“This is highly illuminating,” said Constance.
He beamed at her. “A deep and powerful philosophy, Constance, and it can’t be understood all at once. You have to live and breathe it, as we have these many millennia. We bother no one. Once a month we anoint the altar with the blood of Morax, which we regularly draw. Real blood is important in our ritual. Otherwise we live our lives in the most ordinary ways, like everyone else. We pray, we ask for help, and we communicate with the unseen Daemonium—the ranks of demons and devils, equivalent to the Christian saints. But we don’t stir pots and toss in eyes of newt or jab pins into dolls. Ours is a libertarian philosophy. And I might add, in our group, women and men are absolutely equal.”
“And you want me to join you.”
“Yes. But it’s more than that. Carole Hinterwasser and Mark Lillie, our former leaders, are dead by the demon’s hand—which elevates me to the leadership of the community. I need a partner. I want you to be that partner.”
He still could not read her face. He took a step toward her. “I sense in you, not just a depth of understanding, but also a burning sensuality, white hot—and yet beautifully controlled.”
She continued to look at him, without moving, and without betraying her thoughts. He had never met a human being with that much self-possession. It only reinforced his feeling that she was destined to join with him.
He plunged ahead. “Sensual pleasure is at the very core of our religion. That’s how we celebrate the gift of life, through our physicality, our flesh and blood and organs of pleasure. That’s how Lucifer asks us to worship him: by celebrating the sensual pleasures of the body.”
“In other words,” Constance said, “you worship carnally.”
“We call it Sexual Discourse.”
“In public?”
“As with all worship, we celebrate together. To celebrate Sexual Discourse in front of all increases the excitement, the pleasure. We observe the Sabbat rites here, in this room, on that altar.”
“So you copulate on the altar, in front of a crowd?”
“Crudely put, yes. Two select individuals—not married, who have not had previous congress with each other—take their first, fresh sexual pleasure with one another on the altar, anointed with the blood of Morax. I can assure you it will be a sexual experience like none you’ve ever had in your entire life.”
“Like nothing I’ve ever had?” asked Constance.
“It would be my honor to initiate you into the faith.”
“Right now?”
“I hadn’t planned it that way. Normally it’s done in front of the group. But we’re in an emergency situation, and the forces have arranged for you and me to meet, here, tonight. So…yes. For anyone who wishes to join with us, the act is obligatory.”
“And if I wish not?”
Gavin was surprised by this reply. She had followed his words this far, she was clearly sympathetic to what he was saying… “Look, why speculate? You’re going to join us, I just know it.”
“I am?”
He felt a flicker of concern, even panic. He wondered what to say, how to seal the inevitable.
“Why wouldn’t you join us? You’re perfect. You’re everything we look for. I’ve no doubt you’ll be a great leader.”
“And if I do not?”
“Please, Constance, consider my proposal carefully, because this is your first, last, and only chance. I know you have the wild yearning for freedom in your blood. We’ll unleash that freedom together, and it’ll be beautiful.”
“Beautiful.”
The word, heavy with sarcasm, hung in the air. Gavin began to feel a crushing sense of disappointment, mingling with anger; maybe, after everything he’d shared with her, after the many signs he’d seen of their compatibility, she was going to say no, dashing all his hopes. He put his hand on the grip of his sidearm. She couldn’t be allowed to walk out of there. That would be the end of everything.
“Constance, think very carefully.”
But now he could see that her apparent interest was not acceptance; her calmness was not a sign of acquiescence; and her questions had only drawn out from him information that could be used against him.
“Oh, Constance, Constance, please don’t do this.”
More silence. So be it. Gavin knew that this woman would be an unshakable friend, but also a most dangerous opponent. He felt he’d been tricked. One of the things he’d learned as a kid was always to throw the first punch—and do it early, before your opponent realized a fight was coming.
So he punched first. He lunged forward, knocking the stiletto from her grasp, wrapping one arm around her neck and jamming the gun into her ear. Shoving her back against the nearest wall and pinning her there, he slapped his set of handcuffs around her wrists.
It was over before it had begun. He had completely caught her by surprise. He released her and stepped back, gun pointed. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said.
She stared at him and he was truly taken aback by the look in those eyes.
“I’m sorry I had to do that, but I need your decision now.”
Silence. She drilled him with that baleful stare.
He wagged the gun. “This is the moment of truth.”
In response, she knelt, and—with her cuffed hands—picked up the stiletto he had knocked to the ground. There was a snick as she exposed its blade.
Surprised, he took a few cautious steps back, wondering if she knew how to throw it. But then he remembered that her wrists were still cuffed and her handling of the knife looked inept.
“What exactly are you going to do with that?” he asked.
She reached up and touched the tip of the knife to her own throat, just above the jugular vein. “I’m going to deprive you of the satisfaction of raping and killing me.”
As she spoke, she pressed the point into her skin. After a dimple of resistance it cut into the flesh, a rivulet of blood running down.
Gavin felt an electric shock; despite himself, he was overcome with admiration. This was an amazing woman. My God, she would have made a magnificent partner. He felt a stirring in his loins. But he also realized she’d never join with them. His excitement mingled with a terrible feeling of failure.
Fuck it. She’d been offered the chance of a lifetime and refused it.
He stared as she pressed the knife a shade deeper. He could tell this was no bluff—she was willing to kill herself rather than submit to him. She was going to kill herself. His dismay at not joining with her gave way to an excitement of a very different sort.
“Go ahead,” he said, breathless with anticipation.
He watched as she steeled herself. The knife bit deeper. He was transfixed; he had never seen anything so erotic in his life. Watching her ease the knife into that delicate white throat, seeing the ruby blood running down her pale skin, he felt a powerful shudder ripple through his body.
And then the look in her eyes changed ever so slightly. She paused.
“Don’t stop,” he said hoarsely, the blood pounding eagerly in his ears. “Do it. Do it now.”
Now the knife blade slipped back out. Blood was running freely, but it was only a superficial cut.
Disappointment and anger surged within him, and he raised the gun. “I was sure you had the guts,” he said. “I was wrong.”
Constance’s eyes had been fixed steadily on his own, but now they flickered to one side; with a sudden, terrifying realization, he whirled around just in time to see that she’d fatally distracted him; a grimacing, dog-faced creature took a final hop toward him and he felt a hand with blunt nails seize his arm in a grip of iron.
51
This was Juan Rivera’s second time in Exmouth, and as he looked down what had once been a quaint village street, he saw it was now more reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno. The SWAT team he was leading had dismounted from their vehicles to approach on foot, their first job to secure the area so paramedics could retrieve the dead and injured. A temporary command stat
ion was being set up behind them, radios blaring, sirens going, searchlights blazing. Two MRAPs idled, each with .50-caliber machine guns, ready to move into action if the killer or killers reappeared.
But it looked like the killers were gone. The town was silent—deathly silent. From where he was standing, he could see two bodies in the middle of the street. But even as he squinted into the darkness, he thought he could see at least one other, more distant but equally disquieting shape in the distance. The storm, a swift-moving nor’easter, was starting to pass; the rain squalls were coming less frequently and the wind was dropping. The streetlights were out and the houses dark from a power failure. The scene was lit, instead, by a single house halfway down the street, which was in the last stages of burning, casting a garish glow across the nightmarish scene.
The horror his forward recon team had discovered on Dune Road—the police chief savaged inside his own squad car—had deeply unnerved him. The reports they’d received as they were on their way had been fragmentary: crazy stories of monsters, demons, anarchy, and mass killing. The sergeant—Gavin was his name—was nowhere to be found and hadn’t responded on any police hailing frequencies. Rivera wondered if he, too, was dead.
What the hell had happened here? Rivera swallowed uneasily, collected himself. There would be plenty of time to figure it out; what they had to do now, and do fast, was secure the area, deliver first aid, and evacuate the victims.
He raised his radio and gave the orders, and the SWAT team began moving down the main street in formation, at a trot. As they proceeded, the carnage became more evident. One of the SWAT team started praying under his breath over the frequency, until Rivera shut him up. He could hear other comments, whispered speculation, muttered maledictions. What the hell? he wondered. Terrorists? Meth heads? Gang rampage?
Rivera started to feel a little strange; the scene was utterly unreal. He could see from the hesitant, reluctant way his men were moving that, even if they’d never admit it, they were scared. This wasn’t urban violence; this wasn’t even war. It was something like…well, like a horror movie.
He tried to shake off his own feeling of dread and take firm charge of the situation. In as matter-of-fact a voice as he could muster, he rapped out orders, sending two-man teams left and right to secure the main street and side streets. The first body he came to was horribly mutilated, as if by a wild beast.
His radio began crackling with incoming reports. “Victim outside number eleven Main Street!” “Two victims in the Inn!” The calls were spotty at first, but people were soon talking over one another on the emergency frequency.
As if to push back against the chaos, Rivera watched his team carefully, making sure they were performing by the book: this was a big one, a very big one, and everything they did would be reviewed and re-reviewed. With relative efficiency, given the circumstances, his men established the perimeter, secured the area, and then called in the ambulances. No sirens. Within minutes, paramedics came in and rushed to the many victims, performing triage and, where necessary, first aid.
Not many, Rivera noticed, needed first aid.
Then it came time to clear the houses. There were about twenty of them on the main street. Three had their doors broken in, and in those houses they found more bodies. Even one or two pets had been killed.
In the rest, they found the living: whole families cowering in basements, or hiding in the attic or in various closets, so terrified they could hardly move or speak. And when they did, they spoke of glimpsing a creature: a demon with a tail and a dog’s face. His men duly took down the information, shaking their heads with disbelief. In the storm, the darkness, and the power outage, no one seemed to have gotten a good look at it—at least, no one who survived.
In the thick of battles in Iraq, Rivera had experienced a kind of chaotic, collective terror, in which events were so fast-moving and scrambled that afterward nobody could say what had really happened. That seemed to be the case here. The survivors had nothing to say that was reliable or credible, even though their recollections were remarkably consistent on certain points. If only he could find someone who had gotten a good, long look at the killer…
As if on cue, Rivera heard a shout. Lurching from behind a house staggered the figure of a man, not exactly drunk, but not exactly sober, either: wild-eyed, shouting and waving. He spied Rivera and came rushing over, arms outspread, and before Rivera could react the figure had enveloped him in a panicked hug, like a drowning man clasping his rescuer. “Thank God, thank God!” he screamed. “It’s the end times. The demons have been unleashed from hell!” Despite all that Rivera could do, the man knocked him down in his desperation.
Two members of his team came to Rivera’s assistance and helped wrest the man off him, pinning him to the ground. He continued to thrash and shout.
Rivera rose, then bent over him, trying to speak in a calming voice. “What is your name?”
This was answered with a fresh gust of shouting. “What does it matter?” The man cried inconsolably. “The world is ending; nobody will have a name now!”
Rivera leaned closer and steadied the man’s face with his hand. “I’m here to help you. My name’s Lieutenant Rivera. What is your name?”
The man began to emerge from his mindless panic. He stared at Rivera, eyes bugging, sweat streaming down his face.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Rivera went on calmly. “I want you to listen. Are you hearing me? Nod if you understand.”
The man stared and finally nodded.
“Your name, please?”
A croak. “Boyle.”
“Mr. Boyle, are you hurt?”
The man shook his head.
“What did you see?”
He began to tremble. “Too much.”
“Tell me.”
“A…demon.”
Rivera swallowed. “Could you please describe the attacker?”
“It…he…came down the street… He was running… And making a sound. He kept saying the same thing over and over again…”
“What was he saying?”
“Something like son, son… He was horrible, gigantic, seven feet tall. He had a dog’s snout. Rotten teeth. Naked. Horrible yellow skin. And he stank. He stank like shit.”
“Naked? In this weather?”
“Yes. And…he had a tail.”
“A tail?” This was disappointing; the man was going to be about as useful as the others.
“A horrible tail, not like a real tail, it was dragging around behind him like a snake. And he had hands, giant hands that ripped people apart like they were nothing more than…” He was overtaken by a violent fit of trembling. “Oh, God… Oh, God!”
Rivera shook his head and rose. “Get this man into an ambulance. He’s not sane.”
52
Gavin’s gun went flying as the creature seized his wrist; he drew Gavin toward him with a growl, twisting the wrist hard as he did so. There was a faint crackle of tendons. Gavin grimaced in pain but did not scream; he stared, as if in shock.
Constance remained frozen. So this, she thought with a strange detachment, is Morax—the demon. And yet it was human, or mostly so. A tall man with a dreadfully deformed face: a prognathic snout, with projecting teeth that pushed out from behind rubbery lips, and a sloped forehead with a massive sagittal crest that rose up like a bony Mohawk across his knobby skull. His skin was sallow and streaked with filth, his yellow skin puckered with pustules, scabs, and a thousand tiny scars; his eyes were a dark orangey brown; his body was ropy; he was bald and naked; and his stink filled the perfumed confines of the altar room. But the tail—the tail—was what most arrested her attention. It wasn’t a typical animal tail, but rather a long rope of pink flesh that was utterly limp, its club-like end bristling with wiry hairs. The tail had no life; it dragged behind him like a flaccid, paralyzed limb.
The man gripped Gavin’s wrist with a hand as massive as a bear paw, with spade-like fingers terminating in brown nails. He stared at Gavin
, his pupils contracted with hate. The two seemed momentarily frozen in a grotesque tableau.
And then the creature made a sound, an angry hissing sound, which broke the spell.
Gavin, wincing, spoke with remarkable presence of mind. “It’s all right, Morax. Everything’s going to be fine. You’re home now. Let go of me, please.”
Morax repeated the guttural hiss. It sounded like shunnng, or sohnn, but Constance couldn’t catch it.
“You’re hurting me,” said Gavin. “Please let go.”
In response, Morax gave Gavin’s wrist another savage twist. There was a sharp cracking sound. The sergeant gasped, but—much to Constance’s surprise—kept his composure.
Even if she had not heard Gavin’s story, it would have been obvious that these two had a long and troubled history—a history, it seemed, that was about to reach its end, one way or another.
The two were so focused on each other that Constance realized she had an opportunity to escape—if she moved carefully. The way by which she had first entered the chamber, however, was blocked by the two antagonists. She would have to escape deeper into the tunnels.
She took a step back, and then another, careful to keep her eye on the confrontation.
“Morax,” Gavin said, “I’m now the leader of the coven, which means that we’re partners, in a way. It was wrong, what’s been done to you over the years, and—”
With a sudden roar, the creature yanked Gavin’s hand and wrenched it off as he might a turkey drumstick. Blood spurted from the ragged wrist. With a cry Gavin staggered back, frantically trying to stop the bleeding, now wide-eyed with terror. The demon roared again.
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