by D. J. Butler
He would have felt even better with more alcohol in him. He was starting to feel distressingly sober.
The passage looked like it was a natural cave, to Mike’s inexpert eye, but the walls of both sides were honeycombed with large holes of some sort. The puffing of his own breath around the flashlight obscured his vision a bit, as each step he took was into a fog of his own making. His footsteps were loud and crunchy in the darkness. He walked fast, conscious of the demonic things somewhere at his back, and shoved bullets into his second clip as fast as he could manage.
When both clips were loaded and the gun back on his belt he realized he didn’t hear the footsteps of the others behind him. He stopped, and then his curiosity finally got the better of him. He took the light in his hand, and poked his head into one of the holes. The depression in the wall was barrel-sized and sank down away from the passage. He shone the light down and looked to see what was inside.
The depression was full of skulls.
A hand from the darkness grabbed his wrist.
“Chingado!” Mike shouted.
“No seas maricón!” Chuy hissed, spattering blood from his lips. “You gonna call your friends, you chickenshit joto? You think you can make me do anything I don’t wanna do anymore?”
“Jeez,” Mike panted, trying not to look at his brother’s ghost. Chuy stood in shadow, but Mike thought he could see every cut and every drop of blood on the mutilated specter. “Jeez, Chuy …”
“You don’t get away from me, hijo de puta, comprendes? You’re blood, and that means you’re mine forever, you got it?” Chuy’s teeth shone white as the moon behind the sheets and rivulets of blood that fell from them and spilled out his mouth. He looked like a wild beast, feeding. “I’m gonna teach you a lesson, this time!”
Mike wanted to pull back but the hand held him. Chuy’s face danced in rage.
“Chuy, I … I never …”
“You never what, puto que eres? Me cago en ti!”
A loud boom reverberated through the tunnel.
Something tumbled into Mike’s side, nearly knocking him down. He spun around with his gun and the Maglite, and had his finger on the trigger, about to squeeze, before he realized that the thing in his sights was the mop-headed Chicano kid. He froze, smelling his own sweat and fear.
“Don’t walk slow on my account!” Twitch called. “The boy’s got his own legs.”
Mike turned and stumbled away from the niche of bones, fixing the beam of the flashlight on the ground and not looking at anything else. His heart raced at a thousand miles an hour and the rest of him felt numb.
The passage descended slowly, and as it dropped it opened up, the ceiling rising to twelve or fifteen feet over Mike’s head and the walls as far apart. The space didn’t make Mike feel any more comfortable. He stared at the pool of light, willing Chuy to leave him alone and hoping not to run into any more giant insects.
And then the passage abruptly ended.
Mike stopped, staring at the wall of yellowish brick and the iron door that barred his way. He pulled at the handle; it turned, but the door didn’t open, and Mike saw that there was an antique-style keyhole in the handle’s shadow.
“Mab’s knuckles,” Twitch commented as she and the kid joined him.
“What’s the holdup?” Eddie hissed from the back. “This ain’t no Sunday picnic, whatever Twitch might be whispering to the narcoleptic!” He caught up with the others. “Damn.”
“Can you turn into a—” he almost said fly, “worm or something?” Mike asked Twitch.
“Even if I could,” she said, “that door’s iron.”
CRASH!
“What does that mean?” he asked.
Everyone turned to look back. A flicker of colored light told Mike that the Hellhound had finally smashed through the trapdoor and was in the tunnel behind them.
“What it means,” Eddie said, “is that we’re in trouble.”
He pumped his shotgun.
***
Chapter Six
“Anyone got anything long and thin?” Mike asked, cold sweat bursting out all over his body. He regretted losing his switchblade in the melee at Butcher’s.
“Not at the moment,” Twitch snickered.
Mike felt himself blushing. “No, I mean like a bobby pin or a knife.” It had been a while since Mike had picked a lock, but in his day he’d picked a lot of them. Jimmied open and hotwired a lot of cars, too, picked a pocket once or twice, and broken a lot of windows and legs. Besides, the keyhole was huge, a keyhole for an old-style warded lock rather than a modern tumbler, which probably meant that the lock was easy.
Eddie slapped a pocketknife into Mike’s hand, still shaking from his encounter with the ghost.
“Thanks, Eddie,” Mike said. While he snapped the blade open, he heard a ripping sound from the darkness where Eddie stood. He shone his light on the guitarist and saw Eddie strapping his Maglite to the underside of his shotgun with a strip of duct tape.
“You carry a lot of stuff in those pockets,” he observed. The sweat on his body was drying and he started to shiver from the cold.
“Man of action has to be prepared,” Eddie sniffed.
“Maybe you should MacGyver open the door.”
“You MacGyver the door,” Eddie chuckled. “I’m gonna MacGyver me a little Baal Zavuv.”
“I don’t think MacGyver used guns.”
Eddie’s eye skewed sideways and then he gritted his teeth and blinked. “I don’t think MacGyver was ever on Hell’s Ten Most Wanted list.”
Eddie and Jim turned back to face the oncoming creatures and Mike knelt to look at the lock. “Can you hold the flashlight?” he asked Twitch.
“Son,” Twitch said to the little kid, “hold the man’s flashlight for him, will you, honey?”
The boy dutifully took the light and shone it on the keyhole, and Twitch went back to slapping Adrian’s face.
Mike held the door handle down while he slipped the knife blade into the lock and probed around, feeling for the mechanism. “Where you from, kid?” he asked, and then, in case the boy’s English wasn’t so good, “de dónde eres?”
The kid shrugged.
Boom! The report of Eddie’s shotgun was deafening inside the tunnel.
Mike worked faster. Eddie fired again and again. Twitch stroked Adrian’s brow and murmur-sang a strange, modal-sounding lullaby. The mode didn’t sound familiar, and Mike concentrated on the door, shutting the music out to avoid distraction.
“The rabbi was good to you, was he?”
The kid nodded. “He took me from the sisters,” he said, in a high, piping voice. “I helped him around the temple. He taught me to walk in the path of knowledge.”
“Oh, yeah?” Mike found a point inside the keyhole that resisted with some spring, but responded to pressure. He thought it might be the mechanism, and he worked on it. If he could get it to turn far enough, even if he couldn’t rotate it all the way around, the door ought to open. “So you know the place pretty well? What’s your name, so I can stop calling you ‘kid’?”
“Rafael,” the boy said.
The door in front of Mike face suddenly lit up with orange firelight marred by his own shadow, the source of the light behind him. With the light came a bellow that sounded inside the tunnel like the eruption of a volcano.
The boy trembled and stared up the passage at what must surely be the advancing Hellhound. Mike heard the rasp of metal-on-Hound-hide, and guessed that Jim had entered the fray. He also heard the buzzing of flies, and felt a little sick.
But he didn’t see Chuy, and that was good. That was an improvement.
Adrian sat up. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“What’s always going on?” Twitch countered.
“Right.” Adrian dug into his suit jacket as he climbed to his feet and came out with his machine pistol. “The more things change, and you know the rest.”
Mike could hear the kid’s knees knocking together. “Keep your eyes on me,
Rafael,” Mike urged him. “Did the rabbi give you that name?”
“The sisters did,” Rafael said shyly. “But Rabbi Feldman thought it was a good sign.”
“It is a good sign,” Mike agreed. He didn’t mean anything by it and the name meant nothing to him; he was just making small talk with the kid, to keep both the boy and himself distracted. His fingers were slippery from sweat and he had difficulty seeing through the fog of his own breath.
ROAR! Buzzzzzz!
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat! Boom!
It sounded like a full-blown battle had broken out behind Mike, Adrian, and Eddie, supporting Jim. Mike resisted the urge to turn around and see how it was going.
“You can call me Rafi.”
Click. The door handle popped down several extra inches and the door cracked open.
“What’s behind the door, Rafi?”
Rafi shrugged. “This is as far as I’ve ever been.”
Mike lurched to his feet, holding the door. “Well then,” he said. “You’d better stand behind me, just in case.”
Rafi stepped back, still shining the light on the door. Twitch moved to Mike’s side, clubs in her hand. Mike pocketed the knife and palmed his pistol. He nodded to Twitch, then threw the door open.
On the other side waited cold, dark silence. A breeze cooled Mike’s already chilled face even further, smelling faintly of some far-away waterhole. Behind him, the battle still raged, squealing and roars and bellows mixed in with the constant coughing of firearms and the gigantic buzzing of flies.
“Rafi,” Mike said as gently as he could, “can I have the light?” He took the flashlight and shone it into the darkness ahead. “Stay close behind me,” he told the boy.
He moved through the door. Beyond was a broad chamber, its walls of yellowish sandstone brick and its ceiling just over Mike’s head. Facing him in the wall were three arched doorways. “Come on!” he hollered to the others, and stationed himself to the side so that he could see both the door he’d come through and the three new passageways. He didn’t want anything sneaking up on him from behind.
Twitch pulled Rafi over to one side and perched next to the iron door, clubs raised over her head. “Come on!” she yelled.
Adrian backed through first, wiping sweat from his face and holstering his pistol. “That’s me out of bullets then,” he said glumly. He rummaged through pockets as he backed away from the door, pulling out bits of string, a stump of a candle, a little bone that might once have been part of a human finger.
Two Zvuvim buzzed in through the door after Adrian, and Twitch leaped to intercept them. She knocked one sideways and into the wall, where it hit with a thud and then slid to the ground making a sound that was part buzz and part whimper, but her swing at the second devil-fly missed. She whirled past the creature, overextended and vulnerable. It dove for her neck, buzzing like a power saw—
bang!
Mike splattered black dusty bits and goo all over the wall.
Twitch nodded quick thanks and resumed her position inside the door. Jim backed through next, ducking to get his head in under the doorframe. A Zavuv whizzed clacketing past his guard on the right, and as he stepped into the chamber Jim spun backward with his left hand snapping out in a roundhouse punch. He pummeled the Zavuv with his knuckles, pinning it against the wall.
It bit his forearm, drawing rivulets of bright red blood, but before Mike could get a clean shot, Jim punched the devil-fly in the center of its face with the hilt of his sword. Its eyes burst like Christmas tree ornaments hurled into a brick wall and sprayed thick, sour-smelling fluid on the floor.
Eddie stumbled back into the room, pulling his head down low in the collar of his army jacket like a turtle, and a spout of flame followed him. He tripped and fell flat, hitting the ground hard on his back, and aiming his shotgun at the shadow behind him. The huge black and gray Baal Zavuv rammed its head in through the doorway, its shoulders straining against the top of the frame. Tusks slobbered yellow and thousand-faceted eyes glittered like glass and the Baal bellowed, flies buzzing and swarming around it and erupting from its mouth.
Click.
Eddie’s shotgun was out of shells.
Twitch slammed her batons on the Baal’s eyes. They looked like glass, but they must be as hard as steel—she bounced off like she’d been kicked back. Jim stabbed at the Baal’s neck from the other side; he drew blood, but the Baal didn’t pull back.
Chingón. Mike started firing.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Click.
The Baal squealed, straining with its shoulders in the top of the doorframe like it might rip the wall open to get through. Zvuvim crawled through at its feet, buzzing ferociously. Mike thought he could taste his own heart in the back of this throat, even over the horrible rotting stench of the Baal and its horde of flies.
“Per Volcanum ignem mitto!” Adrian shouted.
A hot wind, full of fire and gold-red light, burst from the bit of candle and the glass lens Adrian held in his hand, slamming into the door. The Zvuvim caught in the blaze disappeared instantly into ash and were swept away. The Baal bellowed again and flailed its dagger-taloned hands, trying to bat away the stream of fire, or grapple it, and then the current swept the big demon out of the doorway.
Jim slammed the door shut.
The fire-wind turned off and Adrian staggered. Mike rushed to throw an arm around the shorter man and prop him up. “Good job,” he complimented the organist.
“Yeah?” Adrian murmured, yawning and pinching himself. “I thought fight fire, et cetera …” He yawned again. “Damn this curse!”
“Stay awake!” Twitch snapped at him, and rapped him on the forehead with her baton.
“Ouch!”
In the outer passage, their demonic pursuers still raged. Mike eyed the door nervously, wondering how long it would hold.
Adrian shook himself and stood. “It’s not my fault,” he said.
“Nothing ever is,” Eddie observed, standing and brushing himself off.
“What’s the magic?” Mike asked Twitch. “Is it in the stick? Touching him on the head with the stick wakes him up?”
Twitch laughed. “I just like hitting him in the face,” she said. “There’s no magic. The poor idiot tries to cast spells, especially under pressure, and he gets suddenly very sleepy. You just do what you can to keep him awake.”
“But what’s the thing with the picnic?” Mike was puzzled. “The whole we’re all alone and it’s nice here, Adrian bit?”
“You’re not my mama,” Rafi said to Twitch.
“No,” she agreed. “I’m too tired to be your mama anymore.” She nodded at the iron door as it reverberated with another combined roar-bellow-buzz. “But I’m better than any of those things out there, aren’t I?”
Rafi nodded.
Eddie limped over to join Jim, who stared at the three passages. Eddie shone his bayonet-flashlight over them by propping the gun in the crook of his arm as he reloaded it. “Does the boy know which door to take?”
“No,” Mike and Rafi said together.
“But there’s a breeze,” Mike said, shuffling over to point at the passageway on the left, out of which he felt the air flowing. “See? This has to lead out.”
“I ain’t at all sure that where we want to get to is out.” Eddie and Jim looked at the passages further. “You see the glyphs, Jim?”
Jim nodded.
Mike looked to see what they were talking about, and realized that each passage had a symbol scratched over the top of it in the stone, and painted at the bottom with a white coloring, like clay. Petroglyphs, he thought they were called, though he’d never been a boy scout and had tried to avoid the deserts of Texas and New Mexico as much as he could. Each passage had a different symbol.
“A serpent,” Eddie said. “A star. And what do you think that one might be?”
“A tree,” Twitch guessed. It looked like a circle with a line coming down out of it, like a kid’s stick-figure drawing of a tree.
�
��Does it mean anything?” Mike wanted to know.
Adrian shrugged. “They’re all in Genesis, aren’t they?”
“More Bible?” Mike groaned.
“Everything’s always Bible in this band, Mikey,” Twitch laughed lightly. “More’s the pity for those of us who’ve never read it.”
“You could call me Mike,” Mike suggested.
“I could.”
“The star is the Host of Heaven,” Adrian continued. “The serpent tempted Eve. And the tree is the Tree of Life.”
“Knowledge,” Eddie corrected him. “The knowledge of good and evil.”
“Life,” Adrian insisted, and deep inside Mike’s fear-chilled and whisky-sodden head, a light bulb went on.
“Knowledge,” he said. “We have to follow the path of knowledge.”
“You read that in a fortune cookie?” Eddie asked.
Mike jerked a thumb at Rafi. “The boy told me. He’s never been down here before, but Rabbi Feldman raised him to walk in the path of knowledge.”
The boy nodded. “It’s true.”
Jim and Eddie locked eyes for a moment. Jim nodded, grabbed Mike’s flashlight and started deliberately down the passage on the right, through the arch under the stylized tree. Adrian followed on the singer’s heels.
“Let’s just hope it is a tree,” Twitch said impishly, “and not the famous lollipop of creation.”
“There aren’t any lollipops in Genesis,” Eddie grumbled. “Creation or otherwise.”
“Really?” Twitch grinned. “That’s a shame. I like a good lollipop.”
Something heavy slammed against the iron door and it groaned and buckled in response.
“Get moving,” Eddie ordered, pumping his shotgun. “I have the rear.”
Twitch jogged up the passage, followed by Mike and the boy Rafi, who ran with them now without anyone holding his hand. Mike let himself get distracted by the sight of Twitch’s horse’s tail bouncing from side to side like a tassel fixed to her leather pants as she ran, until he remembered that whatever she was, she wasn’t quite a woman—not exactly. For that matter, he wondered now whether the tail really was attached to her pants, or what precisely he would see if she weren’t wrapped in leather and spikes.
