Sacrifice (7 page)

“Now!”

She wheezed in fast, sharp gasps, but tried to reach around behind her back to grab at the zipper. Her hand stopped short, and she cried out in pain.

Jeremy flipped her around by her shoulder and yanked the zipper down himself.

Tears and blood streaming down her face, Ariana peeled the vinyl from her body, at last standing hunched and naked before the man who was supposed to be her victim.

He put his hand under her chin and raised her face to look at his.

“You look as good as I thought you would,” he said, admiring the pink knobs of her nipples and the tight, flat plane of her belly. With his other hand, he ran a fingernail between her breasts, and down to the short dark triangle of her sex.

“You picked the wrong guy to night, honey,” he said. “I’ve been pushed around one too many times. You pulled the last straw.”

“It wasn’t personal,” she whispered.

“Neither is this,” he said, equally as soft, but with a tone of steel. “But now we’re gonna do what we came here to do.”

“You set me up!” Joe said out loud, as he stalked around the edge of the campsite, looking for a semihidden place to let loose. The demon answered by singing in his head:

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me a match…

“What’s your deal here?” Joe railed, crying out to the still, black sky. “What is she supposed to do to me? Or make me do?”

Find me a find, catch me a catch…

Joe unzipped a few yards to the rear of the tent and sent a stream out to water the ferns in front of him.

“I’m serious, Malachai. Tell me why you brought us together. What’s going on?”

I’m in no rush, maybe I’ve learned. Playing with matches, a girl can get burned…

“Malachai!” he hissed through his teeth.

“Please don’t be mad,” she said from behind him.

“Give a guy some room, huh?” he asked.

“I’m going to need to do that myself in a minute,” she said. “Should we keep it in the same place? Do bears get attracted to that?”

Joe’s stomach grew cold. He hadn’t thought of that. Maybe he should have pissed farther from the tent.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But that’s not a bad idea. Hang on.” He shook himself, adjusted his underwear and zipped up.

“Right over here,” he pointed, and she stepped past him.

“Please don’t go far,” she said. “I…I’m a little afraid of the woods.”

“I’ll stay right here and turn my back if you want.”

“Cool.”

Tinkle, tinkle, little star…

“Malachai!”

Alex announced she was done, and the two walked back to the campfire. The flames had died down to orange embers, and they threw the remaining sticks and twigs on the center. A yellow tongue guttered to life again, and Joe rubbed his hands as close to it as he could without burning. The night was turning chilly.

“Tell me about you,” Alex said, after a minute. “Tell me about the man who follows you.”

“Hasn’t he already told you everything?” Joe said in a tone of sour lemons.

“Please don’t be that way, Joe. You’re wrong about Malachai.” She shook the too-black ringlets out of her eyes. “He hasn’t told me anything about you. And almost nothing about him. He was there for me when I was in pain, that’s all. He talked to me, helped me get through it. And when I finally escaped from my parents, he told me where to go. He said if I walked down I-80, a man would come along who would help me. A nice man. A man who would understand. As soon as you pulled over and I saw him sitting in the seat next to you, smiling, I knew I’d found you.”

Joe grunted. “So you can see him, huh?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “He’s not always very clear. But it seems like he’s been pretty near, most of the day. I didn’t say anything before because I wasn’t even sure you knew about him.”

Joe let out a rueful laugh. “Oh I know about him alright. We’re joined at the brain.”

“Tell me about it?” she begged.

“All right,” he conceded. “Fair’s fair. What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Start at the beginning. Where are you from? Why are you here? What are you running away from?”

“That obvious, huh?”

She shrugged, and leaned in closer to the fire.

“Most guys aren’t driving up to the mountains in the middle of the week, all alone except for an invisible passenger. They’ve got jobs. And families.”

“Well, count me in for neither at the moment. I walked away from my job last week, not to mention two different women, either one of whom would have been happy to start a family with me. Just so happened they were mother and daughter.”

Alex’s eyes widened. “No way!”

“ ‘Fraid so. Thanks to my good friend, Malachai. A couple years ago, I had a good job in Chicago, working for the
Tribune.
I was doing a lot of exposé stuff, thought I was a real hotshot, fresh out of college and breaking page-three stories. When one of those stories ended up busting my fiancée, I kinda got sour on the big-city newspaper business, and so I hopped in my car and headed out to the East Coast. Found a little town called Terrel right on the ocean, and signed on as their one full-time reporter. It was a little boring after Chicago, but I got used to it. And then this kid committed suicide from the cliff outside of town. At least, everyone said it was a suicide. I started to wonder when the editor didn’t want to report on it at all, and so I started asking around. Turned out that there had been a lot of jumpers from that cliff. I mean
a lot.
So I put on my big-city reporter hat again, and started looking through the old newspapers and stuff to find out what was up. It was really weird. Every year around Halloween, for as far back as I could go in the newspaper morgue, there was a report of someone falling to their death from the cliff.”

“Spooky,” Alex said.

“It got worse. Over the past few years, there had also been ‘jumpers’ nearly every spring. Now the Halloween deaths had usually been out-of-towners, for the most part. But the recent deaths—those had all been kids from the town. And the weirdest thing was, the mothers of these kids had all been swimming in the bay like 20 years ago, when one of their friends turned up dead.”

“Whoa.”

“I got to be friends with one of the mothers, a woman named Angelica, and she told me about this spirit that lived in the cliff. She said the thing wouldn’t let her or any of the women leave town. Turns out, they’d all had to pledge to sacrifice their first born children to the spirit in exchange for their own lives. That spirit was Malachai.”

A low chuckle flooded Joe’s head, and Alex raised an eyebrow.

“He’s laughing,” she observed.

“He’s got a very bad sense of humor.”

“So what happened? How did he end up following you?”

“Well, it turns out, Angelica was the one woman in the circle of friends who hadn’t sacrificed her child to Malachai when the kid turned eighteen, as she’d promised. Instead, she’d given the baby up for adoption to save it. And until her kid was sacrificed, the bargain Malachai had struck with the women when they were eighteen remained unfulfilled. So the other women in the group basically kidnapped Angelica and tied her up in a cave underneath the cliff, trying to torture her into telling them where to find the child. In the meantime, I’d been trying to find out the same thing through a contact I had in Chicago. It turned out that Cindy, the girlfriend of the last kid who jumped off the cliff—the one I wanted to write a newspaper article about—was actually Angelica’s daughter. And the two of us had gotten pretty friendly, because she’d been helping me research the deaths and the history of the cliff and all that.”

“So you got involved with this Angelica, and then with Cindy, and then found out they were mother and daughter?”

“Pretty much. Totally weird. Anyway, Cindy and I found this old entrance into the bowels of the cliff underneath what used to be the town’s old light house. I found this journal down there that talked about how an old light house keeper had made a bargain with a demon to protect the town from an invasion by these other demons, called the Curburide. The demon—Malachai—agreed to protect the town for one-hundred years in exchange for a sacrifice. That’s why the townspeople didn’t want me playing up the whole suicide thing in the paper. Not that most of them knew anything about the pact, but they were used to death at the bottom of the cliff. They’d all grown up with it and didn’t see anything at all abnormal in someone turning up in the bay every year.”

“So, how did Malachai end up attached to you, though?”

“Well, it turns out that our friendly demon had outstayed his welcome. When I added things up, I realized that his one-hundred-year covenant was over, and the bargain he’d struck with the five girls for their firstborn was not a fair bargain at all—he coerced them into it. I found Angelica down in the caves below the cliff, along with the other women, and basically had something of a showdown with Malachai, who for a little while, even managed to possess Cindy. Since he was unbound, and I knew his true name from reading the old journal, I was able to bind him again, this time to myself, and I got him to set both Angelica and Cindy free.”

“Sounds intense,” Alex said. “But you won. Why did you leave them?”

Joe shrugged. “Cindy wanted me to stay. But it just didn’t feel right. Every time I was with her, I could feel Malachai behind me, looking over my shoulder at her. He knew every inch of her, and I could feel how much he wanted to own her, if only for a few minutes, again. In the caves, he’d totally possessed her, and she’d been ready to kill or do…anything at his command. I couldn’t stand it that every time I was with her, he was that close to doing the same thing to her again.”

“But he’s locked to you,” she said. “He has to do your will, right?”

“Until he can find the right loophole, yeah.”

“Why would he want to leave you if your covenant is all that lets him stay here?”

“Because he didn’t get anything out of our covenant except the deal to stay. No sacrifices, no perversions, no weakwilled master who he could run like a puppet. If he can get rid of me but have someone nearby that he can cut a better deal with before he’s forced to return to his own realm…”

Joe stood up and walked to the car to retrieve a bottle of water.

“Had enough for one night?”

“Yeah,” she said, yawning and stretching. “Even the hard ground sounds comfortable right now.”

“Good,” he said. “Cuz I’m beat.” He poured the water slowly over the glowing embers, which had long since given up the ghost of flame. The glowing hunks of wood hissed and sizzled, sending up a cloud of white-hot mist to the sky. By the time Joe had emptied the whole bottle on the coals, the fizzing and hissing had all but died out.

“It’s really quiet out here,” she observed. The hum of crickets buzzed all around them, but outside of the bugs, the night was still.

“I can almost hear my own heart beating,” he laughed.

“Yeah.”

Joe took a deep breath and stared up at the sky. Could some evil force called the Curburide really be struggling to find a way through that velvet curtain to rend and kill?

Yes.

A shiver took his spine, and Joe ducked through the tent flap to find the flashlight. His fingers found it, after fumbling in the dark for a moment, and he set it to shine at the ceiling.

“All right,” he called. “Runaways get the sleeping bag.”

Alex poked her head through the flap and smiled.

“So you’re sharing it with me?”

“Very funny. It’s yours.”

She thanked him and shed shoes and socks. He did the same, and looked the other way as she unzipped her pants and shimmied them down her legs.

“I can’t sleep in pants,” she explained, quickly slipping her feet into the bag and pursing her lips in a raspberry “burrrrr.”

“Me neither,” Joe admitted, and doffed his jeans keeping his back to her, and then pulling the top blanket up and over him.

“You should sleep close to me,” she said after he turned the flash out. “Body heat.”

Joe grunted, feeling an uncomfortable stirring at the thought.

But after a minute or two of cold toes and teeth that were beginning to chatter, he pulled his blanket closer to the girl’s heavy, down-filled bag.

He slipped his feet under the edge of her bag and his shoulder under the edge of its top. The warmth of her arm soaked through to him, and he relaxed, the uncontrollable shivering of his teeth slowly abating.

“Good night,” he murmured.

But her breath had already slowed to the deep, steady rhythm of sleep.

The book was very old. So old, in fact, that Ted was afraid to turn its pages. Every time he did, pieces of the yellowed paper would crumble and fall off on his desk. A lot of the pages were stuck together with mold and dampness, and he didn’t know what to do to pry them apart—the paper was so deteriorated, he was afraid of ruining a dozen pages at a time if he tried peeling one back. Maybe, he thought, if the book sat in his room for a few days, where it had to be a lot drier than the damp cave he’d rescued it from, some of the pages would dry out fully and become easier to manage.

Regardless of the chunks of the journal he couldn’t read, Ted had learned a lot from the pages that he could.

He’d learned about an old light house keeper, Broderick Terrel, who wrote late at night as he watched ships steer by the light of his tower to avoid the needle-sharp fingers of rock that extended up in the shallow lengths of the bay. He’d learned that Broderick liked to spice his tea with a healthy dose of “spirits” to keep the cold of the cliff winds at bay. He’d learned that Broderick had a soft spot for one of the altos in the church choir down at St. Agnes and that Broderick fancied—just once—to turn the light in the wrong direction and guide one of the ships from Raleigh straight into a keel-shredding stand of limestone.

But most importantly, he’d learned that Broderick Terrel had a bad feeling about the things that were beginning to happen on the beach. He’d seen figures slipping up and out of the sand in the purple hours of twilight. He’d seen crabs march together in armies to set upon and disembowel a beagle that had made the unfortunate choice to go trawling the beach one night.

Broderick knew something was up, and he paid more attention than ever. Soon he was seeing ghosts pass through the upper stories of the light house at dawn, and eyes staring down at him in the dusk from clouds.

He started waking in the night from the laughter.

And it wasn’t just dream-laughter. There were no houses for miles down the road that led to Terrel’s Peak and the lighthouse, but Broderick was soon being awakened every night by cackling, giggling, guttural laughter. And screams.

He woke every night with his heart pounding, and his forehead awash in sweat.

Broderick decided that he needed help. But when he’d gone into town to ask for help at the “house of God,” the parish priest only patted his shoulder and said to lay off the sauce. And maybe come into town more often. The light house was driving him batty, the minister said, nodding his head sadly.

Broderick did come into town. He took out every book in the library on spirits, witchcraft, the occult and more.

Mrs. Parkside kept looking at him over the top of her glasses as she checked each title out.

“How’re you doing, Broderick?” she asked.

“Fine, just fine,” he insisted and disappeared back up the road to the light house with his trea sure.

That night, as he poured over a volume on the five castes of demons, a cool hand passed over the pages of his book. He looked up and a figure stood next to his desk, its hair coiffed in a genteel sway that slid down its back, and its face looked as smooth as a boy’s.

“What do you want?” he whispered, seeing the ripple of the fire in the fireplace through the creature’s snowy white robes.

“We’re coming,” it said, and with a grin, it vanished.

“I did not believe that anything good could come from such a visit,” Terrel wrote in his journal. “And yet, I did not know of any means at my disposal to prevent the being from torturing my days and nights with its obscene presence. I stood at the window after its visit, a cup of spirits in hand, and watched the white crash of the waves on the shore below. I could swear that figures walked down there in the freezing cool of the surf. But such figures as to send the chill of winter into a man’s bones. Women that glowed and advertised their nakedness like beacons, yet the dark algae of the rocks shown through their perfect bodies. And the men. I watched them gather in circles and twirl and dance like children, only to stop, grab one thing or another from the beach and vanish.

“Every night, the procession seems to grow, until now, as I stare down at the edge of the deadly surf, I can see a village of the naked, cavorting ghosts shimmering and showing themselves for a moment or an hour before winking back out into the glow of moonlight from which they came.”

Ted kept the book hidden beneath his bed, so his parents and his sister wouldn’t find it. But every night, he brought it out to the desk and teased its pages open to continue the story of the old man in the light house. The man who suffered from visions of ghosts on his beach.

Tonight was no exception. Carefully he turned to where he’d left off the night before, and leaned close to the tight, faded script. The musty smell of the book sometimes made him sneeze, but that didn’t keep him away.

July 8, 1893:

They mean us no good. I can see that now. In the past, I’ve seen them run down a dog using a pack of crabs. But to night I saw them attack a man.

He was strolling along the beach after dark. I did not recognize him from my post at the top of the light house, but I saw his form walking close to the surf. He appeared in no hurry, but neither did he stop and stand. The ghostly village was alive on the shore, dancing and darting in a cloudy cabaret. The man seemed not to notice the rest, as he blithely walked among them, stepping through their silvery forms without pause. But then something strange happened. The frolic of the beings began to wane, and soon they were all standing still, silent glowing sentinels all along the beach. As the man strode unaware into their midst, walking among and through them, they also began walking towards him.

Soon there was a bright mob of the creatures all moving up the beach, destined to meet him. It was as if the light of the stars had all gathered in a fog that walked with legs and arms down Terrel Beach.

As I watched in horror, the man’s gait began to falter and he slowed. Soon a thick crowd of the ghosts surrounded him, and the man stood still, looking right and left. Still he didn’t seem to see the beings that clawed at his face and chest, but he could feel something was wrong. He sniffed the air like an animal, trying to determine the cause of his malaise, and then I witnessed the strangest thing.

He began to remove his garments.

They were guiding his hands. The ghosts were so thick, I could barely see the man anymore, but I could see the dozens of hands wrapped around his own, guiding him to strip naked. He was aroused, that much I could tell even from the air, and I saw the beings kneel at his feet and wrap their arms around his chest from behind. His head lifted back, and he let out a long, loud call to the moon with his open mouth.

And then, they began to herd him towards the waves. Their hands all pushed at his back, and held his ankles, lifting and pushing, guiding him into the angry night surf. I yelled for him to stop, but it was too late. His feet were already covered in the black saltwater as I ran down the stairs to try to stop him.

When I emerged on top of the cliff, he was gone. In the moonlight I could see the pile of his clothes, and the dark shadows of his footsteps that led to the bay. And I could see the twining, dancing mob of the evil creatures twisting and cavorting at the point where he’d entered the water.

But the man was nowhere to be seen.

First they took over the sea crabs. Then they took apart a dog. Now they’re taking our own. They seem to grow stronger and more dangerous by the day.

Soon they’ll be coming for us all.