Covenant (22 page)

If he’d had to describe the sensation, it would have been difficult to find the words. The pain was excruciating, and yet, Ken’s body rocked also with the antithesis of that feeling, each thrust of pleasure also a claw of agony. His breath tasted of copper; his belly squirmed in terror and lust.

No, he couldn’t have named that feeling.

But he enjoyed it, this yin and yang of pleasure and pain. He thrilled to the life dripping from his body as he ripped asunder the life and psyche of another.

Still, that tiny jealous part of him wanted more. In the back of his mind, the naked body of the Gypsy woman receded and he saw the spires of stalagmites and stalactites that he’d always fantasized about even more than he had guiltily thought of taking a woman like this.

Brownsell Caverns…

Come One, Come All to the Fabulous Underground!
the billboards in his mind barked.

“
Some things are mine to give
,” the tar-thick voice cooed in his head. “
And others
…”

The weight on his back shifted then, and he felt the piton plunging deeper inside him, coming closer to piercing his blackened heart.

Laughter then. Purple stars in his soul. And he was standing up. The electricity shot through his legs and he fell to his knees. But hands gripped him beneath the armpits, hoisting
him again to a stumbling crouch. Hot warm liquid coursed down his legs, and he wondered if he’d pissed himself. But he couldn’t bring himself to look down. Only forward past walls of slick gray rock, as a nude, bloody body and a flash of blonde hair whirred around him like a crazedmerry-go-round, keeping him moving, pulling him forward.

It was getting increasingly difficult to concentrate. But he found his center. That sweet, heavy breath in his ear.

“
A little farther now
,” the breath whispered. “
Just a little
more
.”

Ken shrugged and stumbled on.

What else could he do?

Joe grabbed Karen Sander’s face between his hands and shook it from side to side. It moved without resistance in his grip.

“What’s wrong with you!” he yelled.

Her eyelids blinked. But she remained mute.

He pulled her away from the fat woman’s body with an effort. She didn’t resist, but her limbs didn’t move either.

What should he do? He had to break
somebody
out of the demon’s spell. It occurred to him that he himself could be paralyzed at any moment. Why
hadn’t
the thing used him as it had the others?

Or was it getting kicks just by watching him bounce around with as much effect on his surroundings as a pinball, propelled from target to target by a series of possessed flippers?

He slapped the older woman in the face then, wincing at the report. Her eyes blinked again, and a tear rolled down her face. But still she made no move to speak or stop him. He raised his hand again, and then dropped it.

What was the use? She was gone.

Her lips moved.

“Uuuh,” she whispered.

Joe bent closer, putting his ear to her mouth. “Tell me,” he urged. “C’mon.”

A faint hiss escaped her mouth and then a whisper. Just a hint, really. But he understood.

“Look,” she’d said.

He turned around just in time to see Cindy and Ken limp out of the cave, back the way they had come in.

As they left the room, Karen suddenly came to life with a coughing wheeze and fell into his embrace.

Behind her, Rhonda also took in a great sigh of breath and Monica slumped to the ground.

“Are you okay?” he asked Karen. She nodded swiftly as a new stream of tears trickled down her face. But this time she wiped them away viciously with her hand.

Joe left Karen to gather herself together, and went back to Angelica.

She was a mess.

Her breasts were bruised and smeared with dark blood, her clothes ripped and dirtied in a pile at her feet. She trembled and cried to herself, low sniffling cries, like an animal dying in a trap.

“Angelica?” he said softly. “Angelica, it’s me.”

Her eyes opened slowly. Those deep brown eyes fastened on his in disbelief.

“Joe?”

He nodded.

“Not you too!”

“I’m okay,” he answered. “Now let’s put you back together.”

He reached above her and began to undo the bindings from her arms.

When he finished, she sat up and clutched her arms across her chest. Her whole body trembled, and her lips shivered, drooling blood and spit on her thighs.

Joe took off his jacket, then his shirt.

“Here,” he said, offering her the shirt. “Let me wipe you off.”

Angelica shook her head and pulled away from him, curling into a ball on the floor.

“C’mon, hon,” he begged, putting an arm around her. “He might come back at any time.”

“What’s the use?” she snuffled. “He can do whatever He wants with us. And make us like it.”

She looked up at him and hissed, “I
liked
it.”

Joe shook her by the shoulders, trying to rally her resistance, but Angelica began to cry again. “Joe, I liked it,” she moaned.

“We have to stop it somehow,” he prodded, and Angelica looked up at him, a frightening image with black trails down her cheeks crossed by smears of red blood. She laughed. Leaning back on her elbows to reveal her bloodied, bruised breasts, she taunted him.

“He knew that somehow He could make me
enjoy
this!” she said, tears streaming off her cheeks. “How can we stop that?”

Joe didn’t answer, but used his shirt to wipe away the worst of her degradation. Then he offered her the discarded shirt and underwear. This time, without a word, she began to put them on.

“He let us go,” Karen Sander said, walking over to them finally. “Why?”

“More important things to do?” Joe said.

“He never took you at all, did he?”

Joe shook his head.

“Why not, I wonder?”

Rhonda shambled up behind her friend, nearly dragging Monica along behind her. “Yeah, what makes him so special?”

Joe shrugged and walked over to the entrance of the cave, where Terrel’s ancient journal lay abandoned on the ground. He’d dropped it when he’d tried to stop Cindy from stabbing Ken.

Behind him, a quavering voice answered.

“Maybe because he’s not part of the Covenant. He’s not from Terrel, you know.”

Rhonda snorted, and Joe shrugged again.

“Maybe it got more of a kick watching me stumble around without being able to do anything. It feeds off our emotions, off our souls. Maybe I was more useful to it mobile. But now we’ve got to do something. It’s taken Cindy.”

Rhonda gave a deep, rumbling belly laugh, bending over to slap a thigh in the process. Joe thought she might be enjoying this whole situation just a little too much.

“What’re we gonna do, champ?” she said, straightening, but still chuckling. “Go running after the little tramp until the demon turns us into statues again? Fuck that. I say we get the hell out of this cave and back to town before He notices we’re gone.”

This time it was Monica’s reedy voice that answered. “He can reach us there too, you know.”

Angelica finished with her last button, then pushed her matted, bedraggled hair from her face. “He can reach us wherever He wants. So it has to end here. Today. One way or the other.”

“If you’d just tell Him where your kid is, we could all go home free,” Rhonda barked.

Joe opened his mouth, then shut it again. Was there still an advantage to keeping Cindy’s identity secret? He wasn’t sure. But he sure wasn’t going to get any help from Rhonda to save her if Rhonda knew who it was she was saving.

So yes, maybe it was still best left buried. Even if she was already possessed.

“Angelica,” he said, turning away from the other women. “You’ve been a fortune-teller all your life, right?”

She nodded. “Mostly.”

“You must have read some books about spirits and the occult, then, right?”

Again she nodded, a look of puzzlement in her shadowed eyes.

“There must be something that you’ve read that describes
how to get control of a spirit. How to contain it. How to make it do your bidding.”

Angelica shook her head this time.

“No, Joe. Nothing that would help us with this…thing.” Joe held up his hand.

“No,” he said. “I won’t accept that. Don’t say anything—just think a moment. When someone tries black magic and calls a demon, what gives the human power over the spirit? Why should any demon listen to one of us?”

Angelica slumped back to the ground, her brow furrowed in thought.

“What are the methods of power over the spirit?” he said.

“It’s not something I ever really studied,” she said slowly. “Once I took the demon’s gift, I just sort of naturally had these premonitions. I didn’t work at it much. But—”

“Hocus-pocus.” Rhonda guffawed behind Joe.

He waved a hand at her. “Shush.”

Angelica’s eyes glazed as she stared into a distance only she could see. There was quiet in the cave for a minute. And then, slowly, she spoke.

“There is power in names…” she began. “I remember that much. Name the demon and you may wrap him to your will. But in the naming, you also bind the demon to yourself. His works are yours and vice versa. The calling of a demon always endangers the future of your soul.”

“I’ve read something similar,” Joe agreed.

Angelica shrugged. “Doesn’t do you a whole lot of good, does it?”

“Maybe it does.” Joe grinned, tapping the moldering journal in his right hand. “Old man Terrel may have left us something that will save his town once again. I don’t know if it will be enough—”

Again, Rhonda laughed. “Y’all just don’t get it, do you? He owns us. You can call Him fucker or prince and it doesn’t
matter. We’re just toys that He plays with. Get used to it already.”

Joe turned toward the passageway that led back to the top of the mountain. Back, eventually, to a dead end.

“It’s all we’ve got,” he said, and started walking.

With every step, Ken’s life was leaving him. A trail of crimson marked his every step, and it came home to him that it was over. He would never feel the thrill of dropping down a rope to explore the black mystery below. He would never bask in the sharp fire of the sun on an empty beach again. He would never—

“
Ah, but think of what you’ve had. Did you ever think you could
take a woman like that?
” the voice asked him.

His answer was a shaky, strangely sated, “No.” But was the fulfillment of his domination fantasy worth dying over?

“
How about the fulfillment of Brownsell Caverns?
” the voice asked. And as he stepped around the next bend, watching Cindy’s pale buttocks disappear into a broadening cave, his breath sucked in with an audible gasp.

“Yes,” he whispered, and fell to his knees. The hot blood streamed down his vertebrae, dripped from the crack of his ass to the rock floor. But its loss troubled him no longer. The problems of the flesh streamed away like wisps of fog from an August sun, and he gazed around him in ecstasy.

He had reached nirvana.

The cavern he’d dreamed of. Better than what he’d dreamed of. His vision was mundane—stalagmites and stalactites that protruded from the ceiling and floor. But this…this was a glorious underground crystal cave that he’d never even considered might exist. Hell, he hadn’t believed totally that
his dream cave was here, despite a lifetime of searching. And yet here he was. In the midst of an underground cavern more beautiful than any he’d ever heard of. In Terrel. Just minutes from the trails he’d blazed with the Cliff Combers.

The lights twinkled like fireworks in his eyes, electric blue and red reflecting from the dim light of his flashlight. He couldn’t remember ever hearing of a more intense collection of crystal formation, especially all collected in one small room. It would draw a fortune in tourist fees, he thought, his mind jumping ahead. He’d be rich. He’d be…

Dead.

The strength seeped out of him in rhythmic pulses, and he suddenly couldn’t hold his body erect any longer. He slumped to the ground, the lights glittering in his eyes blurring into a kaleidoscope of electric fireworks. A prism of past possibility.

“
Not yet
,” the voice urged.

A fire lit in his groin, hotter than the one that seeped from the back of his heart. Ken started, and with painful effort, raised his head from the rocky floor.

In the center of the cavern, Cindy had positioned herself on a stone slab. Another sacrifice for him, on an altar of glittering crystal. She was the heart of the geode.

She was naked. And her legs were spread.

“Come to me,” she said with the voice of the spirit. Her voice, though soft, echoed through the cavern like an explosion. Ken felt the demon’s strength surge inside him and he put forward an arm. Despite the red-hot poker that stabbed and gouged through his core with every movement, he pushed himself toward her.

“Just ahead, I think,” Joe called to the women behind him.

Angelica hadn’t said a word after falling in step behind his lead, and Monica hadn’t contributed anything since leaving the Cave of the Covenant. Behind them, her snuffling, lost-puppy whimpers continued to whine and echo through the tunnel.

Rhonda had done enough speaking for them all. If taunts were salable, Joe was, in just five minutes of vocalese, a millionaire.

“You really think you can save that little tramp?” Rhonda sneered. “You know she was fucking my son, and look what that got him? What makes you think you’ll be any different? Have you ever wondered if it was even Cindy that you were fucking? Maybe the devil was already inside her then. Maybe you’ve been bonin’ the fuckin’ devil.”

After a bit, Karen tiredly asked Rhonda to “just shut the fuck up.”

It hadn’t worked.

“Tell us, oh Great Spirit Master”—Rhonda smirked— “how will you vanquish this great evil from our town? Is there a virgin you might sacrifice? Don’t look at your girlfriend. And don’t look at any of us!”

Karen shot her a look and at last she quieted. In her heart, Karen felt that something was about to happen that would put an end to her lifetime of slavery. For better or worse…

“I don’t know how much help we’ll be…” she cautioned the reporter.

He shrugged. “Don’t know what I can really do either, but we have to try.”

They fell silent, the slow shuffling scrape of shoes on rock the only noise to rise above the distant rush of water sluicing from mountaintop to ocean. This, then, was the moment.
The
stand
, Joe thought.
Here we make our bid for freedom
. He thought of the story of Angelica’s failed escape from the spirit’s control, and of its result.

They stepped into the crystal chamber.

“Yes,
yes
,” Cindy moaned as a bloody hand flopped up from the cave floor below to grasp for purchase on her chest.

The world was an electric circuit board of pleasure to her now. Every glint of light, every touch on her body, every slick massage of blood…it all brought her spasms of orgasmic
pleasure. She yearned to have a man inside her. Any man. She needed to feel the light penetrate her. She needed Him to be inside her, bringing her to release. Bringing James inside her again.

Ken was climbing the rock pedestal with his last strength and the help of the demon and Cindy reached for him, pulling his trembling arms to her, straining to lift his shuddering, bloody form to lie with her.

In Ken’s mind, the world had faded to a prism of blue and the bloody tan of the blonde girl’s belly. The sight of his blood smeared across her breasts and glistening on her pubic lips excited him one last time, and he mumbled, “Yes,” as she pulled him to her.

“
Ease him in
,” the demon urged in Cindy’s mind. “
Take
him to your bosom as if he were myself. Take his seed and we will
birth a child of our own. You will give it your beauty, and I my
power. Take him. Take me. Take Jam
es.”

A smile lit her face at his name.

“James?” she whispered as the bloody caver sprawled over her. The voice of her late boyfriend seemed to echo in the cave, as if he were here and far away at the same time.

“
Yes, baby, I’m here. Make love to me?
”

It was his voice that spoke to her, and Cindy smiled wider, pulling at the struggling dying man, and closing her eyes to its maddened, unfocused face.

“Yes,” she breathed.