In her vision, the demon passed right through her body, and right through the table underneath, and she knew she had beaten it. Then she watched with satisfaction as the succubus flew up in a rage, creating a fierce wind as it rushed about the room, circling and circling like a bird of prey. Then she stopped in midair and began to descend, seemingly against her will, pulled down by the power of Marie’s words, but not toward Marie. Instead, the demon seemed to be dragged as though by a powerful magnet toward Father Joe. With one more chant from Marie, the succubus ceased resisting, and the sudden end to her struggle caused her to fly at the priest, hitting him square in the chest, penetrating him and becoming one with him against her will.
With a gasp, Marie opened her eyes, not aware that she had even had them screwed shut. She felt as though she had just come up for air, set free from the riptide. She was disoriented after the vividness of her vision, but before she could get her bearings, she heard Father Joe scream, a loud, female-sounding cry that rose from his diaphragm and made Marie’s eardrums rattle. She arched her neck as far as it would go to be able to see behind herself, and saw the priest with his fists screwed into his eyes as though he were trying to rub them out of the sockets. He kept screaming and stumbled backwards, now hitting himself in the forehead with his fists and scratching at his face. “No! No!” he yelled, the last word degenerating into desperate sobbing. Frantic, he stumbled out of Marie’s line of vision; in seconds, she heard his cries diminish as he ran away, his heavy footsteps making the tabletop shake beneath her. And then one more scream split the room, and Marie heard shattering glass. She turned her head just in time to see Father Joe disappear out the immense window at the end of the room, and she cringed in spite of herself at the thought of him plunging down to the concrete slab that surrounded Julian Piedmont’s pool.
“Marie!” Tom called to her. “Did he?”
“Yes,” she answered, tears streaming down her face. For a moment, she feared that she would vomit, but the feeling subsided. Breathing hard, she said, “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he answered. “You?”
“I think.” Adrenaline surged through her body, and she felt near to panicking, but she knew she was physically unhurt and was absolutely sure that the demon had left her unscathed. “Oh God, Tom. We did it.”
“Yeah,” he said with good humor. “Now we just need to figure out how to untie ourselves.”
“The ropes have to give eventually. Start wiggling against them.”
Pushing and straining with her legs and arms and trying to rock her body to the left and right, she soon found herself hoping Tom’s ropes were not as tight. And then she stopped moving altogether and inhaled deeply, a new sense of panic rising in her.
“Tom?” she called.
He grunted his response as he worked at the ropes that bound him.
“Do you smell smoke?”
She felt the vibrations in the table stop as Tom lay suddenly still.
Then came his reply. “Jesus.”
“Father Joe must have knocked over candles when he ran,” she said. Arching her neck again and straining her eyes to look above and behind her, she could see now that flames had begun working their way up one of the enormous black curtains that lined the walls of the room.
“Shit!” Tom shouted. “We have to go, Marie. This place’ll go up fast. Maybe if we rock we can knock the table over and loosen the ropes that way.”
But even as he said it, Marie knew it would not work. The ropes were tight, and even if they could get the table to tip through some miracle of coordination, the ropes would hold fast. In that instant, Marie stopped struggling and prepared herself to die. There was no way they would be freed from their bonds.
“Wait,” came a voice from off to her right, and Marie turned her head to see the James Cagney look-alike approaching the table. For the first time since she and Tom had entered the room, the incubus appeared lucid and able to control the body that had been made for it.
“Wait,” it said again, but this time its voice sounded distinctly different, more high-pitched. Marie told herself she must still be hallucinating. The voice coming out of the man’s body sounded amazingly like Elise’s.
She watched it get closer as smoke began to fill the room, and she could now hear the crackle of flames as more of the curtains and the walls behind them began to catch fire. She could feel the heat from the fire on her skin, and she knew they didn’t have much time. Still, she could not take her eyes off the approaching incubus, and seconds later the Cagney face began to melt. Not from the heat, Marie realized. Rather, the thing was transforming itself, its features becoming softer, the cheekbones higher, the hair longer and turning red. The body was now a woman’s. In seconds, Marie was looking at Elise.
“My God,” she whispered. “Is it you?”
“Quiet,” the thing said. It clearly had Elise’s voice now and appeared to be her exact double. “Save your strength. Let me get you out of here.”
“Is it you?” she repeated.
“I think so,” said the being beside her as it began working at the ropes.
“How?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been…trapped. Like in a dream I can’t wake up from. Till now.” As she spoke, she pulled at the knots, and soon three had been loosened. Marie felt her left arm released, and for the first time since the fire had started she thought she and Tom had a chance of getting out.
“Elise,” she sobbed. “I tried to help you.”
“I know. But right now, help yourself.”
Marie was able to half roll herself over now, and she started using her left hand to work the knots holding her right while Elise began pulling the rope from around her body before starting to untie the knots that held Marie’s legs. The heat in the room was getting unbearable now, as though the whole room was an oven they were trapped in.
After several more seconds, Marie had her right arm free, and she was soon able to pull her legs out of the rest of the ropes with Elise’s help. Coughing now, she hopped off the table and ran to Tom, starting to untie one side while Elise worked on the other. He looked frightened and confused by the roaring flames and the sight of Elise beside him. “It’s okay,” Marie shouted now over the sound of the flames, and before much longer, Tom was free.
All three were coughing now, and as Tom rolled off of the table, he pulled Marie to the ground. “Crawl!” he shouted as he pushed her toward the front of the house. The smoke was thinner toward the floor, and Marie was able to breathe the slightest bit easier. On the floor behind her, she saw the book of spells. It would take her only a few seconds of crawling in the other direction to get to the book, and for a moment she thought of Jasper and how he would have loved to have it. But then Tom pushed at her again, and she began to crawl away from the book. Let it burn, she thought. Priceless as it was, it still wasn’t worth all the misery it had caused, nor was getting it worth staying in the burning building for even the smallest length of time. She looked around as she began to crawl and was relieved to see Elise crawling behind her. Passing Colin’s prone form on the ground, she stopped to try and feel for a pulse, but Tom grabbed her wrist and pulled her along. “No time!” he yelled. And though she was not completely sure that Colin was dead, there was so much blood on the floor around him that she felt certain there was no hope.
When all of Julian’s hooded followers had fled the scene, they had left the front door of the house open. Now, Marie, Tom and the incubus with Elise’s body crawled toward it. The closer she got, Marie was able to feel cool air from outside, and it pulled her along as though the night sky were a rope she had been tethered to.
With the door only a few feet away, all three stopped short when a robed figure blocked the way, coming to the doorway from outside the house. Marie was still leading the way and thought for a second that it was Father Joe, somehow saved from his fall by the demon he had carried with him and come to force them all back into the fire. But then the figure let out
a shriek and ran past them, into the fire. It was a woman’s voice, and Marie knew it was Laura. Driven completely out of her mind, she may have been racing in to try one last time to connect with the demon lover she had lost that night in her apartment, pulled into the fire by the same desire that had led her to Piedmont’s in the first place. Or it may have been the last vestige of her sanity that drove her to end it all in the blaze rather than suffer another minute of the horror the incubus had plagued her with. Marie could not know, but she half turned to grasp at Laura’s robe, wanting to save her in spite of everything the woman had done. Laura was too fast, though, and she disappeared in the smoke that billowed through the house.
“Go!” Tom shouted behind her, and she went. Once they were out of the house, Tom grabbed her upper arm and helped her to her feet. “Run,” he yelled, and they were soon all the way to the wall around the estate.
Marie was out of breath and still coughing. Tears streamed down her face, and she threw her arms around Tom. He held her close, his arms wrapped about her back and his face buried in the hair around her shoulders. The entire house was on fire behind them now, and Marie could still feel its heat on her back. At the same time, she felt the cool night air on her forearms and legs; the contrast gave her goose bumps. When she felt Tom begin to relax his hold on her, she turned her face toward the fire and the strange sight of Elise standing next to her, the light from the flames playing across her face. She could see that the incubus now looked not quite like Elise, its features shifting in a strange, fluid way.
“Set me free,” came Elise’s voice from the thing’s mouth.
Marie understood and nodded. She took Elise’s hands and held them, then looked in her eyes and said, “I love you, sweetie.” Tears spilled down her cheeks again.
“I love you, too,” said Elise.
Marie’s mind was a blank for a moment. Then she took a deep breath and began, “Namon dagoreth--”
“No,” Elise said. “The other way. The way you tried before.”
Marie shook her head. “I don’t think—”
“It’ll work,” Elise interrupted again. “It will.”
Her voice was so calm in the midst of all the chaos, and Marie felt suddenly at ease upon hearing it.
“Elise, I don’t know if I can…”
“Trust me,” she said. “Now let me go.”
Taking a deep breath, Marie looked into the eyes of a being that looked like Elise and thought about all she had seen in the last few weeks. It had all been real. Only faith could explain it—faith in something, anything. She nodded, telling herself that there had to be more to faith than what Father Joe had ruined for her. Still holding Elise’s hands and looking into her eyes, Marie began: “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.” She continued, but where she had said the prayer forcefully with the other incubi, intoning the words with a mixture of conviction, rage, vengeance and fear, now she recited it gently, hoping that it would set free whatever part of Elise was trapped inside this strange, unnatural body. And as she spoke, Elise’s face began to fade away, and the incubus’ face began to shift and distort, looking like an unfinished sculpture being molded by unseen hands. Marie knew that she was not just freeing Elise, but all the other women that the incubus had seduced, and for a moment she even saw the Cagney face looking back at her. While the other incubi had been both terrified and angry at hearing the exorcism prayer, this one looked relieved.
When she finished the prayer, she was suddenly left with nothing but dust on her fingers and a cloak that had fallen to her feet. She turned to Tom again and he held her close for a long time.
Finally, he said, “What about the priest?”
Marie looked up at him, surprised. “You think he survived the fall?” she asked.
“There’s the pool. If he landed in it…”
“Maybe, but it’s an awfully long drop. And I don’t think the pool’s very deep.” She thought about it for a moment, then added, “And even if he did survive, with that thing in him, he’ll likely be completely out of his mind. He was its master, but now the slave’s inside him.”
Tom nodded toward the inferno that had been the Piedmont mansion. “Either way, I’m not going down there to find out. If he did die, though, what about the succubus?”
“She probably left the body when it died. She could still be around here.”
“Should we try to kill it?”
Marie shook her head. “I’ve had enough. Spirits like these, they’re usually bound to a person or a location. Now this one has neither. It will probably just languish up here and fade away, especially if there’s no one left to believe in her.”
Tom nodded. Then he looked toward the wall around the property and said, “We need to get out of here, Marie. I can hear sirens coming down below.”
She nodded and let him lead her away. When Julian’s followers fled the house, they had shed their robes on the ground and driven away in panic, leaving the iron gates open now for Tom and Marie to walk through. On the other side, Marie’s car still sat beside the wall, and just behind it was Colin’s black Lincoln. As she and Tom slid into her Chevrolet, Marie wondered what the coroner would conclude from the burned bodies and the bullet wounds and the priest by the pool with all the broken glass around him. And moments later, when the Chevy’s engine rumbled itself awake, she realized she had never noticed what a good sound it was. She wrapped her arm around Tom’s and rested her head on his shoulder as he made a U-turn on the narrow road and turned the car back toward Hollywood.
Chapter Thirty
The sign on the window had recently been redone; it now read “Sunset Books” in large letters that curved in a half circle to suggest the setting sun. Below that were the words “New and Used” and below that “Specializing in the Occult.” Inside, the store looked much as Jasper had left it, with stacks of books on the floor beside the crowded shelves and the most expensive ones under glass in the display case beside the cash register. A magazine rack had been added; on it were displayed the latest issues of Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Startling Stories, and Weird Tales. The rack added to the clutter, but in some ways the store was getting neater. Tom had used part of his inheritance to rent the vacant store next door, and the landlord had consented to have a door cut in the wall to connect the two spaces. Rows of shelves lined the extension; Tom and Marie had spent the last month moving most of Jasper’s precious private collection from the house to the new section of the store. They knew he would have hated to sell the books, but they weren’t doing anyone any good gathering dust with Jasper gone, and he at least would have been pleased to know their sale would help Tom and Marie for a long time to come.
The weather had warmed up by July with no more nights of rolling fog or mornings of dew and drizzle. Marie sat behind the counter, grateful for the electric fan that blew on her. The store’s front door was propped open with an old dictionary, and the back door that led to the alley was also open. A weak little breeze blew into the store. On the glass countertop beside her, Murphy sat contentedly on his haunches, his eyes half closed and his tail wrapped around him. He paid no attention as Marie turned the pages of the manuscript in her hands, a pencil tucked behind one ear.
The story, which she had titled “The Devil’s in the Details,” was based loosely on what had gone on with the incubi. Writing it had been therapeutic. During the months since the fire at Julian’s estate, she had spent many nights with very little sleep. It didn’t matter if she was home alone or spending the night with Tom; she would drift off and then fall into the worst, most vivid nightmares she could remember having. In some, she wandered through hills similar to the ones around Julian’s house. Coming across the burned ruins of a mansion with an empty pool behind it, she would be overcome with the feeling that the very bushes were alive and watching her, charged with a negative energy that wanted nothing more than to suck the life out of her. Sometimes, the dream went so far as to include the bushes and trees advancing
on her, tendrils reaching out and curling up her ankles before she would awake in a cold sweat and be unable to fall back to sleep.
Reading or playing solitaire had done no good. She had been on the verge of asking Tom for some of his pills when she decided to try turning to her typewriter—when she was alone—or a tablet and pencil when she was with Tom. At first, she had just written her thoughts, keeping a nighttime journal, but soon she had begun toying with the idea of writing a story. After years of reading pulpy adventures and thrillers, she had found that she could write well and with ease. Gratefully, she found that she could write a while and then close her eyes again to sleep through the rest of the night. After several weeks like this, the dreams still plagued her, but the story had come along well, and if she had to sacrifice a bit of sleep and calm to produce it, she was willing to pay the price for now.
In the weeks after the fire, she had combed the newspapers for references to Julian Piedmont’s demise, but the stories had generally focused on the tragedy of the young mogul’s death and the ensuing power struggles at his studio. Though Marie had checked every Los Angeles paper diligently, there had been no mention of Father Joe—nothing about his body being found by the pool, or about him being discovered as a survivor. Uncertainty over the priest’s fate made Marie uneasy, and she feared that she and Tom had acted foolishly the night of the fire when they had decided not to venture down to the pool to be sure he was dead. There was nothing for it now, though, she had come to realize, and as the months had passed, she had slowly begun to feel less apprehensive about the priest and the demon he had carried away.
She still wore the St. Lucy cross around her neck. When she had gone back to the church to clear her things from the office, she had been tempted to offer the cross to the new pastor, but had decided against it. The church had been repaired and painted, and though no one knew what had happened to Father Joe, there was a sense that order had been restored. Marie knew that the new priest didn’t need the relic from St. Lucy in order to lead his flock; he would likely have just sent the little cross to the diocese where it would have been kept safely in storage, never doing anyone any good. On her way out of the chapel for the last time, Marie had knelt before the statue of St. Lucy, thinking about the martyr’s lost eyes, gouged out by frustrated Roman soldiers. It made her think of the other abuses all the victims of the incubi had endured, and she remembered how Jasper had said that St. Lucy could still see without her eyes. Maybe the incubi hadn’t taken everything from their victims, she thought, but they had certainly taken enough.
The Devil You Know Page 31
