by John Everson
“Well, you are going to let us sit here and rot until we’re killed. I’ll take the chance.”
“You already have.”
Malachai shut up then. The darkness was suddenly heavy. Close.
Alex felt the fear finally set in. She’d managed to avoid it for the most part since she’d woken up here because she had had no alternatives. She’d had to get up, run, stay alive. Now, she was just alone in a dark pit. She had time to think. And she knew that a demon would be back for her soon. He would use her and abuse her with glee. That’s what he lived for.
She was just meat to be prepared and eaten. Her stomach growled at the thought of eating.
Alex realized that she was hungry. Like, starving-to-death hungry. It gave her a momentary respite to think about something that was different than “I’m about to be killed.” But it only lasted a moment.
As the silence stretched, Alex closed her eyes and channeled all of her energy into calling to Matthew. If it was hard for him to “see” her here, she worried he might not find his way back. If he even wanted to find his way. Matthew had been a street punk in real life. The kind of kid that did what he wanted when he wanted. She’d always thought that the main reason he took pity on her and helped when her parents had locked her up and whipped her was because he was such a free spirit. Nobody held him down.
“Matthew, please,” she urged.
As Alex called to him, the darkness in her mind began to change. She had opened her inner eye in calling. It was the dangerous process that Gertrude, her ghostly friend since childhood, had helped teach her how to control. For a living person to open themselves to the realm of the dead was dangerous. Most couldn’t manage it even if they tried. But for Alex… If she didn’t shield her inner voice, she would be like a bright light to moths. The dead, or demons, would zero in. They’d smother her with their need. Or kill her intentionally.
She had learned to target her “inner” voice, but that didn’t hide it completely. And now that she was open, the landscape that she saw changed. It wasn’t just blackness around her. The edges of her inner vision bled darkroom red. She could see shadows on the horizon. Things moving. And each time she’d called Matthew, she saw them stop.
Malachai was right. She had to be careful. But she also had to get out of here.
Matthew’s voice interrupted her fear.
“I found some help,” he announced. “But then you’re on your own. If they see us here, they won’t let us leave.”
“Thank you,” Alex said. “I’m sorry to drag you into this.”
Matthew laughed. “I came because I wanted to. But, you better straighten it out, kid. You only get so many tries. Trust me on this. I know.”
Alex nodded. “I got it.”
“Get yourself in place,” Matthew said. “All we can do is lend you power. And I don’t know for how long.”
Alex put her fingers on the edge of the chute and looked up to where she knew the door was. Overlaid on the blackness of the room, she saw distant heads turning. Eyes looking towards her. Shapes moving. She pushed herself up the ramp until her fingers touched the door frame.
“I’m ready.”
CHAPTER 15
THERE WAS BLOOD in her mouth. And blood on her thighs.And blood beneath her.
Everything was bloody.
And wet.
And hot.
Ariana was burning from the inside out.
He had pulled out and left her crying in agony as he pushed off the bed. Ariana didn’t know how badly she was hurt. Wherever her skin was broken burned like fire. So hot, that she had screamed at first when he’d scratched her, until the bastard had clubbed her across the face. That had hurt almost as much as having his barbed flesh decide it was done inside her and rip its way fully back out, trailing slivers of her inner skin with it.
Elotan stood now above the bed. He was grinning. Or leering. His lip curled in a foul humor. He had just beaten her and shredded her from inside out. And that made him smile? Demon, she reminded herself.
“I’m so glad you came to visit,” he said. His voice dripped with mockery. “I always wanted to come visit you, but it just wasn’t my turn. It might never have been my turn. But now, you’re here.”
“I opened the door,” Ariana said. “I spent years trying to let you in.”
Elotan bent over the bed and laughed. “No,” he said. “You let them in. I would never have gotten to go through.”
“Why?” Ariana said. She felt like her voice was a drunken mumble. Her mouth felt numb and swollen and ruined.
“Because it’s not my turn.” Elotan said. “The entryways are guarded. The ones who can go through are chosen. They have waited in line or paid their way.”
“But you’re a demon,” Ariana said. Her voice slurred.
“And there are billions of us,” Elotan said. “Everyone can’t go through at once. The worlds would collapse. There are ranks and rules.”
“So, you’re no different than us,” Ariana said.
A heavy hand slapped her across the face.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” Ariana said.
The hand didn’t hit her again.
“I have you here now,” he said. “I don’t need to leave.”
“I thought you wanted me to open a door for you?”
Elotan shrugged. “Eventually, perhaps,” he said. “But there’s no hurry now.”
Ariana shook her head. “I won’t last long,” she said. “Not if it’s like this.”
Elotan laughed. “What did you think a demon would do to you? Put wreaths of flowers around your neck? Maybe shower you with chocolates?”
Ariana ignored him. “I can help you get through to the other side.” She said. “I can offer you a million women that will be yours. But you need to take me back with you.”
Elotan stared at her without speaking. Then he began to nod. “There are places that are soft, where doors open sometimes. But those are guarded. We can’t open them. We can only wait until someone like you does it from the other side. If you can open a door from here that we can both go through, I want to hear more.”
“I did it from the other side. I think it would work from here too,” she said.
“And what did you need to open the door?” the demon asked.
“A sacrifice,” she said. “A human sacrifice.”
“And where are you going to…” he stopped as soon as he started speaking and a wicked grin spread across his face.
“I like you,” Elotan said. His hand began to work at his crotch, and then he climbed back onto the bed, to tower over.
His brutal but silken hands trailed across her breasts, and fingered the bloody place between her legs. “I like you a lot.”
The fire lanced through her middle in a hideous mix of scorching pain and mind-shattering pleasure. The demon grabbed her by the neck and bent to kiss her with a black tongue. It was barbed like his sex and he was not gentle as he pushed it into the ruin of her mouth.
Ariana screamed, though the sound was muffled by his silken lips.
Meanwhile, he continued to thrust to rip deeper inside her. Something in the very core of her burst, and her body felt the burning of complete, consuming release.
CHAPTER 16
THE CEREMONY HAD BEGUN. Joe and Cheyenne had moved into the stairwell in an attempt to stay slightly warmer as the chill of the desert night set in; he periodically stole down to the bottom of the steps to try to listen and follow what was going on in the chapel.
The group really did nothing at first; it was like a weird potluck for the first couple of hours. The guys had made several trips out to the cars and brought back bowls and pots and plates and a cooler of drinks. They had used the abandoned altar as a table, while they talked and laughed and ate. Someone had turned on a portable stereo that blared a pop radio station in the corner. For a
long time, there had been nothing indicating that this was a gathering of demon callers. It was more like a frat party.
Then Joe had heard the music change. “Stay here,” he’d cautioned Cheyenne, and moved carefully down the stairs.
The atmosphere in the chapel had changed radically in the past half an hour. The air now was flavored in the bitter smoke of incense. And the music now played low and somber. A steady, throbbing beat echoed throughout the corridor, and voices chanted something low and guttural in another language. Or perhaps they were simply voices being played backwards. The syllables were so strange and jerky, Joe couldn’t be sure.
He slipped as close to the doorframe as he could without being seen.
The dinner party was definitely over. He could smell the acrid, leafy telltale smoke of pot in the air. Some of the front pews had been moved to sit against the walls. On the floor, someone had drawn a large circle in white. Within it, two triangles intersected to form a star.
The skinny guy stood in the center of the circle. He was shirtless now, and the younger woman was busy painting a symbol on his chest with a brush. She dipped the brush in a small pint-sized bottle filled with something red. As Joe watched, a star emerged on the hairless chest of the man.
When it was finished, she handed him the brush and jar, and stripped off her top and bra. He touched the brush to the hollow of her throat, and then to the pit of her bellybutton. Then to her nipples, now fully erect. Once those points were painted, he connected them with long arcs of red, until her chest was a four-pointed oval.
Neither of them spoke, but when he finished, they bent to the center of the circle on the floor. Joe thought they actually might have kissed the ground. Then they stood, and walked towards the altar. At the edge of the circle, they stopped, and the older woman stepped forward and handed them a lit black candle. The couple held the candle together, and used its flame to light a thick, foot-tall candle that was positioned there on a stand made of latticed bones. Joe realized that there were also similar candles, still unlit, set on bone stands at three other points around the circle. Spaced out to illustrate the four directions, like a compass: north, south, east, west.
The fat guy and the other girl now walked to the center of the circle, with their own jar and paint. She stood waiting, as her partner unbuttoned his blue- and red-striped shirt and then tossed it to one of the pews. Then they repeated the ritual, with the white guy earning the star and him painting the wide shadows of her nipples and then her throat and belly before encircling them. They went to stand on the opposite side of the circle on the floor from the others.
The old woman and the last Indian man took the center and repeated the ritual a third time. Joe raised his eyes as the older woman stripped off her top. No shame there. Her grey hair hung over bony shoulders and her breasts lay wrinkled and low, pointing to the puckering stretchmarks of her belly. The man was first painted with the red star, and he then painted her with the oval. When they finished, instead of walking together, they separated to the two opposite points of the floor symbol. Now there were people at all four corners. The older woman stood at an apex of the star within the circle, and she began to speak.
“We stand at the circle of the lamb and dissect it with the power of the beast. We have eaten of the flesh but are starving for your spirit. We paint ourselves in the blood of the dead and open ourselves to the living force that waits beyond…”
Joe felt a hand on his shoulder and jumped. He turned and it was Cheyenne. She raised her eyebrows in askance. Joe stepped back away from the doorway before speaking.
“I thought you were going to stay up there,” he whispered.
“Yeah, but then I find you down here staring at naked old women. What’s a girl to think?”
She rolled her eyes. “What the fuck’s going on?”
“They’ve started some kind of ceremony to call the demons.”
“How long will it take?” she asked.
He shrugged. “They’re all different.”
“Well, someone just pulled up in a car outside,” she said. “I think it might be Darin.”
Joe raised an eyebrow. “This may be about to get interesting.”
Cheyenne’s hand tightened on his arm. “He’ll discover I’m gone, and they might search the place.”
“Maybe,” Joe whispered. “But I’d bet they’ll just try to do their rituals faster. They don’t get a selenelion very often.”
“Once in a blue moon?”
Joe stifled a laugh. “Exactly.”
In the other room, the old woman’s voice had raised. Joe put a finger to his lips and crept back to the doorway. She was speaking something in another tongue.
Low and guttural.
It sounded like “Erbo nachtu alian chi vu sel vistiu gru.”
She repeated it again and again, and then said in English, “We are but flesh for you to savor. We open ourselves to your will. We open ourselves to your pleasure. We open ourselves to you.”
They stepped as one to the center of the star within the circle, and put arms around each other’s backs, forming a tight circle of flesh in the middle. The old woman held up a jar of the red liquid they had all painted on each other and poured it to the floor in their midst. Then she began chanting something.
“Urgan tel sin oru vey,” she said softly at first. She said it a third and fourth time, her voice slowly raising, and then the group began to join her. Soon the mission chapel echoed with those strange, nonsense words.
The group joined hands and lifted them to the air, the chant growing louder. And then…
“Stop!” a voice commanded.
The chanting abruptly halted, and the man with the lunch bags walked down one of the aisles to stand in the midst of the group.
“That’s him,” Cheyenne whispered. Joe nodded. He recognized the man.
“How dare you interrupt our calling?” the old woman hissed. “You left us. You’re not welcome here any longer.”
Darin shook his head. “This is a special night,” he said. “This place is a special place. We are here because this mission has made the walls between worlds thin. And when the earth stands between the moon and sun, the walls will be at their weakest. We can’t waste this night on a simple riding ceremony. I’ve prepared a ritual that will open the door wide – and not just until dawn.”
He paused and looked at each of the participants in the circle before he finished his thought.
“Tonight, we will open the door to the Curburide. But this time, it will remain open. Forever.”
CHAPTER 17
“IT MUST BE TONIGHT,” Elotan demanded. Ariana stirred at the sound of his voice. After he had finished with her, she had somehow fallen asleep, despite the hideous fire that burned her mouth and sex. Perhaps she had not fallen asleep, but into a coma. She felt glued to the bed by her own blood. When she tried to move, her arms and legs felt stuck.
But Elotan didn’t let her lie in it any longer. He dragged Ariana out of the bed by her hair.
Ariana gasped at the pain in her scalp. And as she did, she realized that the fire in her mouth was gone. When she opened it to answer him, she found her tongue was sore and tasted foul. But she could speak.
“What do you need to prepare?” he asked.
She took a breath and considered. The rituals she had performed on earth might not apply here. But if you boiled it all down…
“It is really all about energy and focus more than anything,” she said. “The candles and blood and other things that we use; I think they are really just a way of keeping the caller focused.”
“So what do you need?” Elotan asked again. He shook her as he spoke.
“Candles. Something to draw on the floor. I could use chalk.”
“Sulphur?”
“Even better. I will need a knife, obviously. Rope or something to keep our
sacrifice immobile.”
Ariana thought a moment. She was drawing a blank. What else did she really need besides will, ritual, a sacrifice and a knife?
“You said that there are places where the walls between worlds are thinner. Do you know of any that we could go to?”
Elotan pulled her by the hair, demanding that she follow. He took her back to the door to the holding pit.
“I have a place,” he said. Then he opened the door.
The demon gripped her by the neck and pushed her forward, ready to drop her into the sunken room. But then he stopped.
Ariana quickly saw why.
The small room below was empty.
“What?” Elotan yelled. “How?” He bent and confirmed that Alex was gone. The hand on her neck suddenly squeezed, and Ariana toppled forward, thrown through the door. She landed hard, scraping her knee and banging the back of her head on the wall.
Above her Elotan let out a howl of fury, as the door slammed shut, leaving her alone in darkness.
Alex crept slowly down a hallway. The light was yellow and dim. Every doorway seemed hazy, decked in shadow.
“This is suicide,” Malachai whispered in her head.
She ignored him. She was on her own here.
“We can’t help you any more than this,” Matthew had said, after she channeled the power that he and his three friends had granted to pop the lock mechanism on the demon’s cage door. “If they catch us here, they will kill us.”
“But you’re dead,” she reminded.
“They will suck the energy from our souls. There is no return from that; we would cease to exist.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I mean it. Thank you for helping me again.”
“I don’t know if we helped you or not,” Matthew said. “But you gotta figure it out. Us? We gotta go. Now.” And with that, his energy, his presence, suddenly disappeared. Alex closed her eyes and for a moment, she could see a long horizon of dark blue mountains and crimson ponds in the distance. She could also see figures turning, beginning to move in her direction. Light shivered and slivered around their forms as if they were not real, but some kind of cinematic special effect. She understood that these were demons, somewhere nearby, picking up on her energy, or Matthew’s. And honing in.
