Hellhound on My Trail

by D. J. Butler

  “Oh.” Mike kicked the dead fly out of the van. He wished it were bigger, so its corpse might actually slow the Hellhound down.

  Twitch smacked the Baal again, and the firm decisiveness of her attack, and the resulting pleasant jiggles, made Mike very conscious of her femininity. “And their master is a Baal Zavuv.”

  The Baal swiped at Twitch, and Jim stabbed its wrist with his sword, the blade darting in like a cobra to sting and pull back.

  Graaaaraaaaaaaagh! the Baal objected to being stabbed, and Eddie kicked it in the face. Still it hung on, and the van lurched back and forth as it barreled down the highway.

  “Baal … you mean Beelzebub?”

  “Now he gets it,” Eddie muttered. Only the speed of the van kept the Baal outside, by forcing it to use its hands mostly to hang on. Still, its tusks snapped at Eddie through the cloud of flies, and Eddie kicked for the center of its face and pumped the twelve-gauge again.

  “The Beelzebub?” Mike felt sick. He grabbed what looked like a gun, but turned out to be a blow dryer. He looked up to see Jim’s blade reaching behind Eddie’s seatback and skewering a Zavuv, pinning it to the wall of the van. The singer snapped his wrist and tossed the fly-demon off his blade and out the door.

  “You’re not listening,” Twitch said. “It’s a Baal Zavuv.”

  “You mean there are others?”

  “Oh, lots.” Twitch grinned.

  Mike looked back out the open door and saw the Hellhound, racing closer and opening its enormous smoking jaw. Desperately, he grabbed for the only weapon he could think of—

  Snatching the last grenade off Eddie’s bandolier—

  With a faint snick, the pin decided to stay behind—

  And hurling it into the Hellhound’s razor-pit maw.

  “Duck!” Twitch yelled, and dropped into the pile of junk.

  Mike grabbed for the door handle and slammed the door forward, as the Hellhound yakked and fussed at the thing in its jaws, like a cat with a hairball.

  KABOOM!

  Somehow, maybe because it was inside the Hellhound’s mouth, the explosion was bigger than the others had been. The van rocked with the impact, tilting up onto its driver’s side wheels, and every window on the passenger side of the vehicle cracked. Fire washed up against the Dodge like a tide.

  The Baal, caught by surprise in the moment of trying to slap at Eddie with one of its fists, lost its grip. The explosion threw it up and over the van as the van tilted, jerked it free and hurled it into the sagebrush and shadow on the other side. The headlights just caught a flash of it, gray-black and swarming with flies, tumbling down the side of the road, and then the van’s passenger-side wheels touched down with a heavy thump and the van burst out of the cloud of Zvuvim and into clear night air.

  Mike bounced against the back of the shotgun seat and then collapsed. He was sweating and cold, his heart pounded like a jackhammer in his chest, but the stink of the Baal was gone and cold clean air rushed into the van and he felt like he could breathe for the first time in hours. He looked back and saw jets of multicolored flame inside a dark knot of tangled, twisting air that marked where the evening’s strange attackers were.

  Twitch got back into her seat and Eddie swiveled again into a normal sitting position, winding his shoulder like he was stretching for a pitch.

  “Jeez,” Mike said. “Who are you guys?”

  “Like I told you this morning,” Eddie chuckled. “We’re a rock band.”

  “On the phone this morning you forgot to mention the Hellhound.”

  Eddie shrugged. “We’re a rock band that fights evil.”

  Fights evil? “What, like knights of the round table?”

  In the dim light inside the van, Mike saw Eddie’s bad eye drift sideways again, and Eddie hesitated before answering. “Not like knights,” he said. “More like rival gangsters. We’re out to get Satan.”

  “Before he gets us.” Twitch laughed.

  “Carajo.”

  “We’re your family now,” Twitch added. “Jim took you in.”

  “You’ve got the Hand on you,” Eddie explained.

  Mike met Jim’s eyes in the rearview mirror. They were shockingly pale, even in the darkness. “The hand?” Mike asked.

  “The Left Hand,” Twitch said. “It’s a bad thing that Jim agreed to let you in.”

  “No it isn’t,” Eddie snorted, and began thumbing shells into the shotgun. “The bad thing would have been getting left behind and eaten.”

  “And going to Hell, poor boy,” Twitch continued.

  “I’m going to Hell?” Of course Mike knew he was going to Hell. How did Twitch know it?

  “No,” Eddie finished, “Jim taking you in is not a bad thing. Look, it’s like … it’s like getting admitted to the hospital for cancer surgery. It’s bad that you have cancer, and getting operated on is no fun, but getting admitted to the hospital is a good thing.”

  “Unless you get an infection,” Twitch pointed out.

  Mike looked around at the rumpled and torn interior of the Dodge and laughed. He felt shaky. “I haven’t been in too many hospitals, but none of them looked like this.”

  “No,” Twitch agreed, “I have it on good authority that this is a nineteen seventy-something Dodge something-or-other.”

  “You want to get anywhere in this world,” Eddie said, “you need a good car.”

  “You saying this is a good car?”

  “Nope.” Eddie guffawed. “This is a nineteen seventy-something Dodge something-or-other, and a total piece of crap.”

  “You got anything to drink in this piece of crap?” Mike asked. He rummaged through the junk at his feet. “Other than cold coffee?”

  “You got something against cold coffee,” Eddie said, “and we might not be able to be friends.”

  A sign flared on the side of the road in the Dodge’s headlights. Jim swerved toward the sign as if to read it better and nearly ran it over before correcting course and getting the van back into the center of the asphalt, over the dashed yellow line.

  DUDAEL, N.M., the sign read.

  There was no population indicated.

  Twitch handed Mike a small bottle. He smelled spirits, and took a sip without investigating further. He tasted cheap whisky, suffered the burn in his throat and stomach and instantly felt much better. “What’s the Left Hand, then?” he asked. He met Jim’s eyes again in the mirror. “What did you see, Jim?”

  “Jim won’t talk,” Twitch said. “Don’t take it personal.”

  “It ain’t you,” Eddie tried to soften the blow. “It’s because of Isaiah six.”

  Mike took another sip, trying to puzzle out the reference. He thought of Eddie’s combat boots and grenades. “Is that a military thing?” he asked. “Like a code? Are you guys special forces?”

  “No, it’s in the Bible.” Eddie arched an eyebrow at him. “You know what the Bible is, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Mike agreed, “but go easy, I haven’t actually read it, I was raised Catholic and we had a priest to do the reading for us. But I know …” he took a swig and considered, “I know it’s got two halves. And Moses and the Israelites are in one half, and Jesus and the saints are in the other.”

  “This is the Moses half,” Eddie said. Mike offered him the bottle, but Eddie shook his head.

  “What does Moses say about Jim not talking, then?”

  “‘In a the year that king Uzziah died,’” Eddie said in a voice that sounded a little bit like a chant, “‘I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.’”

  “Heavy.” Mike took a sip, glad he didn’t have to drive. “I didn’t hear Jim mentioned, though.”

  “No, Isaiah’s talking about the angels in Heaven,�
� Eddie agreed.

  “Jim’s not an angel.”

  Mike caught Jim’s eye in the rearview mirror and the singer winked.

  Eddie and Twitch looked at each other. “No,” Eddie agreed, “Jim’s not an angel. Here’s the thing. The angels in Heaven, what do they do?”

  “Holy, holy, holy,” Mike said cheerfully. A few more sips of whisky, he thought, and he’d forget the Baal Zavuv, forget the Hellhound, and even, for a little while, forget Chuy. Maybe he’d even forget that he’d wanted to kill himself.

  “That’s right,” Eddie agreed, “they sing. They sing in the New Testament … in the Jesus half, too. Luke two, ‘and suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. And Job says the morning stars sang together, and the sons of God shouted for joy.’”

  “Fine,” Mike agreed. He didn’t care about any of this stuff. “Angels sing.”

  “So when angels get cast out of Heaven,” Eddie continued, as if he was trying to coax Mike to an obvious conclusion, “what do they do?”

  Mike scratched his head. “They rap?”

  “They don’t sing anymore,” Twitch explained.

  “They can’t even hear singing,” Eddie added. “They can’t hear any music. Music is Heaven’s gift to the angels, and when they rebel, they lose it entirely.”

  Mike didn’t think he’d had enough whisky to make him stupid, but he still couldn’t put his finger on the thread. “Jim’s not an angel,” he repeated.

  “Jim won’t speak, because he’s worried about being heard by the angels. The fallen angels.” Eddie nodded encouragingly at Mike, like this all made sense. “But he can sing all he wants.”

  “But you guys all talk.”

  “Oh, the Fallen aren’t listening for us,” Twitch said reassuringly. “Or for you, Mikey. You can talk all you want.”

  This wasn’t a hospital, Mike thought. It was an insane asylum. “Don’t call me Mikey,” he said, a little sullen.

  Eddie nodded. “Almost there,” he said. “Better get loaded up.” He knocked the glove compartment open with his knee and produced a box of forty-five caliber shells, which he passed back to Mike. “Come with us to stick it to Satan. Or stay here and get stuck. Still have the bouncer’s pistol?” he asked.

  For an answer, Mike produced the pistol and started loading both clips.

  “What happened?” Adrian sat upright in the back seat of the van, shaking his head.

  “You fell asleep again,” Eddie grumped.

  “Ah, but first you and I saved the day, big boy,” Twitch elaborated, smiling in a beguilingly feminine way. Mike sipped the last of the whisky, dropped the bottle into the rubbish heaped around his own ankles, and tried to think of an inoffensive way to confirm that Twitch was a woman.

  “Remind me, next time I need a wizard,” Eddie complained to Jim, “to pick one who ain’t narcoleptic.”

  “I’m not narcoleptic,” Adrian said, straightening his tie.

  “Oh yeah?” Eddie was unconvinced.

  “I’m cursed.”

  “With what?” Eddie asked.

  Adrian looked down at the singed knees of his suit. “Narcolepsy,” he muttered. “But only in moments of great stress.”

  “Right,” Eddie agreed. “Only when it counts.”

  “Why are you cursed?” Mike asked. He tried to keep images out of his mind: of Chuy in the basement of the burnt-out school, Chuy getting high on the weed Mike had scored, Chuy and the girl, Chuy cut to ribbons and bleeding to death.

  Chuy in Butcher’s, taunting him.

  “I stole something,” Adrian muttered. “I’m not proud of it, but it was the quickest way to get where I needed to go. Faint heart never won, et cetera.”

  “Or in other words,” Eddie summarized, “you’re a thief, as well as a narcoleptic.”

  “As well as a wizard,” Adrian said. “Besides, if I was the kind of guy who followed all the rules, I wouldn’t really fit in on this team, would I?”

  “Touché,” Twitch admitted the point. Mike thought Jim’s eyes in the rearview mirror looked like they were smiling.

  “We’re here,” Eddie said, and Jim pulled over. The van was still going five or ten miles an hour when he threw it into Park. Mike nearly fell over as the Dodge ground to a squealing, protested halt.

  Mike would have been reluctant to get out of the van, but with Twitch and his (her?) batons pushing him from one direction and Adrian shoving from the other, he had no choice. He yanked open the van’s side door and went out gun first, looking for the Baal Zavuv, the Zvuvim, or the Hellhound.

  He landed a bit wobbly on hard-packed dirt and heard … crickets. Overhead, a lid of a million brilliant stars fell screaming to the horizon, where it clanged off the staunch silhouetted shoulders of the hills and buttes of New Mexico. Other than the starlight, and the light from the Dodge’s headlights, the night was pitch black.

  “Where’s the town?” he asked. “Is this all there is?”

  The headlights glared yellow on a building. It was a simple brick-shaped rectangle, two or three stories in height, with some kind of a dome on top. The light reflected on many colors in the glass of the high windows. Some of the windows, anyway; as Mike looked, he could see that a lot of the glass had been smashed out. The woodwork around the windows’ frames looked chewed to splinters, and the double-wide door to the building was gone.

  Not open … gone.

  “I guess now we know why the Hound showed up before the Baal,” Eddie said slowly. “The Baal came here first, ahead of us.”

  “The question is why the Baal and the Hellhound got here at all,” Twitch noted. “I thought we traveled under the famous wards of obfuscation.”

  “So did I,” Eddie agreed.

  “You can complain about my work,” Adrian said bitterly, dropping out of the van onto both feet, “when you can do better. He who is without sin, and so forth.” He held a green metal three-gallon gas can in one hand, and it sloshed when he moved.

  “Are we too late?” Eddie asked Jim, who stalked around the front of the van with his naked sword in his hand.

  Jim shrugged and went into the building. Eddie followed him, and Twitch.

  BETH RAZ NIHYEH, read a bronze plaque beside the front door, over a single row of characters that Mike guessed were Hebrew; he’d seen them before, anyway, on Bar Mitzvah programs.

  “What kind of place is this?” he asked.

  “A synagogue,” Adrian said.

  Mike pointed at the gas can. “You always carry gasoline into synagogues?”

  “This is Dudael,” Adrian told him, as if that were an answer. He set the can down, spat into the palms of his own hands to slick back his hair, and then picked up the can again. “Where God ordered the archangel Raphael to imprison Azazel and all the other rebel angels.”

  “Azazel?”

  “You know him better as Satan. Lucifer, if you want to be formal about it.”

  “What?” Mike almost dropped his pistol. “What are we doing here?”

  “Jim’s looking for something,” Adrian said. “Something in the nature of a family heirloom, you could say.” He shrugged. “I suppose you can go back, if you want.” Then he disappeared into the building, too.

  Mike didn’t wait; he jogged in close on Adrian’s heels, gun gripped firmly in one hand and the fingers of the other wrapped in the tangle of trinkets on his chest.

  The last thing he wanted right now was to be alone in the darkness with Chuy.

  ***

  Chapter Four

  “Wait!” Mike called, stumbling through the door. “What’s the Left Hand?”

  He found himself in a little antechamber, like a cloakroom or a small lobby, and Adrian had already passed through and gone ahead. Mike stopped to look around and let his eyes adjust—light came in from other chambers, but this entry hall was unlit. Mike had been in more than one synagogue, and here he expected to see, o
nce his eyes grew used to the dimmer light, some kind of social space. Like a board, with community notices, maybe, or items relating to the congregation’s history, or ads for used cars.

  Instead, the room was stark and bare. Off to his right, the chewed-to-bits remnants of a curtain hung over a dimly lit stairway climbing up. Ahead of him was another doorway containing double doors, one of which hung askew on a single hinge while the other lay flat on the floor. Both doors were heavy hardwood affairs, carved with spiral patterns of square Hebrew letters, the bottom of each had been painted gold. To either side of the doorway stood a single stone pillar, smooth and plain. The pillars ended before the ceiling and had nothing on top of them. In the middle of the lobby sat a square block of stone, waist high, that looked like nothing so much as an altar.

  “It’d be nice tonight,” Mike grumbled out loud to himself, “if just one thing turned out to be normal.”

  He kicked himself forward through the door and found himself several paces behind Adrian. The narcoleptic wizard stood beside the can on the floor, shaking a cramp out of his fingers.

  “What’s the Left Hand, though?” Mike asked the organ player.

  “Ask Eddie that stuff,” Adrian said, picking up the can again and huffing slightly from the effort. “I’m the guy you ask when you need to turn invisible or curse someone with the plague.”

  “You saying you don’t know?”

  “I’m saying it’s not my job.”

  “Right,” Mike muttered, and then he looked around inside the synagogue proper and momentarily forgot his question.

  Most of the building was a single long, tall room. Rows of pews had once run from the doors up to the front of the room, Mike could tell, but only a few of them were still standing. The rest looked like they had been run through a wood chipper, their stuffing and covering fabric resting on top of the shattered and splintered hardwood like a coverlet of snow over a junkyard. A mezzanine story full of similarly destroyed seating ran around the back half of the room, and around the entire second-story wall, evenly spaced, were tall stained glass windows, many of them smashed out completely. Mike couldn’t see well, but he could see because a few incandescent bulbs had survived the general devastation and now shed weak yellow light on the wreckage.