Blackwater Lights (27 page)

Sara’s body swung like a pendulum. The blood had slowed but still ran. Lily let go of the braid, and the nearly severed head drooped at an obscene angle. She placed the knife between Ellen’s breasts, the blade tip pointing downward toward her belly.

Billy breathed heavily behind him, almost panting. They were all getting off on this.

Lily dipped two fingers into the pool of blood on the rock and wiped it on her forehead, eyelids, and lips. She dipped her fingers again and moved to Crawford. Wiped his forehead, eyelids, and lips. “Samael, my consort, I anoint you.”

“My life is yours, Mother,” Crawford said.

Lily went around to each of the others. Each, in turn, dropped his hood and received her anointing. Men, all of them. White and middle-aged, except for one bearded man with dark skin. He looked Arabic.

Anzu. Berith. Asael. Sariel. Samyaza. Paimon
.

The last to lower his hood was Kevin.

“
Gaz’alg
, I anoint you.”

They all replaced their hoods. She returned to the altar, joined by Crawford, and held out her arms. “Thus are the children welcomed.”

“G’zaflghna msuzlk,”
they answered. They’d all been charged up by the bloodletting, their faces flushed, their eyes wide and eager. Now he understood what Kevin had meant when he’d described Crawford’s cultists as
glowing
.

Crawford stepped in front of the altar and spoke. “Lay the circle, Mother.”

One of the robed figures retrieved a large bag from behind one of the standing stones and gave it to Lily. She walked around Crawford, pouring white powder from the lip of the bag. It was crystalline, like rock salt, tracing a circle that encompassed Crawford and the altar. When she finished, she put down the bag and walked to Ellen.

She lifted the dagger from Ellen’s chest.

Ray tensed, his body ready to spring. One hint of a move—any move that brought that knife closer to Ellen—would set him off.

She carried the knife to Crawford. He took it and walked slowly and deliberately around the inside of the circle, the point of the blade tracing its edge, chanting under his breath. He returned to the center and held the dagger upward. Its blade flashed the reflection of the flames. It was as if the world revolved around the tip of the blade—all else was frozen. Waiting. Concentrating.

A murmur rippled through the crowd. One of the uniformed cops walked up to the sea of red robes. He was sweating profusely, his hands clenching and unclenching.

Crawford turned. His stare was cold as death.

The cop whispered to Lily. She nodded and smiled. “We have another guest, Samael.”

Two men with rifles appeared from the darkness, escorting a small, thin man dressed all in white.

No
.

The side of Micah’s face was swollen and bloodied. A strip of duct tape sealed his mouth shut. His hands were bound behind his back, and he staggered as one of the men shoved him next to Ray.

Micah fell to his knees. Blood dripped off his face into the dirt. Heat radiated from him, and the sour smell of sweat. He looked up at Sara’s corpse and hung his head. “You’re just in time,” Lily said.

Crawford handed the dagger to Lily and stepped out of the circle. He grabbed Micah by the neck of his blood-splattered suit and pulled him to his feet. “Preacher man! How nice of you to join us!”

Laughter from around the circle.

Lily held the dagger against his chest, the tip resting under his chin. “Let’s see what the old baboon has to say.”

Crawford ripped the tape from Micah’s mouth. Ray winced. The older man’s lips were swollen and torn—whoever had roughed him up had done a thorough job. Micah coughed, spitting blood. He lifted his head and looked directly at Crawford.

“End this now,” he said.

Crawford laughed. “Surely you can do better than that. You’re on camera, old man—let’s have something a bit more melodramatic for the home audience. This is your big moment, after all. Come, come. A soliloquy. Something Shakespearean, perhaps. Or prayers to your silly god.”

“If you don’t stop this foolishness, you are going to die.”

Crawford opened his mouth wide, his eyes flitting back and forth. “Me?”

More laughter. They were eating it up. And hungering for more blood.

Micah licked his torn lips and spat. “If you do what you’re planning to do, you will surely die. A death far worse than anything you could deal to me.”

Crawford stuck out his lower lip in mock pity. “I doubt that, my little lawn jockey. As much as I’d love to have you witness the fruits of my work, after all those days you and your silly gang members spent crawling around in the bushes, I’m afraid you’re going to have to miss the invocation. And it’s a shame, because it’s going to be quite the show. The Great Work is yet to be done.”

“My work is done. Get it over with.” Micah glanced at Ray, then closed his eyes.

Crawford shook his head. “Oh, well. Pity you won’t give us a proper dramatic finale, but
that’s your choice.” He held out his hand to Lily. “Uzzül’uüš, Mother.”

Ray couldn’t look away.

Lily handed Crawford the bloodied dagger.

In movies, this would be the time the good guys arrived. With guns flashing, storming over the hill and crashing through the trees. Helicopters swooping down, raining lead and fire.

“G’zaflghna msuzlk, g’thalk’atu.” Crawford held the blade above his head, pointing at the sky. “G’thalk’atu, g’züghna k’talzzkü.” Lily stepped back. Crawford held the blade in front of his face, eyes closed, murmuring.

Micah smiled. Ray never got that out of his mind. He
smiled
.

It happened so quickly, Ray’s cry didn’t start until Micah pitched forward. One clean stroke, and the blade slashed through the old man’s neck. His face hit the ground, and his blood spread in a widening pool in the dirt.

Billy didn’t pull the chain. He let Ray’s hoarse, broken wail rend the night.

Ellen’s screams joined his. Howling like dogs.

Micah twitched three times, then stopped moving.

Ellen’s screams died out. She moaned wordlessly.

Crawford’s eyes sparkled, his pupils like black holes. “The old beast has whetted your appetite?”

Nods all around. The Middle Eastern man spoke with a thick accent. “Yes, Samael. But we wait”—he pointed to Ellen—“for her.”

Another nodded. “Spill her.”

“The invocation first,” Crawford said. “The first taste of her blood will be our gift to them.” He turned back to the altar, arms outstretched, the dagger in his left hand. Closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and chanted.

“G’zaflghna msuzlk, g’thalk’atu. G’zaflghna msuzlk, g’thalk’atu g’nazzt ok meg’shkzzagz.”

Foul syllables, the language before human language, when blood and torn flesh and fear were the only gods. The noises reached an ancient part of Ray, some atavistic memory, and burned in his mind like acid.

A sound emerged from Crawford’s throat. More insect than human. A familiar sound. Ray had heard it before. Long ago, the same awful cry.

It was the song from that terrible night, so long ago. A song not made by humans, but coming through the throats and out of the mouths of children. And then his own part came, and he felt his throat and mouth vibrating in unison with Crawford’s foul syllables.

The earth shook. The air rippled.

Ray’s face—all of their faces—turned to the brightening sky.

Ray would never know if what he experienced was the same for the others. In the end, it didn’t really matter.

It started with the orange spheres, moving to the sky directly above them from all over the field of stars, melding into a central, glowing mass above Crawford’s circle. They came from everywhere and joined together, and with each addition the central light grew larger and brighter.

Was it just getting bigger, or was it coming closer?

And then, before Ray understood what was happening, it was
inside
him. Like when Crawford had crawled into his mind, only far worse. The thing was trying him on like an old suit. Stretching itself out inside his head and his skin. Filling up every inch. And it was cold. Icy cold, with the arrogance and detachment of a scientist studying an
E. coli
bacterium through a microscope.

It was familiar. It had been inside him before.

It slipped into his mind like a hand into a puppet and riffled through his memories like the pages of a book.
Flip
Mommy
flip
it’s my birthday
flip
Christmas pageant
flip
falling off a skateboard
flip
under the jeweled sky, beneath the trees, among the stones—

And it remembered him. He felt its shock and recognition. It had been here before, many years ago. It had sung through him, revealing its secrets at the command of the foolish men who called to it.

And just as quickly, it lost interest.

The snapping back into his own body and mind was instantaneous and nauseating. It had tossed him aside, like an empty paper sack.

No one moved. They all were frozen, faces blank. Maybe it had gotten inside them, too. Maybe it was still inside them. Trying them out for size.

It was then that things happened very quickly.

Lily was the first to pull back. She stepped away from the circle. The smile disappeared from her face.

The smell of rot, disease, and rancid flesh filled Ray’s nose. He gagged.

Crawford was changing. His face, bathed in the fiery light from above, blurred and shifted from the wide-eyed man to something bug-like to the jagged head of a parasitic worm, morphing through visages so rapidly that it seemed he had no real face anymore. He twisted into impossible poses and contortions as the energy worked inside him.

Ellen was frozen, straining against her ropes, her mouth open wide.

The light, now blotting out the stars above, began to descend.

Lily backed away slowly. Several of the men in robes turned and fled, a few of them covering their ears. Kevin had fallen to his knees, his face buried in the folds of his robe. The guards had simply turned and run. Those left just stared, unable to move, watching as Crawford underwent his metamorphosis.

The chain around Ray’s neck went slack.

Ray lunged. When the chain tightened around his neck, he didn’t stop, and the leash ripped from Billy’s hands. His peripheral vision turned white. He stumbled forward, aiming himself at the circle, half falling, half tripping toward the thing—the demon—that was, and might still be, Crawford.

The Crawford-thing turned. Its eyes flashed.

Ray’s head exploded in crushing pain, and he bounced backward. It had repelled him without even touching him, knocking him back with its gaze. He reeled, staggered, and fell onto his back. Overhead, the bright, blinding light was all he could see. It burned. He turned his head. The rest of them had scattered now or were crawling away up in the dirt, cowering and screaming. One of the men had pulled off his robe and lay naked, writhing and clawing at his eyes. It was pandemonium.

Lily was gone.

The light above them vanished. As if it had just switched off. It—whatever it had been—
was gone. The stars were back, cold and distant as ever.

Crawford’s horrible vocalization stopped. Just cut out, as if the plug had been pulled. And he’d stopped shaking. His hood hung in front of his face.

When it fell back, Ray felt the last, stubborn dregs of his sanity evaporate. He would never be the same. The face in front of him would lurk in his nightmares, would always live in the back of his consciousness, destroying any sense that the universe was rational and benevolent and sane.

Crawford’s eyes were even larger than before, but now they were completely black. No whites, no lids—just enormous black lenses. His head had grown bulbous and drew into a point at the chin, and it moved disjointedly on his thin neck. His arms were bent in front of him, drawn back like a mantis. The fingers that stuck out the end of his robe were segmented, thin, and translucent.

He bent, his arms extended, and lifted the dagger, the bug-like fingers wrapping around the handle.

When he moved, he was unsteady—as if he was trying out his new form. He stepped awkwardly to the altar. To Ellen.