The Messenger (2011 reformat) (34 page)

Jennifer and
Kevin stood before her, but...

My God...

Her children,
too, were emaciated, their faces little more than pallid skin stretched over
their skulls, hollow-eyed. They grinned at her, showing nail-like fangs. Tiny
horns sprouted from their heads.

"Hi,
Mom!" Jennifer said. "What's for lunch?"

"Here's
what I'm eating," Kevin announced, and off his shoulder he plucked his
rotten but still-alive horned toad. He stuffed it into his mouth and began to
munch, rot showing behind his grin.

Jane ran.

But not for
long. Along the next wall of the labyrinth, Carlton was carving the skin off of
a squirming girl's chest and abdomen. The girl had been crudely crucified, her
hands nailed to the rock by iron pitons.

"Hi,
Jane," Carlton said over his shoulder. He yanked a sheet of skin off the
girl as though he were tearing down wallpaper.

Jane screamed
when she turned.

Horned
versions of Marlene Troy and her dead husband, Matt, welcomed her with open
arms. They were living corpses, naked, grinning at her.

Matt rushed to
her, embraced her. His stench nearly knocked Jane unconscious.

"Sweetheart,"
he whispered in glee. Jane tried to squirm away but couldn't. She could feel
his dead erection rise. "You're not really fucking that cop, are
you?"

Jane screamed.

His embraced
tightened, then a bony hand came to her throat. Suddenly his grin switched to a
drooling glare of hatred. "Do you give him head like you used to give me?
Hmm? I'll bet you do, you little tramp. Well, let me show you something,"
and then his other hand rose. He was holding Steve's severed head.

"How's
this for some good head?"

Jane broke
away, her screams pin wheeling behind her. Next came a rock cove in which a
woman was being raped by the thin pale things she'd seen earlier. The things
were mangling the woman, but instead of screams of terror the woman shrieked in
joy. That's when Jane noticed who it was...

Sarah's horns
reared when she craned her neck to look up at Jane. Her suitors were taking
turns with her; demonic sperm shone on her skin. The wounds she'd carved on her
chest in the psychiatric cell seemed to be glowing now: the bell and
star-shaped striker.

"Remember
what I told you?" Sarah slurred.

"This is
a dream! This is just a dream!" Jane yelled.

"That's
right, Jane, a dream of what awaits you. The Messenger likes you, he admires
you. He's keeping an eye on you, Jane." "And so am I," another
voice guttered.

Martin Parkins
staggered forward from the other direction, his postal uniform hanging in
rotten shreds. The pen remained stuck in his eye, and he torqued it upward,
unseating the eyeball from the socket. "Yeah, bitch, I'm keeping an eye on
you too," he said. He held the eyeball up to look at her.

It's just a
dream, just a dream! Jane kept screaming.

"Oh, God,
that feels so good," Sarah cooed. Jane made the mistake of looking down,
to see one of the pallid figures kneeling intently. It was drawing its footlong
index finger in and out of Sarah's brain, through the hole she'd made through
her eye socket in the psych cell.

"Run!
Run!" another voice was suddenly bellowing at her. A large figure, dressed
in black this time. The bearded face loomed-Dhevic-with the largest horns of
all jutting from his forehead. He was pointing toward another crevice-a crevice
that was slowly grinding closed, like a great stone door. Dhevic shoved her
away, and bellowed "Run! Hurry! Go and see it!"

Jane was
nearly mindless now. Her feet stomped through steaming hot muck to the crevice.
One of the pallid creatures was right behind her, pawing at her with its
monstrous hand, when Jane sucked in her gut and squeezed through the crevice.
She made it all the way through only to see that the follower had not. The
crevice ground closed on the thing, which had only squeezed through to the
waist. Bones crunched, and from its doglike mouth came a hail of gelatinous
vomit.

Jane staggered
backward, leaned against a high flat rock. Just a dream, just a dream... but
then she inched her face to the rock's edge and peered out.

More scalding
hot air blasted her face; it singed her eyebrows off, reddened her cheeks. She
knew she must pull away from the pain but for whatever reason she was too
intent...

...on seeing
what was out there.

She was
looking down into a valley, and in the valley sat a church. The church was
black, and vast stained-glass windows were set into its outer walls. Light
throbbed from within, brightening the stained-glass scenes that depicted all
manner of demonic orgy and mutilation. Jane's eyes dragged up the face of the
church, to its looming black steeple, and the inverted cross erected there.

Just a dream,
just a dream, she kept thinking, suffocating in the blast of heat. Behind her,
the crevice was reopening. Jane could see greedy wax-like faces in the gap-but
she didn't care. She'd either wake up or she'd die.

Her heart was
missing beats. Her eyes remained wide on the church steeple. Just beneath the
cross was a bell-tower.

The bell began
to ring.

I

"I don't
know why I'm here," Jane said in the open door.

"I
do," Dhevic said. "Please come in."

"I-"
She stepped back, hesitant. It was broad daylight, yes, the sun on her back,
normal traffic coursing back and forth on the main road behind her. It was a
normal day, so what was she afraid of?

"I
apologize," Dhevic said in his crisp accent. "What I told you earlier,
about my..."

"Benefactors,"
Jane finished.

They sometimes
forget about me. The least expensive motels in the worst parts of town are
generally a necessity. It's clean, though. I've sprayed it for bugs and caught
all the rodents with traps."

How
delightful, Jane thought, and walked in. She re-pocketed the slip of paper he'd
given her with the motel address.

Several bags
of groceries sat on the small desk; Dhevic had obviously just returned from
shopping. Through the front window, Jane could see a new silver Ford SUV parked
there.

"I knew
you'd come," he said.

"Oh,
sure. I forgot, you're psychic. You're an...augur."

Dhevic only
smiled in response. "I understand your sarcasm, but still...you're here,
aren't you?"

"Yes.
There were more murders yesterday. Another one of my employees-"

"Another
messenger," Dhevic corrected. "Yes, I know about that."

"How much
do you know?"

Dhevic made
two cups of instant coffee from a portable burner he'd plugged into the wall.
There were stains on the wall that appeared to be handprints, and a hole, too.
Jane didn't want to think that it might be a bullet hole.

"Did you
dream last night?" he asked, and handed her a cup.

"Yeah, I
dreamed. Of a black church, with a bell tower. And the bell was ringing."

"The
Cymbellum Eosphorus? Do you believe in it now?"

"The
dream was just stress related, Professor Dhevic," Jane snapped. "I had
the dream based on the power of suggestion, because of what you told me in my
office. But you believe in it, right? You said so the other day.

Dhevic didn't
respond, at least not vocally. Jane tried to keep focusedon his face. "The
other day, you said something about this demon-"

"Not a
demon, a fallen angel," Dhevic corrected. "Aldezhor, Lucifer's messenger;
Hell's equivalent of the Archangel Gabriel-"

"Fine. So
then there's this cult," she clarified, "and the members of this cult
believe in Aldezhor?"

"They are
his heralds. They proclaim his prophesy. They are his messengers."

Jane frowned.
"Is that a yes?"

"Yes.
There is... a cult."

"They
believe this myth, and they act on it, as though it were true?"

Dhevic looked
at her, but said nothing.

"They
kill because they believe they're-what?-paying homage to Aldezhor? Making
sacrifices for him?"

Dhevic nodded.
"It's more complicated than that, but, yes. You can think of it that
way."

"Are
drugs involved?"

"No
drugs."

"Hypnosis?
Brainwashing?"

"No. Only
the power of faith played against weakness and innocence. Almost anyone can
become an acolyte of Aldezhor."

"Martin
Parkins is an exception, I suppose, but my other employees-Carlton Spence,
Marlene Troy, and Sarah Willoughby-were all level-headed, conscientious
employees and quality people in general. None of them was the type to join a
cult. How did they get mixed up in it? How did they get recruited?"

"No
recruitment," Dhevic explained. "They were seduced. They were taken. You
can think of it as something akin to demonic possession-"

"Oh, come
on."

"They
were machinated."

The strange
word stretched a pause across the room. "What's that mean?" Jane
asked, exasperated.

"Aldezhor
gets people to do his bidding by tricking them, by praying on their fears and
obsessions, making them believe they're true. He amalgamates lies with truth,
so that he is believed. Keep in mind, his ultimate purpose. Aldezhor is the
mouthpiece of Satan, the greatest liar in history. All of his messages,
therefore, are lies."

"What's
that got to do with-"

"Machination-it's
an occult term, related, as I've said, to possession. Aldezhor is an incubus;
when he becomes discarnated, when he machinates, his sexual persona emanates.
He possesses his victims through a process called discarnate machination. He
walks behind the possessant almost as though the possessed is a life-sized
marionette. He controls everything, a puppeteer, sees everything, feels
everything. You can see him in smoke, rain, and in mirrors. Sometimes, when the
auras are correct, you can see him standing right behind the possessed."

Auras. Great.
"And you believe this?" she asked. "Tell me. The other day you
went into a trance, or something like that. And you said you believed it."

Dhevic's voice
seemed to resonate. "It wasn't a trance. It was the side-effect of a
vision. I have visions. It's my heritage; it's been passed down to me from my
ancestors over centuries."

The air
stilled. Jane tried to contemplate a way to deal with it. Visions? Machination?
She didn't know of such things. But was it possible for her to believe in them?

She thought
harder. She remembered what she'd seen in Dhevic's eyes two days ago. And she
remembered what she'd seen last night at the psychiatric wing...

"Say it
is true," she began. "What do you want? Why did you come here? The
police think the only reason you're here is to exploit the situation for these
tabloid shows."

"Then the
police are wrong, and that's regrettable."

"So
answer the question. Why are you here?"

"To
recover the icon," Dhevic said. "The icon is the nimbus of Aldezhor's
power to become incarnate. The recent sacrificial murders have all been
perpetrated by your employees-postal employees, through the force of the
icon-"

"The
icon?"

Dhevic opened
his leather folder and removed the polycarbonate sheet he'd shown her in her
office. "You know what the icon is," he said.

"The-"She
tried to remember the pronunciation of the word. "Campanulation? The
bell?"

"No."
He pointed down. "The striker."

Jane looked at
the engraving again. At first she was bothered that the church in the engraving
was identical to the church in her dream but, again, the power of suggestion.
She'd seen the engraving in her office already, and her subconscious mind
remembered that and inserted it into the dream. The striker, she thought. She
squinted. The ball of the striker was star-shaped. It stands for the Morning Star-Lucifer.
"So this striker, this icon-"

"Is
what's called a power relic," Dhevic finished. "Think of it this way:
the striker is the object of your cult's worship, like a crucifix in a Catholic
church."

Jane tried to
sort her thoughts. "And you're here because..."

"I'm here
for the icon. I'm here to retrieve it, to confiscate it-and return it to a
secure location."

More silence.

"I don't
believe for a minute that a striker from a bell in hell-"

"The
Cymbellum Eosphorus," Dhevic intoned.

"-is in
my town, causing people to become possessed."

The man
nodded. "I understand. I'm not asking you to believe it. Just help me
retrieve it. I believe it's hidden somewhere in the west branch post
office."