Covenant (11 page)

“Just a little farther,” Ken called.

The ribs of the earth seemed to constrict then, until Joe’s shoulders were scraping earth on both sides.

“Are you sure…this…is the…right way?” he asked.

He could feel the dank blackness closing in around him like a cape. He was smothering in night, choking on fear. What if the owner of the voice was here, at the end of the tunnel, just waiting to snatch him up and toss him over the cliff?

The end came suddenly.

Sweat was pouring down Joe’s face and he couldn’t control the tremors in his arms and legs. And then somebody grabbed his shoulders.

He reacted instantly, slapping the help away and shrieking.

And then he saw it was only one of the other cavers.

“Whoa, dude, take it easy,” the shorts-clad man cautioned. “I was only trying to give you a hand.”

Joe grinned sheepishly as he saw the concern on the man’s face.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Just got a little spooked in there.”

He shook away more offers of help, and climbed up on his own power into the open cavern. Ken followed quickly, and the group moved without pause toward the cave entrance.

When they stepped outside, Joe couldn’t help but look back the way they’d come. He felt pursued, hunted. But whatever
grim reminder of his ordeal he’d expected, he saw nothing. Only blackness. And felt a whisper of cool, damp air.

Like the breath of a grave
, he thought, and hurried into the dying heat of the afternoon sun.

“It spoke to you, didn’t it?” Joe grabbed Angelica by the shoulders and shook her. “Didn’t it?”

Her eyes widened, but she didn’t answer.

He let go of her then, and pushed his way past the fortune-teller to enter her house. Angelica stared after him with her mouth open.

“How dare you barge in here and, and…” she began, finally gathering her wits and following him into the sitting room. Joe planted himself on the couch, clearly not going anywhere soon.

“Level with me now, Angelica. The cliff spoke inside your head when you and the other girls went swimming that day, twenty years ago, didn’t it? And one of you didn’t talk back sweetly enough.”

“Joe…” Angelica knelt before him, resting her elbows on his knees. Her mouth opened in surprise and fear. “Did you hear it, then? The voice at the cliff?” Her voice grew more agitated, and now it was her shaking him. “Tell me, what did it say?”

Joe resisted the urge to say, “I asked you first.” Instead, he leaned back and drew a deep breath before relating his experience in the cave in quick, clipped sentences.

When he finished, Angelica looked at him with something resembling pity.

“You’ve got to go, Joe,” she whispered. “If it’s seen you, if
it knows you…you have to leave Terrel before it’s too late. It’s already too late for the rest of us.”

“What do you mean, too late? What’s stopping you from getting in a car and driving out of Terrel anytime you want?” Joe asked, making a face.

“He won’t let us.” Her voice grew tremulous. “I’ve tried to leave Terrel so many times, I can’t count. But every time I get near the road out, I hear him calling. And if I ignore it…”

“What?” he asked. “What can it do?”

Angelica stood up and looked out the window at the street. Her body was a dark shadow against the orange haze of the streetlight outside. The sun had fallen fast after Joe had arrived, and its leaving dragged behind it the anticipatory taste of dusk.

She moved away from the window and eased into a love seat across the room.

“What can he do? I’ll tell you. He can kill you. He can laugh at you. And worst of all, He can let you live. As He has let all of us live. But it’s a life knowing that we’ve tasted Him. Been used by Him. Been lived in by Him. Because the one thing He wants is our flesh, Joe. He can’t ever fully possess us, not completely. So He plays with us instead. It’s worse than death. Let me tell you about the last time I tried to leave Terrel.

“It was right after Bob O’Grady died. Back in 2000. He was the first of the kids to be taken, and I couldn’t handle it. Neither could Melody, his mom. For years we had lived with the fear of that day, always there, in the back of our minds, but I don’t think any of us really believed it would ever happen. I don’t think we could have lived all those years after Bernadette drowned if we’d really believed that He would take our children. That we would let Him. That we would help Him.

“The night that Bob died, I didn’t just cry. I was a maniac. I screamed for hours. I tore up this house in anger. Literally.
I threw dishes against the walls, pulled the bookshelf down in my reading room—I even put one of the kitchen chairs through a window. And then the next day, I packed up a few things and got in the car. I couldn’t stay here anymore. I remember thinking that I was lucky. That I would never have to surrender my daughter to the monster in the cliff. And that He would never touch me with another’s hand again.

“I’ll never forget that night. I really thought that night that I was going to make it…”

Her eyes took on a faraway look as Angelica began to tell the story of the night she tried to run….

Angelica pulled out of the driveway and headed down Main Street and out of town. Her heart was beating a mile a minute. Could she really do it? Could she really be free of the nightmare at last?

She thought of Bob, remembering his quiet humor, his easygoing attitude. She hoped that the devil was satisfied with the taste of his soul tonight. Maybe with Bob to entertain him, the demon of Terrel’s Peak would be preoccupied. Not paying any attention to her flight. That was what she hoped, anyway.

She was wrong.

The touches were tentative at first, and she brushed them off. But then a pain lanced through her head like a knife. Angelica cursed and the car veered off the road, which, through waves of white-hot pain, seemed to shimmer and shake. Everything grew fuzzy and Angelica could just make out that the yellow lines were moving farther away to the left, the car bouncing more and more violently along the gravel shoulder, headed toward the bay. A grove of trees loomed just ahead, and she tried to swerve back toward the road, but instead, to her horror, her right foot stomped on the gas as her arms locked the wheel straight ahead. The car leapt forward and Angelica shrieked.

In her head she heard a low, horrible chuckle, and then a
scream. The former was the laugh of a demon playing with one of his favorite toys. The latter was Angelica herself, as the car crumpled head-on into the trunk of an oak. The hood crunched and folded with the ear-piercing sound of grating metal. The air filled with the shimmer of splintering glass and cracking wood. Angelica’s forehead bounced off the windshield, and everything disappeared for a while.

Angelica woke in darkness, the sound of summer insects buzzing all around. She shook her head to clear away the cobwebs and gasped; the pain was crippling. But this was real pain, not a prod of His. She gingerly touched her forehead with a finger and traced a circle around a thick, hot bump that swelled across her head right below the hairline. It hurt like hell, but didn’t seem to be hemorrhaging. There was a sticky scab right in the center of the bump, but there didn’t appear to be a big cut. She prayed that it was only a minor concussion.

The stars were twinkling overhead, and Angelica suddenly realized that she was not lying against the cushions of her car. She was flat on her back in a patch of tall weeds just beyond the tree she’d barreled into. Even in the moonlight, she could see that the car wasn’t going anyplace under its own power again. It looked as if its engine were sucking on the tree trunk like a lollipop. The hood was buckled back to the windshield, which had spiderwebbed and partially fallen in, but luckily, hadn’t shattered completely.

Angelica stood up slowly, running her hands over her body in search of cuts or broken bones. Finding no serious damage, she began to walk toward the road, hoping that she could still flag somebody down. There weren’t many cars that cut through Terrel after dark. Her head pounded with every step, but the road wasn’t that far off.

And then He came back.

Angelica’s hands rose from her side of their own accord, and began to slowly, deliberately unbutton her blouse. Tears slipped
down her cheeks and she silently cried,
No
and concentrated on regaining control of her betraying fingers, but it only made her head throb worse with pain. She stopped walking for a moment, but then even her feet turned traitors, and she began to march in the other direction. She was helpless!

Angelica’s fingers jerked and twitched and thrust, and despite her efforts, one by one, they clumsily opened each button. Like a poorly dominated marionette, Angelica shrugged off the blouse as she jerkily approached the road, and then her arms reached behind her to unclasp her bra. When that too fell to the weeds, her hands busily went to work on her jeans, unbuttoning them and then unzipping her fly. Her errant feet stopped marching then, just for a moment, as first one and then the other kicked off its shoe, allowing her body to shimmy clumsily out of the pants. One thumb hooked into the front of her pink pan ties and toyed with the fuzzy cleft beneath. Then, with a hard thrust, it yanked downward, carrying the soft cotton down her thighs. Angelica stumbled and fell to the gravel, crying out as her shoulder was gashed and gouged by sharp stones. And then the invisible strings pulled her erect again and she started walking, stark naked, toward the road.

She shook with anger and fear, but was powerless to stop herself. It wasn’t enough that He had stopped her from leaving town, wrecking her car in the process. Now He was going to get His revenge in some horrible, humiliating way. She knew that He had something more than stripping her naked in store.

Tears streamed down her cheeks as Angelica walked, zombielike, to the edge of the asphalt. Her head felt as if spikes had been driven in behind her eyes, and her feet were gouged and sliced by rocks, shards of broken glass and sharp grasses with every step. In her head, she prayed that nobody would come, that she would stand there at the edge of the road with her thumb out for the rest of the hellish night. Eventually, if nobody pulled up to see the bloody, bedraggled nude girl on
the side of the road, she thought maybe He would get bored and leave her for more interesting prey. And then, before His attention shifted back to her, she could somehow collect her clothes and lost dignity in a broken bundle and escape back to her house. To hide.

But tonight, He had left nothing to chance.

Angelica stood on the side of the road, legs spread, one hand crooked on her side, the other launching a thumb into the air. Presently, she saw headlights.

Her headache had lessened some, but now her joints were screaming with the forced posture. With the glimmer of light in the distance, she poured all her will into moving, first trying to lift a foot. She could feel the tendons shiver with exertion, but His lock on her refused to ease. Next she tried throwing back a shoulder or her head…anything just to topple her body off balance. She didn’t care what hit the ground, so long as the oncoming car couldn’t see her exposed there in the darkness.

But nothing worked. He held her with an iron grip in the same position the whole time, as little by little, the lights in the distance grew brighter, stronger, wider.

Her left thumb pointed outward, in the hitcher’s universal symbol, as her right hand slid from her pale ribs to tangle in the hair at the nape of her neck. He forced her back to arch so that the cones of her breasts jutted out. He kept her right leg bent, knee toward the yellow line, a universal symbol for “come hither.” She looked like a hitching stripper, posing for a pickup. And He had chosen the suitor.

The headlights caught Angelica in their glare with a blinding intensity that ripped through the already-shredded nerves of her skull. Tears wet her face again as blood stained the stones cutting the soles of her feet.

She realized from the height and noise level that the oncoming lights belonged to a truck. In seconds it had slowed down, then, just a few feet away, eased off the road to stop with the complaint of old brakes. The lights dimmed to parking
yellow, and then she could see the rusted wreck that had “come to her rescue.” It was a ’72 Ford pickup, painted school-bus yellow and idling at a choking scream.

Angelica knew that truck. And when recognition dawned, she started crying harder.

The man who stepped out of the driver’s door was the reason for her tears, and her insides quivered in revolt. She pushed and strained to make her feet move until the sky ran red behind her eyes, but He wouldn’t let her run. Her feet stayed planted. This was His ultimate punishment. And pleasure.

Angelica groaned as her hitching arm slowly dropped to her side, and the hand behind her head came down to massage and exhibit her chest for the creep walking toward her.

The creep was Harold Palmer, local mechanic for hire. The bane of her existence since junior high. For years he had hounded Angelica for dates, cornering her at her locker in school, and later, turning up at her house for readings…and an attempt at a cheap feel. She had always—though sometimes only narrowly—avoided his advances. And now she was feeling herself up for him in a cheap, vulgar display of faux lust in the middle of nowhere. This time, Angelica knew, there would be no escape from Harold Palmer. Her stomach begged to be sick as she pinched the heavy bead of a nipple, offering it to the grease monkey moving toward her.

Harold knew that this time, he was going to get lucky with his little Eye-tal-yan girl. She’d given him a good race, but her hard-to-get days were over. From the look of it, she was dying to deep throat him. He almost wanted to make her beg for it…but he didn’t know if he should push his luck.

As he strutted over, fingers looped in the belt loops of his pants, he was licking his lips.

“Well now, Angie,” he said, drawing his words out into a drawl that sounded obscene in itself. “Lookin’ reeaaal good tonight.”

In answer, her tongue traced the outline of her lips as a
slim, teasing fingernail traced the boundaries of an areola. Inside her head, Angelica began to wail. She felt like a girl trapped in glass, pounding on a surface that she could see through but couldn’t break, no matter how hard she tried.

He was on her in a heartbeat. Angelica screamed inside as his beefy, sweaty paws groped at her chest and cupped her ass. She could feel the slime of engine grease smeared wherever his fingers roamed. His breath was sour with rancid meat, and his stubble left raw flesh behind wherever he moved his lips. And he moved them everywhere.

Her body acted as if he were Romeo, responding to him as if he were the man it had been yearning for all night. She could feel her nipples harden, and the crease between her thighs grow thick and damp. Her hands fumbled at his buttons, helping him undress, and her stomach again tried to heave as his tongue entered her mouth. But instead of puking, her tongue grew fevered, trading him lick for lick, kiss for kiss. They slicked each other in spit until each backed off, short of breath. And then Angelica heard a voice that wasn’t hers coo from inside her. It stole her tongue and lauded the mechanic, begging with a stolen voice, “Oh, Harold, I’ve wanted you for
sooo
long. Do me from behind. Do me now!” And as she gagged on that, her hips swiveled and her body bent over, grasping the hood of the truck and mooning the object of her hatred of so many years. Drool was dripping from the corners of her mouth, but the grease monkey didn’t notice.