The Black Mass is still with us, and I have come across a form that promotes evil and evil behavior. I am not speaking of Wicca, for their beliefs are very different from this sect. From my research, I believe their roots come from a ‘religion’ that is hundreds of years old, perhaps even older, though their beliefs have evolved over time. They take drugs during their ceremonies, and they are directly involved in the selling of them.
There are active groups in at least five countries, possibly more. They are here in New Orleans, with branches in London, Paris, New York, and other, less prominent places. They have secret signs, symbols, and meeting places, and they practice strict secrecy of the identity of their members. I infiltrated one of their meetings and saw some of the symbols that they use. I drew them later from memory. An art historian identified them for me as Celtic in origin.
What is even more disturbing to me than their link to the drug trade is the drinking of what I am told is human blood during their ceremonies. One member told me that the blood is always better when drawn from an unwilling subject, and he hinted that people were killed for their blood. A mysterious man named ‘Dother’ – the Irish word for evil - was indicated to me as the leader of the New Orleans group. I never got close to him, but even from a distance the man frightened me.
Jessie felt cold wave down her spine, and the hair on the back of her neck stood up. Another name from Irish folklore. Dother was another of Carman’s sons. She slammed the book shut with a bang that echoed through the quiet of the library, earning her a glare from the woman at the next table. Jessie ignored her, instead hurrying over to the research desk to return the books and thank the woman who’d helped her.
She was going to make Shannon go with her to the Beach Bum after her next class. If she thought this Dan Jackson person was so important, maybe she should check him out. Whatever was happening here, it was just too scary to go through alone.
Shannon agreed to go, but she acted weird the whole time. She fidgeted in the car, and she kept looking behind them. Jessie finally yelled at her because she was making her so nervous, and Shannon had another of those flashes of temper that had so frightened her before. Shannon’s lips actually drew away from her teeth as she glared at Jessie, making her looking so predatory and out of control that Jessie felt pure fright. Then Shannon’s expression changed and she apologized, telling Jessie that she was just exhausted and scared by all of this. Since Jessie knew exactly how she felt, she forgave her. Who could help acting strange with all this stuff going on?
They told the manager of the hotel, a greasy little man who reminded Jessie of a weasel, that they were looking for Dan to tell him that a friend of his had been killed. They didn’t know him personally, but their friend had spoken of Dan a lot, and they felt that he should know.
“Dan quit two weeks ago. I don’t know where the little bastard is, and I don’t care. I’ve got his old address if you want…if you’ll tell the jackass that I’m keeping his last check to pay for the uniforms he still has. He left me so shorthanded that I had to cover two of his shifts plus my own.”
He pointed to a picture hanging on the wall with a plaque underneath that said Employee of the Month. The face in the picture was innocent and ingenuous, with freckles smeared all over his features and an endearing little grin that just made you want to squeeze him. He looked like somebody that Jessie knew, but she couldn’t place who it was. When she said as much, the manager laughed shortly.
“That’s what made him so good around here,” the manager said. “He looks like somebody everybody knows. He was great at first. I thought I’d hit the jackpot. He showed up on time, all the customers liked him, and he did a good job. I always expected to lose him eventually but I thought it would be to some bigger place that could pay him more money. I thought he’d do the right thing and give notice at least, not leave me in the lurch.”
He swatted the paper he held in his hands at the desk, irritably. “Turns out he was just like all the other jerks around here.”
Shannon refused to have anything else to do with any more investigating. She told Jessie that whatever else she wanted to do, she could do it on her own. Jessie decided to wait until tomorrow to go by Dan Jackson’s home, because Mrs. Davis would worry if she were too late coming home.
Jessie had already dropped Shannon off when she realized why Dan Jackson looked so familiar. He reminded her of the kid on that show from the 80’s, the guy that later went on to direct all kinds of movies. Happy Days, that was the name of it. He looked like Ron Howard when he played on Happy Days.
***
Heather Baker liked to sit in her backyard after dark; it was so peaceful then. She liked the patterns that the moonlight made on her lawn furniture, and she liked the quiet of the night.
“I hate the city during the day,” she often told her husband. “If I couldn’t sit outside at night and listen to the silence, I’d have moved to the country long ago. It’s the time when magic is possible.”
Stan was used to her eccentricities and only nodded. Sometimes he stayed awake with her, but not tonight. He’d fallen asleep on the couch watching TV, and she’d woken him with a nudge. He’d stumbled off to bed and she’d come outside to watch the night once more.
The light was suddenly dimmed by a black wisp of cloud that floated across the moon. Heather looked up, frowning, and realized that someone else was in the yard with her. She could dimly see his outline against the orange tree. Her heart jumped in her chest, then for some unknown reason she felt peace wash through her. She wasn’t afraid any longer; she was enchanted.
She stood up, drifted over to the dim figure, and smiled when she got closer. It was a man, and the most gorgeous person she had ever seen. She put out a hand to touch the smooth, cool silk of his shirt, rubbing her palm against the firm muscle of his chest. She didn’t wonder why he was here in her back yard because she already knew: He was the magic in the night that she had always waited for.
“Hello,” she said softly.
Without a word spoken between them, he began to kiss her – fiercely, violently, bending her body back while he held her wrists pinioned behind her. She was helpless to resist him, but Heather had no thought of trying to escape. She was caught in the web of his dark sorcery and she liked the things that he was doing to her. He forced her down to the ground.
Like a sleepwalker, she lay there, reveling in the feel of him against her skin. She felt drugged, somehow, the moonlight shining so brightly into her eyes that she was forced to close them. The heavy scent of the orange blossoms cascaded over her, making her head swim.
Even when he nicked her with his teeth and she felt him sucking at the blood in her mouth, she was excited instead of revolted. It was a violation, but one that she longed for desperately. She wanted him to do it, oh yes, and she clutched the grass with both hands and strained against him, presenting her neck for his pleasure.
His lips were cold against her skin, and Heather felt a moment of confusion. He was cold, cold against her, why would he be cold? Stan was always warm, so warm that they never needed more than a sheet to cover them in bed even on the chilliest of nights.
Stan.
Why was she doing this? She loved her husband and she would never betray him. She didn’t even know this man’s name.
Why was he cold?
She forgot her confusion when he pinned her arms above her head and kissed the little hollow in her neck where a pulse beat quickly. He seemed to like that spot the best, returning to it again and again, and Heather writhed sensuously against him as she felt him begin to suckle there. She let her mind and body waft away on the mysterious, primitive tide of feelings he provoked in her. He could do anything he wanted, anything at all…
It began to hurt a little, that suckling, and so she tossed her head restlessly. He pressed her neck more firmly to his mouth, and Heather felt herself crest the top of a wave until she was crying out with the pain and the glory of it. She felt a gush of warmth flood
down her neck, and her life slipped away while Dian Carman lay atop her.
He left her lying there sprawled underneath the orange tree, in the peace of the night that she had always liked the best.
***
“I did what you wanted,” the rat-faced hotel manager whined.
Leaning back in the hotel manger’s own chair and keeping him standing in front of him like a penitent, Dian fingered the gold medallion that hung around his neck and stared at the man. Hard to believe that this piece of offal ran a hotel, and quite efficiently, to hear Dan tell it. He had been instrumental in the distribution of their little product. Of course, most of that had to do with Dan, who so reassured the customers with his nice, normal face. It couldn’t be bad for you if this pleasant, wholesome young man took it, could it? Of course not.
It amused Dian to keep the man so sweaty and off-balance, so scared, though he could not have said why. The man would have a heart attack if he knew what kind of danger he was in right now, Dian thought idly. I could rip off his head and drink from it as if it were a goblet. I could crush his bones and drink their jelly. One day when I don’t need him anymore, perhaps I will. He smiled coldly, and the man backed off with a cry. Dian laughed.
“Well done,” he said slowly, and laughed again when the man gave an audible sigh of relief. “Did you have official visitors?”
“Some cop came by. His grandma called to bitch me out, and a couple of young girls came by, too. Wanted to know did Dan work here, did I know anything about his social life, where he hung out, stuff like that. I gave everyone a little trickle of information, because I figured they’d get suspicious if I didn’t tell them something.”
Dian leaned forward and raised one eyebrow slowly. The man quailed.
“Tell me about the girls.”
“One was blonde, and she had some nervous Cuban chick with her.”
Dian steepled his fingers and brought them to his face. He stared intently over the top of them and pursed his lips. “Did either of these ‘chicks’ have a name?”
The skinny man raised a trembling hand to his mouth and wiped away the sweat that beaded above it.
“Shannon, I think I heard the blonde call the Cuban chick. Yeah, Shannon, that was it.”
Dian leaned back in the chair once again. “Shannon.” He smiled, and the greasy little man winced. “Shannon.”
***
Shannon edged around the corner of the house, trying to control her panting. She had been sound asleep in her bed when something had woken her. Something had been in her room, something that had frightened her, so she’d snuck out, going right out the window into the night.
She couldn’t think straight lately, everything was fuzzy all the time. The only time she felt right was when she took the drugs, but they wore off quickly now, and she was taking more and more of them. Now, they didn’t seem to be helping her at all. She didn’t feel the way she’d felt in the beginning, god-like and all-powerful; she just felt scared and out of control. Maybe she shouldn’t have left the house, maybe she should have stayed there.
Whatever had been in the house was chasing her now, she could feel it. She couldn’t see it or hear it, but she knew. He had sent something after her.
If anyone were close, they would hear her harsh breathing, so she must be quiet. She crept silently between the houses, and then stood against the side of one, bracing her back against the wall. She let her eyes adjust to the darkness. There was something glowing on the wall across from her and she strained to see it.
Eyes.
Two pairs of eyes.
She gave a harsh cry of despair as Dian Carman stepped out of the shadows and Dan came right behind him. Then the cry turned into a bloodcurdling scream as Dian smiled crookedly at her, his fangs prominent.
With a roar, he was upon her. he ripped his fangs into her breast, stabbing her, slashing her, draining her dry…and Shannon didn’t lose consciousness until the very end. She died in agony, and somewhere in the back of her dying mind, she thought that maybe it was what she deserved.
When he finished with her, she looked like a broken doll that some child had dashed repeatedly against the wall. Her head was torn half off her body, and one of her legs was behind her neck, but there was no blood spill. There was none left to spill.
There was no time to retrieve the body, because lights were going on everywhere and heads were popping out of doors and windows. Dian took off, and Dan booked right behind him.
Dan wondered shakily if he would ever forget her screams at the end. The people at the house, they were stoned when they died, and he’d always made sure that they had a lot of the stuff, not to lessen their pain, but to lessen his work. It had blunted some of their pain, even if that hadn’t been his intention. He knew that Shannon was high; he could read the signs because he’d been around her high so many, many times, but her pain hadn’t been decreased. Just the opposite, in fact. It had seemed to intensify it.
Her cries had echoed down the alley like the haunted shrieking of the damned.
***
Jessie didn’t see Shannon at any of her classes the next day, so she decided to go to Dan Jackson’s apartment alone, cursing her friend. Shannon had just deserted her and left her to do this stuff alone. She was going to hear about this later. But maybe she didn’t want Shannon with her anyway; she’d been acting so strangely and the vision or whatever that she’d had of a worm in Shannon’s heart had really freaked her out. It made her feel sick even to touch her friend now, and she was definitely on the edge of some kind of breakdown. Maybe she’d talk to Shannon’s mom about it tomorrow.
For a twenty, the manager of the building where Dan Jackson and his grandmother lived told Jessie that Dan hadn’t been home in a week. He knew because the old lady had told him so, bitching up a storm about that worthless grandson of hers. For another twenty, he told Jessie that the old woman had just left to do her weekly grocery shopping and wouldn’t be back for an hour, at least. She did it at the same time every week, and she was too cheap to spring for a taxi or a bus, so she walked home and pushed a cart.
“See all those abandoned carts in the parking lot? That’s because of her. Seems like she could take one back once in a while, but she never does. When there get to be too many of them, I call the grocery store and they send somebody down to collect ‘em.”
For yet more money, he unlocked the apartment door and let her go inside. Jessie got the distinct feeling that for another twenty, he would hold the old woman down while she hacked off her head with a pocketknife. Jessie shuddered at the thought and decided to hurry. Maybe Dan had paid him twenty to call him if she showed up, or maybe he wasn’t gone at all. Maybe he was waiting for her with his freak friend Dian, inside one of these rooms.
But her fears were ungrounded. Nobody was inside the apartment. Jessie walked down the hallway and glanced over at what she assumed was the old woman’s bedroom. The narrow bed was covered with a frayed blanket that had once been white, but was not yellowed with age. She saw a Bible open in the center of it.
Everything in the apartment was old, falling apart and decrepit, and not the kind of old that comforts you, the kind of comfort you feel in using things you’ve owned for years. No one loved the things in these rooms. They merely used them until they were well past using and then tossed them away. There was no comfort here, only the kind to be found in that Bible, and Jessie would bet money that the old woman read strictly from the Old Testament, the kind of stories where a vengeful God was just as likely to smite you down as lift you up.
She walked past a bathroom so small that you could sit on the toilet and put one foot in the tub and the other in the sink without stretching. She could hear water dripping behind the torn shower curtain.
Jessie opened the door to the only other bedroom. It, too, was as barren as a monk’s cell. A single window, too small for even a child to crawl through, filtered light through a ragged shade. There was a single bed, a rickety bedside table, and a b
attered chest of drawers. A plank of wood propped up on concrete blocks housed a small collection of paperbacks, mostly battered sci-fi titles.
The room held nothing else. There was nothing under the bed, nothing but clothing in the chest. Jessie plopped heavily down onto the sagging mattress, feeling a spring poke her as she did. She couldn’t imagine spending her life in this room. She struggled to kill the sudden compassion that rose in her chest, and she let her eyes sweep the room. What could she tell about Dan from this room? Something in here should speak to her, shouldn’t it?
What was a killer’s room supposed to look like?
She stared at the blank walls and the old furniture with dead eyes, disappointment tasting awful in her mouth. There was nothing here but the kind of poverty that ate your soul and filled you with rage. What the hell did she think she was doing? There was no way that she was going to figure this out on her own, she should just leave it to the cops.
They didn’t care about Kira and her Mom and Andy the way that she did. She had heard that Bennett guy talking to the other cop. They weren’t going to look for the killer. Her friends and family had been butchered, and nobody cared except her.
Jessie’s fists clenched on the tattered bedspread. It wasn’t fair! Someone should care, someone should find the one responsible for these horrible deeds, and they should be punished. It shouldn’t matter about the drugs. They were dead when they shouldn’t be, and they had been murdered.
Her mother’s words resonated so clearly in Jessie’s mind that she could almost see her face in front of her, the cynical little smirk twisting her mobile face, one eyebrow rising the way it always did when she was agitated. She could almost hear the accent bleeding into her mother’s voice. Come to think of it, she could definitely hear that cotton-pickin’ twang her mother got when she was upset. Jessie smiled.
“You know why people are mean, don’t you, Jess?”
“Because they can be, Mom,” Jessie whispered. “Because they can be.”
“That’s right, baby,” Mind-Mom said. “That’s the truth. Power is an aphrodisiac to some. The more you get, the more you want, and an easy way to get it is to make up unreasonable rules and enforce them on people who don’t have any power. That’s what happened to Dan, and people are gonna do it to you, kiddo. Some of those people are drawn to jobs where they can have power over the powerless. Teachers. Security Guards. Cops. I know some would say that I’m being paranoid, that this is a bad thing to say to my child, but it’s the truth, girl, and we’ve all known some of those people. Tell me, don’t you know some of them right now? They got crappy lives, so they makes themselves feel better by stomping all over you. Maybe some of them don’t even know why they do it, but you do, and knowledge is power. Do what they say when you have to, and think what you want. One day not so long from now, you’ll have power of your own.”
Blood Worship (Chasing Vampires) Page 8
