Covenant

by John Everson

  “Who are you!” he shouted.

  There was no reply. Just the rush of water sluicing over a fall somewhere downriver.

  “Sorry, Joe! Are you okay?”

  “Maybe,” he called back.

  “Our anchor rock gave way. Let’s give it another shot.”

  “I’m everything you ever wanted….” came a belated answer in his mind. A shimmer of heat flowed through his belly at those words, as he thought of Cindy and Chicago. The things he wanted.

  The rope ripped against his gut again, and with a series of short, sharp tugs, he was airborne again.

  “And everything you didn’t,” the voice continued, freezing his bowels.

  “Hurry up!” Joe yelled, kicking wildly at the air. He started trying to climb the rope hand over hand. He had to escape the thing that was in his head. Now.

  “You can run, but we’ll meet again,” it promised.

  Joe’s feet pulled free of the current once more, his heart beating thunderously above the rush of the water.

  “Please, God, let them pull me up this time. Please!” he murmured.

  He kicked viciously at the rock wall when it came near, willing himself higher. He could hear the grunts of the cavers above as they pulled him inch by inch, foot by foot, back up the steep drop.

  “Almost there,” Ken called, his voice a raspy wheeze of exertion. “Hold tight.”

  The top came suddenly, a blinding glare of headlamps lancing into Joe’s face as his head cleared the top.

  Ken was at the front of the line of rope pullers; they had strung themselves out evenly around a large boulder and were using the rock as a pulley.

  Hands reached out to grab his own, and then Joe was lying flat on the cave floor, his breath coming in gasps of relief, his body shivering with the cold and fear. Hands pulled off his shirt and pants and shoes, but he couldn’t focus on what they were doing to him. The air was swimming around his eyes, and all he could think of was the voice, telling him it knew of him, was waiting for him.

  And promising that it would speak with him again.

  He was staggering with his arms propped around the shoulders of two of the others in the group before the fog finally cleared from his head.

  “C’mon, man. You’ve got to crawl through here, remember?”

  He stared blankly at the narrow tube before him and shuddered at the thought of climbing that close to the earth again. Now that he knew something was here…

  “We’ll be right behind you.”

  “Let him be, guys.” Ken’s voice came from behind them. “Go on ahead. Take the rest of the group out first and we’ll follow.”

  One by one, the cavers filed to the opening, stooped down to the crack in the wall and shimmied their way inside the earth like worms groveling their way back into the mud.

  “Not exactly the best introduction to the mountain, huh?” Ken said, putting a hand on Joe’s shoulder. Someone had donated a blue-checked, long-sleeved shirt and a pair of too-large jeans to replace Joe’s sodden clothes. The jeans owner’s shorts and bare legs were now sticking out of the dark crevasse ahead of them, sliding out of sight like a snake.

  “No,” Joe mumbled, shaking his head and turning to look at the caving group leader.

  “We shouldn’t have taken you in so fast,” Ken said, looking dejected. “It’s my fault. You should do some preliminary crawls and stuff to get ready for this. Caves can be dangerous—that’s why we always go in twos. And that’s why we always have the guide ropes. Although”—he cringed slightly— “if you had fallen much farther, you would have dragged me over the edge with you! Our rope was just about out.”

  “I’m sorry,” Joe said, his voice still shaking. “I went too close to the edge. It was my fault. I’m sorry I ruined your outing.”

  “No, no!” Ken said, shaking his head vigorously. “I’m sorry it had to happen, but everything worked out fine. The group saw the river, and also saw how dangerous it can be down here. A victory and a lesson all in one. It will make us all a little more careful. Will you come with us the next time?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t let this put you off. We’ve been coming down here for weeks and never had an accident like this.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what?”

  Joe took a deep breath and, looking around, realized that they were alone. The rest of the group had slithered through the vent and were probably almost outside by now.

  “Have you ever heard the rumors about this cliff?” Joe asked.

  “You mean the bogey monster that keeps making people think they can fly?”

  Joe nodded.

  “What about it? You don’t buy that crap, do you?”

  “Until today, no,” Joe said. “I came to see you because your ad sounded like you were into the occult and focused on this cliff or something. I’ve been following up on all the suicides from the peak, and wondered what was behind them. I figured, there’s no way that it’s natural for one person to jump off the cliff every Halloween. There must be a group that’s behind it.”

  “So you thought the Cliff Combers might be some kind of killer Cliff Cult?”

  Ken laughed out loud, his voice echoing far behind them into the depths of the earth. Joe stared at his yellowed teeth and shivered hard.

  “Not us,” Ken said finally. “And I wouldn’t be down here if I thought there was someone else waiting to meet us. That’s kid stuff, man. People jump off that cliff on Halloween because it’s Halloween. Creepy night. The time for all the weirdos to want to join the undead and all that. This is the biggest peak for a hundred miles, and all the crazies just naturally seek this place out. And it’s kind of legendary for that, so they just keep coming.”

  “That’s not good enough for me,” Joe said. “I don’t buy it.”

  Ken shrugged. “What can I tell you? We could sit around down here and creep each other out with weird stories and shit, but I’m saying this is just a cave, like any other. And I want to find out where that river runs to. Whether it hits the ocean or keeps going deep underground, beneath the ocean floor. It was freshwater, wasn’t it?”

  Joe nodded.

  “Figured. It’s too big and too high to be an ocean runoff channel.”

  They sat and looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then Ken wrinkled his forehead and asked, “When I asked if you bought that bogeyman stuff, you said not until today. What did you mean by that?”

  “Just what I said,” Joe answered. “Until today, I thought there were people behind all the suicides.”

  “And what changed your mind?”

  Joe looked at the other man and smiled sadly. “If I tell you, you’ll think I’m nuts.”

  “If you don’t, I might anyway. So what?”

  “When I was in the water down there, I heard a voice.”

  “Yeah. That was us. We were calling down to you.”

  “No. This was a different voice. I could hear it in my brain and in the water and feel it vibrating right through my bones.”

  Ken gave him a sideways “yeah, sure” look. “What did it say?”

  “That it was everything I ever wanted, and didn’t want, and that it had been waiting for me.”

  “So maybe you heard God and we pulled you back from the brink of death. Or maybe the devil’s waiting for your soul.” Ken grinned as he punched Joe in the shoulder.

  “Cold water does strange things to a man’s head,” he offered, and then stood up. “We should catch up.”

  “It said one more thing,” Joe said as Ken motioned him into the tunnel.

  “What’s that?”

  “It said we’d meet again.”

  Ken looked at Joe and then looked behind them into the whispering, damp blackness that extended as far as the eye could see.

  “Let’s get up top, huh?” he said.

  Joe nodded and gritted his teeth as he forced himself into the tight channel of rock. He imagined the earth pulsing all aroun
d him, a giant gullet waiting to crush the human meal inside. With panicked breath and desperate arms, Joe pulled himself forward. He could hear the panting of his partner behind him.

  “Just a little farther,” Ken called.

  The ribs of the earth seemed to constrict then, until Joe’s shoulders were scraping earth on both sides.

  “Are you sure…this…is the…right way?” he asked.

  He could feel the dank blackness closing in around him like a cape. He was smothering in night, choking on fear. What if the owner of the voice was here, at the end of the tunnel, just waiting to snatch him up and toss him over the cliff?

  The end came suddenly.

  Sweat was pouring down Joe’s face and he couldn’t control the tremors in his arms and legs. And then somebody grabbed his shoulders.

  He reacted instantly, slapping the help away and shrieking.

  And then he saw it was only one of the other cavers.

  “Whoa, dude, take it easy,” the shorts-clad man cautioned. “I was only trying to give you a hand.”

  Joe grinned sheepishly as he saw the concern on the man’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Just got a little spooked in there.”

  He shook away more offers of help, and climbed up on his own power into the open cavern. Ken followed quickly, and the group moved without pause toward the cave entrance.

  When they stepped outside, Joe couldn’t help but look back the way they’d come. He felt pursued, hunted. But whatever grim reminder of his ordeal he’d expected, he saw nothing. Only blackness. And felt a whisper of cool, damp air.

  Like the breath of a grave, he thought, and hurried into the dying heat of the afternoon sun.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “It spoke to you, didn’t it?” Joe grabbed Angelica by the shoulders and shook her. “Didn’t it?”

  Her eyes widened, but she didn’t answer.

  He let go of her then, and pushed his way past the fortune-teller to enter her house. Angelica stared after him with her mouth open.

  “How dare you barge in here and, and…” she began, finally gathering her wits and following him into the sitting room. Joe planted himself on the couch, clearly not going anywhere soon.

  “Level with me now, Angelica. The cliff spoke inside your head when you and the other girls went swimming that day, twenty years ago, didn’t it? And one of you didn’t talk back sweetly enough.”

  “Joe…” Angelica knelt before him, resting her elbows on his knees. Her mouth opened in surprise and fear. “Did you hear it, then? The voice at the cliff?” Her voice grew more agitated, and now it was her shaking him. “Tell me, what did it say?”

  Joe resisted the urge to say, “I asked you first.” Instead, he leaned back and drew a deep breath before relating his experience in the cave in quick, clipped sentences.

  When he finished, Angelica looked at him with something resembling pity.

  “You’ve got to go, Joe,” she whispered. “If it’s seen you, if it knows you…you have to leave Terrel before it’s too late. It’s already too late for the rest of us.”

  “What do you mean, too late? What’s stopping you from getting in a car and driving out of Terrel anytime you want?” Joe asked, making a face.

  “He won’t let us.” Her voice grew tremulous. “I’ve tried to leave Terrel so many times, I can’t count. But every time I get near the road out, I hear him calling. And if I ignore it…”

  “What?” he asked. “What can it do?”

  Angelica stood up and looked out the window at the street. Her body was a dark shadow against the orange haze of the streetlight outside. The sun had fallen fast after Joe had arrived, and its leaving dragged behind it the anticipatory taste of dusk.

  She moved away from the window and eased into a love seat across the room.

  “What can he do? I’ll tell you. He can kill you. He can laugh at you. And worst of all, He can let you live. As He has let all of us live. But it’s a life knowing that we’ve tasted Him. Been used by Him. Been lived in by Him. Because the one thing He wants is our flesh, Joe. He can’t ever fully possess us, not completely. So He plays with us instead. It’s worse than death. Let me tell you about the last time I tried to leave Terrel.

  “It was right after Bob O’Grady died. Back in 2000. He was the first of the kids to be taken, and I couldn’t handle it. Neither could Melody, his mom. For years we had lived with the fear of that day, always there, in the back of our minds, but I don’t think any of us really believed it would ever happen. I don’t think we could have lived all those years after Bernadette drowned if we’d really believed that He would take our children. That we would let Him. That we would help Him.

  “The night that Bob died, I didn’t just cry. I was a maniac. I screamed for hours. I tore up this house in anger. Literally. I threw dishes against the walls, pulled the bookshelf down in my reading room—I even put one of the kitchen chairs through a window. And then the next day, I packed up a few things and got in the car. I couldn’t stay here anymore. I remember thinking that I was lucky. That I would never have to surrender my daughter to the monster in the cliff. And that He would never touch me with another’s hand again.

  “I’ll never forget that night. I really thought that night that I was going to make it…”

  Her eyes took on a faraway look as Angelica began to tell the story of the night she tried to run….

  Angelica pulled out of the driveway and headed down Main Street and out of town. Her heart was beating a mile a minute. Could she really do it? Could she really be free of the nightmare at last?

  She thought of Bob, remembering his quiet humor, his easygoing attitude. She hoped that the devil was satisfied with the taste of his soul tonight. Maybe with Bob to entertain him, the demon of Terrel’s Peak would be preoccupied. Not paying any attention to her flight. That was what she hoped, anyway.

  She was wrong.

  The touches were tentative at first, and she brushed them off. But then a pain lanced through her head like a knife. Angelica cursed and the car veered off the road, which, through waves of white-hot pain, seemed to shimmer and shake. Everything grew fuzzy and Angelica could just make out that the yellow lines were moving farther away to the left, the car bouncing more and more violently along the gravel shoulder, headed toward the bay. A grove of trees loomed just ahead, and she tried to swerve back toward the road, but instead, to her horror, her right foot stomped on the gas as her arms locked the wheel straight ahead. The car leapt forward and Angelica shrieked.

  In her head she heard a low, horrible chuckle, and then a scream. The former was the laugh of a demon playing with one of his favorite toys. The latter was Angelica herself, as the car crumpled head-on into the trunk of an oak. The hood crunched and folded with the ear-piercing sound of grating metal. The air filled with the shimmer of splintering glass and cracking wood. Angelica’s forehead bounced off the windshield, and everything disappeared for a while.

  Angelica woke in darkness, the sound of summer insects buzzing all around. She shook her head to clear away the cobwebs and gasped; the pain was crippling. But this was real pain, not a prod of His. She gingerly touched her forehead with a finger and traced a circle around a thick, hot bump that swelled across her head right below the hairline. It hurt like hell, but didn’t seem to be hemorrhaging. There was a sticky scab right in the center of the bump, but there didn’t appear to be a big cut. She prayed that it was only a minor concussion.

  The stars were twinkling overhead, and Angelica suddenly realized that she was not lying against the cushions of her car. She was flat on her back in a patch of tall weeds just beyond the tree she’d barreled into. Even in the moonlight, she could see that the car wasn’t going anyplace under its own power again. It looked as if its engine were sucking on the tree trunk like a lollipop. The hood was buckled back to the windshield, which had spiderwebbed and partially fallen in, but luckily, hadn’t shattered completely.

  Angelica stood up slowly,
running her hands over her body in search of cuts or broken bones. Finding no serious damage, she began to walk toward the road, hoping that she could still flag somebody down. There weren’t many cars that cut through Terrel after dark. Her head pounded with every step, but the road wasn’t that far off.

  And then He came back.

  Angelica’s hands rose from her side of their own accord, and began to slowly, deliberately unbutton her blouse. Tears slipped down her cheeks and she silently cried, No and concentrated on regaining control of her betraying fingers, but it only made her head throb worse with pain. She stopped walking for a moment, but then even her feet turned traitors, and she began to march in the other direction. She was helpless!

  Angelica’s fingers jerked and twitched and thrust, and despite her efforts, one by one, they clumsily opened each button. Like a poorly dominated marionette, Angelica shrugged off the blouse as she jerkily approached the road, and then her arms reached behind her to unclasp her bra. When that too fell to the weeds, her hands busily went to work on her jeans, unbuttoning them and then unzipping her fly. Her errant feet stopped marching then, just for a moment, as first one and then the other kicked off its shoe, allowing her body to shimmy clumsily out of the pants. One thumb hooked into the front of her pink pan ties and toyed with the fuzzy cleft beneath. Then, with a hard thrust, it yanked downward, carrying the soft cotton down her thighs. Angelica stumbled and fell to the gravel, crying out as her shoulder was gashed and gouged by sharp stones. And then the invisible strings pulled her erect again and she started walking, stark naked, toward the road.

  She shook with anger and fear, but was powerless to stop herself. It wasn’t enough that He had stopped her from leaving town, wrecking her car in the process. Now He was going to get His revenge in some horrible, humiliating way. She knew that He had something more than stripping her naked in store.

  Tears streamed down her cheeks as Angelica walked, zombielike, to the edge of the asphalt. Her head felt as if spikes had been driven in behind her eyes, and her feet were gouged and sliced by rocks, shards of broken glass and sharp grasses with every step. In her head, she prayed that nobody would come, that she would stand there at the edge of the road with her thumb out for the rest of the hellish night. Eventually, if nobody pulled up to see the bloody, bedraggled nude girl on the side of the road, she thought maybe He would get bored and leave her for more interesting prey. And then, before His attention shifted back to her, she could somehow collect her clothes and lost dignity in a broken bundle and escape back to her house. To hide.