Wicked Prayer

by Norman Partridge

  But the shrunken head didn’t care about the blade.

  He cared about his reflection, trapped on the steely surface.

  “There has to be something special about this woman,” Kyra whispered, trying to convince herself “I know it.”

  And Raymondo thought: Maybe Kyra is right. Maybe I'm the one who’s wrong.

  Maybe there were secrets in Lilith Spain’s eyes. Or more correctly, maybe there had been secrets there. Secrets the actress knew nothing about, secrets Lilith Spain had seen, but hadn’t noticed.

  Like a reflection, trapped on the blade of a ceremonial knife.

  Like a reflection, glimpsed on the black, dilated pupil of a drug-addled eye.

  Johnny Church twisted free of Dan Cody’s blood-spattered jacket and tossed the rain-soaked garment on the floor.

  He sure as hell wasn’t going to be needing a coat. It didn’t seem like he was going anywhere.

  Johnny stood at the window, watching Kyra walk through the cemetery. Raymondo was knotted around Kyra’s chrome-slivered necklace, the rising storm lashing both of them with silver shards of rain.

  But Kyra wasn’t bothered by the weather. She’d stripped off the wet wedding dress. She had a raincoat now. Black PVC. She’d swiped it off the Spain bitch.

  That was no surprise. The two women were the same size. Had been, anyway, before Spain got herself wasted. Hey, Ky’d even swiped the chick’s wedding dress. And she’d almost swiped the little no-hope’s eyes.

  That hadn’t happened, though. Mostly because of Raymondo, Johnny figured.

  Not that the little fuck had bothered to explain things to Johnny. His words had been for Kyra’s ears only. A lot of spooky double-talk, with a heapin’ helpin’ of the same old new-agey babble that always drove Johnny crazy.

  Not that Johnny was completely clueless. He’d picked up a few important points. Like: Spain was definitely connected to the black bird’s power, because Ky had seen Spain in her vision. Like: that didn’t necessarily mean the Spain chick knew squat about the Crow. Like: it might only mean that the Crow’s secrets were contained in something the Spain chick had seen, something that had cast its reflection on her black, drugged-out pupils once upon a time.

  Go figure. Raymondo, the little brown-noser, could sniff out any juju that fell in range of his withered nostrils. And according to the head, the Crow’s power was definitely in the neighborhood.

  Out there somewhere, in the city of the dead.

  And close enough to smell.

  So one more time, they’d taken off on the Crow’s dark trail— Raymondo the dowsing rod, Kyra the dowser. As far as Johnny was concerned, it was all a bunch of treasure-hunt bullshit, anyway. Kyra hadn’t even included him in the hunt. She’d just told him to watch Spain. Like Lilith was going anywhere, except maybe to the bathroom for another little menage a trois with Mr. Needle and Mr. Spoon.

  As good-byes went, Kyra’s farewell wasn’t much.

  But Johnny knew that’s exactly what it was.

  So long, pal. Nice knowin’ ya.

  Don’t let the screen door hit you in the ass on the way out.

  Parting, and sweet sorrow, and all that other bullshit.

  Wind rattled the window, louder now. The storm was rising, and Kyra was heading for that big fuckin’ tower by the cliffs. A columbarium, she’d called it. Whatever the hell that was. To Johnny, it just looked like some weird lighthouse without a light, a thing that didn’t move, trapped in a swaying ocean of Monterey pine and cypress that soon enough gave way to the real thing—the cold, black Pacific.

  Johnny didn’t care. Let Kyra go ahead and grab her immortality. Let her get hold of it with her greedy black claws and swallow the fucker whole. He didn’t figure he was riding that particular gravy train anymore. Kyra had got what she’d wanted out of him, used him until he slipped that wedding ring on her finger. He’d delivered her to the Crow’s honeymoon suite, and now she was ready to leave the both of them behind.

  D-i-v-o-r-c-e, metaphysical-style.

  First man, then bird . . . and guess who was next.

  A grin crossed Johnny’s bruised face. If Raymondo thought he was even going to get lucky . . . well, he’d be wrong. Sooner or later, the head would find out that Kyra Damon didn’t need him, either.

  And then Kyra would disappear, just like she was doing now. Rainwater washing the window, streaming over the uneven panes, washing Kyra away.

  Across the cemetery . . . and into the trees . . . and then she was gone, lost beneath a twisted canopy of pine and cypress.

  Where she was, Johnny figured Kyra couldn’t see a thing.

  Not through that canopy of branches.

  She couldn’t see the house, or the cemetery, or the ocean.

  She probably couldn’t even see the colum-fucking-barium.

  Johnny turned away from the window and closed the drapes. It was nicer inside, anyway. He looked around the bedroom. Pretty cool appointments, as the decorators said. Gargoyles fitted with black candles. Lots of velvet, also black. Big screen TV with a DVD combi-player and a rack of VCRs, and plenty of splatter-toons in more formats than Johnny recognized.

  And, hey, Johnny had to admit that he was impressed as he sorted through the movies stacked by the players. Johnny figured that most of them were new arrivals to Hearse’s collection, because more than a few were still shrink-wrapped.

  Good stuff. Yes, indeedy.

  There was some older stuff, too—probably Hearse’s favorites, kept handy for repeated viewings. As far as Johnny could tell, the rocker was heavily into Italian gore—Dario Argento, et al.—but Johnny wasn’t much on that stuff He liked his horror American, and Hearse had a lot of prime examples: choice films by George Romero, Sam Raimi, Andy Milligan, Wes Craven, Stuart Gordon, and the granddaddy of them all, Herschell Gordon Lewis.

  Hey, even some Bob Clarke stuff. Deathdream and Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things. Talk about appropriate titles for your basic Kyra Damon theme night. Johnny figured those two would make a good double-bill. Later, of course. Because the night was young, and there was more to life than TV.

  That was Johnny’s philosophy, anyway. And he figured it was Erik Hearse’s, too.

  One look at Hearse’s bed—all cold steel and velvet and bondage gear—and Mama Church’s only son figured that one out.

  Yeah. Johnny had to hand it to Erik Hearse. The guy knew how to live. Dude like Hearse, he got what he wanted. Got himself the career, and got himself the money. Then he got the house, the cars, the cool accessories and accouterments . . .

  And he got himself the woman, too.

  Johnny thought about that. Yeah, Hearse had himself a woman, and he had a lot of money. Johnny wondered what Hearse would pay for Lilith if someone were to snatch her, do the kidnapping thing, the ransom thing—

  Yeah. Hearse had it all. Johnny wanted it all.

  Everything, and then some.

  Johnny had always thought that it would be hard to get everything you wanted, that there had to be some trick to it. But maybe it was real easy. Maybe all you had to do was reach out and take what you wanted.

  And Johnny knew how to take.

  So he’d start with Hearse’s woman. Hey, it didn’t hurt to plan ahead, now that the supernatural gravy train was winding to a halt. Johnny sure wasn’t going to get a day job, and who knew? Maybe Lilith Spain would turn out to be his true calling.

  Johnny smiled, a flash of surgical steel twinkling on his lower lip, a glimmer of niobium on one raised, sinister eyebrow.

  He stared at Erik Hearse’s bride, still nodding her little nod over in a crushed velvet chair by the bed.

  Lilith wore a wedding ring on her finger.

  Johnny wondered if she knew what it meant.

  Maybe not. After all, her name was still Lilith Spain. It wasn’t Lilith Hearse.

  Deep in Johnny’s gut, a little coal of resentment flared alive and started to burn.

  He cracked his tattooed knuckles.

  Lilit
h Spain . . . she looked a lot like Kyra Damon.

  She really did.

  Kyra didn’t walk through the forest that surrounded the columbarium tower.

  She ran, because Raymondo was hot on the scent of the Crow’s dark power.

  She ran, but she couldn’t seem to get anywhere. There were all those goddamned trees, for one thing. And where there weren’t trees, tombstones choked the path . . . old ones covered with moss, cracked and weather-worn and unreadable. They rose from the dank ground like broken teeth in a dead man’s skull, and Kyra dodged around them, squeezed between the twisted tree trunks, raced to find—

  The tower.

  She stopped. The rumble of the storm was far above her head, but she couldn’t even see it through the dark latticework of branches that roofed the forest.

  Raindrops pattered against the PVC coat Kyra had taken from Lilith Spain. Her eyes searched the forest, warily, for she knew this place.

  An icy breeze tore through her hair . . . foggy, damp as a sponge.

  "Deja vu?” Raymondo asked, hanging from her necklace.

  She nodded, her eyes still on the trees. She wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, because she knew this place. It was twin to a place she had visited in a dream, a land that belonged to the Crow, a place where a ghost had held a knife to Kyra’s throat.

  But this time Kyra wouldn’t be caught by surprise.

  Not by Leticia Hardin’s shade, a spirit that didn’t even have a pair of eyes.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Raymondo said, his voice soothing. “That’s what the bird wants.”

  “Yes,” Kyra said. “I know.” And then: "Which way, Raymondo?”

  “Straight ahead. Through those cypress trees.”

  Kyra pulled her Walther and advanced through the grove. She saw no sign of Leticia Hardin there. No surprise, that. For this place wasn’t part of the Crow’s territory, where the woman’s spirit had attacked her. It might have been once, but it wasn’t anymore. Now it was part of Kyra Damon’s world. She had planted her boot on it, and she had marked its earth, and she owned it the same way she owned the Crow’s power. She was destined to walk its paths, and she would have the treasure that waited for her at journey’s end.

  Kyra came through the trees, to a curved black wall beaded with rainwater. She looked up into the sky, saw silver needles slashing down like the blades of a thousand knives, but none of them cut her.

  She couldn’t be cut. Couldn’t be hurt. Any wound she suffered would heal in a heartbeat.

  Such was the power she’d stolen from the Crow.

  She circled the wall until she came to a lone door. A heavy bronze barrier . . . and locked.

  “This isn’t good,” Raymondo said. “We may need Johnny Church, after all.”

  “We’re done with Johnny,” Kyra said simply. “He’s history.”

  “Actually, he’s more like anthropology. You know—like Neanderthal man, or maybe—”

  Kyra wasn’t listening anymore.

  She stepped toward the bronze door.

  And then she yanked the door off its hinges.

  Dan Cody had brought the Crow to the California coastline, a long hard drive in Emily Carlisle’s Dodge Durango. But a hole pecked in a tattered road map could only bring him so close to his final destination, and so he rolled down the window and loosed the Crow upon the storm.

  Soon enough the black bird delivered Dan to the place where his destiny waited. It was not a difficult task. For this was the one place on earth that the Crow knew well. The bird knew every tree, every monument. It knew the paths that were rarely trod by man, and it knew where those paths led . . . and what secrets were hidden at a final resting place where the echo of human footsteps was rarely heard.

  The dead man followed the bird as it glided away from the highway, black wings tracing the path of a narrow paved road that sliced through a forest of pine and cypress, cutting a twisting trail to the Pacific.

  The road opened up as Dan broke through the trees. He didn’t recognize the house up ahead. Not at all. But he knew this place, just as the Crow knew it. He had visited a landscape that was its twin in a vision, and though he had only visited once, once was enough to brand the place in his memory.

  He recognized the trees, with their branches like the gnarled fingers of fairy tale witches, and he smelled the scent of salt fog intermingled with other scents, strange scents that brought memories of the desert, and he recognized the whisper on the storm-driven wind, a strong sure sound like the sound of Leticia’s even breathing when he had lain with her at the heart of Cuervo Canyon.

  Dan recognized all those things, and one other.

  The lamb’s blood-colored '49 Merc that was parked just inside the cemetery gate.

  Kyra strode toward the circular marble staircase that connected the columbarium’s three floors. She had removed Raymondo from her necklace, and now she clutched the shrunken head’s hair in one hand, holding him before her like a lantern.

  Kyra’s boot heels clicked across the marble floor. A cold quiet penetrated this place, and Raymondo sensed that few had walked here in the last fifty years. No vandals had penetrated the columbarium’s thick stone walls, and no antique dealers had plundered its dark treasures.

  For this was a place of dread, unto itself, apart and alone.

  A place not unlike Kyra Damon.

  Or the Crow.

  Intruders shunned the columbarium. The forest kept most of them away, an ominous Hansel and Gretel wood of knotted pine and cypress where branches cast frightening shadows that proved as effective as steel bars. Those who dared brave the forest were met by a circular stone wall that held its own shadow like a dark secret. If they were brave enough to follow the curve of that wall, they came eventually to a six-inch thick door of polished bronze that trapped reflections the way prison traps a criminal.

  The lock on that door was old, and primitive. A practiced thief might have picked it easily enough, if his mind were not clouded by fears of future confinement—in a funerary urn, or a crypt, or a coffinbox. Such a lock could not be picked by trembling fingers that feared death, and so the columbarium’s treasures had remained safe for many years.

  But it was safe no longer, for Kyra Damon’s fingers did not tremble. She was strong enough to rip a metal door off its hinges, even if its bronze surface held her reflection like a greedy prize.

  Dangling from Kyra’s grasp, Raymondo’s head twisted on a long hank of black hair as they crossed the room. For a moment he saw what lay behind them. The bronze door lay outside in a lake of rainwater, showing Kyra’s trapped reflection only to the mud below. Dim light spilled through the empty doorway. It was the only source of light on the first floor, where the walls bore no windows at all.

  They climbed the marble staircase that led to the second floor. Black shadows softened, a result of dim light cast by the many stained-glass windows that waited there.

  Now Raymondo saw the columbarium’s black walls clearly. Where there were no windows, the polished stone was home to hundreds of glass-covered niches, each small chamber a last home for the cremated dead.

  Raymondo glimpsed funerary urns of every description. Fat bronze containers, filigreed and inlaid with precious stones. Silver urns gone black with tarnish. Polished steel that cast Raymondo’s reflection like a funhouse mirror, accentuating a jackal smile that made the shrunken head swell with pride.

  “Is it here?” Kyra asked, and she didn’t have to tell Raymondo that she was talking about the Crow’s dark strength.

  “No,” Raymondo said. “But we’re getting close. Keep going.”

  Kyra did. She followed the twisting staircase. Stained glass filtered dull light, painting Kyra’s face the colors of long-faded flowers.

  Impossible, in the dark of the storm that swelled outside.

  Possible, in a place honeycombed with the power of the Crow.

  And they were getting closer to the source of that power. Raymondo knew it. He stared at names engraved on
polished urns as they passed them by, stared at flowers that had withered long ago behind glass, at old photographs and tokens of lives lived and lost.

  Not all the dead had chosen urns for their final resting place. In one niche, Raymondo glimpsed a whiskey bottle packed with the last dregs of a terminal drunkard . . . and in another, a tarnished sportsman’s trophy that held a dead man’s ashes as its final prize. Another niche contained a child’s toy bank, its little treasure locked away for a future that would never come . . . still another held the cremains of a cherished geisha, her final resting place a lacquered Japanese box in the shape of a fan.

  A Victorian doll in a black lace dress stared from the window of the last niche on the second floor. Stuffed like sawdust inside the doll’s hollow porcelain head were the cremains of an elderly spinster. The doll’s eyes, dusty and unblinking now, had first been glimpsed by the dead woman on a faraway birthday morning, when death was still a lifetime of emptiness away.

  Raymondo smiled. Passing fancies, all, he thought. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and on we go into the ashtray of eternity.

  At last Kyra came to the third floor. The ceiling, baroque in style, was much higher in this chamber, and the stained-glass windows were larger here. Raindrops spilled down the glass, washing Kyra’s face in streaming shadows of ever-changing color—the dark majesty of dying violets . . . the rich gleam of severed aortas . . . and the dull flat color of drowned children’s skin.

  “Here,” Kyra said anxiously, scanning the room with Raymondo’s head held high. “The answer must be here.”

  And Raymondo saw that it was, locked behind glass in a niche that held a collection of antique porcelain tobacco jars.

  Instantly, Raymondo understood that these jars did not hold passing fancies.

  These jars held eternity. Raymondo could see that. For they were shaped like human heads—a harlequin, white-faced and black-lipped; a stoic bronze-skinned Cherokee in a feathered headdress; a pirate wearing an eye-patch and a scowl. A soldier, and a ballerina . . . and other jars, too. Jars shaped like the heads of animals—a panther, a grizzly bear, a timber wolf. . .