Covenant

by John Everson

  But Malachai was with us last night. Protected us.

  Those lightning bolts the village cowered from were not made by God or nature. They were the crash and burn of a thousand Curburide souls. The ancient spirit burned and sucked up those invaders like a child sucks down a peppermint stick. They nourished him and as I watched, he grew. What I had seen as the faint haze of a saturnine man expanded and widened as he took the stature of a giant. And as he grew, his flesh became solid, so that I could no longer see the stars through him. He swung and grabbed and kicked the hazy Curburide monsters from the sky until there were no more.

  His laughter was terrible. His smile pure villainy. But he saved us from certain immolation.

  Now I only wonder: at what cost?

  At what cost.

  Joe skipped ahead a few more pages, thinking that this was the stuff of B movies and novels. But then again, he knew Malachai existed. He hadn’t known its name before, but he’d heard its voice. It was impossible to believe…but impossible not to.

  November 21, 1893

  His ancestors were protectors. I have talked with him often, these past nights.

  I know his story now.

  How the Indian people worshipped him and his kind. How Malachai and his kind saved the souls of the red-skinned people from the periodic attacks of the devouring Curburide, who followed the Indians wherever they roamed. Who feasted on them when the storms were right. Of how the Curburide took the souls that were not protected and sentenced them to live in a limbo within the wraiths themselves. A purgatory of damnation.

  Malachai’s people—if people you can call them— fought the Curburide. And yet, they were much alike. They took offerings of souls from the Indians. It was done in ritual. An annual offering to the spirit that protects. And that spirit took the souls…and ate them. Devoured their essence and blended it with his or her own. It strengthened the spirit, but it also changed him.

  Malachai has been distant and terse since All Hallow’s Eve, and I’m frightened now. More so, I think than before. He is stronger than ever now. His belly is filled with so much of the dark evil of the Curburide.

  What will it make of him?

  Joe shut the book. So…the spirit became that which it devoured. Or took on some of its attributes, anyway. You are what you eat. That would explain how Cindy could “talk” to James and the others. But the spirits of the town hadn’t been enough to tame its malevolence. Maybe Malachai needed to feast on a nunnery to neutralize its poison.

  Enough.

  He knew now what the beast of the cliff was and what it had become. A toying, malevolent destroyer. A spirit that enjoyed the bending of others. It feasted on their doubts, fears and weaknesses. It had become a Curburide itself.

  And he had to stop it. Somehow.

  He had to rescue Cindy and Angelica and all the others from its grasp.

  If he only knew how.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Cindy heard Angelica’s scream, but it didn’t dissuade her from moving forward. The sound, a shrill, ear-piercing cry of anger and contempt, actually warmed her. She delighted in the way the scream got inside her head and moved through her spine like firewater. It was delicious in the same way as the damp, cold air brushing against the soft down of her sex as she walked through the dark passageway.

  Delicious.

  This was all so…delicious.

  A small part of Cindy wondered why she had never felt this way before. Why the goose bumps that lined her arms and thighs didn’t make her shiver. But it was only a small part. The waves of excitement rushed over her again and again, like the incoming tide.

  She was engulfed in sensations. She was suspicious that perhaps the sensations were not all her own. After her nights on the cliff with the spirit, she knew, actually, that they were not all from within her. The spirit was touching her. Moving her.

  But it felt so good….

  Ken thrust into the enraged woman beneath him with a violence that threatened to break his mind. The tiny piece that was still Ken cried out louder than the woman.

  Screamed.

  “It’s not as if you haven’t dreamed of this.” A sinister voice chuckled inside his skull. “I’m just giving you what you’ve always wanted.”

  No no no no no…Ken cried. Whimpered, really. The woman’s breasts jiggled beneath him, sloshing in time with his movements like the skin of a half-empty waterbed, their nipples engorged and dark. He imagined their dark tips were plugs, the kind of pointy caps that you could twist and pull to release the water out of a cooler. These plugs held in, not ice water, but the blood that beat through her heart.

  “Why don’t you pull them?” the voice asked. “Pull the plugs and release her blood.”

  No. I won’t hurt her.

  “But you already are. Here, try this.”

  Ken’s right arm reached out and slapped Angelica’s cheek. It flushed bloodred, but she didn’t cry out. Her silence was more disturbing to Ken than her screams. But even worse than that was the way his cock seemed to grow even longer within her as a result of the violence. His body coursed with power, and that wicked kernel of Ken that made him drive out of town once or twice a year to anonymously rent films like Tied Up and Titillated grew stronger.

  “Yes, you do like that don’t you? I only give my people what they want.”

  Ken’s hand shook, but he raised it again. This time, he slapped her breast. And then he took the thickened nipple between his thumb and forefinger. A smile grew on his face—an evil, twisted “I’ve got candy” kind of smile.

  And then he pulled on the plug.

  The pain was terrible. It flowed through her veins like acid, locked her toes in spasms of paralysis.

  But it wasn’t the pain that hurt her so much as the degradation. The absolute inability to lift a finger to stop what was happening to her. He pounded away at her as if she were an object, and grinned when she made any sound of distress. So she locked her jaw shut, determined to endure him without giving in to his violence.

  And then he grabbed one of her nipples and yanked.

  Her mouth opened involuntarily and she screamed.

  “God damn you!” she cried out, and gasped as the sensation of a burning coal settled hot in her misused chest. His fist connected with her jaw at the end of her scream, and the world spun gray around her. But she didn’t black out.

  Not completely.

  Dimly she could still feel his violation within her. Feel the tremors of pain that he caused with every unwanted stroke. But worse than all of it was the realization that even though the demon had left her completely alone, her sensations unmitigated by His own lusts, she felt tingles of pleasure through the abuse. A tiny piece of her begged for him to rip out her hair, grind her body into the dirt, slap her until she couldn’t be anything but a slave of someone else’s desire.

  Blood dripped on her chest and face and she held out her tongue, struggling to catch its drops. Rhonda reached out a hand and smeared her tits with Bernadette’s lifeblood, then lowered her head to taste it. Rhonda’s big teeth brushed against one bloody nipple, and then bit down hard. An explosion of lust centered below Rachel’s belly, and she reached down to touch the blood-smeared flesh of her friend’s thigh. Both girls began to giggle….

  Angelica closed her eyes and desperately wished for it to stop. She didn’t want this; she absolutely didn’t. She didn’t want to remember the bloody orgy that had happened in this very spot years before. She didn’t want to enjoy this abuse, and yet, she had wished for it since that night. And since the night of her attempted escape.

  Her hands encircled his neck as she straddled him, the honey between her legs thickening and creaming again, though his cum was still dripping in clear drops from her belly from their orgasm just moments before. His eyes bugged out as she felt herself cumming again, as she heard him gasping, “I loved you….”

  She didn’t want to be raped again. She didn’t.

  But then she came. />
  And a secret voice within her, a voice that was not of the spirit of the cliff, laughed.

  Yes you do, it whispered, and her heart tore in two.

  Joe stopped at the cavern of crystal, for just a moment.

  “Cindy?” he called. His voice echoed emptily through the room. The flashlight bounced with eerie fluorescence off the rainbow rocks. It was like an underground disco ball. He grinned to himself. There was something about this room, he thought. Something that stank of a connection to the spirit. But what was it? And how could he use it?

  He looked around once more, noting the ruby red glow of the far corner, the emerald caste of the flat-topped outcropping in the center of the room, the open passageways ahead of him. This was the heart, he decided. The heart of the spirit.

  Shaking his head, he moved on into the artery leading down, deeper into the body of the mountain.

  This is an insane situation, he thought. His own mind answered him. And how is this any more crazy than an old man enlisting one spirit to fend off an army of others?

  He grunted at himself, and then sucked in a breath. Bending over, he lifted a white cotton shirt from the ground. Just ahead of it lay a silky brassiere.

  This was Cindy’s!

  He moved faster, and within a few feet found her discarded pants and pan ties as well.

  What the fuck?

  The gray shadows of the passageway slipped by him faster and faster. He was moving as quickly as he could without tripping or banging into walls. He could feel the air growing thicker with moisture; the ocean exit couldn’t be too far ahead.

  And then a bloodcurdling scream made him stop, stiff en.

  “God damn you!” a voice cried.

  He heard every word clearly. It was a woman—Cindy?—and she wasn’t far ahead, unless cave acoustics were playing him for a fool.

  He turned a bend and stopped.

  Just ahead, in an open cavern, he could see Angelica’s black hair splayed out on the rocky floor, and Ken, the Cliff Comber dweeb, plunging his white ass up and down above her like an oil rig on a fresh strike.

  But that wasn’t what stopped him.

  For a moment, he couldn’t process what he was seeing. Cindy, golden, buff and beautiful, was crouched over something on the floor nearby. She didn’t seem aware of him, but rummaged around in a bag or pack of some kind. Then a smile spread across her face and she stood again, the muscles rippling in her flanks as she strode purposefully across the cave.

  In her hand she raised a knife-size spike of steel shaped like a long nail. A cave-climbing piton, Joe realized.

  Joe watched frozen at the sight. What the…?

  She bent over the coupling Ken and Angelica, and then began to stroke Ken’s back with the steel poker.

  “Cindy, no!” Joe cried out finally, and sprinted across the cave to knock her away from them.

  But he was too late. Cindy’s arm came down with a wet smack in the center of Ken’s back. The piton was buried in the caver’s vertebrae and he flinched as the blood spurted out from behind him. But his muscular thrusts didn’t slow.

  Joe tackled Cindy, who tried kicking and pushing to roll away from him.

  “Let me go!”

  She jumped up and ran back to Ken. Grabbing onto the piton like a saddle horn, she pressed herself against his bloodied backside and then threw her arms around him. Her lips touched his shoulder and then her tongue traced a path through the spreading stain of crimson on his shoulder blades. When she came up for air, her lips and chin were painted in gore.

  Angelica screamed again, and Joe crawled carefully closer. He saw the reason for this yell. Ken’s breath was coming in wet, slurping gasps, and a dark slime of blood was escaping his mouth. Angelica’s chest was already a smeary mess with his lifeblood, but still Ken fucked her, not seeming to notice the pain in his back or the woman suckling his wound or the death leaking in rhythmic spurts from his lips.

  Joe tried to pull Cindy off from behind, but her nails raked at him, gouging his cheek.

  “Noooooooo!” she wailed, and then grabbed the piton with both hands, moving it up and down like a gearshift in Ken’s gory back. The blood fountained out at her and she laughed, washing her hands in the spray and then rubbing her breasts and belly with it until her beautiful tan had turned to a bloody sunburn. At last, Ken’s motions began to slow, and he lay heavier upon Angelica, who had begun to retch, and cry hysterically.

  But Cindy was just getting started.

  She rubbed her hands on Ken’s ruined back and then drew lines of blood across her cheeks, and traced thick gory trails around her breasts with a dripping finger. She washed her hands in Ken’s wound and spread his blood below her belly button and across her thighs with a moan. Then she moved forward, positioning herself above the blunt shaft of the piton embedded in Ken’s back.

  At that moment Joe finally realized that they weren’t alone in the cave. He caught the glint of eyes across the room. Abandoning Cindy’s sex-death ritual for the moment, he hurried across the room in the dark and found the three women, frozen like statues. Karen Sander’s face was streaming with unwiped tears, but Rhonda Canady’s lips were twisted in a secret smile. Monica’s eyes, however, were expressionless, strangely vacant.

  “You want to give me a hand here?” he begged.

  Karen saw the naked girl come strolling into the cave and inwardly winced. Wasn’t that the girlfriend of Rhonda’s boy? The bastard had gotten her too?

  She struggled to call out a warning, something, but she still couldn’t move. Then the reporter came stumbling into the cave and she felt a surge of hope. How many minds could the creature control at once? Maybe if they all tried to break free at the same time…

  She closed her eyes a moment and poured all her will into moving her foot. Nothing. She looked ahead once more and saw the reporter tackle Cindy.

  But he really only succeeded in getting himself scratched up. The girl took the fall like a linebacker and brushed him aside. She was clinging to the dying rapist like a tick. Karen strained to cry out to him, “Over here,” but no sound came from her mouth. She could feel the tears coursing down her face, which felt hot with her silent efforts. She had to break free. Had to.

  Maybe her silent screams did have some effect, because all at once Joe looked at her. Right at her. And then came over.

  Could he break them free?

  Help me, Joe, she screamed inwardly. Help all of us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  If he’d had to describe the sensation, it would have been difficult to find the words. The pain was excruciating, and yet, Ken’s body rocked also with the antithesis of that feeling, each thrust of pleasure also a claw of agony. His breath tasted of copper; his belly squirmed in terror and lust.

  No, he couldn’t have named that feeling.

  But he enjoyed it, this yin and yang of pleasure and pain. He thrilled to the life dripping from his body as he ripped asunder the life and psyche of another.

  Still, that tiny jealous part of him wanted more. In the back of his mind, the naked body of the Gypsy woman receded and he saw the spires of stalagmites and stalactites that he’d always fantasized about even more than he had guiltily thought of taking a woman like this.

  Brownsell Caverns…

  Come One, Come All to the Fabulous Underground! the billboards in his mind barked.

  “Some things are mine to give,” the tar-thick voice cooed in his head. “And others …”

  The weight on his back shifted then, and he felt the piton plunging deeper inside him, coming closer to piercing his blackened heart.

  Laughter then. Purple stars in his soul. And he was standing up. The electricity shot through his legs and he fell to his knees. But hands gripped him beneath the armpits, hoisting him again to a stumbling crouch. Hot warm liquid coursed down his legs, and he wondered if he’d pissed himself. But he couldn’t bring himself to look down. Only forward past walls of slick gray rock, as a nude, bloody body and a flash
of blonde hair whirred around him like a crazedmerry-go-round, keeping him moving, pulling him forward.

  It was getting increasingly difficult to concentrate. But he found his center. That sweet, heavy breath in his ear.

  “A little farther now,” the breath whispered. “Just a little more.”

  Ken shrugged and stumbled on.

  What else could he do?

  Joe grabbed Karen Sander’s face between his hands and shook it from side to side. It moved without resistance in his grip.

  “What’s wrong with you!” he yelled.

  Her eyelids blinked. But she remained mute.

  He pulled her away from the fat woman’s body with an effort. She didn’t resist, but her limbs didn’t move either.

  What should he do? He had to break somebody out of the demon’s spell. It occurred to him that he himself could be paralyzed at any moment. Why hadn’t the thing used him as it had the others?

  Or was it getting kicks just by watching him bounce around with as much effect on his surroundings as a pinball, propelled from target to target by a series of possessed flippers?

  He slapped the older woman in the face then, wincing at the report. Her eyes blinked again, and a tear rolled down her face. But still she made no move to speak or stop him. He raised his hand again, and then dropped it.

  What was the use? She was gone.

  Her lips moved.

  “Uuuh,” she whispered.

  Joe bent closer, putting his ear to her mouth. “Tell me,” he urged. “C’mon.”

  A faint hiss escaped her mouth and then a whisper. Just a hint, really. But he understood.

  “Look,” she’d said.

  He turned around just in time to see Cindy and Ken limp out of the cave, back the way they had come in.