Covenant (15 page)

Caves were funny things. Just when a tunnel looked as if it were opening up to some enormous cavern, instead it narrowed down to a fissure the width of a dime.

Ken Brownsell shone the headlamp on the smooth gray face before him and shook his head. There had to be a branch-off that he’d missed. There was no way it could just peter out like this. He had gotter barely one hundred yards from where the freak show had taken a dive into the river. Just around a couple bends and then, pow—a solid rock face. And it didn’t narrow down to nothing, like most false tunnels. It ended in a wall. As if someone had cemented up the way to keep intruders out.

He took out his piton hammer and began to test the depth of the rock before him. Was it only a pile-in that had closed off the path? Was there an empty chamber of breathtaking beauty just a foot or two away?

He put an ear to the wall and tapped with the hammer. Slowly. Listened for a telltale hollow note. One careful inch at a time, he worked, sounding the cave out. Praying that this run was not over.

His face was cold with perspiration. And fear. He couldn’t bear to think that this was it. No. He
wouldn’t
believe it. The way had been too wide up to now. Too promising. Brownsell Cavern too close.

He pounded, over and over again, pausing each time to listen, to evaluate the ring of the hammer on the rock.

Wait.

Was that a hollow knock? He punched the hammer harder, shoved his ear flat against the cool lime. Banged again.

And again.

And then…an answer. There was a slow, steady groan echoing through the passage. The earth seemed to be moaning, like some mythic ice giant struggling to turn over in its bed. The seamless rock face before him creaked.

Cracked.

“Shit.”

The floor beneath Ken began to shiver, and before he could get to his feet, the wall in front of him was gone. He had been leaning on it as he pounded, and as it fell forward, so did he. But there was no ground to fall onto. Ken was launched into space, his hand still clutching a piece of cool stone from the wall. It had fractured beneath his hammer like glass.

“
Fucckkkkk!
” he yelled, and then struck something hard. A red-hot pain sliced through his shoulder as he bounced off an outcropping on the cave wall, and Ken was again airborne, but only for an instant. Then the fire in his shoulder was doused in icy cold as he hit the river. The same river that Joe Kieran had swam in just days before. Only this time, there was no one waiting above to pull the tumbler out.

“
I was wondering how long it would take you to end up down
here
,” a voice in Ken’s head said with flytrap-happy menace.

Then the current sucked him under, ice-cold water seeping up his nose and then into his lungs as he opened his mouth to gasp. Everything went black.

Joe’s mind was a million miles from writing about city councils and bake sales as he slipped in the side door to the newspaper offices, passing the morgue on his way to the newsroom. He almost ran right into George, who was mopping the hall.

“Whoa there, son,” the janitor laughed, raising a hand to shield himself from a collision. “You don’t watch where you’re going, you’ll never get there!”

Joe laughed and clapped the old janitor’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Just a lot of things on my mind right now.”

George squinted one eye and looked Joe over critically. Glancing behind himself, and then over Joe’s shoulder, he finally said quietly, “You been staying away from that business we talked about, have you?”

Joe shook his head. “I couldn’t, and now…”

“Come here,” the janitor instructed, and pulled Joe by the elbow toward his office.

Once inside, George shut the door and turned back to Joe, motioning him to sit on the cot, as he had before. Again George pulled up a large plastic canister to sit on.

“Alright then, what’ve you gotten yourself into?”

“I just wanted to do a real story on the suicides,” Joe said. “I took your advice, and went and visited Angelica, but she didn’t really help—not at first, anyway.”

He told George about receiving the threatening letter, and then about meeting Cindy. When he described the urban
legend she’d told him about the disappearance of John Ryan, the janitor just nodded, as if he’d heard it all before.

“I didn’t buy any of that,” he said, “until I went with a group to explore the caves at the foot of Terrel’s Peak.”

George’s eyebrows raised, but still he said nothing.

“Everything was fine, until I lost my footing and fell off the trail into an underground river. That was when I heard Him.”

George’s eyes widened. “Him?”

“The devil, the spirit, whatever it is that’s inside that cliff. There is something there, George. I know it now.”

The janitor stood then and walked to the door. When he turned around, Joe saw that his left hand was shaking. The older man steadied it by reaching out to hold onto a shelf of cleaning materials.

“It’s spoken to you,” he said, shaking his head.

“And that’s not all,” Joe continued, quickly outlining what had happened at Angelica’s the night before.

George sighed as Joe fell silent.

“I warned you to stay clear of this business,” he said.

“Too late.” Joe shrugged. “But now I need to find out more about this thing. I’ve got to help Angelica. But I don’t know where to go. How did it come to be here in Terrel? How can I fight it, if it comes to that?”

The old man seemed to shrink in on himself, then stepped closer.

“You can’t fight it,” he whispered. “All ya can do is hope to stay out of its sight, and ya haven’t done a very good job of that.”

“No,” the younger man agreed.

“There’s nobody I know of in town who could give you any more than you’ve gotten from Angelica,” George said. He rubbed a hand on his chin. “Like I told ya before, it’s sometimes better not to know about some things. I know that’s not what you wanna hear, being a reporter and all.”

“But I have to find out more about this thing,” Joe insisted. “Angelica is in danger, and I won’t just abandon her.”

George nodded slowly, and then walked past Joe to the shadowed recesses of the long janitor’s room. He reached up and pulled down a shoebox from the top of an old steel newspaper shelf that had bowed so much in the middle that it could no longer hold much of anything. Removing the lid of the box, George pulled out a small book and brought it to Joe.

“You’re not the only one in this town who’s worried about those kids,” he said. “A couple years ago, when those kids started jumping, and not on Halloween, I did a little reading on the subject myself.”

Joe took the thin volume and read the small white letters on the nondescript brown spine.
Witchcraft, Demonology, and
Possession
. No author was listed.

“It’s not about Terrel, or the problems we have here,” George said, “but it does have some interesting theories about demons and the like. I don’t know what you can do with that knowledge, but you’re free to borrow it, if you like.”

Joe nodded, leafing through the pages. It was a short book, but the print was small and there appeared to be no diagrams or pictures.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll take a look.”

He stood up. “I better get to my desk. Randy’s going to have a cow, I’m so late.”

George nodded, but the look of concern didn’t leave his weathered face.

“Joe,” he said as the reporter opened the door to leave. “I can’t tell you to stay out of it. But be careful.”

Joe turned the book over and over in his hands as he hurried to his desk. He still felt funny admitting that this was real. Part of him still denied hearing the voice inside the cliff. But the other part already longed to crack open this volume. He needed information, any information, about what sort of being could be behind all of this. He needed to know how to avoid being turned into a demon’s marionette, as Angelica had once been.

He stashed the book in his backpack and sat down to start on the day’s stories. But he’d barely begun to type, when he heard his name.

“Joe,” Randy called from across the newsroom. “Come into my office a minute?”

That didn’t sound good. Randy never called anyone into his office unless he had a beef. Everything else was open newsroom game. Hell, there were rarely more than three people in the newsroom at any one time as it was.

Joe steeled his shoulders and followed his boss to the broom closet the editor used as an office. What had he screwed up now?

The stupid library story was done, the village board meeting story had been a no-brainer, as they usually were. It wasn’t like the village board had a whole hell of a lot of business to take care of in a sleepy burg like Terrel. It certainly wasn’t as if they spent any time talking about people who periodically plummeted from the town’s favorite natural landmark.

“What’s up, Randy?” he asked nonchalantly as he strode between the stacks of yellowed newspaper that bordered the doorway. The burly editor didn’t smile.

“Shut the door.”

Joe clenched his jaw and did as he was told. This was definitely not shaping up to be a good talk.

Randy walked behind his steel desk and pulled out a battered leather chair with a screech of unoiled ball bearings. He sat heavily, and stared for a moment at his only full-time reporter as though he were a prison guard looking at the inmate who’s just incited a food fight. It was not a look of pride.

“I told you to lay off the suicide story, Joe.”

He nodded.

“You haven’t.”

“I haven’t written anything more about it,” Joe sidestepped, wondering how the editor knew he was still investigating the subject. Had he been eavesdropping outside the
janitor’s closet? Surely George wouldn’t have warned the editor about him.

“Maybe not,” Randy continued. “But you have been going around and asking people a lot of questions. Questions that hurt people. Questions that bring up painful memories of the dead for no reason. You’re giving the
Terrel Daily Times
a bad reputation, Joe. This isn’t the
National Enquirer
. We don’t pick at scabs again and again to keep them bleeding. The Canady kid’s dead. So’s the Sander kid. And the O’Grady kid. Now listen to me, Joe, because I’m not having this conversation with you again.”

The editor leaned forward and looked hard at Joe.

“Leave them to rest in peace.”

The twin caterpillars above Randy’s eyes rose in question.

“Got it?”

Joe nodded.

“Good. Now go get me a story I can actually use in tomorrow’s edition.”

Randy broke eye contact then, and turned away from Joe to stare at his computer monitor. Within seconds, he was typing as if Joe had already left the room.

He took the hint.

On his way back to his desk, Joe tried to figure out who had ratted on him. He didn’t dare ask Randy. Who had called the paper to complain? Rhonda? Karen?

Angelica…or should he say, Rachel? He smiled at the new/old name. It was very biblical. Despite Cindy’s theory that it hadn’t been Gypsy enough, it seemed to Joe as if it could have been used for a fortune-teller name.

Or maybe Angelica had just wanted to escape from the person Rachel had been. She hadn’t escaped the consequences, though.

Whoever the complainer had been had just made his job harder. Because now he needed to dig more than ever. He needed to find Angelica’s child before the women did. He
didn’t know where to turn to begin to search for Angelica, but he could at least put some wheels in motion to help protect her kid. Which meant some long distance phone calls. And a trip to the county registrar’s office. He needed a date of birth and a hospital before he called Chicago. He looked up the number and address in the phone book and jotted it down on a note pad, then stuffed it into his pants pocket. Then he picked up the phone and dialed another number.

Angelica’s.

Not surprisingly, she didn’t pick up.

He hung up the phone and settled into his chair. He had some business to take care of before he could spend any more time on his pet project, or else he’d be out of a job. Randy’s angry scowl flashed in his memory.

But as he stared at the dusty screen of the old VDT, he kept thinking of last night. Of a yellow piece of paper with
Bernadette
written on it in the same hand, he thought, as the yellow paper that had warned him to quit looking for death. And of the warm lips and tender arms of Cindy, who had clung to him so passionately in the night ocean air of the cliff.

She had wrapped herself around him like a vine, squeezing her smooth flesh to his own with a need that he wasn’t sure he could fulfill. She seemed so hungry. Her eyes flashed with the light of the stars as he kissed her neck, her chest, her chin.

“I love you,” he had said eventually.

“Yes…” She sighed and rolled on top of him.

Joe shook the daydream away. He had found someone special on Terrel’s Peak last night, but it wasn’t who he’d gone there looking for. And
that
woman might be in great danger now. He had driven by Angelica’s house on the way to work, and she hadn’t returned home. Her phone remained unanswered. Where had they taken her? What were they doing to her?

And what would they do if they found her child before he did?

Steeling himself to run through his checklist of today’s stories as quickly as possible, Joe opened a blank Word file and began to type. He wanted to get over to the registrar’s office before five.

Angelica’s back bounced painfully against the steel floor of the van as the vehicle turned off Main Street to head out of town. She knew where they were going, and there was nothing she could do about it. Rhonda and Monica had bound her hands as soon as they got in the van. She had struggled against them, but she was no match for Rhonda’s weight—and pure-bitch mean streak. The woman had always had a bitter fire in her that was best left alone. Beefy hands had gripped her shoulders like pincers, and Angelica had thrust a shoulder at Rhonda’s face and connected with a satisfying “oooff” coming from the target. Teeth closed on the shoulder then, and Angelica had screamed. Rhonda had let go and laughed.

Had the bitch drawn blood?

Angelica couldn’t see out the back windows, but she knew where they were going. She could feel Him getting closer with every mile.

The van lurched suddenly, and then tilted off balance, hood facing forward. The back end bounced unsteadily with a heart-skipping lurch, but then, just as quickly, the vehicle evened out again. They had reached the beach, she knew in an instant.

After a few minutes of listening to the engine whine and moan as the tires spun their way through gullies of sand, the van finally came to a sliding stop and Karen killed the lights
and motor. The side door slid open and two hands reached in to help Angelica out of the van.

“Let’s go,” Rhonda growled, and pushed Angelica up from the seat. With her hands behind her, it was difficult to step down from the van, but Monica and Karen held her arms and half pushed, half dragged her down to the sand.

They herded Angelica through the dark, eerily swaying tall grass near a scattering of heavy boulders, and then down along the water. She recognized the spot instantly. It was the cove beneath the cliff, where six girls had once come on a hot sunny day in 1981 to swim.

And then there were five
.

The tiny mountain loomed above them here. Its shadow blotted out much of the sky, but there was still enough light to pick their way through the rocky shore. They were headed toward a cave that was only accessible at low tide.

They had all been there once before.

A car passed on the road, growing higher and farther above them, and Angelica watched the pale nimbus of its headlights ascend to the top of the cliff. But instead of passing on, it stopped just before the peak and waited. Then the lights went out.

Somebody was parked up there. Probably some high school kids making out in the backseat, she thought as they trudged along the beach below. It was the perfect necking spot, if you could ignore the history. If she could just break away long enough to get on the path to the top…

Rhonda pounded at her back to shove her forward, and Angelica took the opportunity. She exaggerated the effect of the blow and fell into the backs of Karen and Monica. Karen lost her balance and had to catch herself on hands and knees on the sand. They both turned to rail on Rhonda.

“Take it easy, Rhon,” Monica squealed.

“I’m only giving her a taste.”

Attention momentarily diverted, Angelica ducked from beneath Rhonda’s guiding hand and leapt from her crouch to
run back toward the van. The path was easy to see beyond it; the grass of the road broke where the gravel curved down to lead to the beach.

She had had the advantage of surprise, but was hampered by not having the use of her arms. Her feet slipped and sunk in the loose sand, and it felt as if she would lose her balance and fall forward to eat the beach at any moment. But she ran hard, determined to make it to the road, where she could scream for help from whoever had stopped up at the cliff. She had to get closer though. Nobody would ever hear her cry here above the crash and wash of the surf.

Angelica passed the van, her strides lengthening as she grew more accustomed to running without elbows pumping at her sides. She was going to make it!

She set one foot on the slippery incline, then another. Her head topped the rise and she was on the road that led either back into Terrel or up to the top of the cliff.

And then something heavy slammed into the back of her head, and she did, indeed, taste the ground.

The floor was cold and damp beneath her hands.

From somewhere far away she could hear voices. They were talking about her. The quiet one said, “Jesus, Rhonda, did you have to hit her so hard?”

“Yeah,” a high-pitched one added. “What do we do if she doesn’t wake up?”

“She’ll wake up,” a third voice answered, and suddenly something cool and salty splashed across her face.

It ran down her nose and into the back of her throat and Angelica coughed. Her eyes fluttered open as she struggled to breathe, choking out blood and salt and the grit of sand from her mouth.

“Told you.” Rhonda grinned. The chunky woman was kneeling above Angelica, a flannel shirt twisted up in her hands. She wrung a few more drops of water onto Angelica’s face.

The fortune-teller shook her head, and rolled away from
Rhonda to find herself staring at the knees of Karen and Monica.

“Anything more you’d like to tell us about Andi?” Karen said. She sounded sad, somehow. Angelica could see in her eyes that she didn’t want to do this. Rhonda, on the other hand…

“I told you, I couldn’t do anything if I wanted to.”

“All right then.” The other woman sounded resigned. “We’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Yeah, we’d love to stay and chat about the old days”— Rhonda smirked— “but the tide’s coming in. Pretty soon this cave will be closed off by the ocean. A perfect cage for our little Rachel. You understand. But you won’t be totally alone. You’ll have Him to keep you company.”

Karen cut the other woman off.

“Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ve done enough.”

And with that, the three women rose and walked, single file, out of the rocky room and into the passage that led back to the ocean.

“Does the water fill up that room during the day?” Angelica heard Monica ask as they hurried out of the cave.

“I don’t know,” Karen’s voice echoed back. “For her sake, I hope it does.”

She sounded beaten.

Angelica writhed and twisted, but succeeded only in grinding loose dirt down beneath her belt and into her underpants. That just added to her discomfort.

They had brought her back here, after all these years. To the sanctuary.

To the site where they had forged their “Covenant.”

Across the room, tucked into a crevice in the rock, a candle burned. Its flame guttered wildly as she watched, throwing eerie shadows up the wall to scrabble and scratch long fingers of light across the ceiling. She could almost see the silhouette of Him coming to claim her. If He’d been human,
she knew just what He would do before He killed her. Unconsciously, she locked her knees together. But
that
wasn’t what she had to worry about at the moment. He wasn’t human, and He couldn’t have his way with her physically.

No.

The way He fucked you was much worse. He fucked with your mind. Made you want things. Do things. Made you sign away your future…

She was eighteen again and her name was Rachel.

“Rhonda, come over to the rock!” Rachel called, pushing a wave from in front of her with interlaced fingers. She loved to watch the water break against her hands, rolling around them and splattering her with salt water. Mom warned her against swallowing the sea foam. “You’ll catch God knows what sort of germs or slimies if you go swallowing that dirty water.” But Rachel never paid the warnings much mind. She licked the spray from her lips and smiled. The taste stuck to her tongue, a near-oily residue of life. Well-salted life. Tears in a cup. Sweat in an ocean. The water was her place, her womb. And she dragged her friends here whenever she could.

“I really should get back soon,” Rhonda complained in that familiar “let’s wrap this up” tone. If the ocean was Rachel’s life documentary, it was just a short sitcom for the rest. Jump in, have a few laughs and get out without getting anything wet deep down. Soul deep. Rachel came out here to play, but the gang never seemed to totally understand that there was more. When you sat on the rocks out in the middle of the bay, you could stare into someplace beyond. Some days, she thought the whole town was really more like a pier. Just a place where you could dive off into the water, if you were brave enough. If you wanted to see what was beneath the dark, rushing waves. That was where reality was, she thought. That was where life began.

Rachel thought maybe she had skimmed the surface of those secret primordial depths, if not dove in. Her friends showed no
interest in doing more than strolling out along the pier…and then turning back.

“It is getting late,” Karen chimed in. Her freckles stood out more in the dying light. She never seemed to tan in the sun, only grow paler around the freckles. Her hair hung in a long hemplike braid, its natural orange fire dulled to a sodden brown. Karen followed Rhonda in everything. And Melody, Monica and Bernadette were usually not too far behind. The bigger girl had a way of getting what she wanted.

“One more lap?”

Rhonda rolled her eyes.

“C’mon, it won’t take too long,” Bernadette offered, taking Rachel’s side for once. Rachel flashed her a smile and dove into the deep green-blue water, heading over toward the foot of the cliff. There were more shells to find there, where the rocks jutted like pylons from the water, and held on to the refuse that the tides dragged in from the depths of the ocean.

The splashing behind her increased as her friends followed. They had already piled a stash of sea treasure on the bank, but one more run wouldn’t hurt. Who knows, maybe they’d find something cool from a ship. They’d brought in a long fiberglass shard earlier today that Rachel was sure had belonged to some kind of boat.

“Maybe the pilot’s body is wedged between one of these rocks,” Rhonda had suggested drolly. “Maybe the next time we go down, we’ll find his skull.”

Karen had splashed her in the face and the whole group had struck back to shore for a while. But sunset wasn’t far off now. It
was
time to head home. Missing dinner was a capital offense. But Rachel really hated to go home. Any excuse that she could think of to stave off that torture…

“By tomorrow, if there is anything else left of this boat, it will all have been pulled back out to sea,” she called over her shoulder. The other girls didn’t need much prodding, however.
They all had dreams of sunken treasure chests and long-lost strings of pearls in their heads.

Rachel reached the spot where they’d found the long piece of fiberglass and turned to the others. “Let’s start here. Anything you find, pile up here on the rock, okay?”

The others nodded, and split off to the surrounding boulders, taking deep breaths and then plunging their heads beneath the surface to scan the murky ground beneath.

The treasure hunt was on.

It was Bernadette who found the cave. She’d gotten quite close to shore, beyond where the rest of the group was trawling for broken clues from a broken boat. Chances are, the boat hadn’t even sunk near here, but had been washed up by the tide from miles away. All sorts of strange debris had piled into Terrel Bay over the years. Its deadly currents were legend on this coast.

“Hey, you guys! Over there.” She pointed at the base of the cliff, just a few steps of sand up from the rock-strewn water. “Is that an opening?”

“Could be,” Melody said, nodding. “Let’s check it out!”

The girls trudged out of the water to convene on the beach once more, and shaking and squeezing the water from their hair as they went, walked over to the small opening in the mountain. It was only three feet wide, but that was plenty of room for Rachel to stick her head inside.

She whistled, and the sound echoed for what seemed like miles.

“It gets bigger and bigger,” she said, pulling her head out. “It looks like a huge cave in there.”

“How come we never saw it before?” Bernadette asked, her naturally sloe eyes squinted even tighter in wonder.

“It’s probably underwater most of the time,” Karen said. “Look at how close the tide is to it now.”

“Can we look inside?” Bernadette pressed.

Rachel knew that if she had asked, Rhonda would have
said no. Absolutely not. Time to go. But instead, the bigger girl turned and ran down the beach.

“I’ve got a light on my bike,” she called over her shoulder in explanation.

Ten minutes later the six bikinied Terrel High seniors were tiptoeing beneath the cap of Terrel’s Peak. A smooth rock path wound up and away from the ocean into the bowels of the mountain.

“We should follow this for only a few yards or we could get lost,” Rachel warned.

Rhonda shushed her. “Just watch out that you don’t step on any creatures from the black lagoon. We go straight in, we go straight out. It’ll be fine.”

They stepped, single file, up a slow, smooth incline. And then the path opened into a room.

Without warning, Bernadette screamed.

The other girls reached out for her, but the girl was already in motion, running across the width of the cavern into the dark.

“Bernadette, wait,” Rachel called, and the girls began to run forward after her.

Rhonda shone her light around the room, revealing glistening gray walls, but no sign of Bernadette.

“Bernadette, what the fuck?” she growled, and then her light found the girl, huddled up in a ball against the farthest wall of the cave. Her face bobbed back and forth, as if looking for something. In the light of the flash, her narrow eyes seemed to have bulged to twice their normal size.

“Did you hear him?” she whispered as the rest of the girls gathered around her.

“Hear who?” Rhonda asked.

“He said…He said he’d been waiting for us.”

“Quit screwing around, Bernie,” Rhonda barked. She always called the younger girl Bernie when she was annoyed. “We should probably get home.”

“I heard a man,” Bernadette insisted, but the rest of the girls ignored her.

“Probably just the ghost of a pirate.” Rhonda laughed. “Trying to keep us from getting at his gold. Maybe it was the guy from the boat.”