The Devil's Equinox

by John Everson

  The priest reached out with the tool he’d grabbed at the rectory. He put the business end on the chain that locked the door from uninvited visitors like themselves…and pressed the arms together. With an easy snip, the chain separated and fell away. Father Vernon dropped the metal cutters to the asphalt ground nearby and pulled open the metal doors that led to a stairway down. It looked like a storm cellar below. The priest met his eyes. Then without a word he began to descend the metal steps.

  Austin turned and put his foot on a rusted metal step and followed the other man’s black robes down into the dark. When the ladder ended, he reached out with one foot and shifted it around until he found the ground beneath. They were in some kind of underground room. The floor was old, rough concrete. The walls appeared to be the same, at least from the one wall that he could see. Vernon moved quickly through the dark, and he struggled to follow, not wanting to trip, but not wanting to lose sight of the priest either. The only light in the place glimmered in from windows near the ceiling – well, glass that let in the distant glow of streetlamps, nothing more.

  It was enough. They walked carefully in the near dark until they reached a heavy wooden door. It had a black iron handle with a thumb latch as an opener. “Here we go,” Father Vernon said.

  The older man pressed the latch down and pulled the door open. It moved slowly, with a faint but angry creak.

  And then the priest made a sound that caused Austin’s stomach to shrink.

  “Uh-oh.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The door that Father Vernon had opened led to a dark chapel. Austin recognized the stations of the cross instantly – he had been here before. It was the Chalice Hall. Within, along the walls, there were eyehooks that had chains linked to the wrists of a series of naked and subjugated victims. They were kneeling or standing all along the wall. At the front of the room, an altar of rustic wood held the form of a nude woman. A man wearing only a bishop’s hat stood between her legs. An upside-down cross hung from the wall behind them.

  A woman clad in black silk and silver chains stood behind the altar and directed the bishop in his fleshy impaling; Austin only had a second to take in the woman arching her back on the altar before he realized that their entrance had evoked an immediate response.

  The door released a stream of silken black. As soon as Austin glimpsed the room beyond, figures from within moved out to surround them. Before he could react, they were circled by a crowd of nuns who looked like they had walked off the set of a pornographic movie. They pressed in close, acting as a wall of flesh, leaving them no room to move. He tried to use the crowbar to force them back, but he couldn’t lift his arms at all. Warm flesh shifted almost provocatively against his own, but in this situation, the touch of feminine breasts and thighs did not serve to excite him. Hands gripped his arms and wrists and waist and pressed him back against the stone wall. The crowbar was pried from his hand.

  As the depth of the mob grew, he lost track of Father Vernon, who was pulled in another direction. Tongues licked at his lips and cheeks, and women crushed his body to the wall. One by one, they ground hips against his before shifting to the side as another woman moved in to take her place. It was as if they all needed to physically touch him, just once. He was meat in a blender of dark sisters. Their eyes flashed with secret thoughts. Red, wet lips parted and touched and moved away from him like a kaleidoscope.

  And then he was dragged into the chapel beyond. The scent of human copulation and the sighs of passion and pain surrounded him like a fog. Entering the chapel was like diving into a pool of sex. Not exactly the expectation when you walked into a room with paintings of stained-glass windows and a cross. For a moment he wondered if they intended to add him to the throng of bodies being flogged against the walls.

  But instead of chaining him with other victims, a group of sisters held on and led him through a narrow door at the back of the room behind the altar.

  The sister guiding the insemination on the altar didn’t acknowledge their presence at all. They moved past her as she flipped her arm and flogged the breasts of the woman before doing the same to the ass of the man joined to her. Austin could see the flesh redden as her black strap connected and withdrew with wet, sharp snaps.

  Somewhere in the room a male voice screamed, and a woman laughed.

  And then they were through and into a narrow space beyond.

  “Welcome home,” a familiar voice said from behind him.

  Regina stepped around his captors and smiled. Her hair was wild, curls loose and uncombed, strands twisted and rising above her head in a way he’d never seen. She might have just risen from her pillow, except that the makeup around her eyes was dark and perfect. She wore the costume of all the sisters here, and he could see the excitement of her nipples as the filmy material moved and shifted as she walked.

  She was excited at the opportunity to dole out pain.

  “Tonight is the night of the Devil’s Equinox,” Regina said. “Tonight is the night that Ceili will become one of us. The only question is how. Will she bring us power as her soul passes, or will she become one of our acolytes, using her flesh to open our sisterhood to more interest from the devils we indulge? Have you decided? Will she become a pure sacrifice, or a devils’ whore? Those are your only two choices.”

  Austin shook his head.

  “She will be neither,” he insisted. “Because she’s leaving here with me tonight.”

  “You say words that are both false and foolhardy because….” Regina pointed at the women all around him. “There are all of us, and one of you. You can’t stop all of us. You can only choose how much you will try to get in our way. I know you will. But I have to tell you this – in the end, all of your efforts will not matter. Ceili is ours. She will always be ours. So, I will ask you to consider – do you want her soul to bring us power as she moves on to her own afterlife…or do you want her to become one of us, using her body for Satan?”

  Austin glared at her but refused to answer. He accepted neither of her two alternatives. But he also didn’t know how he was going to change fate, given that his arms were currently held tight between the hands of six different women in Regina’s army.

  “You have three hours left to decide,” Regina said. “And I want you to think about this carefully. If you release her soul, she’ll leave this earth and move into her own life beyond. The power of your sacrifice will give us what we desire. And it will set Ceili free to seek the next stage of her soul’s path.”

  She leaned in to Austin’s face, so that he could see the strong determination in her eyes.

  “If you choose to not set her soul free, we will sacrifice you. But your daughter will not go free. She will be raised here as a daughter of Satan. She might go out and do exactly the same as what I did to you. Meet men in bars. Promise them their most secret desires, and then take them to bed again and again. Always despising them…but using their weak, desperate needs to bring the sisterhood what we all truly need. More sacrifices. More power. No matter what you do tonight, we will grow in numbers. All that you decide here is whether Ceili will become one of us, or whether you will set her free.”

  She leaned close and touched her tongue to his lips. “Think about it,” she said. “This time we’ll make sure you don’t go roaming until we need you.” Then she moved away.

  The hands on his arms gripped him harder then and pulled him toward a doorway. When they reached the threshold, he tried to resist, digging his feet in and struggling to reach out to grab at the dark wood slats that bordered it. But to no avail. A heavy hand pushed hard against the small of his back, and another pounded against the place just beneath his left shoulder blade. Someone else dug a finger into his side just below the ribs and in seconds Austin’s attempt at resistance failed. He fell forward into a small room, and someone lifted and clasped his wrists in cold steel cuffs.

  A sister with a curled
wisp of blond hair escaping her wimple to trail across her cheek reached above his head to secure the left arm, and when she was through, she let her body slide across his. Her eyes lifted toward the ceiling as her breasts rubbed across his chest, and she licked her lips as her cheek touched and pulled away.

  Then she met his eyes and her lips spread apart into a wicked grin.

  She laughed. An ego-crushing cackle of victory. Her tease was just that – a challenge won. She knew she’d had him, if only for a second. She had roused him and imprisoned him in the same moment.

  “See you later, stud,” she whispered, and pulled away. When she turned, the rest of the sisters went with her, and in seconds Austin was left in the room alone.

  Austin found himself hanging, arms above his head, in a small dark cell. A prisoner again. Déjà vu. Three times, you’re out. So much for escaping. He stifled the urge to cry in frustration and tried to think of his next move.

  His mind came back blank. After a while, he fell back to the only thing that he could think of to do. It had been years since he’d said the words in earnest before tonight, but he meant them more than ever before in his life as he spoke them for the second time in as many hours.

  “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name….”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The dark felt like a blanket. Thick and warm. It held Austin close against the wall. He waited and prayed. Prayed and waited. He could hear sounds from beyond the room, faint laughter and music. The throb of drumbeats striking again and again somewhere far away. He murmured every prayer he knew and then repeated them all. But eventually, his whispered prayers fell to silence and he struggled to hear what was going on beyond this room.

  His eyes grew heavy after a while. This day seemed to have lasted forever. And he couldn’t bear to face the moment at its end. A moment that grew closer with every breath. How was he going to find a way to save his baby?

  Something creaked. It sounded as if it came from the direction of the doorway. In front of him. He couldn’t make out anything, however, in the dark.

  “Who’s there?” he asked softly, but there was no answer.

  He heard the sound again. A faint slap on the ground and then a slow drag. The sound of halting footsteps.

  It was closer now.

  The air near his cheek grew cold, as if a gust of winter air had suddenly filled the room. He wanted to rub the chill away, but his arms only rattled the chains above his head. And then a whisper spoke straight to his ear.

  “You are a disappointment in so many ways,” the voice whispered. The chill slipped across his lips and touched his neck on the opposite side. Austin shivered involuntarily.

  “How does it feel to be a prisoner?” the whisper asked, in his other ear this time. “Do you like being the one trapped in a place where you can’t escape?”

  He shivered again but didn’t answer. The voice laughed.

  “You’re pathetic,” it said. And then the chill shifted, and the edge of his chin suddenly felt wet and cold – as if it had been dipped in a bowl of ice water. The chill slid up to his nose and down to his throat.

  “I wish I could watch them make you suffer,” the voice said. “You deserve everything they could do to you. But I need you to survive. I hate it that I need you to get out of this…but apparently, I do. You need to save Ceili. And you can’t do that while you’re chained to a wall, as satisfying as this position may be for me.”

  Twin pinpricks of light ghosted into view inches from his face. As he struggled to see through the suffocating black, the angry eyes of his dead wife looked back at him from the darkness. She seemed to shine with her own internal light, a ghoulish blue-white glow that was faint as smoke, but solid enough to show form. Seeing Angie’s face made his heart constrict.

  “How are you even here?” he asked.

  “You don’t want me to be here?” she asked. “I’m hurt. You said you’d always want me by your side.” He could hear the sarcasm dripping from the whisper of her voice.

  “You’re dead,” he said. “I buried you.”

  “And your girlfriend killed me and then brought me back as her plaything,” she said. “Most women would have been happy that the ex was dead and buried, but not your little witch whore. Oh no, she didn’t just want to steal my husband and baby, she wanted to steal my soul. She wanted me here to see her kill my baby. So here I am, thanks to her spell. She pulled me back from somewhere else, and when she calls, I have no choice but to answer. And if she has her way, after tonight, I’ll have to serve her fully.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked. “What does she want from you?”

  Angie shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you get Ceili out of here. Which means I can’t enjoy watching you get what you deserve tonight.”

  “Can you get me out of these chains?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I have moments where I can move and touch physical things…but it’s not consistent. I’m like a wave, I come and go without warning. Unless Regina calls me. Then for a little while, I’m solid.”

  “I can’t get out of this on my own,” he said.

  Her eyes flashed and she moved back from him. Suddenly he could only see the blackness again. “Angie?” he whispered. “Are you there?”

  There was silence.

  Shit. He didn’t want her anywhere near him. But…she was the only chance he had right now.

  Austin pulled on the chains that held his arms above his head. They had very little give. They were threaded through an eyehook, so he could stretch one arm up and allow the other to come down, but the clasps around his wrist were tight. He couldn’t slip out of them.

  Something metallic clinked several times on the stone floor, as if something hit the floor and bounced several times. The sound came from the direction of the entrance of his cell.

  Austin froze.

  He could see nothing through the dark. But after a moment, there was a faint sliding sound. Again, it sounded metallic. But small. As if a small bit of chain or something was shifting across the floor, one inch at a time. It happened again and again. A faint, repetitive rhythm. After a minute, he realized the sound, albeit faint, was drawing steadily closer. It would make a soft clink, then a sound of shifting across stone.

  Then silence.

  And then he’d hear it again. He tried to judge the distance, but in the dark, it was impossible. All he could be sure of was that something was shifting across the floor toward him, though. And it sounded very close now.

  The sound stopped.

  He cocked his head, trying to hear.

  “Kick off your shoes,” Angie’s voice suddenly whispered in his ear. Austin jumped.

  “I can’t do everything for you,” she said. “You’re going to have to do some of the work.”

  “What do I need to do?” he whispered.

  “The key is at your feet,” she said. “You’re going to need to kick off your shoes, and use your feet to grab it, lift it and get it into your hands.”

  “I’m not a monkey,” he complained.

  “And I’m not alive,” she countered. “Suck it up. Unless you want to be just like me, you better tap into your inner ape and do this. I was able to knock the key off the ring and push it across the floor…but I can’t levitate the thing. If Regina has her way, after tonight’s ceremony I’ll have a real body again, be able to pick up the key, unlock your chains and kick you in the balls. But by then it won’t matter.”

  Austin touched his toe against the back of the sneaker on his other foot and pushed. It took a couple times, but eventually the heel of the shoe slipped off and he could kick the shoe to the floor. Then he repeated the process with the other shoe. With his toes, he then pulled down his socks.

  Once barefoot, he carefully felt along the cold stone for the small m
etal object that he knew was there.

  “To the left,” Angie whispered.

  His toe found it, and the key shifted away from him.

  “Careful,” she warned.

  Austin dragged it back toward him until the key was positioned between his feet. Then he had to somehow get it from lying flat on the floor to standing up between his feet so that he could wedge it between two of his toes.

  The key shifted and clinked on the floor in the dark. He used one foot to hold it in position and tried to use his big toenail to get under and lift it from the floor. Just when he thought he had it, the key fell back.

  “Damn it,” he complained after several failed times. “I can’t do this.”

  “That’s why our marriage fell apart,” Angie taunted. “I had to do everything for you.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, “I think it’s the other way around.” But her words enraged him and gave him the energy to try even harder. And then with an invisible shift, the key suddenly was tucked in between the big toe and second toe of his right foot.

  He tried to lift it and pull down one arm, and almost lost his balance and fell.

  “Just as coordinated as ever,” his dead wife’s voice whispered with unveiled disgust.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he said.

  Slowly, he dragged one arm down as far as it would go and then began to lean on the chain to help maintain his balance as he lifted his foot. His finger touched the end of the key, and he felt it loosen and begin to slide out of his toes.

  “Damn it,” he swore again and scooped down with his hand as hard as he could.

  He caught the key just before it dropped to the floor. Then his whole body collapsed. He gripped the key tightly as he fell back against the wall and quickly stamped his bare foot back to the ground to halt his fall.

  “You should have been a dancer,” Angie said. He could see the glimmer of her body nearby, but he could no longer make out her form.