by John Everson
Ted walked to the center and reached out to the crystal altar with his left hand. He stopped, inches from its glassy surface. Would a jolt of blue fire scorch him for his intrusion? This had been the seat of the demon’s power. Did any still remain, like a battery poised to spend its last electric jolt?
He tapped a fingernail on the cool, hard surface, but nothing happened. With his palm he traced the latticework of its surface. There were spots of darkness blotting out the window to the crystal’s core. Rusted, gritty spots led away from a deep dark stain near the center of the flat surface.
Dried blood.
Sacrifice and soul-binding had occurred here.
Ted stepped away from the stone and twisted, clockwise, admiring the sparkle and flash of the room. This was nature’s disco, and he the only dancer.
He grinned and moved to the edge of the room, peering into each corridor that led to places deeper inside the cliff.
His flashlight disappeared without meeting any reflection down the first two paths. They seemed endless. Then he found a side room. The corridor wound around the outside of the circular chamber, and ended in this half-hidden cubby. He walked to the end, and found a small ledge, like the surface of a desk. A look at its contents said it had been used for just that, once.
This was probably where the keepers of the old lighthouse had come to for safety during the fury of a North Atlantic storm, he thought. They would have stoked up the giant searchlight, trained its saving, warning beam toward the ocean and then crossed their fingers that any wayward ships could see it. And then, as the structure groaned and shivered in the treacherous winds, they would have fled to safety below. To here.
The shelf held a couple of old, small bottles, and what looked like chicken feathers, in a pile to one side. In the center lay an old, rotting book. It was bound in reddish brown leather, and Ted could see without even flipping, that its pages were yellowed and mold-eaten.
The Journal of Broderick Terrel it said on the cover.
He opened the book to a random page and smiled. This was what he had come for. This was why he was here. The script was faded and hard to read, but its import was clear:
“I have called a demon from hell,” the author had written in an early entry.
Ted set down the flashlight to shine sideways across the pages, and read on.
PART I
Leaving Home
The rewards of a successful Calling are riches and hedonistic fulfillment beyond any man’s wildest dreams. But the path to union with the Curburide is long. He who chooses this path must be committed to the Calling in both heart and soul; there is no turning back. To waver on the path means not only death, but eternal damnation. Once the Calling has begun, and first blood spilled, the Caller belongs to the demons called Curburide. If the Calling is successfully completed, they will also belong to the Caller—a mutual symbiotic bond is forged. But if the Curburide detect weakness, doubt or insincerity in the Caller before that bond is complete, beware…
—Chapter One, The Book of the Curburide
CHAPTER ONE
If the lights went any lower, the woman would have been indistinguishable from the shadows. She was dressed all in black.
All.
Even her hair was covered in a shiny skullcap ending in two pointy faux cat ears. The only skin showing was her face, but when lights flickered across the costume, her obsidian body rippled with dark reflection.
Ryan Nelson eyed the woman from heels to head and, without even realizing it, licked his lips.
Un-fuckin’-believable.
Four-inch stiletto-heeled boots merged seamlessly into glossy black bodysuit and arm-length vinyl gloves that showed every flow of flesh and muscle beneath. Not that she moved or flowed. He had been sitting next to her in the club for an hour so far, and had yet to see her do more than bat an eyelid.
The latex cat suit was not unusual. It was Sunday night— and more importantly, Halloween—in Austin, Texas, and a catwoman was the least of the odd sights he’d seen so far. Driven by the wild college crowd of the University of Texas, which nestled just blocks off the state capitol steps, the city had been forced to close off a several block stretch of Sixth Street, downtown Austin’s main drag. A wild mix of college kids and locals paraded down the asphalt, in costume creations dredged from some pretty twisted and bloody imaginations. Mascara-smudged vampires leaned out of every open bar window as if this was Amsterdam’s red-light district. Ragged witches French-kissed bile-and gore-streaked corpses. And when they came up for air, they all peered over second-floor balconies to watch the parade of other homemade horrors on the street below. At least three “Sons of God” pulled giant wooden crosses behind them as they trudged down the street. Ryan was quite sure that the original walk that had inspired the Stations of the Cross celebrated in Christian churches around the world had not used a cross with handy tote wheels screwed into the base.
While there certainly were many costumes of greater extravagance, Ryan’s favorite so far had been an older woman. She had been dressed in ripped and mud-crusted rags. She’d walked along the crowded street with a rope tied around her waist. Hanging from that rope, with twine knotted tight around their tiny ankles, were a half dozen baby dolls. At least, he assumed they were dolls. From the smears of blood across their tortured, wrinkled faces, he wasn’t sure, and he hadn’t stepped close enough to confirm or deny the atrocity.
Early in the evening, he’d spent a couple hours shivering outside with the mob in the chill, unseasonable wind and laughing at the bizarre imaginations of his neighbors, until he finally left the street and slid into the comforting black confines of Elysium, an outwardly nondescript, black-walled goth club around the corner on Red River. His own facial white-paint and the pale threads in his black-and-white-striped hobo suit glowed electric blue-white in the black light of the club. As he passed through the entryway, a girl in a purple corset, torn fishnets and a bloody ax lodged in her skull caught his eye, flashed a red lipstick smile of appreciative recognition and yelled “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.”
He grinned back and bowed, appreciating her recognition, then moved to the bar where a blood-spattered cheerleader in a gold and blue ultrashort skirt poured him a Vampire’s Kiss.
The DJ was mixing ambient, ethereal Delerium as Ryan né “Beetlejuice” found a chair along the dance floor to wait for the evening’s band lineup to start playing. He took an empty seat next to the young “catwoman” and silently whistled his appreciation of her getup.
Over the next few minutes, as the disco ball and a couple of red and blue spotlights worked in tandem to swirl a mind-numbing pattern across the floor, alternating from psychedelic circles to swimming neon tadpoles, Ryan snuck looks at the silent feline. He wondered if she was with anyone. She seemed to be sitting alone, and wasn’t drinking. She stared straight ahead across the floor, without expression. Cat’s eyes.
Over the course of an hour, she didn’t uncross her legs or move the gloved hands from her lap. The black whiskers penciled on her cheeks didn’t so much as twitch. She was a statue, cool dark eyes trained at some point just above the floor. There, impossibly thin men both in drag and wearing tight leather pants with fishnet shirts along with uniformly chubby women in combat boots and pink or blue hair and various shredded bits of spandex, netting and twines of chain moved in a disconnected, colorfully jerky ballet to the beats.
“Wild night, eh?” Ryan said after a while, staring straight at catwoman’s face. Her expression didn’t change. She didn’t answer. He shrugged and sipped his blood-dyed drink, averting his eyes to the floor.
Murder Box, a local band, picked up their instruments at last, and Ryan abandoned his seat to get closer to the stage, nodding at the industrial guitar grind and bleating synthesizers as an Edward Scissorhands look-alike thumbed the bass, spiky black hair bobbing in time. A young goth girl wrapped in tantalizing curtains of gauzy black swiveled her bared hips and teased the audience as she fellated a mi
crophone above the pounding beat.
After the set, he bought another drink and looked for a place to rest until the headliners came on, a Florida darkwave act. He slipped between a variety of ghouls and black-clad, black-eyed patrons and found himself back again at the edge of the dance floor, at the same empty seat next to the catwoman.
He sat.
She didn’t seem to have moved.
“They were pretty good, didn’t you think?” he asked.
Her head tilted ever so slightly to almost meet his gaze, and then returned to face forward, still saying nothing.
Ryan drew up his death-clown charcoal-ringed mouth and sighed. Talk about ice-queens. But she was gorgeous, in an arctic way. It was one thing if she didn’t want to be picked up—he’d been there. But she could at least be polite. The more he thought about it, the more it steamed him. A simple shake of the head, the barest acknowledgement of his existence, would have been enough. Purely out of spite, he leaned over her shoulder and struggled to keep a straight face as he dropped a line patently designed to piss her off as much as her silence had annoyed him.
“Do you come here often?” he asked.
No answer.
Not even a flicker of response.
Ryan sighed and presently went back to watching the goth boys and goth girls pirouetting to the gloomy self-flagellation of The Smiths. The dance floor was slowly filling, as people began to elbow their way in closer to the stage, eager to be in place for the next set.
And then she spoke.
Her voice was cool, like her eyes, but her meaning was clear.
“Do you want to take me out of here?”
Ryan turned abruptly to face her. Had she said what he just thought he heard? For the first time, her face was actually turned toward him, eyes trained fully, unblinkingly on him, awaiting his answer. Her pale lips were drawn tight.
“Huh?” he said.
“I asked if you wanted to take me out of here?” she repeated, her voice a delicate shard of deadly beautiful crystal, high-pitched and thin enough to break.
“Now?” he asked.
She moved, for the first time all night, stretching provocatively while running both black-gloved palms down the shining suit. Ryan stared as her black-gloved fingers traced the lithe ridges of her tightly visible rib cage and then reached down over the spread of her thighs. Her outfit groaned like the creasing of a tight leather couch as she stretched, catlike in her chair, and then opened both eyes wide to meet his growing interest.
“Yes,” she said. “I need to go. Now.”
It didn’t take him long to consider. Visions of his hand unzipping that tight vinyl flooded his mind. Ryan jumped to his feet. He bent and offered his arm. Catwoman smiled and nodded, gracing his forearm lightly with a cool vinyl finger. She rose with a slow but audible crunch. In her heels, she was as tall as he was, and in mincing steps she strutted next to him through the crowd of goths and out the doorway. From behind them, Ryan heard someone again call out “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.”
“I think someone just wished you away,” she said.
“Looks like it worked.”
“I’m just up the street, at the Marriott,” she announced.
“Cool.” He led her down the street, through the crowds of gaudy painted faces and gales of drunken laughter. Her steps clicked like sniper shots against the pavement, and she said nothing more until they had passed Stubb’s and some burnt-out ware houses and turned the corner to arrive at the Waller Creek bridge near the hotel.
In five minutes, he was trailing her up the stairs of the hotel’s rear courtyard, across the polished granite-tiled lobby, and up the elevator to room 618. She flipped a light switch, and Ryan saw that she had rearranged the room, piling the mattress and frame of one of the two double beds up against a wall.
A ring of what looked like pebbles littered the ground where carpet marks indicated that the deconstructed bed had stood not so long ago. Catwoman turned and pressed her face to his, drawing his breath out in a hard kiss. She stared wide into his eyes.
“I like the floor,” she said, and drew her tongue from his chin to his ear, biting briefly at the lobe.
“Why don’t you get out of those clothes, make yourself comfortable,” she hissed. “I’ll be right back.”
She disappeared into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. Ryan shed his hobo coat and tie, and kicked his shoes to the side of the bed. He sat down on the bed she hadn’t dismantled and waited, grinning expectantly when he heard the run of water in the next room. He imagined her coming out of the bathroom wearing only a towel, hair let down to flow in loose curls of raven gloss over bare shoulders.
His imagination was wrong.
She returned still fully clad in vinyl, still gloved and skull-capped.
She walked over to him, and planted one leg between his feet while handing him a warm, wet cloth.
“For your face,” she offered. “Can I take your shirt and pants for you?”
“Can I take your cat suit for you?” he retorted. She lifted her chin.
“Boys first,” she said, looking down her whiskers at him. “I’m shy.”
He laughed at that, but took the cloth and rubbed the character makeup from his face with vigorous wipes. Then he stood and unbuttoned his shirt and pants, letting them fall to the floor.
“And what do you keep in there?” she asked, nodding at the growing bulge in the pouch of his underpants.
“You don’t waste time, do you?”
She grinned, and touched a pink tongue to her upper lip.
“Do you want to waste time?”
He kicked his underwear off and stood naked, hands on his hips.
“Does it pass?” he asked, confident, though starting to feel a little uneasy. This was definitely a weird one. Would she be a frigid mannequin beneath him, or would she truly become a catwoman?
She nodded. “It’ll do.”
Hands behind her back, she circled him, inspecting. He shivered as a cool nail scratched down from the top of his neck to the crack of his buttocks. She slid close, kissed him with her entire body, wrapping around him like a coat from behind, biting at his ear, whispering as she pinched his nipples. Her hands slipped down to move between his legs, kneading and gripping at the flesh swelling with desire.
“I need your help,” she purred in his ear.
He moaned.
“I need a big, strong man to help me open the door,” she purred again, and he made as if to turn around. Her hand gripped tight and held him facing forward. “I need you to give it up for me,” she said, slowly withdrawing her hands. Then she wasn’t there at all, and Ryan felt a chill as her voice commanded, “I need you to stay right there.”
He rolled his eyes and continued to face forward, wondering if he should make a quick and apologetic exit. Catwoman really was some kind of freak.
Behind him she whispered something. Something he couldn’t hear.
“What?” he asked, but her voice didn’t pause.
He turned around and saw the woman had dropped in a crouch on the floor. Her forehead touched the ground and she mumbled and whispered to herself.
He felt a knot form in his belly and shook his head. In a heartbeat he’d made up his mind. Last straw.
Ryan began to step backward, noting the location of his clothes out of the corner of his eye.
Her head shot up at his silent retreat.
“Wait,” she hissed. “I need your help, I’m not done.”
“Well, I’m done,” he said. “Thanks for the memories.”
He reached for his shirt and she pounced, knocking him off balance and then pushing him to the floor on his back.
“Whoa,” he said, grabbing her by the shoulders to hold her back. “I don’t know what you’re into, but I don’t think I’m the right one for you tonight.”
She slipped her arms inside his and pressed her palms to his chest. She leaned in, breath warm and sweet against his face.
; “You’re done when I say you’re done,” she said. Her words weren’t warm and sweet at all.
He pushed against the floor with his elbows and tried to rise, but then her lips pressed wetly to his and he hesitated, involuntarily responding to the force and erotic liquid heat of her touch. A cool finger reached around his shoulder to ruffle the back of his hair. He smiled and slipped his tongue between her teeth. And then something hurt as she drew that caressing hand around his throat…pressing deep with cold pressure.
Something pinched his throat, and a confusing alarm of ice and fire rang inside Ryan’s skull. Then the pain blossomed and he coughed at a tickle across his larynx…and then there really was pain…and warmth spilling out across his chest and shoulder. He tried to scream but Catwoman pressed his head to the floor and drew the second razor secreted in her palm across his neck from the other direction, severing his windpipe and vocal chords in one deep slice. A spray of blood spattered and beaded across her protective vinyl bodysuit. The pain was all-consuming and he struggled against her weight, but every movement was excruciating. The room blurred instantly. Ryan struggled to look at his killer one last time, his brain crying silently, “Why?”
She pressed him firmly to the floor and waited. His own blood dripped back down onto his lips, cascading from the jet escaping his throat to dribble impotently down the shiny black vinyl of her chest. The taste of iron from his blood slipped into his mouth and clouded his last shuddering sight as it pooled in his eye sockets.
“Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” she said with a smile, and licked a spot of blood from her pencil-drawn, smeared whiskers.
“Now you’re done.”
CHAPTER TWO
“They’re coming.”
