by John Everson
She shook away the image, and opened her eyes, moving quickly to the door. If they had “seen” her, they’d be visiting Elotan’s house. And she didn’t intend to be there when they did. She hoped Matthew found his way out of this horrible place before they set their sights on him.
Alex didn’t know where she was going to go, but she wasn’t going to just lie there in a pit waiting to be tortured. So she walked. There had to be someplace that she could find here where she could hide, and plan what to do next. There was a dirty light down at the end of the corridor, and she moved towards it, quickly at first, to get away from the demon’s door, and then slower as she realized that demons could be lurking in the doorways and halls that she passed.
The important thing was that she walked. And walked. Alex realized that the corridor only kept shifting. She had walked around bends and turns and yet still, the light ahead seemed constant.
That made no sense.
The light should have dimmed and been lost if she’d turned. Yet it was always there, far down the hall. It was as if with every step, the dirty light ahead of her grew one step farther away.
“Where do you think you’re going to go?” Malachai asked.
“Out into the Curburide city,” Alex said. “What do you care?”
“Things work differently here,” Malachai said. “There are no streets in the way you imagine. And there are no maps. You will need to think about where you want to go or you will go nowhere.”
Alex’s legs faltered and stopped. What did he mean? She was in another world, but space was still space… or was it?
She focused on the light ahead that refused to grow closer and considered Malachai’s direction. Then she thought about getting to the street outside. Thought hard. Pictured herself getting there. She began to walk again, never taking her eyes from the light. After a moment, she grinned. The light was now noticeably closer.
“Now that’s magic,” she whispered.
In just a few more steps, she was there.
The corridor simply… ended. She walked through the arch and stood in front of a massive building. There were other blocky grey structures to the left and right. It looked as if she were on a city street, only there were no signs or cars. Or movement.
Alex shrugged and began to walk. She couldn’t exactly get lost here; she didn’t know where she was to begin with. She didn’t belong anywhere. As she passed the building she’d exited, she could see that its walls stretched around a city block; they weren’t straight, but curved; they jogged and disappeared into a maze of other structures. She couldn’t tell where it ended. Just as she couldn’t see where this street led. There were buildings that followed, one after the other until it all grew hazy and dim in the distance.
“Where am I?” Alex whispered, partly to herself.
“Where do you want to be?” Malachai answered.
“Are you saying I’m just making all this up?” she asked.
“The Curburide are real,” he said. “How you see them… that’s not.”
“Over there,” a voice called.
Alex looked to the source. A block or so away, a dark-skinned demon was pointing at her. A handful of others stood behind him in the street. At the voice, their heads shifted as one to catch her in their sights. Alex did the only thing she could think of.
She ran.
CHAPTER 18
“NO ARNIE tonight, huh?” Dexie said. It was 1:15 a.m. and they were closing up the bar at the Cowgirl.
Cindy shook her head and then high-fived the other waitress. “There’s something to be said for a quiet night.”
“Yeah, I’ll tell you what you can say – no tips,” Dexie said, throwing the hand towel at Cindy.
She caught it, and wiped down her side of the bar before tossing it to the bin. “Well, yeah, there’s that. Seemed like nobody was around tonight. I think the band decided to use this as a practice instead of a performance. Did you hear them trying to figure out that Coldplay song?”
Dexie nodded. “Where’s the harm? It’s not like anyone was on the patio. I think everyone went to bed early so they can get up and see that eclipse in the morning.”
“Maybe.”
Cindy pulled her purse from under the bar.
“Hopefully tomorrow night will be better, she said, and waved at Dexie and then at Trev as she walked out of the bar and down the bricked outside front patio to the gate. Dexie had just reminded her that she hadn’t seen Joe Kieran all night. And why. The early morning breeze caught her and she shivered as she unlocked the car door.
He’d told her he was going to hang out near the old mission and see if anyone turned up to say a Black Mass or whatever demonlovers did on the night of an eclipse. She’d told him he was nuts, but he wasn’t having it. He was a reporter, he’d said. This was what he did.
She hadn’t bothered to point out that he wasn’t working and so there was nobody to write the story for. Even though she barely knew him, she already could tell it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Cindy looked up at the moon, currently shining white, bright and full in a cloudless sky. The sky was full of stars, silent and watchful. She hoped they were watching over Joe Kieran right now. She had only known him a couple days, but she liked the guy.
As she started up the car, she thought about swinging past the mission, just to see if she could spot him and make sure he was okay.
“That’s idiotic,” she told herself. “If you could see him that easily, so could they.”
“Stay unseen,” she whispered, and pulled out onto Guadalupe Street.
CHAPTER 19
CHEYENNE HUGGED Joe’s back as she peered into the chapel over his shoulder. She pressed close to him not so much to see as to get warm. The jacket was great, but she could feel goosebumps on her thighs. And the jacket wasn’t really long enough to stay down over her butt. She kept pulling it, trying not to expose herself, but it kept sliding back up. So standing behind Joe she was not only keeping warm, but avoiding giving him more of a free show than he’d already had.
This was the most fucked up situation she’d ever heard of. It wasn’t enough that she’d been kidnapped and locked naked in a basement. Oh no. She had to be kidnapped by some asshole who was somehow in league with a group of Satanists. And then she had to be rescued by a guy who wanted to horn in on their ceremony to talk to spirits? What the fuck?
She wanted to bolt away from the whole deal. Let this guy stand here and watch a bunch of half-naked idiots chanting nonsense if he wanted to. Only trouble was… the only way out was through the pentagram, or whatever that was they were all standing around in the chapel. She was stuck. All she could do was try to stay warm and stay out of sight until the devil worshippers decided to leave. Which apparently was not going to be soon.
Asshole had just shown up and was talking to them about some special thing he wanted to pull tonight. He held one finger up in the air, and disappeared out the front door of the chapel for a minute. When he came back, he had a woman with him.
She was blonde and thin. And her eyes looked like they were going to pop out of her head. There was duct tape across her mouth and her hands were tied behind her back. Darin was holding her by her hair.
“What makes you think you can keep the door open this way?” the old woman asked him.
“I have the book,” he answered. “The Book of the Curburide. Believe it or not, it was hidden right here, in the chapel by someone. So its power has probably been invoked here before. Maybe that’s part of the reason this place has always been a soft spot; a doorway. With the book, and the power of this group, and the sacrifice of the star, we can do more than just offer the Curburide an hour with us. We can take them home.”
The old woman shook her head. “How do you know the book is real? There are a million of these kinds of spell books published by posers and fakes.”
“It’s authentic,” he promised. “I wouldn’t have planned all this if I wasn’t sure.”
Darin pushed the woman at the thin guy. “Here Mike, keep a hold of her.” The woman looked ready to run, but Darin grabbed her by the elbow. “Don’t let go,” he cautioned Mike. Then he looked at the Indian guy.
“Telly, come with me.”
Joe suddenly pushed away from the wall and grabbed Cheyenne by the arm. They moved quickly back down the hall and halfway up the dark stairs until they were out of sight of the main floor.
“He’s going to get the other women,” Joe whispered in her ear.
A pang of fear stabbed Cheyenne in the heart.
This was where the shit was going to hit the fan.
CHAPTER 20
THE STREET BECAME a blur. Grey buildings, sulphur sky. She could smell something burning in the air; it was rich like incense, but flavored with something more bitter. Like clove cigarettes.
Alex ran. In her mind she tried to see. She had always been able to open her inner eye to see the dead. Could she see the Curburide? She turned a corner and stopped, leaning over with her hands on her knees to catch her breath. For a moment, Alex closed her eyes and forced her inner eye to see.
The world was a blue shadow there. Things moved all around her. Clouds? Smoke snakes? Demons? She struggled to see farther into the shadows, and then she saw the lights. Hundreds of pinpoints.
Thousands maybe.
They glowed like stars on the horizon, surrounding her in every direction. But they weren’t stars. They shifted and moved, impatient light, looking for something to shine upon. Some of them moved and turned, and she could see the hazy air their light cut through. She realized that all around her, the bright stars were turning away from whatever they were looking at, and trying to focus on her. The beams of light grew closer and closer to her.
“Close yourself!” Malachai demanded.
At his voice, Alex abruptly opened her eyes, and the blue shadows faded away. She was on a grey street corner. The horizon was a smoky shade of fire, deep orange and grey mixed and churned. She needed to get off the street. Standing in the open in a world of creatures that fed on her kind was not a good recipe for survival.
She walked, scanning the doorways on either side of the street for some place that looked promising. She didn’t know what she was looking for until she saw the stairs leading down. A dark basement entrance to a building that speared up dozens of levels into the brackish moody sky. A place to hole up, if nobody was around.
Alex descended the stairs and found an ornate wooden door at the bottom. It was carved in channels and filigree, the kind of entry you might find on an old mansion or museum. But this door was streaked with mold and pitted with rot. Down here below the street, it was being eaten away by weather and time. She put her hand on the stained bronze of the knob and tried to turn it.
The door opened.
Alex’s heart jumped. She actually hadn’t expected the door to budge.
She stepped inside, and gently pushed it shut behind her. She stood in a small foyer. Wooden buckets and boxes lay about on the floor, while the walls were covered in long metal tools. She wasn’t sure what most of them were for; the handles extended into long twisted blades or wires. One split into two metal rods that appeared to be connected to a mouth. The pulleys ended in a long narrow jawbone pocked with yellowed, pointed teeth. There were gaps where some of the teeth had gone missing, and the spring between the metal rods was rusted.
Alex reached out to touch the handle of the thing, wondering what you did with a jaw on a handle.
Snap!
She jumped back as the teeth clacked shut.
Okay, then. She still couldn’t divine the purpose, but she would be careful not to put her hand anyplace near that thing.
Alex moved on. The foyer opened into a long narrow room. Some kind of sitting area. There were a couple of easy chairs and tables. The light was very dim but she could see there were piles of stuff everywhere. When she bent to look at what anything was, the objects changed from indistinct shapes of grey to sharper, defined things. But even with definition, the things were no more comprehensible than the shadowed blobs. Bone lattices connected by pulleys and wires. Electronics on tables connected with spaghetti wires to bloated sacks fleshy and sickly pink.
In one wall, there was an opening meant to be a fireplace, though that wasn’t its current use. A mantel above it held a row of jars and candles and strangely twined things that draped over the side like misshapen socks hung out to dry. Inside the hole where the fire should be, Alex saw a tower of broken faces. Eye sockets and teeth. A pile of skulls in all shapes and sizes. There could be no fire there; the bones filled the space completely. On one of the chairs nearby, a full human skeleton sat, one arm perched on a small table beside the chair. It looked like a sentinel, waiting for her. Ready to speak with a bony larynx at any moment.
Alex shivered. The room was ghoulish. She moved past it, and found a bigger room beyond. This place was draped in veils. They hung from the ceiling and the walls. Some were dark chocolate, others pale and milk white and others the color of dirty sand. She saw designs painted on some; dragon’s heads and geometric symbols. The Greek alphabet. Spiders. Skulls.
A long couch dominated the center of the room. The air was musty here, heavy with age. There was no obvious light source, but still, Alex could dimly see. She walked towards the back of the couch and stopped when she reached it, putting one hand on the back as she looked about. Her fingers touched what seemed to be velvet on the rounded top of the couch back. It felt good to the touch, and she stroked it absently, while looking at the ballooning veils and tapestries that hung everywhere. They were almost suffocating, there were so many. It felt as if they would all fall from their hooks and cover her if she moved the wrong way.
What was this place?
Fingers covered her own and squeezed.
Alex jumped back, but the hand did not let go. She looked down and saw aged fingers, covered in a dusky grey wrinkled skin, veins showing through like buried worms.
“This is my home,” a voice whispered, answering her silent question.
Alex yanked her arm back, but the fingers did not release her. “Wait,” the voice whispered. “I don’t get many visitors here.”
The hand gripped her like a vise, and a woman slowly rose from the hidden depths of the couch. Alex tried to pull back, but it was no use. The demonic woman was ancient. Her face was lined like water-stained parchment, all ripples and valleys and divots. She had deep-set eyes, black or brown, Alex couldn’t tell. They were dark pits in a hideously lined countenance that still managed to shine with an inner light.
“Tell me how you came to be here,” she said.
From the grip on her wrist, Alex knew that it wasn’t a request.
“I was brought here,” she said. Lame response.
“By who?” the demon asked. Its voice was soft, but it masked a danger that Alex couldn’t identify. She could feel it though. She was in terrible danger here. This creature might appear old and feeble, but if Malachai had taught her anything, it was that nothing in the world of the Curburide was really as it seemed.
“A woman who wanted to meet you,” Alex said.
“Meet me? I don’t think so. I would have heard such a calling,” the demon said. Her lips looked like scars.
“Not you, in particular,” Alex corrected. “But demons. She wanted to meet all of you.”
“And what did she hope would come of that?” the ancient thing asked. It reached out another thin, but solid hand and gripped Alex by the forearm. “Your kind doesn’t fare well here,” it said. “Although we always enjoy having you.”
“I’ll just go then,” Alex said. She tried to back up again.
The old woman shook her head. “It’s not safe for you out there. As soon as
you step outside my door, they’ll be on you.” The grey curls of the woman shook. “You were looking for someplace to hide out, I know.” She smiled, those pale worm lips stretching like salmon yarn. “I wouldn’t mind some company, and you could use some food, I’ll bet.”
As she suggested it, Alex’s stomach growled again. It had been a lot of hours, maybe even a day, since she had eaten.
The old woman levered herself off the couch, somehow always keeping one claw hooked around Alex’s wrist.
“Come,” she demanded, and pulled her towards another door. This one led into a kitchen. But while Alex recognized the basic implements of a kitchen – sink, cabinets, a table – she wasn’t sure of the meaning of some of the things that hung from the walls. Like the other rooms, there were many things made of a strange hybrid of bone and metal. Alex wasn’t sure what such implements were to be used for. But before she could think too hard about it, the demon pressed her into a chair.
“What is your name, child?” the old woman asked.
“Alex,” she answered.
“Strange name for a pretty girl,” the demon said. She reached out a long, thin finger and traced the line of Alex’s jaw. “A very pretty, brave girl walking down these streets alone.”
“It’s a nickname,” Alex said. “But I like it.”
“My name is Helone. I don’t like my name much at all. But it’s mine. So I suffer through eternity with it.”
The old woman turned and reached into one of the cupboards. “I think this will do well for you,” she said. When she turned around, she held a bowl full of chopped up... well, it looked like cornflakes. Alex wasn’t completely sure.
It didn’t matter. She didn’t suppose she could exist here forever without some kind of sustenance. So she would try it.
Helone sat down across from her at the small table. She pushed a small pitcher towards Alex. “I can’t offer you fresh milk, but this might be a bit like honey for you. It will give you strength.”