Covenant

by John Everson

  “No, don’t worry about me.” Joe laughed. “I’ve been specially trained to deal with these types of suits.”

  “Oh, really? And tell me, how does one get that sort of training in…where was it? Um, Chicago?”

  Cindy tossed a wisp of blonde hair out of her eyes. “Do they have these kinds of suits in Chicago? I wouldn’t think they’d be very comfortable to wear in the snow, ya know.”

  “Oh, it gets above thirty-two degrees there now and then,” he quipped, playing along. “Heck, there’re even a few beaches— with real sand!”

  “Yeah, but isn’t the water usually iced solid or slushy?”

  “Solid, no. Slushy? Depends which way the currents from the Indiana refineries are moving—and what sort of waste they’re carrying!”

  She laughed and let the towel slide off her shoulders, revealing a dark but not heavily tanned complexion. Cindy looked like the type who could tan easily, Joe thought, but she’d said that she hadn’t been out in the sun too much yet this year for all her cliff-walking.

  “Well, you’re welcome to share a towel,” she offered, holding two corners and letting the wind spread it out in the air like a magic carpet above the sand. “If you think it’s safe.”

  “I’ll take the chance.” He grinned and dropped his bag to the beach.

  They sat cross-legged on the towel and Cindy nodded to the foamy water a few feet away.

  “Doesn’t look so horrible from here, does it?”

  Joe shrugged. “It’s all perspective, I suppose. Things seem a lot different depending on where you stand. Kinda like how people look at that cliff up there.” He leaned back to stare at the rock face that jutted out over the bay. “Some people think all those people are just depressed suicides. Others think there’s some monster in the cliff that draws people to their deaths. And then others, like me, think there are some people behind this whole death spree. All depends on how you look at it, I guess.”

  Cindy’s eyes took on a faraway look as she followed his gaze. But she remained silent. Shit, he thought. Diving in too fast. Let the girl warm up to you a minute before dunking her!

  “Um, hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring that stuff up right away like that,” he apologized.

  She shook her head and looked puzzled for a second.

  “Oh…no, Joe, it wasn’t that. Don’t worry about it. Believe me, I know about things looking different from where you stand. A couple years ago I came out here and thought I knew everything about this town, this beach. And then I went away to school, and everything here just kinda shrunk, ya know? Like it wasn’t important at all anymore, like it never was? But then James…you know.”

  She bit her lip and Joe stifled the urge to reach out and hug her. He hardly knew the girl, after all. But the way she always seemed to put that little question mark at the end of her sentences…well, he could just die for that!

  But before he decided whether to reach out and pat her shoulder, she started talking again.

  “Well, now I see that I didn’t know everything there was to know about Terrel. And I can’t look at it as just a sleepy small town anymore, either. I know you’ve heard some of the rumors about this cliff, and you probably think everyone’s stupid for believing them. I know I did until this summer. I thought people were crazy as cornflakes for thinking some evil spirit or whatnot lived in that rock. But now I know better.”

  “Maybe that’s where I need to start,” Joe interrupted. “Tell me what the rumors actually say about the cliff. All I’ve heard is that I should stay away from it. You know, someone actually stuck a note under my door warning me if I didn’t leave the place alone, ‘death would find me.’”

  Cindy’s eyes widened for a moment, and she looked up at the top of the cliff again, as if expecting an answer.

  “That’s silly,” she said slowly, not really sounding like she believed it. “There’s a Covenant….”

  Joe’s eyebrow lifted. “A Covenant?”

  “Um…yeah. I don’t know. One story goes that old man Terrel, when he used to run his lighthouse up there on the cliff, well, he got lonely. So he used to read to himself a lot. Thing is, the guy had some pretty weird tastes in reading, which only got stranger the longer he sat up there on the hill. They say the ships that docked here used to bring him in books from all over the world, magic and occult kinds of books. Supposedly, he used these books to summon up a demon to keep him company through the long nights.”

  She looked at Joe and grinned. “Some company, huh?”

  “Yeah, I think I would have worked on conjuring up a woman, myself,” Joe said, feeling his face redden slightly at admitting such a thing to a relative stranger. And he couldn’t help but see her as the woman he’d conjure, which didn’t help his conscience. She only laughed, a delicate, easy sound that put Joe at ease once more.

  “Well, supposedly, once old man Terrel died—and there’s one story that says the demon killed him during an argument— once old Terrel died, the demon was stuck here and it got lonely stalking around the light house every night. The city council tried hiring other lighthouse keepers to take Terrel’s place, but none of them would stay in the lighthouse for more than a couple weeks. They’d complain about noises in the night, and weird lights in the hallways. Some didn’t last more than a night. So pretty soon, the lighthouse just sat empty. But they say during storms, even though nobody was up on that cliff, people could see the lamps lit up and beaming out into the bay. That’s when it was most important for a lighthouse to run, ya know. To save the ships from crashing into the shore when the visibility got bad during the choppy seas and rain. The people said the demon had made a pact with old Terrel; they called it a Covenant, to protect the town. You know, when people started jumping off the cliff, it was never anyone actually from the town of Terrel. People got pretty superstitious about that, figuring that the demon took sacrifices in exchange for guarding the town. They figured, well, if they kept their mouths shut, then the thing would just take outsiders and leave them alone.”

  Joe shook his head and grimaced.

  “But that was, like, fifty years ago,” he said. “Are you saying everyone in this town still thinks that there’s a demon in that cliff that’s watching over them and sacrificing the lives of outsiders once a year?”

  “Pretty much!” she chirped. “Crazy, ain’t it?”

  “Pretty much,” he agreed. “And everyone in town knows these stories?” he asked.

  “Oh, geez, you hear ’em from the time you’re a toddler,” she said. “There’s all kinds of stories about the ‘ghost’ of Terrel’s Peak.”

  “Like what?” Joe asked.

  Cindy leaned back on her elbows, giving him a good view of her body. He found himself longing to kiss the thin pucker of her bellybutton, and imagining the heaven that was only barely hidden beneath her suit. He crossed his legs, not wanting to give her a good view of what her stretch had just done for him.

  “Well,” she said, face staring into the blue of the sky as she thought. “There’s one that supposedly happened to a kid named John Ryan. I first heard it on a camping trip with the Girl Scouts. It’s one of those stories that you have to tell around a campfire.”

  “Can we just pretend we’re by a campfire?” Joe asked. He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. “It’s starting to feel like we’re sitting by a fire out here.”

  She laughed, and then sat back up, tucking her legs to her chest and wrapping her arms around.

  “You can see that Terrel’s Peak is this town’s haunted house,” she explained. “I mean, look at this beach. Any other beach like this in summer would be packed! But people do still go up to the peak sometimes. Usually on a dare. In other towns, kids dare each other to go inside abandoned houses. Here, we dare each other to climb the peak. So, the story goes that this kid, John Ryan, went with a group of high school seniors up the cliff to where the road ends up there to have an early graduation party. They sat around drinking and smoking and making out, right?
So, after draining a couple of six-packs, it gets late, and someone dares John Ryan, who’s like, the wimp of the bunch, to take a flashlight and climb to the top of the peak. He says no way, but they don’t let up. ‘Afraid of the bogeyman?’ they say, and they keep taunting him. This goes on for a while, and at last, humiliated and a little drunk, the kid grabs the flashlight away from one of the girls and starts up the trail.

  “‘Flash the light when you reach the top so we know you went all the way,’ one of the gang shouts as John Ryan marches up the path that goes to the very top of the peak, where the old lighthouse used to stand.

  “‘Flash it three times if you see the ghost,’ another of the kids says.

  “They watch him walk up the cliff and out of sight, and everything gets real quiet. Nobody really wants to talk now, because they know that they wouldn’t have gone up that trail, and they all feel a little guilty for riding him that way.

  “It was a moonless night, and the waves were loud against the rocks. When you looked over the edge, you could see the whitecaps, but just barely. And when you looked up, you could just make out the tip of Terrel’s Peak.

  “So the kids all just stand there and watch, and the minutes tick by with no light and no sign of John Ryan. They start to get real nervous, watching the top of the cliff and then looking down below.

  “‘He probably turned and ran right past us back to town,’ one of the football jocks said.

  “‘Maybe someone should have gone with him,’ the flashlight girl suggested, feeling guilty.

  “‘We didn’t say he couldn’t use the flashlight before he got to the top so he could see his way,’ another nervous kid reasoned.

  “Then, at the top of Terrel’s Peak, an orange glow flickered on.

  “‘There he is,’ someone cried, and pointed at the glow.

  “But the light snapped off just as fast as it had come on. And then they heard a screech, an awful, horrible ear-piercing scream.

  “‘What was that?’ one of the girls said, just as a light winked on again, only this time, it seemed to come from the open sky just below the cliff’s edge.

  “‘Look!’ They pointed, and the light went off. ‘What was that?’

  “The light came back on again for the third time, just for a split second, down on the beach below Terrel’s Peak. One of the girls saw it and screamed. The kids all got into their cars then and sped back to town, promising not to tell anybody, because then they’d have to say what they’d been doing up there at night. But one of the girls broke down to her parents, and they called the police.

  “The next day, a search party found the flashlight, shattered and broken on the rocks below the peak.”

  Cindy’s eyes grew wide and she leaned toward Joe, pausing dramatically before whispering, “But John Ryan’s body was never found.”

  Cindy pulled back and laughed, rocking back and forth on the towel. “Spooky, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Joe agreed, “but who’s to say the kid didn’t just fall off the edge because he was drunk and his body got sucked out with the tide?”

  “That’s exactly what I used to say,” she agreed, and then leapt to her feet.

  “Wanna get wet?”

  Cindy ran toward the surf and Joe followed, after shucking his shirt and kicking off his shoes. By the time he tiptoed through the pebbles and shells and sunk his toes into the cool, sandy mud of the bank, Cindy was already twenty yards out. With a twist and an arch, her pink and yellow butt came up out of the water, and then her whole body disappeared beneath the waves. Joe launched himself into the breakers and began paddling hard to catch up to her.

  “C’mon, already,” she yelled, head popping up even farther ahead. “Don’t they teach you Chicago kids how to swim?”

  “Sure,” he called back. “But if we go too fast we run out of water!”

  The waves felt a lot stronger than they looked, Joe thought, as he redoubled his efforts to catch her. It felt good though, to swim without worrying about bumping into one of a thousand other people crowding and fouling the water. A handful of people had taken up spots here and there down the stretch of sand since they’d first arrived, but the beach still looked empty. Actually, the fact that this beach wasn’t mobbed with people on such a perfect day was nice, but also kind of creepy. It was also proof, he supposed, of the superstition that gripped the town.

  The ocean was cool, but not icy-cold like Lake Michigan, which didn’t even warm up much in the middle of summer. Fish zipped past him in mini schools, sometimes brushing with tickling fins at his thighs and calves. Dunking his head underwater, he opened his eyes to see a murky green bottom, with fronds of God-knows-what growing between rocks covered with fuzzy muck and plant life. Small mountains thrust up here and there from the ocean floor, rising to spires and plateaus just above the waves. A few feet away, he watched a green and gold fish dart away from his path. Coming back up for air he saw that he’d never catch Cindy—she had a good head start and was used to plowing through these kinds of waves, while he kept getting mouthfuls of salt water.

  Just as he was beginning to question whether he’d have enough stamina to swim back, she pulled herself up on one of the outermost boulders that dotted the inner reaches of the bay and waited. He was out of breath when he reached her, his legs aching with the effort of kicking his body forward. She lay on her belly on the rock and offered him a hand.

  “C’mon up, landlubber!”

  He was grateful for the boost, and collapsed in a heap next to her on the rock. It was just big enough for both of them to lie side by side, feet hanging off the end.

  “I love swimming out here,” she said, her voice just barely audible above the rush of the ocean. “It’s so calming.”

  She pointed a finger out to the open sea.

  “Out there it’s so vast, so huge. It’s like outer space, in a way. You could never explore it all. And back there”—she pointed toward the spires of the Methodist church, one of the only visible markers of the town of Terrel from this distance— “it’s, like, claustrophobic sometimes. So this is the perfect middle ground. We’re right between zero and infinity.”

  She laughed then, a nervous but light sound that Joe found intoxicating. “That sounds really dopey, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” he answered, still gasping a little for breath. His chest felt as though it were on fire. “I think it’s probably pretty sharp. The thing is, you can’t really live very long right here, in the middle. You have to pick a side. What do you want to be? Explorer or small-town housewife? Do you want to live in the comfort of zero, or the chaos of infinity?”

  Cindy turned away from the beach and looked out at the waves. The sky seemed to meld in an arc of blue right into the farthest point of the ocean the eye could see. A perfect kiss of air and sea.

  “I used to know,” she said finally. “But now I’m not so sure.”

  She flipped back, resting her head on her hand, her elbow on the rock. He couldn’t help but notice the way the suit clung tight to her body, every yellow and hot pink–painted curve pressing toward him. Her nipples were erect with the cool kiss of the ocean still dripping off her. The water pooled in her bellybutton, dripping down her gleaming skin to disappear in the pores of the rock beneath them. He had to keep telling himself that he was not here to seduce, but to get information. But as her eyes met his and he saw the way they glinted in the early-afternoon sun, he found his original purpose more and more obscure.

  “What about you?” she asked. “What do you want to be?”

  “I thought we went over this the other night.”

  “We started to, but you kinda copped out. I want to know why you’re here in Terrel. You seem like the explorer type to me. I think you’re a real reporter. And Terrel doesn’t really need a real reporter!”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “So, why here? Are you here to stay, or just passing through? Or”—her smile deepened, revealing just a few too many teeth— “are you on a big, secret u
ndercover story?”

  “The story of my life.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It all started when I was a boy…”

  “Stop it! C’mon. Give!”

  “Maybe later. After a couple of beers. You can drink, can’t you?”

  “Depends who’s buying.”

  “Me, if you can beat me back to shore.”

  “Don’t consider taking up gambling, huh?”

  With that she slid off the rock into the water, and in an instant was slicing through the waves back to the beach.

  Joe followed, but this time, he didn’t bother to try to catch her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Have you heard Him call?”

  “Yes,” Karen answered, clutching her glass tightly enough to whiten her knuckles. “And we’re going to have to answer soon.”

  “I hear Him over and over again in my dreams. I can’t get any sleep anymore. And when I do fall asleep, my dreams are…”

  Bloody arms holding and stroking and caressing …

  Karen ran a trembling hand through her hair. “I know, I know. I told you it wouldn’t end with James. I’ve even felt that…that tingling He gives. Like I need to be with someone again. It’s been years since I had that feeling, that compulsion, other than on the day. I’ve even felt like painting again. But I refuse to pick up the brush. I just won’t give in to that.”

  The other woman nodded. “I’ve been playing the piano for hours at a time this week. It’s like someone else is using my hands; I can’t stop. But I still say Rachel is the key. If we find out what she’s done with the child, the Covenant will be fulfilled. And then we’ll be left alone.”

  “Not if that reporter keeps bugging us.” Karen sighed. “What if he finds out the full story? You know He will never let us leave, but if the story comes out, the people in town will kill us if we stay.”

  “Have you talked to the others about it?”

  “No. But I’m thinking it may be time for a meeting.” Karen nodded, as if in saying it she had made up her mind to call one. “But not at the water.”