“And you?”
She laughed lustily. “You amuse me,” she said, “as few men do. Give me the talisman and come with me now. I’ll even let Diane keep her dugs and her gearshift hand if they’re that important to you. The lifespan of you mortals is such a brief season—spend it prodigally, roaming the earth with me as my favored consort. I shall reveal wondrous things to you. For behold, at this very moment the picture on Carla’s gravestone is doing a striptease for you, right over there.” She pointed to a row of graves to my left.
Sucker that I am, I lowered the knife to half-mast while my eye roved. By the time I realized I’d been had, Janis’s black-caped form was already flying westward and out of sight like a windborne ash rising from a heretic’s pyre.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Lilith Sabbat
As soon as I got back to Belleville I parked in front of Fox & Hare, peered inside the dark shop, and hammered on the door, ignoring the closed sign. No response, except for an angry rebuke from the pensioner who lived upstairs.
Three times I drove around the Belleville police station like an anxious suitor without going inside. Law enforcement seemed hopelessly inept compared to the supernatural elements warring against all I held dear and all I held sacred. I knew how predictably crazy it all would sound to a bored desk sergeant or junior detective. As an associate attorney, I too had with practice synchronized my wackometer for the earnest pressure of speech, the excess intensity in distracted eyes, the talk of improbable rumors and conspiracies in the air. And, not to put too fine a point on it, once I unfolded my crazy-quilt rug merchant’s tale of dark cabals, blood clubs, gypsy kidnappings, and ritual murders to the authorities, I would have failed to rescue my wife and children while at the same time flagging myself as their likely killer. The husband is always the first and last suspect.
So I drove aimlessly around Belleville—boyhood home of Buddy Ebsen. Charles Dickens slept here and cursed the accommodations. Nowadays I could drive over former cow paths and mud roads since paved, past thrift shops, craft shops, and antique stores without number. And still, after more than one hundred fifty years of progress, Belleville boasted more lawyers and chiropractors than sock monkeys per square block.
I drove around outside of town trying to retrace the route Artie took to The Wet Spot. I knew it wouldn’t be in any telephone directory or on any map. Finally, after getting lost a few times on the gravel roads, I gave up in frustration. I was beginning to believe the place didn’t exist, that it was a lunar mirage of a tavern, a trick of light and imagination seen only under a gibbous moon. And yet I panicked visualizing my kids there, Auntie Liz plying them with sodas, bar snacks, and video games while she waited for instructions.
The church was closed and locked. Even though there were no cars outside I still tried the door. Somehow I knew I couldn’t call Father Seraphim in on this emergency. It was a sign. This was my wilderness, and it was up to me to find the promised land.
By evening it had become unseasonably warm for February twenty-ninth—warm enough to sit outside in an overcoat without freezing. I sat alone in a park on a dry picnic table under a shelter and prayed for God to get us through this—to end this nightmare. I prayed for strength to forgive my enemies and turn them away from evil. Still I couldn’t speak their names in prayer. But God knew all their names. I asked him to destroy their evil plans before they came to fruition. And then a presence, in what I’d call a mosquito voice, uttered three strange yet familiar words into the ear of my soul:
You’re the man.
Taking that for as close as I’d ever gotten to divine inspiration, I jumped in my car and headed for Kokker’s estate.
Parked cars, mostly luxury vehicles but with a few clunkers mixed in to make things egalitarian, crowded both shoulders of the private lane to well away from the mansion. I managed to parallel park in a short space behind Artie’s hearse.
Someone had built a druid-style bonfire in the middle of Kokker’s Stonehenge. It seemed imprudent, even dangerous in the midst of a mostly evergreen forest. But fire wasn’t the danger I most feared as I crept through the woods, brushing past pine boughs as stealthily as possible, edging up to the clearing. Approaching as close as I dared, I knelt on a bed of dry, brown needles under cover of a tall spruce while I surveyed the action.
It looked like a pep rally at first. Everyone was there: Liz and some of her bar girls, Ramses and a few from his stable, and even Duane Benoit. From my vantage point, I could pick out Mark Kane the way you’ll never see him in any TV commercial. Coroner Ruggles and Judge O’Byrne were there representing county government. Some of the throng of others I thought I recognized from the orgy-reception in Kokker’s foyer the night of the dinner party. Cootie Tremayne stood warming himself near the fire like a hobo.
Now I could see the reason for the bonfire. Everybody was stark naked, crowded into a circle to keep warmed by the blaze. I spotted my Diane towering above and in the center of it all, almost unrecognizable with her head shaved and her body smeared head to toe in red ochre. Her feet had been tied together, her body trussed up in a rope arrangement loosely threaded through a pulley attached to a gibbet affair overhead, its base built into a circular stone altar. Although her feet were planted firmly on the altar, it looked as though she could be made to fly around like Peter Pan with one tug of the rope.
While I watched, clutching the dagger and plotting some kind of Robin Hood rescue, the crowd parted and Janis strode queenlike to the inner circle clad in a blood-red robe uncinctured and open in front. Kokker—also queenlike—the man I’d least like to see nude again, followed bob-bob-bobbin’ behind her wearing nothing but his birthday suit and a see-through silk scarflike affair over his shoulders and arms. Janis and Kokker ascended to the altar, where they stood one on either side of Diane. Janis carried a gleaming skull chalice the size of a loving cup. She raised one arm in triumphant greeting. The mob cheered. It seemed like some bizarro magic act, with Janis the magician and Kokker her lovely assistant.
Janis bent and set the chalice on a stump near the altar. She beckoned to the crowd. Moments later, three men approached and knelt around it. Soon the faces of the three contorted; as though in unison, they bowed their backs and strained forward. As soon as the first trio had finished, three new players rushed forward like a pit crew to take their places. While the crowd and I watched, five more turnovers knelt before the cup: a twenty-one-gun salute in all. Women came forward then and squatted one by one over the Jolly Roger chalice; hands on hips, each in turn donated her own sample to the recipe. Finally Ramses swaggered forward and, with a modicum of solemn effort, bestowed his own generous dollop. He grasped the brimming chalice in one massive hand and, with a courtier’s bow, offered it to Janis. She raised it like a toast to the cheering crowd, then passed it to Diane, who from her expression was unsure what was expected of her.
I stared like a man caught in a nightmare. My mind hadn’t been working right since the moment my wife had left me; it was as though she’d packed up my brain in a suitcase with her other things. I had been blind with panic since realizing my kids were gone. Now, for no apparent reason, crouched behind the spruce tree, gawking at my wife standing there naked and holding a tankard of unspeakable filth, I thought about seeing Artie’s hearse.
Artie’s hearse? It should have been locked down on the county impound lot. Its owner, falsely presumed dead, couldn’t risk arrest on outstanding warrants to claim it.
A powerful hand gripped my left shoulder and spun me around in mid-realization. I stared into the crystal-clear eyes of Artie Tremayne. He was packing his Browning, and I don’t mean a little book of poetry.
“Counselor! Trying to get a jump on the Christmas-tree rush before they put out all the picked-over shit?”
Before I could think up a suitably smartass reply, he lowered his voice to a menacing level and ordered, “Hands behind your head and interlace your fingers. Kick off your shoes and march your stocking feet double-time into
that goddamn clearing. We take a dim view of peeping toms around here.”
The cold, wet ground saturated my socks before I’d gone two steps. Pine needles pricked at the soles of my feet. Artie trotted me down the sloping bank and three times around the perimeter of the circle like a Roman POW in the coliseum amid a cacophony of jeers and catcalls demanding that I “take it off.”
Janis’s voice sounded, rising above the crowd’s. Her broad grin looked absolutely vulpine by firelight.
“The honored guest’s hubby has crashed our party at last. Sergeant at arms, bring the prisoner forward where we can all get a better look at him. And I do mean a better look.”
The throng chanted even louder: “Get naked! Get naked! Get naked!” Artie prodded me between the shoulder blades with the automatic.
“It’s showtime, Counselor. What’re you waiting for, a little traveling music? Get up onstage and give ‘em what they want before they tear you apart.”
So I climbed onto the altar and, facing Diane holding the chalice, began disrobing. I lay my articles of clothing one by one onto the rough stone surface. Where was Hephzibah when I needed her? I spread my coat so that it covered most of the pentagram, feeling like the Polack in the old joke who stepped outside the chalk circle three times without his wife’s rapist noticing. Artie still pointed the pistol right at my heart.
By the time I’d stripped down to my shorts, I had a new appreciation for the demands of the ecdysiast profession and had resolved that, if I ever got us out of here alive, I’d never be caught dead in one of those places again.
“Don’t be shy, Ricky,” Janis urged. “Listen to Artie. Give the people what they want.”
“There’s something you don’t hear every day,” I told her. “Somebody saying ‘listen to Artie.’” But I turned to the howling spectators, peeled off my Fruit of the Looms, and let it dangle. The mob’s responsive roar nearly passed the pain threshold. I’ve been told I have a nice one, but corroboration is always appreciated. “Rick! Rick! Rick!” they shouted as one.
I turned again to Diane. It all brought me back to the scene by the hot tub that night at Kokker’s. Once again I was the last one to disrobe. Diane’s face remained impassive behind the thick plaster of dull red. With her shaved head and big monochromatic breasts in primitive bonfire light, she reminded me of a favorite well-fingered picture from National Geographic.
Kokker had bent at the waist—I didn’t envy the onlookers with a rear vantage point—and was rummaging through my jacket. He shouted “Eureka!” when he came up with the dagger. With a flourish, he handed it to Janis, saying, “This seals our bargain.”
If my shedding my shorts had stirred the congregation, the tender of the dagger whipped them into an absolute frenzy. Janis brandished the glinting knife aloft with both hands like the warrior queen she was, shouting, “Destiny has been put right tonight!”
Kokker began leading the crowd in what seemed a kind of demonic creed:
O mighty uncrowned unbowed head,
O Whore of Babylon, authoress of seduction,
O Demon Mother who bears the face of paradise,
Forsaker of Adam, thief and slayer of children,
Beguiler of bride and groom alike;
Turning away from paradise, you made its face your mask.
Fecund with a brood of demons,
Unslakable thirst for human blood;
Demiurge, Demon Mother,
Look upon us with your true face tonight.
“Cute,” I said, turning again to Diane, “they’ve written their own vows.” But then I noticed she was mouthing all the words with them.
They repeated their prayer three times before a gasp—unison as the chant—went up from the crowd. Janis’s face began to change again like that very morning in the Lilith cult cemetery. Only this time, the face was as beautiful as I’d ever seen: a distaff Lucifer before the fall.
“You have done well, Vercingetorix,” she said in the same soothing voice I’d probably heard in my bassinet. “You have arrived at a most wise decision. The decision to please oneself is truly the wisest of all.”
The crowd murmured agreement. I half-expected to hear an amen. Janis’s procreating hand darted forward with a pickpocket’s dexterity and fondled me. Alarmed, I glanced toward Diane, who continued to hold the filthy chalice like a supplicant in a trance. I looked imploringly into her eyes, their lids smeared and encrusted with the red earth of Eden, her pupils blue as the sixth morning sky.
“Look up to heaven, Diane,” I cried out to her. “Resist the Evil One!”
Janis’s betraying fingers had already caressed me to the beginnings of a response—that same provocative, molesting tickling I recognized from my childhood. Gazing directly into my eyes as though meeting a dare, Diane raised the chalice to her lips and drank. When she lowered it again, I saw her silvery mustache, a snail trail of men’s drippings superimposed on her mouth like lip gloss carelessly applied. She bore a little girl’s innocence even then, as though she were about to pipe up and say, All gone! Her compliance had to be the effect of drugs that Artie had undoubtedly loaded her with or the witches’ curse of the glittering ruby necklace—the only thing she still wore.
“Good girl,” Janis told Diane, taking the chalice from her and handing it to Kokker, who stood and held it, shifting from one foot to the other and breathing heavily. The entire throng, in fact, seemed eager for some anticipated deeper abomination.
“Shall I bestow my beauty mark?” the transfigured Janis inquired softly. Diane nodded like a sleepwalker.
“Very well, then.” Janis closed her eyes and began rubbing herself. The crowd fell silent with awe, watching the middle finger of Janis’s opposite hand grow like Pinocchio’s nose, a crazy digital erection. She wet the tip of it inside herself. I wasn’t the only one moaning when she withdrew it and touched it to Diane’s right breast like ringing a doorbell, at about eight o’clock below the right nipple.
Diane gave an abrupt, involuntary sigh. Where Janis had touched her, an unsightly mole the shape of a falling star instantly appeared like a signet ring’s mark in sealing wax. But had her soul’s doom been sealed as well?
“You have kept your bargain, Vercingetorix,” Janis said, her face liquid bronze and shining like the moon. “Now I shall keep mine. You and I shall wander the earth, sating ourselves on forbidden pleasures so exquisite they have been denied mere mortals since time before time. You have chosen well to forsake—as have I—the cursed bondage of marital servitude. Join me now. Your forgetting shall be as swift and final as the infliction of a punishment.”
“I’ll bet the resemblance won’t end there.”
My response seemed to astonish her. In her wounded pride, all she could come up with was, “What?”
“Is that that ‘soul-piercing wail of the banshee’ you mentioned this morning? Needs work.”
Janis had already recovered her composure. “Very well,” she intoned. “Because you have rejected my bargain, the talisman shall slake its thirst for another generation in your fallen Diane’s blood, bringing impossible wealth and success to the talisman’s soon-to-be restored owner: Doctor Kirk Kokker!”
Kokker began jumping up and down, clapping his hands and screaming like a woman. His utter lack of composure was worthy of a game show contestant.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought the deal you had with Kokker was your daughter for the knife.”
“The talisman has been our bait for every generation,” Janis replied, “our hook into you mortals’ souls. What use have I for a dagger? Yet each time I return for it, its owner begs me to use it once again to renew its power. Kokker has so implored me—look at him, oblivious to what I’m saying, rather like the first time. He is a score of years older yet not a moment wiser. By giving him Madeleine I lay my eggs in him. Her chrysalis shall feed on his dry carcass from within until she emerges triumphant after I am gone from this place. Gone without you at my side: your choice, not mine.”
/> Janis slipped behind Diane just as she had in the Running Head video and raised the dagger, saying, “Now behold the hidden spring of blood.” The bonfire flames seemed to rage higher, throwing a lurid light against the ramparts of Kokker’s phony Stonehenge. I had barely enough room to plunge my hand between Diane and Janis and grasp the necklace. Janis’s necklace.
The amulet burned in my palm like a hot coal. I yanked on it with all my strength, remembering Sandra. The chain broke.
Then I heard the real thing: the dispossessed banshee wail of ten thousand years of stolen life wrenched from its fleshly lair. Janis’s body seemed to wrinkle and sag like a lifetime picture album viewed at animation speed. Within an instant she became a wizened hag, dry and lifeless white hair lengthening before my eyes to cover her like a shroud, her fingernails extending to impossible lengths with stop-motion photography speed and chittering like insects against one another with the writhing of her papyrus-over-bone fingers. Finally her fingers became still. Putrefaction seized her then like a predator. We all witnessed the spectacle—an accelerated recapitulation of the way of all flesh. I won’t describe it any further except to say the Dracula flicks have no clue.
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