The Devil of Echo Lake (27 page)

Billy followed.

Watching her pace across the catwalk intoxicated and holding the knife made him deeply uneasy, but as they approached the bedroom, he felt the disquieting sensation increasing at just the moment when seeing her on safer footing should have eased it. Something wasn’t right. It was the light. A dim illumination flickered through the white curtain, shifting the tone of the canvas through a range of muted hues. Candle light. He had left no candles burning here, in his private space. What new game was this?

He almost told her to stop, to wait, as if some physical danger must lie on the other side of the curtain, something that even the razor-sharp knife in her hand could not defend against. But he said nothing. He watched as she parted the veil, needing to know.

She hesitated, taking in the room he could not yet see beyond her. Turning to face him, she asked, “Who are these people?”

Billy stepped through beside her, and saw Jim and Kate looking back at him across the gulf of years. Twin shrines flanking his unkempt bed. Kate was looking over her shoulder, caught in the candid instant before noticing the camera pointed at her. She had always been camera shy, so he’d had just a few photos of her, each acquired on the sly, and all lost in the house fire, along with the woman herself.

He remembered taking this one. The humidity of the summer day on the porch, the yellow jackets hovering in the rose bush by the mailbox. Her placid inscrutable eyes, so soft on that day, somehow managed to pierce him right through here and now. This picture could not be here. He looked again at Jim’s photo, this one not candid at all—tie-dyed t-shirt obscured by a big, red disposable cup of keg beer in one hand, face so overly stern and serious as to be comical, chest puffed out, stomach held in for the shot, a prince in the castle they had once shared.

Heat overwhelmed him, flushing into his ears and cheeks from some eternal source, ever at the ready, flooding his eyes with tears in an instant, shattering the unframed photos into splinters of refracted candle light. Suddenly it was all here with him in this unexpected defenseless moment: the profound emptiness at the core of his body, the sorry burden of abandonment and betrayal. Unfinished business.

Worst of all, the firm knowledge that he had gotten what he wanted all those years ago by casting these friends from his heart like worthless cargo from a ship caught in a gale. The treasures he had found on the other shore had been worthless in his isolation. And he had raised anchor again, kept on moving. From the day Trevor Rail had set his course, he had kept on moving. But it was all catching up with him now.

Who had put these pictures here? Was it the ghost who haunted this place? He didn’t think so. This smelled like Rail.

Without thinking about what he was doing, he plucked up the photos, walked over to his acoustic guitar perched on the chair in the corner and slipped them between the strings into the sound hole where he wouldn’t have to look at them. Where they would be safe.

“Who are they?” Rachel asked again.

“Friends I lost. I told you about Jim.”

“And her? Was she your girlfriend?”

He nodded. “Her name was Kate.”

“They’re both dead?”

“Yes.”

“Who put them here?”

“I think maybe Rail. He’s been fucking with my head for a long time.”

“That’s pretty sick. You two have some old feud?”

Billy laughed. “I guess you could say that.”

“He said he produced
Eclipse
, right?”

“Yeah. A lot of those songs were about her. Even if I didn’t know it at the time.”

“That CD saved my life.”

He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time since they had entered the room, maybe for the first time since she had entered his life. He said, “Then maybe we’re even.”

“My step-father used to rape me. By the time I was sixteen I couldn’t feel anything.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Then I heard your song ‘Empty Vessel’ on the radio, in a parking lot, and for four minutes and twenty-eight seconds I could feel
everything
. I can’t tell you how many times I played that CD.”

He reached out to touch her wrist. She let him. Scar tissue under his fingers.

She said, “I found out everything I could about you. It opened a lot of doors I didn’t know were there. Other bands, books, people like me.”

“It’s good to hear it helped somebody.”

“It did. And not just the music, but the artwork, the images. It taught me to look under the surface of things. Everything my mother ever wanted is worthless in the end. No meaning at all in it, all that materialistic crap. But you taught me to celebrate death, because it’s the ultimate truth for everyone. And everyone denies it.”

“I don’t know if I ever meant to teach anyone that.”

“Well, you did. And I’m better off for it, because knowing it and facing it, I can finally
live
.”

“Is that why you got the tattoo? To celebrate death?”

“Yeah. You like it?”

He touched the Ouija board on her belly. “It’s pretty intense. You ever use it?”

“Sometimes. That’s what this is for,” she said, touching the teardrop shaped silver and glass pendant that dangled from her black silk choker.

“Does it work?”

“The first time we ever tried it, me and my friend Christine, we called up my Aunt Judy. She’s the only one who ever gave a shit about me. It works. Better than a regular Ouija board because, when you think about it, it’s written in blood and pain, not just ink.” She bit her lip.

“I want to try it.”

He wasn’t sure what response he expected from her, but when she didn’t answer, just clawed at her shirt and crossed her ankles, he realized he had asked for something more personal than sex.

“Who do you want to talk to?” she asked, “Kate?”

Billy hadn’t even considered the possibility and the idea chilled him. “No. Someone I’ve never really met. Her name is Olivia. She haunts this place.”

“Really? There’s a ghost here?”

“They say she was a witch. Or people thought so, anyway. They say she walked with the Devil in the woods out there.”

“You’re not lying to me, are you, Billy? Making shit up?”

“Just telling you what I heard. I know it sounds like a campfire story, but I’ve heard her play the piano, believe it or not.”

“I believe you.”

“And I caught a glimpse of her on the night you followed me, the night we met in the forest. She wanted me to see something, but I don’t know why. And I need to know. I need to ask her, and I can’t just wait around for her to come calling. Not anymore.”

“Why’s it so urgent?”

“Because I’ve been talking to devils.” He breathed a short laugh. “Crazy, right? Even you must know that’s crazy. A dead Aunt is one thing, but…”

“Yeah, you might want to keep that one in Siouxsie’s cupboard at your next interview.”

Billy smiled. “Well, between you and me, I think it’s time I talked to someone else who might know the Devil. Someone who can tell me what the hell’s going on here. Because I’m just lost.”

“And you think Olivia can help you.”

“Maybe. Are you game?”

She set the
tanto
down on the bed and touched the pendant in the hollow of her throat again. She lifted it, kissed it lightly, and asked, “Where do you want to do it?”

He led her to the grand piano and put the hood down. He laid a horse blanket over the black lacquered surface and asked her how it worked. She told him she would need candles and some massage oil or other lubricant for the pendant to move freely.

Billy went downstairs to rummage through the drawers and cabinets. When he returned carrying three candles in glass jars (he didn’t want to touch the votives that had appeared with the photos) and a bottle of olive oil, she was stark naked except for her rings, studs, and choker pendant. He studied the tattoo: an arch of black letters above her navel, a line of numbers below, the sun on the underside of her right breast with the word YES, and the moon on the left with the word NO.

Billy lit the candles and placed them on the piano. He turned off the green-shaded banker’s lamp and watched Rachel lift herself onto the blanketed piano, where she stretched out on her back among the candles. She released the glass teardrop from the choker and placed it in Billy’s hand.

“This is the planchette,” she said. “Oil me up so it can glide.”

Billy rubbed a thin glaze of olive oil over her pale skin from her hips to her breasts. He set the silver filigree framed teardrop on her, just above her navel, point upward toward her face. It was coming back to him now, how this was done on a normal board. Some people called them ‘witchboards,’ he recalled. His arms broke out in gooseflesh as he placed his fingertips on the base of the instrument and Rachel placed hers on the sides where it narrowed to a point.

She said, “The motion can be intentional at first to get it started. Guide it in a circle around the center like this. Just relax, and when you’re ready, ask a question. If she’s here, it will start to move by itself and we just hold on lightly.”

The planchette traced an orbit around her belly, gliding easily on the thin film of golden oil. The church was dead quiet. In time, the circle widened, and the letters and numbers were magnified by the glass eye as it passed over them.

Billy cleared his throat and said, “Olivia Heron. I want to talk with you. Are you here?”

The planchette shot out of the circular pattern in a straight line to Rachel’s right breast, stopping with the silver point aimed at the stylized sun face and the word YES.

“Did you play the organ in this church when you were alive?”

The planchette slid back a few inches along the path it had traveled, then returned to YES.

He still wanted to test this with something Rachel couldn’t know. “What notes did you play for me on the piano?”

The planchette guided their hands to the letter D, then moved along the arch of letters, dwelling on each one long enough to emphasize it before glossing over others to pause at the next, spelling out D-E-A-D. Billy reduced the pressure of his own fingers on the planchette as it moved, trying not to influence it, and almost losing touch entirely under the speed of travel. A frisson of excitement tingled through him as the glass eye settled again on the final D.

“Are the stories true? Were you a witch?”

The planchette returned to an aimless revolution around the center of the tattoo.

“Were you accused of witchcraft and murdered for it?”

The planchette shot forward to point at YES again, this time jabbing its silver point into the underside of Rachel’s breast. She breathed a short cry that Billy couldn’t differentiate—pain, pleasure, surprise, or all three?

“Why did you want me to follow the tracks? Why did you lead me to that place in the woods?”

The lens moved over the letters: TREE.

“The tree by the pool in the clearing? Did they hang you from that tree?”

NO.

“I don’t understand. What about the tree?”

ASHES.

“Ashes. Did they burn you?”

YES.

“Tell me about the creature I met in the clearing. The face I saw in the pool. Who is he?”

MY LORD.

“Is he the Devil?”

OLDER.

“What does he want?”

TO PLAY.

“Is he good or evil?”

The planchette glided to the cleft between Rachel’s breasts, the space between sun and moon.

“The pictures I found in this church tonight; did you bring them here? Do you know my friends from… the other side?”

The planchette circled before drifting over to the moon on Rachel’s left breast and the word NO.

In a quieter voice, directed at Rachel, Billy said, “I don’t know if I’m asking the right questions. Does it matter how you phrase them?”

She didn’t answer. He looked up at her face in the candlelight. Her eyes were closed, lids fluttering lightly as if she were in REM sleep. The gentle undulation of the tattoo with her breathing had grown deep and slow but her fingers still touched the planchette, her hands still hovered above her flesh.

Billy asked, “The man who works with me here, the one named Rail, do you serve him?”

In answer, a revolution away from and back to NO.

“Did you ever know him before we came here?”

Another revolution ending at NO.

“Thank you,” Billy said, relaxing the set of his shoulders, lifting his fingers from the planchette and expelling a quivering exhalation. “That’s what I needed to know.”

Rachel’s hand seized his wrist in a grip so powerful his circulation was instantly cut off, his hand going numb as fear flooded him. Her eyes shot open, no longer hers, wild and intense, feral and feline. She spoke in a voice that was also not her own, the timbre of an entirely different set of vocal chords, the words accented with a dialect he couldn’t quite place.

“He followed me to the sacred grove. John Van Buren followed me there, though he had a wife, he watched me always, and he did see my prayers and offerings to the ancient one.”

Billy felt chilled to the bone, as if his thundering heart was pumping all of the blood right out of him onto the piano and the floor.

“When I would not lay with him, he claimed I was a sorceress, that I had afflicted him with demons. ’Twas slander and libel, and some knew it. No witch had been hanged since the law of the Crown held sway. But they feared me and hated more than they feared. Hags and their cruel masters. They hanged me and burned my body to ash.”

Rachel's nails bit into Billy's wrist, and he struggled to breathe through a throat constricted with fear.

“No consecrated ground for my flesh. No burial at all. They feared that I would blight the crops if I touched the earth. So they fashioned a globe of glass, a witchball, and sealed my ashes within, never to mingle with earth or wind, never again to lie with the Lord of Beasts, never to rest in rain, dirt and dew.”

“What do you want from me?” Billy whispered.

“I hunger for life, for sensation. I scavenge where it spills out its heat. I have feasted this night where the one who treads the serpent path lays the joker in a shallow grave, but it avails me not. I yearn to ride the wind, to kiss the earth, to tremble in the reed pipe. And you, kindred soul have come to free me from the hollow tree where I am bound. You must release me!”