The Devil's Equinox

by John Everson

  Father Vernon nodded. “The Devil’s Equinox. It’s a rare event, and something I know they’ve been planning a ritual around to increase their power for a long time now. They need the blood of an innocent to be spilled during the height of the Equinox to open the death portal – the pathway that souls take to leave this world. If that blood is spilled by the child’s mother or father, the gate will be thrown open all the way, and the power of the Devil himself can be harnessed and brought to live in the flesh of those who participated in the sacrifice.”

  “Well, I’m not going to stab Ceili, or whatever they want me to do to her. So, their spell is not going to happen. If we can’t get the cops in there over the next couple hours, I’m just going to have to find a way to get her out of there myself.”

  The priest nodded again. “We don’t have much time. They don’t need you to complete the sacrifice, but it would bring them more power if you did. So, the ritual will go forward with or without you. And the murder of a baby isn’t the worst of it.”

  “How could it get worse than that?” Austin asked.

  The priest looked up at the ceiling, not meeting Austin’s eyes. “If they eat the flesh of your child in the Devil’s Banquet after she’s killed on the goat’s altar…everyone who tastes her will gain the power of glamour. Whatever story they tell someone after participating in the ritual, they’ll find the person hearing them believes.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Austin said. “Because they eat a baby, people will suddenly believe everything they say?”

  “That’s the power the Dark One grants in exchange for the abomination he seeks,” the priest answered. “It’s a great talent to have if you plan to rob banks,” he joked.

  Austin shook his head. “Regina took me in easily without killing Ceili,” he said. “I don’t think she needs any more help.”

  “No,” the priest agreed. “We need to find a way to save your daughter.”

  Austin was silent for a minute as he thought about the past few days. He remembered reading Regina’s journal the night she’d left it out. She had written about the importance of the bones of the dead in creating both protection spells and building an arsenal of power. It was the whole reason she had taken up residence in the house next to his. Her need for the bones of a child was really why he had run into her in the first place. If he was right, he might be able to pit her own magic against her.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “But I need some time to prepare.”

  “We have a little time,” the priest said. “I don’t think they’ll begin preparing for a couple more hours.”

  “Perfect. I need to go home for a bit,” Austin said.

  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to go far from here,” the priest said. His face looked concerned. “What are you thinking of doing?”

  “I’m not totally sure yet,” Austin said. Actually, he had a good idea of what he wanted to do, but he didn’t want to admit to the priest what the idea was. Not yet. Not until it was time. It wasn’t the kind of thing a priest would condone or help with…and he definitely needed the priest’s help right now.

  “It’s just an idea,” Austin said. “But I want to check it out. Would you be able to keep an eye on the Equinox building to make sure they don’t take Ceili out of there while I’m gone?”

  Father Vernon gave him a questioning look, but ultimately nodded. “That’s not a problem at all,” he said. “I’m happy to be on the outside looking in, rather than the way it was before you found me. I can keep an eye on them for you.”

  “Thanks,” Austin said. “Could I use your phone to call a taxi?”

  Father Vernon shook his head. “No need for that,” he said, as he pushed himself upright with a groan. “You can take my car. Lord knows it could use a few miles to be put on the odometer. All it does is sit in the parish garage.”

  He walked out of the room before Austin could answer, but returned a moment later holding a key ring.

  “Here you go,” Father Vernon said. “Go home and get what you need. I’ll stand watch out back and make sure they don’t all decide to run off somewhere. But I don’t think there’s any need to worry. They’ll hold the Devil’s Equinox ceremony inside Club Equinox. I’m sure of that. They’re not going anywhere.”

  The priest pointed at a clock across the room. “It’s after seven o’clock now,” he said. “Do you think you can be back by nine? I would think they’ll begin to prepare for the ritual by then. That’s three hours before midnight, the moment of change. It’s the time they’ll try to hold a final ritual using your baby. And they’ll surely know you’ve escaped by then. Which may change some of their plans.”

  Austin nodded. “I don’t need that much time.”

  He accepted the keys from the priest, who then led him out of the room and down a back hallway to a door that opened on a garage.

  “Hurry,” the priest warned. “I’ll keep an eye on things until you return.”

  “Thanks,” Austin said, and stepped down into the cold garage. He pressed the button on the wall and the door opened. Then he got in a long black Buick and put the key in the ignition. He wasn’t completely sure where he was, but he knew that as soon as he started navigating through the streets of downtown Parkville, he’d figure it out. The place simply wasn’t that big. He couldn’t go more than two or three streets without running into some place that he’d been before. He turned the key and the car sprang to life. Austin pulled out onto the small street outside of the parish garage and turned left. He drove for three blocks and then he saw Park Avenue and smiled. It was one of the main drags through town, and he was instantly oriented. He made a mental note of where he needed to turn when he came back. Then he turned left again and gunned the engine to start down the road toward home.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Sometimes your view on life changes overnight. Last week, Austin would have laughed at anyone who tried to tell him that witches were real. That magic was real. That the Devil was real.

  But tonight?

  Austin was driving a priest’s car home to gather materials for a magic spell. It sounded ridiculous, even to him. But he was now operating on the ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ philosophy. Or something like that. He’d read enough of Regina’s journal to remember some things. He hoped he remembered enough. In particular, he knew the power of bones. And he knew from her writing where there were bones of power.

  He pulled into his driveway and thumbed the remote to lift the garage door. He wasted no time inside, but slipped on a pair of shoes, ran up the stairs, opened the medicine cabinet and grabbed a razor blade from inside. He tucked it carefully into his jeans inner pocket and then hurried back downstairs to the kitchen to grab a small candle and matches. Then he grabbed a light jacket from the hall closet. The night wasn’t that cool, but he needed pockets to carry things in. In the garage, he found a roll of galvanized wire and a flashlight. Then he walked down his driveway and headed to the house next door.

  He walked around the side of the garage, and used the steps in the back, hoping to stay out of sight. He didn’t need anyone calling the police and accusing him of breaking in.

  Though that was exactly what he intended to do.

  Austin looped and crimped the wire, and then slipped the makeshift ‘key’ into the lock. He turned his hand, but instead of tripping the lock mechanism, the wire just bent. He pulled it out, added a third strand of wire to the hook and put it in again.

  Then he shifted the ‘key’ inside the doorknob and slowly moved it side to side, searching for the right fit.

  When he turned it this time, something inside the lock clicked.

  Austin smiled and turned the knob on the door.

  He was inside.

  He flipped the light switch on the wall, but as he suspected, nothing happened. If the house had been vacant all this time, there would be no ele
ctric. He pulled the flashlight out of his pocket and flipped it on. When the light guttered to life, he walked down the hall to find the door to the basement.

  What he needed was down there.

  One by one he descended the steps. The flashlight flickered eerily against the walls in the dark, and he moved slowly, worried about tripping on something and braining himself by falling down the stairs in an abandoned house.

  He remembered the description of the basement from Regina’s journal. Or maybe ‘spellbook’ or ‘grimoire’ was the more accurate description of her secret book that he’d read. Either way, he knew that he needed to walk through the underbelly of this house and find an oven or old hearth on one wall.

  It was damp and smelled of old mold as he walked through the silent space. Somewhere water dripped periodically. He felt as if he should be able to hear anything within a mile radius of here…it was so silent. Even though he had on rubber soles he could hear every step he made…he could actually feel the hair rise on the back of his neck as he walked under the floor joists beneath the kitchen above. He could imagine someone rushing him from the dark; he’d never see them until he was down.

  The thought made his heart race and he walked faster, bobbing the flashlight from side to side as he searched for the place Regina had described.

  It didn’t take long to find; it wasn’t a large house. The flash trailed across the old iron vent and door embedded in the wall, and he brushed his fingers across the surface, tracing the edge of the door down to the latch.

  He gripped the latch between his fingers and pulled; the door creaked open with a hideous squeal. Austin trailed the light across the space inside. The hearth was maybe four feet deep and three feet high before it constricted into a funnel to the flue. There were blackened bricks that served as the floor, and a grate for ashes in the center of them. According to Regina’s journal, there was a shovel for ashes nearby….

  He looked around and located it, lying in the concrete corner of the basement a few feet away. Austin grabbed the shovel and brought it to bear in the same way she had described. He pushed the edge between the bricks and tried to pry them loose. The iron clanged and scratched against the stone, but after a few misses, he was able to move a brick upward enough to reach forward and hold it with his fingertips. Once he had a touch on it, he let go of the shovel and grabbed it with his other hand as well.

  It took some massaging, but gradually, he was able to shimmy the brick upward, pushing against the edges until it moved. Once he was able to grip it on both sides with his fingers, he grabbed the ash shovel again and dug it against the edge of the brick. He pushed on the handle, levering it up, while holding the top part with his fingers to ensure it didn’t fall back in the hole.

  In a few seconds, he’d lifted the thing out. And once he had that edge…the process went quickly. He pulled out a half dozen bricks and set them to the back of the hearth. And then he looked at the gray sediment beneath. There was a pile of gray and white ash there. And gravel.

  And as he brushed the top bits aside….

  Bone.

  Austin reached down and lifted a small white thing that looked like a twig and held it up in the light of the flash. It was the bone of a human baby; he had no doubt because the round dome of a tiny human cranium was lying in the gravel just above it. The telltale eyeholes and tiny jaw and teeth were facing him. The piece he held should be the child’s upper arm bone. The skeleton was fragmented, not perfectly formed in the gravel – after all, he wasn’t the first to disturb it – but he could make out the tiny shards of fingers on the left, and the lower bits of the spine to the right.

  There was a foot at the bottom of the bones that almost made him cry. Unlike the rest, it seemed to have held its shape perfectly.

  The thought of that tiny heel and ivory toes once having flesh upon them instantly made him well up. This had been someone’s baby. A tiny helpless child.

  But it had ended here. In the ashes of a firepit. Its life snuffed out and its flesh and bones buried for use in dark spells to bring some gain of evil power to someone else. It had never grown up and gotten the chance to live its life. Instead, the child had been used as someone’s pawn. The thought made his stomach churn.

  And the worst part was, he was here to continue the trend of using this infant. The only reason he was here was to mine this baby’s bones.

  Austin closed his eyes and took a breath. Then he reached down and removed the small skull from the gravel. As he picked it up, some of the gravel around it moved, and he saw a narrow, oval stone with a round hole bored through it on one side. It would make a perfect top for a keychain, but Austin knew better. The stone was a hagstone. He’d read about them on the Internet while doing some research about witchcraft, after he had realized that was something Regina dabbled in. He had seen a diagram of what one looked like. It was a totem of protection, according to witch lore. He raised an eyebrow, surprised at himself for even being able to recognize it. But the stone was unlike all of the other gravel near the baby’s bones. He had no doubt that it had been placed here by the same witch who had killed this child. He picked it up and added it to his pocket collection, along with a few of the other larger bones. He stuffed them all in his pocket, and then picked up the flashlight. He could obsess about how unfair it all was, but that wouldn’t change anything. This baby was dead.

  His was alive.

  He would use the remains of the other child to make sure Ceili stayed that way.

  There was nothing he could do for this baby, other than make its sacrifice mean something positive. So he tried to make himself feel good about disturbing its remains. Lord knows they’d been used to drive dark magic in the past. He needed to use them for a positive force today.

  Austin bit his lip and shone the light around the gravel pit beneath the bricks. He saw the tiny finger bones of the infant and shook his head. Then he backed away. He wasn’t going to sift through the gravel to take every piece of the skeleton with him.

  He took a breath and reached out to move a handful of other larger bones into his pocket. He didn’t want to think any more about what those tiny white shards represented. Austin turned away from the hearth and began to walk out of the basement. He needed to get back to where this child’s life could help save another’s. His child’s.

  He walked the silent steps back up from the abandoned basement and exited the house, pulling the door shut behind him. The neighborhood was silent…and he was thankful for that. Nobody asked him what he was up to or how his day was going. Instead…it was just the dry rustle of leaves, and the distant moan of traffic on Eighth Street.

  Austin half ran across the yard to his garage and looked around for something he could use as a weapon. He didn’t keep a gun in the house. There was a hand ax hanging above his garden tools, but he shook his head at that. Instead, he grabbed for a crowbar. Easier to swing, and he could use it to jab. Then he pulled open the door to the car and tossed the crowbar on the passenger’s seat. He reached into his pocket for his keys and cringed; he had to sift his fingers through bones to find the car keys. But he did. Because…he needed to leave.

  The engine revved to life a minute later and he pulled out of his driveway, barely pausing to make sure the garage door started to shut.

  There were bones rattling in his jacket pocket. Hell…there was a baby’s head rattling in his jacket pocket.

  That was all kinds of fucked up.

  When he pulled up to the curb by the church, he looked at the roof and saw the deep blue of the night over the shingles. He leapt out of the car and ran up the concrete steps to the door. Before he could even raise his fist to knock…the wooden door opened.

  “I’ve been waiting,” Father Vernon said. “I didn’t want to leave the foyer until you returned.”

  “I’m back,” Austin said. “Now we need to make something happen. Any thoughts on getting into the club
without being seen?”

  “We go in the back door,” the priest said.

  “All I could find at home to use as a weapon was this,” he said, brandishing the crowbar. “You don’t happen to have a machine gun or something lying about the rectory, do you?”

  The priest smiled and shook his head.

  “The Lord will provide.”

  “I hope so,” Austin said.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  Austin nodded, but did not elaborate. He actually had no idea what he was going to do with the things weighing down his pockets…but he thought they would help…somehow.

  “Yes and no,” he said. “It’s just us, and I obviously didn’t find a gun or anything.” He shook his head and put up a hand. “Just get me back inside.”

  “I know a way,” The priest said. “Wait here. There is one thing we’ll need.”

  He disappeared back into the rectory and left Austin alone. The minutes seemed to stretch out into hours as Austin waited, looking around and hearing nothing but silence and the creaking of an old building around him. It was an eerie few moments. Was the priest coming back? Where had he gone?

  And then Father Vernon stepped past Austin and down the rectory steps. He was holding a metal tool. It had handles like a tree branch clipper and looked like some kind of jaws, or clamp, at its end. “Don’t ask,” he said. “Just follow. Stay quiet.”

  Austin followed the priest down a stone path that led across the rectory yard and into a back alley. The night air moved with a sour force against the back of his neck as they walked; the alley was like a wind tunnel and the scent of old garbage wafted like a sick perfume.

  Father Vernon put up a hand to tell him to stop. They were in front of a nondescript steel trap door in the ground next to the brick wall of a building along the alley. “This will lead us inside,” he said quietly. “But you must be quiet from here on. There are guards in some of the back halls. Just follow my lead.”

  “My lips are sealed,” Austin said. “Just get us to Ceili.”