by Harvey Click
“Tell them the story of the time when my father locked me in a cellar for seven days and seven nights, and tell them how I found the light of Lucifer invigorating the lonely darkness and whispering secret words of power meant only for my ears. Tell them that I remembered those words and held them close to my heart and used them as a roadmap on my long journey into the pure light of Lucifer.
“Tell them how I schooled myself through long years of arduous research, all alone in my studies until I met a great but cowardly teacher. Tell them I met Drew Dieborn on a cold November day by Mirror Lake, and tell them how he taught me gnosis I had never dreamed of.
“But tell them that Drew makes no use of his knowledge because he’s a coward and a fool. Tell them his spells don’t work because he doesn’t have the courage to pursue the pure light of Lucifer. Tell them he lives in fear of Yahweh, the false demiurge, the exterminator of truth. Tell them that because he wants to end my ministry, I’ll soon dispatch him to the cold grave, and he will find no honor or respect in Underworld.
“Tell them that Rue is milk, moans, a poison. Rue is milk because she gives sweet nourishment to those who love her. Rue is moans because she causes moans of delight or torment with equal ease. Rue is poison because she destroys all those who defy her.
“Tell my true story to the denizens of Underworld, my young apostle, so my name will be renowned and feared long before I arrive.”
She walked around the circle lighting the thirteen black candles. When they were lit she reached up and unscrewed the one bare bulb in the ceiling.
She fetched a smoking censer and swung it over him, chanting words he couldn’t understand. The incense smelled sweet but sickly like lilac or lavender mixed with something dead, and the words she chanted sounded like the mutterings of an insane priest.
After several minutes she carried the censer out of the circle and lit something in the big metal brazier near the wall, causing smoke to billow up. It was pale blue, wispy and thin, more like steam than smoke.
She returned to the circle with something like a long stick wrapped in black cloth and placed it on the table between Jason’s legs. With a piece of chalk she touched up some lines that Jason’s feet had smudged. Finally she carefully drew in the missing gap of the circle, as if shutting herself inside—or shutting something else out.
She removed the black cloth and revealed two objects: a wooden rod about four feet long and a dagger with a blade about one foot long. The rod was painted with smooth black lacquer and capped with silver at both ends, and Jason realized he was looking at a real magic wand.
But it was the slim dagger that drew his eyes. It gleamed like a mirror, reflecting the yellow candle flames, and the edges looked sharp enough to shave with.
Holding the wand aloft in her left hand and the dagger in her right, she stood facing the brazier with her back to Jason and chanted some more words or names that meant nothing to him. Then she began to sing words he could at least halfway understand:
“O Hecate, Goddess of sorcery and the subtle craft, I summon thee in the name of Lucifer, to whom thou owes thine obedience. O Hecate, Goddess of crossroads and graveyards, I conjure thee in the name of Satan, to whose authority you must conform. O Hecate, goddess of gates and doorways, I bid thee appear in the name of Belial, whose will shall not be resisted. O Hecate, Goddess of ghosts and necromancy, I command thy presence in the name of Leviatan, whose power exceeds even thine own. O Hecate, come without tarrying, come and fulfill my desires, come now and conduct thyself according to my intentions.”
She sang some more incomprehensible words, her thin voice sounding like a strange pipe or flute as she modulated from one word to another. The yellow candlelight played tricks with the pale blue smoke issuing from the brazier, and at times Jason believed he saw a woman’s face in the wisps. It was an evil face, or maybe it was just smoke.
Rue turned her back to the brazier and lowered her wand and dagger. “O Hecate, Goddess of Underworld, I can feel thy holy presence in this room. I long to gaze on thee, but I know that no living mortal dares look into thy face.
“Tonight I offer unto thee a nearly perfect sacrifice. I say nearly perfect because he has two small defects. These I will not try to hide from thee, and in fact in my sacred square I have named him by his defects. I have named him Lone-eye Knur-ped because he’s partially blind in one eye and one of his feet is slightly deformed.
“But aside from these minor flaws, he’s most comely and quite beautifully proportioned and well worthy of thine approval. His hair is golden like summer wheat and his eyes are blue like still waters. I have tried him in bed and can attest to his virility and vigor. I believe he will provide thee with much pleasure and merriment.”
Jason’s wrists were chaffed raw and bruised from jerking and tugging against the straps, but he kept trying. Though he had never put much stock in prayer, he prayed now as furiously as he tugged, but neither effort seemed to be doing any good.
“I offer unto thee this luscious feast, O Goddess, and in return I request only two small favors. First, I ask thee to keep me young and beautiful for many years to come. Second, I beseech thee to make Mingo desire me as I desire him. For more than two years he was mine, and I granted him many valuable favors. I smote his enemies and I blessed him with great success until he unfairly cast me aside for a lesser woman. After that I wooed him with potent spells, but he resisted their compulsion. I vexed him with pains and maladies and I sent a succubus to haunt him, but he suffered these indignities without surrender.”
Jason thought of the afterlife Drew had described. That was fine for Drew—he was an old cripple who had probably pretty much given up on life many years ago when his girlfriend died.
But Jason had barely gotten started on life. There were a million things he wanted to do. He wanted to go places, see things, learn to play the guitar better, maybe start a band, maybe read some more books and improve his grammar, maybe even go to college, maybe see Emily again…
“O Hecate, three times before have I offered sacrifices unto thee, and I have requested only these two small favors in return. One favor thou hast granted me—thou hast kept me young and beautiful. The second favor thou hast denied me. Therefore I offer unto thee this fourth sacrifice, and if thou deny my request again I will never offer another treasure unto thee. Other deities can grant me what I ask, and all of my rich gifts shall henceforth be given unto them.
“Jerry Mingler is rightfully mine, and I will have him back!” she shouted.
Conan would miraculously break free of the straps as if they were made of paper. But Jason wasn’t Conan—and the terrible truth was, nobody was Conan. In Conan’s day people believed in magic and miracles, so maybe miracles could happen then. But in these un-magic times all the miracles had dried up, despite a few lunatics here and there crazy enough to still believe in them.
Lunatics like Rue, who believed there actually was a goddess in that foul-smelling smoke, which was even stupider than believing the characters in a movie were real and could leap out of the screen at any minute.
Lunatics like Drew, with his phony love potion made of Old Spice and whiskey. A week ago Drew had practiced the same sort of hocus-pocus Rue believed, and now he believed in an afterlife filled with pretty flowers and chirping birds, but that was probably just as bogus as his potions and spells. The heart attack had addled his brains and had caused him to see something that was no more real than the phantom face in Rue’s billowing smoke.
And if magic was phony, then probably religion was too. If there wasn’t any devil, why should there be any God? The little Baptist church Jason’s parents used to attend once in a great while hadn’t been filled with anything except deluded people hoping there was something else in the building. It was all delusion. There were no miracles, no magic, no God, no devil, no angels waiting to save Jason from this horrible murder motivated by fantasy and madness.
“Wherefore, O Goddess of ghosts and graveyards, I, Rue, thy devoted servant
, do offer unto thee this worthy sacrifice and beseech thee in return to look upon me with favor and grant my humble requests.”
Rue moved to Jason’s left side and raised the dagger in her right hand. She was strangely beautiful but no longer looked quite human. Her long, sleek, perfectly black hair made her pale face look unnaturally narrow, and her eyes seemed to be glowing with faint green light like the ancient radiation of two distant stars.
The dagger was aimed at his heart. Jason stopped his useless tugging and shut his eyes. The deathblow would come soon, and instead of vainly bruising his wrists he wanted to savor his last moment of life.
Behind his shut eyelids there was only darkness—no God, no devil, no magical beings waiting to save him. But then the darkness parted like curtains, and he saw a beautiful woman. She had golden hair just like his and sky-blue eyes just like his, and she stood beside a blossoming tree in a radiant place with flowers and birds and a grassy green meadow behind her.
Time had stopped, because he knew in the place where this woman stood there was no time. He knew he could gaze at her lovely face for as long as he wanted and Rue’s dagger would come no closer, because time was for the living, and in this place time meant nothing.
He was no longer afraid.
The woman smiled and said, “I give power to your arm.”
Something like a bolt of lightning surged through his left arm, and suddenly it was free from the strap. Rue’s dagger was already plunging toward his heart, and his hand shot up and caught her wrist. He twisted it hard and heard it snap like a stick.
Rue screamed with agony, and the dagger flew out of her hand and landed on the floor somewhere. He glanced at her just long enough to see that she was writhing in pain, her right hand bent completely backwards so her long red fingernails were touching her upper forearm.
In the next instant he unbuckled his right hand from its strap and reached down to unbuckle his feet, but there was no time—he saw that Rue was already grasping the dagger from the floor—so he scooted off the table, the ropes that held his feet straps sliding down the table legs to the floor. He lifted the end of the table to free the ropes, but one of them was caught on something, and his right leg was dragging the table behind him as he lurched toward the shelf where the Ruger lay.
Before he could reach it, Rue had the dagger in her good hand and was lunging at him. He freed his foot, lifted the end of the heavy table, and tipped it toward her. It landed upside-down on top of her, and he heard a dull thud as her skull hit the concrete floor.
He grabbed the gun and turned to face her. Howling with pain, she wriggled out from beneath the table and struggled to her feet, still clutching the dagger. Blood was pouring out her nostrils and dripping off her chin.
“Drop the knife,” Jason said. “It won’t do you no good.”
She stopped howling and caught her breath. She was standing crookedly, as if her back was injured. The green light of her eyes was more intense now, as if her brain were smoldering and ready to burst into flame.
She smiled and plunged the dagger deep into her gut. She stood there for a while staring at him with the knife buried in her abdomen to the hilt, and then she sank to her knees and knelt for a while, still staring, and then she toppled forward into the growing puddle of blood.
Part Nine
Into Darkness
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jason took off the robe and put on his clothes. The air was thick with smoke, so he carried the brazier to the rear of the basement and dumped whatever was burning into the pool of rainwater, making it hiss like an angry snake.
After he screwed in the ceiling bulb, he examined the buckle he’d broken. The steel tongue had snapped in two, and the hole it had been in was stretched almost to the next hole. His left wrist was bruised and swollen, and some of the skin was missing.
Reluctantly he knelt beside Rue’s body and rolled her over. Her eyes were still open but no longer glowing; now they looked like lifeless green glass, like marbles he used to play with.
He shut them and was about to stand up when he noticed a small square of leather hanging around her neck by a leather cord. Words were carefully printed on it with silver paint, and he removed it so he could read them:
I AM MILK, A POISON, MOANS
IN YOU + IS SLEEP
LONE-EYE KNUR-PED
He put it in his shirt pocket and went upstairs. As he passed through the dark studio on his way to Rue’s phone in the living room, he saw that his portrait on the easel was now cut up like the paintings upstairs, nothing left but a spider’s web of ragged canvas scarcely visible in the gloom.
He groped his way to the living room, and while he searched for the phone in the shadows he saw malevolent yellow eyes watching him. Aleister was sitting on the fireplace mantle, blithely indifferent to the fact that his mistress was dead, and for a moment Jason pitied Rue—nobody had loved her, probably not even her cat. Soon it would be prowling the alleys looking for someone else to feed it, and when it found someone it would never again give a thought to its dead mistress.
He found the phone and was about to dial O to call the police when he heard a faint noise from the kitchen. It was a key in the lock of the back door, and as he stood motionless in the dark he heard the door open and then heard a faint whisper. A ray of light appeared, the beam of a flashlight moving from the kitchen into the studio. The flashlight beam found him and stared at his face.
“Where’s Rue?” Mingo asked.
“She’s in the basement,” Jason said. “She killed herself with a knife.”
Mingo switched on the studio light, and two more men stepped out of the kitchen. One was the man with the lean mean face who had driven Mingo’s Cadillac to The Way, wearing his dark glasses now as he had then. The other was stockier but looked just as mean. All three men wore black gloves and held pistols, and their pistols were aimed at Jason.
“Go have a look, Leonard,” Mingo said.
The lean one disappeared into the kitchen and then could be heard descending into the basement.
“Don’t point them guns at me,” Jason said. “I had me enough trouble already tonight.”
Mingo nodded at the stocky one, who put his gun away, but Mingo kept his aimed at Jason.
“What’re you doing here?” Jason asked.
“Drew called me and said something about hearing a tape recording of a phone conversation,” Mingo said. “He said he heard Rue giving you some sort of hypnotic hoodoo command, and he thought you were in trouble. I owe him a couple favors, so I came by to see if you needed some help.”
“You didn’t come here to help me,” Jason said. “You come here ‘cause you were afraid her power would get stronger like it did the other three times. Their heads are down there in the basement, them other three guys she killed.”
Mingo smiled and shrugged. “Let’s just say we had a coinciding interest,” he said. “I help you and I help myself at the same time.”
“You ain’t helping me much by aiming that gun at me.”
Mingo put his gun away, reluctantly it seemed. Leonard returned from the basement and said, “It’s a mess down there. Lots of blood. Looks like there was some kind of devil worship going on.”
“Mop it up and scrub everything with bleach,” Mingo said. “Elmore, go look around for some big garbage bags. If you can’t find any, make do with a blanket.”
The two men went to the kitchen in search of garbage bags and cleaning supplies. Jason reached for the phone again, and Mingo reached inside his jacket to touch the butt of his gun.
“You’re not thinking about calling the law, are you?” Mingo said. “You’ve been staying here with her, you’ve been her lover, and now somebody’s stabbed her in the basement. Put two and two together.”
“I’ll tell ‘em ‘xactly what happened,” Jason said. “You can back me up.”
“No I can’t,” Mingo said. “I come here, there’s a dead woman in the basement and some crazy kid talking shit upstairs
, what am I to believe?”
Jason put the phone receiver back in its cradle.
“Here’s how we’ll do this,” Mingo said. “My boys will take the body to her car. With that privacy fence, nobody will see them. They’ll drive the car away and it will never be seen again.
“Tomorrow night they’ll come back and clean up everything spic and span. Rue doesn’t have a job or any friends in town, no one to notice that she’s gone. I happen to own this house—I’ve been giving her free rent and plenty of grocery money trying to get her to lay off of me with her hoodoo spells, but she didn’t want to lay off. So another renter leaves in the middle of the night without paying her rent, who cares?”
“It won’t be no skin off your ass if I call the cops,” Jason said.
“Won’t it? Me and Rue had a thing going for a couple of years. Plenty of people know this, including all my enemies. Imagine the headlines, some kind of love killing with a dose of Satanism to spice up the story. I can’t have my name mixed up with shit like that—I’m planning to run for public office in a couple years.”
Mingo reached in his wallet and handed Jason five twenty-dollar bills.
“What’s this for?” Jason asked.
“Bus fare and some go-to-hell money, ‘cause I want you to go to hell and do it quick. Don’t try to tell me you won’t mention my name if the police get a hold of you, ‘cause when they pin this killing on you you’ll be singing like Aretha Franklin with the whole band wailing behind her. It’s past midnight now, and I want you out of town by noon today. I’ve got plenty of friends, and you don’t want them seeing you anywhere near this city ever again or you’re going to be keeping Rue company in Corpse City.”
Mingo stepped back and looked at the cut-up portrait. “Did this used to be you?” he asked.
“Yep.”