The Seventh Stone (52 page)

“
I’m looking for the Black Magic Woman,” Braydon shouted over the guitar riff.

The hippie straightened up, his eyes suddenly clear and focused on them. He depressed a button on the ‘sixties vintage, manual cash register. The cash drawer opened with a ringing clang. The hippie pulled something out. He thrust it towards them. Braydon reflexively yanked Christa behind him. The hippie clenched a handgun, looked like a M1911 Remington single action, semi-automatic, standard issue handgun in Viet Nam. “I don’t want to do this, man,” the hippie said.

“
Then don’t,” said Braydon, adrenaline zinging into his system. He was nearly one hundred percent sure that he could get the drop on this older, drug-addled threat, but killing him wouldn’t get them any closer to the Abraxas stone, and winging him would put Christa in more danger.

“
She said you would come. She told me if anyone else came looking for her, I should kill them,” the hippie said, visibly disturbed, his voice as shaky as the hand holding the gun.

Christa stepped out from behind him, her arms outstretched. “Joseph of the Circle of Seven sent us,” she said. “He told me to tell you this. A brave man dies but once, a coward many times.”

The hippie narrowed his eyes. He was either drawing a bead on Braydon’s forehead, or struggling to wrap his mind around Joseph’s message. He relaxed his stance just enough that Braydon could make out the peace sign tattooed on the inside of his elbow, where he might have shot up heroin in the day. “You’re too late,” he said. “The black magic woman took him to the Abraxas. He thinks he will find the stone, but he will only find his end.”

“
She took whom?” asked Christa, worry honing her voice.

The hippie shook his head, lowered the gun to his waist. “The man with blood in his eyes. He boasted that he had battled the hounds of hell and lived. He said he would snap every bone in my body, from small to large, until I told him where to find the Abraxas. He was a giant of a man. He could do it, and he would, he told me, to save our country.”

“
Rambitskov,” Braydon seethed. “He beat us here. And he’s probably got Stonington.” Which explains the bloody hand on the Stonington’s car window.

“
The little guy,” Adam said, “in the fine suit.”

“
Sounds like Stonington,” said Braydon.

The hippie’s grip on the pistol loosened even more. With his free hand, he toyed with the love beads around his neck. “The first horse of the Apocalypse rides a white horse, the horse of Conquest. It can be the conquest of good, or of evil.”

Braydon lunged forward. He snatched the pistol from the hippie’s hand. “I’m putting my chips on good,” he said. He checked the gun’s magazine. Empty. He looked at the hippie. “No bullets. I guess you are, too.” He set the gun down on top of the glass display case.

Christa stepped forward. “You’ve got to take us to the Abraxas, now.”

“
The man before you fell under the spell of Basillades,” said Adam. “He failed in getting the Abraxas from her. What makes you think you will succeed?”

“
Because we have to,” said Braydon.

The hippie’s face was ashen. “I can’t see any more death, whole villages wiped out,” he said. “I can’t.”

“
Whole villages wiped out,” said Christa. “That’s the same words Salvatierra wrote in his letter about Alvaro Contreras ravaging the Muisca Indians.”

“
This guy isn’t reliving the times of the conquistadors,” said Braydon. Then again, in a sense, he was, just on a global scale, but Braydon didn’t want to completely blow the old hippie’s mind. “This time, you can stop it, Adam,” he said. He pointed to the television. “This isn’t Nam. It’s New York. Children are dying. You can save them if you help us.”

“
You have not seen the Abraxas,” he said. He hugged his arms across his chest. His eyes were darting back and forth. “You don’t know its power, man.”

“
You’re a guardian,” said Braydon. “One of the Circle of Seven. Your uncle chose you because he knew you could protect the Abraxas stone.”

“
My uncle didn’t choose me as guardian,” said Adam. “It was supposed to be my cousin. He died in Nam. He was killed because I didn’t cover his back. They were coming in to napalm that village. He went to save this kid. I tried to stop him. I was scared, man. Then the jets come. No more village. No more cousin.” Adam grew more agitated. His hands shook. He paced back and forth behind the confines of the display counter. His hand dove back into the cash register drawer. Braydon tensed, but Adam was only getting a joint. He stuck it between his lips, snatched a lighter from beside the cash register, and lit it with trembling fingers. He breathed the smoke in deeply, closed his eyes. When he spoke, smoke came out in puffs with the words. “This isn’t my destiny,” he said. “I didn’t ask for this.”

Braydon lunged across the glass case and grabbed Adam by the scruff of his t-shirt. “I didn’t ask for this, either,” he said, “but some crazy guy poisoned
our
city and
our
villages this time. And the only way to save them is for you to lead us to the Abraxas. Your cousin’s death, all your buddies in Viet Nam, they fought for nothing if you don’t help us now. This is the only way to save your country.”

“
That’s what the other guy told me,” he said. “You know what I did.”

Christa sidled around to the back of the display case. She lifted the needle off The Doors record on the phonograph. The silence brought relief. Jim Morrison had gotten to the part where the minor chords could mesmerize even a sober listener into wanting to escape into a drug-induced unreality. Christa laid her hand gently on the hippie’s arm. “Knowledge isn’t persecution,” she said. “It is redemption. Take us to the Abraxas.”

The hippie looked up at her, then out the window towards the street. His gaze focused on the stepped base of the Transamerica pyramid. From this angle, he could only see the angled girders of the ground floor anchoring the forty-nine floors tapering to a point above. “Beneath the pyramid is a tomb,” he said. “All who enter it are cursed.”

“
It wouldn’t be the first time,” said Braydon. “And I’m going to make damn sure it’s not the last. In the past two days, I’ve been shot at, chased by phantoms, nearly crushed beneath a cathedral, half drowned in a flash flood, and attacked by Skinwalkers. I’m not giving up now.”

Adam worried his love beads. “And you survived all that,” he said. “Far out, man.”

“
Sort of like a miracle,” said Braydon, “if you want to think of it that way.”

“
So you believe this is part of God’s plan,” said Adam.

“
I believe this is part of God’s nap,” said Braydon. “And I wish He’d wake up.”

“
But He saved you,” said Adam. “So He could save me.”

Braydon hadn’t thought about their calamities being a godsend, but, he had to admit, the phantoms, the flood, the Skinwalkers, all of it actually did save them, brought them here, to this place. “Listen, we’re not here for a rap session, Adam,” he said. “If we don’t get that Abraxas, a lot of good people will die.”

Adam gestured for them to follow him. He led them to a storeroom in the back, then to a steel door. Adam shifted a pile of beat up boxes. Behind them, on the wall, was a keypad. Braydon watched as Adam punched in the code, 666, the sign of the beast. Easy to remember, at least. The door opened to a set of metal stairs descending a good twenty feet, one landing halfway down. Braydon couldn’t shake an ominous feeling of dread, and it wasn’t only that he was building up to a severe case of claustrophobia.

Adam led the way down the stairs from the back of his record store. Braydon followed his trail of marijuana smoke, trying not to breathe in too hard. This situation was whack enough without being stoned.

At the bottom of the stairs, the passageway reminded him of an underground bunker, a fall-out shelter of gray cement walls dimly lit with caged bulbs every fifteen feet. It bent at a right angle ahead, then another. The cement floor was slick with moisture. A damp chill pervaded. He and Christa followed as Adam’s Birkenstocks scuffed around the corner ahead.

A howl, followed by a scream, reverberated down the passageway. Christa slid to a stop. So did Braydon. He strained his ears, but could hear only the patter of Adam’s footsteps getting further away. Then, something else, at first low, hard to hear, a chanting. Although they hadn’t moved, the chanting grew louder.

Braydon slipped his gun quietly from his holster. He stepped in front of Christa, moved forward cautiously, gun first. Over the chanting, he heard Christa breathing hard and fast behind him. No, it wasn’t her. It was him. A terror like none he had ever experienced gripped his gut. A giant fist was squeezing the air from his lungs. He wanted nothing more than to turn back. The chanting grew louder, faster. It was a rhythm of harsh, unfamiliar syllables, repeated, over and over.

The passageway turned another corner. He came around the edge of it to find Adam, standing stock still in the passageway. Not ten feet ahead, it opened to a low-ceilinged room. The faint scent of old ash, from fires of long ago, wafted towards him, along with another, more acrid, more disturbing odor of something smoldering. The chamber was lit with torches, the light dancing on the walls, playing with the shadows. One thing was distinctive, the charred, curved timbers forming the periphery of the chamber. It was the skeleton of the hull of the Niantic.

Adam was trembling. “I can take you no further,” the hippie said. “It’s up to you to get the Abraxas now.”

Braydon edged by Adam to get a better look inside the chamber. He wished he hadn’t.

Stonington, or what was left of him, hung from an old iron loading hook in the middle of the chamber. His face was grimaced in agony and stiff with death. His chest had been stripped bare. Red marks covered his torso. The burning odor had come from Stonington’s seared flesh. A group of seven monk-like figures in white robes circled around him, hooded heads pointed down, their chanting fading now. A large man in a red robe stood by Stonington’s body. His right fist clenched a cattle prod. It was Rambitskov. A sickening nausea roiled in Braydon’s gut. Rambitskov hadn’t reacted to their presence, although he was staring right at them. The man’s eyes were bloodshot and unblinking. Rambitskov had been drugged, or hypnotized, or traumatized, perhaps beyond repair.

Braydon retreated a step. “Fall back,” he whispered to Christa. He couldn’t let her in there. He couldn’t even let her see in there. “We’re not going in without backup.”

An eighth monk in white stepped towards them from the far wall. He aimed a gun at them, a Sig Sauer P 229, probably Rambitskov’s.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said from behind him. Braydon turned back to see that Adam, too, held a gun, a .45. “But unlike that relic in my cash register, this gun is most definitely loaded.” Adam backed up three steps, out of range of Braydon’s fist, which he most definitely wanted to punch through the hippie’s face. “Do not anger her by attempting escape,” Adam added.

A black-robed woman came beside the monk with the gun. She lifted her hood and let it fall upon her shoulders. Her face was wrinkled with age, but her hair was jet black, bangs cut straight and sharp at her brow line. Her eyes were outlined in kohl, like an Egyptian. Her lips were flaming red. A woman like that refused to accept her mortality, a dangerous attitude, especially if she believed, like some ancient cannibal, that killing others would imbue her with renewed vigor.

She held a small, black box in her hand. It had four buttons. She pushed the top one. A steel panel started sliding shut, slicing off the passageway between Christa and their escape route. Christa twisted around, and lunged towards the closing panel. She grabbed the edge of it with her fingers. She yanked them away as the door slid shut with a metallic clash.

“
I am Bassillades,” the woman in black said. “You seek Abraxas, the all powerful one, the ruler of life and death. You cannot run from what you seek.”

CHAPTER
61

Braydon had confronted crazies before, put his share of them behind bars, but this woman calling herself Bassillades wasn’t crazy. She was, simply, evil. The intent to kill, just for the pleasure of it, glimmered in her eyes, along with raw intelligence. He half expected her to tell him that resistance is futile. He half expected she’d be right.

He could shoot the monk with the Sig Sauer, kill him instantly with a bullet to the forehead. But that might prompt Adam to pull his trigger. Adam didn’t seem the type to shoot him in the back, but he couldn’t count on that. Even if Adam shot him, he’d have a good chance of spinning around and dropping Adam with a quick shot to the heart. That would leave Christa to wrestle the remote away from black magic woman, press the button, and open the steel panel blocking their escape route. Rambitskov would be slowed down stumbling over his and Adam’s bodies to chase Christa. It might give her enough time to escape. More likely, Rambitskov or black magic woman would overpower her. Worse case scenario, Christa would be taken alive, without him to help protect her. The reek of Stonington’s seared, dead flesh intensified in the confined passageway. Braydon could not gamble with that possibility. He stepped forward into the chamber.

Braydon let Adam take away his gun. Rambitskov advanced menacingly, wielding the cattle prod like a knife, his eyes unseeing, yet seeing all. The black magic woman, Basillades, raised her hand. Rambitskov stopped. The seven monks in the white robes stepped back in unison, their faces still hidden, downcast. They expanded their circle until they had reached the periphery of the chamber, and stood like statues with their backs against the charred timbers.