“It is about the photographs, Ron. About what I’m doing here. It is very much about that. You see—catching a little runt like you sniffing around my territory is something I do have a problem with.” Rail’s voice twisted with an anger that hardened the seductive tone like cold water quenching molten steel.
“I swear I didn’t see you here. I didn’t see anything. Just let me go home.”
“Maybe you forgot you were here at all. Is that it?”
“Yeah.”
“They do say the Devil’s weed impairs the memory.”
Gribbens giggled, nodding his head, but still walking cautiously backward, matching Rail step for step.
“Perhaps I should encourage your habit then, help you forget.”
Gribbens’s face darkened with confusion at this new tack.
“Need a light?” Rail asked, waving his hand at Gribbens’s chest, a flower of fire unfolding from his fingertips, flaring up in the tight space between them, and rising toward the interloper’s astonished eyes with a gentle roar.
Gribbens arched backward away from the fire, threw his arms up to shield his eyes and lost his balance. He tumbled over the railing with a wild cry and fell toward the floor, toward the mic stand that held the upward pointing tanto.
Rail watched the body twisting in the air, listened as the cry became a shriek cut short when Ron Gribbens had the wind driven out of him. The blade impaled him through the gut so cleanly that the boom stand followed, running right through the gash.
Rail watched as thick, round globules of blood leapt up toward him from the tip of the knife and then rained back down like hail on the varnished wood floor, pattering and exploding in exquisite starbursts. The spatter was a gorgeous thing to behold from above. The beauty of that knife just continued to unfold. If only Eastman were here to capture it. Ah, well, he thought, looking at his wristwatch,
Time to find that Pine Sol.
Nineteen
Billy fumbled with the key for a moment, finally got it in the slot, and tumbled through the church doors with Rachel draped around him. She was singing his own lyrics in his ear—not a real turn on—and attempting to undress him with less than nimble fingers. For his part, he didn’t feel particularly horny tonight, at least not on a conscious level, but his body was showing signs of voting yea anyway as her hands roamed and plucked, chipped black nail polished digits flitting in and out of his shirt and jeans. Then she stopped.
“What’s that smell?” she said, suddenly distracted from the task at hand. They were staggering across the floor, which was cleared of the couches and guitar stands that usually covered it, all moved aside for the photo shoot. Billy had noticed the chemical bite in his sinuses immediately upon entering the room. “Some kind of cleaner,” he said. They usually come in the mornings before I get up. Looks like they took advantage of the empty floor and gave it a polish while we were out.”
“Stinks like a darkroom,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Lez go upstairs. You can carry me, like Dracula.”
“I don’t think so, baby. It’s a pretty tight spiral. How about the control room couch?”
“Fine, be a wimp. I'll climb it myself. Couch sex is pretty lo-fi after a nice dinner,” she said, sauntering away from him with a weave. It had been good wine, no doubt, but he was a little surprised to find she had such a low tolerance. Well, she was petite.
He noticed that her trajectory had put her on course for the sole object on the empty floor: the mic stand that still held his Japanese dagger. “Ho! Rachel, watch the knife, girl. Jeez.” He stepped forward to remove it from the clip and tuck it away somewhere, but now that she was focused on it, she beat him to it and had it in her hand before he could get there.
Holding the knife seemed to sober her. She turned it this way and that, watching the light play over the blade, transfixed. When she met Billy’s eyes again, it was with a whole new intensity. “You ever play with this in bed, Billy?”
His heart beat a little faster. “Not really my cup of tea,” he said.
She held the tip of the blade to her lips as if to shush him, then gently pulled her lower lip down with it. “I used to cut sometimes,” she said. “Acshully, all the time. Not so much anymore. Used to need it. Now it’s more of a treat.”
“That thing’s super sharp, Rach. Lemme put it away.”
She ran her tongue along the unsharpened spine of it in reply.
“Come on,” he urged, “Lemme have it. You’re kinda drunk. You shouldn’t be playing with knives.”
“I can teach you things,” she almost sang. Then the knife was behind her back, held tightly in her right hand, the wrist of which she gripped with her left. She solemnly marched up the stairs, grasping the knife that way, where he could see it.
Billy followed.
Watching her pace across the catwalk intoxicated and holding the knife made him deeply uneasy, but as they approached the bedroom, he felt the disquieting sensation increasing at just the moment when seeing her on safer footing should have eased it. Something wasn’t right. It was the light. A dim illumination flickered through the white curtain, shifting the tone of the canvas through a range of muted hues. Candle light. He had left no candles burning here, in his private space. What new game was this?
He almost told her to stop, to wait, as if some physical danger must lie on the other side of the curtain, something that even the razor-sharp knife in her hand could not defend against. But he said nothing. He watched as she parted the veil, needing to know.
She hesitated, taking in the room he could not yet see beyond her. Turning to face him, she asked, “Who are these people?”
Billy stepped through beside her, and saw Jim and Kate looking back at him across the gulf of years. Twin shrines flanking his unkempt bed. Kate was looking over her shoulder, caught in the candid instant before noticing the camera pointed at her. She had always been camera shy, so he’d had just a few photos of her, each acquired on the sly, and all lost in the house fire, along with the woman herself.
He remembered taking this one. The humidity of the summer day on the porch, the yellow jackets hovering in the rose bush by the mailbox. Her placid inscrutable eyes, so soft on that day, somehow managed to pierce him right through here and now. This picture could not be here. He looked again at Jim’s photo, this one not candid at all—tie-dyed t-shirt obscured by a big, red disposable cup of keg beer in one hand, face so overly stern and serious as to be comical, chest puffed out, stomach held in for the shot, a prince in the castle they had once shared.
Heat overwhelmed him, flushing into his ears and cheeks from some eternal source, ever at the ready, flooding his eyes with tears in an instant, shattering the unframed photos into splinters of refracted candle light. Suddenly it was all here with him in this unexpected defenseless moment: the profound emptiness at the core of his body, the sorry burden of abandonment and betrayal. Unfinished business.
Worst of all, the firm knowledge that he had gotten what he wanted all those years ago by casting these friends from his heart like worthless cargo from a ship caught in a gale. The treasures he had found on the other shore had been worthless in his isolation. And he had raised anchor again, kept on moving. From the day Trevor Rail had set his course, he had kept on moving. But it was all catching up with him now.
Who had put these pictures here? Was it the ghost who haunted this place? He didn’t think so. This smelled like Rail.
Without thinking about what he was doing, he plucked up the photos, walked over to his acoustic guitar perched on the chair in the corner and slipped them between the strings into the sound hole where he wouldn’t have to look at them. Where they would be safe.
“Who are they?” Rachel asked again.
“Friends I lost. I told you about Jim.”
“And her? Was she your girlfriend?”
He nodded. “Her name was Kate.”
“They’re both dead?”
“Yes.”
“Who put them here?”
/> “I think maybe Rail. He’s been fucking with my head for a long time.”
“That’s pretty sick. You two have some old feud?”
Billy laughed. “I guess you could say that.”
“He said he produced Eclipse, right?”
“Yeah. A lot of those songs were about her. Even if I didn’t know it at the time.”
“That CD saved my life.”
He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time since they had entered the room, maybe for the first time since she had entered his life. He said, “Then maybe we’re even.”
“My step-father used to rape me. By the time I was sixteen I couldn’t feel anything.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Then I heard your song ‘Empty Vessel’ on the radio, in a parking lot, and for four minutes and twenty-eight seconds I could feel everything. I can’t tell you how many times I played that CD.”
He reached out to touch her wrist. She let him. Scar tissue under his fingers.
She said, “I found out everything I could about you. It opened a lot of doors I didn’t know were there. Other bands, books, people like me.”
“It’s good to hear it helped somebody.”
“It did. And not just the music, but the artwork, the images. It taught me to look under the surface of things. Everything my mother ever wanted is worthless in the end. No meaning at all in it, all that materialistic crap. But you taught me to celebrate death, because it’s the ultimate truth for everyone. And everyone denies it.”
“I don’t know if I ever meant to teach anyone that.”
“Well, you did. And I’m better off for it, because knowing it and facing it, I can finally live.”
“Is that why you got the tattoo? To celebrate death?”
“Yeah. You like it?”
He touched the Ouija board on her belly. “It’s pretty intense. You ever use it?”
“Sometimes. That’s what this is for,” she said, touching the teardrop shaped silver and glass pendant that dangled from her black silk choker.
“Does it work?”
“The first time we ever tried it, me and my friend Christine, we called up my Aunt Judy. She’s the only one who ever gave a shit about me. It works. Better than a regular Ouija board because, when you think about it, it’s written in blood and pain, not just ink.” She bit her lip.
“I want to try it.”
He wasn’t sure what response he expected from her, but when she didn’t answer, just clawed at her shirt and crossed her ankles, he realized he had asked for something more personal than sex.
“Who do you want to talk to?” she asked, “Kate?”
Billy hadn’t even considered the possibility and the idea chilled him. “No. Someone I’ve never really met. Her name is Olivia. She haunts this place.”
“Really? There’s a ghost here?”
“They say she was a witch. Or people thought so, anyway. They say she walked with the Devil in the woods out there.”
“You’re not lying to me, are you, Billy? Making shit up?”
“Just telling you what I heard. I know it sounds like a campfire story, but I’ve heard her play the piano, believe it or not.”
“I believe you.”
“And I caught a glimpse of her on the night you followed me, the night we met in the forest. She wanted me to see something, but I don’t know why. And I need to know. I need to ask her, and I can’t just wait around for her to come calling. Not anymore.”
“Why’s it so urgent?”
“Because I’ve been talking to devils.” He breathed a short laugh. “Crazy, right? Even you must know that’s crazy. A dead Aunt is one thing, but…”
“Yeah, you might want to keep that one in Siouxsie’s cupboard at your next interview.”
Billy smiled. “Well, between you and me, I think it’s time I talked to someone else who might know the Devil. Someone who can tell me what the hell’s going on here. Because I’m just lost.”
“And you think Olivia can help you.”
“Maybe. Are you game?”
She set the tanto down on the bed and touched the pendant in the hollow of her throat again. She lifted it, kissed it lightly, and asked, “Where do you want to do it?”
He led her to the grand piano and put the hood down. He laid a horse blanket over the black lacquered surface and asked her how it worked. She told him she would need candles and some massage oil or other lubricant for the pendant to move freely.
Billy went downstairs to rummage through the drawers and cabinets. When he returned carrying three candles in glass jars (he didn’t want to touch the votives that had appeared with the photos) and a bottle of olive oil, she was stark naked except for her rings, studs, and choker pendant. He studied the tattoo: an arch of black letters above her navel, a line of numbers below, the sun on the underside of her right breast with the word YES, and the moon on the left with the word NO.
Billy lit the candles and placed them on the piano. He turned off the green-shaded banker’s lamp and watched Rachel lift herself onto the blanketed piano, where she stretched out on her back among the candles. She released the glass teardrop from the choker and placed it in Billy’s hand.
“This is the planchette,” she said. “Oil me up so it can glide.”
Billy rubbed a thin glaze of olive oil over her pale skin from her hips to her breasts. He set the silver filigree framed teardrop on her, just above her navel, point upward toward her face. It was coming back to him now, how this was done on a normal board. Some people called them ‘witchboards,’ he recalled. His arms broke out in gooseflesh as he placed his fingertips on the base of the instrument and Rachel placed hers on the sides where it narrowed to a point.
She said, “The motion can be intentional at first to get it started. Guide it in a circle around the center like this. Just relax, and when you’re ready, ask a question. If she’s here, it will start to move by itself and we just hold on lightly.”
The planchette traced an orbit around her belly, gliding easily on the thin film of golden oil. The church was dead quiet. In time, the circle widened, and the letters and numbers were magnified by the glass eye as it passed over them.
Billy cleared his throat and said, “Olivia Heron. I want to talk with you. Are you here?”
The planchette shot out of the circular pattern in a straight line to Rachel’s right breast, stopping with the silver point aimed at the stylized sun face and the word YES.
“Did you play the organ in this church when you were alive?”
The planchette slid back a few inches along the path it had traveled, then returned to YES.
He still wanted to test this with something Rachel couldn’t know. “What notes did you play for me on the piano?”
The planchette guided their hands to the letter D, then moved along the arch of letters, dwelling on each one long enough to emphasize it before glossing over others to pause at the next, spelling out D-E-A-D. Billy reduced the pressure of his own fingers on the planchette as it moved, trying not to influence it, and almost losing touch entirely under the speed of travel. A frisson of excitement tingled through him as the glass eye settled again on the final D.
“Are the stories true? Were you a witch?”
The planchette returned to an aimless revolution around the center of the tattoo.
“Were you accused of witchcraft and murdered for it?”
The planchette shot forward to point at YES again, this time jabbing its silver point into the underside of Rachel’s breast. She breathed a short cry that Billy couldn’t differentiate—pain, pleasure, surprise, or all three?
“Why did you want me to follow the tracks? Why did you lead me to that place in the woods?”
The lens moved over the letters: TREE.
“The tree by the pool in the clearing? Did they hang you from that tree?”
NO.
“I don’t understand. What about the tree?”
ASHES.
“
Ashes. Did they burn you?”
YES.
“Tell me about the creature I met in the clearing. The face I saw in the pool. Who is he?”
MY LORD.
“Is he the Devil?”
OLDER.
“What does he want?”
TO PLAY.
“Is he good or evil?”
The planchette glided to the cleft between Rachel’s breasts, the space between sun and moon.
“The pictures I found in this church tonight; did you bring them here? Do you know my friends from… the other side?”
The planchette circled before drifting over to the moon on Rachel’s left breast and the word NO.
In a quieter voice, directed at Rachel, Billy said, “I don’t know if I’m asking the right questions. Does it matter how you phrase them?”
She didn’t answer. He looked up at her face in the candlelight. Her eyes were closed, lids fluttering lightly as if she were in REM sleep. The gentle undulation of the tattoo with her breathing had grown deep and slow but her fingers still touched the planchette, her hands still hovered above her flesh.
Billy asked, “The man who works with me here, the one named Rail, do you serve him?”
In answer, a revolution away from and back to NO.
“Did you ever know him before we came here?”
Another revolution ending at NO.
“Thank you,” Billy said, relaxing the set of his shoulders, lifting his fingers from the planchette and expelling a quivering exhalation. “That’s what I needed to know.”
Rachel’s hand seized his wrist in a grip so powerful his circulation was instantly cut off, his hand going numb as fear flooded him. Her eyes shot open, no longer hers, wild and intense, feral and feline. She spoke in a voice that was also not her own, the timbre of an entirely different set of vocal chords, the words accented with a dialect he couldn’t quite place.
“He followed me to the sacred grove. John Van Buren followed me there, though he had a wife, he watched me always, and he did see my prayers and offerings to the ancient one.”
Billy felt chilled to the bone, as if his thundering heart was pumping all of the blood right out of him onto the piano and the floor.
The Devil of Echo Lake Page 21
