by Andrew Mayne
There’s a small fire of charcoals in front of a tall oak tree that was old when this was still Indian country.
White stones keep the smoldering briquettes from setting the dry weeds around them ablaze.
There’s only the ringing sound of the spoons and forks in the wind and the occasional caw of a crow in the distance. Telling the others I’m all alone, I assume.
“You da witch?” a deep voice asks from behind.
I suppress a gasp and spin around to find the source. In the fading sun and dim glow of the fire, I almost miss him. Tall, real tall. Thin like a scarecrow, Black Nick is dressed in stitched slacks, a sweater as random as his house, and a black blazer with patches on the sleeve. Well-worn, but not dirty, he reminds me of a survivor from a postapocalyptic movie. Old—hard to tell how old—he’s got deep blue eyes. White-blond hair sits on his head like a bad toupee. His feet are bare.
“I wouldn’t call myself that,” I reply, more calmly than I feel.
Black Nick steps out of the trees and takes a seat on a rock by the fire across from me. “Dancing up in trees in the middle of da storm, pitch black night, if that ain’t a witch, I dunno what is.” He stirs the coals with a stick.
“You saw me in the tree?”
“I didn’ say I did. I just said whats you were doin’ last night. Yo business is yo business.”
His accent isn’t West Virginian, but it’s not quite Southern, either. It’s a mishmash of pronunciations I can’t quite place—maybe with a hint of Minnesotan Swede.
He gives me a close look in the firelight. “You ain’t no witch. Just a fool.”
“I’m an FBI agent.”
“Same thing. I see why people think you a witch. You got a mysterious way about you. Coming up here in the night. Things out here. Dark things.” He’s reproachful, but not menacing.
“I came to talk to you about that. Has anyone asked you about what happened at the church?”
“Lotsa people. Coming here to ask Black Nick for some help. Wantin’ totems to ward off the wickedness. Ignore me forever. Call me names behinds my back. But when the evil come, then they all want Black Nick.”
“Has anybody like me come to talk to you?”
He stabs the stick into the fire, sending up a shower of sparks. “Fools aplenty.”
“I mean a law enforcement officer, a cop. Has anyone asked you for a statement?”
He draws a circle in the ashes with his poker. “What would I state? You seen what happened. Not much else to tell.”
“What did happen?” I hope that, even up here, he may have heard something we didn’t.
“Didn’t you see nothing with all your tree climbing? Something evil happened.”
“Yes, but because of whom?”
He scratches the rough skin of his chin. “The whom is da Sheriff Jessup. I suppose you know that already.”
There’s a way he emphasizes ‘whom.’ “Is there someone else involved?” I ask.
He stirs the flames again. “Supposing you knock this stick from my hand into the fire? My hand done let go of the stick. But it’s yo hand that done the knocking.”
“Is there someone else involved?”
“Supposing.”
“Can I ask you if you know something about this?” I reach for my phone to show him the photo of Bear McKnight’s chest.
He raises a hand. “Don’t show me that. Might as well call him over to supper. I know who you’re talking about.”
“Is that who’s behind this?”
“That troublemaker has been to these parts before. The Indian-folk had their own name for him. And the folk before them, and before them. He’s playing his tricks, as expected.”
Tricks. It’s a weird word for evil. Oddly, that’s how many cultures see the devil: as a trickster.
“What else has he done?”
His blue eyes stare into mine. “You read your Bible? Plenty. Ask old Abraham.”
“So you think he’s the cause of what happened?”
“I didn’t say that. I say he’s involved. But if you let the door open for him to step inside, your fault for leavins the door open.”
“The door?”
“He don’t just show up unannounced. Someone brought him here,” he replies matter-of-fact.
This drunk Yoda act is getting on my nerves. “The sheriff? Did he open the door?”
“Why’d he do a fool thing like that?” Nick’s blue eyes flash at me like this is the dumbest question in the world.
“Maybe he’s crazy?”
“If’n he’s crazy, he don’t need the troublemaker’s help. Crazy people do awful things all the time. The troublemaker just sit back and laugh.”
“So someone else made the sheriff do these things?”
“I reckon.”
“Anyone around here?”
“No one here knows about how to use a man’s fears to open the door. Nothing.”
“Except you . . .”
“Excepting me.”
“You and the sheriff get along?” I take a cautious step away from Black Nick, wishing I’d brought backup.
“We get along fine. When those prisoners bust out the lockup, Black Nick help get them. When kids get lost up here because they want to spy on Black Nick, I make sure the sheriff find ’em. When the fools decided to camp out on Lighting Peak and got a taste of the ’tricity, Black Nick carried them down the mountain. Me and Jessup get along fine. I’ve no need to open the door on him. Wouldn’t open it no how, even if I did. You never get it closed.”
“What about Reverend Curtis?”
Nick shakes his head. “He’s a Christian man just like me. No quarrels. I ain’t got none. If you’re trying to ask me polite if I had anything to do with what happened to those poor folks, the answer is ‘no.’”
He reaches into a trouser pocket and pulls out a handful of moss. He drops it into the fire, then tosses a copper penny from his jacket into the middle of the flames. White smoke shrouds the penny and begins to drift upward. Black Nick fans it with his hand. “No one round here knows the magic.”
Growing up in a family of magicians, I’ve met plenty of people who believe in the ‘real’ kind and have their own rituals. I stop myself from distracting him by asking what he just did. “Can you name someone who might know that kind of magic?”
“Lotsa folks. I been a bunch a different places before I came here. Hill folks, like me. Keep to theirselves. Following the old trails. The ones the Indian-folk found when they came here. Trails left back in the days when the angels were all getting along.” He points toward a cluster of trees. “Trails like that.”
I glance at the thick gnarl of bushes and trees protruding from the edge of the clearing. “It doesn’t look like much of a trail to me.”
“Cause you can’t see. Like I said, lotsa folks can. None around here no more, save me.” He stands up and beckons me closer.
I hesitate.
“Come on. Black Nick ain’t going to bite ya. We need to say a prayer.”
“For who?”
“For poor Sheriff Jessup. So his wandering soul will find its way home and he won’t disturb nobody more.”
I relent and take his hand. He’s more bone than muscle. I’m sure I could take him in a fight, especially since I’ve been spending extra time at the gym these last few months. Maybe too much time.
Black Nick clasps my other hand. I feel like the root of an oak tree has grown around them. He lowers his head. “Lord, forgive there Sheriff Jessup for what he’s done. Find him safe passage and protect all them folk.” His grip tightens. I try to pull away gently, but he won’t let go. “See to it this one finds her way. Make sure she don’t get lost in her own long shadow.” He releases me. “All right. I should take you back to your blue car down at the end of the trail. I don’t want you gettin’
lost up here and running into you-know-who.”
I’m not sure if he means the devil or the sheriff. Neither one would make for an enjoyable encounter. Although with the sheriff I’d be able to do something within my mortal jurisdiction.
A HALF-HOUR LATER, we reach my car. Black Nick managed to guide me without the use of a flashlight. He said it just invites troubles—it is better to not be seen.
“Things agonna work themselves out. But you gonna keep putting your nose where it don’t have no business.” He takes out a shard of black glass from his pocket. “I get these up on Lightning Peak. When the ’tricity hits the ground, it leaves these behind.” He hands it to me.
It’s heavy. He’s ground the rough rock into an edge like a blade. A hand knife made from a bolt of lightning.
I’m uneasy about the gift. “That’s okay. You don’t have to.”
His eyes widen. “I do have to. You go running into trouble, some of that trouble is going to come running toward you.” He throws his hands up in the air and won’t take it back.
He waits for me to get inside my car before turning back to the trail that leads up to his shack. Unafraid of the dark, he vanishes in the night with the determination of someone who knows his own destiny.
9
“LET’S TALK ABOUT demons,” says Ailes as I walk into the conference room at Quantico.
“Wonderful,” I reply, taking my seat. The chair, like the building, is decades old. Off from the main FBI campus, we’re in our own corner.
Gerald, my lanky, mop-headed coworker who looks like a teenager who got lost on take-your-kid-to-work day, is sitting at his laptop pecking away at a furious speed. Behind them is a fullscreen video wall. In the center is the Hawkton church.
“Oh, so now we’re interested?” I remark.
“I’m always interested. No, it seems Mitchum wants some more information about demons.”
“What gives?”
“This,” replies Ailes. He nods to Gerald. The church erupts into a fireball on the monitor. The roof rips apart and then the entire building explodes. When the smoke settles, the structure is spread across the ground in a thousand splinters, just as I saw from the helicopter.
“Where’d we get this footage?” I ask, surprised. I didn’t know anyone was filming at the time.
“We made this. Gerald took all the laser-mapped 3-D data and put it into one of our number crunchers.”
“Impressive.” I feel a bit silly for thinking it was real. I glance at Gerald and nod. He gives me a meek smile.
“You haven’t seen the half of it.” Ailes picks up a laser pointer and aims its red dot on a small white plank in the bottom left corner of the screen. “See that?”
Gerald moves his cursor over the board and the image zooms in. The individual grains in the wood become visible. He runs his finger across the track pad and the board flies into the air, reversing the trajectory of the explosion. Seconds later, I’m looking at part of a wall inside of the church, which has magically reassembled. There’s a cork bulletin board a few feet away from the plank. The camera spins around, showing us the entire interior of the church. Not all the details are there—some areas are pixelated chunks—but overall it’s convincing.
“We have to fudge a few things,” says Ailes. “But it’s useful.”
“I’ll say. It’s like a time machine. So what’s with the new interest in demons? Mitchum take another look at the smudge I found on McKnight?”
“Not quite. Roll forward,” Ailes tells Gerald. The camera flies back to a bird’s-eye view of the hellmouth. He points his laser at a patch of ground in the field across the street. “Zoom.”
The camera pulls close to another plank. This one is darker, like flooring. On its edges are several deep gouges.
“Look familiar?” asks Ailes.
“No. Not really.”
“Roll back, Gerald.” As before, the board shoots through the air to fall back into place inside the church. Several other planks nestle down on either side. The gouges continue on to the other boards, and next to each other, the jagged carvings form a name: Azazel.
The same name in English that I saw written in Hebrew on McKnight’s chest.
“Who wrote this?”
“We think that perhaps one of the victims carved it with a house key.” Ailes points to the blood stains on the floor in front of it. “Maybe Mrs. Alsop. Now we have two people saying the same thing. Both of them alive long enough to tell us something.”
“Yet none of them said, ‘Jessup’?” I ask.
“Nope. Kind of odd. Even Mitchum realizes that now.”
There’s a small victory for me she’ll never acknowledge. At least not in a positive way. “Where’s the forensics on Alsop? Any bite marks?”
“Gerald, we got the live feed from the forensics lab?”
Gerald turns the screen to a live view of one of our new autopsy rooms in DC headquarters. Two robot arms move over the body of what looks like Reverend Curtis. A separate window shows the super high-resolution images the cameras on the arm are capturing. At this magnification, the wrinkles on Curtis’s skin resemble vast canyons. Hairs shoot out like black tree trunks. Each pore is a pit that fades into the earth.
“We’re building a 3-D model of each victim,” explains Ailes. “We’re also capturing infrared so we can see the kind of blood vessel rupturing. The abrasions might tell us another story. It’s time-consuming.”
“You’re scanning the body?”
Gerald points to the skin detail. “We’re making a 3-D map.”
Ailes nods. “So far, cause of death appears to be our missing sheriff.”
“But nobody thought to implicate him in their last dying breath? Instead, they name a demon?”
Ailes shrugs. He’s still trying to figure things out too. “That sums it up. You wanted weird, you got weird.”
“What I wanted was a nice tidy case I didn’t have to be involved in. What we got was inconvenient reality. What about this ‘Azazel’? Any other meaning besides a demon?”
“He’s a popular character in fantasy literature and gaming,” replies Gerald. He pauses for a moment. “Also one of the members of the Brotherhood of Mutants.”
“GREAT, JUST PUT an APB out for Magneto. Case closed.”
Gerald gives me a smile, appreciating the reference.
“How’d your interviews go in Hawkton?” asks Ailes.
“The town is more eccentric than you can imagine. I even got a souvenir.” I set Black Nick’s blade on the table.
Ailes picks it up and looks at the unfinished handle. “Nice fulgurite.”
Of course he’d know what it was called. I’d had to Wikipedia it. “That’s from Black Nick.”
“Ah,” replies Ailes. He gives it a tap. “Iron? That’s rare.” He hands it back to me. “Careful with that edge. I read the local reports on him. You think he figures into this?”
“I don’t know. He seems pretty harmless. He wasn’t wearing shoes when I met him. I also don’t think he climbed up any trees. I doubt he’d be able to get the bodies up there without a pulley, unless his crows helped him.”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind. With enough patience, he’d be worth talking to again if we have more questions. I suggest someone with a gentle touch. He’s real backwoods.”
“What was his assessment?”
“He says the devil was involved, but not the instigator. He took pity on Jessup. He thinks the sheriff wasn’t under his own control.”
“Interesting . . .” Ailes’s eyes drift up to the side as he starts to think about something.
“How interesting?”
He slides his open laptop over. “Our sheriff took quite a few bites of McKnight,” he says, pulling up an autopsy photo on the screen of McKnight’s mangled neck. “In one of those bites, he managed to ch
ew into the side of his own mouth. We found his DNA.”
“I can tell you that hurts.” I touch my cheek, more than one bad memory resurfacing.
Ailes zooms into the wound. “We pulled separated tissue out and ran it through a dozen different screens. Cheek cells, unlike hair or skin cells, can tell you a little bit more because they’re in the mouth. In this case, we found something unusual. Just a trace, but enough to make a spike.” Ailes points to a graph. “Psilocin.”
It takes a moment for me to remember my pharmacology classes. Psilocin is a psychedelic. “Psilocin? This was in Jessup’s sample? You mean he was on mushrooms?”
“That’s the closest match. But it’s something different. The conventional toxin screen wouldn’t have noticed it. Hold on.” Ailes taps away at his keyboard faster than I can think. “Here . . .” A chemical structure floats on the screen.
It’s just a bunch of ping-pong balls to me. “Care to dumb it down? I’m just a former showgirl who learned a few card tricks.”
He rolls his eyes and points. “Hardly. That’s the phenyl ring. Almost all of the psychoactive drugs we have involve some variation of this. Jessup had something in his body that’s a close match to psilocin, something similar to what you’d find when a magic mushroom breaks down.”
“So the sheriff did get high off mushrooms?” We’ve reached my limit of crazy for the town.
“No. I said close. That’s the funny thing about chemistry. Rearrange an atom or two and decongestant becomes meth. Substituted phenethylamines are a whole family of molecules that can interfere with your neurotransmitters in a variety of ways. It’s why synthetics aren’t always precise. A right-handed version of a molecule might be a nausea-alleviating wonder drug, but the left-handed version could have the same effect and cause birth defects, like Thalidomide.”
“So the sheriff was on some kind of synthetic drug?”
Ailes shakes his head. “Not necessarily. It could be a natural substance that hasn’t appeared in our databases yet. We’re still finding new and different ways to mess with our brains. Archeologists have even found what appears to be psychoactive moss in ten-thousand-year-old graves. Its main ingredient is a substituted phenethylamine we hadn’t seen before.” He traces his finger around the molecule. “There could be a billion permutations. Each one affecting the brain in a slightly different way. One might slow down processes in the calcium channels, while increasing the response between auditory neurons.” He looks at me like the result should be obvious. “Words would sound distorted to you, slow and drawn out.”