Sacrifice

by James, Russell

  Paul had the look. The look he used to have on the football field. The look he had when he stepped out of the car that summer night and saved their scrawny high school asses from Nassau County thugs. Those narrowed eyes and set jaw said it was about to hit the fan. Paul had been ordered around once this afternoon, and the former cop didn’t look ready for a second round of it.

  “Paul,” Jeff whispered. “Don’t.”

  Too late. Paul dropped the lunchbox and launched himself at the man with the gun.

  The man didn’t flinch. The pistol barked and a bullet tore into Paul’s shoulder. Paul spun one hundred eighty degrees and dropped like a stone.

  “Paul!” All three friends went to his side.

  “Shit, Jason,” one of the men said to the shooter. “You want to wake the whole town?”

  Dave tore away Paul’s shirt and then slid one hand underneath him. “No exit wound,” he said.

  “Ellen,” one of the men said. He held up the bag of talismans from Bob’s garage. “Check this out. They brought everything we need.”

  “Then we’ll do it now,” Ellen said. She looked at the four at the base of the tree. “That way you can all watch.”

  Jason used his pistol to wave them over to the right. Dave and Jeff helped Paul up, and they repositioned to the base of a sculpture of an angel with outstretched wings.

  “How bad does it hurt?” Dave said.

  “Not as bad as it will,” Paul said. “I’ve had friends on the force shot.” He pressed his hand against the wound to slow the bleeding.

  Ellen picked up the lunchbox and extracted the bone. She tossed the box away and it clattered against a tombstone. She cupped her hand around the bone and sighed with satisfaction.

  Jeff stared down the barrel of Jason’s gun. Paul leaned against the angel and blood seeped through his fingers. Bob’s killer held the key to allowing a murderous spirit early release from Hell.

  He’d never felt so totally screwed.

  Chapter Seventy

  Ken had flickered out once on the trip to the graveyard. Suddenly he was in a strange car in the dark. He gripped the armrest in panic. But he looked around and he was with his friends. Faces he could trust.

  The tide of memory came back in as they parked at the graveyard. The Woodsman’s bone was buried here, and they were going to destroy it.

  As Jeff began the excavation, Ken faded out again for a minute, but was back when Paul pried off the lunchbox lid. His immediate call to start the process was as much about trying to stay in the moment as a rush to rid the world permanently of the Woodsman.

  But now none of it mattered. The four of them sat in the grass, one with a bullet in his shoulder. Bob’s killers had Silas’ finger bone. The show was over.

  “Why are you doing this?” Jeff asked Ellen.

  “Thirty years ago,” Ellen said. “You idiots screwed up a good thing.

  “The week after Tom Silas was murdered at the mill, his wife and children finally arrived from England. They had to lay low under a new last name for fear of reprisals by the founding families. Our families became a permanent underclass. Well, when children of those guilty families started dying untimely deaths, it didn’t take long for our family to put two and two together. Within a generation, Tom visited our children to tell his story. For two hundred years we watched with joy while offspring of the founding families paid for their fathers’ sins.”

  “You let children die?” Dave said. In his indignation he started to stand, but Jason turned the muzzle of his pistol to Dave’s face and he sat back down. “Most of those kids didn’t know they were related to the founders. The founders protected their own.”

  “All the same bloodline,” Ellen said. “What do we care? We knew what you did at the mill. Silas told me one bone was saved. We searched the mill and couldn’t find it.”

  Ken thought that had to be it. Bob must have seen the digging at the mill and that’s what made him call us all back.

  “When your pal Bob wouldn’t spill where it was, we figured he didn’t know. So one of you, or all of you had to know where it was. All we had to do was watch and wait.”

  “You were the woman at Bob’s funeral,” Jeff said.

  “From there you were easy to tail,” Ellen said. “All the way to here.” She gave the bag of talismans a kick toward one of her men. “Set us up.”

  Ellen placed Silas’ lone bone on the center of a toppled tombstone. The last name read PARKER. She smiled with contempt.

  Ken gripped the edges of his jeans in frustration. He wanted to do something, anything to stop what was about to transpire.

  One of Silas’ descendants arranged the talismans in a tight circle around the bone. He tossed the bag of lye and the vial of holy water aside. No one would be melting that bone tonight. They would probably enshrine it somewhere. The man squirted a ring of lighter fluid around the bone and lit it.

  Jason crouched to look his four captives in the eyes. “Pathetic old dudes.”

  Ken wanted to strangle the asshole.

  Blood oozed between Paul’s fingers where he pressed against the wound. He stifled a moan.

  “You okay?” Jeff said.

  “I’ve seen cops shot worse and live,” Paul said. His eyes did not leave the ring of fire on the tombstone.

  “We need to get you to a hospital,” Dave said.

  “No,” Paul said. “Right now we need a miracle.”

  Ellen knelt before the flames, hands out at her sides. She began to read a file off her smart phone. The glow gave her face a demonic cast. The words she spoke were Latin, but they were not the ones Ken had transcribed earlier. He tried to translate, but only caught snippets of the incantation. Ellen made an inverted sign of the cross and Ken put it all together.

  “When we did our ritual,” Ken said, “we asked God to open the door between this world and the one beyond. She is specifically asking Satan to open the gate between here and Hell.”

  Over the bone appeared a white, glowing wisp, a foot-long string of fog. Ken got a sinking, helpless feeling in his stomach as the ritual they’d planned was used for evil, opposite ends.

  Ellen continued her incantation. The wisp fleshed out and hovered over the bone relic. It solidified into the shape of a man, though too vague for any details. Ken didn’t need details to know who it was.

  An idea clicked. The physical part of the ritual was the same. If the burning talismans opened a phone line, maybe Ken could turn it into a party line and place his own call, a call for reinforcements.

  He’d shoved his prayer sheet into his pants pocket when Ellen announced her arrival. He couldn’t pull it out now and start reading it. Jason wasn’t nearly distracted enough for him to get away with that. He’d have to recite the prayer from memory.

  Ken focused. He’d just flipped in and out of awareness twice. He hoped like hell he had it in him to keep in the moment long enough.

  He brought up his room at the Village Green Inn. The memory of sitting at the desk, blank paper before him. It stayed blank. Damn it, he’d just written it out, then read it until he could recite it. Now nothing?

  The opalescent spirit over the bone became clearer. The head took shape, and there was no mistaking the outline of that swept-back, tri-corner hat.

  If reinforced recent memories didn’t register, Ken decided to go back, way back. It seemed like the older his memories were, the fresher they seemed, even if they were as brief as the shot he had of the moving van phone number he’d dug up the night he got lost on the way to the Village Green Inn. Ken went all the way back, past the intermittent memory of that Thursday night study session. He went back to when Madame Calabria gave him the original prayer. Ken closed his eyes.

  He thought back to the moment when, perhaps out of guilt, she handed them the prayer of St. Severinus of Tours. He saw the folded page in his hand. The page opened.

  And the prayer was crystal clear.

  “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” Ken began to wh
isper. “In nomine Dominum Jesum Christum, Filium Dei unigentum ajuvandum me festina.”

  As Ken whispered the text he read in his mind, the Woodsman came almost full form, only hands and feet still a vague blur. The spirit looked up to the starry sky with a victorious smile.

  “Ego scisco vos ut solvo…” Ken paused. This was the critical part of the plan. Before he had inserted the name of Thomas Silas here, the request targeted to allow his soul to cross the barrier from here to whatever awaited him next. Now he would use someone different.

  He searched for one more memory like a madman ripping through mental filing cabinets. He tossed aside remembrance after remembrance until he found what he sought, a vision of the founder’s family tree, those passing pages he’d flipped through that afternoon on the museum. He needed those names, those blurry, fleeting names in that stilted, archaic script.

  He concentrated on slowing the turning pages. He imagined a clock whose second hand slowed, slowed and stopped.

  The pages froze mid-flip. The names came at him like a freight train.

  “Dolly Jamison,” Ken said. “Hiram Reed, Ezra Fletcher, Charles Reed, George Adams, William Pickney…”

  Ken read thirty names, people so old that they had to rest in this town’s oldest cemetery, where all were buried in those days. As he spoke each name he conjured the pain of survivor’s loss and the fear of those who were helpless prey, with the hope that when the doorway opened they would answer his call.

  The Woodsman solidified as substantial as the day Ken first saw him lead Josie Mulfetta to her death. He alighted on the flattened grave stone, both feet just outside the burning circle. Ellen stood and stared at her ancestor’s spirit with a look of blissful awe.

  Silas’ other descendants watched in amazement. Jason involuntarily lowered his pistol as he stared at the Woodsman. All born after the Woodsman’s mill-fire exile, they had taken on faith that Ellen’s story was true. Their perverted dedication was rewarded.

  “Ipsa me deduxerunt in montem sanctum tuum.” Ken completed the prayer and hoped for salvation. Instead all he saw was the Woodsman.

  The spirit stretched as if awakening from a long sleep, looked past Ellen and straight at his four adversaries.

  “Failures,” he sneered. “All you sacrificed was for nothing. And now with my bone unearthed, I can hunt founders’ offspring to the ends of the earth.”

  The ground rumbled beneath them. Everyone reached for a stone to steady themselves. The Woodsman looked confused.

  Milky white apparitions rose from dozens of headstones, vague human figures with heads like hoods and flowing bodies that ended in tattered streamers. They floated forward until they encircled all the graveyard trespassers, with the Woodsman in the center.

  Two glowing hands reached up through the toppled Parker headstone and grabbed the Woodsman’s feet.

  The Woodsman’s head snapped back and forth, and he saw he was surrounded. He struggled against the hands that held him in place. His loathsome, self-satisfied smirk turned into a look of panic. The fuzzy forms might have been unrecognizable to Ken, but the Woodsman knew them all. Victims and parents of victims. Past selectmen who had cowered in terror while their townspeople were stalked. The current, corrupt crop of founder elites may not care if Tom Silas was resurrected, but this generation did.

  The spirits swarmed the Woodsman. Like a pack of piranhas, each tore a swatch from him. The Woodsman wailed with each assailant’s attack. They tossed away each severed section of the Woodsman, and it vaporized before it hit the ground. The Woodsman swiped at the specters in defense, but they shot out of reach, only to swing around for another pass.

  With Silas’ extremities gone, the spirits formed in a whirling, glowing mass around the Woodsman’s body. For a moment he was obscured, and all that proved he was there was an agonizing cry of pain. The wail faded away and the spirits retreated. The Woodsman was gone.

  Then the spirits turned on Tom Silas’ male descendants. The avenging souls swooped and swirled around them, shrieking like charging banshees on the hunt. As they passed through the men, each screamed like they had been impaled. The four men fled. The spirits dogged them in their retreat.

  But Ellen would not yield. Four spirits returned and whipped around her like a phosphorescent sandstorm. She wavered but stood her ground. Then the four spirits hovered around her head, paused, and then passed through her head simultaneously. As they exited, Ellen cried out. Her eyes rolled back to all white and she collapsed on the ground.

  The spirits vanished. The night went still save for the flames that still burned in the circle on the tombstone.

  For a moment the four sat in stunned silence at the base of the angel monument.

  Dave moved first and took a check of Ellen’s pulse. “Stone-cold dead.”

  “Let’s put and end to this,” Jeff said. He retrieved the lye and holy water bottles from where one of the men had thrown them.

  He and Ken held the containers over the bone in the center of the ring of fire. They nodded to each other and poured. The lye and water hit the bone. It sizzled. By the time they finished pouring, the tiny bone had liquefied, and the Woodsman’s door back to our world closed forever.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  An air cargo hangar at La Guardia was no place to say goodbye. It was loud, hot and reeked of jet fuel and forklift exhaust. But it was all the surviving members of the Dirty Half Dozen would get.

  Marc’s body lay in a long, silver, metal shipping container. No one knew if there was a casket inside as well or if the box was designed for bodies alone. The outside had the wear of multiple uses, so the four wanted to believe it carried a coffin. The box sat on a dolly ready for loading to Seattle.

  They found out about Marc’s suicide the morning after finally dispatching the Woodsman. The cops tracked Marc back to the Village Green Inn. They interviewed Jeff, who decided that giving them Marc’s last message wouldn’t do anyone justice. He said he and the others thought Marc was on his way home. The cops asked if there was any significance to the water tower. Jeff said none that he knew.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this here,” Ken said.

  “Well, surprising as it may be,” Dave said, “his wife banned us from the funeral. Bad influences and all.”

  “We can’t keep burying each other at this rate,” Ken said.

  ”We came too damn close to a double funeral,” Jeff said. He gave Paul a soft shot to the kidneys.

  Paul’s right arm hung in a sling. He told the ER doctor that he’d shot himself cleaning his own pistol. As an ex-cop he’d caught some crap about it, but no investigation. That meant he didn’t have to produce the pistol Jason left in the graveyard, which saved a lot of questions about an unlicensed handgun.

  “There is a funeral today if you feel the need to attend one,” Dave said. “But we weren’t invited to that one either.”

  The caretaker of St. Andrew’s had found Ellen’s body in the cemetery the morning after the aborted resurrection. With no external signs of foul play, it looked like natural causes. Dave had cleaned the remnants of the ritual from the scene before dawn broke. He’d also buried Bob’s ashes at the oak tree’s base. It seemed fitting.

  A worker in a blue jumpsuit approached and stood at the end of the container.

  “Uh, I’ve got to load this one,” he said.

  Jeff rested his hand on the container. “A good friend who we know did what he had to do, both thirty years ago and this week.”

  The four stepped away, and Marc’s remains rolled past them and out to the waiting plane. No one said a word. Jeff checked his watch.

  “I guess I’ve got to catch a flight,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “Connecticut isn’t going to drive to me.”

  “Ken,” Paul said. “Are you going to be okay?”

  In the aftermath of the cemetery events, Ken had told them about his condition.

  “He’ll be better than okay,” Jeff said. “Everything is s
et for next week at my research center in San Diego. Every staff member’s been instructed to work for Ken. No medical stone will go unturned.”

  “Thanks,” Ken said. “I really appreciate it.”

  “Having my name on the building ought to be worth something,” Jeff said.

  “And Hallie and I are right here on the Island,” Paul added, "if you need anything.”

  There was a slightly hollow ring to these honest sentiments. A round of handshakes ended, and the four dispersed to their separate cars.

  Jeff could not help but think of their graduation, where a different set of four of them had last said goodbye. Same somber mood after making sacrifices to rid the world of the Woodsman. Same feeling that they would never see each other again. But this time Jeff was sure of it. He knew he would not visit Ken in San Diego. Ken would not take Paul up on his offer. Dave had no reason to set foot on Long Island again. The sacrifices this time were too great for any friendships to bear, no matter how old.

  Jeff didn’t drive to the rental car return. He headed east and took the Northern State Parkway back home. He had one more loose end to tie up.

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Jeff walked into the Venetian at five minutes to closing. The last patrons of the evening passed him on the way out. Two waitresses chatted by the kitchen door, a close eye kept on the clock over the main door. Katy approached from behind the register.

  “The kitchen closed half an hour ago,” she said with a smile. "Wait this long and you will go hungry.”

  “After closing used to be the best time to show up,” Jeff said. “Nothing beats cold lasagna and crusty garlic bread.”

  “If I start feeding every transient who wanders in here,” Katy said, “the place will go to hell.”

  Jeff laughed for the first time in days. It felt great.

  “Actually,” he said, “I need to talk to you for a few minutes if you have time.”