by John Everson
“Shit,” he said, but the dead caver slid to the ground. Then Cindy’s eyes met his own and she smiled.
“Yes, my darling,” her voice rasped. Its normally girlish tone seemed deeper, harsher. “You can take his place. I need a live one for this part.”
Suddenly Joe’s body was not his own. His hands flew over the buttons of his shirt, ripped with clumsy haste at his belt. He could feel his erection rise, though he wanted nothing less than to make love to Cindy right now.
“Stop it,” he cried silently.
“Sit back and enjoy the ride,” Malachai whispered. “You know you want it.”
He realized in horror that this was what Angelica had probably felt like the night she had seduced him. Powerless. Angry. Used. He cursed himself for not having gotten to the chapter on possession in the book George had given him. He knew of no way to fight this hold on him.
But the demon knew its business. The room seemed to fade from his view and before him, he saw Cindy as she’d been in the back of his car, innocent and sweet. As she’d been on that night in his apartment, seductive, loving. His clothes were now gone and his erection raged. Joe couldn’t think of anything but lying with her. Having her.
Fucking her.
She was ready for him, her body glistening with sweat and blood, her sex engorged and open. The demon let him waste no time. The cave swam in and out of focus, a blue-green wash of light and sound. He could hear voices, distantly. A scream? Below him Cindy’s eyes danced with light, her mouth whispering over and over, “Yes, James, yes.”
And then he heard the laughter.
It began deep in the back of his brain and spread with his impending orgasm to shiver through every muscle.
“Say g’night, Gracie.” The laughter mocked him as he slipped and slammed in the blood covering Cindy’s body and came deep inside her. As his orgasm rocked him, Cindy’s mouth opened in an O of pleasure. She yelped a series of short, sharp cries, and then moaned with contentment beneath him.
“Oh, James,” she whispered, still not seeing the world around her.
Joe could see Rhonda to one side of their rock altar, her large teeth gritting, hands above her head. The piton that had spelled Ken’s end was now in her hands.
The demon had used him and now was throwing him away. And he was helpless to stop Him. His hips shivered in the last throes of ecstasy and he watched, in slow motion, as the steel spike completed its upward arc behind Rhonda’s head and then began its descent toward his spine.
Then there was another sound, another “no,” and something hit him, hard, jarring his awareness closer to reality. A weight slapped his body down harder onto Cindy, whose “whoof” of surprise blew spit onto Joe’s frozen face.
There was a scream, and another impact, this one less intense than the first.
Karen threw herself face-first over the top of Joe and Cindy, protecting them from Rhonda’s attack with her body. Monica screamed as Rhonda brought the steel down to stab Karen instead of Joe.
Something snapped in Monica at that moment. All her life she’d been the one bossed around. The one who’d meekly said “okay” and done whatever the group wanted. The one who the demon had told to kiss the lips of her dead friend Bernadette, and who had. She had been bossed by Rhonda, had sacrificed her child to a demon and married a man who would just as soon beat her as kiss her. But one woman had helped her keep her sanity through it all. One woman had sat with her night after night at her kitchen table, soothing her fears. Karen had saved her.
And as Monica saw Rhonda bring the steel spike down to stab her—their—friend, Monica felt the anger of a lifetime surge at Him, at Rhonda, at herself for her entire wasted life. It coursed through her in a white-hot angry instant filling her with a power she’d never felt before. Every hesitation she’d ever known was washed away. Monica sprang to action, throwing her thin arms around her friend’s beefy neck and holding on for all she was worth.
Get up, Karen’s lips mouthed to Joe. Her brow creased in violent tremors of pain, and she closed her eyes and collapsed to the stone altar half on top of him.
Joe didn’t waste the time she’d bought him. He slid from between Karen, who was gasping for air, and Cindy, who seemed oblivious to everything, and stood, naked and trembling, to stare at the scene behind him.
Monica was screaming at the top of her lungs, her ear-piercing cries echoing through the cavern like the sound track to a horror movie. Rhonda twisted and struggled, battering behind her clumsily to remove the other woman from her neck. For a moment, Monica held her off balance, but with her own natural strength and the urging of the demon, Rhonda quickly recovered, and threw the woman to the ground. Not content with freeing herself, Rhonda stomped over to Monica, who was already turning to fight again. But this time, Rhonda had the upper hand. She held the smaller woman’s shoulders and pushed her back to the ground. As Joe watched in horror, Rhonda grabbed the other woman by the hair and began methodically bashing her old friend’s face into the rock of the cavern floor. Joe could hear each wet, thudding impact.
“Spirit,” he screamed. “I invoke your name, Malachai, and command you to stop.”
“Don’t do this,” a cold, familiar voice whispered in his skull.
But at Joe’s command, Rhonda did stop, her face suddenly gone blank.
“Malachai, if you wish to remain any longer in this realm, I insist that you release them all,” he continued. Behind him, Angelica coughed and cried. And then he heard footsteps slap the rock. They faded as she ran from the chamber.
“You have damned her,” the voice mocked. “She can never live with the knowledge she has gained of herself. She runs toward the depths of the water now.”
Joe looked back and forth between a bloodied, confusedly blinking Cindy lying on the dais and the now-empty corridor that led to the ocean.
“Who will you save?”
“Stop her,” Joe commanded, and the spirit laughed.
“There’s only so much you can command using only my name,” He said. “I’m under Covenant to another.”
“That other is dead and buried,” Joe answered. “And that hundred-year Covenant has been done for years now. Your pledge to Broderick Terrel is over. You have no right to remain here any longer.”
“Ah, but I have extended it,” the spirit taunted. “Just ask the women around you.”
“An unfair bargain,” Joe complained. “They had no choice in the matter.”
“Nobody forced them to my cavern,” the spirit said. “Nobody forced them to push their children from the top of the cliff.”
“I don’t believe that,” Joe countered. “But it doesn’t matter. You yourself said moments ago that this Covenant with these women was over. You are free and not bound on this plane to anyone…and so I name you—”
“Yeeeaaaiiii,” Rhonda screamed, and charged at Joe, mouth drooling long dribbles of saliva, sausage fingers clenched in rakelike claws.
Joe sidestepped her attack and screamed, “Malachai, I command you—”
“You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Stop this instant. You—”
“Don’t!”
“—are mine to bind.”
From an achingly long distance came a sudden shriek. And next to him Joe felt rather than saw Rhonda slump to the ground as the demon released her.
He was surrounded by bodies. The blue crystals electrified the room again, just as it had when Ken’s body had finally expired. Did that mean the demon had claimed another soul? Was the light a signal that someone had been “absorbed”?
He knew without question that Angelica had just died. And now her spirit was locked inside the crystals. Locked in the dungeon of the demon, Malachai.
Sliding the piton slowly from the wound Rhonda had carved with it in Karen’s bloody shoulder, he twisted around and smashed its needle point into the glowing crystals in the center of the cavern, those that supported the sacrificial dais.
A hurricane exploded in
his head.
“AAAHHhhhheeeiiiiii!”
A shriek of unearthly power…and peril.
But Joe stabbed again and again, chipping away blue electric sparks and bits of crystal as clear as rock candy from the pedestal. An unseen force lifted him, and he flew backward through the air. He crashed with a shattering impact into a wall, and slid with a painful scrape to the corner of the cavern.
But he didn’t stop. Instead, arm over arm, knees grinding the grit of the floor into his flesh, Joe advanced again on the speeding phosphorescent trails of power, and hammered at the seat of the demon’s strength.
“Demon, I release you and command that you—”
“Covenant!” screamed the voice in his mind, and behind its desperation he could hear a thousand keening wails of grief and bliss. The voices of all its captured souls. Would they be free upon the earth if Malachai was killed? Or would they dissipate to silent air? Joe couldn’t stop to wonder as he was once more propelled backward. This time his head hit the cave floor with a blinding smear of heat.
“Let us come to terms, and I will spare your girlfriend, and the souls,” Malachai begged.
“You will be mine to command?” Joe asked, hardly knowing what he was saying.
“Name your terms,” the demon barked back. The whirlwind in Joe’s head grew louder. He could hardly think. The demon’s voice wheezed aloud through the silent tension of the cave, its power bleeding visibly like poison across not only the damaged crystal center, but chiming away through the cave walls as well. The room was aglow with deadly blue power, but parts of it seemed to be fading, blacking out completely. Joe had struck the nerve in hammering at the center. He considered ignoring the demon’s request and finishing the job, hammering at the crystal until no light lit the cavern at all. But he had no assurance that that would stop the demon from killing and possessing again. Would the removal of its seat of power kill it, or only send it in search of new victims to replenish itself?
“You have called me by name and I cannot possess you until a bargain has been agreed upon. Name your terms.”
“You will not hurt the people of Terrel anymore,” Joe called. He tried to think but couldn’t focus. What else should he require?
“You will do as I say, whenever, whatever I tell you.”
“Those are your terms?”
“Yes.”
“Then I accept, and a new Covenant is struck,” the demon answered, and the din behind His voice lessened somewhat. The blue glow began to fade from the cave walls, but still swirled and twisted amid the broken stones of the altar.
“I am yours to command,” Malachai said. “And you are mine to follow. Until your death, since you did not state another end time. Guard yourself.”
With that, the last bright glow of blue light winked out, an implosion of contentious energy, and Joe looked around shakily. The room still glittered faintly with an LED blue glow, but now its power seemed at rest, its light faint. A moan from the dim altar made him look to Cindy, but her eyes were closed and the sound wasn’t hers. It came from the ground.
“Joe,” Karen Sander croaked. Her eyes fluttered, then focused hard on his own. “Joe…did we win?”
“Yes,” he said, crouching beside her to put a hand behind her back, and carefully ease her up.
“It’s over,” he said. “I hope.”
EPILOGUE
There is nothing quite like a summer’s day near the ocean. The breath of salt mingled with the lilac-rich scent of budding flowers, the buzz of soaring insects, and an unclouded golden sun could make life taste like…honey. Or something. Joe looked away from the piercing blue of the sky to focus again on the casket beneath the red and white canopy.
Reality check. People were dead.
Cindy held his arm with both hands, but said little through the service. She’d said little for the past three days, asking only that Joe hold her tightly. He’d complied without question.
Rhonda stood at the back of the small gathering at the cemetery. She looked as if she wasn’t sure whether she should come forward or go home. Her grief was palpable. Joe would never say it to another soul, but it was her hands, possessed or not, that had caused this ceremony.
The minister stood before a wooden lectern and gave a speech suspiciously similar to the one Joe remembered from the funeral for Rhonda Canady’s son just weeks before.
There really wasn’t much you could add to the experience, he supposed.
“As she was in life, so she is in death,” the minister said. Joe thought it sounded like a threat.
Angelica leaned over and whispered in Joe’s ear. “What kind of a thing is that to say?” she complained, and Joe shook his head, stalling her, wondering where the holy man was going.
The blue-green bruises from Ken’s abuse had turned to yellow near Angelica’s eyes, and her arm hung in a sling, heavy in its white cast. She’d broken it in her fall into the cold water of the underground river. The blue light of the chamber hadn’t signaled her death, as Joe had believed. It had been Monica’s soul that fed the demon that last time, not Angelica’s.
But how much of Angelica really remains alive? Joe thought. She cast odd, veiled glances at her daughter and drummed her fingers absently on the heavy plaster on her arm. She hadn’t laughed or cried since leaving the hospital. Her eyes looked perpetually shell-shocked. Joe wondered if she would ever speak with a Gypsy accent again.
“Monica was a quiet soul, a woman always concerned with the good of others,” the minister continued. “She will watch over us all now, from where she is above.”
“She’s not above, not really,” Malachai whispered in Joe’s head. “She’s with us now. Right here. Anything you’d like us to do, master? Raise the corpse up in the casket, perhaps, give ’em all a little scare?”
“No,” Joe said aloud, and shook his head. Cindy looked sharply at him, then turned away. She knew who he was talking to. Was she jealous now that Malachai had claimed him as master? He had forbidden the demon from talking with her. Would she still want to see him, after the death and dust settled? He didn’t know how to ask. Could she live with the fact that he’d made love to both her and her mother?
Could he?
He wondered if he should ask Malachai to heal Angelica’s soul. Could he use the monster to achieve a good end, as Terrell had? And if so, at what price?
“I am yours to command,” the demon reminded. A sadistic hint of glee colored its tone.
Its voice hung like an anchor from Joe’s soul.
“Yes, I know,” he mumbled, looking at the broken mother on his left, the silent daughter on his right. The women he had unwittingly hurt, and now pledged himself to protect. Somehow, to heal. At what price?
“I know.”
PROLOGUE
Goose bumps peppered Ted’s skin. The temperature dropped every step forward. The air swam with palpable presence, as if he was walking through a liquid current of clammy spider-webs. Ted shivered, but kept moving.
It had all happened down here. His sister Cindy had finally told him the story after he’d badgered her enough. A spirit had lived inside this cliff, a spirit that had killed and killed and killed again. It had demanded sacrifices from the town of Terrel for more than one hundred years. But now it was gone, along with that reporter from the Terrel Daily Times.
Ted had come, pressing through the dank, cobwebbed caverns, to see where it had all happened.
Once, these cold stone corridors had been the basement beneath the old lighthouse. Terrel had been a minor port, back in the day, and its lighthouse had stood high on the cliff above the town, warning errant ships away from the deadly pillars of stone gouged out of the bay like crippled fingers. The light house was long gone, but the stairs leading down into the cliff remained, hidden beneath a pile of remnant boulders and rotting beams.
Ted shone his flashlight back and forth, catching the watery glint of the cool gray walls on the right and left, its light sucked away into the endless black hole
ahead. His narrow beam was swallowed by that blackness, but he continued on, step by step, into the void. There was no sound besides the soft shuffle of his feet on the uneven floor, and the whisper of his jeans in motion. Ted had never felt so alone and cut off; at times, he had to remind himself to breathe.
The flashlight struggled to pry through the darkness, and then suddenly, Ted saw a reflection, an answering flicker, bounced back from the black. There was something ahead. He yearned to hurry up, to run ahead and see what was there, but forced himself to move slowly, carefully, panning the spot across the floor a few feet in front of him to make sure he didn’t trip over a rock and break a leg. He didn’t think he could crawl all the way back down the tunnel and up the stairs to the outside world. Even if he could, it wasn’t likely he could flag anyone down for help from the top of Terrel’s Peak. It was not exactly the center of town.
Heart pounding harder, Ted continued his slow, measured walk, occasionally flicking the flashlight up to eye level to look far down the path. The reflection grew with every step, a twinkling prism of blue-white light. The corridor walls narrowed. It tightened until his shoulders almost touched the rock on either side of him and he wondered if he was really just walking into a claustrophobic dead end.
And then the wall to the left disappeared, his flashlight meeting only blackness as he raised it up and down. He swung it to the right and there too the walls had disappeared. The air was even colder here, its taste on his lips salty and dead.
He brought the flashlight back to dead center and was almost blinded. The room exploded in a prism of sparkling light, reflecting off the object in the center of the cavern. The walls all around were visible now; more passages led to and away from this room.
This was it! He had found it! The chamber of crystal that his sister had described.
A pedestal—a rocky altar—of watery blue crystal rooted in the center of the room; it reflected his light in a blinding feedback loop to the azure mirrors that cut into and out of the walls all around. It was like standing in the center of a gigantic geode.
