The Devil's Equinox

by John Everson

  In a moment that Austin knew he would never forget, the small infant’s skull suddenly appeared clothed in flesh once more. It was dark, rotting flesh, but its eyes were black and bright, and its teeth opened sharp as an alien carnivore.

  The baby snapped and tore at the flesh of Regina’s breast, leaving a bloody hole in its wake before spitting the chunk to the floor and chomping down for a second bite.

  Regina screamed. But she wasn’t beaten. She batted the demonic skull to the floor, but it only rolled mouth over head twice and then stopped…and rose again on its own power. It flew through the air to bury itself in the soft flesh of her breast once again and again Regina shrieked.

  “Sisters!” she cried. “Don’t let her take the child! Stop his calling. The doll!”

  Austin felt something strange in his head. Almost a feeling of…pure power. Hunger. And as he watched the skull turning Regina’s chest to gore, he knew that the power was shared. He had called…something…that had taken the form of the skull, but that something was connected to him too. And probably the Dark Eye.

  He silently urged the creature on, to destroy Regina and stop this ceremony. A group of the women rushed to help Regina. But another group of the sisters retrieved the clay doll from the floor.

  They placed it on the altar and began to pound their fists on it. Something smashed Austin’s chest and thighs and belly and he was suddenly flat on his back on the floor gasping for breath. He distantly heard Regina’s voice, and someone called for the knife.

  And then something with the force of a freight train at 60 mph hit him in the face, and the gray fog went instantly black.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The silence was deafening.

  When Austin awoke, he could hear the air buzzing with…emptiness. He almost rolled over to think about going back to sleep when he realized he was lying on a cold floor and the events of last night all came rushing back. He hadn’t gone to bed; he’d been used like a puppet and then knocked out by Regina’s kewpie doll.

  His eyes shot open and he sat up with a start. The motion almost made him sick. His whole body ached as if he’d truly taken the beating that they had given the doll. He almost let himself lie back down, but then stopped himself.

  Where were they all?

  He looked around and saw that the room was completely empty. The image on the TV screen showed the empty expanse of a dawn sky. The floor was littered with discarded clothes and splattered everywhere with blood, but all of the bodies were gone.

  Nearly.

  Austin saw feet sticking out from beyond the altar. He forced himself upright, and after teetering a moment, staggered toward the sacrificial table. Father Vernon’s corpse lay twisted behind it, a puddle of blood pooled on the floor next to him. His face still looked surprised.

  He should have felt remorse, but instead, as he looked at the pale hairy body of the old man, he only felt disdain. Father Vernon had disgraced his order. He had been a smiling liar and a foul pedophile and had tried to maneuver Austin into killing Ceili. He had no sympathy for the man or guilt for his actions. He had killed a mosquito.

  Austin turned away from the altar and saw the white skull of the baby from the furnace. It was back to its original form, no longer a ravening demon head. He bent down and picked it up, gingerly slipping it back into his pocket. Then a thought occurred to him and he looked for the place where he’d put the rest of the bones in a circle. It wasn’t good to separate the bones of the dead, he thought. He picked up the ones he could find and put them back into his pocket with the skull. But now what?

  From the blue-sky image still being broadcast on the TV, the night was over. The Devil’s Equinox was done. He had stopped them from killing his baby. Or had he?

  He had seen Angie – or what was left of her – snatch Ceili away from Father Vernon, but then he had no memory after the witches had crushed the doll likeness of him on the altar. Had Regina gotten the baby back and completed the ceremony?

  Where had they all gone?

  He walked slowly out of the Sacristy and down an empty hallway. The torches were still lit, but as he walked down one hall and through another to reach the front area where the main ‘club’ was, he did not hear a sound beyond the air in the ventilation ducts.

  He poked his head into room after room and all were empty. When he reached the front club, all of the lights were off, but he could see the empty bar and chairs turned upside down and resting on tables so the night crew could go through and wash the floor. Presumably, that had already happened since he could see the light of morning filtering in through the shutters.

  Austin turned and walked the back halls of the club once more. He descended to the lowest level and walked through the empty museum space and the abandoned torture room where he’d originally found Father Vernon.

  After a half hour of searching, he had to admit that the club was empty.

  Ceili…and Regina…were gone.

  Austin walked out into the crisp morning air and felt empty. Lost. The rays of the sun felt sterile and pale. Everything he had ever loved in his life was gone. There was nothing that he could do but go home. He would come back here tonight when the club was open. In the meantime, he needed to prepare.

  He tapped the skull in his pocket and considered the power of blood and magic. One way or the other, Regina would pay for what she had done.

  * * *

  Austin parked and walked into the empty house through the garage as he always did. He stepped through the shadowed kitchen and resisted the impulse to turn on a light. He was going upstairs to take a shower anyway.

  He stopped at the living room and stared at the sofa where he had come home so many times to see Regina sitting with Ceili, often writing in her Book of Shadows. He’d thought it an innocent thing, a woman’s journal. He couldn’t believe how wrong he had been.

  How easy a man is to deceive when a woman is involved.

  He shook his head and stepped into the foyer to go up the stairs to his bedroom. He had one foot on the first step before what he was looking at really hit him.

  There were footsteps on the white carpet leading up the stairs. Black muddy footprints.

  Who had been here? Those had not been here when he’d left last night.

  Austin took a hesitant second step. What if the intruder was still upstairs? He didn’t see a return path of steps leading down. Though maybe the mud had worn off the shoes by then?

  A baby cried upstairs.

  Austin didn’t hesitate then but dashed up the steps and turned at the landing toward the nursery. The crying stopped before he reached the top step. His heart filled with hope, but even as he ran, he cautioned himself that this couldn’t be. Who would have brought his baby home? Was this just another trap from Regina?

  He pushed through the nursery door and was greeted with the surprised face of Ceili. She looked across the room at him and smiled, waving a pudgy fist in the air in his direction.

  The problem was, she waved at him from the arms of her mother. And well…Angie had seen better days. Her hair was matted, and her eyes were yellow and pale. The flesh of her forehead hung in blackened strips, and the arms that held his infant were gray and yellow with dark sores and purpled bruises. She smiled as he came in, and the inside of her mouth was black against the white of her teeth.

  “Welcome home,” Angie said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Austin thought something crawled along the inside of her lip and over the tips of her teeth. Something with a lot of legs. She stroked the baby’s head with one blackened hand and cocked her head.

  “Did you miss me?”

  Afterword

  I’ve always had a sweet spot for stories of the occult – secret societies, druids, witches. Ancient rituals and secrets. The Devil’s Equinox, my eleventh novel, plays off of all of those tropes, so this truly was a case of
me writing a book that I’d want to read myself! And it’s been a long time in coming to fruition.

  A lot of writers keep idea journals and are constantly coming up with new ideas for stories and jotting them down. I keep lists of story ideas too. However, ‘constantly’ isn’t really part of my regimen. I’m not spinning out new ideas every other day on the fly and scribbling them all in an ever-growing notebook. Most of my novels have actually come out of just a handful of brainstorming sessions that I’ve held over the past dozen years. I’ll sit down every two or three years and brainstorm a series of plot ideas. I don’t spend a lot of time on each one at first…just write down a few sentences and then move on to the next idea. Later, I’ll come back to the list and decide what things I want to actually expand on and develop. Some become short stories, and some novels. Some never become anything.

  Looking back at the file creation dates on my computer, it appears The Devil’s Equinox was first brainstormed thirteen years ago! A single paragraph describing the gist of the plot for this novel – along with a couple sentences that were the core idea for The Family Tree, which I eventually wrote in 2013 – both are in a Word document that I saved back in 2006. I wrote a full nine-page synopsis for The Devil’s Equinox two years later, in 2008, which would have been the period when I was trying to decide what book should follow my third novel, The 13th. I believe at that time, given that I’d just written another ‘occult’ horror novel, I decided to go in a different direction, and instead developed Siren as my next book.

  So, I knew what The Devil’s Equinox was going to be eleven years ago! What took so long? Time flies and I can only write so much in a year. Looking at the original outline – not much changed in the story between the outline of 2008 and when I sat down a decade later to finally write it. Over the years, the story stuck with me, and last year it finally seemed the right time to dive in.

  Those who’ve read the introductions to my other novels know that I typically write in a variety of places. For many years, I traveled a lot for work, and so I wrote on the road – typically in pubs, because I hate sitting in hotel rooms. I also have a few local haunts that I’ve spent many hours in working on books after heading home from my day job. Last year, however, I didn’t travel much and I put in a lot of long hours at the office, so I didn’t go out to my local pubs after work. So aside from a couple nights at Spears Bourbon Burger bar in Wheeling, IL and Bub City in Rosemont, IL after attending two local conventions, I really wrote nearly all of The Devil’s Equinox at the oak bar I built in my basement, or at the glass bar that sits on my patio, with a steady soundtrack of Elsiane, Delerium, Cocteau Twins and other dreampop artists. For whatever it’s worth, this novel was probably written more at home than any other.

  I hope you’ve enjoyed the dark dreams I spun there!

  John Everson

  Naperville, IL

  March 2019

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks, as always, to my longtime editor, Don D’Auria, and Flame Tree publisher Nick Wells, for not only buying my books but helping to make them better with comments and edits. There are some friends and fans who have always encouraged me to keep typing on, when the way seemed dark. It’s thanks in part to them that instead of playing a lot more pinball and watching dozens more giallo and poliziotteschi movies from the 70s, I wrote this novel instead. My wife, Geri, has encouraged me and given me strength. My writer friends, Bill Gagliani, Dave Benton, Jonathan Maberry, Brian Pinkerton, Tim Waggoner and Mort Castle have graced me with their energy, advice and support. Likewise my non-writer friends and longtime supporters, including Chris Brook, Raymond Brown, Jerry Chandler, Lon Czarnecki, Lynn Frost, Lionel Ray Green, Leah and Joe Guillemette, Sarah Ham, Sheila Mallec, Don May, Jr. John Nardi, Lynn Neering, Peg Phillips, Coral Rose, Mike Sickler, Mickey Thompson, Karen Toonen, Russell Vangilder and many others have all helped drive me forward. I hope you’ll enjoy the result!

  About this book

  This is a FLAME TREE PRESS BOOK

  Text copyright © 2019 John Everson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  FLAME TREE PRESS, 6 Melbray Mews, London, SW6 3NS, UK, flametreepress.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Thanks to the Flame Tree Press team, including: Taylor Bentley, Frances Bodiam, Federica Ciaravella, Don D’Auria, Chris Herbert, Matteo Middlemiss, Josie Mitchell, Mike Spender, Will Rough, Cat Taylor, Maria Tissot, Nick Wells, Gillian Whitaker. The cover is created by Flame Tree Studio with thanks to Nik Keevil and Shutterstock.com.

  FLAME TREE PRESS is an imprint of Flame Tree Publishing Ltd. flametreepublishing.com. A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  HB ISBN: 978-1-78758-222-4, PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-220-0, ebook ISBN: 978-1-78758-223-1 | Also available in FLAME TREE AUDIO | Created in London and New York

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  Flame Tree Press is the trade fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing, focusing on excellent writing in horror and the supernatural, crime and mystery, science fiction and fantasy. Our aim is to explore beyond the boundaries of the everyday, with tales from both award-winning authors and original voices.

  Also available by John Everson:

  The House by the Cemetery

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