by James Swain
“Check to see if anything else is on fire,” he said.
Holly was in a daze. She checked the kitchen and the bathroom.
“All clear?” he asked.
She nodded dumbly. He hated to be a party pooper, but it was time to go. He removed the five-pointed star from the gift bag he’d brought, and made her put it on.
“Don’t take that off until I tell you to, okay?”
Utterly embarrassed, Holly stared at the floor. He wanted things to go back to the way they used to be, and gave her a hug.
“Can’t we just be friends?” he asked.
She started to cry. He hated when she did that. He got a paper towel from the kitchen, and wiped away the tears. She looked vulnerable now and more than a little afraid. He grabbed the bag with the remaining necklace and went to the front door. She followed him as if blind.
“Good-bye. I’ll call you in a few days,” he said.
“Aren’t you going to explain?” she blurted out.
“Explain what?”
“You were under a spell.”
He waited, certain there was more.
“No one can break a witch’s spell. It’s not possible.”
“I guess there’s a first time for everything.”
“Be serious, Peter. How did you do that?”
There were certain things that even Peter didn’t understand about himself. Like how he moved objects with his mind or set off car alarms or made cups of coffee boil or flames jump off kitchen stoves. At the most unexpected of times these things just happened, and he never knew why. His temper was partially responsible, but there was another reason, and he had yet to fathom its meaning. Now he had another strange power to add to the list. He could not be kept under a witch’s spell. It pleased him to know that Holly could not make him her prisoner, and he hugged her before going out the door.
25
Ray was freaking out.
What if someone came, and saw Jucko’s headless body lying on the ground? They’d most certainly call the police, and he and Doc Munns would be arrested and sent to jail. He could not let that happen, not unless he wished to anger the Order of Astrum.
Ray was more afraid of the elders of the Order than he was of the police, or of going to jail, or just about anything else he could think of. He’d seen the kind of horror the elders were capable of wreaking upon people in their service who did not perform up to their standards. They were brutal, and he had made it a point to never make them angry.
Ray made Munns get into the passenger side of the van. Munns had calmed down and was reverting back to his old self. The transformation was as startling as it was remarkable One moment, he was the embodiment of a beast that had guarded the gates of hell for over two thousand years; the next, he was a pudgy slob, and easily the world’s biggest loser.
“Stay here,” Ray said.
“What’s going on? What happened?” Munns asked, sounding bewildered.
“You don’t know?”
“No. Did I kill Jucko?”
“You cut his head off. I’ll tell you about it later.”
Ray went about cleaning up the mess. He dragged Jucko’s body into Munns’s storage unit, near the footlockers that contained Munns’s previous victims. Then he threw in Jucko’s head. Keeping the victims in airtight footlockers had seemed like a good idea, until now. The bodies were a liability, and Ray wasn’t sure what he was going to do with them, or with Jucko. He’d think of something, it was just going to take a little time.
Ray had known that Munns had problems when he’d first recruited him. Men who killed had troubled pasts, which was why they killed. It was sweet revenge for all the terrible things that had happened to them growing up.
Munns’s childhood had been a living hell. Ray had heard the stories from the people in town. Munns’s parents were no-good drunks who’d taken turns torturing him. One day his father was beating the snot out of him while his mother looked on; the very next, Mom was giving him the belt while Dad smoked a butt and watched. Beating their son had been a sick sport that had lasted for many years. It had stunted Munns’s growth and left psychological scars that no amount of time would ever heal.
That was Munns’s story, at least part of it. There was another sordid chapter, although Ray had never gotten the details. Something had happened when Munns was a teenager that had been the icing on the cake. It was so ugly, that at times Munns lost control, and did crazy things, like try to run over townspeople’s dogs.
Ray had known all these things about Munns, yet still had recruited him into the Order. In hindsight, it now seemed a mistake. Munns was too imperfect for the job, too flawed. The Order did not tolerate mistakes, and Ray would pay for his lack of judgment.
As Ray started to leave the unit, the sliding metal door clanged shut in his face, throwing the interior into darkness. The door wouldn’t budge. Was Munns playing a trick on him?
“Let me out!” he said, banging on the door with his palm.
A scraping sound made him jump. Something was crawling across the floor. He dug out his lighter and flicked it on.
He gasped. Jucko’s severed head was rolling across the floor by itself. Coming to its own body, it stopped. Before Ray’s disbelieving eyes, the tendons and sinew rejoined in perfect union, and the dismembered corpse became whole again.
Jucko stood up. His face was lifeless, his eyes unblinking. Ray had thought he knew evil. But now, he realized he didn’t know evil at all. The evil he knew was clever and sly and played wicked tricks on the world. The evil standing before him was different. It was pure, and came straight from the depths of hell.
“Give me your lighter,” came a ghostly voice out of Jucko’s mouth.
Ray hesitated. He did not want the room to return to darkness. Then his imagination would take over, and he’d lose his sanity.
“No,” he squeaked.
“Do as I say. It’s for your own good,” the voice said.
The voice of reason, coming out of a dead man’s mouth. Ray reluctantly handed over the lighter. In the dead man’s hand, it turned into a torch, which illuminated the entire room.
The lid to one of the footlockers popped open, and a female corpse climbed out. It was no longer shrouded in plastic, but wore stylish city clothes and had a skeletal face. The lid to a second footlocker popped open, and a second victim emerged, this one dressed like a much older woman. The dead women stared at Ray with hollow eyes.
Their number gave them away. It was the elders, come to pay him a visit. Ray had never felt more afraid in his life. “Guess I screwed up, huh?” he said.
The unholy trio did not reply.
“I can do better,” Ray promised them. “I swear I can.”
“To who do you swear?” came a voice out of Jucko’s mouth.
“To Satan and everything he stands for.”
“Forever and ever?”
“Yes, forever and ever.”
“Good. There has been a change in plans. We need you to speed up the process. Munns needs to bring the woman named Rachael out on the train sooner. Munns must call this woman, and convince her to come out right away.”
“But everything’s in place for Friday night,” Ray protested. “She’ll become suspicious and start questioning him.”
“Help Munns deal with her suspicions. Work with him.”
“Munns is a basket case. He’ll screw up,” Ray said, speaking his mind.
“We’re giving you another chance,” said the voice. “Make the most of it.”
“You’re crazy,” Ray said under his breath.
“Deal with him,” said the voice.
The two dead women charged across the shed, and pinned Ray against the door. Their bony fingers gripped his arms and held his struggling body in place. The one to his left bit into his cheek and held the flesh between her teeth; the one on his right clamped her teeth down on his earlobe, and tugged on the skin. At any moment, he expected to be eaten alive.
“Care to reconsider?�
� asked the voice.
Ray took a deep breath, expecting it to be his last. Not once had the elders asked him his opinion. They didn’t care what he thought. He was just a slave.
“All right,” he said.
“You’ll work with Munns and make the girl come out?” the voice asked.
“I’ll try.”
“That’s not good enough!”
The dead women began to tear away at Ray’s flesh.
“I’ll do it!” Ray screamed.
They stopped eating him. Ray shut his eyes, and tried to wish this nightmare away. Opening them a moment later, he found that nothing had changed.
“Is that a promise?” the voice asked.
“On my mother’s grave,” Ray said.
“We’re going to hold you to that.”
“I said I’d do it,” Ray said. “Why is this woman so important to you? Is there a reason?”
Jucko brought his face within inches of Ray’s. His breath reeked of the rotted architecture of an evil man’s soul. “The woman is meaningless. It’s Peter Warlock we’re after. Warlock is trying to save Rachael, and will travel from New York to come to her aid. That is predestinated, and there’s no changing it. When Warlock arrives in your little town, he will have an FBI agent with him. That is predestined as well. The agent will arrest Munns, and you as well if you’re not careful. Your job at that point will be to stay out of the way. Understood?”
“Why? What will happen?”
“What do you think will happen, you stupid little man?”
Ray shook his head, his thoughts clouded by fear. The teeth of one of the dead women began to gobble his ear and he shrieked in agony. “Please! Spare me!”
His ear was being torn from his head. The other dead woman tried to rip a hunk of flesh out of his cheek. He screamed and struggled but could not free himself from their bony grasp. The dead man standing in front of him lowered the torch onto the top of Ray’s head. Ray felt his hair catch fire, and knew that this was the end.
As if by magic, the torch extinguished itself, throwing the shed into darkness. The dead women stopped eating his face. They seemed to just melt away, and Ray brought his hand up to touch his unscathed head. Behind him, the sliding door slid open on its own accord and filled the shed with sunlight. Jucko’s headless body lay on the floor, his head a few feet away, while the footlockers were propped against the wall, the corpses of Munns’s victims still inside.
None of it had been real.
It didn’t matter. Ray was still terrified. The elders had tapped his innermost fears. They knew what scared him, and had used those fears to turn his soul inside out. Locking the sliding door behind him, he hurried across the parking lot to his van. Munns sat in the passenger seat, listening to a Marilyn Manson CD on the sound system.
“Where you been?” Munns asked.
“Shut the hell up.”
Ray stared through the windshield at the road, thinking hard. He would have to concoct some reason to draw Rachael from New York. He’d always been good at making up stories, and supposed it wouldn’t be too hard to come up with a convincing lie. The hard part would be to get Munns to call Rachael, and make her believe him.
Ray glanced at his passenger. Munns was humming along to the music. He did not appear the least bit upset by what he’d done. Munns rolled up his sleeve and began to scratch the skin around the tattoo of Surtr holding the severed head of Peter Warlock. It was one of Ray’s best creations, the colors so vivid it almost looked alive.
“The skin is burning,” Munns explained.
Of course it was burning. The skin always burned for the new recruits entering into hell. The hard part was that it never stopped burning.
“Change of plans,” Ray said. “We’re going to get Rachael to come out sooner. We need to come up with a story that she’ll believe.”
“Why? What’s going on?” Munns asked.
Ray hesitated. How did he explain what had just happened in the storage shed? The words had not been invented. Even if they had, he was not sure he would have uttered them.
“It’s a long story,” the tattoo artist said.
26
Peter cabbed it back downtown. He’d dodged a bullet, but had a feeling that this was not the end of things between him and Holly in the romance department. Holly was in love and she was also a witch. That was a recipe for disaster if there ever was one.
The last person on his list was Snoop, never the easiest person to track down. Once Peter found his assistant and gave him the five-pointed-star necklace, he’d go home to Liza and apologize for not calling. Perhaps a quiet dinner, or a foreign movie at an Upper East Side art house would do the trick.
He sent his assistant a text, and told him they needed to meet up. Snoop wrote back to say that he was setting up a pop-up club at Jobee, a Taiwanese restaurant on Howard Street. Did Peter want to join him? Peter wrote back that he did, and gave the cabdriver the address.
Pop-up clubs were the latest rage. All across the city, party promoters were setting up velvet ropes and plugging in turntables in dim sum parlors, Midtown office spaces, strip clubs, school playgrounds, even Laundromats. At midnight, these unassuming spaces were transformed into trendy nightclubs, complete with snarling bouncers and a line of partygoers stretched halfway around the block hoping to get in.
Snoop liked to work pop-up clubs because they were great places to meet women. The fact that the clubs weren’t legal added to the thrill. Jobee, his newest venue, was located just north of the fake handbag district on Canal Street. The cab pulled up to the door, and Peter hopped out.
Jobee’s front door had a paper menu taped to it, and the house specialty, Taiwanese Oyster Pancake, caught his eye. It was the only restaurant in the city that served the dish, and he decided to take some home to Liza as a surprise.
He went in. The restaurant’s interior looked like a cyclone had hit it. A waiter was shouting into a cell phone, asking the police to hurry. Tables and chairs were turned upside down, the kitschy paper lanterns swung wildly from the ceiling. He cursed under his breath, knowing he was too late.
He hurried to the back of the restaurant. There, he found Snoop slumped in a chair. His assistant’s head sagged on his chest, and his eyes were tightly shut. The only thing moving were his legs, both of which twitched uncontrollably. The restaurant’s owner and a cook knelt beside Snoop, trying to rouse him. Behind the chair stood the party promoter, a Russian named Boris from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Boris was telling the waiter not to call the police, and the waiter was ignoring him. It was not a pretty scene.
Peter took the last five-pointed star from his bag, and fitted it around his assistant’s neck. He had no idea if this would do any good, but he gave it a try. Snoop’s lips started to move. Peter leaned over and put his ear up next to his assistant’s mouth, listening hard.
“Peter, is that you?” Snoop asked.
“Yeah,” Peter said. “Did that thing take you away?”
“Oh, man, this is crazy. One minute I’m in the club, the next I’m at some crazy guy’s house on the side of the hill, and he’s trying to run me down with his car.”
“Are you still there?”
“I ran away from him. Trying to find my way to town, wherever the hell that is.”
“I need to get you out of there.”
“Can you do that?”
“I’m going to try.”
“Great. Here he comes in his car. He’s got a gun—he’s trying to shoot me!”
Snoop’s feet began to tap the floor as he attempted to run away from Dr. Death. Only Snoop wasn’t going to succeed, just as Liza hadn’t gotten away, nor Peter himself. Dr. Death had a home field advantage, and was going to shoot Snoop if Peter didn’t act quickly. Rising, he quickly hustled the owner, cook, waiter, and Russian promoter out the front door.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the owner asked him.
“My friend needs help. Please stand here, and keep the police out.�
�
“What is wrong with your friend?” the owner asked. “Is he on drugs?”
“That’s none of your business.”
With that, Peter went back into the restaurant and locked the door behind him. He didn’t want an audience to witness Snoop coming around, and hearing what he had to say. As a psychic he was sworn to keep secrets and not talk about his dealings with the other side. It was a hard promise to keep, but he did his best. He grabbed Snoop by the shoulders and attempted to shake him awake. His eyelids fluttered.
“He’s shooting at me!” Snoop said desperately.
“Wake up! Wake up!” Peter implored him.
“Oww! Something hit my leg. Oh, my God, it’s bleeding. He winged me!”
“Snoop, you’ve got to open your eyes!”
“I can’t. This is so crazy. Get me out of here, will you!”
Peter stopped shaking his assistant. Something was keeping Snoop from returning. He let his eyes canvass the room. In the back of the restaurant was a darkened space with several booths. His eyes locked on the shadow person hovering over a table. The last times hadn’t worked, so the shadow person had decided to hang around, and make sure it did this time.
Peter did not remember moving across the restaurant toward the booths. Nor did he remember raising his arm. Just the sound of his fist striking the shadow person in the space that should have been its head. The evil spirit emitted a groan, and shrank into itself. Two more blows produced similar effects. He was hurting it, and making it smaller. The third blow did the trick, and the shadow person became the size of a beach ball before disappearing, the sound coming out of its mouth a pitiful cry.
He hurried back to Snoop. His assistant had woken up, and was examining his leg where he’d been shot by Dr. Death. He was in a daze, having a hard time grasping that his trip hadn’t been real. Peter helped him out of his chair.
“You’re my hero,” Snoop said.
“Let’s get out of here before the police come. This is one trip you can’t talk to anyone about.”
