Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  “You’re either the sculptor, the chisel, or the stone being shaped,” Hector said.

  The guy was full of shit. Clarence didn’t have a shred of doubt about that. But he might be only half full of shit. Maybe less. The idea that Sobell would treat him like a chisel and toss him out when he’d been used so hard he got damaged wasn’t so much a worry as it was a fuckin’ law of nature.

  Hector would fuck him over, too, as soon it became advantageous. That didn’t mean he might not be useful. It might take some careful positioning, but Clarence thought it could do him a world of good to cozy up to the man. Metaphorically speaking.

  “I hear you,” Clarence said. “I believe you, too. I just don’t know what I can do for you. I ain’t much more than a gofer here.”

  Another bloody cough, and this time Hector wiped a gob of red phlegm on the dashboard. Jesus fucking Christ.

  “We need a weapon,” Hector said. “A weapon to strike against the source of this corruption, to cut it from our spirits like cutting out a cancer. A weapon, and strength in numbers.” He coughed another of his ghastly coughs again. “Bring me to your people. I can help them. Slow the changes. Buy time.”

  Clarence looked away from the road and checked Hector’s eyes. The guy was desperate, no doubt about that. He might even be sincere. Maybe he was lying his ass off, or maybe Sobell was, but there wasn’t no reason not to work both angles. If Sobell used Clarence’s guys to find the solution, great. If not, maybe Hector here would offer up another way.

  He considered his options. Big John was his first concern, but maybe that wasn’t the best idea. Phil Holsom, though . . . He was down with this stuff, too, and that might be a better way to go. Phil was solid, dependable, and a good earner, but he also was meaner than a pit bull with a mouthful of ground glass. If this went bad, nobody would miss him all that much. It wouldn’t be hard to spin up a story about Phil pissing the wrong guy off, and there wouldn’t be a lot of questions. The man’s wife would probably be grateful.

  “Let’s go see my man Phil,” Clarence said.

  It was off the beaten path a good way—Burbank was forty-five minutes or more from Phil’s place in Compton—but depending on how this went, Clarence wasn’t sure they’d be hitting Burbank after all. Sobell had a problem with it, he could go fuck himself.

  Phil’s place was in a two-story apartment complex across from a dollar store and a discount liquor shop. The complex was surrounded by a red-brown metal fence, but it looked to have been recently renovated, and the lawn in the courtyard was kept well enough. Decent enough digs for the neighborhood. Clarence entered the code at the gate and parked his car inside. He got out and started walking toward the first-floor apartment on the corner.

  Hector followed him, with Jerome and Leland trailing a little farther than normal, probably to get some distance from the smell.

  He was only a few strides from the door when it opened. A heavyset woman with close-cropped hair and bright earrings came out and pulled the door shut quietly, as though trying not to wake a baby. Clarence saw her shoulders slowly descend an inch or two as she let out a breath.

  When she turned around, she gasped and one hand went straight to her chest. “Jesus, you scared me.”

  “That’s a big bag,” Clarence said.

  She looked down at the big beach bag she carried. From where Clarence stood, it looked full of clothes.

  “Gonna visit my mom,” she said. She sounded like any of a dozen lowlifes trying to tell Clarence that they were on the way to see him with the money, really, and then they’d just gotten sidetracked.

  “Anything I need to worry about in there, Cheryl?” Clarence asked, tipping his head toward the apartment door.

  She licked her lips nervously. “I . . . I don’t know. He’s . . . busy.”

  “Is he awake?”

  “Uh. Sort of. Not really?”

  “You don’t sound too sure.”

  She looked at the sidewalk, then back up, and she shrugged. “I ain’t too sure. He’s in the bedroom, kinda . . . zoned out?”

  “Does he have a gun?”

  “Three or four of ’em, I think.”

  “Does he have a gun on him?”

  She shrugged again and gave him an embarrassed smile. “Don’t know.”

  She’d been honest with him after the initial lie, Clarence thought, but there was no way she was visiting her mom. She’d packed clothes enough for a week, from the look of things, and from the terror on her face, he thought she wasn’t planning to come back at all. From what he knew of Phil, the man wouldn’t have tolerated that. That she’d taken time to pack anything at all rather than just head for the hills suggested Phil wasn’t altogether with it. “Go visit your mom,” he said.

  She walked away, casting nervous glances back over her shoulder until she reached her car.

  Clarence waited until she pulled away and then put his hand on the doorknob and slowly turned it. He pushed the door open with the palm of his other hand, letting it swing open as he stood outside. When he saw nobody inside, he went in. It was a good-sized two-bedroom apartment, and even if Phil was a mean fucker with impulse control problems, he apparently hadn’t blown all his cash on booze and drugs. Either that or his old lady kept him in style. Slick furniture, lots of leather, nice TV. Nice decor overall, like maybe an interior designer had been at the place. Even a couple of pieces of art, nice blown-glass stuff like decent Chihuly knockoffs. He would have guessed Phil had the artistic sensibility of a trout, but there they were.

  The bedrooms were on the left, past the kitchen. Clarence walked softly in that direction, his shoes making no sound on the carpet.

  Jerome ushered Leland and Hector in and closed the door.

  Clarence paused at the beginning of the hall. He could see the door to the master bedroom, open a crack, at the far end. It might make sense to send Jerome in first. That’d be less dangerous, but Jerome didn’t necessarily draw a distinction between surprising and threatening. Phil might end up with holes in him if he was up to anything more unusual than taking a nap. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it would be a pain in the ass.

  Clarence took a few more steps, then stopped as a sound reached him. Words, or something with the cadence of words. Nothing intelligible.

  He glanced back. Hector’s eyes were alight, his head cocked as he listened. Yeah, this was the kind of shit he was looking for.

  Clarence walked to the end of the hall and paused. He couldn’t see anything through the crack, couldn’t make out any words in the stream of gibberish Phil was muttering on the other side. He listened carefully for the sound of anything that wasn’t Phil—a freakish dog thing, maybe—concentrating so hard he heard the sound of his pulse swishing in his ears.

  Nothing.

  He pushed the door open.

  The scene that greeted him was too bizarre to process, and for what must have been a minute or more he stood frozen at the doorway. His first insane thought was that he was staring at a huge, bloody eye, hung vertically so that its pointed oval shape stretched in the floor-to-ceiling direction. His next thought was that no, it was a wound, stretched and pulled into that shape, followed closely by the idea that it was a psychopath’s deranged depiction of a vagina. It was five feet high or more, oval, splashed in dark red blood, and mounted on a rectangular frame.

  His mind slowly put the scene together. It was a bed, actually, or had been once. It had been tipped up against the wall, nearly vertical, and the mattress slashed open in the middle. The slash had been pulled open, creating that stretched oval, and then it had been, bizarrely, packed with meat. There had to be two hundred pounds of meat there, some of it impaled on the exposed bedsprings, some just crammed into the hole.

  The bed frame itself had been used as a mounting frame for a webwork of string that crisscrossed the mattress in a sort of broken spiral pattern that
circled and partly covered the opening. The hole in the center was what had given Clarence the impression of an eye.

  No wonder Phil’s old lady was tearing ass out of here.

  Phil’s muttering hadn’t so much as broken rhythm. Bare-ass naked, he squatted in front of his disgusting creation, muttering and tracing a pattern on his forehead or face—Clarence couldn’t quite tell from back here, with Phil facing away.

  Shoot him, Clarence thought. Couple of quick taps and get out of here. It wasn’t the blood. Clarence had hurt a lot of people in his time, and had watched a lot more get hurt. But this . . . This shit was unholy.

  “Fuck me,” one of the guys behind him said. Clarence just nodded.

  The advancing stink told him Hector was coming, and he returned to the moment. Hector’s face bore a wide smile as he approached, and Clarence stepped to the side as much to get away from him as to let him pass.

  Hector placed his hand on Phil’s shoulder, and finally Phil stopped talking. He looked up abruptly, mouth hanging open.

  Hector smiled at him. “A fitting tribute,” he said. “The flies will grow thick upon it, and Belzebuth will delight.”

  Phil’s mouth still gaped. A strand of bloody saliva hung from the scrubby shit on his chin he called a beard.

  Wipe it off. Wipe that shit off and fucking pretend you’re a goddamn human being.

  “Rise,” Hector said, still beaming at Phil. His fractured persona had been annealed into a lens or a mirror, focusing all his intensity on the man. Clarence could feel it, even off to the side. He felt in himself a desire to follow Hector’s instruction—a small desire, easily ignored, but it caught him by surprise. “Rise,” Hector said again. “You have made your gift. Now we have great work to undertake.”

  Phil stood.

  “Now, calm yourself. Recite the Nine Words and the Prayer of Abaddon.”

  Phil started talking a bunch of bullshit again, and Hector started talking right alongside him. This had gone far enough, Clarence thought. This Hector guy was nuts, and maybe playing him besides, but he sure as shit wasn’t calming things down. Clarence moved to pull out his gun, and—

  Actually, he didn’t move at all. Couldn’t. “Jerome?” he said.

  “Uh . . . I’m stuck.”

  Hector smiled at Clarence, his mouth huge and terrifying.

  “My son?” he said to Phil. “Clean and clothe yourself.”

  This time, Phil hesitated. “Why?”

  “In time, we will bleed the innocent and feast on the flesh of our foes, living and dead. We start down that road today.” This time, he put both hands on Phil’s shoulders. “You will be my sword and my pistol, my cleaver and maul.”

  Phil grinned, revealing red teeth.

  “Now,” Hector said, facing Clarence, Jerome, and Leland. “You three. We have much to discuss.”

  Chapter 14

  Karyn lay back in bed and stared at the roof beam again. She knew it was there from the demon image, but in her eyes the roof was now a hole with charred edges, blue sky beyond instead of the night sky that corresponded with the hour. If she could just concentrate, get the beam to come back . . .

  Ten minutes of staring did little but give her a headache, some kind of tension thing that crawled up from her shoulders through the back of her neck and planted crampons in the base of her skull. She tried to breathe slowly, to force herself to relax and just let the view come of its own accord, but that didn’t work worth a damn, either.

  In her mind, the image shifted to a field of stars. Nighttime in some cool or arid place, the sky an impossibly deep black, the stars against it glinting pinpricks of unreal clarity. It reminded her of camping as a kid, a trip up to Lake Tahoe. The stars had been like this there, and she’d watched them for hours.

  The image focused on one star in the center, and then something odd and disorienting happened: the focus changed. One star in the center stood out in almost three dimensions, as if it would be possible to pluck it from its inky setting, and the others around it faded, first to dull points, then to a sort of gray soup in the background as the focus on the center star intensified. It was a familiar sensation, so familiar that she expected it to come with a sort of tight feeling in her eyes that wasn’t actually present.

  She recognized it now. She’d done the same thing during those nights at camp, lying on a picnic table away from the fire and watching the star. Focus on one, let the others fade. It was disorienting and a strain on her eyes, impossible to keep up for long, but fascinating when she could maintain it for more than a few seconds.

  In her mind, the sequence repeated itself.

  These are instructions. Did the demon actually know how this worked?

  It was worth a try.

  She tried focusing on the spot where the roof beam was supposed to be, tried to force her eyes into that hyperfocused state. There was nothing to focus on, though, as far as her eyes were concerned, and the pain in her head crept around to the front, becoming a band that encircled her skull. After endless minutes with nothing to show for her effort, she took a different tack. Instead, she tried focusing on the image in her mind, bringing it to the point where her eyes were straining. A bolt of nausea shot through her stomach, and her head spun. For a moment, a bare fraction of a second, she thought she saw the roof beam, though that might have merely been the image.

  She closed her eyes. She didn’t drift off to sleep so much as she was dragged down to it.

  * * *

  A light exploded in Karyn’s head, jolting her awake. She sat upright, knocking over a glass of water and raising her hand to protect her eyes, but the light wasn’t coming from outside. The blinding sensation hurt her mind, not her eyes.

  “What?” she snarled.

  The light vanished. A hooded figure stood in front of a stage. The curtain, red velvet, was down, blocking the stage from view, but as Karyn watched, the figure gestured grandly with one arm, and the curtain drew back.

  On the stage, a good-sized home office, complete with an oversize desk and a sort of long counter along the back wall. Every flat surface was piled with manila folders, leather-bound books, and stacks of paper. Special Agent Elliot, in a tank top and sweatpants, sat in an awkward cross-legged position on the desk chair, a dozen documents laid out in front of her.

  The stage setting was gone, Karyn noticed. Whether it had vanished abruptly or just faded out, she had no idea. She was in the room with Elliot now.

  Elliot wasn’t looking at the documents. She was instead staring at a minuscule something held pinched between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. From her vantage point, Karyn couldn’t see it, but that didn’t matter.

  Is this real? she wondered. If so, how was she seeing it? The splinter was there. Was this pure fantasy or an extrapolation conjured up by the demon? A dramatic reenactment, as it were?

  Her ruminations were cut off as Elliot abruptly swung her legs off the chair. Elliot stood, took a step from the desk, then picked up one of the documents. The paper was covered in weird symbols and handwritten Latin, neither of which Karyn understood. Elliot threw it back down on the bed with a look of fear and disgust, put the splinter down on the headboard, and disappeared into a room off to the side. A few moments later, she came out, drying her face with a towel. She looked at something on her laptop, then turned back to the document.

  After staring at the document for a minute or more, her mouth working as though she was talking to herself, shaking her head every so often, she put it down again.

  The corner behind her swelled with darkness, from which a pair of baleful eyes shone above a gleaming, tooth-filled grin.

  Elliot picked up the splinter.

  Don’t do it, Karyn thought, suddenly repenting of her decision. There has to be some other way to do this.

  Elliot, cleverer than Karyn had been, and with more luxury to consider, stoo
d facing the wall. She arched her foot, put the splinter between her big toe and the wall, and then stepped down, forcing her toe forward. Her face twisted in a grimace, more shock at the pain than at the pain itself. She looked down. Half the splinter still stuck from her toe.

  She squeezed her eyes shut—then suddenly opened them and kicked the wall.

  She dropped to the floor clutching her foot.

  “Enough,” Karyn said. “I’ve seen enough.” The image didn’t vanish, though. A scaly hand extended from the darkness and settled on Elliot’s shoulder.

  Elliot looked up, making eye contact with Karyn.

  The vision vanished, returning to Karyn’s room.

  Before Karyn could mentally adjust to being back in the loft, her phone lit up with a text message. She picked up the phone. A short note, from a number she didn’t recognize: We need to meet. NOW.

  Karyn got up and started looking for her shoes.

  * * *

  Elliot met them at the front of the municipal building. She’d traded in her sweatpants and tank top for jeans and a plain blue blouse rather than reverting to FBI duds. She still managed to exude an aura of “cop,” Karyn thought. When she saw the car pull up, she started hobbling over.

  “Last chance to speed off into the night,” Nail said. “Morning. Whatever.” He was still complaining about getting called for chauffeur duty at two in the morning, but it wasn’t like the buses were running at this hour.

  “No. This is what we came for.”

  “Pretty sure she’s carrying,” Nail said. “Shirt’s loose, but it ain’t that loose.”

  “I don’t think she’s going to shoot us.”

  “Just saying.”

  Elliot tapped on the window, and Karyn directed her to the back with a movement of her head. A moment later, Elliot got in.

  “Where are we going?” Elliot asked.

  “You hungry?” Nail asked.

  “No.”

  “Then we’re going to go sit under a bridge somewhere, I guess.” He pulled the car away from the curb and accelerated.