Hellhound on My Trail (5 page)

“Jim’s not going to talk to you,” Eddie reminded Mike through gritted teeth. “And we’re not looking for a
thing,
we’re looking for a
place.”

“Well, did we find it, then?” Mike pressed.

“Over here!” Twitch shouted from halfway across the room. She was poking open the trapdoor of something that looked like an oversized mail slot, built right into the wall. It was about where Mike had heard the noise earlier, he thought.

Jim immediately ran to join her, and Eddie followed at a walk, shotgun at the ready. “What is that, the
genizah
?
”
he shouted.

“What’s a
genizah
?
”
Mike asked, his head spinning. “And is it more or less dangerous than a Baal Zavuv?”

“It’s a cabinet,” Eddie said as he broke into a jog, “full of books that are too old to use and too holy to throw away.” He called back to Mike over his shoulder, without looking. “Get Adrian up! We need Feldman to show us the way forward!”

Mike went back to the scene of the failed summoning, scratching his head at what to do. Adrian snored gently, so he started by pinching the sorcerer’s nose and twisting it sharply clockwise—no effect. He thought of Twitch, and how the drummer had awoken the wizard earlier.

“Come on, big boy,” he said awkwardly. “It’s just you and me, and everything is hunky-dory.” His own words made him feel uncomfortable. He rapped Adrian on the forehead with his knuckle. “Everything is nice and easy, no pressure. Let’s have a picnic.” Mike cleared his throat and looked around to be sure no one was watching him. The thought that he might see Chuy made him a little nervous, but he guessed that he had enough liquor in him to hold the apparition at bay for the moment. He hoped he did.

The rabbi’s twitches were getting more extreme. He flopped around like a live fish on a hot sidewalk, and Mike frowned. What was that black stuff bubbling up between the old man’s teeth?

And why had Twitch picked up the gas can earlier? What was it she had said … that the rabbi was
infested
?

Mike stood up and stretched to get a better look at Rabbi Feldman. The substance bubbling inside his mouth was beginning to well up past his lips and spill down onto his throat, and onto the chest on which he lay. It was black as tar, but was formed into discrete globes. Just like caviar, Mike thought, not that he’d eaten much caviar himself, other than what he’d stolen from weddings he’d played at. Only each of the bubbles was quivering, and as they fell and hit the floor, they continued to shake and roll around.

And the rabbi stank of rotting meat.

Just like the Baal Zavuv.

“Guys?” he called it. “This doesn’t look very good.”

There was no answer. He looked over at Jim, Eddie and Twitch, and saw that they were helping a person—someone really small—a skinny little
kid,
actually, crawl out of a hole they’d smashed in the wall.

He kicked Adrian. “Wake up!” he barked.

Nothing.

How would he light the gas, if he had to? He remembered Adrian’s book of matches, pushed the pistol into the back of his belt and got down again to shove his hands into Adrian’s pockets until he found it.
GOLDEN DAWN MOTEL
, read the scratched and faded lettering on the little black book, or maybe it was
GOLDEN SANDS
, he couldn’t be sure,
AMARILLO
. It smelled like ammonia and the cardboard was fraying, but if the Golden Dawn gave guests matches with their name on it, Mike had stayed in places that were worse.

“Guys?” he called again, and stood up to look at Feldman.

The rabbi’s face was covered in a black foam of the jiggling little bubbles. Bubbles were squeezing up around the spike in his chest, too. One of them had bobbled its way down one leg of the rabbi’s trousers and quivered beside his ankle, like a tiny little blob of sphinx poop. Mike stooped to look at it.

“Cagado,”
he muttered.

Inside the bubble, behind a black film that swirled like oil on a puddle, he could clearly see a fly. It was as big as a horsefly and its mandibles glittered like metal.

He kicked Adrian again, really hard this time, and in the stomach.

“Oomph!” Adrian bellowed, and woke up. He curled reflexively, wrapping himself around Mike’s foot and tripping him. Mike fell backward—

hit the floor—

and banged the back of his head against the gas can.

“No!” he gasped, scrabbling at the can with both hands—

as it slowly tipped over—

and Mike missed, the can hit the ground and the gas sloshed out. On the hardwood floor it puddled under the sphinx chest and the rabbi’s body.

“What are you doing?” Adrian grunted, and clambered to his feet. His eyes widened. “Hey!”

Mike followed Adrian’s eyes from where he lay on the floor, and saw that Rabbi Feldman’s body was covered in black foam. No, he realized, it wasn’t foam anymore. It was a cloud, coalescing and rising off the body.

A cloud of flies.

“Carajo!”
Mike yelped. He grabbed the book of matches and fumbled to pull one of them out. The back of his ears felt wet and he wondered if he’d cut his head in the fall. He’d have to check later.

“Per Isidem …”
Adrian intoned, and then staggered back, sucking in oxygen like he’d emerged from long minutes underwater.
“Per Isidem …”
His eyes rolled back into his head and he struggled not to swoon.

“Help!” Mike shouted, snapped one of the matches into flame—

“Don’t!” he heard Eddie yell—

and he tossed the match over his head.

Whoosh!

“Aaagh!” Mike roared in sudden agony and rolled away from the sudden explosion of light and heat behind him. His shoulders and upper back were on fire—literally. He stumbled like a one-legged sprinter past Adrian, who waggled his fingers over his head and tried again to get out a spell.

Water
 …
he thought. His back and the back of his head burned.

No, a tapestry
 …
he lurched around, trying to find the nearest wall hanging.

The room exploded into whizzing particles of light, and with a sinking feeling in his heart and stomach, Mike realized that he hadn’t stopped the flies, he’d only lit them on fire. Now they raced about the room in all directions, shining with flame and trailing smoke that stank of sulfur, rotting meat and gasoline. They flew zigzag like dandelion spores of light, or like Leonids unconstrained by gravity, racing out in all directions from Rabbi Feldman’s funeral pyre.

“Hold still!” Mike wasn’t sure who was shouting.

But burning insects hit Mike and stung him, on his legs and his back and his arms, and he couldn’t stop running. He smelled a terrible stink and realized it was his own hair and flesh burning, and he kicked and stumbled through the rubble of former pews, trying to get to the wall and a tapestry.

Ahead of him he saw the small silver horse again, and the sight rang a bell in his brain that he was too panicked, and in too much pain, to listen to. A little skinny boy in ill-fitting jeans, white t-shirt and unlaced trainers clung to the back of the animal. He held onto its long silver mane as the horse reared, its hooves trampling a heap of large scrolls that spilled out of a hole in the wall.

Beyond the unexpected horse and its mystery rider, Jim stood with his back to Mike, raising his sword, facing the synagogue door—through which swarmed a funnel cloud of Zvuvim.

***

Chapter Five

“Got you!” Eddie shouted as he tackled Mike.

The guitarist hit him from behind and right on the shoulders and the back of his neck, where he was burning. It hurt and Mike screamed, but Eddie had his jacket in his hands, and as he dragged Mike to the floor he beat at his body, snuffing out flames.

“Aaagh!” Mike screamed again. He pounded his fist on the floor in pain, grateful that at least he wasn’t totally sober. He wished he were a hell of a lot more drunk, though.

Then Eddie was up again and shrugging into his jacket. “Incoming!” the guitar player shouted, and brought his twelve-gauge to bear on the swarming cloud of giant flies.

Boom! Boom!

Mike climbed to his feet, feeling fat and fried and chopped to pieces, like a roaster in a chicken rotisserie. The Zvuvim raged in through the front door of the synagogue in a chittering cloud, and the rabbi’s burning corpse-flies buzzed forth from the depths of the hall to meet them, a swarm of glittering candle-points that sparkled and winked from within the black mass.

Jim stood in the doorway, heaving the flattened door off the ground with one hand while he slashed at attacking Zvuvim with the sword in his other. He moved like a matador, avoiding flies by throwing every other part of his body out of the way but holding his hand, and the door it pushed up, fixed in place. Eddie charged in his direction, shotgun up and firing, blasting flies out of the air with each squeeze of the trigger. They swarmed so thick now that it was impossible to miss, and the challenge was to hit the one you were aiming at, and not a different Zavuv that got in the way.

Bang!

Mike squeezed the trigger of the pistol, not remembering when he’d pulled it from his belt, and shattered a dive-bombing Zavuv into stringy black fragments.

The silver horse took off at a gallop with the boy on its back, away from the Zvuvim and around the wall of the synagogue.

The kid, Mike thought. It was the kid who had made the noise he’d heard, not rats. Rats would have been less weird, though, than a kid hiding in a … what had Eddie said? A cabinet full of old books no one could read anymore?

“Get over here!” Eddie yelled.

Boom!

Mike blasted another Zavuv and raced to join Jim and Eddie. Jim had shoved the fallen door back into place and Eddie now held it up with his back, shoving shells into the twelve-gauge and ducking fly attacks. Jim squatted to try to muscle the hanging door up as well, but two Zvuvim clinging to the hardwood slashed and bit at his hands. He bled and grunted and swatted at them with the hilt of his sword, but he made no progress with the door.

Bang!

Mike blew one of the Zvuvim to bits and the other jerked away into the air,
chittering
. Jim got his shoulder under it and slammed the door into place.

“We need wards of sealing here,” Eddie said, and Jim nodded.

“It’s no good,” Mike panted, pointing up at the shattered windows of the second story. The windows were narrow, but only narrow enough that they forced the Zvuvim to crawl through, rather than flying at top speed. “They can get in up there.” He fired three more shots, exploding two Zvuvim in the air and a third that crawled rasping along the ceiling beneath the floor of the mezzanine.

“You’re forgetting the Baal,” Eddie said. “And the Hound. Adrian!” he shouted. “Show me some love!”

Adrian stumbled to the door, batting away burning flies with his left hand. In his right, he held the machine pistol that Mike had first seen back in Butcher’s roadhouse. “What’s Twitch up to?” the wizard grumbled. “We must all hang together, et cetera.”

“Twitch is looking for the way
out
!”
Eddie barked. “Your job is to cork up the way
in
!”
He took aim at a Zavuv winging in low behind Adrian’s back and blew it to kingdom come. The shotgun reports sounded louder under the mezzanine, with an instant slapback echo like a guitar running through a pedal set to one hundred milliseconds of delay.

Mike shook the distracting thought out of his head.

ROAR!

The sound came from outside the synagogue, but it was as loud as the crashing of Niagara Falls.

“Will it help if I tell you we’re at a picnic?” Mike offered tentatively.

“Piss off!” Adrian snapped, pushing his pistol into a shoulder holster under his scorched suit jacket and digging two pieces of chalk from his pocket. “And get out of the way.”

Mike shrugged. He only wanted to help.

Then he and Eddie peeled aside and stood guard—Jim stepped away from the door but kept one hand up against both panels, pinning them in place as Adrian began to draw pictures on the panels with chalk in two colors, blue and red. Mike took potshots at any Zavuv that got too close to him, but the big black flies seemed to be swarming a little mindlessly. The little flies, at least, burned to extinction one by one and dropped to the floor, leaving the room lit by dim bulbs here and there and the funeral pyre of Rabbi Feldman.

The white horse continued its gallop around the perimeter of the synagogue, plunging under the mezzanine and getting closer to them.

“Don’t fall asleep!” Eddie snapped, and threw an elbow into Adrian’s ribs.

“Unnh, huh? Hell!” Adrian stumbled and hastily wiped away a long red scrawl down the wood that he had made in the moment of nodding off.

Jim began to hum. Mike couldn’t think of the name of the tune, but he would have sworn he knew it from somewhere. It was like one of those songs that you learn as a kid in school, and you never hear again, until you’re an old man and you hear some other little kid singing it, and you don’t know why you know the tune but you know it.

Adrian nodded and resumed drawing. “Okay, yeah,” he muttered. “Wards of sealing. That’ll hold them shut for a while.”

Mike looked over his shoulder to get a better look at the drawing. It was ornate and in two colors and it covered both doors roughly in a design that looked part spider web, part clock interior, all gears and radiating spokes and here and there a character Mike recognized as being Greek or Hebrew, or didn’t recognize at all.

Jim stepped away from the doors, and they stayed standing.

“Now listen to me, my son,” Mike heard Twitch say in a gentle, extremely feminine voice, “I need you to show mama your hiding place. The secret one. The secret way out that your father showed you.”

Mike was surprised to find Twitch at his elbow again, kneeling and cradling the little boy in his arms. And then he realized that he shouldn’t have been surprised, that there was a perfectly logical explanation for Twitch’s appearances and disappearances … only the logic in question was the logic of madness.

The kid didn’t look like he could be named
Feldman
—he looked Chicano, like he could have fit in perfectly with Mike and Chuy and all their cousins when they were kids, even wearing the same cheap clothes that were always a little too big because it was cheaper to buy them that way—a skinny little kid under a mop of thick black hair. He looked calm, even blissful in Twitch’s arms, like he really thought she was his mama.

“I don’t know my father,” the boy said.

“Not your dad,” Mike said. “Rabbi Feldman.”

The kid looked at Mike, his face suddenly contorting into a mask of terror.

Boom!

“Hurry it up,” Eddie grumped, pumping the shotgun to chamber another round.

“Hush, baby,” Twitch purred, and Mike thought he saw the tail on her rump swish back and forth. The boy calmed right down. Mike wondered whether the kid was scared of him, or he had just broken the spell of Twitch’s voice. Obviously, there was something more than just simple soothing words going on, since Mike had seen it work on the wizard and the little boy both. “I meant the rabbi.”

The walls of the synagogue shook and the sealed doors bowed slightly inward as something outside hammered into them, hard. Something really, really big and strong. Grains of chalk shook off the door and drifted down toward the ground.

The little kid didn’t seem to notice. “Yes, mama,” he said, and he started walking back toward the burning corpse of Rabbi Feldman, pulling Twitch by the hand.

“The wards of sealing will hold, right?” Eddie demanded as they all followed.

“They’ll keep the door shut,” Adrian said. “They can’t stop it from getting pounded into smithereens.”

Eddie coughed out a bitter laugh. “Remind me to get a competent wizard next time.”

“You
don’t want a
wizard,”
Adrian snorted.
“You
want a
Jedi Knight.”

“Damn straight,” Eddie agreed. “Or a Company of United States Marines.” He fired several shells at a knot of approaching fly-demons, bursting some and scattering the rest of them in agitated buzzing circles.

“You …” Mike whispered to Twitch as he followed. “You’re the horse.”

“Well,” she smiled softly and whispered back, “I’ve never had any complaints from the ladies.”

Mike’s jaw worked of its own accord for a few long moments, opening and shutting his mouth wordlessly.

“I …” he finally said.

“Yes, Mikey,” she (he?) answered. “It’s a big world, full of crazier stuff than you can ever possibly guess. I think your Shakespeare said that.”

“He did?” Mike was too astonished to object to being called
Mikey
, and he didn’t know what to make of the Shakespeare reference. He had dropped out of school long before they ever got around to William Shakespeare. “I mean, he isn’t
my
Shakespeare. He wasn’t one of my people.”

“Oh, sure he was,” Twitch said. “People guess all kinds of mysterious things about that poor young man, but I knew him …
well …
and I can assure you that he was very definitely
human.”

“And you’re a horse,” Mike repeated himself, feeling stupid.

“No, silly,” she said. “Not all of the time.”

The little kid stopped, and Twitch and Mike stopped with him. Adrian cleared Zvuvim off to one side of them with long
rat-tat-tat-tat-tat
sweeps of his machine pistol, and Eddie guarded the other flank with his shotgun. “There it is.” The boy pointed at the flaming wreck of the chest, with Rabbi Feldman’s charred corpse smoldering over wood that had collapsed into glowing coals.

The doors resounded to the sound of another mighty blow, and Mike looked back over his shoulder, through the cloud of swarming demonic flies. Chalk sifted down from Adrian’s designs, but the doors held.

“Poor kid,” Mike muttered, turning back to look at the kid pointing earnestly at the toasted rabbi. “He’s got a death wish.”

“What do you mean, darling?” Twitch asked the boy. “Show me.”

“Under,” the boy told her. His voice was a little dazed, like he might be in shock. “Under the ark.”

“Poor dumb kid,” Mike groaned, and couldn’t help but think of Chuy. Chuy had only been a kid too, really, a criminal many times over but not yet eighteen, when Mike had led him to his death. He hadn’t meant to, but he’d done it. “He thinks we’re on a boat.”

But as soon as the kid spoke, Jim dropped his sword to the floor. The singer grabbed both halves of the broken table beside the pyre, shoving one into Mike’s hands and turning to the fire himself.

“Huh?” Mike fumbled.

“Shovel!” Eddie shouted.
Boom!
“Shovel like your life depended on it!”

“It does,” Adrian affirmed.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

The Hellhound bellowed again, so loud Mike thought he felt his own spine tremble with the sound. The Zvuvim seemed to be getting smarter, and they swarmed in closer, diving and clacking their steel mandibles together greedily. Eddie and Adrian kept them off with a ceaseless chatter of gunfire.

Jim pressed his half-table to the floor like a squeegee and Mike followed him clumsily, feeling fat and slow next to the lean, broad-shouldered giant of a singer. He grunted with effort and proximity to the hot coals, and Jim snorted air through his nostrils, and they fell forward and the weight of their bodies brushed away the stinking inferno—

and Mike saw the outline of a trap door, made of scorched hardwood, with an iron ring bolted into it.

CRASH!

Mike stumbled to his feet and whirled to see the Baal Zavuv, tall and gray-black as it charged forward through the splintered remains of the synagogue door, its cloak of flies buzzing frenetically to keep up. At the demon’s heels came the Hellhound, adding blue and black tints to the weird, patchy light inside the building.

“Adrian!” Eddie shouted. “I need daylight!”

“Oh yeah?” Adrian shouted back, blasting a Zavuv away from Eddie’s back and slapping a new clip into his gun. “Shall I just set the gun down, then?”
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
“Between the devil and all that jazz!”

Twitch dropped the little boy’s hand and jumped to Adrian’s side, flailing with a wooden club in each hand and knocking demon-flies away like so many low-hanging apples in an orchard.

Jim grabbed the iron ring and heaved. A groan escaped his lips and Mike saw smoke curl up from around his fingers. The ring, he realized, had to be hot, and the thought of the pain that Jim must be feeling made Mike’s back and shoulders and the back of his head ache. He dreaded looking in a mirror.

“Mike!” Eddie yelled, and he realized he was standing in the middle of the action and doing nothing. He drew a bead on the Zvuvim over Adrian’s head and started shooting.

In the meantime, Jim had lifted the trapdoor to a vertical position. Stone steps, rough-hewn and worn down really deep in the center of each step, descended into darkness. Jim grabbed the little kid and tossed him down the stairs over a short yelp of objection.

The Hellhound bellowed behind Mike, and with the bellow came a slobbery chittering squeal that he recognized as the Baal’s. He spun and fired without aiming,
bang! bang! bang!

He thought he could smell the Baal’s meat-stink from across the synagogue.

“Per Isidem lux!”
Adrian shouted, and light exploded from behind Mike and flashed onto the charging Baal Zavuv and Hellhound. It was a palpable wave, like a flashbulb’s glare, and when it hit the Baal, the great gray demon lord shrieked in pain and crashed to the ground, flailing and dragging the Hound with it. Zvuvim fell from the sky like volcanic ash, stunned and writhing in surprise.