There was a big gaping crumbling-edged hole in one wall, with a hollow black space on the other side. He shined the light from his phone through it and saw the short drop—more than a step, less than a jump—onto the landing of a switchbacked flight of industrial metal stairs.
Down he went, treading on crushed cigarette butts and bits of broken glass. He tried to imagine the good citizens of Fairmont descending these steps in the calm and orderly fashion urged by those old pamphlets—women and children first, nobody panicking—and couldn’t do it. Nope. It’d be pushing and shoving, trampling, screaming and chaos.
At the bottom, another door opened onto a hallway, perhaps originally done in that shade of hospital green somehow meant to be soothing. Wire-caged lightbulbs clung to the upper corners like weird spiders. Some of them even still worked, which was either impressive or unnerving, or maybe both. They shed a thin jaundice-yellow light, the color equivalent to the ammonia pee smell from above.
Helpful signs hung askew, labeling offices and cluttered storerooms, pointing directions to dormitories and mess halls. The furnishings—gunmetal grey desks, filing cabinets, swivel chairs—looked like they might’ve been kicked here all the way from 1948. Out-of-order drinking fountains, corroded fire extinguishers, and bulky prehistoric telephones stuck randomly from the walls like rock formations.
Surprising, really, Jake thought, that none of those urban spelunker types had sought it out yet. Or Fallout LARPers, if there was such a thing. He reminded himself to ask Marty. Marty would know. Marty wouldn’t LARP himself, hell no, didn’t go in for any of that brand of geek-shit (except collecting pictures of cosplay babes) but if it was a thing, he’d know.
Marty had even nicknamed the place for them: Vault 420. Partly because this was where they’d all sneak off to smoke before getting the apartment, and partly because the room they used most had a hubcap-sized clock on the wall with the hands perpetually frozen at guess-what-time. They’d considered it a favorable omen.
Opposite the perpetual 4:20 clock was a cheerful cartoon poster depicting cheerful cartoon people gathered at a dinner table: Mom serving a platter of meatloaf to Dad, Big Sis, and Little Bro, while a cheerful cartoon dog begged beside Little Bro’s chair. REMEMBER, read the printed caption, FAMILY FIRST. To this, someone—presumably whichever smartass had also decorated the double doors topside—had added EAT YOUR.
Other than that, it was much the same as Jake remembered. An office of some sort at one time, with one of those big-ass metal desks and a filing cabinet tipped onto its side to serve as a bench, it still smelled of bygone weed. One of the miraculously still-working light fixtures was just outside, though sporadically sputtering and emitting a low, irritating, buzzing hum.
He set to shifting stuff about, clearing a wide space on the faded and discolored linoleum. In addition to the candles required for the ritual, he’d had the foresight to bring along a couple of little battery-powered clip lamps, arranging them so their bright cones spotlight the center of the floor.
Consulting the print-out pages from various demonology wikis, he went to work. By the time he heard the scuff and thump and rustle of footsteps approaching, and familiar voices carrying strangely in the subterranean acoustics, he had the outline done and most of the glyphs and sigils chalked in.
“Wow, what a dump,” Brendan said. “What a shit-hole.”
“Yeah, well, you can leave any time,” Beth replied.
“Hey, no, I’m not leaving, I was only saying.”
“It is kind of…uh…run-down,” said Devon, the new kid.
“’Course it is; they built it a hundred fuckin’ years ago,” Spencer said.
“Not a hundred,” said Marty. “Maybe more like seventy.”
They came in, pausing and looking impressed when they saw the progress Jake had already made. Even in the clip-lamp beams, the intricate pentacle with its rings of arcane symbols and designs was pretty cool; by candlelight, it would be spooky awesome.
Each of the other guys carried various bundles of what components they’d agreed to bring. Jake had told them it’d be more effective if everyone contributed something. So, Spence had some fresh-laid eggs from his Nana Nell’s ratty-ass chicken farm…Devon brought a box of yeast-culture packets from his parents’ bakery pantry as well as the glass windchime he’d volunteered…Brendan must’ve scoured several antique stores to find a brass bell and an old church censer…and Marty…
Marty grimaced as he presented a Shop-N-Go bag, into which was stuffed another Shop-N-Go bag and then another and another, like some kind of screwed-up nesting doll or baggie turducken. Inside all that plastic was a wad of convenience store restroom dispenser paper towels, and at the core of that was a slim brown paper bag. And, according to Marty, inside that was a wad of toilet paper, and inside that, the moon-blood of a nubile maiden.
“How did you even—” began Devon.
“You don’t want to know,” Marty said, shuddering.
“I want to know,” said Beth.
“Yeah, me too,” Spencer said.
“It was at work the other night, okay? This car pulls up and a girl comes in, like in a real hurry, asks where we stock the, uh…the female products—”
“Tampons,” Beth said in a clear, loud voice.
He flinched. “Yeah, those.”
“You’ve gotta get over that squeamish thing if you’re ever gonna get a girlfriend,” Jake said, placing silver plates at the points of the pentacle. He’d ‘borrowed’ them from the fancy restaurant in the clubhouse of Vintner’s Green, the golf course where he worked. “She might expect you to do real-life grownup stuff like pick ‘em up at the store for her.”
“My mom asked me and my dad to do that once,” Devon said. “There were like a million kinds. He had to ask some lady for help.”
Beth heaved a sigh and shook her head.
“So, she grabs a box and books it to the bathroom,” Marty said. “Then she comes back out, apologizes the whole time she’s paying, says it was an emergency, she thought she had some but they must’ve been in her other purse…she wouldn’t shut up... it was a nightmare.”
“And then, what?” asked Spencer. “After she’s gone, you duck into the ladies’ room and fish the dead mousie out of the trash?”
“Dead…?” began Devon.
Spence mimed holding up something as if dangling from a tail, or a string, and Devon turned greenish.
“That is so wrong,” Beth said. “Not to mention fucking creepy and probably illegal.”
Marty nodded miserably. “I know, and sick, and disgusting…I almost puked.”
“But,” Brendan said, “important part: was she a nubile maiden?”
“What do you want from me, dude? She was a girl! I dunno! A chick, a hottie, high school, maybe college…I dunno! Am I supposed to quiz her about her noob-ility?”
“Chill, Mart-O,” Spencer said. “You did good. ‘Specially for a total wussy-pussy, you did good.”
“Yeah, great, thanks, whatever. Can we just do this already?”
“We got everything?” Brendan asked Jake. “We set?”
“Almost. I still need to do the salt and twine, then we light the candles. Beth, how’s it look?”
She boosted herself up to sit on the battered old desk, heels of her equally battered old Converse high-tops bumping atonal clonks, and leaned back so she could frame the whole scene with her phone. “Ready to film the FAIL. Viral video internet sensation, here we go.”
“Ha, ha. Okay, Spence, shut the door.”
“We’re shutting the door?” Devon asked.
“You want anybody walking in on this?”
“Well, no, but...”
“It’ll be fine,” Beth said. “As long as nobody farts.”
“Now you tell us,” said Spencer, moving to the door. “Guess we shouldn’t’a scarfed all those fuckin’ Shop-N-Go burritos on the way over.”
Jake finished tracing the chalk lines with runnels of salt, spilling them from a
curled fist like one of those monk-types making a mandala out of colored sands. He began winding the black yarn around the waxy bases of the white candles—also ‘borrowed’ from Nineteen On The Green. “Okay, Brendan, Dev, be ready with the bell and the chime for when I start lighting these up—”
“Definitely no one fart,” Beth said.
“We are all gonna die,” Marty said. “That’s it, game over, we are all gonna die.”
Chapter Five: Incantation
Found footage.
Beth held her phone steady, shifting her gaze back and forth from the screen to the scene.
As if the world needed more video evidence of guys being stupid horndogs. Or more video evidence of a bunch of retards trying to fuck around with the occult. Fuck around but literally, in this case.
Typical.
She kind of wished something would happen. Just to see the looks on their faces. Just to watch them shriek like little girls, wet their pants, freak out, and run. Like those compilation clips of oh-so-tough dudebros going through a jump-scare haunted house or getting epicly pranked with a fake snake or some shit.
To give Jake credit, he’d done a decent job organizing them and setting the stage. The diagram he’d copied from whichever demonology website was complex and intricate, not just a plain old goth/metalhead pentagram. The smaller designs etched within its outer ring looked suitably astrological, alien, Lovecraftian, and weird all in one. A couple of them, she had to admit, were downright disturbing in an unsettling way she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She didn’t remember having seen them on his various printed-out pages and reminded herself to ask him about them later.
Later, when they’d stopped laughing about their failure and what asses they’d made of themselves.
With the clip-lamps off, and the five candles lit—Brendan ringing the brass bell and Devon tinking plinks from his mom’s glass wind chime as Jake touched a match to each wick, counting them off in halting Latin—the grubby confines of Vault 420 took on a shifting, shadowy, moody atmosphere. The flames glimmered in the basin of pure water, even if the water was a jug of distilled they’d picked up at the Winston City Wal-Mart and the basin a huge gnawed-on plastic dog dish Spence had gotten from Coach’s garage, Coach’s dog Roxie having been upgraded to sturdy stainless steel.
Once they’d all quit wisecracking and snickering, hushed up and acted more serious, it almost started to seem halfway legit. Each of the guys had taken their places at one of the points of the pentacle, like in that hilariously bad Devil’s Daughter movie they’d watched. All they needed was the hooded robes.
Okay, no, they’d need more than the hooded robes. Positioned like dutiful little cultists or not, they were still a far sight from even the ‘vintage seventies’ idea of devil-worshipers, which evidently really had involved a lot of boobs and bush, as well as slender young studs with porn-staches and body hair, like contestants in a Freddie Mercury look-alike contest.
She glanced from Spencer to Marty, from Devon to Brendan, to Jake.
Talk about a far-fucking-cry…
Jake swung the censer in precise looping arcs. Scented smoke puffed from it in drifting spirals, twining around the tendrils rising from the candles. Much different types of smoke than they were used to, adding to the general eeriness of the ambiance. For a second or two, her eyes even played hypnotic tricks, suggesting the fine greyish wisps formed fleeting shapes…letters…symbols.
Yeah, and animators really did put subliminal sex messages into Disney cartoons.
The guys had fallen silent, even Spencer, as Jake waved the censer around, reciting more words in halting Latin. It was, Beth reflected, still an improvement on his mangled attempts in Ms. Gateaux’s French class. Not that many of her students had been there out of a love of language; it was a graduation requirement, and given the choice between a hot lesbian or the hundred-year-old gimp who taught Spanish, well…
There was a pause, nobody moving, nobody speaking.
The smoke hung. The candleflames had stopped flickering, and burned standing straight and tall in the motionless air.
Beth noticed they all—even she—had fallen into a slow pattern of breathing in unison. How was that for creepy? This was how people psyched themselves right the fuck out, or right the fuck into believing this shit.
Her mind suddenly spat up memories of a much-younger Beth, a Bethie who slept over at a birthday party for her older cousins and they played light-as-a-feather, they played Mary-in-the-Mirror, they would have been all over that Charlie-Charlie game if it’d been big back then.
That little Beth…who wasn’t yet ready to rule out either Santa Claus or the boogeyman…the Bethie still several years from coming home to find her brother, hanging from the banister in their entryway, purple and gurgling…
That Beth had been, in those moments, utterly convinced.
Her mind also spat up her own voice: Have you even watched a horror movie?
“Offer the hen’s egg, freshly laid,” Jake said.
He no longer sounded halting, jokey, or unsure. He sounded…charismatic, even a little bit…sexy.
A clammy shiver slithered down her spine. Talk about unsettling.
Spencer leaned forward, holding one of the brownish eggs in both hands. He cracked the shell on the brim of the plastic dog dish and emptied its gloopy contents into the water. The yolk, swimmy in its puddle of clear gelatinous whites, made an irregular, yellow, lidless eye.
“Offer the moon-blood of a nubile maiden,” Jake said.
Marty, with more grimaces and flinches, unwrapped the layers of his gross-gotten bundle until he reached the wad of stain-splotched toilet tissue with a straggle of string trailing from one end. He flicked it into the basin, then scrubbed his hand furiously on his pants, making thick trying-not-to-hork noises.
The tissue paper bloated out and blossomed like a weird fungal flower, its maroon crustings rehydrating to red, as it absorbed and went soggy. Some caught on the egg-edges and drew down jellyfish streamers with it as it sank.
“Offer the lock of virgin’s hair,” Jake said next.
This, obviously, had been a source of contention; no way in hell any of them were going to own up, no matter how painfully evident might be the truth. In the end, to let everybody save face, Brendan raided the combs of his younger brothers.
“They’re twelve,” he’d explained, “nerdy as hell, and Village-of-the-Damned creepy-looking. Be a miracle if they ever get to first base with a girl.”
He opened a zip-top bag and shook several thin white-blond strands onto the surface of the now-murkier water.
The candle flames continued not to waver. In fact, though she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just her eyes, she could’ve sworn they all burned at exactly the same height, color, and shape.
Suggestibility sure was one devious, insidious bastard.
“Offer the sacrifice of innocent life,” Jake said.
And by now, damn it, he didn’t just sound charismatic and sexy, he was looking it, too. His normal clean-cut and wholesome boy-band/pretty-boy/boy-next-door look, which made him perfect for his job as a golf caddy for rich tourists, had somehow taken on a wickedness…
It was an effect of the candles, the lighting, the smoke.
Had to be.
Devon tore open the packet of yeast cultures from his parents’ bakery pantry and sprinkled out a fine rain of gritty, grainy powder. His brace-yourself expression simultaneously proclaimed ludicrousness and guilt. They were yeasts, for fuck’s sake, not even brine shrimp or crickets. It wasn’t as if billions of them didn’t go into bread every day…you want genocide, you want ovens…
Beth shook herself. Was she honestly sitting here, filming this, equating a packet of goddamn baker’s yeast to the Holocaust?
There were no flashes or sparks or Horton-Hears-A-Who-esque choruses of tiny doomed screams. Just that gritty rain of particles, some of which clumped and some of which spread, and the contents of the basin grew murkier still.
Jake undid his jeans.
The spell of intent silence was abruptly broken.
“Dude! What the hell?” Marty yelped.
“Don’t tell me you forgot what else it calls for,” said Jake. “The new-spilled seed of a virile youth.”
“Yeah, but...” Even Brendan looked askance. “You’re gonna just…whip it on out right here in front of everybody?”
“Hey, whoa,” Beth said, tipping her phone toward the floor. “There goes our PG-13 rating.”
Candles sputtered. Light danced and shadows leaped. The smoke whirled and whorled in slow, lazy hazes.
“So don’t watch,” Spencer said. “Nobody says you gotta watch.”
“Are you gonna watch?” Devon asked.
“No fuckin’ way.” He barked a laugh. “I wanna look at a dick, I got one of my own.”
“Watch, or don’t, I don’t care,” Jake said. “But we need to complete the ritual. No sense stopping now.”
“Fine,” Beth said, letting the edge of a challenging sneer sharpen her tone. “You want me to film it?”
“Your call.” He didn’t wink, didn’t so much as glance at her, only unzipped the rest of the way.
“Dude,” Marty said again, in a weak, protesting bleat.
It was like a roomful of kids trying not to be called on by the teacher. Beth kept her phone on record but aimed anywhere besides Jake…capturing the uncomfortable reactions of the others…capturing the noises, the sliding of skin on skin, the ragged changes in breathing…
Had it gotten weirdly warm and steamy in this closed, crowded room?
Had it gotten intensely awkward and more than a little personal?
…a muffled low groan as if through clenched teeth…
Damn it, was she blushing?
Was anybody else?
Who knew?
Nobody could look at anybody.
…a liquid splatter and splash…
…Jake’s husky exhalation like a sigh…
Spermjackers From Hell Page 4
