St. Agnes' Eve

by Malachi Stone

  “You know better than that, Duane.” I waved the two files at him. “I wonder if a forensic documents expert could match the ink on these two babies. You think it’s dry yet?”

  He lunged for the files. I let him have them without a fight, even though I was armed with a very fancy antique knife. I’d made other photocopies. He tore through both folders before realizing they contained no originals.

  “Let this one go, Ricky,” he said. “She’s dead anyway. Give me a break—yanking my ticket and sending me to prison won’t bring her back, but it sure as shit will ruin me and my career.”

  “How may times you think you can use first person in a single sentence, Duane?”

  “Look, Ricky, confidentially I was the one trying to save her life. I saw all this coming. If you’d done the smart thing and taken the deal, which everybody but me expected you to do, she’d be alive today, Kokker’d have his new little chippy, and you’d be a million dollars richer. But I told Kane, I said, ‘Ricky’s got this integrity thing, this home and family hang-up. It’ll take more than big tits and big bills to turn him.’ Nobody listened. Nobody ever listens.”

  “So what’d it take to turn you, Duane? Confidentially.”

  “Would you believe tape? Videotape. Stretched end-to-end it probably wouldn’t reach that wall. But what was on it was what turned me. That’s all I’m saying. You know how it is.”

  I left Duane staring at the carpet like he was waiting for a hell mouth to open up for him. Somehow I didn’t think he’d have to wait long. As for me, I wasn’t through paying my respects to the dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Desecration Day

  It was a pretty drive to Salem. By the time I made it there around ten, the morning sun had burned away most of the frost and further tattered the grave-blanket of snow, exposing the dead fields of loam and clay. Stopping off at the Village Hall, I went through two clerks before finding one old biddy who could give me directions to a cemetery that wasn’t on any plat map.

  The county road led to an unmarked gravel lane. Gravel became dirt. Swerving and fishtailing, I feared losing the car in the shallow ditch miles from the nearest farmhouse. If this road turned completely to mud before I ventured home, the early thaw might make me as much a prisoner as my mother’s corpse ripening below the frostline.

  The mud road ran along a ridge lined with a windbreak of huge poplars standing like sentinels guarding a dark secret. Then, after a mile or more, I spotted it standing on a rise off to the left: one of those secluded country cemeteries you barely notice along quiet rural roads. I’d driven as close as I dared; the road threatened to transform itself into a grass waterway or a dry creek bed. I stopped and parked in the ruts that had brought me there.

  Luckily I’d thought to wear my high-topper tennis shoes. I had to slog across wet headlands of government ground perhaps twenty rods long to reach the cemetery. Set apart by a lancet-tipped, wrought-iron fence like a diadem gone black with tarnish, it crowned a hill surrounded on three sides by woods grown wild. As I drew closer to enter, I looked above my head and recognized the insignia that towered over the visitor like a capstone in hell’s lich gate.

  The owl with a dying snake in its beak. I rubbed my eyes and slipped the Lilith talisman from its hiding place to be sure. It felt warm from my exertion. When I held it in the air with both hands to compare it side-by-side with the other, I thought I heard an infernal chorus of faint wails emanating from the ground beneath my feet. They were the terrified moanings of once-proud women, of Lilith weeping for her children.

  The two symbols were identical. This was one boneyard with the Lilith cult’s own mascot for a watchdog. Time’s passage had eroded many of the older gravestones like soap—some of the birth dates so weather-worn they seemed to contain only three digits. The newer markers bore pictures of their deceased in identical delicate frames like miniature Rococo mirrors. I wandered through the rows of unkempt graves until, suddenly, there she was. My mother at about thirty. In archival-quality black-and-white she was already showing signs of the dissipation that would kill her—intimations creeping in like mold around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. The hard smile on her face seemed indecorous, given her current surroundings.

  I stared into her eyes, cold and mineral as the silver nitrate that formed their image. She’d never known Diane or any of the children. Would she have cared for them any more than she’d cared for me? Drink and men’s bodies had been her only loves all her unnatural life.

  I fought to quiet the strident voices of memory. Then, already kneeling, I began to pray. It took all I had. I prayed the Orthodox prayer for the dead with tears wrenched from the obscenity of the past and the despair of the present. I prayed for her to find a place of brightness, a place of peace, a place of green pastures, a place of refreshment, where all sickness, sorrow, and sighing have fled away and where the light of God’s countenance shineth forever. I prayed that all her sins would be forgiven her, whether in thought, word, or deed, for there is no man who liveth and sinneth naught. For Thou and Thou alone art without sin, O God.

  Then, God forgive me, I held the pocket mirror up to her picture as though checking for life in a corpse. I held it there perpendicular, as Sandra had taught me to do.

  The paradise face. My mother had worn it to her grave. I stroked the cold, damp marker, tracing my finger along the dates carved in the cheap limestone—the dates that set the outer limits of her earthly life. The birth date: 1926, the nine already so eroded it seemed more like a seven. I tried to scratch it more distinct with a corner of the mirror. Then I heard a familiar voice ask, “What the hell are you doing here, Ricky?”

  That’s when I caught Janis’s reflection standing behind me. So help me, she wore a black velvet cape befitting a gothic apparition. I spun around, almost falling on my ass from the wet and slippery dead sod. The mirror struck the tombstone’s base and broke in pieces.

  “I thought you people were supposed to be invisible in a looking glass.”

  “You’re confusing me with a vampire,” Janis said. “It’s an understandable mistake. Now give me the talisman.” She outstretched her arm, her red-lacquered fingernails grasping like talons.

  “I don’t have it,” I told her. “I hid it inside an antique Russian anoushka doll in Diane’s collection—”

  “It’s in your right breast pocket. Give it to me, Vercingetorix. Oh, yes, that is your given name, you know. Your mother chose it for you, naming you after the king of the druids. I ought to know; I was there at your birth.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Janis?”

  “Feeling nostalgic? Baby, you don’t know the meaning of the word. I’ve wet-nursed prodigies like you since before the invention of the wheel.”

  “You’re not making sense, Janis.”

  “Janis. Lilith. What’s in a name? Look inside yourself—you know it’s true. Now give me the talisman, and together we’ll rule the world.” She smirked fetchingly, cocked her head, and added, “I’ll even repeat that special trick I showed you in your office—any time, any place.”

  “There’s a little matter of a twenty-year blood guild, isn’t there? Before you and I implement our plan of fellatio and world domination?”

  “The Lilith Sabbat will supply the blood tonight. Diane’s blood. You’re a son of a bitch, Ricky. Your mother paid the price. Now it’s Diane’s turn.”

  “What price? The penalty the purebloods exact for bringing a half-breed male into the world?”

  “It’s called a prodigy, and no, that’s not penalized. We’re all guilty of that, sooner or later. So many enticing opportunities and so much time on our hands.”

  “What, then?”

  “Why, marriage to a human. The unpardonable offense. Unbearable to our kind. Your mother lost her life for it, and Carla. Regrettably, Sandra’s situation prevented her execution in the traditional manner. No problem. Diane’s sacrifice shall empower our race for another score of years.”

/>   “I’ll see you in hell first.”

  Amused by the cliché, she said, “Can you truly hold to the illusion you’ll regret the loss of Diane after all the humiliation she’s inflicted on you? The treachery? The betrayal? After all, she betrayed her own sisterhood, her blood heritage older than creation.”

  “That damn necklace has cast some sort of evil spell over her. This is all your doing.”

  She threw her head back and laughed. Her teeth were perfect, but then so are a shark’s. “Dear boy,” she said, “Was it my doing that Diane strung that pretty amulet around her lovely neck? Or that she invited into her heart a full-blooded lust for a virtually everlasting life filled with forbidden pleasures? Savor for yourself the delicious irony of it all: her waiting there anticipating the Demon Mother’s illicit touch, then in the time it takes to vault out of paradise or entertain a doubt, beholding her own luscious breasts sliced off along with her procreating hand. You’ll be standing over her as she lies dying in her own gore. I’ll even let you keep the necklace for a souvenir. You men are so fond of trophies.”

  “And what about my kids? Are you and I going to drag them along on that world tour you’ve been promising?”

  Her expression grew even colder. “Do as you wish. They’ll be guests of honor at the execution tonight. Although if you should understandably choose to leave them to others afterward, they’ll be more than adequately cared for.”

  “I’m sure it won’t be the least bit traumatic for them, witnessing their mother butchered.”

  “You seem to be forgetting your children are descended more from our kind than from yours. Your sons are greater prodigies than even you yourself. Your daughters too are three-quarter blood. They’re not the sort to be squeamish about an execution. Does a farm child waste pity on the hog at a butchering jamboree?”

  “You didn’t waste any pity on Sandra, did you, Janis?”

  Her expression, the way she held her head, even her hands assumed an attitude of innocence falsely accused. She looked like the icon of Saint Agnes, but with no lamb at her bosom. “Sandra? Why, I loved the girl. Perhaps not with your passion—”

  “Spare me. You’ve got it backward. Sandra wasn’t only in love with Kirk, was she? She was in love with you, too. She couldn’t help herself. Her deadly mistake was in assuming the feeling was mutual. That was the other reason she couldn’t stay away from the mansion, even when her husband wanted to divorce her. That was why she so desperately wanted to keep you away from her husband in the first place—her feelings were all mixed up: love and jealousy for both you and Kirk. Last night she might have been on the lookout for the Kokker maneuver from its namesake, but not from you. You crept up behind her, whispered erotic nothings in her ear, then all at once it’s lights out for her. She slips below the surface of the water, unconscious. The strangulation was later, to make it look good when you framed her sole beneficiary for her murder.”

  “Have you heard that methamphetamine abuse can lead to brain damage and insanity? Why on earth would I want Sandra dead?”

  “Because it was part of the devil’s pact you struck with Kirk Kokker. I didn’t realize it until too late, after I read Sandra’s real will and phony prenup this morning. Kokker wanted rid of Sandra—I don’t know why, I guess he was bored with her—but he realized he couldn’t risk millions of dollars in holdings through a messy divorce or by killing her himself. Even hiring a hit man would leave too many worrisome loose ends, because he’d have been the only one with a motive. But you have enough legal education and training to know about the Slayer statute, don’t you, Janis? You know: the one that says a beneficiary who murders the testator forfeits all claim under the will? That’s why Sandra’s will was such a joke. The plan all along was for you to call Celestal once the stage was set and tweak him enough to get him over there just in time to stumble into the frame. Misty says Celestal told her it was a woman’s voice on the phone.”

  “What do the hornbooks on evidence say about hearsay, declarant dead?”

  “Oh, I’m not saying you’ll ever be prosecuted for it. You’re much too smart for that. But with Sandra out of the way, and Diane soon to be out of the way, you’ll ease right in as the wife and soon-to-be widow of Kirk Kokker, filthy mammon intact.”

  To my astonishment, she turned and spat. “Nauseating thought,” she shuddered, grimacing as though I’d just picked my nose and eaten the results in front of her.

  “Why, then?” Staring at her, I finally comprehended.

  “It’s your daughter he wants, isn’t it? He wants Madeleine—a younger, fresher identical twin to you—to corrupt and molest. He offered you the talisman in exchange for your daughter and getting Sandra out of the way. Only now we both know he doesn’t have the talisman any more.”

  “Then give me the talisman and my daughter goes free. You know you love me, Ricky. You’ve loved me since I midwifed your mother the day you were born. Mine was the first face in the world to greet yours. How many men can say that about any woman?”

  “You’ve made me love you the same as all the others. You have that power over both men and women. And the ones who love you the most get destroyed: my mother, Carla, Diaz, and now Sandra. And how many more over the centuries, right, Janis or Lilith or whatever the hell your name is?” Remembering what Sandra had told me about demons, I added, “By the way, what the hell is your name?” In retrospect, it was probably a faux pas.

  Janis’s countenance turned to molten metal. She looked like nothing in the world so much as a brass idol come to hellish life. Her voice raged and thundered above airport decibel levels.

  “Belay your insolence, prodigy. Men have worshipped me under many names the world over since the time before time. I have been called Isis, Astarte, Artemis, Kali. I am the Dark Wanderer, Mistress of the Blood Moon, the Queen of Hell. I am legend and myth made flesh to confound man’s imagination. When Lot’s wife, the falling brimstone a fever against her back, turned for one final peek at destruction, before her gaping mouth and wide eyes turned to rock salt it was my Medusa’s face she saw peering back at her out of the roiling smoke and fire. I am mother to gorgons and sirens. I it was who taught the banshees their soul-piercing wail. I catechized young Cleopatra in the wily arts. It was I who secreted the hooded cobra in her bosom for the final lesson—death’s sweet betrayal—and hid her mummy away where no man might enter. In ancient Greece the witches who knew me only as Hecate learned their murmured spells by rote from my lips. By my black magic they rode astride their male consorts, straddling them like broomsticks. The Amazon women burned off their bowstring breasts to escape my Lucifer’s brand, yet all were sacrificed to demons. I reigned in Salem and in Ephesus. I am She, fleet of foot and long of limb, hair of beast and talons of blood. Last incarnation of the Mother to hordes of swarming demons. I am Lilith!”

  An electric-chair thrill burned through my guts when she uttered that name. For some reason, I assumed I’d be in less mortal danger if I made small talk with the apparition. When you want to know something, just ask. I did.

  “And your daughter?”

  A hideous smile spread across her lips. “A tendril shoot. She is Me and I am She.” Janis fixed me with her heavy-lidded serpent’s eyes and began uttering what seemed to be an incantation in a strange, guttural tongue. It sounded like belching the alphabet backwards at a crazy pitch, and I feared it might mean my damnation. What had Liz said? Some apocryphal story about Solomon keeping seventy demons prisoner by the power of the talisman?

  I unsheathed the dagger and brandished it over my head.

  “Speak English, God damn you to hell!”

  Fast as clapping off a light, Janis reverted to human form. There was a smell like hair burning. “Why, this is hell, Dick,” she said, her voice a perfect imitation of Sandra’s. “Nor am I out of it. You’re the one who went to college. Don’t you know your Marlowe? Queer Chris, we call him down in hell. Yes, he too dabbled in the black arts. Had ambitions of possessing the talisman. His presump
tions ended with his being pierced in the eye with it. You men are so squeamish about piercings.”

  I held the knife erect. “So have a look into the future. What happens to Kokker? And your daughter?”

  “He will have her for a season,” she went on, still in Sandra’s eerily purloined voice, “but his plans will perish.”

  “Perish how?”

  “His dirty fingerprints are all over the cassette I gave you of Carla’s execution. The authorities will cross-match those prints with the set on file from his chiropractic license application, search his mansion, and uncover all his other nasty secrets.”

  “And then?”

  She sighed impatiently. “And then, quite tragically, he will die by his own hand. Kirk’s new last will and testament will be discovered in safety deposit box 25597 in the vault of Land Trust Bank in Clayton, Missouri, leaving Madeleine amply provided for. An impressive inheritance shall be hers, as Kirk’s sole beneficiary, on her twenty-first birthday.”