Resurrecting Ravana

by Ray Garton

  Giles took a mug of coffee from the desk, leaned back in his chair, and sipped it. The information found by Willow did not tell how to resurrect the ancient Hindu demon, but it listed some of the things needed in order for the procedure to work. And one of them was distilled water.

  That left no doubt in Giles’s mind that Ethan Rayne was behind the attempt to raise Ravana. But it didn’t explain why he would do such a thing.

  Giles agreed with what Willow had said earlier that night. If Ravana’s reign spread from Sunnydale to cover the globe, and if his reign meant nothing but chaos and bloodshed, what could Rayne, or anyone else, profit from it?

  His question was answered on the very next page. He read it aloud in a hoarse, weary voice: “ ‘Once revived, Ravana will reward the mortal who aided in establishing his new reign. That mortal shall sit at the right hand of Ravana and be given his own rule, and he shall live as a prince in Ravana’s kingdom.’”

  Giles read it again, and again, as dread rose in his throat like bile. He sighed and buried his face in his hands.

  There was a long list of things Giles did not like about Ethan Rayne. His voracious hunger for power was near the top.

  As he sat there with his face in his hands, Giles found himself dropping off to sleep. He sat up abruptly and scrubbed his face with his palms. He’d been drinking coffee all night, but it wasn’t helping. His weariness was cutting through the caffeine and pulling him down with its weight. There was no way he could absorb any more information without sleep.

  Giles stood and stretched his arms high over his head as he yawned. He turned off the desk lamp and headed for bed.

  As Joyce drove home through the rain, Buffy turned on the radio and tuned in to the news station to see if there had been any more murders. Sure enough, the Rakshasa had not slowed down in their work.

  A Sunnydale man had killed his wife and their eight-year-old twin boys with an ax. Police had found the man dead in a crawlspace over his garage. No details were given about how the man had died or in what condition his body had been found, but Buffy didn’t need them. She knew the condition of the dead murderer — she could see it in her mind.

  At the house, Buffy and her mother walked to the front door beneath her mother’s large umbrella. Joyce fumbled with her keys, unlocked the door, and they went inside.

  “Oh, no!” Joyce cried as Buffy closed the door.

  Buffy spun around to see what was wrong.

  The living room looked like a tornado had hit the house. The coffee table had been knocked over and everything on it was scattered over the carpet. The sofa cushions had been tossed across the room, and the sofa itself had been turned upside down, the dustcover underneath sliced open from one end to the other. The walls were bare, and everything that had been hanging on them was on the floor.

  “Just like the gallery,” Joyce whispered tremulously.

  Buffy’s stomach, full from the breakfast she’d eaten, felt sick as she looked over the mess. She walked between the toppled coffee table and overturned sofa and went upstairs to her room. She paused before opening the door, not sure she wanted to look.

  Her room had been violated, too. At its absolute messiest, it had never come close to the condition in which Buffy found it now. The mattress had been taken off the bed, the closet had been emptied, drawers had been pulled out and dropped to the floor, including her equipment drawer; knives and stakes and all her other weapons were scattered over the floor.

  Joyce brushed by on her way down the hall to her own bedroom. A moment later: “They went through every room in the house!” She sounded near tears.

  Buffy felt sick to her stomach. Someone had gone through their house, throwing furniture this way and that, emptying drawers, breaking things . . . and that someone had gone into her bedroom, touching her belongings — private things, things only she had touched — violating her privacy, soiling the very air in the house. All those things still belonged to her, but Buffy wasn’t sure she wanted to touch anything after it had been smeared with the intrusion of some faceless stranger.

  She left her room and headed for the kitchen, wondering if indeed every room in the house had been torn up. She flipped on the light as she went in.

  All the cupboard doors were open and broken bits of china, shards of glass, and silverware covered the floor. Drawers had been pulled out, sponges and brushes and bottles of cleaners had been scattered over the floor, and the cupboard under the sink was open and empty. Even the crisper drawer had been removed from the refrigerator and placed on the counter, where its contents had been set aside.

  “Somebody’s looking for something,” Buffy whispered. “And I bet I know what they’re looking for.”

  First, somebody turns over the gallery. Then the home of one of the employees of the gallery. Whoever it was, they were looking for the Ravana statuette.

  Giles said Ethan Rayne was in town, and that he suspected Rayne of being behind everything that was happening. But he didn’t know for sure. What if Rayne was just looking for the Ravana statuette? What if someone else had it and was using it to bring the Hindu demon back, and Rayne was trying to find it for himself? Something else she would have to remember to tell Giles.

  She wondered if she should start making a list.

  Buffy could hear the faint sound of her mother crying down the hall. She decided to sweep up the mess on the floor before she or her mother took a piece of glass in the foot. She made her way slowly and carefully across the kitchen, trying to avoid glass and bits of china but crunching some of it under her feet nonetheless. When she reached the narrow closet where the broom was kept, she pulled the door open —

  And a face as pale as death, with red eyes and shiny metal teeth, came out of the rectangle of darkness toward her.

  Chapter 17

  THE MAN IN THE CLOSET WAS FASTER THAN BUFFY’S reflexes. A gloved hand covered her whole face and pushed hard. She stumbled backward, trying to keep her balance, but fell anyway. Pain made her cry out as the jagged edges of broken glass and china pierced her back.

  Heavy foosteps ran out of the kitchen, crunching the pieces of dinnerware.

  Buffy started to get up, but froze. She would have to be careful not to slice up her palms. She reached up with one hand and grabbed the lip of the counter behind her and pulled herself into a sitting position, brought her knees up to her chest and awkwardly got to her feet.

  Joyce screamed. The front door slammed shut.

  “Buffy!” Joyce cried, terrified.

  Buffy moved fast, but gingerly, over the kitchen floor and found her mother in the living room, standing at the entrance to the hall.

  “Who was that man?”

  Buffy didn’t stop to answer. She clicked on the porch light on her way out the front door, ran across the lawn, and stopped on the sidewalk. Eyes squinting against the rain, she looked to her right, her left, across the street.

  A car door slammed and the engine started nearby, to Buffy’s left and across the street. Headlights came on.

  Buffy spotted the white limousine and ran toward it. She was ready to kick the windows in, if necessary.

  Moving surprisingly fast for its size, the limousine pulled away from the curb and sped by before Buffy reached it. Angry, frustrated, she could do nothing more than stand in the street and watch its taillights grow smaller and dimmer with distance, until the car completely disappeared.

  “Oh, Buffy, that was the man from the gallery!” Joyce said when Buffy came back inside. Her voice trembled almost as much as her hands. She paced frantically between the coffee table and sofa.

  “I know,” Buffy said distractedly. “He was still in the kitchen.”

  “His eyes —”

  “He’s an albino.” During the split-second in which Buffy had looked into the man’s face, his pink irises made her think of the Rakshasa, and she’d thought, at first, that he was one, or was perhaps some giant human-Rakshasa hybrid. The silvery glint of his teeth confused her further, and she tho
ught perhaps he was some kind of robot. But the instant she recognized the metal on his teeth to be braces, it all came together, and she realized he was an albino man, most likely the one her mother had mentioned at Denny’s. “And he’s got braces on his teeth. Like an eleven-year-old.”

  “Well, he’s certainly the biggest eleven-year-old I’ve ever seen.” Joyce stopped pacing, fists clenched at her sides, eyes tightly shut, and shouted, “What does he want?”

  “He was looking for the Ravana statuette,” Buffy muttered, to herself as much as her mother. “He tried the gallery first. He’ll probably be hitting the houses of the other gallery employees, if he hasn’t already.”

  “I’m calling the police,” Joyce said, already on her way to the telephone.

  “No, wait,” Buffy called. “I don’t know, maybe we shouldn’t.” She wondered if it was a good idea to bring the police into it. In her line of work, they only made things more difficult. “I just thought —”

  “Thought what? Buffy, our insurance won’t cover this if there’s no police report.”

  Buffy shook her head slowly and sighed. “I don’t know what I thought.”

  Joyce went to Buffy’s side and put an arm around her. “You should go to bed. You’ve got school tomorrow. Today.”

  “My bed’s on the floor.”

  “So, we’ll put it back where it belongs and make it up.”

  “As long as I’m up, I should probably patrol —”

  “You’ll do no such thing. You’re going to bed right now. Go brush your teeth while I call the police and the other employees to warn them. Then I’ll help you make up your bed.”

  Buffy knew she was right. Her bones ached with weariness and she felt as if her skull had been stuffed with wet cotton. She went into the bathroom, swept some broken glass into a corner with her sneakered foot, and brushed her teeth. In the bedroom, she changed back into her nightshirt, then pulled the mattress toward her bed. She stumbled and fell on it with a grunt.

  Seconds later, she was sound asleep.

  It was sprinkling lightly when Willow left early for school the next morning, and the sky was still dark with clouds. But there was a large gap to the east that revealed bright blue sky and through which shined corrugated shafts of sunlight. A misty, unfragmented rainbow arced in front of the diamond-shaped opening in the clouds.

  A sight like that normally cheered Willow, but she had too much on her mind to pay much attention to it. That morning, she’d heard about the latest murder, which had taken place early the previous evening, and she wondered how many more were going to take place before they found out how to stop them. That was why she’d left early that morning. She planned to spend some time on a computer in the library before classes, looking for more information about Ravana and the Rakshasa. But that wasn’t the only thing on her mind.

  Willow still couldn’t shake what had happened the night before. If they had been alone, if there had been no one else around or in earshot, both Willow and Buffy would be dead. Of course, Willow would have been dead first, but it hardly mattered. It was either that, or kill Buffy and become the all-you-can-eat buffet for the Rakshasa.

  The whole thing still creeped her out; if she thought about it long enough, it made her want to crawl out of her skin. But disturbing as it was, something good had come with it. She no longer had to wonder what had happened to her friendship with Buffy. That it was nothing she had done — or hadn’t done — was an enormous relief to Willow; she felt like she’d lost twenty-five ugly pounds overnight.

  Before leaving Giles’s car last night, Willow had turned to Buffy and asked, “So, we’re cool?”

  Buffy had grinned and given her a big, tight hug.

  The grin had been contagious, because Willow wore it into her house. On the way up the front walk, Willow had chanted to herself quietly, “Cool at last, cool at last!”

  There was a bruise beneath Willow’s left eye that a little makeup managed to cover, for the most part. Her lower lip was still swollen, but the cut didn’t look nearly as bad as she had expected. Although she’d come up with an explanation — she was going to say she’d run into the edge of a door — she wasn’t looking forward to being asked about it all day. She took some consolation in the fact that she was able to walk to school. Buffy could have put her in a hospital bed in the space of a few seconds.

  At school, the halls were still quiet; it was too early for much activity. In the library, Giles’s office was dark and the door was closed, so she assumed he hadn’t arrived yet.

  Willow went to her usual computer and booted up.

  There was a sound somewhere in the library, so soft it could not be identified immediately — a wet sound . . . squishing? sucking?

  Standing slowly and without a sound, Willow left her computer and crept toward the sound. It was just on the other side of the bookshelf in front of her. She walked along the rows of books, listening carefully to the strange, moist sound. She slowly rounded the end of the bookcase . . . and rolled her eyes.

  “You guys make out louder than anyone I’ve ever known,” Willow said.

  Xander and Cordelia bounded from the sofa and away from one another, straightening their clothes and hair on the way. They spun around almost simultaneously and faced Willow.

  “Don’t you make any noise when you come into a room?” Xander asked.

  Willow laughed. “Over all that racket? You sounded like hippopotami frolicking in the mud.” Smiling, she turned and went back to her computer.

  Xander and Cordelia followed her.

  “Hey, uh, did you hear about the murder?”

  “Yep. Another Rakshasa banquet.”

  “Have you seen Giles?” he asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “How about Buffy?”

  “No. But it’s early and she had some Rak activity at home last night. I came to do some more searching on the ’Net. I don’t know what you and Cordy are doing here.” She was still smirking as she sat down at the computer again.

  Xander ignored the remark. He stood beside her. “So, what do you think?”

  “What do I think about what?”

  He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “About the current weirdage we’re dealing with.”

  Willow glanced up with him, then did a double take when she saw the dead-serious look on his face. It wasn’t an expression Xander wore often, and it startled her a little.

  “Well, I haven’t thought about it long enough to form an opinion. Between defending Mila and looking for information about —”

  “I think it’s scary. And serious.”

  She pushed her chair back from the computer and turned to him fully.

  “You know,” Xander continued quietly, “I’m the first one to admit I’m about as brave as a turkey on Thanksgiving. That’s why, y’know, I usually lay low. I hate pain, and I’m not into, y’know, suspense . . . especially when the suspense is over whether I’m gonna live or die. But this thing . . .” He shook his head and wrinkled his nose distastefully. “What happened last night — between you and Buffy, I mean — that scared the hell outta me. I couldn’t sleep last night because I was afraid I’d have that nightmare and what if I suddenly wanted to open a can of whup-ass on you? I mean, what if, God, what if I felt that way about Cordy? And just the thought of those ugly little boogers hanging out in my room at night, watching me sleep makes me wanna move into a bank vault for a few weeks.”

  “They wait for you under your bed,” Willow said.

  Xander’s face fell. “They . . . what?”

  “Well, see, after I went to bed last night, Buffy called me with a heads-up about the lizard-rats. She’d locked all her windows and her door, just like she told us to, but it didn’t work because they were already there. They were waiting under her bed for her to go to sleep.”

  “Under . . . her bed.” He lost some of the color in his face. “Well . . . thanks. That’s just great.” He stepped away from her and walked nervously in a small circle. �
�I’m just now getting over my childhood fear of the monster under the bed, and now you tell me the monster under the bed is for real. You’re like that Rod Serling guy stepping out from behind the refrigerator to say the next stop’s the Twilight Zone.”

  Willow stood and went to him, put a hand on his shoulder and got him to stop walking in a circle, like a dog chasing his tail. “Look, Xander, we’re gonna find a way to stop those things. I wouldn’t be surprised if we came up with something today.” She sounded far more certain than she felt.

  “You think?” he asked, giving her sidelong glance.

  She couldn’t lie to him, not when he seemed so vulnerable. He looked like a little boy waiting for his turn to see the dentist. “I’m hoping. Okay?”

  “Well, hoping’s not as good as thinking, and thinking’s not nearly as good as knowing . . . but I’ll take it.”

  Willow went back to her seat and started clicking her mouse.

  Xander muttered, “But I’m not goin’ near my freakin’ bed till this is over.”

  Giles entered the library looking older than his years. He carried his briefcase as if it were full of bricks. His face seemed to have physically lengthened and there were crescent moons of puffy flesh under his eyes. Even his clothes looked weary.

  “Ah, hello, Willow, Xander,” he said hoarsely.

  Cordelia joined them and stood next to Xander. “Too late, Giles. We’ve taken over your library,” she said, smiling.

  “The way I feel today, I’m quite tempted to give it to you.” He went into his office and returned a moment later with a Thermos cup of tea.

  “Are you sick?” Willow asked.

  He shook his head. “Just exhausted. I was up quite late going over the material you gave me, Willow. And it proved to be quite fruitful. I simply didn’t get enough sleep.”

  “What did you find in those pages?”

  “A lot, and I’d like to discuss it. But not without Buffy. Have you seen her?”