Sacrifice (5 page)

“Cut the crap,” Joe growled. “If you’ve got something useful to tell me about the Curburide, spill it. Otherwise, shut your invisible trap.”

Malachai laughed.

When Broderick Terrel made his bargain with me to keep the Curburide at bay, he had very little patience as well. He was lucky I liked him.

“And you don’t like me?” Joe asked.

There was no answer. He let it lie, and sat up to stir the corn and beans. They were crusting and bubbling on the sides of the pans facing the fire, and cool on the outside. Joe knew he should hold them over the center of the fire, but had no idea how long Alex was going to be. It would only take a few minutes to thoroughly heat both in the center of the flames. He hoped she hurried; the sun was nearly set and the cerulean sky surrounding the moon had darkened to a deep ocean blue.

He laid back and watched the moon grow brighter, ignoring his demon. After a few minutes, he closed his eyes to rest.

The voice startled him out of a fuzzy half dream of Cindy, running like a young girl around the merry-go-round at the park. She was laughing at him, and daring him to jump on the moving ride. He only waited and shook his head, hands in his pockets.

“What do you think?” the voice asked, and Joe jumped a little, shaking his head awake and snapping open his eyes.

“Uh?” he said and pushed himself up on his elbows.

There was a girl in front of him, and she looked familiar. But she didn’t look like Alex. The orange curls had been replaced by a mass of jet-black ringlets, and the baggy dungarees with tight brown suede pants. Instead of the yellow T-shirt, she wore a long-sleeved shirt with trailing, flouncy wristlets, and a low-buttoned front that proved the girl had breasts to bare, regardless of how young she might be.

“Uh,” he said again, and she laughed.

“Better?”

“I guess,” he finally said.

“If anyone’s looking,” she said, “they’re looking for a redhead. And a redhead who always dressed in baggy clothes and baseball caps. I picked up this shirt and some dye and makeup at Walgreen’s.”

She twirled around, modeling for him.

“I’ve never looked this good!” she laughed.

“Oh come on,” he grinned. “I’m sure you’ve dressed up before.”

“Never wanted to,” she shrugged, and dropped to the ground next to him. She cocked her head towards the fire and observed, “You’re burning the corn.”

The smell of burnt food finally registered in Joe’s nostrils and he swore as he pulled the pots back from the edge of the fire and stared at the blackened mush that was caked on the far edge of each of them. “Damn.”

“I’ve got a candy bar in my bag,” she offered.

Alex took the pans down to a stream just behind their tent and rinsed them out after dinner. They had managed to salvage enough of each vegetable to stave off the worst of the day’s hunger pains, though even the non blackened corn and beans tasted burnt.

“I never burn stuff,” Joe had moaned, and she just laughed.

“I’ll cook tomorrow,” she promised. “But we’ve got to pick up something besides corn and beans.”

“Deal,” he said.

While Alex rinsed the pots, Joe gathered some more branches for the fire, though it was slow going. The woods had been picked clean of any logs small enough for him to manhandle, and he hadn’t brought a chain saw to cut up any of the fallen trees that were too big to crack a piece off of. He imagined the rangers would be out in force anyway if they heard a chain saw going near the national park.

When he’d set a store of small branches and twigs next to the tent, and stoked up the flames until they were a couple feet high again and white-hot, Alex returned to sit next to him. She looked older, now, he thought, than when he’d first seen her, in backwards cap and loose clothes. The makeup, he supposed. And maybe the hair. He liked it black—the color was a shock against her otherwise light skin, but in a good way. He didn’t dare say anything though. It occurred to him that if she was found in his tent, there’d be more than just a kidnapping charge leveled against him by the likes of her parents. The thought made his stomach turn.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, after a bit. The sticks crackled and popped in the fire, sending sparks up to disappear in the dark blue sky.

He’s thinking how much he’d like to strip you naked and push those cute little shoulders to the ground,
Malachai said in his head. Joe ignored the intrusion.

“I’d still like to know what happened to you,” he said. “Where you’re from, how you ended up on the side of the road, why you had to dye your hair…”

She turned away from him, and got to her feet. Sticks and dried grass crackled beneath her tennis shoes as she walked to the edge of the tent and looked out into the pitch-black shadows of the tree line just a few yards out.

“I don’t think it’s an unfair question,” he added.

Alex didn’t move for a minute. When she did, her profile seemed to glow in the flickers of the fire.

“I’ll make you a deal,” she said finally. “I’ll tell you my story, but you’ve got to tell me yours. You’re not out here just on a vacation or something, I can feel it.”

“Deal,” he said.

“One more thing,” she demanded, walking back to the fire.

“What’s that?”

“We make a pledge to keep each other’s secrets.”

“No problem.”

She reached into her pants pocket, and pulled something out. A small red pocketknife. She flicked a blade open, and slid the edge across her palm before handing the knife to him.

“We pledge in blood.”

The ring was growing wider now, and she could feel her strength increasing. Soon, she would be able to draw the final razor and with the blood of her final victim, close the knot to open the door.

With every kill, Ariana felt her power increase, and the gap between the worlds grew more transparent. As she stared at the walls in the hotel rooms she killed in, she could see them fade sometimes, and see the movement just beyond. Shadowy, indistinct. But growing stronger. The Curburide were out there, waiting. Their hands reached out to her, their faces begged for release, going in and out of focus like the gasp of an unborn baby in the hazy sights of an ultrasound. She could hear their whispers in her sleep.

“Soon,” they promised. “We will be yours to command. You will be ours to love.”

Sometimes she felt the hair at the back of her neck and the top of her forehead move, as if a cold hand had given her a glancing caress. When she closed her eyes and focused, she could see their fading hands pass across the air before her. Waves and kisses from the other side. Soon, as she drew her net wider, and dedicated more sacrifices to them, she would grow powerful enough to speak with them directly. To see and touch and hold them. To bring them through the veil at last.

After the first kill, she’d experienced an awful doubt, the kind of stifling claustrophobia that left her balled up and crying on the floor, sure that the entire world was watching, and laughing at her foolishness. She
knew
that the police would be at her door at any second, and would find the blood of the Cat Club Bondage-a-Go-Go boy under her nails.

She had trembled there on the floor, imagining how they would track her from a stray hair left on the body, and haul her into a maximum security jail for her crime. She would have gained nothing, would have lost all. And still would have no hard evidence that her beloved Curburide were any more than the figment of a medieval cult’s imagination.

She imagined explaining to them that she was only following the direction of an ancient book that explained how to call the spirits of the afterworld to her command. Ariana had stayed balled up on the floor of her living room all night long that night after her first kill, imagining the laughter of the police. They would stand, a ring of fat, pasty men with facial hair and balding pates, in a circle around her in the sterile white interrogation room, trading barbs at her expense.

But on the day after her first kill, as she lay still crying and immobile in her apartment, wondering what had become of the body she’d flayed in the hotel the night before, the sun had slowly risen, and the street noise grown in its usual cadence before fading again at the end of the day. And the sun had set without any officers coming to her door.

And when she finally stood and rubbed the crusts of salt from her eyes, Ariana had stared at her television and her gut had unknotted along with her smile.

A message had been written in the dust covering the slate gray glass of the slumbering set. It was barely visible in the fading light of sunset, yet its intent was clear.

“Forge the chain,” it said.

“The chain,” according to the ancient text, was a string of six murders, ritually performed in six cities from one end of a nation to its other. The final victim was to be a person of some spiritual consequence, who had communion with demons, and should be sacrificed in a place of power on the highest hill or near the sea.

It hadn’t been hard to plot out the six cities. Since she lived in San Francisco, her path took her across the Southwest and would end up on the East Coast at the Atlantic. The problem had been to find a “person of some spiritual consequence” who could be sacrificed on a hill.

“Thank God for the Internet,” Ariana smiled, pulling on her latex gloves in preparation for a night on the town in Tallahassee.

She knew roughly where her string of murders needed to end. She kept the map with her at all times, with its red circles plotting out the locales of her past and future kills. But while her first five murders could take the blood of anonymous strangers, her last kill had to be someone special. How to find that someone special was the problem. Her coup d’état had to be a person of some power and connection.

Ariana had done searches for metaphysical phenomena centered around the East Coast and joined a dozen newsgroups and discussion groups on the Internet related to witchcraft and demonology, looking for someone of “spiritual consequence” who lived in the vicinity of that last red circle; someone who would be an appropriate victim.

In the end, she found exactly who she needed through a Yahoo chat room. A girl who had been possessed by a spirit just a few months before. Ariana hadn’t actually chatted with the girl herself, but the girl’s brother had proven most informative. He even bragged of having found a book about a covenant struck with that very same possessive spirit, a hundred years before. The boy’s name was Ted, and he lived in a town near the Atlantic, at the foot of a seaside cliff.

A town called Terrel.

Once the sun goes down in the mountains, the glow of the stars can be almost blinding. The tongues of the fire flickered against the dull blue tarp of the tent and the windows of the car, but its light quickly died a few yards in any direction. And not far beyond its reach, the forest began, a tall stand of heavy primeval pines that reached like black pillars into the sky. Overhead, the canopy of black velvet was sprinkled with white dots and murky clouds of star clusters and galaxies a million light years away.

Joe leaned back and sighed, feeling the cold, hard bumps of the earth digging into his back and butt, though he didn’t mind the inconvenience. He’d trade a comfy couch for this in a New York minute. He was out of it. Away from it all. And while he had company in his escape, and the resultant worries that brought, his heart was the calmest it had been in weeks.

Alex sat on the other side of the flames, her face shimmering orange with the reflection of their crackling tongues. She held a long stick, and poked it into the heart of the embers now and then, stirring the sticks to flare up and burn brighter. She still held a tissue to her hand where she’d slit the palm to invoke a blood promise. Now she was keeping her end of the bargain.

“I’m sensitive,” she explained, raising her eyes from the fire to gauge Joe’s reaction. They looked black instead of blue in the shadows. “And I don’t mean, like, crybaby sensitive. When I was little, I used to always tell my mom not to step on the man, and she would freak out.”

“The man?” Joe asked.

“Yeah. I could see people who weren’t there. Old shadows, ghosts, I don’t know. But I got nervous ‘cuz my mom always seemed to be pushing them and stepping on them. They never said anything or complained, but I thought she ought to watch where she was going. At first, she thought I just had a big imagination. But she could see how I would walk down the hall or through the kitchen or wherever, and suddenly swerve to walk around something. Something she couldn’t see. After awhile, it started to creep her out, and she’d spank me for lying.”

“ ‘There’s no one there,’ she’d say, and paddle my butt with a wooden spoon until I agreed with her.”

“Was it just in your house that you saw these people?”

“Oh no—I saw them everywhere. At church, in the store. The world I lived in seemed a lot more crowded than my parents’ world! There were some that I could barely make out, and others that looked almost solid. And some I only saw once or twice, while some of them hung around all the time. There was a girl named Stacy who came around a lot in my backyard to play on the swing set with me.”

“So they would talk to you?”

“Some of them. But there were others that didn’t even seem to see me.”

Alex stared into the flames and her voice dipped lower and lower as she talked about the ghosts.

“Do you still see them?” Joe asked.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “But not unless I really try. After awhile, my mama spanked me every time I said I saw someone who ‘wasn’t there’ and so I started trying
not
to see them.”

“Do you think she believed that you saw something?” Joe asked. “Or was she just afraid of what she knew you were tapping into?”

“Oh, she knew I saw something,” Alex affirmed. “She was scared to death of it, too. You have to understand, my parents were strict Baptists. It was all about work and worship with them. And they didn’t want a daughter prone to flights of fancy. Mama managed to keep the whole thing a secret from my dad for a long time. He was always working in the fields during the summer, and in the winters he’d hire himself out as a handyman as often as possible. So if he wasn’t caring for our own crops and animals, he was miles away, helping with someone else’s. Raising the kids was woman’s work, and a girl child wasn’t what he was interested in anyway, so he didn’t pay that much attention to me early on.

“I remember one of the first times I mentioned the others to him. I must’ve been about four, and he was actually sitting in the parlor, reading the newspaper. One of the house’s regular ghosts, an old man named Jack, was leaning over my dad, staring at the newspaper over his shoulder. I was playing with my dolls on the floor, and I kept looking at my dad and giggling, because Jack’s face was right there next to my dad’s, only fuzzier, less distinct. And Jack kept reaching for the edge of the newspaper, trying to turn the pages himself. My dad was reading the news and business sections, and Jack wanted to get to the sports section.”

“‘What are you laughing at,’ my dad said after a while, looking at me over his bifocals. ‘I’d like some peace and quiet to read the paper, young lady.’

“I wasn’t afraid to tell him exactly why I’d been laughing. ‘Jack is looking over your shoulder, Daddy,’ I said. ‘He says he wants to know how the Cardinals are doing. What are Cardinals, Daddy?’

“My dad’s face got white. ‘Cardinals are birds. Who’s Jack?’ he asked.

“ ‘He’s a nice old man, Daddy,’ I said. ‘You should say hi.’

“My dad didn’t think any of this was at all funny. ‘Carol!’ he yelled, and my mom came hustling around the corner from the kitchen. ‘Your daughter seems to think there’s a man named Jack living with us. Would you care to tell me what’s been going on around here while I’ve been away?’

“My mom was pissed. She balled up the dish towel she had in her hands and pointed upstairs. ‘To your room, Alexandra,’ she said. ‘Now.’ I remember the whole thing so clearly. Because that’s when the bad times really started. I grabbed my Barbies and ran up the stairs. But I could still hear my parents. I heard my mom saying something about me ‘seeing ghosts’ and my dad asking ‘how long has this been going on’ and ‘when were you planning to tell me?’

“I didn’t realize how much my momma had been protecting me until that day. But from that moment on, if I made any mention of the people who shared our house with us, or stepped out of the way of a ghost that no one else could see while we were out in town, at the store or whatever, my dad showed no mercy. He grabbed me by the shoulders, bent me over his knees and paddled my ass with his hand or anything else that was convenient.

“ ‘We will have no witches under this roof, do you understand, young lady?’ he’d say. My momma didn’t do anything but stand there and watch. I hated her for that. But I got really good at hiding what I saw from both of them. If I said or did anything that indicated I’d been talking to or playing with the others, I got a beating. And so I only talked to them in my room after dark. Sometimes my friend Becca would come to me then, and play dolls with me. And afterwards, she’d climb in bed with me and help me go to sleep.”

Alex looked off into the darkness of the woods, her eyes shimmering with tears. “I haven’t seen Becca in so long. Not since the exorcism.”

“Exorcism?” Joe asked. “Your parents actually brought in a priest to banish the spirits?”

“Not a priest,” she said. “My dad did it himself. He was scared to death that someone else would find out about his daughter, the witch. He couldn’t imagine that the ability to see ghosts could be anything but evil and the ghosts anything but demons. So he bought a book about demonology and exorcisms, and one night, when I was sitting in my room, playing dolls with Becca, he slammed open the door and stomped into the room.

“ ‘Are you talking to one of them?’ he asked, and his face was beet-red angry. ‘Don’t you dare lie to me,’ he warned, and I nodded. Becca started to cry next to me, and I reached out to pat her on the shoulder, even though I couldn’t feel her. ‘Don’t you touch it, child,’ he yelled, and grabbed me by my hair, yanking me to my feet. My mom appeared behind him in the doorway, but as usual, she didn’t say or do a thing. My hair was really long back then, and he held it up in the air for her to see, motioning at it with his free hand. It felt like he was going to pull it all out by its roots, and I began crying and clawing at his arm to release me.

“ ‘This is the culprit,’ he said, pointing at the orange knot of hair sticking out of his fist. ‘I read it in the book. Witches can be known by the orange of their hair and their frequent conversations with the invisible. You have birthed a witch, woman.’

“ ‘She’s just a child,’ my mom finally said in my defense, and he just snarled at her. ‘Get the book. We are going to rid our house of her demons right now.’

“My momma disappeared and came back a minute later with the book. My dad didn’t let go of my hair the whole time, and Becca clung to my leg and kept saying, ‘I’m sorry’ over and over. ‘Get the white candle,’ he demanded, ‘and the vial of holy water.’ He asked for a bunch of things, and when my momma had brought them all, he shoved me down on the floor and demanded that I stay there. Then, with his foot on my chest holding me down, he began saying a bunch of funny-sounding stuff from the book, Latin I’m guessing now, and waving the lit white candle around the room. When he reached the end of the words, his face seemed to grow larger and larger to me, and his voice boomed through the room. I’ll never forget what happened next.

“ ‘In the name of the Lord God Jesus Christ, I command all those spirits who lack the anchor of flesh to leave this place, never to return. From my house I banish thee, from my life I banish thee, from all corners of the earth I banish thee. I command thee to release your hold on this mortal coil and follow the road you’ve strayed from back to where you belong. By the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I banish thee to hell.’ ”

“All around me I suddenly heard the most unearthly screams and screeches, and I saw Becca rise up from the floor into the air, her mouth open wide and her eyes rolling back to white. She was growing hazy and stretched, almost like a wax candle that has begun to slide and melt. Her screams filled my head and deafened me, and I screamed out myself. Then she was gone, and the rest of the house fell silent and my father slammed the book shut.

“ ‘Are they gone?’ he asked. I was crying harder and rolling up into a ball, but he yanked me off the floor by my hair again. ‘Tell me the truth,’ he yelled again. ‘Are they gone?’

“ ‘Yes, Daddy,’ I said. ‘You killed them.’

“He smiled and nodded at my mother, but now I really began to cry in earnest.

“ ‘You killed all of my friends,’ I screamed.

“He grabbed me with both hands by my waist and threw me into my bed. ‘From now on you play with real friends, and not these devils,’ he said. ‘I find another devil in my house, and I’ll do to you what I just did to them.’ ”

Alex stopped talking, and Joe studied her face as she wiped away tears from her eyes and looked down into the flames. It was a wild story, but given his own tale, he couldn’t completely doubt her. It was also a troubling tale in a way he couldn’t completely put his finger on. What were the chances that a man haunted by a demon would pick up a hitchhiker plagued by ghosts?

“So you never saw Becca again?”

She shook her head. “Nope. Or Stacy or Jack. Or any of the others that had kept me company around the house and backyard for years. My house was like a prison to me after that day. There was no one to talk to, no one to play with. I still saw ghosts when we went shopping at the supermarket, or walking along the roadways in town, but I was careful never to talk to them. I knew my dad would kill them—and me—if he saw me talking to them. So things were pretty quiet for a couple years.”

“You still see them, then?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” she said. “But I’ve learned to block them out. Lately there’s only been one that I’ve talked to, and most of the time, until recently, I could only hear him.”

“You can’t see him?” Joe asked. “Isn’t that a little strange?”

“I couldn’t see him before, because he was far away,” she said.

“But you can see him now?” Joe asked, propping himself up on an elbow.

Alex nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “He’s standing right behind you. His name’s Malachai.”

Gotcha,
a voice laughed in Joe’s head.