by John Everson
“You okay?” he asked.
Her eyes locked back on his, and she spoke slowly, carefully.
“You know…” she began, her voice barely a whisper, “Angelica did have a child.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She told me that she’d given a baby up for adoption once.”
Cindy continued, her tone slow and deliberate. “And her name isn’t Angelica.”
“Huh?”
Cindy didn’t blink, just stared at him with eyes wide and still. “She wasn’t always called Angelica. Her name used to be Rachel. She changed it when she started being a fortune-teller. I guess she thought it sounded more Gypsy to be Angelica. Or maybe she wanted to forget about being Rachel.”
Joe said nothing. He thought back to the newspaper accounts of Bernadette’s drowning. How could he have not picked up on the name thing? Of course, as he thought about his sources, most of what he’d learned about Bernadette’s drowning had come from Angelica and Karen. The newspaper hadn’t even listed the girls who had been with her when the girl had drowned.
“What do you know about the baby?” he asked finally.
Cindy closed her eyes a moment. Her lips pursed briefly, and she looked as if she were gathering herself to recite a memorized speech. When her eyes opened again, they were staring over Joe’s shoulder. But she began to speak.
“Once Rachel—Angelica—had a lover. Nobody in town knows who he was. Maybe he was one of her clients. Maybe he was an out-of-towner who just passed through and got a little something extra while he was here. But Terrel saw the evidence. Her belly grew big and she delivered in the hospital. She never brought it home, though. She gave up her baby for adoption as soon as it was born. Most people around here have probably forgotten the whole thing, since she never had the child in her home and has never married. Hell, it apparently happened back when I was a kid, or maybe even before I was born. But for a little while, Angelica was all the gossip there was here. Our fortune-teller was our town scandal.”
Joe looked out at the ocean, too stunned to speak. He thought of Angelica’s story of rape and murder. When she had been younger, Angelica had hidden away her child so the demon could never find it—the spirit had taken revenge on her for hiding her baby by staging the rape, and the murder of Harold, Joe bet. But what had become of the child?
A tremor shook Cindy and she shrugged her shoulders. When she opened her eyes again, they were bright and alert, as if she’d just successfully shaken off a nap.
“Out of all the women who were there when that girl drowned, Angelica is the only one who hasn’t had a child jump from the cliff, isn’t she Joe?”
It was his turn to nod now, and suddenly everything was clear to him. It was Angelica’s turn. Her child must die. She’d tried to hide it from Him, from the other women. And so they’d taken her, no doubt at His direction. They would probably torture her until she told them how to find the kid. And then they would kill it.
“You were a reporter in Chicago, right?” she asked, and put a hand on his arm. “Did you know anyone there that could help? Maybe someone who could help you find her child and warn it?” Her face held a look of deep concern.
Joe thought about his contacts back in Chicago with the child welfare department. He might still be able to pull a string or two.
“Rachel Napalona, huh?” he said, and Cindy nodded. “All the other kids died when they were eighteen. How much you wanna bet this kid’s just about eighteen years old?”
Cindy looked sad, and with a tired smile shook her head affirmatively. “It’s a good bet,” she said.
“I’ll try to find something out tomorrow,” he said. “I might be able to track the kid down.”
“What are you going to do now?” she said, a quaver in her voice.
Joe looked at her, saw the heaviness of tears in her eyes, but the desire for something else there as well. He needed to keep looking for Angelica. Who knew what they would do to her? But how was he going to find her, if she wasn’t up here on the cliff? His heart was torn, thinking of Angelica being tortured somewhere. Beaten and bled for information that would ultimately lead to the death of her only child. But here in front of him was another woman who needed his help. He didn’t know where he was going to go to look for Angelica, but he knew that he could comfort Cindy and see her safely home.
“I guess that depends on you,” he said finally. “What would you like to do? Can I drive you home?”
In answer, Cindy leaned into his neck and kissed his ear with a tremulous whisper. “Would you stay here with me a while longer?”
Visions of Angelica, tied to a chair in a white room, weeping mascara over bruised and bleeding lips danced through his mind. But where was that room? In front of him, with no question of where she was, Cindy’s smooth, perfect face pleaded for his attention.
Shit.
He slid a hand around her back and she melted in closer. Gently he stroked her hair and spine, and then, hardly believing that he was doing it himself, he moved his fingers up beneath her loose tank top and rubbed the silky smooth flesh of her back. She slipped sideways and demonstrated to him that she wasn’t wearing a bra.
Presently, she wasn’t wearing a tank top either.
CHAPTER FOUR
Caves were funny things. Just when a tunnel looked as if it were opening up to some enormous cavern, instead it narrowed down to a fissure the width of a dime.
Ken Brownsell shone the headlamp on the smooth gray face before him and shook his head. There had to be a branch-off that he’d missed. There was no way it could just peter out like this. He had gotter barely one hundred yards from where the freak show had taken a dive into the river. Just around a couple bends and then, pow—a solid rock face. And it didn’t narrow down to nothing, like most false tunnels. It ended in a wall. As if someone had cemented up the way to keep intruders out.
He took out his piton hammer and began to test the depth of the rock before him. Was it only a pile-in that had closed off the path? Was there an empty chamber of breathtaking beauty just a foot or two away?
He put an ear to the wall and tapped with the hammer. Slowly. Listened for a telltale hollow note. One careful inch at a time, he worked, sounding the cave out. Praying that this run was not over.
His face was cold with perspiration. And fear. He couldn’t bear to think that this was it. No. He wouldn’t believe it. The way had been too wide up to now. Too promising. Brownsell Cavern too close.
He pounded, over and over again, pausing each time to listen, to evaluate the ring of the hammer on the rock.
Wait.
Was that a hollow knock? He punched the hammer harder, shoved his ear flat against the cool lime. Banged again.
And again.
And then…an answer. There was a slow, steady groan echoing through the passage. The earth seemed to be moaning, like some mythic ice giant struggling to turn over in its bed. The seamless rock face before him creaked.
Cracked.
“Shit.”
The floor beneath Ken began to shiver, and before he could get to his feet, the wall in front of him was gone. He had been leaning on it as he pounded, and as it fell forward, so did he. But there was no ground to fall onto. Ken was launched into space, his hand still clutching a piece of cool stone from the wall. It had fractured beneath his hammer like glass.
“Fucckkkkk!” he yelled, and then struck something hard. A red-hot pain sliced through his shoulder as he bounced off an outcropping on the cave wall, and Ken was again airborne, but only for an instant. Then the fire in his shoulder was doused in icy cold as he hit the river. The same river that Joe Kieran had swam in just days before. Only this time, there was no one waiting above to pull the tumbler out.
“I was wondering how long it would take you to end up down here,” a voice in Ken’s head said with flytrap-happy menace.
Then the current sucked him under, ice-cold water seeping up his nose and then into his lungs as he opened his mouth to gasp. Everything went
black.
CHAPTER FIVE
Joe’s mind was a million miles from writing about city councils and bake sales as he slipped in the side door to the newspaper offices, passing the morgue on his way to the newsroom. He almost ran right into George, who was mopping the hall.
“Whoa there, son,” the janitor laughed, raising a hand to shield himself from a collision. “You don’t watch where you’re going, you’ll never get there!”
Joe laughed and clapped the old janitor’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Just a lot of things on my mind right now.”
George squinted one eye and looked Joe over critically. Glancing behind himself, and then over Joe’s shoulder, he finally said quietly, “You been staying away from that business we talked about, have you?”
Joe shook his head. “I couldn’t, and now…”
“Come here,” the janitor instructed, and pulled Joe by the elbow toward his office.
Once inside, George shut the door and turned back to Joe, motioning him to sit on the cot, as he had before. Again George pulled up a large plastic canister to sit on.
“Alright then, what’ve you gotten yourself into?”
“I just wanted to do a real story on the suicides,” Joe said. “I took your advice, and went and visited Angelica, but she didn’t really help—not at first, anyway.”
He told George about receiving the threatening letter, and then about meeting Cindy. When he described the urban legend she’d told him about the disappearance of John Ryan, the janitor just nodded, as if he’d heard it all before.
“I didn’t buy any of that,” he said, “until I went with a group to explore the caves at the foot of Terrel’s Peak.”
George’s eyebrows raised, but still he said nothing.
“Everything was fine, until I lost my footing and fell off the trail into an underground river. That was when I heard Him.”
George’s eyes widened. “Him?”
“The devil, the spirit, whatever it is that’s inside that cliff. There is something there, George. I know it now.”
The janitor stood then and walked to the door. When he turned around, Joe saw that his left hand was shaking. The older man steadied it by reaching out to hold onto a shelf of cleaning materials.
“It’s spoken to you,” he said, shaking his head.
“And that’s not all,” Joe continued, quickly outlining what had happened at Angelica’s the night before.
George sighed as Joe fell silent.
“I warned you to stay clear of this business,” he said.
“Too late.” Joe shrugged. “But now I need to find out more about this thing. I’ve got to help Angelica. But I don’t know where to go. How did it come to be here in Terrel? How can I fight it, if it comes to that?”
The old man seemed to shrink in on himself, then stepped closer.
“You can’t fight it,” he whispered. “All ya can do is hope to stay out of its sight, and ya haven’t done a very good job of that.”
“No,” the younger man agreed.
“There’s nobody I know of in town who could give you any more than you’ve gotten from Angelica,” George said. He rubbed a hand on his chin. “Like I told ya before, it’s sometimes better not to know about some things. I know that’s not what you wanna hear, being a reporter and all.”
“But I have to find out more about this thing,” Joe insisted. “Angelica is in danger, and I won’t just abandon her.”
George nodded slowly, and then walked past Joe to the shadowed recesses of the long janitor’s room. He reached up and pulled down a shoebox from the top of an old steel newspaper shelf that had bowed so much in the middle that it could no longer hold much of anything. Removing the lid of the box, George pulled out a small book and brought it to Joe.
“You’re not the only one in this town who’s worried about those kids,” he said. “A couple years ago, when those kids started jumping, and not on Halloween, I did a little reading on the subject myself.”
Joe took the thin volume and read the small white letters on the nondescript brown spine. Witchcraft, Demonology, and Possession. No author was listed.
“It’s not about Terrel, or the problems we have here,” George said, “but it does have some interesting theories about demons and the like. I don’t know what you can do with that knowledge, but you’re free to borrow it, if you like.”
Joe nodded, leafing through the pages. It was a short book, but the print was small and there appeared to be no diagrams or pictures.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll take a look.”
He stood up. “I better get to my desk. Randy’s going to have a cow, I’m so late.”
George nodded, but the look of concern didn’t leave his weathered face.
“Joe,” he said as the reporter opened the door to leave. “I can’t tell you to stay out of it. But be careful.”
Joe turned the book over and over in his hands as he hurried to his desk. He still felt funny admitting that this was real. Part of him still denied hearing the voice inside the cliff. But the other part already longed to crack open this volume. He needed information, any information, about what sort of being could be behind all of this. He needed to know how to avoid being turned into a demon’s marionette, as Angelica had once been.
He stashed the book in his backpack and sat down to start on the day’s stories. But he’d barely begun to type, when he heard his name.
“Joe,” Randy called from across the newsroom. “Come into my office a minute?”
That didn’t sound good. Randy never called anyone into his office unless he had a beef. Everything else was open newsroom game. Hell, there were rarely more than three people in the newsroom at any one time as it was.
Joe steeled his shoulders and followed his boss to the broom closet the editor used as an office. What had he screwed up now?
The stupid library story was done, the village board meeting story had been a no-brainer, as they usually were. It wasn’t like the village board had a whole hell of a lot of business to take care of in a sleepy burg like Terrel. It certainly wasn’t as if they spent any time talking about people who periodically plummeted from the town’s favorite natural landmark.
“What’s up, Randy?” he asked nonchalantly as he strode between the stacks of yellowed newspaper that bordered the doorway. The burly editor didn’t smile.
“Shut the door.”
Joe clenched his jaw and did as he was told. This was definitely not shaping up to be a good talk.
Randy walked behind his steel desk and pulled out a battered leather chair with a screech of unoiled ball bearings. He sat heavily, and stared for a moment at his only full-time reporter as though he were a prison guard looking at the inmate who’s just incited a food fight. It was not a look of pride.
“I told you to lay off the suicide story, Joe.”
He nodded.
“You haven’t.”
“I haven’t written anything more about it,” Joe sidestepped, wondering how the editor knew he was still investigating the subject. Had he been eavesdropping outside the janitor’s closet? Surely George wouldn’t have warned the editor about him.
“Maybe not,” Randy continued. “But you have been going around and asking people a lot of questions. Questions that hurt people. Questions that bring up painful memories of the dead for no reason. You’re giving the Terrel Daily Times a bad reputation, Joe. This isn’t the National Enquirer. We don’t pick at scabs again and again to keep them bleeding. The Canady kid’s dead. So’s the Sander kid. And the O’Grady kid. Now listen to me, Joe, because I’m not having this conversation with you again.”
The editor leaned forward and looked hard at Joe.
“Leave them to rest in peace.”
The twin caterpillars above Randy’s eyes rose in question.
“Got it?”
Joe nodded.
“Good. Now go get me a story I can actually use in tomorrow’s edition.”
Randy broke
eye contact then, and turned away from Joe to stare at his computer monitor. Within seconds, he was typing as if Joe had already left the room.
He took the hint.
On his way back to his desk, Joe tried to figure out who had ratted on him. He didn’t dare ask Randy. Who had called the paper to complain? Rhonda? Karen?
Angelica…or should he say, Rachel? He smiled at the new/old name. It was very biblical. Despite Cindy’s theory that it hadn’t been Gypsy enough, it seemed to Joe as if it could have been used for a fortune-teller name.
Or maybe Angelica had just wanted to escape from the person Rachel had been. She hadn’t escaped the consequences, though.
Whoever the complainer had been had just made his job harder. Because now he needed to dig more than ever. He needed to find Angelica’s child before the women did. He didn’t know where to turn to begin to search for Angelica, but he could at least put some wheels in motion to help protect her kid. Which meant some long distance phone calls. And a trip to the county registrar’s office. He needed a date of birth and a hospital before he called Chicago. He looked up the number and address in the phone book and jotted it down on a note pad, then stuffed it into his pants pocket. Then he picked up the phone and dialed another number.
Angelica’s.
Not surprisingly, she didn’t pick up.
He hung up the phone and settled into his chair. He had some business to take care of before he could spend any more time on his pet project, or else he’d be out of a job. Randy’s angry scowl flashed in his memory.
But as he stared at the dusty screen of the old VDT, he kept thinking of last night. Of a yellow piece of paper with Bernadette written on it in the same hand, he thought, as the yellow paper that had warned him to quit looking for death. And of the warm lips and tender arms of Cindy, who had clung to him so passionately in the night ocean air of the cliff.
She had wrapped herself around him like a vine, squeezing her smooth flesh to his own with a need that he wasn’t sure he could fulfill. She seemed so hungry. Her eyes flashed with the light of the stars as he kissed her neck, her chest, her chin.
