Redemption (Covenant Book 3)

by John Everson

  “Where you would have lived for the rest of your life?”

  “Maybe, but people usually move around more than that.”

  “When you can go wherever you want, you find it doesn’t matter if you stay in the same place,” Helone said.

  Alex sat down in the chair and took a sip of the drink. She instantly felt a warm trail light up her esophagus, and a buzz grew in the back of her brain. She’d had beer and wine back in Nebraska with her friends – hiding out after high school in the cornfields with a cooler. But this was different. It was like drinking flowers and honey and fire.

  She wondered if Helone would kill her if she surrendered and laid back and let the liquor claim her completely.

  “You still don’t trust me,” Helone whispered.

  Damnit.

  “I trust you more than some,” Alex said.

  “More than your father? More than your mother?”

  Alex nodded.

  “You paid them back for what they did to you.”

  “It was them or me,” Alex said.

  Helone made a harrumphing sound. “You had help. You could have just left. You chose to take it further. Perhaps you’re not so different from the Curburide that you fear.”

  “They would have called the police to find me and bring me back,” Alex said. “My father would have had his way eventually. I had to put a stop to it once and for all.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  Helone closed her eyes, and her head settled farther back into the couch cushions. She didn’t say anymore, as her breathing settled into a quiet but steady rhythm.

  Why did demons need to breathe? Alex wondered, as she took another sip from the glass.

  The room felt strange suddenly, as she mimicked Helone, and laid her head back on the cushions. There were shadows everywhere, from the silken scarves and sheets that draped the ceiling and the walls. And the skulls that leered from the corners of the mantel. Alex closed her eyes for a minute, to clear her head…

  …Alex woke with a start. She knew instantly that she’d dozed, not just closed her eyes. But for how long? She looked around the room and nothing had changed; the lighting was still the same, the veils still hung from everywhere above her. She looked at the couch in the center of the room.

  It was empty. Helone was gone. Her first thought was that maybe the demon had simply gotten up to go to the bathroom and would be right back.

  And then she realized how ridiculous that might be. Did demons pee? She had no idea. They fed on energy… what would they expel as waste? Black clouds?

  “I don’t wanna know,” Alex murmured. She pushed herself up off the couch pillow and stretched. She felt fuzzy. As if she’d awoken from a deep dream, though she couldn’t remember dreaming.

  She rose from the couch and yawned. Wide. As if she could sleep for a week. After the last few days, maybe she could.

  The demon’s mantel looked jammed with all sorts of things. What did an ancient being keep for memorabilia? Alex crossed the room to get a closer look. There were things there that she didn’t understand. Odd shapes and colors that she couldn’t quite get her mind around. One piece seemed to have a sort of Escher-like rainbow of interlocking colors and angles but when she stared hard at it, the shape grew… less clear. She couldn’t have described it if you asked her to. In fact, just looking at it made something inside her tremble and quail. Her stomach began to feel nauseous. For a moment, Alex wondered if maybe the liquor that Helone had fed her had messed up her system, but as soon as she dragged her eyes away from the oblong-square-round object, the nausea disappeared.

  There were other things on the shelf that she could look at and understand. Candleholders, carved in some kind of creamy stone (or bone?), with tall spears of wax jutting from their centers. They bordered each end of the mantel, next to triads of human skulls. No subtlety in décor there, Alex thought.

  There were glass things too; a red vase with some kind of spiny black frond sticking out of it. The thing had dozens of crooked branches, which opened into smaller spines that spread out into a kind of dark web. It was intricate, if not beautiful.

  There were many smaller things strewn across the mantel too. A ceramic thimble. A small wooden doll. A leather hair tie with small white and turquoise beads. A faded black and white photo of a woman. A string of pearls. As Alex looked across the mantel beyond the larger things that you could see easily from the chair, she realized that it was like a junk shop; or the top of someone’s dresser. Littered with disconnected things that must have meant something to someone, but probably not to Helone. What would a demon want with a tattered book of human poems by Walt Whitman?

  Alex reached out to pick up a leather bracelet. But as her fingers brushed it, she stopped. Something moved in the corner of her vision. She froze.

  It wasn’t Helone; the movement came from above. High off the floor. She turned her head a fraction, then another and cautiously looked up at the ceiling. One of the veils seemed to be fluttering, faintly. Though there was no vent or breeze in the room.

  As she stared at it, the motion stilled. A chill ran down her spine. Something had made that thing move. Something was here with her. She pivoted, and slowly turned, looking all around the room. It was dark, but not so dark that she couldn’t make out the floor and corners and couch and walls. The room appeared empty. But what hid behind the hundreds of tapestries and veils that covered every corner of the ceiling?

  Alex took a deep breath and looked back to the mantel once more. She refused to show fear to whatever had moved in the room, but she no longer felt very interested in exploring Helone’s junk collection. She did still want to look at the bracelet, however. There was a design on it stitched in blue and lavender and she was curious to see what it was. She lifted it in the air to study. And as she looked at the beads, which formed a circle with a transected Y in it – the hippy peace sign – the veil in the corner suddenly rippled and moved. This time, she wasn’t shy.

  Alex turned towards the movement and called out, “Who’s there?”

  The gauzy, translucent fabric above twisted, and jutted out from the wall. It looked like a face pressing through a thin sheet. The veils and hangings around it shivered as it pushed past them. Alex took a step back, though the moving veil remained hooked to the ceiling. The face pulled back and the thing went limp again. She realized she’d been holding her breath, and let it out. What the hell was that?

  Two hands suddenly pushed through the veil. They reached for her, pulling the veil tight from its anchor. The fingers were still several feet away from her, but she could see them shifting and moving behind the fabric. Struggling to reach out for her. The fingers stretched and contracted, never fully taking the shape of a hand and wrist; the veil didn’t wrap tightly around the whole form, but she could see what it was nevertheless. It was like a hand trying to push through a balloon – partly visible, partly outlined.

  This is what a ghost really looks like, she thought. Alex had talked to spirits all her life, but they’d always shown themselves to her in human form. They looked normal. Whatever was trying to press its way into the room through the veil was… only partly formed. And malevolent, she was sure.

  Alex set the bracelet down, and back-stepped slowly towards the couch. Perhaps it was time to return to the bedroom Helone had set her up in.

  The fingers kept reaching and twisting behind the fabric. Silently. It was eerie. Alex took a breath and forced herself to turn away from looking at it. She began to walk towards the doorway, but as she approached, one of the veils on the wall beside the exit billowed out. It was as if someone had just shot an air hose into the center of the thing. This veil was hazy and brown, almost chocolate-colored and had no designs painted on it. But as it expanded, Alex could make out a face clearly, and hands and arms. This one looked more fully formed. She decided she wasn’t going to wait to find out what it wanted. Th
e doorway was only three or four steps away. Alex bolted.

  The hangings on the top and other side of the exit suddenly came to life, and shot out across the opening. She didn’t stop. Alex dove at the doorway.

  Arms wrapped around her as she did. Silken fingers grabbed her wrists and ankles and an arm shot around her middle. Her momentum pulled them from their hooks on the wall, and she felt the fabric stretch, but the ghostly arms didn’t let go. Alex’s motion stopped, and she found herself hanging in the doorway, staring down the hall towards the kitchen and bedroom.

  A fly in a web.

  “Let go of me,” she demanded.

  All at once, the fingers did just as she asked. She fell backwards as they did, and landed on the floor on her rump. The veils all around the door now held clearly human shapes. They blocked the exit completely. Instead of limp veils, the fabric had been completely “filled out” and two large men stood there. They folded thick arms across nearly see-through chests. One of them had a dragon tattoo on one bicep. She could see their chins and the dark pits where their eyes were. She could make out the dimples around the larger one’s waist, and see the soft outline of his penis, hanging down, unaroused.

  It suddenly occurred to her that this form wasn’t simply pressing its shape against a veil; it was inhabiting a tapestry whose natural shape included two arms, two legs and a head. The tattoo was… really a tattoo.

  She looked at the other figure, and then at the deflated billows of veils that hung all around the room.

  “Oh my God,” she couldn’t help saying aloud.

  What she had chalked off as thin tapestries and “veils” weren’t veils at all. These were not oddly colored and inked silk decorations.

  The room was decorated in hundreds of human skins!

  And right now, something was re-inhabiting a couple of them. The arms were a perfect fit in the “sleeves” of the hanging. The tapestry was clearly constructed with legs as well.

  Suddenly it all made sense. This room was not just Helone’s sitting room. This was her trophy room. And Alex was the latest prize.

  Fear gripped her heart, and panic overwhelmed her. She was not dying in this room! She scrambled to her feet and stared down the two figures that now blocked the door. They had been big men once. But they were skin and air now.

  She launched herself at the crack of space in between them, hoping to slide through the gap before they could close on her. She met a balloon wall. The figures closed the gap and Alex didn’t even get her hand punched between them.

  One of them laughed faintly.

  She lay there on the floor and stared up at them. They left her alone. They seemed content to stand there, arms crossed, blocking the way like some kind of ghastly bouncers. Only these bouncers were keeping her in, not kicking her out.

  What did they want with her?

  “It’s not what they want,” a voice said behind her.

  Damn it, she wasn’t closing her mind again. Alex forced the wall up around her mind as she turned towards the voice. A skin fluttered in the back corner of the room, near the fireplace. Alex rolled to her feet and stepped around the couch to face it.

  “What do you want?” she asked. Her voice was not friendly.

  “What I’ve always wanted,” the voice said. The shivering skin was now filling out; there were stumps for arms and trunks for legs.

  “Do you remember when you were just a little girl, maybe four or five?” the skin asked. Alex could now see the outline of a face pressing against the pale skin.

  “A little,” Alex answered.

  “There was one day when you were riding your bicycle outside, and talking to someone invisible.”

  “I’m sure they weren’t invisible to me,” Alex said.

  The ghost ignored her. “You weren’t watching where you were going, and you hit a rock on the pavement. You fell over and scraped your shoulder and knee, and came running to the house.”

  Alex could see the full shape of the spirit now, from the tight bobs of the curls on its head to the short cut of its fingernails. But like silk stretched over a face, it didn’t fit perfectly. There were places around the chin where the material bagged, and the eyeholes in the abandoned skin didn’t seem to quite conform to the shape of the woman now inhabiting the skin. But the light of brown eyes did appear within the holes as the voice spoke.

  “I was waiting for you,” the lips said. “And I told you then, that those demons wouldn’t protect you. They’d leave you there on the ground when you stumbled and fell. But I would be there forever. Nobody’d ever love you like I did.”

  “Mama?” Alex whispered. Her eyes were brimming, but now she could make out the familiar sag of her mother’s cheeks and the world-weary look in her eyes.

  “Yes, Alexandra,” the skin said. It reached up with both arms and pulled at something on the ceiling. She realized a second later that it had detached the skin from its hook when it drifted to the ground before her.

  “I will always be your mother,” the ghostly thing said. “And a mother’s love is forever.”

  Alex forgot herself and opened her arms to accept her mother’s embrace. Tears streamed down her face as she touched the soft skin that her mother’s spirit wore. It was not her mother’s skin, she knew that. It didn’t fit right. But there was solidity behind it. And right now all she wanted was to go back to her mother’s arms as she had as a child. She’d been hurt badly. Worse than ever.

  “It will all be all right now,” the ghost whispered, petting her hair with borrowed fingers. “Mama’s here.”

  A vision of her mother flashed before Alex’s eyes. The last time she’d seen her, in the backyard of their home in Nebraska. Her mother’s eyes had been open. Her mouth wide from screaming. Her face had been painted in blood. Alex felt her legs grow weak. This was too much.

  “I said I’d always love you,” her mother said. Her arms pulled Alex tighter. “But that was before you killed me with an axe.”

  “Mama, I’m sorry,” Alex cried. “I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t want to do it, but you and dad…”

  “So you’ve found our lost lamb,” a deep voice said nearby. Alex lifted her head from her mother’s soft shoulder, and saw another skin filling with form nearby. She recognized the derision in the voice instantly.

  “Dad?” she said.

  “You have lost the right to call me that,” the spirit said, stretching one of the arms of its newfound skin. “I renounce you. You are no longer my daughter. You are a murderess. A concubine of the devil.”

  Alex tried to push out of her mother’s embrace and realized that the arms were no longer hugging her, but holding her prisoner.

  “Mama let go,” she said, struggling. “I didn’t want to do it,” she said. Tears streamed down her face as her voice cracked. She remembered that horrible day vividly; calling Gertrude and all the spirits who were her friends to help her. She’d been a prisoner in her own basement. Her father had stripped her naked to horsewhip her, and then dressed her in sackcloth to atone. But he had not intended to stop at that. He’d read the stories of the Old Testament too many times. She was going to be his Isaac; a sacrifice to the Lord. He would save her soul from the certain damnation that would come of talking to ghosts, and prove his allegiance to God at the same time.

  “You were going to kill me,” she screamed. “You were going to kill me and the only choice I had was to kill you first.”

  She remembered the power surging through her, as her friends shared with her their strength, and Malachai helped guide her hands. She didn’t know how it had gone beyond simply escaping and turned into a bloodbath, but she had been filled with a fury that went beyond simple human rage. Beyond what any teenager could handle.

  “You had many choices,” her father said, stepping forward. “You could have served the Lord as your mother and I did, rather than consort wi
th devils.”

  “They were not devils,” Alex screamed. She beat her fists on the false shoulders of her mother, as the fleeting joy of seeing her mom turned to regret and now quickly anger. “Let go of me!” she demanded. “Gertrude and Matthew and all the rest were good people. You were both just too crazy to see that. The rest of the world knows that to worship God, you don’t need to wear sackcloth and give him sacrifices.”

  “The rest of the world is going to hell,” her father said. “But we’re here now to finish our job as parents.”

  “We want to send you to heaven,” her mother whispered.

  A bolt of heat shot through Alex’s belly as she realized her mother wasn’t here to comfort her. She drew her leg back and then drove the knee forward, catching her mother in the crotch while pushing away with her hands.

  The gambit worked. Alex stumbled backwards as the arms released her. She caught her balance on Helone’s couch.

  When she straightened up again, her parents stood before her, naked inside stolen skins. It was a horrible thing. She could see scars on her father’s chest that she did not think were his, and the sag of her mother’s small, empty breasts. She had never seen her parents this way. Despite the heat of the Nebraska summers, her father never took his shirt off. Her mother had always worn dresses.

  They advanced on her slowly, and she backed away.

  “Why are you doing this?” Alex cried. Her chest was on fire with a war of emotions. For a moment, she had felt a return of all the love and comfort being in her mother’s arms had given her as a child. And then in an instant, all of the anger and hatred of her teens had returned. Nothing changed after death; they were still intolerant, evil people hiding beneath the mask of righteousness.

  “We are your parents,” her father said. “It’s our job to raise you right. And part of that job means having the understanding and fortitude to know when to dole out punishment. We’re here to do our job.”

  He rushed forward and Alex ran around the couch, putting its width between them. Her mother and father divided and moved to opposite ends. One of them was going to reach her.