Deadly Curiosities

by Gail Z. Martin

  Lucinda was murmuring a quiet chant as we moved further into the gloom. A moment later, the door slammed shut with a boom that echoed through the large, empty building.

  By the time Stor-Your-Own closed down, the renters said the whole place felt creepy, as if the demon’s taint had activated all the old ghosts, the dark resonance of objects stored there, and the tragic history of the land beneath our feet. So while the demon’s nest might be in Building Four, every building was dangerously haunted, and the threat level was higher than ever before.

  We had come into the building by a side door, and it put us at the end of a long row that ran the width of the warehouse. Cobwebs shrouded the corridor like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. Heavy, clingy webs hung down from the ceiling in sheets, and they rippled as the air stirred around us. The surface of the floor seemed to move, covered with roaches. Calling them ‘palmetto bugs’ didn’t make them any less ugly.

  I really wanted a flame thrower, anything to make the spiders keep their distance. Maybe it was Sorren’s presence, but the spiders retraced their lines, into the shadows of the high, open rafters. No telling what was up there, watching us.

  “My unit is over here,” Chuck said. “Careful where you step.”

  Sorren and Mirov used their swords to cut us a path. The stone at the top of Lucinda’s staff glowed, and its faint light kept the spiders back. Roaches skittered around our feet. They didn’t seem bothered by the glow. Then again, they’ll survive nuclear war, so I don’t imagine they’re afraid of much. Their shells crunched under the soles of our shoes with every step.

  As I looked around, I saw that there were several side corridors opening off this aisle, and along all of them were the roll-away steel doors of the individual storage units. Most of the doors had been left open by their previous tenants. A few hung half shut, as if they were jammed on their runners. They loomed like dark caves. Anything could be waiting in there.

  Chuck’s unit was about a third of the way down the corridor. By the time we reached it, we had passed three intersecting hallways that stretched off beyond the range of our goggles. From inside his jacket, Chuck unfolded a canvas backpack that looked like it could hold a lot of clocks. He was quick with key in the lock on his storage unit door.

  The steel door clanked as it rolled up on its runners. The sound rolled through the building like thunder. Chuck revealed his cache – a unit stacked almost floor to ceiling with boxes of Baby Ben alarm clocks.

  “Be quick about it,” Sorren said.

  Within a couple of minutes, Chuck had stuffed his bag full of clocks. He riffled in a faded and stained duffle bag that was near the door, pulling out several pieces of government-issue equipment that I doubted he picked up at a scratch and dent sale. He slipped the items into his pack or pockets without explanation, then locked the door and shouldered into the backpack.

  “Show us the way,” Sorren said. I could tell his patience was wearing thin. Every moment we lingered was more opportunity for the demon in Building Four to figure out ways to keep us from getting where we wanted to go.

  “Over here,” Chuck said. “Down this way.”

  I figured it was a toss-up as to where we were safest. Inside the building, we had its resident spooks to deal with, but the demon might not see us coming. Outside, we were more likely to be spotted, and there was no guarantee there wouldn’t be just as many homicidal ghosts, bloodthirsty akrevon minions or spirit-sucking shadow men waiting for us.

  “Do you feel it?” I murmured to Lucinda. “There are things all around us, watching. And I don’t think it’s the spiders.” The storage building was oppressively silent. Darkness stretched in all directions, and with the night goggles, it was harder to tell shadows from shadow men. Even so, I had the feeling that the darkness just beyond our goggles’ range down the side corridors was full of spirits, energy and supernatural somethings – none of it good.

  “Uh huh,” she replied, and I heard her say something under her breath. The smell of pipe smoke wafted past us. I could hear her singing softly but I could not make out the words.

  “It’s trying to goad us into running,” Chuck said. “It likes us being scared.” I could hear the defiance in Chuck’s voice. He didn’t like being pushed, and his anger and headstrong nature gave him the power to overcome his fear.

  As we moved further into the darkened building, it grew colder, much colder than anything without air conditioning gets in the summer in Charleston, even at night. The feeling of being watched was overpowering. The smell changed, too. When we first entered, the building smelled of dust and mildew and stale air. Now, the scent had changed. It reminded me of a mausoleum I had once gone into with Sorren, retrieving another artifact. The smell of dust mingled with death, rotted fabric, and moldering wood. The resonance was stronger the deeper in we went, too. Left-over emotions and memories clung to the empty units: dashed hopes, abandoned dreams, interrupted plans.

  It was worst near the units that still had locks, the ones that were still filled with their owners’ cast-off possessions. I swear the stuff in those units knew it had been left behind and resented it. People don’t pay to store trash. The things they put into storage they either mean to come back for, before life interrupts, or feel that they can’t let go of, even if they don’t want it around.

  Even if they don’t know it, the objects have a hold on them: memories, guilt, obligation. Sometimes, that hold is supernatural. I had the feeling that was the case with much of what was left in these units. I wish I could have told the owners that you can’t abandon bad mojo. It will wait for you, find you, and track you down. The abandoned units were brooding, and like a drunk in a bad mood, they were looking for someone to take it out on.

  Our plan was simple. Find the demon. Fight the demon. Kill the demon.

  The devil was in the details.

  Sorren, Mirov, and Chuck had discussed strategy at length, with Lucinda, Teag and I chiming in with ideas. Our biggest problem was that we didn’t know exactly where the demon’s nest was. Chuck was certain it was Building Four, but even that was a big place. There were lots of places to hide. We were counting on Lucinda and me being able to narrow it down when we got close to the building, so that we didn’t go in a door that put us right on top of the demon, but didn’t enter so far away that the demon had a chance to prepare.

  Assuming, of course, that the demon didn’t already know we were coming.

  The air felt heavy, the way it does before a storm. The darkness seemed more opaque, and the feeling of being watched intensified. Not just watched – resented. Every instinct told me that I needed to run the other way. We kept going.

  I was glad Sorren was up front with Chuck. I knew that Sorren could see just fine in the dark without needing goggles. Lucinda was still chanting and singing in a low voice, and I caught another whiff of pipe smoke.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of motion in the shadows. Teag saw it, too.

  “Spirit lights,” he murmured. “Very faint, but definitely there.”

  “The spirits know we’re coming,” Lucinda said, her voice roughened by the chanting. “They know.”

  Somewhere inside the building, I heard footsteps on the concrete floor. They stopped, and then to the right, I heard the screech of something dragged across the thin metal siding on the walls of the units.

  Down the length of the corridor, the latches on the closed doors began to vibrate as if the compound were shaking in an earthquake.

  Behind us, one of the open storage unit doors crashed down, then another, and another, starting at the far end of the corridor and rolling toward us like a tide. I felt a surge of power flow past us, sending the doors nearest us slamming to the floor. I knew the steel panels didn’t slide that easily on their runners. Something was making its displeasure very clear.

  We got to the end of the corridor. I was starting to glimpse faces in the shadows, gray figures of the ghosts of this cursed land. The figures shifted in the gl
oom, at times becoming more defined, then dissolving into nothing. I couldn’t make out the details, but I knew who they were. Hanged pirates.

  Wronged businessmen and hardluck women. Victims of Jeremiah Abernathy’s court and Moran’s demon. Too many restless souls, too much blood-soaked ground. The demon’s power drew the spirits, gave them energy, but they were here before the demon came, and some of them would be here after the demon was destroyed. Too much blood had been shed for me to think we could exorcise this unhallowed ground in just one night—or maybe ever.

  Sorren turned to the rest of us. “We go out this door, cross a driveway, and go into the door on the end of Building Four. That’s where I need everyone’s senses on alert.” He looked at me and then at Lucinda. “Chuck says he’s seen activity at the northern end. That’s the opposite corner, a straight shot.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Once we go in, it’s on.”

  The storage unit was not the ideal place to confront a demon. Problem was, there isn’t really a good place. We might have lured the demon out, using one of us like bait, but that introduced so many variables – and the possibility that a passer-by could get caught up in the firefight – that we took that idea off the table early. Going to the demon on its home turf was suicidal, no matter how many movies show the hero fighting a dragon in its lair. What makes a great movie doesn’t usually play well in real life.

  We had debated the alternatives. If we went into the old warehouse mid-building, we could be right on top of the demon before we got our bearings. And if the demon sensed us – a very likely possibility – it would be over before it began. I would have preferred it if we could have made a circuit of the building to locate the demon, but odds were, if we located him he would also locate us. I figured he already knew we were here. He was confident, waiting for us to come to him. I just hoped we could turn that confidence against him.

  We crossed the short expanse of asphalt between buildings, staying low and keeping to the shadows.

  Even so, I felt watched. I wasn’t sure which was worse: being outside and exposed or going into Building Four where we knew a demon was waiting.

  We got to the building and Sorren bent to pick the lock on the door, but it was unlocked, and swung open at a touch. Just as I feared: we were expected.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  WE OPENED THE door to hell.

  The old warehouse stank of death. The air was heavy with the smell of blood and the stench of rotting flesh. It was a compliment to compare it to a charnel house, because the bodies here weren’t treated with respect and certainly weren’t embalmed awaiting proper burial. It smelled worse than a slaughterhouse, unless the meat being cut up happened to be weeks old and left out in the sun to rot.

  Blood streaked the walls and steel doors of the warehouse. Blood pooled on the floor. Gobbets of things best unidentified were dried on the walls where they had been flung in an orgy of gluttony.

  Maggots churned in masses that heaved under their own weight. Even the spiders and the roaches had quit Building Four. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here…

  Mangled soldiers had breathed their last within these brick walls. Prisoners of war had prayed to die.

  Slaves had toiled here under the lash. Workers had died here, under unconscionable conditions.

  Epidemic victims had seen fevered visions. And on the land beneath the building, pirates had been hanged and buried while their bodies were still warm.

  Their spirits were still here.

  But in the shadows all around us, as blue-white orbs hovered and dodged, I glimpsed more recent spirits, ghosts for whom death was still a shock. Jimmy Redshoes. Kevin Harvey. And the five-man crew of the Privateer, still following their captain, Russ Landrieu, beyond the grave.

  There were others as well. Fred Kenner, Stor-Your-Own’s murdered owner. I saw faces I knew only from their obituaries, the drifters and vagrants who had been fodder for Moran’s demon. They stared at me from the shadows, as if there was something I could do to end their torment. I felt no threat from them. Moran and his demon were threat enough.

  Our night vision goggles cast the interior in foxfire shades, a sickly green luminescence. The ghosts weren’t alone in the darkness. Shadow creatures prowled in the hollow sockets of the empty units, misshapen, distorted energies that had never been men, creatures that fed on terror. Here in the presence of their master, they did not bother masquerading as human. Their true form showed in grotesquely elongated limbs, twisted forms, and lantern-jawed heads. They were just waiting for orders.

  At every cross-corridor, Lucinda put a barrier of salt and iron nails, trying to seal off those hallways so nothing could come behind us. It was a nice idea, but I wasn’t counting on it working. A glance down those corridors told me they were littered with garbage and abandoned possessions. Apparently, Moran and the demon had made themselves at home. Lucinda lagged behind us, chanting softly to herself, calling on the Loas for protection and help.

  The air stank of bile and sulfur, rot and shit. Now that we were halfway down the corridor, we could see that the demon had rearranged the place to suit himself, battering down the thin metal panels that separated the individual units to make the back third of the corridor one large den.

  The blackened skins of the murdered men hung on the walls like trophies. Symbols of power were daubed in blood above and below the skins. The bones and decaying carcasses of small animals littered the floor: stray dogs, feral cats, unlucky rats, and rabbits that ventured too close to a demon starved for blood. In the center of the area, on a low wooden table, dozens of candles burned in a tawdry shrine.

  “Come to finish me off?” A deep, mocking voice echoed through the storage building.

  Corban Moran stepped out of the shadows. Without his hat, I could see his shriveled features clearly, quite a difference from the man I’d seen in the photo with Jeremiah Abernathy. Sorren had left him for dead. Moran may not have died, but the cost of that encounter was clear.

  “You are supposed to be dead.” Sorren’s voice was low and dangerous. I was watching two predators face off against each other, and I hoped Sorren was the biggest bad-ass on the block.

  “You certainly tried.” Moran’s tone was thick with contempt and hatred. “I knew Abernathy’s demon was still unbound, and I knew no one had ever brought back the most powerful artifact from the Cristobal. I needed that piece to recover my power.”

  “And you killed the salvage team that almost beat you to it,” Sorren said.

  Moran shrugged. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world.” He smirked. “I tried to buy them off, tried to scare them off. They wouldn’t leave it alone. Now they’re dead and I have the artifact.”

  He held up a crystal sphere the size of a bowling ball. Inside was a blood-soaked mummified goat’s head. “The Baphomet Orb,” he said, holding it like a trophy.

  I shivered. I’d found a reference to that artifact in one of Uncle Evan’s old journals. A Baphomet Orb was difficult and dangerous to make, and thankfully rare. It gave the owner power over a demon called by name. The orb held the head of a goat severed under a full moon, soaked in the blood of a murdered man, into which a candle made with fat rendered from a hanged man was placed and burned, then the whole thing was bound in strips of human skin and encased in glass, sealing in its power.

  “It won’t bind the demon forever,” Sorren warned. “You’re a fool if you think you can control that thing for long.”

  “I don’t need forever,” Moran replied. “I just need longer than I had left.”

  “And what’s in it for the demon, besides what’s left of your soul?” Sorren asked. It was like the rest of us weren’t there, the continuation of an old pissing match. I didn’t need magic to feel how much the two hated each other.

  “I promised him the city for his taking,” Moran said with a grand sweep of his arm. “That should keep him well fed and return my full magic – and then some.” “You followed Cassidy,” Sorren accused.

  “I figu
red she’d lead me to you,” Moran replied with a sneer. “You’ve always been soft about your pets. I wanted to kill her like I killed the others and leave her for you to find – a reminder of the old days.”

  Our group subtly shifted positions. Moran was only part of the threat. Mirov was scanning for the demon, and Chuck was close to him. Lucinda had moved up near Sorren to handle Moran and his magic.

  That left Teag and me for the minions and shadow men, and any vengeful ghosts or other nasties that might be waiting for us.

  Even so, we weren’t really ready for it when all hell broke loose.

  I can’t describe a demon’s shriek, because words don’t suffice. But if you put a live horse through a wood chipper, and lit a lion on fire, and put the two awful death cries together, you might be close.

  The demon had a skull like an ibex, with long, black horns that curved backwards. Red eyes gazed balefully. It stood on his powerful hind legs, with a muscular body covered in coarse, matted dark hair like a musk-ox and feet like a vulture, its dark claws fouled with old blood. It was clearly and grotesquely male, and naked except for lanyards of withered, severed fingers and the skulls of animals, some still with rotting bits of fur.

  It rose from the shadows behind Moran like a nightmare god, bellowing its awful shriek, and it went straight for Sorren.

  Sorren sidestepped with vampire speed, and Mirov was right behind him, sword in one hand, Sig in the other. Two rounds burst from the Sig, catching the demon full in the chest. To my utter surprise, the shots drove the demon back a step, as a silvery powder blossoming from the wound in the monster’s matted hair.

  The beast screamed in fury and went after Mirov. Chuck pulled something that looked like a sawed-off shotgun from beneath his jacket, flipped a switch, and thrust it at the monster, hitting him with the green fire of a supernatural stun gun. The demon staggered, and in that instant’s pause, Mirov came in slashing and stabbing, scoring deep gashes that bloodied the demon’s filthy hair. It swept a clawed hand at Mirov, knocking him out of the way, and went after Chuck, who was swearing under his breath as he jabbed his stun pole at the demon again, green fire crackling.