by D V Wolfe
“Are you sure you wrote the address down right?” Noah asked, looking up at the house.
I squinted at the house and saw a piece of lined notebook paper was taped on the inside of the front door window. ‘The Night Phage’ had been scrawled across it in black marker. I pointed at the sign on the door. Noah groaned.
“That does not inspire a lot of confidence.”
I parked at the curb and shrugged at Noah. “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
“Or lack of one,” Noah muttered, looking up at the house.
Despite the face I was putting on for Noah, I was having to hide my disappointment. I’d had high hopes when I found the store in the yellow pages, but those hopes were gone now that we were in front of it. Even if this was an actual occult shop and not just a way for a serial killer to lure victims into their home, there was about a fifty percent chance that the proprietor was just a bored innocent looking to make some entrepreneurial bucks. In those types of shops, clients were mostly other bored innocents wanting to know if their boyfriend was cheating on them and if so, how to brew a love potion to get him to stop or to make his balls shrivel up. Of course, there was the other fifty percent to consider. I tried to cling to the hope that this was the home of a real practitioner, who might be able to help us.
We jogged through the heavy rain to the front door. I tried the knob but it was locked. I knocked and we waited. There was a pentagram hanging in the window to our right.
“See,” I said to Noah, pointing at the window. “That’s a good sign.”
I could hear someone fumbling around inside, but it was a good three or four minutes before I saw an elderly woman bent over her cane, making her way to the door. She was wearing what looked like a purple windbreaker jogging suit and a fleece hat with monkey ears. She had to be the real thing.
She reached up, turned the lock, and tugged the door towards her. She peered up at us through thick glasses and smiled. Then, without saying a word, she nodded her head and turned, heading back down the hall.
“Uh, good morning,” I said.
“I haven’t had hunters stopping through Stevensville in a long time,” She called back at us, her voice strong, despite her age and obviously frail health. She paused and looked back at Noah. “Lock the door behind you. I hate dealing with the people who usually show up and I don’t want them wandering in on their own.” Relief spread through me. She paused halfway down the hallway and turned to look over her shoulder at us. “Hilda Pinkerton, though to the people out there who don’t have a clue about what’s actually going on, I’m Madame Night Phage.” She gave a short cackle and pushed open a door. “So are you here about the big hubbub in Sicily?” Hilda led us into a side room that smelled strongly of herbs which covered an underlying smell of wet earth and rot.
“Yeah,” Noah said in answer to her question as I surveyed the wall-to-wall IKEA bookcases, their shelves swaying under the weight of jars and boxes crammed in, filling every space. Several of the bookcases leaned dangerously forward and I could tell someone hadn’t thought to anchor them to the wall. Hilda moved behind a folding table and settled herself in an old Queen Ann chair.
She motioned for us to take the folding chairs across from her and said. “Well, what can I do to help?”
“I need some items,” I said. Hilda turned to focus her old woman gaze on me as I rattled off everything I could remember Rosetta cramming into those pill caps. Hilda nodded after each ingredient and I was feeling optimistic... until I finished.
“I don’t have anything like that,” Hilda said.
“But...you were nodding,” I said, feeling the optimism in my chest collapsing in on itself.
“Oh, I know what you need,” She said. “but it’s not angel tears or angelica root.” She leaned forward on her cane and struggled to her feet. “Were you taking those things in a potion?” she asked, hobbling over to a bookcase in the corner of the room.
“Pills,” I said. “I have these…”
“Hauntings?” Hilda asked, turning to look at me.
I shrugged. “I call them visions. It’s a long story.” Hilda seemed like a nice old gal but I didn’t really have the energy or the time to tell her my life story.
“Well, they happen when you sleep, and when you’re awake, right?” Hilda asked, shuffling through boxes on the lower shelf. I watched the bookcase shifting along with her activity and got up to go steady it, Noah right behind me.
“Yes,” I said. “The worst are the ones during the day. They make it hard to concentrate on anything.”
She nodded again and I cut my eyes to Noah who was watching her open and close boxes as she looked. Every one of the boxes smelled foul and we were both gagging by the time she finished looking through the bottom shelves. She leaned her head back and looked up towards the top of the bookcase.
“There it is,” she said, glaring at something on the top shelf. Then she glared at me as if it was my fault it was there. All the activity had knocked her monkey stocking cap askew and she looked like a pissed-off gorilla from this angle.
“Which one?” I asked, steadying the bookcase with a hand and one knee, while Noah braced it on the other side.
“The purple cardboard box,” Hilda said. I spotted the box. It read ‘Dubby’s Fine Chocolates’ on the end that we could see. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. Chocolate sure beat the hell out of swallowing black powder and sulfur. And the angel’s tears. I tugged the box out of the tight hole it had been crammed into and handed it down to her. She flipped the top open and the smell almost knocked Noah and I down. Definitely not chocolate. I looked down into the box, trying to see even though my eyes were watering from the smell. “Just the thing,” Hilda said happily as she looked down at the box’s contents. When my eyes stopped watering over the smell wafting from the box, I looked over her shoulder at the corpse of some kind of rodent.
She moved back to the table and Noah and I let go of the bookcase. It swayed gently and then stilled and we backed away from it slowly. Noah was trying hard not to gag and I was resisting shoving my fingers up my nose just so I didn’t have to smell the damn thing anymore. Hilda patted the table in front of her and we returned to our seats. “I’m not eating that,” I said. I definitely wanted that to be understood.
“Of course you’re not,” Hilda said, reaching into the box and pulling the dead thing out gently. She laid it on the table and spread out its dried leathery wings. It was a dead, mummified bat. “The rare Tutela Bat, the finest in protection from spirits. Stuffed full of a potent mixture of sulfur, corpse flower extract, the fat of your enemies..” She paused and looked at me. “Well, my enemies, I don’t know you that well.” She looked back down at the dead bat. “And the excrement of a yearling lamb. Well, a yearling goat, in this case.” She looked up at me and sighed. “Not a yearling, I actually don’t know how old Butterbean is.” I opened my mouth, but I didn’t know what to say yet. “And you don’t eat something like this,” she said, quickly before I could speak. “You wear it.”
I blinked at her. “Wear...wear it?”
She nodded. “Do you have a color that speaks to your soul?” Ok. Now my confidence was starting to move her towards the other fifty percent of shops like this.
I felt my brows knit together. “Uh, what? A color that...no.”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t hurt to ask. I’ve got purple for the soothing of a wounded heart, red for a soul’s passion and yellow for happiness and good fortune.”
“Definitely yellow,” Noah said, grinning at me. I wanted so badly to give him the finger, but at this point, I didn’t want to disturb the air around the dead thing by making the hand gesture and risk sucking more shit-stuffed, dead bad fumes into my nose, so I settled for a death glare.
Hilda struggled to her feet again and hobbled to the cabinet behind her chair. She dug around in a drawer and came up with a piece of yellow nylon parachute cord. “Here we go.” Noah and I watched as she threaded the cord through the biggest sewing ne
edle I’d ever seen and then skewered the bat with it like it was some hideous travesty of a bead. She wove it in and out of the dead bat corpse several times. Noah and I cringed every time her needle made contact with the dusty fur and crunched through the brittle carcass below. And the smell that followed each puncture was indescribable. “There we go,” Hilda said, tying the two ends of the parachute cord in a knot. I thought she was going to hand it to me and I could just carry it, very, very far in front of me until we got to a dumpster. I reached out for it and she shook her head. “I need to give it an enchantment when you put it on so that it melds with the visions that it needs to keep hidden from your waking mind.” Oh good. Can’t forget that. She slung the thing around my neck, the bat’s corpse hitting me in the nose and mouth before falling to my chest, leaving little tufts of fine black fur, dust, and shit I didn’t want to think about floating in the air in its wake. Lovely. Now I could both taste and smell this atrocity. Hilda handed her cane to Noah and wrapped a surprisingly strong hand around my forehead, pulling my head back into her chest, between her boobs. Then, she placed her other hand on the dead bat, putting more pressure than was probably necessary on it as she pressed the thing into my skin. I glanced down and it’s mummified head had dipped under the top edge of my a-shirt and was between my boobs. Perfect. Hilda chanted in Latin for about ten minutes while I tried to breathe as little as possible, which wasn’t easy considering the amount of pressure Hilda was putting on my sternum. Finally, when I thought I was going to pass out from either lack of oxygen or the smell, she let go and backed away. I blinked and looked around. Noah, Hilda, and I were alone in the room. The visions were gone. I stared at her in disbelief. She grinned and nodded at me. She took her cane back from Noah and moved around the table to take her seat again.
“Th-thank you,” I said to Hilda. Noah caught my eye, his expression asking me if it had worked. I nodded at him and he visibly relaxed, his face splitting into a smile.
“Now that’s one problem solved,” Hilda said. “When do we attack?”
I thought I was hearing things. “I’m sorry,” I said. “When do we attack?”
Hilda huffed. “Well, you two aren’t going to be able to take down a disturbance that big on your own. I expect it’s a demon cult?”
“Cannib-” Noah started but I raised a hand, cutting him off.
“What makes you think it’s a demon cult?” I asked.
Hilda settled herself back in her chair, the monkey ears on her hat flapping forward. “Signs. Mason Briggs’ cattle herd all died overnight. That was three nights ago. The town’s water supply,” Hilda nodded towards the hallway and I assumed her bathroom or her kitchen “Ran black for six minutes two nights ago, then ran red with blood for six minutes last night, not to mention hail, in June, in Oklahoma.”
She was right. Those were demonic signs. There was no way Festus was causing all of that. Something else was going on. “We’ve been tracking this tribe of cannibals for a while now,” I started. “A little over a week ago, they chowed down on a crap ton of demons and kidnapped a dem..a friend.” Maybe it was the bat fumes, maybe it was just desperation, but, for whatever reason, I threw caution to the wind and leaned forward. “We found them last night in Sicily. They’re planning something called a Red Moon Rite? Their new leader said it would be ‘the final transformation of their strength’ or something. Do you know what that might be?”
Hilda had steepled her fingers in front of her and rested them against her lips while I’d been talking. She closed her eyes, and for a moment I thought I’d put her to sleep. She didn’t move or speak after I finished. I looked at Noah and he shrugged as if to say he didn’t have any brilliant ideas of what to do now. I tapped the table. Nothing. She did seem to be quite old. She might have just passed away while I was talking. I reached out to touch one of her hands and her eyes flew open. I jerked my hand back. “Sorry,” I said.
“And you have been touched by this tribe before?” she asked.
“Touched?” I asked.
“A part of them has mixed with a part of you?” Hilda asked.
I didn’t know where she was going with this. “I...I mean, their old leader bit me and I suppose her drool…” I looked down at my right bicep. When I looked back up at Hilda, I saw her gaze was fixed on the spot.
“May I see?” She nodded at the scar on my bicep. I moved my arm onto the table and got another whiff of mummified bat. Hilda had a surprisingly strong grip as she twisted my arm back and forth in her hands, studying the puckered skin. It didn’t look too bad, thanks to Noah’s cauterizing. Hilda turned in her chair and snatched a glass bottle of something off another table to her left. She pulled the cork out and dumped it on my arm. It was some kind of yellow powder with an itchy sort of smell that clawed into the nose. Noah and I immediately had sneezing attacks. My arm was on fire and Hilda had it in a death grip again, almost ripping it out of the socket, holding me in place while I sneezed my head off. When the yellow powder had finally settled on the tabletop and my arm, I was able to stop sneezing. I turned back to look at the burning skin on my bicep through streaming eyes and I forgot to breathe. The flesh had gotten red and I could see a clear outline of Sister Smile’s teeth where she’d dug into my flesh. Hilda was the only one that didn’t look surprised. She poked and prodded the old scar and the red flesh, then a flicker of something passed across her face. It was gone before I had a chance to register what it could have been. Hilda released my arm and set back. “So she is with the tribe in Sicily?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. She might be dead. She’s been replaced as their leader. Now, this big guy, named Mastick is running the show. He’s the one calling for the Red Moon Rite,” I said.
Hilda got up from her chair again and hobbled around the table. She hobbled past us and out of the room.
“Should...should we follow?” Noah asked. I wasn’t sure. We had both gotten out of our seats and were heading towards the door when Hilda reappeared, a leather-bound book under her arm.
“You two are like a couple of rat terriers with nervous bladders. Sit,” Hilda said.
So we sat. She returned to her chair, set the book down, and settled herself before opening it and turning the pages. The book looked hand-written with drawings of moon cycles, every few pages.
“I’m assuming this Mastick is referring to the full moon, tomorrow night.” She turned to a page with the picture of a full moon and paused. She smiled to herself, shook her head, and looked up. “Of course, this full moon is actually a Strawberry Moon or a Rose Moon, but nonetheless, a Red Moon Rite would still be just as potent as if the tribe was conducting it on an actual Blood Moon.”
“Strawberry Moon?” Noah asked.
Hilda nodded. “An old name because of the harvest. In Europe, it’s often called a Rose moon.” She looked back down at the book. “Regardless, if they’re planning a Red Moon Rite, strength is definitely what they’re seeking.” She looked up at me. “They’ve been consuming demon flesh?” I nodded. Hilda sighed. “Then, it’s no mystery what they’re planning.” She paused and Noah and I looked at each other. Hilda raised her gaze and behind her thick glasses, I saw her eyes move from Noah to me, and then she gave a weary sigh. “It’s a good thing I didn’t decide to take that senior’s trip to the museum today or you two would have been S.O.L.” She tapped the book in front of her and Noah and I leaned in to listen. “A Red Moon Rite is a ritual affecting physical attributes. It was often used by covens of witches to cement their eternal youthful appearances, well until their contracts came due, or for warlocks and necromancers to keep their human appearance or their resistance to rot after the spells and elixirs they were taking, wore off.”
“So, the tribe is performing this rite,” I said. “To keep the supernatural strength the demon flesh was giving them?” Hilda nodded.
“But, the two cannibals that you and I ran into last night,” Noah said to me. “We were able to kill them. I mean, it’s been over a week since they ate
those demons in St. Louis.”