Covenant (19 page)

Cindy kissed Joe good-bye with the perky energy of a true morning person. Joe was still in his sweatpants, hair tousled and sandpaper stubble on his face. He had let her shower first, but now he was looking to be late to work for the deal. He’d pulled Saturday duty this week.

He looked longingly into the dark kitchen for a moment and then shook his head wearily. No coffee this morning.

He plodded to the bathroom and decided without conviction that a five-minute suds job was in order. It turned into fifteen, but who was counting?

A clean blue shirt and pair of Dockers later and Joe was on his way, but the scare that had rocked his belly an hour earlier was still seated there, like a burrito that doesn’t know when to digest.

He was scared for Cindy. Scared for himself.

She’d begged him to meet her up on the peak tonight. The last place he wanted to go now. But she hadn’t relented.

“If you don’t show, I’ll just walk home,” she’d smiled with a nonchalant toss of her blonde hair. She knew he wouldn’t let her walk home from there after dark if he had the choice.

And so did he.

And yet it might be safer for her if he did. She’d been going there safely on her own for weeks now. But what if the thing could read his mind? It had been in his head once when he’d been inside the peak. What if it reached him on the summit?
What if it discovered her true lineage, thanks to him? Maybe it would use
him
to push her from the cliff right then!

He needed more information. Somehow he had to find out more about this thing. What was it? How long had it really been there?

How could he get rid of it?

The answer…or at least the start of it, came to him at lunchtime. He’d stopped in at his favorite kill-sometime haunt, Books and Baubles. On a whim, he scanned the occult section of the store’s bookshelves, which yielded virtually nothing. He skimmed the pages of a book on poltergeists, but it offered very little advice on getting rid of the supernatural pests other than one: move.

He needed to finish the book George had given him, he thought. He hadn’t gotten far the other night, but there could be some help there. He was curious to see what it said on the subject of possession.

Next to the occult shelf was a book on Dizzy Gillespie. And near that, a volume about and by Bill Cosby. They were new mass market biographies, but interspersed with them were older volumes. Red leather classics about famous people. And not-so-famous people. One of them, he pulled from the shelf for its ornate gold lettering.
The Journal of Arthur
Godwyn
, read the spine. He had no idea who Arthur Godwyn was.

But the title gave him an idea.

The Journal of
…

It rang a bell for him.

The newspaper reports he’d read of the early days of Terrel spoke of the lighthouse that had once been at the top of the cliff. The earliest stories of cliff divers stretched back to the days of the light house’s operation. But the destruction of the lighthouse hadn’t resulted in the destruction of the entity, which seemed anchored to that location. If the being had “haunted” the lighthouse, wouldn’t it have disappeared with the structure?

When Joe was a kid, he had vacationed in New England with his parents. One of the places they’d gone was a lighthouse on the top of a rocky promontory overlooking the Atlantic. He remembered the dank stone steps leading up to the room where the giant warning light was lit. He also remembered the steps leading down, belowground. A storm shelter for the lighthouse keeper to retreat to, if the winds got too dangerous to risk staying aboveground.

Could Terrel’s lighthouse have been built along the same lines?

What if the light house had not only guarded ships from hitting the shoreline, but guarded people from finding the entrance to the lair of the cliff’s prime evil? What if the storm cellar of Terrel’s lighthouse had been the entrance to the demon’s underground lair?

And why Terrel? Had it been called here by a lighthouse keeper? Could there be notes or books still buried beneath the remains of the lighthouse that could shed more light on the nature of this particular demon?

It was a long shot, but Joe thought that if there were anything left of the story of the cliff’s demon, it was hidden belowground. Maybe he had been on the right track with the Cliff Combers. Just in the wrong location.

Tonight, he vowed, before he met with Cindy, he was going to have a closer look around up on the top of the world.

And with any luck, he’d rediscover the stairway to hell.

The rush of the river gradually receded from an overpowering roar to a distant fuzz of white noise as Ken made his way down the haphazardly carved path toward what he hoped was an ocean exit. What he would do if the trail ended in a pit of black water that gave no indication of the closeness of the ocean, he wasn’t sure. But he was betting against it. The cavern seemed wide enough to indicate that it had once been a major waterway. As such, he expected it ran straight out of the cliff and across the beach. There were many such inlets from the ocean shore.

One stony outcropping looked much like another, especially in the dark.

“Why didn’t I bring someone to buddy me?” Ken berated himself again and again. But it was too late now. Now he was lost underground with no one to call on. No rope to pull him back to safety.

Images of himself lying alone in the deep shadowed dark slid through his mind like a private perverse slide-show.

Ways to Die in a Cave, #42
read the caption of one slide. In it, Ken’s foot was missing, vanished into a hole in the rock floor. He couldn’t get it back because the shattered bone of his femur extended like a white icicle from the bloody hole it had pierced in his jeans. Ken lay on the cave floor staring at the broken splinters of bone with a soundless scream frozen on his slide-show mouth.

Ways to Die in a Cave, #54
was even better. This was one of his subconscious’ favorites. Here, an emaciated, eye-bulging Ken staggered down an endless corridor of slimy gray-green rock, banging his head and shoulders against the sharp edges without caring. Behind him, a small herd of beady eyes glowed hungrily. The eyes chased him through the darkness, and every now and then, one got close enough so that he could see the matted brown fur and long pink tail. And the teeth. Two of them, yellowed and pointed. The pack made a low, shuffling, scuffing sound as they chased and chased and chased him through the dark labyrinth. A labyrinth that never ended.

Ken slapped himself in the face.

“Stop it,” he cried out loud. “Enough.”

There will be an exit
, he repeated silently.
I will find my way
out of here
.

And maybe I’ll even find a cavern that will be worth all this
, a quieter portion of his brain tossed out.

He forged on.

The hours seemed like days to Angelica. She had long since ceased to struggle against her bonds; her arms had gone numb and then come back to life half a dozen times as she twisted and strained against the ropes. You could say one thing about Rhonda—she knew how to tie a good knot.

Angelica had worried for a while that the tide would sweep into this room and drown her, but she had heard it come and go without ever feeling its damp probing. Which made sense, she supposed. If the tide did reach this room, the “gifts” she and the other girls had found here so many years ago would never have remained in the room. Still, it was a relief when she realized that the sound of the surf, which had gotten louder after Karen, Rhonda and Monica had left, had receded once again. Which meant that it was daytime. She had spent the night tied up in the cave where she had once buried her mouth in the naked, forbidden places of her friends. At the urging of a demon who had never let her forget.

She had slept in his bed once before. What would the consequences be this time?

A sound came from beyond the room. A voice.

Angelica lifted her head to listen harder. Had the girls come back? Would they torture her some more, or realize that she really couldn’t help them and at last set her free?

“…sell caverns, yes,” she caught. More of a mumble than
a conversation. And it didn’t sound like Karen or Rhonda. Or Monica.

“Who’s there?” she called out, and felt instantly foolish. But could things really get worse for her?

The noise from beyond the cavern stopped. She listened through the silence, only the distant sound of waves lapping at the rocks on the shore slipping through the absolute black absence of noise. And then, a trickle of rock noise. As if a shelf of loose limestone had tumbled to the ground only a few feet away.

“Yes,” the voice said, as if in answer to something.

Angelica drew her body up into a tight ball, trying to disappear into the wall. And then a blinding light flashed through the cave and caught her in the face.

“Who’re you?” It was a man, his voice deep and raspy out of the painful glare of white and yellow light.

“Turn out the light,” she begged.

“Oh, yeah, sorry.”

With a twist, the light suddenly shone on the far side of the room, and she could see, through the rain of red and green dots in her eyes, a stubbled, youngish face. He was tall, lanky. His dirty brown hair hung in tangled ropes past his shoulders. Angelica instantly pegged him as a college student. Maybe a philosophy major, she guessed. Probably a Deadhead. His jeans and blue flannel shirt were stained with dark splotches. He’d been down here a while, she guessed.

“Who are you?” he asked again.

“My name’s Angelica,” she said. “Some friends of mine were playing a little prank and tied me up here. Could you help me out?”

“I’m Ken.”

He didn’t answer the rest of her question. Instead, he came and sat down next to her. The rank odor of sweat mixed with seaweed came with him. She noticed his face was smeared with something dark. Mud? Or blood?

“Ken Brownsell,” he added, and grinned in a way that made Angelica go cold.

“I was hoping I’d discover a good cavern while I was here.” He reached out a dirty hand and stroked the hair from her forehead. His eyes traveled down the shadow of her cleavage.

“This one looks like a beaut.”

“Yeah,” Angelica answered. “It’s, um, very nice. Would you mind untying my arms?”

His eyes met hers for a full minute. Black, empty marbles of eyes. Eyes that didn’t show a soul or a feeling that she could understand.

Angelica had seen those eyes before. She’d seen them in the face of a rapist she had killed. And before that, she’d seen them in the head of her friend Bernadette, right before the girl had collapsed to the ground for the last time.

“I don’t think so,” his mouth said. But his eyes didn’t say a thing.

Angelica realized that things
had
just managed to get worse. A lot worse.

Joe pulled into the now-familiar parking pit at the top of Terrel’s Peak. The car slid into the gravelly offshoot of the highway with a satisfying lurch, and Joe quickly yanked out the keys, slammed the door shut with a hollow bang and stepped up the path toward the edge of the promontory.

It was near sunset, and he didn’t have too much time before Cindy would probably be heading up here herself. He wanted to be done with his explorations before she arrived. And then he wanted to get her the hell away from this cliff. Chicago suddenly didn’t even seem far enough away.

A gull shrieked overhead, its shrill call sending a ripple down Joe’s spine. It was a mournful sound, and not one that he really wanted to think about right now. He forced his attention to the ground, searching for any evidence of a filledin hole in the earth. There were rocks everywhere, ranging from pebbles to car-size boulders, and he weaved in and out of the tumbled piles.

Scrub grass poked weakly out from the cracks and crevices in the rock. You had to be tough to survive up here, he mused, drawing the collar of his jacket closer to his neck. The wind whistled past in a nonstop, bone-chilling rush, and out beyond the edge of the cliff, where the blue of the ocean stretched out to the gray of the horizon, a handful of gulls hung lazily on the current, not flapping or moving, it seemed. They hung suspended in the sky, surfing the wash of air that
screamed past Joe to suspend itself above the cliff and out over the edge of the world. This was a gull’s world, he decided, and, in his musing, almost tripped over the broken bricks that marked the edge of the remains of the old lighthouse foundation.

He stopped and knelt, examining the perimeter. A wavy line of dull red cobbles ran in a circle as wide as a house. At five-foot intervals, heavy white pillars stuck out from the earthlike splints. Each of these was fractured off within three feet of the foundation’s base. In between, a spray of rubble covered the earth. Splintered beams that looked like petrified fossils were jumbled in five piles and mortared with broken brick and stone. Most of the lighthouse had crashed out into the ocean, but here were the pieces too heavy to be blown away by any storm.

Joe walked through the circle slowly, stepping gingerly around the boulders and broken beams. Treading quietly, as if in a cemetery.

And wasn’t this a memorial, of sorts, for dozens of the dead?

A preliminary walk around the decaying foundation yielded nothing. There was a lot of rock and rubble here, nothing more. Scrub grass crept up the sides of the rocks, forming a barrier of green and shadow over spots of the otherwise barren promontory.

He began to look past the former walls of the lighthouse. Could there have been another structure here? Another entrance to a storm cellar or the like?

He stayed in the circle though, and methodically checked each broken pillar for movement.

They were not budging for the likes of him.

He moved out into what was once the center of the lighthouse. There were timbers small enough here for him to roll over, if not lift.

Joe chose one timber that looked dried out and relatively light and gave it a shove.

Light, my ass
. He grinned.

But with a trickle of gravel, the timber creaked out of the earth, and then Joe let go, tumbling it to the side.

More rubble beneath. And an oblong piece of stone that looked almost fully intact. He brushed the dirt and stones from it, and found the edges.

Damn glad I wore gloves for this
, he thought as he massaged the crumbling mud from the edges and nodded finally, his hunch proven correct.

He’d found a stone step. Probably one that had begun a long slant upward to the lighthouse’s cloud-skimming loft.

“Where there are steps up, there may also be steps down,” he murmured, and began rooting about the pile, looking for a likely lever to nudge.

It was kind of like playing that game Ker Plunk. He grinned, thinking back to his childhood. Pull the wrong piece of wood and the whole mess collapses and you lose. The only difference was, in this case, you wanted to lose. You wanted to pull out a stick and have the whole pile fall down.

Not on top of you, though, of course.

He shifted a small timber and suddenly had easy access to the underside of a larger beam. Its end was pinned by a number of television-size masonry shards, but he gave it a shove anyway, and things all around him began to shift.

“Heeeeeyeeeeaaah,” he bellowed and pushed upward with his whole body on the old beam. There was a slow, building creak, and then a fast snap. Then a satisfying
clack
of rock banging together. The whole mess shifted to the right. As the weight suddenly disappeared, Joe lost his balance and began to fall forward with the wood, his grip still with the bottom of the now airborne beam. He let go, but his body continued its forward momentum and he tripped over debris to land heavily in the space just moments ago occupied by a twelve-foot timber.

“That may be enough of that,” he murmured, and mopped a dusty glove across the sweat streaming down his forehead and into his eyes.
I don’t know what I’m trying to prove here
anyway. Anything that might have been left underground one hundred
years ago has long ago molded away to dust
.

He lay there a moment, arm over the splintered end of a rotted beam, catching his breath.

Something smelled, he thought.

Like the cool, wormy air of the bottom of the rock pile.

Or was it more than that? The temperature of the air around him seemed to cool as drafts of damp air breathed by.

Joe crawled forward a foot. Then another. His head was tucked below a person-size pillar of stone, overhung by a mass of brick and wood. He hardly dared breathe lest he bring the whole pile down on top of him.

But the air seemed colder here than just a couple feet above. His hands felt their way forward beneath a low shelf of rock.

The ground dropped out from under his right hand.

With his fingers, he carefully mapped out the drop, praying that nothing bit his hand as he blindly explored the opening. The hole descended six inches or so, and then his hand hit bottom. He slid his fingers forward on the flat surface another foot or so, and then his fingers dropped into air again.

He pulled back.

There was a stairway here. Into the mountain. Into the lair of the devil of the cliff.

Joe grinned with maniacal glee. He was going to get the bastard where he lived.

With renewed effort, he began to widen the area around the hole, careful not to cause a cave-in.

A half hour later, face muddied and streaming with perspiration, Joe stood back and admired the results of his labor.

A stone step. And beyond it another. And another. They disappeared down into the blackness of the mountain.

He grabbed a flashlight from his backpack and then pulled the pack onto his shoulders. He planted one muddy sneaker on the first step. He turned around, looked out at his car; he was barely able to see it from here. He swiveled again, facing the black hole before him, and, his back to the still-towering
pile of rock above him, he descended the stairs on his hands and knees.
Like a ladder into hell
, he thought.

There were thirteen stairs. He counted. And at the bottom, he straightened and looked above him to the tiny hole of bright blue that was the sky. It seemed impossibly far away from down here.

Joe shone the flashlight around, making a careful circle of light in the underground. The base of the stairs ended in a narrow corridor that led off to the left. Not away from the cliff’s edge, but parallel to it. It was a man-made hallway, with grouted stone on the floor, walls and ceiling. He felt as if he’d entered a catacomb.

That feeling intensified when he turned the corner. His steps echoed dully as he moved forward, and then went down another flight of thirteen steps. Again, thirteen.

Here the stonework vanished, and the walls reflected back a dull chiseled gray at the beam of his light. He walked forward, slower now as the comforting, familiar sounds of the mountain wind and the crying gulls disappeared completely. Here there was no sound but that of his own making. He could hear his heart beating through the stillness. It was not a comforting sound.

Something moved behind him, and he froze. He heard it again. A scuffing, like footsteps. The skittering sound of a rock falling.

Shit. One thing he hadn’t brought was a weapon. He hadn’t expected human interference in this little exploratory expedition, but that was stupid, wasn’t it? Joe thought about what the demon had done to Angelica on the side of the road not far from here. It hadn’t hurt her itself. It had used another.

“Joe?”

His heart skipped three beats.

“Joe, are you down here?”

He let out his breath in an explosion of relief. It was Cindy. It was only Cindy! But how the hell had she found him?

“Yes,” he yelled back. “Stay there, I’ll be right up.”

He turned back and started back up the steps to the man-made part of the corridor. But she was already there.

“Hey, I saw your car and didn’t see you. So I looked around a bit and saw all this stuff kicked around here at the old lighthouse spot. When I saw the stairs going down, I figured you must’ve turned archaeologist or something.”

“A little investigative reporting, that’s all. Let’s head back up.”

But she started down the stairs instead.

“No,” she said. “This is great. What’s down here?”

“We’ll come back another time,” he lied. “You’re not dressed for this.”

Cindy fingered her loose white cotton top and shrugged. “If this gets dirty, I’ll toss it. I’ve had it forever.”

“Actually I was thinking more of your pants,” he said, giving it one last shot. She was wearing those skintight stretch pants. Light blue. Very nice around the thighs and butt, he noticed again.

“Naah.” She grinned and tossed her head. “Let’s go. These are comfy for walking or climbing…or just about anything else!”

She bounced ahead of him, and they started back down the corridor once again, deeper into the mountain.