Black Dog Short Stories II

by Rachel Neumeier

  Keziah didn’t react, but Justin set his teeth and stared longingly at the gun Crowley now held.

  Crowley laughed at him and said smugly, “The rest of you, come on, out of there, let’s go. You want to see your granny, don’t you, Justin?” He rapped impatiently on the hood of the car. “Come on, or I’ll tell my pet here to fetch the lot of you. She’d be pretty rough about it, I bet—except for you, right, Justin?”

  Justin longed to punch this guy in the face. He couldn’t remember ever wanting to punch someone before in his life.

  “Let’s go, Justin,” Father Stepan said quietly. It was a calming, easy tone: Come on, I’ve got this. He got out of the car and walked around it to face Crowley, quietly confident even now. Mrs. Farris followed him, clutching her handbag. She looked elderly and frail and helpless, not at all like the kind of woman who might carry a gun. So that was another possible asset, because the old lady sure hadn’t looked like that before.

  Moving slowly, Justin got out of the car, too He didn’t believe it, he didn’t believe for a second that Father Stepan had anything under control, but he couldn’t see anything else to do and maybe he was wrong, maybe Father Stepan did have some kind of plan. Some better plan that just going along to see what happened. He was pretty sure the priest had been military, once. Or something. Maybe he had a plan. Maybe he did, or Mrs. Farris did, or they both did together, since they were friends.

  Besides, Justin couldn’t bear letting that punk order Keziah to drag him out of the car. There had to be a way to free her. He thought about circles and pentagrams and mandalas...if he drew a circle around Keziah, maybe he could knock out Crowley’s influence, whatever it exactly was. If he could draw a circle. Only he couldn’t. Not the fast way, at least. He tried. He opened and closed his hands, and he could see the geometry of what he wanted to do, but he couldn’t do it. Trying to get a circle to leap to life around Keziah felt like...it felt like trying to pick up a needle through a handful of cotton wool. He couldn’t do it. If he had a chance to walk it, trace the full circle the way Natividad did...he wasn’t sure he could do that, either. If Natividad were here, he bet she would come up with something.

  “Let’s see, let’s see . . .” Crowley looked them over. “All right, get rid of his cross,” he told Keziah, pointing at Father Stepan.

  Blank-faced, Keziah walked forward and reached for the chain, touching it gingerly with the tips of her fingers, hissing at the burn of the silver. Without a word, Father Stepan ducked his head and slipped the chain off over his head. Rather than force Keziah to touch it, he set the crucifix aside on the hood of the car. “It’s not the crucifix that makes the priest, you know,” he said quietly.

  “That’s what you think,” Crowley said, offensively smug. “You’re not the first priest to come after Kristoff, you know. You priests, you’re even more vulnerable than a normal person. You’ll find that out.”

  Father Stepan still didn’t look afraid. He looked angry, but more than that, he looked grieved. Like he’d heard more in this than Crowley had maybe meant to say. Justin tried to draw a mandala on the dusty earth with his toe, but the circle wasn’t straight and nothing happened that he could tell. When Crowley waved them all toward the open door, he set his teeth and followed.

  The little white objects Crowley had scattered by the camouflaged door turned out to be small bones; finger bones, maybe. Justin wasn’t even surprised. The bones were dry and cracked, or etched with writing of some kind, he couldn’t quite tell. He thought of ducking to pick one up, but couldn’t quite bring himself to touch any of them, and in the end just made sure to step carefully around them. No one else stepped on the bones either, he noticed, except for Crowley, who seemed to do it on purpose.

  The camouflaged door led to a metal stairway that clanged underfoot, unnervingly loud, and from there to a dusty hallway that looked way too ordinary to belong to a secret government complex. The hall, all cheap institutional paneling and linoleum, looked like it belonged in a not very impressive office building somewhere. Except for the door at the end of the hallway which was kind of like a vault door and not much like anything you’d find in an office building anywhere.

  Crowley slammed this door closed behind them just as he had the first, but when the young man waved them all forward, Justin took a second and set his hand on the door, trying to lay a spiral on it and around it. A spiral would draw your friends in and help them find you. He knew how to make a spiral, for God’s sake, he could hold the indefinite equations in his head and open a spiral right up...but not here. Not through all the gray, diffuse fog these...black witches, or whatever they were, had laid down.

  So Justin drew a spiral on the wall with the tip of his finger, he held the equations in his head and drew it blindly, even though he couldn’t see it, and hoped that he’d done something.

  Probably he hadn’t done anything useful. Keziah was still trapped somehow, and Crowley had Mrs. Farris’s gun, and Father Stepan had no cross, if that would have made any difference...Justin couldn’t imagine anything the priest could do.

  This was completely ridiculous. The whole thing was completely ridiculous.

  The bunker looked a lot more like a bunker once Crowley led them down another stairway, with dim lights along the ceiling and a musty smell, and through yet another vault-like door, and finally into an enormous concrete-walled room. Machinery growled somewhere, the sound echoing off the distant walls. Two rows of big metal pillars marching into the distance, and a kind of low stage or dais or something, raised maybe three feet above the surrounding floor, took up a lot of the foreground. An unidentifiable heap of something, maybe a bundle of cloth, lay up on the platform, close by the nearest edge. All around this bundle stood a ring of fat white candles in black bowls, the candle flames tall and wavering. A bonfire burned inside the ring of candles, near one end of the bundle. Black smoke rose up, heavy and unpleasant. Not woodsmoke. More like burning plastic, but with an undertone of charring bone. The stench of the smoke mingled with the heavy odor of gasoline and the musty, unused smell of the bunker itself. Justin thought this smell would come back to him in his nightmares, if he lived through this.

  Metal boxes and platforms bolted to the floor around the stage had probably once held some kind of machinery, but they were mostly empty now, bare clamps and the cut ends of wires protruding here and there. It was surprisingly easy to imagine an alien spaceship lying up on that stage, surrounded by scientists and military people and God knew what kinds of equipment. Nicholas would have gotten a kick out of exploring this place...for a moment Justin had nearly forgotten about Nicholas and Amira. He made himself not look at the heavy door, which Crowley had left standing open behind them. He hadn’t managed to draw a spiral on that one. But it was open. Surely that was good.

  Then he spotted Grandmama Leushin. She was below the near edge of the stage, half hidden by the flickering shadows from the fire. She was sitting on a straight-backed chair, surrounded by a tangle of wires and a black powdery circle that had nothing to do with high-tech equipment, a circle that looked to Justin like it had been made of something soft and powdery that absorbed light. Graveyard dust and the ashes of burned bones, he assumed.

  His grandmother didn’t seem to have been hurt, not as far as he could tell. He couldn’t see any ropes or cords or anything tying her to the chair, but he guessed the circle was doing the job of keeping her confined. He wondered what would happen if somebody rubbed out part of that circle—what would happen if he did. Hard to guess how this kind of black witchcraft might interact with Pure magic. Easy to guess that the ash circle had been specifically made to counter Pure magic.

  Grandmama Leushin looked older than Justin remembered. A lot older. If he hadn’t known she was in her seventies, he’d have guessed she was twenty years older. Her face was thinner than he remembered, and her hair—he remembered it as almost pure white, but the light down here gave everything a grayish, yellowish tinge. Maybe that was why she looked so old and kind
of sick. She had turned her head and leaned forward, but she hadn’t gotten to her feet—maybe she couldn’t get up, maybe she really was sick—or hurt—Justin couldn’t tell; he was still too far away. They were heading in that direction, at least.

  Someone—Crowley and his buddy Kristoff, no doubt—had brought in a generator, wired it up and turned it on. That was the machinery Justin had heard. It wasn’t far away, but the room was so big and the generator so small that even with the echoes the racket wasn’t actually deafening. And at least the generator meant they weren’t stuck in the dark, with nothing but that unpleasant fire and those nasty candles to light up this place.

  Though that...that was actually a mixed blessing, because as they got closer, Justin gradually made out more details of the scene up on that stage. He supposed he’d known from the first that the heap lying in the circle of candles must really be a body. He would have been glad not to see the specifics. He hadn’t really wanted to know that it had been another old lady, at least as old as his grandmother; or that all her fingers had been cut off. He tried not to wonder whether that had been done before or after her throat had been cut. He tried even harder not to imagine his grandmother sitting in that chair, watching while these people killed her. Maybe she’d known her. He hoped they hadn’t been friends.

  He could see the same kind of muffled almost-Pure silvery magic around Grandmama Leushin, exactly the same as the half visible glow around Mrs. Farris. It was appallingly easy to imagine a whole circle of old ladies with some kind of peculiar magic, like the Pure but different, and these nasty black witches or whatever they were murdering one old lady at a time. A bargain with the Devil, maybe; Justin didn’t know and wasn’t sure it mattered. Whatever this was, it was definitely a way to gain power—power over black dogs, maybe over regular people. Maybe not over the Pure, judging from this Crowley’s first approach to Mrs. Farris.

  Not that that would mean the Pure were safe. As always, the Pure appeared to be special targets. Justin couldn’t help but glance at Mrs. Farris. Her mouth was a thin line, her eyes pointed straight ahead, her handbag clutched in both hands. She looked timid and old. Father Stepan, a supportive hand under her elbow didn’t look afraid. He looked angry.

  Keziah...Keziah didn’t look like anything. Her face was still, masklike. But her eyes had gone bright, pale, fiery yellow. And her shadow was blacker and sharper edged than it had any right to be, in this artificial light. As though she stood a lot closer to that bonfire than she actually did.

  Keziah wouldn’t be afraid, Justin knew. She would be furious.

  He was scared enough for all of them. This was not how he’d pictured this scene, when he’d declared they had to rescue his grandmother. Somehow they’d gone from facing a punk kid who backed down from the ordinary threat of a gun, to facing a black witch who didn’t seem at all worried about being shot and who could put a leash of some kind on a black dog as strong and angry as Keziah.

  Then it got worse. Because a man who had to be Crowley’s friend Kristoff walked around the generator and stopped, waiting for them.

  Justin had expected a guy a lot like Crowley—young, cocky, maybe not too smart. He saw at once that this guy was not like that. Kristoff was a lot older, probably closer to Father Stepan’s age. He was bigger, too; not big like a guy who worked outdoors or with his hands, but bulky and soft, with round arms and plump hands. He was pale, like he never set foot outside in the sunlight if he could help it. The light down here gave his skin an unhealthy yellowish tinge. His face was round, his eyes pouchy, his mouth pursed. He looked like somebody who worked in an office somewhere. Like a lawyer, maybe. A senior partner, who sat behind a big desk and gave orders to legions of flunkies. The way he tilted his head and crossed his arms and waited for the rest of them to come up to him suggested that he thought he was better than all of them put together. The contempt in his attitude wasn’t subtle. Yeah, Justin had no trouble imagining this man sitting in some office somewhere, casting spells on his business rivals to make their clients walk away or the IRS audit them or whatever the modern equivalent might be to making their cows go dry.

  Crowley ushered the rest of them forward and showed them off to Kristoff with a proud wave of his hand. “Look, a black dog and everything. Nice piece, isn’t she? That dust is good stuff, you should show me how to make it, we need more if we’re gonna find black dogs working with white witches, and now we’ve got plenty of white witches. Not just a bunch of old dried-up bitches; look at this kid. I thought you said white witches were always –”

  “Shut up,” Kristoff said. His voice was heavy, unemotional, inexpressive. Crowley shut his mouth, and Kristoff spent a long stretched-out moment studying them all, one at a time, starting with Keziah and ending with Father Stepan. He didn’t seem very interested in Mrs. Farris—Justin supposed that once you started murdering old ladies, they might all blur together—and only marginally more interested in Justin himself. But his gaze lingered on Father Stepan. “A priest, I see. You’ve never seen a true black mass,” Kristoff said to Crowley. “I’ll show you one.”

  And without a word, Father Stepan shot him four times. He aimed twice for his right foot and leg. Then, as Kristoff staggered in surprise but, obviously unhurt, did not fall, Father Stepan took a sharp breath and shot him twice more in the chest.

  Justin, taken perfectly by surprise—he’d never once guessed the priest might be armed, and hadn’t seen him draw his gun—nevertheless left Father Stepan to it, seized Keziah by the arms and, moved by a sudden impulse that came out of nowhere, reached up and drew a pentagram on her forehead, tracing the five-pointed star with his fingertip. “Be free,” he told her. “Be free of it!” He tried to draw a pentagram around her the other way, the fast way, by defining it mathematically and so bringing it to life; but he couldn’t do that, not through the muffling fog of black magic that filled this place.

  Keziah shuddered and blinked, but her eyes stayed fiery and when she turned, her hands broadening and distorting, it was away from Justin, toward Father Stepan. She was going to kill him, she was already half in her black dog form, and though Justin put himself in her way, she only shouldered impatiently past him, toward the priest. His grandmother was shouting in a high voice, cracked and terrified and furious, urgent words Justin couldn’t understand, about opening or approaching or releasing something. Her hands were together as though she were praying.

  But Justin lost track of her, Kristoff was still on his feet and still a threat—deformed silver bullets were scattered around the black witch—Mrs. Farris threw the crucifix she’d had in her handbag to Father Stepan, who caught it and started toward Kristoff, his gun in his left hand, but holding the crucifix in his right like it was the true weapon. At this, Kristoff backed away, his hands held up as though to shield himself. A nasty snaky solid kind of blackness writhed before him, between him and Father Stepan, but at least Kristoff was no longer smiling.

  Mrs. Farris had also drawn yet another gun from some hidden holster and was now shooting at Crowley, but with no better results. Crowley first ducked back, but then rushed forward and knocked the gun out of Mrs. Farris’s hands, though she tried at the last moment to duck away. He slapped her, contemptuously, the kind of slap he might have aimed at a misbehaving child. Mrs. Farris stumbled and fell to her knees, and Crowley aimed the gun he still held—he was going to shoot her, he was going to shoot her right now, but Keziah had nearly reached Father Stepan. Justin, torn, flung himself after Keziah—it wasn’t a considered decision, he wasn’t thinking at all, he just couldn’t let Keziah kill Father Stepan -- though he didn’t have any way to stop her, apparently –

  Amira flowed out of the shadows and tore Crowley apart, and Nicholas leaped up on the stage, scattered the candles with two swift blows, tore right through the horrible bonfire, leaped down again, and raked his claws across the ashen circle surrounding Grandmama Leushin. And Father Stepan turned his back on Kristoff, who had turned and was now walking away, not quite running,
but walking fast. Father Stepan let him go, slamming his heavy silver Orthodox crucifix against Keziah’s shaggy throat as she reared over him. He shouted, “May the Lord rebuke thee, Devil! Depart from this servant of God, from her mind, from her soul, from her heart –”

  And Keziah whirled away from the priest and slammed a blow instead against the generator that tumbled it over and tore it free of all its wires and connections. All around them, the lights went out, but Justin instantly made another kind of circle around himself and around Father Stepan, and another around his grandmother, and another around Mrs. Farris, light blooming in one protective circle after another. Only after he’d done that did he realize the muffling effect of the witches’ magic had disappeared.

  Even in the dark, Justin was aware of Keziah leaping away, fully in her black dog form now, after Kristoff.

  The silvery light of the Pure was not very useful to see by, unless you happened to be Pure. All but two of the candles had been extinguished, and what Grandmama Leushin called the banefire had been scattered and mostly put out. But Nicholas was good with fire, especially when he was upset, which he definitely was right now. He tumbled various chairs and a small table together and set them alight, and although Justin wouldn’t have wanted to toast marshmallows over that kind of fire, even black dog fire wasn’t as horrible as what the black witches had made. And after all, they only needed enough light to get out.

  Somehow it seemed farther on the way out than it had coming in: the darkness seemed to press down harder and the stairs seemed longer and the vault-like doors seemed heavier, and likely to slam in their faces...Kristoff had gotten away. Keziah had lost him, somehow. That should have been impossible, but who knew what a black witch might be able to do? Justin had been relieved beyond measure when Keziah had come back, and relieved again when no one tried to shoot her even though she was still in her black dog form. But he had been terrified when she’d taken back her human form and told them bitterly that Kristoff had gotten away from her. Justin had immediately felt a terrible certainty that the black witch would somehow get out first and shut the doors and seal the rest of them down here with horror and death and the lingering miasma of black magic.