by DC Malone
I continued to watch that empty pulpit, waiting for any sign of movement, even a flicker. Nothing happened, but that didn’t lessen my certainty that something was there. I had another epiphany as well. The thing that I knew full well was there was the source for that feeling of dread that seemed caked onto every surface around me. It had nothing to do with the church itself; it was the demon that stood watching.
Only, it had been doing more than just watching.
He will make you watch too.
My heart lurched in my chest, and I spun and ran back down the central aisle between the rows of pews. My boots hammered out bright, rapid taps as I pushed my body as hard as I could. I knew the demon wasn’t bothering to give chase. It didn’t need to. It had already done what it wanted.
I smashed through the double doors to find the entryway room empty. I cursed my slowness as I watched Carter’s car pull away from the curb through the church’s front windows.
Chapter 11
“Hiram, if you don’t pick up this time, I’m going—”
“No need for threats, I’m here.” His voice on the other end of the line was a small weight off my shoulders, but there were plenty of others there to take its place.
“And I haven’t been deliberately dodging your calls. I’ve just been tied up again, I’m afraid.”
I knew from his tone he was talking about Gwen and her infernal investigation. I allowed myself a moment’s irritation, but that was all. There wasn’t enough time for such things.
“I’m going to need your help.”
“Isn’t that always the way—”
“Shush,” I said, “Normally, I find your curmudgeonly ways tolerable, but right now I have a situation. A demon situation.”
“Demon situation? Oh.”
“Yeah, it turns out that was the missing factor in that case I was working.”
Hiram let out a harsh laugh that was the embodiment of everything I wasn’t feeling at that moment. “That makes a lot more sense than that whole mind control thing. You don’t hear a lot about demons these days. They’re all over the old texts—demon this and demon that. They were blamed for pretty much everything at one time. Of course, they were probably only responsible for a fraction of those things. You know, this really changes the way I see things with those monks I was telling you about. Perhaps, they weren’t all that far off with that evil business.”
“I’m sure you have a lot of interesting stories about the old days,” I replied. “But, right now, I have something of an urgent matter to deal with, and I need to know anything you can tell me about the demon. Particularly, ways to break its hold over someone.” I also really needed to not let Hiram work himself up into a longwinded lecture.
I was in the back of a cab, on my way to Francie’s to meet up with Luka. I figured there was a very good chance I was going to need some muscle, and he was the obvious choice. The problem was, I felt like I was moving at a snail’s pace, and there was no telling where Carter had gotten to.
By the time I had managed to snag a cab, Carter had been long gone. The demon had done to him what it had done to the others, and he was as good as a ticking time bomb. That’s what the shades had meant when they had said it wanted me to watch.
The demon wanted me to watch what it was going to make my friend do.
“That’s a big question,” Hiram said with a sigh. “Not all demons are created equally. We need to know more about what we’re dealing with.”
“I was kind of hoping for a universal cure-all here, man. Something like pouring salt on a butterfly while facing east.”
“Sorry, it’s probably not going to be that simple,” he said. “Also, don’t pour salt on butterflies.”
“Noted. I do have the creature’s name. It’s Lechbaalmet.”
“Yeesh, such a lovely name.”
“Do you know that one?” I asked. I was just a few blocks from Francie’s, and I hoped to have some kind of working plan before Luka and I set off after Carter.
“Well, no,” Hiram said. “I’m not exactly on a first-name basis with very many demons.”
“Crap.”
“Hold your crap for the moment. Just because I don’t know of this Lechbaalmet, doesn’t mean I won’t be able to dig something up. Also, we do have some preliminary information to work with.”
“Such as?”
“Well, he’s certainly more than some lower-tier demon—not something some idiot teenagers with a Ouija board might accidentally summon.”
“Does that really happen?”
“More than you’d think.” Hiram made a clicking sound with his tongue, like he always did when he was lost in thought. “No, our demon has real power. It takes considerable power for them to stay on our plane for any amount of time. The fact that Lechbaalmet has not only managed to stick around, but also to bend several people to his will, means he is one of the greater demons.”
“Didn’t seem all that great to me.”
“Har har. This does tell us a few things, my comically impaired friend. A greater demon must be bound to someone and some place. There is a hierarchy of importance to those two tethers—the person is most important.”
“So, the demon can’t stay on our plane without its connection to the priest?”
“Priest?”
“Sorry, keep forgetting you’re not completely in the loop. I’m pretty sure the priest, a Father Donovan, is the man who summoned this particular demon. And if my experience at his church tells me anything, that’s the place where the demon was summoned.”
“A priest? That’s a bit peculiar. Don’t recall ever hearing of a priest who intentionally summoned a demon, but I suppose it takes all kinds. And you’re probably right about the church being its place of refuge now. As far as range of motion, the demon can only be within the confines of the place it was summoned, or very near the summoner himself.”
I shuddered as I recalled how the creature had descended upon Father Donovan in the alley as if from thin air. The thought of being that thing’s personal homing beacon wasn’t at all appealing. On the plus side, it meant Donovan wasn’t dead, which, when I really considered the implications, might not have been much of a positive at all.
“Alright, Hiram, I’m pulling up in front of Francie’s now. Anything at all you can tell me about breaking the demon's hold over a person?”
The cabbie shot me an impatient look, which probably had a lot to do with the fact that I had been talking about demons for five solid minutes, so I paid and got out to stand on the sidewalk in front of Francie’s bar. The afternoon had only brought colder, windier weather, and I had to hunch my shoulders against it to keep from shivering.
“Like I said, not all demons are the same. And without better knowledge on our side, we’re pretty much shooting in the dark.”
“Shooting blind is better than not shooting at all,” I said.
“Okay, well, this kind of thing typically works a bit like a game for them. Most demons fetishize a particular sin or sinful behavior.”
“This one seems to have a thing for murder.”
“Yeah, but it is using others to do that murdering. It wouldn’t be fun for it otherwise.”
“So, what? It just likes controlling people and watching them murder other random people? I don’t see the appeal.”
“Demon logic isn’t going to seem particularly appealing to any sane person,” Hiram said. “And we’re using logic pretty loosely here. Take those images you found at the murder scene, for instance. Now that we know the context, those things aren’t so hard to fathom. It’s vanity. Plain and simple. The demon wanted to leave behind a calling card —something for mankind to look upon in awe. Honestly, though, I wonder about this control aspect you mentioned. You say its summoner was a priest, right?”
“Yup, and so far, all of the people it has made into murderers were members of his church.”
“Ah, there you go,” Hiram said, as though that explained something.
“There I
go where exactly?”
“That’s the demon’s game. He’s taking the priest’s flock, corrupting them, and likely making the man bear witness to that corruption.”
“I guess that would be a horrible thing to see,” I said. To a priest, it would have to look a lot like the negation of everything he stood for, which, I supposed, it was. “But is it really corrupting them when the demon is in control of the whole thing?”
“How do you know it’s in control?”
“Uh, because these regular people are out there murdering other people with their bare hands. Didn’t we just go over all this?”
“That’s not what I mean,” Hiram answered. “We know that the demon is influencing these people, but that’s not the same thing as controlling them. Something tells me that this wouldn’t be nearly as fun for that creature if there wasn’t some kind of complicity from the affected person.”
“He knows the truth of their hearts.” The shades’ words came to me in a flash.
“Come again?”
“I talked with some rather freaky spirits in Donovan’s church. Among other things, they said that the demon knows the truth of their hearts. Doesn’t that sound a lot like…”
“Like maybe our demon friend isn’t exactly working from a blank slate? Yes, it does. Perhaps, it is feeding the desires of these people. Likely enhancing them. You’d be amazed by what a person is capable of when the confines of consequence and remorse are removed from the equation.”
It wasn’t a comforting thought, but what Hiram said had the ring of truth to it. Wasn’t it possible that, somewhere down deep in the darkest part of his heart, Mr. Compton, under the pressures of financial metrics and quarterly reports, had wished ill upon some of his employees? It would likely have been a fleeting thought, maybe just a feeling, but it seemed almost a certainty that it was in him somewhere. Not something he would have ever acted upon ordinarily, just a thought to blow off some steam. I could kill that guy for such and such. It happened to the best of us. And it was no different for Caleb the homecare worker. I was sure he’d had many exhausting nights where his irritations bubbled up into the back of his mind.
But if that was the demon’s game, whispering that it was all right to act upon such urges, it begged one question of immediate concern. What murderous urges did Carter have to act upon?
“Okay, time is of the essence here. I have a runaway cop who’s got a demon whispering sweet nothings in his ear. You’ve got to have something that can help break the spell.”
“I’m afraid you’re just going to have to treat the symptoms until I do a little research,” Hiram replied.
“Symptoms? I’m not dealing with the flu, Hiram.”
“It’s not all that different, really. Your cop friend has an affliction, and while we don’t yet have the cure, that doesn’t mean you can’t mitigate the adverse reactions. Tie him up, cuff him to a steel pipe, lock him in a trunk. Do whatever it takes to keep him off the street until we figure out how to break the demon’s hold on him.”
Chapter 12
I walked into Francie’s with a clearer idea about what needed to happen but no clear ways to make it happen. I had no clue as to where Carter might go or what he might do. Maybe someone down at the police station had some ability to track him or his car, but that didn’t seem particularly likely. Besides, I doubted they’d give me that kind of information just for the asking.
Luka was already waiting for me as I strolled up to the bar. He had chosen to stand next to the barstools rather than sit, and one of the overhead neon signs cast a blue glow on him that only served to make his dark skin look richer and more complex. He wore dusky jeans and a fitted white button-down shirt. His downturned lips and furrowed brow made him look simultaneously angry and studious, which was essentially the man’s default look. And at nearly seven feet tall and proportionately broad, his sentry stance by the bar wasn’t doing Francie any favors in terms of patronage at the moment.
“The situation is dire?” The bass of his voice punched cleanly through the warble of country music that was currently drifting out of the bar’s ancient jukebox.
“I’m not sure I would say dire exactly.” I nodded to Francie behind the bar and waved away an offer for my usual. “Just not ideal, let’s say.”
“You sounded panicked when we spoke.” Luka shifted his weight to one leg. It was a subtle movement, but it may have been as close to fidgety as I’d ever seen him. He’d clearly come here in a rush and was anxious to jump to action.
“I was a little panicked,” I admitted. “And things aren’t much better now, but I think I have a better handle on them. Carter was influenced in some way by a demon. I’m sorry. I know he was sort of family to you. Well, ex-family, I guess. But we need to find him and—”
“Kill him.” Luka nodded solemnly. “My car is around the corner.”
“Uh, no, that’s not at all what I had in mind.”
Luka’s brow furrowed even more deeply. “But we cannot hope to catch him on foot.”
“That’s not the part of your plan I have an issue with, Luka. If we find him, we can just keep him under lock until we get the demon’s hold over him broken. No need to kill anyone, especially one of the good guys.”
Luka grunted and strode toward the bar’s exit, leaving me to scurry along behind in his wake and cast an apologetic next time to Francie. “We will do that if we are given the choice,” he said, as we walked out into the chilly air.
Luka’s car was parked haphazardly, and highly illegally, in front of the dumpster in the alleyway up from Francie’s. We got in and headed east, merging into the glacially slow late afternoon traffic. I couldn’t help but feel we were in the world’s slowest highspeed chase, with absolutely no idea where the person we were chasing even was.
“Do you happen to have more contacts within the police department? Someone who might be able to point us at Carter?” We hadn’t even made it a block from the bar, and I was still trying to wrack my brain for something that might lead us to our quarry.
“I do, but I cannot see how they would be of any help. If Carter is as compromised as you suggest, it is not likely he would be calling in to offer up his current whereabouts. I thought you would have a suggestion for where we might find him. He did not say anything when you parted?”
I reviewed the moments before Carter left me at the church, but I came up with nothing. His reaction had been almost immediate, and he’d even gone under the pretense of continuing his investigation in the other room. That might have been the most chilling thing about the whole episode. He’d been Carter still, not some puppet under the control of the Demon. He’d had the presence of mind to try to stall me and give himself a head start, so he was still thinking like a cop and completely aware of his actions. It was like whatever it was that had been done to him had only given him permission to act on an impulse, but he still had to play by the usual rules to ensure he got his chance to act.
Honestly, it would have been better if he had just zombie walked out of that church with a slack jaw and vacant stare.
“No, but I could try his partner, Al,” I said. “Al Tompkins, I think. There’s a chance he might have had contact with him.”
If the demon’s game were to encourage a person’s already existing murderous impulses, it stood to reason that the target of said impulses would be someone Carter knew. I wasn’t privy to Carter’s feelings on the subject, but if it were me, Al would rank pretty high on the kill list. That guy was a strangling waiting to happen.
I put a call into Carter’s precinct and, after getting the run around for several minutes and having to convince two different people that I was, in fact, consulting on an active case, they finally patched me through to Tompkins.
“This is Tompkins.”
A flash of irritation shot through me just at the sound of the man’s voice. It seemed like I could hear his bushy mustache scratching against his phone.
“Al? This is Meredith. Meredith Bale.”
>
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold up. I don’t know any Merediths. And trust me, honey, I’d remember someone with a sultry voice like that. You sure you got the right number? Now, don’t get me wrong, mind you. I’m not against getting to know ya. If you know what—”
“Jesus, Al. I don’t have time for this. I was the consultant for the murder case you’re working with Carter. The strangulations. I’m the, uh, psychic.”
“Oh, for cryin’ out loud!” Al barked off a series of obnoxious laughs directly into his phone receiver. “That’s my bad, sweetheart. I’m not one to forget a pretty voice or pretty face, for that matter. ‘Specially when the girl with that pretty face and pretty voice could turn me into a frog or somethin’. You’re not calling to do one of those phone horoscope things, are you? ‘Cause I don’t have the three bucks a minute to pay.”
I held my tongue and counted to ten. There were a few seconds when I seriously considered just hanging up and waiting things out.
Would it have been that bad if Carter got to Tompkins first? Would anyone really care if that guy got strangled to death?
“That’s all very droll, Al. But I’m in a little bit of a hurry.” I gave myself a little mental pat on the back for not screaming incoherently into my phone. “I’m looking for Carter. It’s really important.”
“One of your crystal balls turn up a clue?”
“Al.”
“Sorry, sweet thing, but I haven’t heard from the bum since yesterday afternoon. To be honest, that’s not such a bad thing. You ride around with that sad sack for any amount of time, and you want to climb up on top of the highest building you can find and do a friggin’ cannonball off the sucker. Makayla this, Makayla that. I’d almost feel sorry for the guy if he wasn’t acting like such a pansy.”
“Makayla?”
Luka stiffened beside me, then swerved across traffic and turned up one of the crossing avenues. He ignored my questioning look.
“Yeah, Makayla, his ex,” Al continued. “You know, I’ve told him a hundred times what he needs. There’s this place just outside the city called The Sundance House. A lot of people call it seedy, but that just means they don’t charge a cover. They got this one girl in there, Poppy, who reminds me of that chick from Gilligan’s Island. You know, the one with red—”
