by John Everson
He stared at the flickering light on the ceiling. Candle fire. Hypnotic and eerie. He was chained to a wall in a room beneath a building where a coven of witches performed sex magic around a goat’s head. And just down the hall from where a cadre of BDSM worshippers played whip the body with each other for kicks.
All behind a façade as bland and innocuous as possible. A two-story brick industrial building in the old part of town. All because one night, after a fight, he sat in a bar at midnight and wished that his wife was dead.
In front of a witch.
Be careful what you say because you never know who is listening. He could have used that advice a couple months ago and his life would be very different now. Austin cursed himself again and again but it didn’t matter. It didn’t bring Angie back and it didn’t loose the chains that held him. Hindsight was both 20/20 and more painful than any of the whips being used in the club outside this room.
Austin looked around the room and without thinking, let out a whistle. The walls were covered in graffiti. But it wasn’t the usual kind. Some of it looked like mathematical hieroglyphics, but some of it he recognized. Like the pentagram. And a pentacle. And intricate drawings of a ram’s head. In one instance, the head of a goat appeared inscribed at the center of the star that was drawn inside a circle. There were words written near the symbols, but they were words in a foreign language, something far older than English, he thought.
The longer he tried to decipher the black scrawls and drawings on the walls around him, the more uncomfortable he felt. Not that being chained to a wall was comfortable…but his stomach and chest tightened the more he stared at the walls. He was in a bad place. There was no other way to describe it.
And it was all his fault. He’d had bad thoughts about Angie and his life and sent those thoughts into the world. And the world had answered him in a way he could never have imagined. Wicked karma. He had found himself free of his perceived problem…and ‘gifted’ with a new partner who made him feel more like a man than he ever had before. Regina had driven him to heights of lust and ecstasy that he had never experienced with Angie. And because of that, he’d trusted her with everything that was important to him.
Exactly as she’d wanted.
Now he was here. And his lover…and his babysitter…were going to take everything from him that he had left. Including his life, apparently.
Austin felt tears roll down his cheeks. This was all more than a little insane.
He spent the next four hours staring at the evil symbols painted on the rough rock walls all around him…and pulling on the bonds that held him to the walls of the Devil. But nothing moved more than a few inches. He couldn’t stop thinking about his baby. And he couldn’t escape.
He was a rat in a trap. And unless he could chew his arms off…he wasn’t going anywhere.
Austin could hear the thump of the drums out in the club area and the hum of voices; but as the night went on, both sounds faded until eventually, he realized that he was chained to a satanic wall in silence.
The feeling had long ago left his arms, and his eyes had begun to close of their own accord. And soon, the world simply disappeared into a vapor dream of anger and depression. He struggled at first, trying to stay awake and keep the Devil’s symbols in view. A reminder of how fucked his situation currently was. But at some point his eyes closed and didn’t reopen. Austin was exhausted and succumbed to sleep no matter how his heart bled.
The silence was the sum of his dream.
Black. Lost. Silence.
And then…
…from somewhere…
He heard the toll of an ancient bell.
The slow, steady clang of a bell ringing far away in the dark.
Austin opened his eyes.
The room was almost black…but not completely. A candle flame still guttered in an inset in the wall across from him. Another candle still flickered down the wall a couple yards away. Beyond those, and a couple other tiny candle lights farther away, the room was a study in black.
The hair on the back of his neck stood up.
Austin was barely awake, but something made him realize he needed to be awake. A bell tolled somewhere, a slow, relentless echo. The sound was sad and slow…and undeniable. He struggled to keep his eyes open and take in the room. Something didn’t feel right. And after looking into the shadows for a bit, he realized what the problem was.
He wasn’t alone.
There was a pale figure on the far side of the room. He could barely see it in the dark, but it looked like a woman. She moved slowly, shifting one strange step at a time across the long black space. Any sleepiness left him then, as he began to track her across the room. She was coming his way.
The clock struck again and again, and Austin wondered what time it really was. He had lost track. He didn’t know if he’d even heard the first chime.
As the figure drew closer, Austin found his eyes growing larger. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but as he watched the shuffle of her feet and the movement of her hips, he couldn’t deny that…he knew the woman walking across the room. Only…it couldn’t be.
He stared and squinted and then shifted his gaze again trying to convince himself otherwise.
But there was no denying it.
The woman walking toward him – the woman who wore a rotting blackened blouse and stained skirt – was his wife, Angie.
He could never deny those eyes.
And now, they looked at him with a gaze that said, “You are dead.” They stared at him unblinking…filled with a dangerous intensity.
He watched helplessly. Step by step she drew closer to him. He pulled on the chains that held his arms, but he knew it was a futile gesture. And indeed, his wrists did not slip out of the bonds or pull loose the chains from the wall.
Austin was held fast. Stuck.
Angie was now just four feet away from him.
“You … can’t be here?” he whispered, but even at a whisper his voice cracked. She was dead. How the hell and why the hell was she standing in front of him?
Angie kept coming. Slowly. Relentlessly. Austin pulled again against his bindings, but to no avail. He could not break free. His wife was free to exact whatever punishment she cared to dole out. He was at her mercy.
Angie moved closer, one slow step at a time. And then she was right there in front of him. As she approached, he could see how the flesh of her cheeks had rotted, turning black and suppurating, sliding like burnt grease down the face he knew so well. She was a hideous thing, ghoulish and dead…but he couldn’t deny that it was her.
His dead wife was touching him.
“Did you miss me?” she whispered. Only…her voice sounded cold and dead, not at all like the soft, easy tones of the woman he’d slept with for the past seven years. Austin wanted to scream…and cry…and draw away…but he could not retreat. Angie had him at her disposal.
She drew her fingers across his face and he could feel the sticky cold rot of her flesh as it passed. A part of him wanted to throw up.
“Why are you here?” he whispered.
When she smiled, the sides of her mouth rose up beyond where they should have. And he could see the roots of her teeth, like the skeletal bones that they were. She was rotting away, and yet she was here, touching him.
“Your girlfriend brought me back,” she said. “She thought it would be amusing to have the ghost of the woman she killed around to do her bidding. But at the moment, she doesn’t need me. So, for a few minutes anyway, I’m free to do as I want. Why am I here? I’m here for you. I’m here for Ceili. Is she okay?”
The question sent a pang of pain down his spine. It stabbed his heart. Was she okay? No, she wasn’t okay. If he didn’t kill her, someone else was going to. There was no upside here for his baby.
“No,” he gasped. “They want to kill her for some black magi
c ritual, and I don’t know how to stop them.”
Angie’s eyes widened, and she pressed a slimy finger to his lips. “You are all she has now,” she said. “Figure it out.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Austin said, as tears began to run down his face. The ghost of his wife was not conciliatory. She stood now right in front of him, the strange white-blue complexion of her dead face hard to ignore as she prodded him.
“She needs you now,” Angie said. “Get over your stupid, selfish bastard self…and save our daughter.”
“I can’t do it alone,” he complained.
“Let me help you,” she said, and reached out both of her hands to touch his face. When he felt their cold, slippery touch, Austin couldn’t help his reaction.
He screamed.
That only gave room for her tongue to slip into his open mouth.
He gagged, and then screamed again. But her body pressed close to his own, and her mouth soon completely engulfed his, smothering his terror. He felt as if her kiss was choking him. But that didn’t stop him from screaming. His voice disappeared down her dead throat. He couldn’t breathe. But still he screamed. Eventually, his fear lessened as the darkness came and overwhelmed his sight. He struggled for a moment, trying to hide from the glare in the eyes that stared bitterly into his own. The world grew foggy then as his chest burned with desperate fire and his mind slid down into the dark to escape.
Chapter Twenty-Two
There were candles all around him.
That’s the first thing Austin saw when he finally returned from the blackness. As his eyes fluttered open, he saw the orange glow of flames everywhere. Candles guttering.
And bare legs all around.
There was a circle of women looking down on where he lay.
Brown legs and white, smooth skin and stubbled. Knobby knees and sensually curved. There were all types, but the common denominator was they all wore the black gauze of the sisterhood across the delta of their thighs. Which barely hid anything. He could see the dark delta shadows between their hips as he looked up from the couch he lay upon. It was a very strange vantage point. His neck was sore and when he rubbed it, he realized that they’d removed the collar. He was out of his chains and his hands were free, but there was nowhere for him to run. There were too many of them. Too close.
“You’re awake,” Regina said. He felt his heart sink as he recognized her voice. “We’ve been waiting.”
“What do you want?” he asked.
“We want you to do what must be done,” Regina said. “We’ve taken off the bindings and set you free. Ceili’s soul is now in your hands. You can choose whether her essence lives on in ecstasy or eternal agony.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “You can let her go home with me, and she’ll be spared any of this.”
Regina smiled. “If you perform the ceremony, her soul will escape the bounds of earth without pain. She is still an innocent. Only her bones will be left behind, and those will become the third totem of Club Equinox. They will hold great power, because of what her father – you – did. But you have to be brave and not stray. You must take her heart quick and clean and set her free…and in doing so, we all will be set free.”
“You’re free right now,” Austin said. “Taking my baby’s life won’t free anybody.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Regina said. “Her bones will be a tool of immense power – but only if you, the man that made her, release her.”
“You mean if I kill her.”
“Release her,” Regina said. “We are all prisoners on this realm. Haven’t you learned yet that Equinox is all about release? The power of an innocent can bring us things you have never imagined.”
“So, it’s really all about you?”
Regina smirked. “Isn’t that every human relationship? Haven’t we talked about this before?”
Austin started to sit up, but the bare foot of one of the sisters pushed his chest back.
He let his head fall back, but as he stared up at the wood-beam ceiling, he asked, “And what happens if I refuse?”
“We’ll take your life as her substitute,” Regina said. “It won’t provide us with the same power, but it will provide us with revenge. And Ceili will then grow up a member of the coven, and will lose her soul to the power of dark magic – if that’s the kind of thing you’re concerned about.”
“Why would you want to raise a child here?” he asked.
“Because we can guide her from infancy on to the way,” Regina said. “And the child she could birth someday could bring us more power ultimately than she will right now. But I don’t particularly want to wait another generation to find out.”
“I will never kill my baby,” Austin pledged.
Regina shrugged. “Then you will doom both yourself and her.”
She reached out and took the hand of the woman on the left, next to her. And that woman in turn took the hand of the woman to the left of her. A moment later, there was a ring of women standing in a circle around him. Two remained within the circle, one on either side of him.
Regina said something in a foreign tongue. The words were strange and guttural. It sounded exactly like what he’d expect a satanic spell to sound like. Dark. Evil.
He couldn’t believe that her sweet voice was uttering such things. After all of the nights he had kissed those lips and touched her body with passion. And trust.
It was like seeing an angel lick a pile of excrement and grin, with vileness smeared across her lips.
“Burunte, kiemu vrzimente schutonge!” she said. And the sisters around her all repeated the foreign words in unison.
More words followed, syllables filled with the bitterness of the gutter and the dark sheen of something foul. The sisters bowed after every sentence, never breaking their contact. But then Regina looked up at the ceiling and shouted something that sounded like a command. Or a curse.
“Erudactus Comi Dei Vol!”
The two sisters on the inside of the circle suddenly lifted instruments from the floor, where they had apparently been lying unseen by Austin. He saw them bend, and the silver glint in their hands when they stood up, only knowing at first that the sisters had grabbed something metallic. But then they lifted the tools above their heads and held them pointed toward the ceiling and he saw that he was in trouble.
They had raised long silver blades from the floor.
Deadly, curved blades.
Austin began to sit up, but a hand grabbed his hair from behind and kept his head pressed down to the stone he lay upon.
He reached behind him but as soon as he touched the wrist of his captor, more hands suddenly gripped his arms, and pulled them back to rest on the dais. The alien words of Regina rose in volume, and the entire sisterhood answered her invocation with a single word.
“Neviletis!”
The blades came down then. Slowly. The sisters touched the tips of the wickedly curved knives to his nipples and held them there.
Austin found himself holding his breath. His arms were held fast, and he didn’t dare move.
Regina said something then that sounded more like a command than a prayer, and the two women holding the knives nodded in unison. A moment later, he felt the cold bite of steel pressing upon…and through…his flesh.
The women dragged the knives down across his chest, opening blood lines that led from his two nipples to meet at his belly button.
They stopped when the blades met there, and Regina spoke in English for the first time in several minutes.
“They could end it all here,” she said. “But that would be pointless – at least at this moment. We need your participation tonight. Let this be a lesson, though. In a heartbeat, your life could be ours. Sacrificed for power. Or spite. Your life is ours to use as we wish. Please us and live. Displease us…and you will regret it as yo
u die.”
The sting of the cuts hit him then. Austin looked down and saw the red beads welling along the tracks they’d cut through his skin. The cuts were not deep. But they would hurt for days.
“These are the final hours,” Regina said. “We will take you to a room to think things over. When the moment comes, you will act as one of us…or you will die and Ceili will grow up as a sister of Equinox. And she will lose her soul, if that is something that truly matters to you.”
Hands grabbed him then and pulled him upright from the cold stone. The sisters broke apart from their circle around him and scattered. His hands were pulled to his back, and Austin was pushed to walk forward.
The hallway was short and dark and then he was back in his cell, with symbols of dark magic all around him. Illuminated by candle, not electric light.
Austin drew a fingertip across the trail of pain that led from his left nipple to his belly button and grimaced as the nerves registered his finger’s passing.
He raised a fingertip dripping with red and closed his eyes.
He was not mortally wounded, but he was bleeding. And it stung like hell.
Austin walked the room, staring at the weird symbols and foreign words scrawled across the rock. His cell was akin to being imprisoned inside a devil’s spell. He could see the magic, but didn’t know what it said. Or how to break it. Finally, he lay down on the cot and closed his eyes to think.
He was a man in a snow globe.
The Devil’s snow globe.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Something tickled his ear.
That was the first thing Austin recognized as he began to wake from a sleep so deep he felt drugged. He’d lain down on the cot after pacing the prison cell, and surprisingly, he’d dozed off. It was difficult to shake off the torpor of the dark place his mind had just been moving in. He didn’t remember any dreams, only a thick, heavy darkness that even now was calling him back.
But something cold and wet circled the outside of his earlobe. When that unpleasant feeling registered again, Austin finally opened his eyes and began to raise his hand to push whatever it was away.
