The Devil's Equinox

by John Everson

  The Irreverent Mother repeated the act and passed the knife on to the next. Regina reached out and cupped one bloody palm in the hand of her superior. As they pressed their hands tightly together, a drip of blood fell between them to dot the floor.

  The blade made its way slowly around the room, until the last woman to Regina’s right sliced her hand. She reached out and took the final sister’s hand and held it up into the air.

  “We are now one,” she proclaimed. “One in the service of Satan. One in the unity of our sisterhood. One in the joining of mouth to wound, wound to mouth. My blood is yours and then hers and again mine. My heart pumps its load of life into your veins. My sickness is yours. Your disease is now mine. Sisters, we are now one.”

  Their hands all rose in the air, and then came down to reach out and grasp and fondle each other’s bodies. Almost instantly cries of ecstasy filled the room as fingers plumbed each other to release a wetness more primal than blood.

  The sighs and moans increased, as the priests huddled inside the circle. Most of them watched, but a couple reached beneath their robes to follow the lead of the women, whose heads swayed and bent, as they pleasured themselves and others.

  Austin was part of the inner circle now; his captors knew he could go nowhere and had abandoned him and taken up their positions as part of the blood circle. He couldn’t escape, but he could at last move closer to his baby. Father Vernon had set the baby back down in the bassinet and now knelt at the waist of one of the gyrating nuns, his tongue outstretched as if awaiting Communion.

  It all allowed Austin to move close to Ceili, and he bent and kissed his baby’s cheek for the first time in days. “Daddy’s here now,” he whispered, and the look from her electric bright eyes melted his heart. “I’m going to get you out of here,” he said. “I promise.”

  He had read enough of Regina’s book to know that the sharing of blood was an important part of their rituals. It formed connections and shared power. It broke the seal on the visible shell of nature and released the secret energy within. It was the reason all of the witches around them had sliced their hands. He’d come prepared in his own way. He had decided to fight fire with fire. He did not have an entire circle to draw upon. But he did have one sacred font. He reached into his pocket and drew out a small razor blade. He had thought that he would have Father Vernon in his circle, but obviously that was not going to happen. Still, he had himself and Ceili.

  Austin looked around and confirmed that all eyes around him were currently trained on Regina. He sliced a small cut on his left palm. Then he took the blade and held it to Ceili’s soft perfect skin. He didn’t know if he could go through with it then. How could he cut his baby? But around him the noise of perversion increased, and he took a deep breath and touched the blade to her palm. Her hand bled.

  Ceili cried. Austin lifted the baby out of her crib, and then sat down with her on the floor. The nuns closest to him glanced over at the baby’s cry, but quickly seemed content that Austin was simply trying to comfort his child as he sat on the ground. They turned their attention back to Regina in moments.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Austin said, and gripped Ceili’s wounded hand tightly in his own. “Your blood to mine, my heart to yours,” he whispered. “I call upon the spirits in this space to join my circle. Feel the blood in our veins, swim in our circle now. As we give you this taste of life, we draw from you the power to resist those that would break our circle. We offer blood for your protection now.”

  He didn’t know if he was supposed to feel something change or not. If spirits truly did hear the words and enter their wounds…would there be a charge of electricity? Would there be a whisper in his mind of some ethereal creature? Regina’s book had not said.

  How long did he hold her hand? He had no idea. His inner critic laughed at him. Who do you think you are, trying to pretend you can use witchcraft?

  He shrugged it off. This was the only chance he had right now. He couldn’t beat them with force. It was just him and a baby against dozens of Devil worshippers.

  But blood was not the only weapon he had. Austin reached into his pockets and began to draw out tiny shards of ivory. The bones of the baby that had been in the basement of the house next door. The hagstone. Ceili’s brush.

  The baby continued to cry in his lap as he arranged the bones of the dead child in a circle around him. There were long gaps between the tiny arm and leg and rib bones, but he drew a circle of bone around them.

  Shape was important in magic. That’s one thing he had learned from Regina’s writings. Shape and substance and intent.

  Here, he had made a circle of protection, from the innocent bones of a child. And his intent was to use that circle to repel any forces that gathered against them.

  The philosophical arithmetic was there. Whether it meant anything really was another story.

  Next, he took out the hagstone, which was hung on a thin strand of twine. He had a brush in his pocket that he’d taken from Ceili’s dresser at home. He pulled three strands of hair from between its tines, and carefully weaved them in between the threads of the twine so that they held fast to the necklace.

  Then he reached up to his own head and tugged loose a strand of hair. He felt the pinch on his skull as it let go. For good measure, he pulled two more. Once he had the hair between his fingers, he pressed one end into the twine, the same as he had with Ceili’s. He wove it in and out of the necklace and when both of their hairs were securely threaded into the twine, he took the necklace and placed it around her head. A hagstone was a traditional ward, to keep away evil spirits and those with bad intent, and he could think of no better time or place to use it than here. Ceili was surrounded by those who intended evil against her. If the blood bond and bone circle couldn’t protect them, perhaps the hagstone would.

  Austin took Ceili’s wounded hands and held them in his own. She stopped crying then, and wide tearful eyes looked up and met his own.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” he whispered. “I will make it up to you, I promise.”

  He looked around them at the bones and closed his eyes a moment. He had to think. It wasn’t as easy as simply throwing bones and relics about. You had to invoke something. There needed to be intent, and a calling. Something to bind the relics and the desire.

  “I call upon the ghosts of light, the spirits of healing, the angels of protection,” he said aloud. “The forces of darkness are gathered around us, preparing to strike. We need your help. Lend us your strength and protection. Make the space between us impenetrable as a wall of stone. Our will is yours, our life is yours. Join with us now to drive the dark away.”

  Austin had no idea if anything he said was right. There was no previously fashioned ‘spell’ or calling here to draw from. Regina’s journal had suggested that it wasn’t the actual words that mattered in a spell, only the intent behind them. The words provided a focus, so the more structured they were, the better off the spell caster was – they could focus on the intent behind the words versus thinking of what to say.

  He had needed to think of what to say, but it came easily. In this instance, he knew exactly what he was asking for. Whether any force was in the room that would grant it was another question.

  The sound of Regina’s voice behind him had been a lulling background the whole time he’d been preparing his ‘counterspell’ to her ritual. But now, the room was suddenly quiet. As he recognized the change, he felt a cold hand grip his heart. Something was changing. He instinctively knew that couldn’t bode well.

  He looked up from Ceili’s wide-eyed face and met the gaze of Regina. She stood just a few feet away and had stopped her ritual to stare at what he was doing.

  “Do you really dare to presume?” she said when she saw that she had his attention. “Do you think that you can form a circle within a circle? You have no training in the arts. Where did you find those bones? Do you think you ca
n just grab chicken bones from the trash and use them to invoke demons?”

  “I’m not calling demons or using garbage,” Austin answered.

  Regina laughed and shook her head. “You can try to play this game, but you will fail,” she said. “You don’t know the rules. No matter what you do here tonight, there is one thing that is not going to change. Your circle will not stop it. One of you will die here tonight. The only question is which one.”

  Austin shook his head. “You will not break this circle,” he said.

  Father Vernon laughed at the challenge and stepped easily over the bones. He reached down and grabbed Austin by the neck with both hands, yanking him to his feet. Regina stepped forward and lifted Ceili from his grasp.

  “You have to believe in the magic to use it,” the priest said, and then tossed Austin backward. His feet left the floor for a second and he stumbled and fell back to the ground.

  Regina handed Ceili back to the ex-priest, and the baby began to cry again.

  “Don’t play with what you don’t understand,” Regina said. “Sisters?”

  Suddenly a group of half-naked women surrounded Austin before he could rise from the floor. He looked up and saw black silk and knees. And then he saw Brandy in their midst. His former babysitter held a knitting needle in one hand, and some kind of doll in the other. It looked like a crude clay model, but he could see arms and legs and a head. And he could see the shreds of denim that wrapped its middle, and a scrap of black T-shirt that covered its upper half. He realized that Regina had been holding something similar the night that she had led him to hold a knife to the neck of the bloody ‘bride’.

  Brandy smiled at him with a grin reminiscent of a shark. He started to get to his feet, but she pressed the needle down into the leg of the doll.

  A white-hot pain erupted in Austin’s left thigh, and before he had fully stood up, he found himself crumpled to the ground.

  “This is the power of magic,” Regina said from beyond the circle. “It is a power that takes years to invoke. You must have a relationship with those spirits and the power you call upon. Study and sacrifice and most of all, faith. You have none of these things.”

  Regina bent over one of her acolytes and smiled sadly at him. “You could have made this so much easier on yourself, you know.” Then she pointed at the floor. “Sisters, remove the circle.”

  The nuns all turned and bent to the floor. When they faced him again, they each held a shard of the bone that he’d laid out on the floor.

  “Turn the power of the circle upon him,” Regina demanded.

  Austin didn’t know what she meant, and he was still holding his thigh and moaning at the pain when Brandy held the doll out over his head. One of the sisters held a leg or an arm bone from his circle of protection and pressed it down into the soft clay of the doll.

  As the pointed shard of the bone pressed into the forearm of the clay doll, a stabbing pain suddenly knifed through Austin’s arm just below the wrist. He screamed and grabbed at the wound, but of course, there was no wound. Only…horrible, horrible pain.

  He writhed and twitched on the floor at their feet, and then another sister held out a bone, and stabbed it into the other arm of the doll. Austin shrieked.

  And there was more. The nuns stabbed the effigy in the legs and arms and groin, until Austin was curled in a fetal ball on the floor crying hopelessly for the pain to stop.

  At last, Regina’s voice cut through his screams with a single word. “Enough.”

  The pain began to drain away, and as Austin looked up, eyes blurred with tears, he saw the sisters removing bone after bone from the abused doll.

  Regina held the doll now and caught his eye. She clearly wanted him to see what she was doing. With one finger she moved the arm of the doll until it bent in and touched the doll’s chest.

  Austin suddenly found his own arm bending, and his palm slapped firm and held at his heart. And then Regina held the doll upright, arranging its legs and arms as if it were a man standing.

  Austin’s own legs suddenly sprang to independent life and he rose from the floor as if nothing had just happened.

  The power of real magic was suddenly clear to him. This was not all bullshit hocus-pocus. This was real. And Regina had him tied somehow to her doll like a puppet.

  “All of those nights we spent together were preparation,” she said. “I took what I needed.”

  It was an oblique explanation, but still, explanation enough. To Austin it simply translated as, “You’re fucked.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Regina stood before him, a black veil on her head, a black cape cinched around her throat. She wore nothing else. She leaned forward to kiss him, and as her tongue traced the rim of his lips, he felt static fill his mind. When she touched him, all of his senses dulled. It had been that way for some time now, and he’d chalked it up to the blinding power of love before, but now he knew it was something else. It was dark magic. She had made him her toy. He realized that this was not the first time she had used him. And now she could move his legs and arms however she wished to accomplish the goals of her game.

  “I hate you,” he whispered when she broke off a kiss.

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “You hate being weak and foolish. But that’s not my fault.”

  She stepped back then with a grin and turned her attention to the throngs of satanic worshippers all around them.

  “And now,” she said. “We begin at last.”

  Austin felt the world had become a gray blur. His eyes were open, but everything grew fainter, fuzzier. He struggled to stay alert. His legs moved suddenly of their own accord, as Regina held up the doll and mimicked the motions of walking. He tried to stop his feet, but it was no use. They did not respond to him.

  This really was the end. He no longer had any control at all.

  He tried to move his hands and was able to make a fist with his left. That was something. She didn’t control every muscle. Yet.

  He slipped his hand into his pocket and his heart fluttered when he felt the shape inside. He still had the skull of the incinerator infant in his pocket. He hadn’t used it as part of the circle on the floor.

  He gripped the skull in his hand, closing his eyes to focus on what he needed now to say. Magic was real. And he needed somehow to invoke it.

  “I believe,” he said, thinking of Father Vernon’s critique. “You have to believe in the magic to use it.”

  “I believe in the power of magic,” he said softly. “I believe in the power of love.”

  He paused and gathered his thoughts. He knew that he needed to channel his request in the right way. He needed to frame his invocation.

  “I loved you then,” he whispered. He teased the center of his palm with his fourth finger, opening the wound that he’d made to form a circle with Ceili. He could feel the tip of his finger grow damp, and he smiled. He had released blood for this spell. His fingers touched and slipped inside the eye sockets of the infant’s tiny skull as he framed his calling. He made sure to smear his blood across the bone of the cranium, linking him to whatever latent power remained in the relic. “My blood to your bone,” he said. “Our hearts beat the same time; our minds thought the same thoughts. I would have done anything for you.” He forced his voice to be silent, though his lips continued to move.

  I needed you then, when we were young and together. But I need you more now that you are not here. I need you to do something for me now. For us. I call upon the ashes of our love. I call upon the memory of our desire. I call upon the strength of our past to save the seed of our future. I need you. But Ceili needs you more. Help us before the Eye of Darkness peers down from the Devil’s Equinox and holds us in its deadly sight.

  He needed to say more. He needed to call for a specific action…but suddenly his body was not his own.

  Austin felt his hands lift
, and his lips stilled. He felt paralyzed; his body was a block of stone, and yet, with his eyes, he could see parts of himself in motion. One part was his right hand, which reached out toward Regina. She held the clay doll in one hand, moving pieces of it with a finger. But then she reached out to one of her sisters and returned with a silver blade. She held it out to him, and Austin watched as his fingers opened and closed on the haft of the knife.

  He had just accepted a knife that he did not want. At least not for the job he knew it was intended for. Unless he could turn it to his own ends.

  He tried to move the arm that held the knife, but nothing happened.

  Regina controlled his body completely. But she did not control his mind. And in his mind, he continued to call for help, even though his hand no longer touched the skull. He poured the power of his soul into his calling, begging for forgiveness. Begging for help. Not for him, but for Ceili.

  Around him, the room began to echo with a single phrase, repeated again and again.

  “Unto us, look down.”

  “Unto us, look down.”

  “The eye of darkness is opening, sisters. Reveal yourselves to him so that he may see you for what you are. Release all pretense and costume.”

  Regina pulled off the veil that topped her hair and unclasped the thin cape from around her neck. She stood naked before him, as all around the room the sisters emulated her. Habits and vestments and seductive silk fell to the floor until the circle around Austin and Ceili was a circle of flesh.

  Two of the sisters approached Father Vernon and reached up to unclasp the vestment from around his neck. When it fell to the floor, one continued to unbutton his black shirt while the other knelt and released his belt before pulling down his zipper. The old man wore a stained white T-shirt and briefs beneath the uniform of his office, and the sisters removed those as well, leaving him standing bare, wearing only a pair of black socks. The man’s gut hung down below his belt line, and the gray curls of pubic hair almost obscured the knob of his sex. Austin wished it was completely hidden but could not avert his eyes. When the sisters had helped him remove his socks, they both kissed the priest on the lips, and then stepped back to the witches’ circle.