, but he went anyway. He couldn’t just sit in his house and wait for the police to call. And after the threatening text, he didn’t dare call them now to ask what they were doing. He was obviously being watched. Plus, the police had a hundred cases to deal with. He only had one. And it meant the world to him. To the police, finding Regina and Ceili was just a job. They would clock out at the end of the day and not feel a thing if they didn’t turn up a clue. So he was not just going to sit and wait for them to help him. But he didn’t even know where to begin. The best way to find Regina would be to go to Club Equinox, if he only knew where it was. He had a vague idea of which direction Regina had headed in when she’d driven him there but really, that directional sense only extended to the end of his neighborhood. Past there, she could have gone in any direction. He knew she’d passed over the tracks at one point, but those tracks cut all the way across town.

  Austin decided to start at the only place that he knew Regina had gone to outside of his house. He drove to the place where he’d woken up this morning. Maybe Equinox was actually close to there. Of course, he could be standing right next to it and not know – there certainly wasn’t going to be a big marquee sign on the street proclaiming Club Equinox – your darkest desires unleashed!

  But maybe…if he found some likely buildings, he would hear the distant pound of club beats. It was nearly dusk, so it was a good time to go out looking for a dance club based on ears alone.

  When he arrived, he pulled up in front of the large loading-dock doors and got out of his car. The place looked much the same as it had this morning. Sprawling and empty. He walked around the building to the back parking lot and shook his head. This was definitely not where the club was hidden. There were no cars here, no sidewalks and no sounds really, aside from the wind whooshing across the open field out back. When Regina had led him from the car to the club he knew that they had parked on a downtown street – he could hear distant traffic and they had walked down a sidewalk for a block before arriving at the club. He had this mental image from his time walking around blindfolded that the club was in a downtown kind of area with curbs and old sidewalks – he remembered stubbing his toe a few times on uneven concrete slabs.

  He walked back to the car and drove slowly along the road back toward the center of town. There was an old downtown area just a few blocks from here, so he followed the parallel run of the old train tracks for a couple minutes until the road curved away, and then he found himself waiting at the light to drive over the tracks. The intersection just beyond them marked the center of the old Parkville downtown; the one nice thing about living in a small town was that you couldn’t go too far before ending up in the center of things. While there was a growing array of suburban sprawl developing all around the downtown, the old area itself was not that extensive. He turned right at the main intersection and drove slowly down the side streets. The restaurants and bars and grills of the main drag quickly turned into large old brick buildings with no commerce evident. Originally built as warehouses and factories, the Parkville downtown was now a mix of converted residential and office space. There were business signs on some of the buildings, but not for much that would draw consumer traffic. This was wholesale row. He noted a carpet warehouse, an electronics supply business and a hair salon in between buildings with no signs at all. Those unmarked buildings had likely been converted to condos.

  He drove in a widening square around the center of town, noting possible areas that seemed like places Club Equinox could have been located. He stopped a couple times, and walked for a couple blocks, looking and listening for potential hidden locations in unmarked old brick buildings.

  All he could hear was the distant sound of a freight train running along the tracks on its way through town.

  Every now and then he thought of Ceili’s cherub face and a particular look that she got when he kissed her or fed her. And instantly his throat grew thick, and tears fell from the corners of his eyes. He had failed her. Utterly failed his baby. He couldn’t forgive himself. And he didn’t know what to do to make it right.

  He nearly tripped on a broken sidewalk slab and grew hopeful for a moment – could this have been the same sidewalk where he’d stubbed his toe when blindfolded? He walked up to a large red-brick building with tall stone pillars and decorative window facades. There were gargoyles on the corners of the roof where the gutters hung down. This was an old building with classic architecture. The kind of building that they used to construct when people actually cared about architecture versus simply creating ta
ll pillars of steel and glass.

  It might have been a bank at one time, but today it appeared untenanted. He walked up to a ground-floor window and looked inside. There were empty white marble counters within and broken tile floors. It looked as if several things had been removed from the wide room, given the state of the floor, which was strewn with crumbled papers and chunks of debris. The room he could see appeared long abandoned.

  And as he stood still and listened, he couldn’t hear any sounds of inhabitants.

  Depressed at the futility of this search, Austin walked back to his car. He could hear the distant sounds of cars and the hums and mechanical clanks of fans and air conditioners: the background noise of any town when all the people are inside for the night, and the air holds the fading heat of the day, but not much more.

  Austin drove home, more depressed than ever.

  * * *

  When he walked into the house through the garage entry door, he kicked his shoes off in the mud room and opened the inner door to the kitchen. And instantly had a sudden, overwhelming feeling that something was wrong.

  The hair on the back of his neck suddenly stood up, though he heard no noise at all in the house. He entered the room and flipped the lights on.

  The cabinet doors over the stove were both open, and there were bottles and baby formula cans sitting on the counter.

  Austin frowned. He had not left the kitchen like that. Somebody had been here. He took a deep breath and considered. Had Regina come back secretly to get Ceili’s things?

  He cautiously walked through the family room and paused at the landing to listen. What if she was still here?