Anathema

by Bruce Talmas

  Rose was going through the barn slowly, studying every inch of the place. I didn’t know what he was hoping to find, but he was certainly looking for something. Clearly, he wasn’t expecting to find a person though. He was moving with all the stealth of a perturbed rhinoceros. Even without my night eyes, I could have tracked his movement easily just by following the beam of his flashlight and the clomp of his service boots. The young man edged closer to Rose. I edged closer to them both. Rose tensed up as his instincts flared to life, telling him he wasn’t alone. But it was too late. The young tattooed man brought the wooden plank down on both of Rose’s arms, knocking both the flashlight and the gun out of his hand. The blow was hard enough that it could have broken one or both of his arms, but the wood was old and it splintered without doing too much damage.

  I was less than ten feet from them at that point, and the flashlight caught me squarely in its beam as it skittered across the floor. No one was paying attention, though, so I remained in anonymous darkness as the young man picked up Rose’s gun and flashlight and pointed them both at the cop.

  “Who are you?” the young man asked.

  Rose was holding his left arm. It had taken the brunt of the attack. He was hunched over a bit, but still had his wits about him. “I’m a cop.” He reached for his wallet, but the man raised the gun and Rose put his hands up. “I’m just getting my badge.”

  “I don’t care if you’re a cop. Did The Ferryman send you?”

  “Who?”

  “The Ferryman.”

  “I don’t know anything about any Ferryman,” he said.

  “That’s what I was hoping you’d say.” The man raised the gun again, this time clearly intending to use it. Rose shrunk inward, preparing himself for the final blow he’d ever feel.

  So much for remaining anonymous. I came up behind the tattooed man, pulled his head back, and slit his throat with the combat knife. Rose squinted into the darkness, trying to see what was going on as I grabbed the gun from the falling Satanist.

  I reached down for the flashlight, and I could see Rose weighing his options. His brain going through the probabilities and outcomes of this new scenario. It took him less than a second to decide he shouldn’t try anything stupid. I nodded in approval at his decision.

  “Speak of the Devil,” I said, “and the Devil appears.”

  I handed his gun back to him.

  He just stared at it for a second, then hesitantly reached for it. “Thanks,” he said, still shaken but gathering himself quickly. He took a second look at me, and I could see the realization dawn on him.

  “You were at the apartments today,” he said

  I offered a hand and helped him up. He dusted himself off then squared up with me, waiting for a response.

  I nodded. “I was. Sorry about the jaw.” There was some redness on the left side of his face. It would eventually bruise, and there would be some swelling, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. For once, I’d done a pretty good job of pulling my punches.

  “You just saved my life, so I’m not going to hold it against you.” He stopped rubbing his forearm long enough to touch his jaw and wince. “Who are you?” he asked

  “My name’s Jacob.”

  “Thanks Jacob.”

  I had about as much goodwill and moral authority as I was going to have in this relationship, so I figured I should just make my play now. “…And I need your help.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because you’re a cop. And because I think the person I’m trying to find has something to do with your son’s abduction.”

  That got his attention. Suddenly both his wounded arm and his sore jaw were forgotten. He looked at me hard. “What do you know about my son?”

  “Nothing yet, but I hope to learn some things soon. When the time comes, can I count on you to help me?”

  He ignored me. “If you have any information about Alex’s kidnapping, you have to tell me.” His voice nearly broke at the mention of his son’s name. I could hear the desperation, maybe even obsession, in his voice. I could use that, but I also didn’t want to push too hard. He was a man on the edge. Having had a long, distinguished career as a man on the edge, I knew the dangers that went with that. Push him too hard, and he’d become a time bomb. A danger to himself and anyone else around him. That was worrisome, since I was planning on being around him in the near future.

  “How did you find this place?” I asked him.

  “I tracked Romeo’s cell phone. When the shooting happened at the apartment building, I checked the places he’d been in the past couple of days, and realized that he’d come all the way up here, right next to where a well-known murder had just taken place. From there it was just putting two and two together.”

  I nodded, impressed with the man’s work. “And how did you find the kidnappers?”

  “Luck and persistence. I’ve been tracking every scumbag that’s been fingered for any abductions in recent years. I’ve been tracking a half-dozen of them, but when I bugged Romeo and Josh, I realized that they had just pulled off a big job and a big payday. It made me think they were the ones, so that’s where I’ve been focusing all my energy for the past few days.”

  “Very nice work, Detective. Hopefully I’ll have some more evidence for you in the very near future. There are some things I have to do first though,” I told him. “I don’t know anything yet, but I will soon. When I have something, you’ll know. Until then, gather everything you have on the case. I’ll be in touch.”

  He looked at the gun I’d given back to him as if seeing it for the first time. He immediately aimed it at me. “Or you can tell me everything you know about my son’s disappearance now. Or I will kill you.”

  “No, you won’t,” I told him flatly. “I already told you I don’t know where he is, but I’m the only one that can find out what happened to him. I think you know that, and I don’t think you’d risk losing that.”

  For a second, I thought he was going to shoot me anyway, but eventually he lowered his gun.

  “You’re on the right track.” I felt I had to offer him something. “I don’t know how or why, but somehow this place is connected to those missing kids, your son included.”

  I walked to the door, still half expecting a bullet in the back. None came. The sun was very low on the horizon now, and the shaft of light reached all the way across the barn floor.

  “The cops have searched every inch of the house, and so have I,” he said. “There’s nothing there.”

  “Not there,” I said. “Here.” I threw open the sliding barn door the rest of the way. “On the floor.” I pointed to the giant pentagram burned into the floor. “This is where they conducted their rituals.”

  He looked at the floor in disbelief. The pentagram took up most of the area of the barn. In the evening light, it was impossible to miss. Any other time, you’d never know it was there. In the near corner, there was a circle of protection for the Magician to ward himself during the ceremony. In this particular case, I was sure the ceremony would have been a Summoning. Nothing else would have needed magic like I’d felt outside. And nothing else would require a human sacrifice. I was quite confident I was looking at the place where Belial had ascended. It would explain the huge magical field that I’d felt when I touched the barn, and there was a certain symmetry to the idea.

  “How did we miss that?” Rose asked, more to himself than me. “And how did you know that it was here?”

  I shrugged. “I have bigger secrets than that to share, but we’ll save that for later.”

  “Leave the body here,” I motioned to the tattooed young man with his throat slit. “Don’t call the cops. They’ll find the body soon enough. Just act like you were never here. It’ll be simpler that way.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “You will do that, or I won’t help you.”

  He knew he wasn’t holding any of the cards here. He might not have liked it, but he was smart enough to recognize the fact. H
e nodded grudgingly. It was just my luck that I got a true-blue, stand-up cop to work with. If I could barely talk him into not reporting a crime, he was definitely going to balk at some of the other suggestions I’d be making before we were done with this. That was going to complicate things. Blackmail and threats worked a lot easier for me than persuasion. Even a tiny bit of corruption would have gone a long way to keeping Rose in line.

  “In the interest of full disclosure, I’m not sure you’re the right person to be helping me,” I told him.

  He looked up from the markings he’d been studying on the floor. “Why not?”

  “Because if our roles were reversed, I would have shot you,” I said. It was something he needed to hear, and better now than when it was too late to do him any good. “If you want to follow this through to the end, you’re going to have to make that decision eventually.”

  I left him there, gun still in hand, to decide for himself what he would do with it when that time came.

  ********

  Chapter 20

  I thought about stealing Rose’s car, but our burgeoning relationship was on shaky ground as it was. Stealing his car and stranding him in the middle of a crime scene was more stress than I thought it could bear. When I’d left Josh’s car a few miles away, I had assumed I was either going to find Belial and fight it out then and there, or find an abandoned farmhouse where I could spend the night. Instead, I found a young Satanist, now dead, and a cop with a grudge. None of which made spending the night all that appealing, but I also wasn’t going to walk all night trying to find a serviceable car to steal.

  So I went to the house and decided to have a look myself. I waited for Rose to come but he never did. I assumed he’d seen all he needed to see. But I knew this house, and while I didn’t know all of its secrets, I knew the people who had lived there: my family, twisted little freaks that they were. If anyone was going to find anything here, it would be me.

  Mrs. Lynch had actually been a nice lady, if a bit demented. If you discounted the fact that she worshiped Satan and practiced black magic, that is. I never heard her yell at her children or raise her voice to anyone, really. By that admittedly low standard, she wasn’t too bad a mother. She'd probably been brainwashed from an early age, so that by the time I knew her she was simply a bored housewife with a penchant for sacrificing goats. Motherhood came naturally to her, so taking me in as a baby was no big deal for her. She fed me and burped me and did all those other motherly chores, and left the indoctrination and mental abuse to Mr. Lynch. Mr. Lynch was a farmer. He was hard-working, hard-drinking, and overall just a hard man. He beat his wife; he beat the dog; he beat Simon, his kid, recently deceased. He probably would have beat me, but I was the Golden Ticket, his one-way pass to the VIP section of Hades, so he left me alone. He had struck a bargain with Hell that he would raise me in return for "special" status when he inevitably went there.

  In a weird way, I hoped he got it. I'm the one who eventually sent him there. In this very house, in fact. I'd left home at the age of thirteen. I just wanted out. I didn't know if that meant the city, the state, the country, or the world, but I had to get away. It was when I went after drug dealers and pimps like the DeWitt brothers. But I made an exception to come back and kill the old farmer. After all the things I'd seen him do, and that he allowed the demon in me to do, it was the least I could do for him.

  Now here I was, going through his underwear drawer like I was trying to find his stash of Playboys. Rose had been trying to conduct his search in stealth. I had no such need. Turning on all the lights from basement to attic, I began working my way through the house. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Rose or the cops, it’s just that I knew my brother, who'd been living in this house, and the types of safeguards he would employ to keep his family's secrets. His safe wouldn’t have a key or a combination lock; it would have spells and wards.

  Despite the advantage of having an idea what to look for, it still took me almost three hours to find it. It was in the bedroom, in plain sight if you knew how to look at it. The Concealing that had been used was similar to the one I had used on my own home to keep magical seekers at bay. I thought again about the Angel who might be lending his magical mojo to the proceedings. This was further evidence. This was Big Magic. Magic which I didn’t have the language to easily unlock. After another hour of reciting spells that I’d thought were long forgotten, I finally gained access.

  By the time I did get into the safe, I had to take a break. Sweat was pouring off of me, and frustration had taken its toll in the form of frayed nerves and bleary eyes. I wasn’t good with tedious tasks: They made my skin itch, and having to employ such powerful and precise magic drained all the energy from me. My mystical safe cracking had exhausted more energy than all the killing I’d done in the past few days had fed me. Sleep was beckoning, but I put the thought out of my head for a while. Dwelling on the prospect of a little damnation wasn’t good for my soul.

  Very little of value was in the safe, at least in the traditional sense. Whatever deviant treasures it had held while my stepbrother was alive had been moved, either by him or those who killed him. There were only two items of interest in the safe. The first was a single sheet of aged parchment, its characters handwritten in an unfamiliar script. It looked like Angelic Script—maybe Enochian, but what did I know? It was like trying to distinguish between Spanish and Portuguese without knowing either language.

  I folded the parchment and stuffed it in my pocket. If an archaeologist had been there to witness it, he probably would have had a coronary. It looked old, but I didn’t care about any historical value it might hold. I just wanted the information on it.

  The second item was a detailed manuscript that explained how to make a gateway to Hell. I’d heard of such things before, but I’d never seen an actual recipe of how to cook one up. Needless to say, it wasn’t easy. It involved a powerful magician, a willing demon, and a large sacrifice. Alexander Rose and the other children from the school bus came to mind. The idea of those kids being slaughtered for Belial’s Summoning, combined with the frustration from getting into the fucking magic box in the first place, got my blood boiling.

  I’d been through a lot in my thirty-two years of stomping angrily around the planet. I’d been held captive in my own mind for my entire childhood, forced to witness atrocities committed by my own hand—atrocities no one, particularly a little boy, should have to endure—not to mention that I’d been shot, stabbed, burned, run over, and, once, thrown off the top of a very high building…okay, it was only a three-story building, but height is relative when it’s your ass being thrown from it. I’d taken it all in stride, with my normal grace and good nature. Shit happens. I understood.

  But these fuckers were really starting to piss me off. It wasn’t just killing the kids that angered me—although that definitely put them at the top of my shit list. It was the smug confidence they displayed in doing so, acting as though they were untouchable. Someone had to speak for the dead, and I happened to be in town. Not to mention I was really good at killing, and I didn’t respond well to hurting innocent people for shits and giggles. I didn’t know who was responsible for everything that’d happened, but I knew at that point that I was going to make them answer for it. Even an Angel could be killed, I told myself. Belial himself, while he was on earth, was vulnerable. Tough as shit, probably, but vulnerable.

  If it breathes, it bleeds.

  What I was facing was at best a really powerful magician and some goth-punk teens who liked the idea of casting a few spells and messing with the forces of darkness, at worst a really powerful magician and a bunch of other really powerful magicians and some demons—and possibly an Angel—thrown in to boot. Either way, my enemy was beatable.

  The unavoidable fact was that, until I knew who I was dealing with, I didn't really have a plan. There was a big difference between facing Belial and a member of the Heavenly Host and facing Belial and The Walking Dead fan club. Since I wasn’t getting any
answers up here, I was going to have to go to the source. Fortunately, I happened to have a step-by-step manual on how to open a gateway to Hell.

  Even better, the dipshits had already built one for me. I thought about the magic that nearly knocked me on my ass back at the barn. If that residual magic was still wafting around in the ether, I could tap into it. If my logic held, it meant I could reopen the gate. Not only had they built it for me, they’d left it unlocked.

  I retraced my steps to the barn with its scorched pentagram and its circle of protection, and I lay down in the center of the mystical symbols. I didn’t know exactly what the process was, but opening a psychic link to Hell seemed like it would be a good start. It was, in theory, simply a reverse Summoning.

  Best of all, I didn't even have to open the gateway myself. Lucifer did it for me, every time I fell asleep.

  Piece of cake.

  Damnation beckoned, if only for a while. With just a tinge of dread, I complied.

  Sleep came quickly, and with a purpose.

  ********

  I lied before when I said that I physically go to Hell every time I fall asleep. I bear all the physical scars of having been in Hell, but my body stays in this world. Think Nightmare on Elm Street without the striped shirt and the fedora. I once recorded myself sleeping to see what happened during my nocturnal damnations, but my body stayed right where it was. It started smoking and bleeding, seemingly by its own internal mechanisms, but it stayed put. Lucifer's hold was strong on me, but it wasn’t that strong. To physically enter Hell, I would need a pre-standing gateway: preferably one with a giant pentagram that had recently been christened with human blood.