The Demon Stone

by Christopher Datta

  THE DEMON STONE

  by Christopher Datta

  Christopher Datta is a retired Foreign Service Officer. The opinions and characterizations in this book are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the United States Government.

  Copyright © 2014 Christopher Datta

  Paperback ISBN: TK

  Ebook ISBN: TK

  Cover design: TK

  In Loving Memory of

  William Francis Marsh

  Liz Slesinger

  Aileen Miles

  And

  Hampton and Gem

  You Good Dogs, You

  PART I

  Blood Brothers

  Chapter 1

  The pilots were drunk, and the plane lurched left and right like a falling leaf as it dropped to the runway. The battered turboprop carried, by Kevin’s count, eighty-two adults, at least seven complaining goats, a crate of live chickens, three squalling infants, two pigs and two elderly flight attendants smoking in front of the lit “no smoking” signs. The crew, he’d been told, were all Serbian draft dodgers who’d fled the Balkan War and never looked back.

  “Cowboys,” muttered the passenger to his right, rolling his eyes.

  Landing so hard only his seatbelt kept him from catapulting to the ceiling, Kevin felt lost as he stepped out onto the rickety mobile stairway pushed up against the plane. Climbing slowly down, his fellow passengers elbowed madly past him running for the terminal. Reaching the tarmac, Kevin paused.

  He was in Africa.

  He considered a passage from the book in his hand, a story about the Congo. “I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge?”

  What knowledge would he find here, Kevin wondered, standing for the first time in the heart of humanity’s birthplace, where life was old and the fear of what prowled the dark first quickened a man’s breath. He felt an apprehension he could not name, a dread as primal as his instinct for life and its certain end, following in the corridor of all the lost generations of men who began, on this continent and so long ago, that great rhythm of birth and death that led to him, and that would continue to hammer, like drums in the night, far beyond him into the fog of an unknowable future that most likely would not remember his coming or passing.

  Kevin glanced at his book again. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “Mistah Kurtz—he dead,” Kevin muttered to himself.

  Chapter 2

  One Year Later in Northern Minnesota

  Liz Pemberton told herself yet again how crazy she was to feel trapped and claustrophobic sitting on the back bumper of a car in the middle of the great outdoors. She lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply to steady her nerves, but the dark walls of the forest pressing in on either side of the raw dirt road she was parked on made her feel as panicky as being shut up alone in a dark cellar. Even worse, she thought, who knew what the hell might be behind the nearest tree, which was so close she could reach out and run her hand across its scabby-looking bark. Why, she asked for the hundredth time, had she allowed Kevin to talk her into this trip?

  And for the hundredth time she answered herself that it was the murder. Again she replayed in her mind the television news footage she’d seen over seven months earlier. A gaunt old woman in a pink floral housecoat standing on the front steps of her white ranch-style home, perfectly normal in every respect except for being drenched in blood and waving a gun in her shaking right hand. In the corners of the screen dozens of police officers sheltered behind squad cars, their weapons drawn. In her mind’s eye, she once again saw the picture jerk as the woman’s gun swept directly to the cameraman who, when it passed, returned to zoom in on the woman’s face. The look in her eyes as they shifted from side to side still haunted Liz. Confused and desperate, they were the eyes of a cornered animal, unable to comprehend how she’d come to be there.

  She raised the gun to her face, as though seeing it for the first time and surprised to find it in her hand. She looked out again, shaking her head and rubbing her left hand compulsively against her bloodstained cheek. She opened her mouth to speak, but hesitated a moment. She licked her lips, and then, with just the hint of a shrug, pointed the gun to her head and pulled the trigger. But Liz had not actually seen her in that last desperate moment because the news producers discreetly cut away to a view of the crouching police, and Liz only heard the shot and saw the officers flinch.

  It turned out that the old woman had murdered her husband with a large kitchen knife not long before the news crew filmed her suicide, although murder hardly described the ferocity of the crime. She’d literally hacked him to pieces with such violence that bits of gore spattered the kitchen wall.

  Liz hadn’t known Kevin’s in-laws’ names and so hadn’t made the connection to him until the phone rang a half an hour after she had watched the broadcast.

  She answered to a long silence into which she repeated, “Hello?”

  “Liz, it’s me.”

  “Kevin?” she said, barely recognizing his voice.

  “It’s my fault,” he said, gulping the words. “No one knows, no one can know. But I know, Liz, and it’s my fault.”

  Unaccountably, his tone raised the hair on the back of her neck. “As the priest used to tell me in confession, say five Hail Marys and go and sin no more,” she joked. “It always worked for me.”

  “You saw it, didn’t you? On television? It was on all the twenty-four-hour cable channels.” He sounded quietly hysterical.

  Liz shivered. “You’re scaring me, old friend. What was on television? Give me a complete thought here. I feel like I’m coming into the middle of a conversation you’re having with someone else.”

  “My mother-in-law killed her husband and then shot herself. It was on all the news shows. Morgan did it, Liz, but God help me, it’s my fault.”

  “Those were your wife’s parents?” Liz was silent a moment, shocked. Murders like this were not supposed to happen to people you knew. Finally she said, “What do you mean Morgan did it and it’s your fault? You’re not making sense.”

  “Morgan killed them, Liz. She did it.” His voice was strained as he continued repeating the phrase, “She did it, she did it, she did it.” He then mumbled something Liz could not make out.

  “Okay, Kevin, okay,” Liz whispered into the phone, and thankfully he stopped.

  In all the years they’d been friends, Liz had never before heard this kind of desperation in Kevin’s voice. A chill swept through her and to break the silence she said, “I saw it, Kevin. They’re sure the old woman killed her husband, everyone says so, and then she killed herself. Half the country must have witnessed it on television by now. Morgan didn’t kill her mother. She didn’t, Kevin. You’re just in shock. It’s natural to think about things you might have done and signs of trouble you might have seen, but that’s not your fault. This was something Morgan’s mother did, not Morgan and not you.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Kevin. “It is my fault. I brought it back from Africa. No one knows, but I did. It’s like a virus and now Morgan’s got it. But I was the carrier, Liz. I brought it back, God help us all, and I don’t know how to stop it. I’ve got to stop it and I don’t know how.”

  “Kevin,” she said, simultaneously frightened and exasperated, “stop what?” She bit her lip. “Sweetie, you’re not talking sense. Do you want me to come out? You need to get help. Morgan’s going to need you to be there for her, and you’ve got to pull yourself together.”

  She could almost hear him shaking his head. “No, stay away. It’s not safe, Liz. I shouldn�
��t even be talking to you, but you’ve got to know that Morgan did it. You don’t understand, no one does and no one can. No one.” There was a pause, and then Kevin whispered, “The horror, Liz, will never, ever leave me.”

  “What was horrible, Kevin? What are you talking about?”

  “The night Bill died. That’s when it started.”

  Chapter 3

  Africa

  Kevin entered the bare terminal building to find throngs of shouting people surrounding two booths and waving passports at bored-looking men in shabby blue uniforms. He hung back, wondering what to do, until he heard his name called, and then he spotted Bill pushing through the crowd. Giving him a hug, he slapped Kevin on the back.

  As Kevin had expected, Bill was his eternally tall and scrawny self, his face red from the sun. Bill never tanned, he just burned. His dark hair was, as usual, long, and a thin reddish-black beard covered his chin. Kevin had seldom seen him in better spirits.

  Bill had left a lucrative medical practice in the United States some years back to come work in Africa. Now he was running a clinic for Doctors Without Borders in a refugee camp caught in the middle, according to the little Kevin had read in the newspapers, of a particularly vicious civil war.

  Kevin’s journey had begun with a call in the middle of the night, which was when Bill always called. Despite his international experience, Bill seemed unable to grasp that even though he was awake, time differences meant there where places in the world where normal people were in bed. Through a sleepy haze he realized that Bill was asking him to take a break from his teaching job to come help him at his clinic. “It’ll do you good,” he had said, “to see what it’s like for most of the world away from your easy life of malls, Sunday Night Football and internet porn.”

  Kevin Houdek had known Bill Marsh since high school, well over twenty-five years now. Back then they’d been rebels, sometimes with a cause and sometimes without. But Kevin had, even then, been the more cautious of the two, often keeping Bill’s most extremist tendencies in check in their opposition to what they both viewed as a corrupt and grossly self-indulgent American culture. On the other hand, Bill had forced Kevin to be more than safely and cynically detached in his defiance of social norms, pushing him out of his comfort zone to engage in acts of disobedience that got them arrested on two occasions: once for spraying red paint on the fur coat of a corpulent middle-class lady on a downtown Minneapolis street, and the other time for breaking and entering a munitions factory at night to cover the walls with antiwar graffiti. Both incidents resulted in fines and community service sentences later expunged from their records when completed because, in the case of the rather sympathetic woman, it turned out she loved animals and the coat was fake fur. She asked for, and the court granted, leniency. In the case of the munitions factory, no real damage was done and nothing taken.

  They were blood brothers united by their shared joy of being a headache to school administrators who, Kevin later reflected, were remarkably tolerant of their often-juvenile antics. In short, they acted like jerks in a way that only the self-righteousness of youth is capable of mistaking for principle.

  In their commitment to creating a new social order, Kevin had become a teacher and Bill a doctor. Eventually, life took them to different cities as they slowly eased into ordinary pursuits as ordinary citizens. At least, Kevin had, and it seemed to him Bill was doing the same, making a substantial amount of money as a doctor. And then to Kevin’s surprise, Bill unexpectedly quit, leaving the U.S. to take on medical jobs in the most god-awful places he could find, his old social conscience apparently rekindled.

  And that was when Kevin grew to expect those late-night calls when the whim struck Bill that it was time to rekindle the moral outrage of his oldest and best friend.

  Being caught in the maelstrom of an African civil war was now Bill’s “real” world, “and it’s time you get a dose of it before you completely forget even wanting to experience a life out of the ordinary,” Bill had told him that night. “Besides, I need help at the clinic.”

  “I don’t want to go to Africa,” Kevin had said, stumbling from the bedroom to the living room so as not to wake his wife, Morgan. “Just because something’s distant, dangerous and depressing doesn’t make it more real. I’m a teacher, and I already work for the common good. Besides, I have a chronic allergy to being shot at.”

  Of course, ever since he’d first known him, Bill could always badger, guilt and cajole him into doing things he’d never otherwise even consider.

  “See life on the edge at least once,” Bill had said. “You’ll learn more about what’s important and what’s bullshit in one month here than in all the rest of your life put together where you are now. Bring your daughter Beth. It’ll do her good, too.”

  “I’m not about to take my teenage daughter into a war zone.”

  “You let her live in the same house with her mother. Compared to Morgan, an African civil war is a walk in the park.”

  “You’ve never given Morgan a fair shake,” Kevin had shot back. Bill and Morgan had never liked each other, often leaving Kevin to defend his old friend to his wife and vice versa. Generally, he ducked talking about the one with the other whenever possible.

  “No, I’ve just never understood what keeps you two together,” Bill had said. “But this isn’t about her. It’s about you coming to help me out at the clinic. I need you here as much as you need to be here.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Of course not, and I mean that on so many levels.”

  Chapter 4

  Minnesota

  The night Bill died, Kevin had said. That’s when what started? What in the world, Liz asked herself, did he mean? Bill Marsh had been Kevin’s friend even longer than her. She knew he’d been a doctor in Africa. She knew Kevin had gone to see him, and that while he was there Bill had died. But that was all she knew. She’d gently pushed Kevin about it several times, but he wouldn’t say a word more.

  “What does Bill have to do with your mother-in-law’s death?” she said, mystified.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called.”

  He sounded like a frightened five-year-old. This murder-suicide was horrible, but it did not account for this irrational outburst. It was not like him at all.

  He hung up.

  She called him back repeatedly, but got no answer.

  When she continued calling the next day, Morgan picked up the phone. Liz told her how sorry she was about her parents, but Morgan’s response sounded distant and mechanical.

  “Yes, a terrible tragedy,” she said, echoing Liz’s words.

  “Is Kevin there?” said Liz. “Can I talk to him?”

  “No,” said Morgan stiffly. “He’s not. I don’t know where he is. I actually thought you might know.”

  There was an edge to her voice. “In fact,” Morgan continued, “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he’s with you right now, and that he asked you to call to spy on me.”

  “Of course not, Morgan. I would never do anything of the kind,” said Liz.

  “I’m not the fool you think I am,” she shot back. “I know more than anyone realizes. Much more. I’ve always been betrayed. Always. But not anymore. You’ll see.”

  And she hung up.

  Liz was as mystified by that conversation as she had been with Kevin’s. It was two weeks before she heard from him again—when he called to tell her he was divorcing Morgan. He would not say why. In fact, Kevin dodged away from saying much of anything about what had happened in either Minnesota or Africa, but he did call her regularly after that. It seemed to Liz that all he wanted was to hear a friendly voice. Estranged from his wife, and with Bill dead, she was probably the only friend he had left.

  And so they talked, but in the back of their conversations, behind all the empty words, Liz felt the presence of a red-eyed beast. Something had changed Kevin, but he kept it shut up tight in the darkest corner of the darkest room of his heart.

  Chapter 5
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br />   Africa

  Bill slapped a wad of U.S. dollars on the counter in front of the customs inspector. Without even glancing at them, the man pocketed the cash and nodded to the exit.

  “Bribe?” asked Kevin.

  “You don’t want to spend your first day in Africa here in this airport do you?” Bill chuckled.

  As they pushed through the shabby terminal lobby, Kevin lapsed into a daze brought on by jetlag and the crowds of young men pulling at the bags he’d hauled off the plane. Dressed in dirty jeans and tee shirts and all speaking at once, they aggressively begged to carry his things for him. Kevin was shocked to see a few waving amputated stumps of arms in the air while thrusting their remaining hands at him in a plea for money. One sad-eyed boy had no arms at all, using a tin can hung from a dirty string around his neck to collect coins.

  Guards dressed in khaki uniforms and carrying automatic rifles lounged around the airport entrance, looking bored.

  Bill led him outside and opened the rear door to a large, dark blue Toyota Landcruiser parked outside the airport entrance. He roughly pushed Kevin in, and when he slammed the door Kevin found it mercifully quiet and cool in the car.

  A tall, thin African gentleman sat at the wheel, apparently smiling at him. Kevin wasn’t sure because his face was disfigured by multiple deep scars across his cheeks and his forehead. He reached over the front seat and vigorously shook Kevin’s hand, saying something Kevin didn’t understand. The man looked young except for his eyes, which appeared old and cautiously alert.

  Bill jumped in next to him from the other side of the car. He introduced Kevin to Peter, their driver, and they sped off. The disorganized airport, the pushing and shoving, the heavy smell of humanity pressed together in the heat, the mutilated beggars and the aggressive demands to carry his bags had all left Kevin reeling.