Hard Spell (39 page)

  I made myself not break down, or pass out, or change my mind. I made myself continue.

  "Karl, my partner, remember him?"

  "Yeah, sure."

  "He's over there."

  She moved her head slowly and looked. "Is he...?"

  "No, he isn't, not yet."

  She turned back, and stared at me, confused and afraid and in pain.

  I turned to Rachel, who was kneeling close by. She looked at me, then at Christine, then Karl. Then back at me. Biting her lower lip, she nodded.

  I didn't need her permission, I knew that. But I was still glad to see that nod.

  I looked down again at my daughter.

  "Christine, honey..." My throat was clogged, and I had to stop and clear it. "Christine, there's something I want you to do..."

Time passed, as it has a way of doing. I gave depositions to half a dozen law enforcement agencies about certain events taking place at the Scranton Water Authority's pump house on a moonlit night in June.

  I also gave a lengthy deposition to a Grand Jury that was considering whether to indict Rachel Proctor for the murder of two police officers. No indictment was handed down, since the "demonic possession" defense is widely recognized by the law in Pennsylvania, and most other states. Rachel is back at work as a consulting witch to the department. She keeps threatening to turn me into a toad, but she's just kidding around. I think.

  A couple of witchfinders who had been making a nuisance of themselves around Scranton disappeared without a trace. McGuire's received a few palls from their boss, the Witchfinder General. Every time, he tells the WG that he's got no idea what happened to them. The last call, McGuire floated the theory that Ferris and Crane had decided to chuck the witchfinder business and open up a little antique shop in New Hampshire, someplace. Or maybe Delaware.

  I spent four days in the hospital for treatment of severe concussion. I was released under strict doctor's orders to take it easy for a while. That worked out okay, since I spent the next three weeks on administrative leave while giving all those depositions.

  Lacey Brennan came to visit me while I was in the hospital. Twice.

  When the Powers That Be were as satisfied as they were likely to get that I hadn't broken any major laws, I went back to work with the Supe Squad. I've had to make some adjustments in my work schedule, though. Instead of a strict 9pm to 5am routine, McGuire lets me get my shift in between sunset and sunrise, no matter what times those may be. My partner needs to stay out of the sun, and he sleeps during the day, anyway. Despite the weird hours, we're still a pretty good team. We've cleared more than our share of cases, and busted a lot of bad supes.

  I try to get home a little before sunrise every day, work permitting – so I can say "Goodnight" to my daughter before she heads down to the basement of our house for her day's rest.

  Lots of changes, not all of them easy to make – but life is change, and adapting to it is one way of proving to yourself that you're still alive. And being alive feels pretty good.

  My name's Markowski. I carry a badge.

Acknowledgments

Betsy Brown, that most unlikely descendant of Cotton and Increase Mather, helped me avoid a fundamental error concerning these august gentlemen.

  John Carroll, who has been my friend since dinosaurs walked the Earth, was very helpful concerning the details of life in the Wyoming Valley, where I no longer live but Stan Markowski does.

  Karen Case sustained my soul.

  Jean Cavelos, Director of the Odyssey Writing Work shop and sole proprietor of Jean Cavelos Editoral Services, Inc, has the best mind for story development of anyone I've ever met. She was of immense help to me in plotting this novel.

  My agent, the lovely and talented Miriam Kriss of the Irene Goodman Agency, did her usual fine job of contract negotiations.

  Terry Bear's job was providing snack suggestions, a responsibility he fulfilled admirably, as always.

About the Author

Justin Gustainis was born in Northeast Pennsylvania in 1951. He attended college at the University of Scranton, a Jesuit university that figures prominently in several of his writings.

  After earning both Bachelor's and Master's degrees, he was commissioned a Lieutenant in the US Army. Following military service, he held a variety of jobs, including speechwriter and professional bodyguard, before earning a PhD at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

  Mr Gustainis currently lives in Plattsburgh, New York. He is a Professor of Communication at Plattsburgh State University, where he earned the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2002. His academic publications include the book American Rhetoric and the Vietnam War, published in 1993, and a number of scholarly articles that hardly anybody has ever read.His popular series of urban fantasy novels featuring investigator Quincey Morris include
Evil Ways
,
Black Magic Woman
and the forthcoming
Sympathy for the Devil
.

www.justingustainis.com

Extras

An excerpt from
Evil Dark
– the next thrilling Occult
Crimes Unit investigation.

The red circle, which was maybe ten feet across, looked like it had been carefully painted on the concrete floor. The five-pointed star inside it had also been done with care, probably by someone who understood the consequences of getting it wrong. It was easy to see the detail under those bright lights, which would have done credit to any movie set.

  Inside the circle squatted two heavy wooden chairs. One of them was stained and splattered all along its legs and sides with a brown substance. When it was fresh, the brown stuff might have been red – blood red.

  A man sat in each chair. There was nothing remarkable about them – apart from the fact that they were both naked and bound firmly to the chairs with manacles at hands and feet.

  Not far from the chairs stood a cheap-looking table, its wood scarred and pitted. Someone had laid out a number of instruments there, including a small hammer, a corkscrew, a pair of needle-nose pliers, a blowtorch, and several different sizes of knives.

  A man's voice could be heard chanting, in a language that had been old when Christianity was young. This had been going on for several minutes. The men in the chairs sometimes looked outside the circle in the direction of the chanting, other times at each other. The one with dark hair looked confused. The other man was blond and clearly the more intelligent of the two, because he looked terrified.

  Then came the moment when the air in the middle of the pentagram seemed to shiver and ripple. The ripple grew, but never crossed the boundary of the circle. After a while, some thin white smoke began to issue from that shimmering column. Over the next minute, the color of the smoke went from white to gray, then from gray to black. The chanting continued throughout all of this.

  The dark-haired man went suddenly rigid in his chair. He threw his head back as if in great pain, the muscles and tendons in his skin standing out all over his body. This lasted for several seconds. Then, all at once, the man seemed to relax. He looked around the room, and the circle, as if seeing them for the first time. His facial expression was one he hadn't displayed before. It combined cunning and hatred in roughly equal proportions.

  The chanting stopped. Then the voice said a couple of words in that same obscure language. It spoke sharply, as if giving a command.

  The shackles holding the dark-haired man to the chair sprung open, as if by their own accord, and fell clattering to the floor.

  The dark-haired man stood slowly, facing in the direction the voice had come from. He spoke in what sounded like the same language, his voice harsh and guttural. No human voice should sound like that. The voice from outside the circle replied, using the same commanding tone as before. The dark-haired man bowed his head briefly, as if acknowledging the other's authority.

  Then he walked slowly to the table and surveyed the instruments that had been lined up like a macabre smorgasbord. He turned and looked at the blond man, a terrible smile growing on his thin face. Then the dark-haired man picked up from the table the pair of pliers and the blowtorch. After taking a moment to make sure that the blowtorch was wrking, he walked over to the chair where the blond man sat chained, naked and helpless.

  What happened next went from zero to unspeakable in a very few seconds. Soon afterward, it went beyond unspeakable, to a level of horror that there are no words to describe.

  Twelve very long minutes later, the blond man gave one last, agonized scream and escaped into death. I sat there and watched him die.

• • • •

Then somebody must've pressed "Stop," because the screen went mercifully dark. A few seconds later, the lights came on.

  The nine people in the room sat in stunned silence, blinking in the sudden brightness. Then everybody started talking at once.

  There had been eleven people in the room when the DVD started. But there'd been enough residual glow from the big monitor for me to see two tough, experienced police officers quietly leave over the last few minutes, one with a hand clasped tightly over his mouth.

  I was glad nobody would know how close I came to being number three out the door.

  My partner Karl leaned toward me and said softly, "Sweet Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. And people say
vampires
are inhuman."

  "Well, strictly speaking, you are," I told him, just to be saying something.

  "You know what I mean, Stan."

  "Yeah, I do. And I'm not arguing with you, either."

The two FBI agents walked to the front of the room and stood waiting for us to quiet down. They'd been introduced to us earlier, before the horror show started. Linda Thorwald was the senior agent, and she'd done most of the talking so far. She was of average height for a woman and slim, with the ice blue eyes you associate with Scandinavia. Her hair was jet black, and I wondered if she was a blonde who'd had it dyed to increase her chances of being taken seriously in the macho culture of the FBI. People have done stranger things, and for worse reasons.

  Her partner was a guy named McCreery who had big shoulders, brown hair, and a wide mustache that probably had J. Edgar Hoover spinning in his grave. He moved like an athlete, and I thought he might be one of the many former college jocks who find their way into law enforcement once it sinks in that they're not quite good enough for the pros.

  When the room was quiet, Thorwald said, "I regret that I had to subject all of you to that revolting exhibition of sadism and murder. If it's any consolation, I've seen more than one veteran FBI agent lose his lunch either during or immediately after a showing of this… supernatural snuff film."

  Snuff films are an urban legend, probably started by the same kind of tight-ass public moralists who used to rant about comic books destroying the nation's moral fiber. But the myth made its way into popular culture, and stayed there. There's been plenty of counterfeit ones made over the years, with sleazeballs using special makeup effects to rip off the pervs who think torture and murder are fun. These days, you can see stuff like that at your local multiplex. It's all fake, but I still wouldn't want to know anybody who was a fan. If I'm going to hang out with ghouls, I prefer the real kind – they can't help what they are.

  There have been some serial killers who took video of their victims to jerk off over between kills, but that was for their own private use. If by "snuff film" you mean a commercially available product depicting actual murder, then there's no such thing.

  Or rather, there wasn't. Until now.

  "I wanted you all to see that video," Thorwald said, "because it's important that you understand what we're up against, and what the stakes areCopies of that DVD have surfaced within the last month in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and, uh–" She turned to her partner.

  "Baltimore," he said.

  "–and Baltimore," she went on. "But the Bureau has been interested in this case for longer than a month. Quite a bit longer."

  Thorwald took a step forward. "You know that expression, 'I've got good news and bad news?' Well, I'm afraid I don't have any good news to offer you today. Instead, I bring bad news, and worse news. Charlie?"

  I could almost see the two of them rehearsing this act in their hotel room last night. The whole thing had a stagy quality that was getting on my nerves. Of course, after what I'd just witnessed, my nerves were pretty damn edgy already.

  "The bad news," McCreery said, "is that what you just saw isn't the first video depicting this kind of torture-murder. I mean, one apparently carried out by a demon that's been conjured and then allowed to 'possess' an innocent party."

  That must've been the dark-haired man we'd just seen. He hadn't done all those awful things to the blond guy – the demon who'd taken him over had done it, using his body as an instrument.