Covenant (25 page)

She pressed him firmly to the floor and waited. His own blood dripped back down onto his lips, cascading from the jet escaping his throat to dribble impotently down the shiny
black vinyl of her chest. The taste of iron from his blood slipped into his mouth and clouded his last shuddering sight as it pooled in his eye sockets.

“Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” she said with a smile, and licked a spot of blood from her pencil-drawn, smeared whiskers.

“Now you’re done.”

“
They’re coming
.”

The voice was in his head, but that still didn’t prevent Joe Kiernan from answering it out loud. He was alone in the car, and in the middle of nowhere. Nobody was likely to hear.

“What the hell are you talking about now?”

Joe didn’t respond well to the occasional intrusions of Malachai, his indentured spirit. It wasn’t like the invisible demon ever meant him well.

“Who’s coming?” he asked. The irritation oozed from his tone.

“
The Curburide. Somebody is calling them. I can hear it
.”

“And I should care about this because…?” Joe asked, keeping his eyes on the road and his foot on the pedal.

He had miles to go before he slept. Nebraska was a long state. A long, uneventful, incredibly even-planed state. It played tricks on you, as the road unwound straight to the horizon, crossing and recrossing the damned Platte River, as if you were going in a circle, not a line. The Platte River was like the Styx—unless you were Charon, you could never escape crossing it.

“
Because whoever is calling them is strong. They can hear. And
they are answering
.”

“So?” Joe asked. “What am I supposed to do about it?”

“
Nothing
.”

Joe watched the orange-fire tongs reaching low over the
horizon, watched the light stretch and grab one last futile time before fading into a memory of sunset’s oblivion.

“Then why even bother to tell me?” Joe asked again.

“
Because I thought you’d want to know
.”

Joe didn’t say anything.

“
I thought you’d want to know that you don’t have very much
time left to live
.”

The demon in his head began to laugh, louder and louder until Malachai’s invisible power manifested itself physically, cracking the Hyundai’s aging vinyl ceiling until it dripped dusty blood over his head.

Joe sneezed and shook his head in irritation. The demon had a penchant for the dramatic.

“
They’ll kill you and everybody you’ve ever known
.”

Images of Angelica and her daughter, Cindy, flashed before his eyes. He’d left them both behind in his flight from Terrel. It was Malachai’s fault that he had gotten close to each of them, and Joe’s fault that the two women had been brought back together, eighteen years after Angelica had given Cindy up for adoption in a vain hope to save her child from the grasp of the demon.

Thanks to Joe, Angelica’s effort and estrangement had almost been in vain. But in the end, Joe had also saved both of them from Malachai’s enslavement. The demon had held an entire town in thrall, thanks to a century-old covenant. The creature had holed up in Terrel’s Peak, a cliff just outside of the seaport town, and demanded blood sacrifices every year to protect the townsfolk from an even worse fate—an incursion from the Curburide, a howling scourge of sadistic succubi that would have, if they’d had their way, fucked and flayed the flesh from every living being in Terrel. While Malachai had kept his bargain and protected the town from the Curburide, he had also struck a side deal to serve his own sadistic ends. A deal which would have resulted in Cindy’s death, had Joe not managed to uncover the demon’s real name and bind its service to him.

But in saving Cindy from the clutches of the demon Malachai, and also freeing Angelica, Joe had taken on an awful burden. The demon was now locked in servitude to him. The terms of the contract bound Malachai to Joe, and required that he do whatever Joe asked if he was to continue to have access to the earthly realm. One of Joe’s first commands had been that the demon would not harm him or those he loved. But Joe had no doubt that the spiteful creature would do its best to quietly put him in harm’s way, for when Joe was dead, it was unbound again. Free. It would then be able to swindle some other unwitting soul to strike a new covenant. One that would give Malachai all the advantages.

Part of him was ready to grant the demon its freedom. Part of him was ready to just lay down in the center of the road and wait for a semi to come along and cleave him in half. Let it all hang out.

Life hadn’t turned out the way he’d planned. Joe had landed a plum job at the
Chicago Tribune
right out of college, and had taken to big-city reporting like a hound to a rabbit trail. He loved uncovering city hall corruption. He had broken the story about the police superintendent and his connection to the Colombian drug lord, Anabi Urubu. In a matter of months, Joe had put together a network of street kids who traded all sorts of information with him. He’d put the bust on a school principal for child pornography, and gotten a city ward boss put away for his dealings with the mob.

Joe had taken to the game with relish, never realizing that his girlfriend, the woman he intended to marry, was also in bed with the wrong crowd. And one of his exposé pieces on corruption in the district courthouse had landed her in jail for graft and forgery. She’d refused to see him after her indictment, and his fervor for turning over stones had soured. He suddenly didn’t want to know what people hid in their bottom drawers and back rooms. He didn’t want to know who they saw after dark, down by the alley at Eighty-third and Halsted. He didn’t want to do anything but watch his own backyard. Play it safe.

Stay home.

The stories dried up, and his street network disappeared. It only took a couple missed visits to make those kids turn skittish and taciturn. One day, Joe went home from the paper, threw his clothes in a suitcase, his books and CDs and papers in a couple boxes, and got in his car and drove. He’d driven to the end of the world, the East Coast town of Terrel, right on the ocean. Ironically, in his desperation to escape the million minor sins of the big city, after only being in the tiny town of Terrel a few weeks he’d discovered a ring of murders that was bigger than any small-time crack dealer and welfare department grafter. He’d gone from mundane, selfish thievery to malevolence that transcended generations.

He’d lost a thieving girlfriend from his bed and gained a deadly demon in his head. Hardly a bargain.

The last bloody rays of sunlight faded without further conversation, and Joe’s world contracted to a thin ribbon of yellow-striped asphalt. He rubbed his eyes, squinting into the headlight-burned night, and decided to call it a day when a green sign flashed by advertising
OGALLALA
, 2
MILES
. He’d been on the road for nearly twelve hours, and it was time for a rest. He was humming a Creedence Clearwater Revival song when he pulled off the exit and headed for the center of town. The last place he’d gotten gas at hadn’t been big enough to call a “town” in his estimation. It had consisted of a graying general store that seemed more a giant moldering growth on the pavement than a planned structure, a Clark service station with orange, rounded pumps from the 1960s and a tilted rusting grain silo. It was essentially a crossroads where soybean farmers met on Friday nights.

He hoped that Ogallala would prove larger. It appeared as a bold spot on his Nebraska map, which was a good sign.

He was in the “downtown” area in minutes, and pulled up to a small brick façade that boasted in simple blue neon, brill’s. A Budweiser sign glowed in the window.

Joe killed the engine and stepped out of the car into the crisp night air. He hadn’t realized how stuffy the car had gotten until he stepped out of it with a groan of stiff joints. His stomach turned over and he realized that not only was he stiff, but he was starving. He pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped inside.

Brill’s was a good-size bar, with two pool tables off to one side, and a long bar on the other. He could see the grill behind the bar to one side, and a healthy selection of whiskies, vodkas and gins against the center wall.

“Evening.”

The voice was heavy and husky, but friendly. It came from a big man behind the bar, moving out of the shadows and into the red glow of a Pabst Blue Ribbon sign.

“Hi,” Joe said, pulling up a stool at the bar. Only one other stool was taken. A thin, grizzled man nursed something amber over ice at the end of the bar.

“Quiet night, eh?” Joe off ered.

The big man nodded, drying his hands on a stained white towel. Joe saw he’d been washing glasses in a small sink when he’d come in.

“Not much going on here on a Tuesday night,” the man said, and held out a hand.

“Frank,” he said. “Frank Brill. You just off the highway?”

It was Joe’s turn to nod.

“Then you’ll be wanting a meal and a room, yes?”

Joe smiled. “You nailed it.”

“I can handle the one; you’ll find the other about two blocks down. Prescott Hotel. Not a bad place for a night.”

Frank pulled a menu out from beneath the bar and set it in front of Joe.

“You can look at this if you want, and Jenny will rustle up anything from here that you want, but”—he leaned forward conspiratorially, after glancing over his shoulder at the double doors in the back of the grill area— “I’d stick with the hamburger and fries if I was you,” he whispered.

“Done,” Joe said, pushing the menu back. “Got anything on tap?”

“Miller, Bud, Coors,” Frank said. “What can I pull you?”

“MGD,” Joe said, and glanced up at the TV flickering above them in the corner. A female news commentator with overly red lips and smallish eyes was mouthing cheerily as footage of a black bodybag being carried to an ambulance played in a small window next to her sickly happy face.

“You hear about this nutjob?” Frank asked, thumbing at the screen as he pulled a beer from the tap.

Joe shook his head.

“Third stiff they’ve found so far, and each in a different city.”

“New serial killer?” Joe asked, and took a healthy swallow from the heavy pint that Frank passed over.

“Apparently.” The burly barkeep shook his head and grimaced. “If the murders have been in different cities how do they know it’s the same guy?” Joe asked. The beer slid down his throat and took the imaginary dust of a day of travel away.

“Same scenario in each place,” Frank said. “Real freak show. All three bodies have been found in hotels, in rooms rented by a woman with black hair. She apparently picks ’em up at a bar, brings ’em back, strips ’em and then slices their throats. The police aren’t saying what else she does, but it must be pretty twisted, because they’re saying each killing was done exactly the same way. When the second one happened, they knew immediately it was done by the same person. She’s cutting up more ’n just their throats, I’d guess.”

Frank looked away from the TV and called to the back, “Jenny! Burger and fries up!”

“I’ve been on the road the past couple days,” Joe said. “When did this all start?”

Frank picked up a glass near the sink and started toweling it dry with the dirty rag he’d wiped his hands on a moment before.

“San Francisco,” he said. “A week or two ago. Then Phoenix.
This one that they’re talking about was last night. Down in Austin, Texas. Poor schmuck still had some clown makeup left on his face from Halloween.”

“Creepy,” Joe said, and took another swig.

“Make you think twice about who you go home with after last call, that’s for sure,” Frank said, turning away. “Excuse me.”

The bar own er shuffled into the back with a stack of glasses, and Joe noticed the old man at the end of the bar was staring at him. The guy looked at least sixty-five, with long silver-speckled black hair matted around his ears and collar. A two-day growth of beard salt-and-peppered his wrinkled, sunken cheeks. His eyes were black in the low light of the bar, but Joe could see clearly that the man was grinning.

“They’re coming,” the man said, head nodding vigorously. “Oh yes,” he said, getting up from his stool and moving quickly to the exit. His eyes never left Joe as his hands pushed the door open. “They’re coming.”

Joe’s heart leapt.

“Who’s coming?” he asked, but the man was already through the swinging door of the entryway. Joe jumped off his stool and went after the man, pushing through the swinging saloon-style doors and pressing his shoulder to the heavy wooden outer door that he’d come in through.

The air was cooler outside, and the handful of streetlights did nothing to blot out the velvet black sky awash with pinpricks of light. There were a couple cars parked on the Main Street, but the lights in the shop windows on either side of the bar were out, and there was no sign of the old man. The breeze tickled the hair on the back of his neck.

“Who’s coming?” he murmured to himself, and stepped back inside.

In his head, he heard only laughter.

Thanks to Shane Ryan Staley, David Barnett and Charlee Jacob for friendship, critique and encouragement, doled out in appropriate measures when I most needed each.

To my dad for letting me turn his Wisconsin cottage into a writer’s retreat to work on the final revisions of this manuscript, and to my wife Geri for letting me disappear into the world of
Covenant
for days at a time.

To Edward Lee, Gerard Houarner, Michael Laimo, Jasmine Sailing, Brian Keene, Bill Breedlove, Martin Mundt and Kathy Kubik, who have both inspired me with their visions and supported my own.

To Julie Flanders, Emil Adler and the rest of October Project for countless hours of inspirational listening; this book was produced in scattered periods over the course of several years, but one constant was the sound track of October Project music along with healthy repetitions of discs by Tanya Donelly, This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins, Loreena McKennitt, Wild Strawberries, A3, Toad the Wet Sprocket, New Order, the Cure and many more.

And finally, thanks to Cari Laird Jaro, who back in 1994 directly inspired this novel when she pointed out a newspaper clipping about a tavern perched on a cliff that happened to be an incredibly popular spot for suicides. That clipping is long lost, but the idea never left.