Friend of the Devil, page 14
32
ASHES TO ASHES
Sam wandered for a good while until he saw the V-shaped poplar again. This time, he realized it was actually two trees—one white, the other black—but growing so close together that they appeared to stem from a common trunk split at the roots.
There was no longer a body in the dense brush behind the tree, and the ground was no longer slick with Dale’s insides. But the soil, he could tell, had been turned. And there was a conspicuous tidiness to the area. All around it, there were fallen leaves, bird droppings, squashed berries, broken twigs—but in this one spot, only fresh-swept earth as though the wind had decided to blow just this patch clean.
A fly buzzed by Sam’s ear, and he crushed it against his neck. He began circling the area in a widening spiral, hoping to pick up tracks.
He heard a great flapping. A shadow fell over him. He looked up to see a giant crow tilt above him and take a branch, a worm in its mouth. The bird stared at him, its eyes glossy gold in the moonlight, its head inclining here and there with a clockwork twitch. Sam knew little about birds, but he thought crows were smaller than this, and as he drew closer, he wondered if this might be a raven. “Nevermore,” Sam said.
The worm in the bird’s mouth caught Sam’s eye. If Sam knew little about birds, he knew even less about worms. Still, he was fairly confident they didn’t have a fingernail and what was left of a knuckle. The bird swallowed the finger in its beak and flitted off. Sam followed, hoping it might lead him to the source of this grisly fare.
Soon, the flies grew thicker, their buzzing gathering in a dull roar. The swarm was focused on the contents of a freshly dug pit. Sam drew his gun and silently edged toward it.
Within the pit, lying in a grotesque tangle of limbs, were parts of Jimmy, Laura, Bernard, Evan, Paul, Dale, and a very young boy who Sam gathered was Izzy, the orphan. Sam heard a twig snap and rolled into a defensive crouch behind a tree.
Someone was humming cheerfully. A hooded figure walked to the lip of the pit carrying a canvas bag. The cat, Crowley, darted about the person’s feet.
Sam primed his gun. “Freeze.”
The hooded figure turned abruptly in his direction but otherwise obliged.
“What have you got in the bag, Ms. Lee?” Sam asked.
The librarian pushed the hood of her cloak back and smiled at Sam. She shook Paul’s head out of the sack and into the pit.
“There a reason you killed all those people?” Sam asked.
“They saw the book,” she said. “Except for Izzy. His death served a different purpose.”
“And what was that?” Sam asked.
Ms. Lee’s mouth twitched. She appeared to be suppressing a laugh.
“You drink his blood to summon a demon?” Sam asked.
She nodded.
“Do you have any idea how batshit, fucking crazy you are?” Sam asked.
“You served your purpose, Mr. Gregory, recovering the book and leading us to all the uninitiated who’d seen it, but now it’s time for you to go.”
“Us? Who’s us?” Sam asked.
She clutched her medallion and began mumbling in Latin.
“Ms. Lee, you are three or four abracadabras away from me emptying my .45 into you, so why don’t you knock this shit off and tell me who the hell—”
She flicked one of her fingers. Sam’s gun sailed out of his hand as though she’d tugged it with an invisible string. It clattered against the trunk of a tree fifty feet away.
“Please watch your language,” she said. “This is, after all, a school for children.”
Sam stared at her, frozen. Ms. Lee pushed her palm toward him, and an invisible force knocked him head over heels. He scrambled to his feet and saw her grinning at him with all the wide-eyed wonder and warmth of a baby. Then she lifted off the ground and beamed down at him, the moonlight behind her. He tore off toward the mouth of the vale, her rolling, delirious laughter spurring him.
33
COVEN
Harriet huddled on the spiral staircase that led from the journalism building into the tunnels. She put her hands in her mouth and bit down to stop them from shaking. She wasn’t sure why she’d run. She hadn’t killed Mr. Chesterton. His frog had killed him. But she imagined explaining that and decided she’d been right to dash.
What . . . what if she’d lost her mind? What if she’d imagined everything in the tunnels?
But she had his robe and that necklace. She’d seen him down here doing . . . something. Hadn’t she?
She took out the map of the tunnels she’d begun to make and started plotting a path back to her dorm. If she got into her room, she could think. She could figure out what to do next.
Lock your door and say your prayers. . . . Fat lot of good that’ll do.
Why had Flynn said that? What did he know?
She was walking—she thought—beneath Washington Irving Place, when she saw a candle. Someone in a hooded robe was using it to light the way. She killed her flashlight and pressed her back against the wall.
From the other direction, she heard shoes scraping stone. She turned and saw another hooded figure with a candle. It was headed toward her.
She moved quietly away, took a right and pulled up short when she saw two more hooded figures with candles. In the other direction, three more. She squatted, fished around in the broken masonry and found a loose brick. She stood and held it high.
The hooded figures began to converge. But not on her. They all seemed to be heading in one direction, away from the main campus. Harriet quietly pulled Mr. Chesteron’s robe and necklace from her bag and put them on. She found a candle and some matches in one of the robe’s pockets. She lit the candle, threw the hood over her head and slowly fell in with the throng.
34
ROUGH WATERS
Sam ran, skidded, and tumbled back to the mouth of the vale. He’d just cleared the fence when, in the distance, he saw a dozen tiny flickers slowly snaking toward him.
Soon he could see that the flickers were candles, that each candle was held by a person wearing a hooded cloak like Ms. Lee’s, and that they were making their way toward the vale, the eerie chords of their mumbled chants just reaching him. He sprinted through the narrowing gap between the candle bearers and the fence and cut toward the dock.
He jimmied open the door to the boathouse, cranked up the bay wall, jumped into a motorboat and began bringing a rock down on the chain mooring it.
The door banged open. Flynn stumbled in and fired a speargun at him. Sam ducked and the harpoon missed him, lodging near the boat’s motor. Flynn charged, loading another harpoon, as Sam danced backward in the motorboat, inadvertently kicking the starter. Flynn fired another harpoon, which barely missed Sam and splintered the paneling by the throttle.
As Flynn reloaded, Sam charged, hoping to tackle Flynn before he could raise his weapon. The buffeting of the boat threw off his jump, however, and he ended up landing ribs first against the edge of the dock. He turned his head and was staring up the shaft of a locked and loaded harpoon.
“I know what you is,” Flynn slurred. “I know what goes on here.”
“I’m not . . . I’m not part of this,” Sam said. “I don’t—”
“Go to hell,” Flynn said, but as he started to pull the trigger, the motorboat kicked into gear and the chain pulled taut, taking Flynn’s legs out from under him. He fell on his back, his head over the edge of the slip, but he miraculously held on to the speargun, which he continued to level at Sam.
At the same moment, Sam saw the lever for the winch suspending the sailboat above Flynn. He dove for it and slapped open the catch. The boat came crashing down on Flynn’s face, snapping his neck over the lip of the dock.
Flynn’s limbs still twitching, Sam went through his pockets and found a large ring of keys. He opened the lock on the chain mooring the already moving motorboat and dove in as the chain spooled free.
As he pulled away from the dock, Sam saw several of them standing on the bluffs overhanging the bay, hoods thrown back, medallions against their chests. He saw the headmaster and Ms. Lee and Dr. O’Megaly and a dozen others, their hands joined, chanting.
The waves began to churn around Sam, and soon he was awash in roiling froth. He threaded his arms through the steering wheel to avoid getting thrown clear as the boat was tossed airborne by the chop. The waves were driving him back against the shore and the small motor in his boat was no match for them. They dashed his boat against the breakwater; he spilled out and hit the rocks, then all was black.
35
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE
When Sam came to, he was sitting in the middle of a pentagram. Dale’s pentagram had looked like a child’s version of this one. The candles dotting each angle were three feet tall, set on thick silver sticks filigreed with golden fractals and inlaid with rubies. The pentagram wasn’t raked into the ground with a stick but chiseled into a giant stone slab, its crevasses overflowing with a mélange of exotic spices. Gouged into the stone were what appeared to be great claw marks.
Surrounding Sam was a throng, all wearing hoods, all chanting, their heads bowed. One of them stepped forward and lowered his hood. It was Thomas Arundel, the headmaster. He smiled.
“Hello, Sam.”
“What the hell is this?” Sam asked, standing.
“A faculty meeting of sorts,” the headmaster said. “We’ve been having them here since the school was founded over three hundred years ago.”
“Uh-huh. And what are you meeting about?” Sam asked.
“You,” said the headmaster.
“How did Ms. Lee . . .” Sam started, then trailed off. “Who are you people? What’s going on? How did you . . .”
Sam stared into the headmaster’s wide, friendly face—a face with which the headmaster had learned to evince warmth over the centuries. But the eyes still twinkled with giddy cruelty. It was Mason Alderhut.
Sam tried desperately to pull himself together. This was a trick. This was all some trick. The stuff Ms. Lee had done in the forest, the way they’d summoned the waves to crash his boat, the headmaster looking like Alderhut—this was all just a magic trick, and he was not going to fall for it.
“I can kill some of you,” Sam shouted. “Maybe not all, but if you come at me, some of you are going down. You all want to take that chance?” He gathered some of the spices in one hand. He thought maybe he could blind whoever came at him first and make a run for it.
“We’re not going to kill you, Sam,” the headmaster said.
“Oh. Right,” Sam said, glancing at the claw marks. “You’re gonna have your demon do it. The one you murdered that poor kid, Izzy, to summon. That’s what I’m supposed to think?”
“You don’t understand, Sam,” the headmaster said.
Sam eyed the thick silver candlesticks, thought maybe he could use one as a weapon. “I understand you’re a creepy group of psychos, and I also understand that there’s no such thing as demons!” he yelled. “I don’t know how you’re pulling this magic shit, but I know it ain’t real!”
“You don’t understand, Sam,” the headmaster said again.
“Come on, bring on the demon! What, does one of you wear a costume? You got a giant dog you dress up? What kind of Scooby-Doo bullshit is this?”
“Sam,” the headmaster said kindly, “you are the demon.”
“What?”
“There is no Sam Gregory,” the headmaster said. “We created him. We had to. Without giving you the anchor of a mortal ego, you would be impossible to control, even for us.”
Sam stared at the headmaster, slack-jawed. “Right . . .” he said. Sam edged a little closer to the headmaster, thinking he might be able to get him in a chokehold and that if he threatened to snap his neck, maybe the others would back off.
“I know,” said the headmaster. “You think you know who you are: Sam Gregory. Insurance investigator. Veteran of a war where you got that tattoo.”
The headmaster pointed at Sam’s snake tattoo. In the undulous candlelight, it looked as if the snake were slithering.
“In fact, you are a veteran of a war, Sam. The first war of all time.” The chanting grew louder. “It was between God and Lucifer. And your side lost.”
One more foot, Sam thought, just get one foot closer to me, you crazy bastard, and I can—
A searing pain shot through Sam’s shoulder blades and he dropped to his knees gasping. “The fuck did you do to me?” Sam rasped.
“Nothing, Sam,” the headmaster said quietly. “You are as God made you.”
Sam wailed in agony as the skin around his toenails and fingernails split and blood ran down his feet and hands. His gums cracked and blood filled his mouth. Unendurable pain rippled through every muscle in his back. Something was tearing its way out of him. He heard a slow, booming, flapping sound and smelled feathers wet with blood. The candle flames around him flinched and faltered in a rhythmic breeze, and Sam realized with horror that the breeze came from him. He turned his head and saw, over each shoulder, a mass of leathery sinew and black feathers eight feet high. He stared at the razor-sharp whip of a tail coiled around his cloven hooves and the black talons that had sprouted from his fingertips. He tilted back his head, parted his fangs and howled in terror.
“Time to go home, Sam,” the headmaster said.
This isn’t happening, Sam thought. They’d given him something to make him hallucinate. Or this was just another nightmare. Or . . . he’d finally snapped. He knew he was on the edge. He remembered the way the doctors had looked at him when he got back from the war, how he’d lied to get released, didn’t tell them about waking up in the corner of his room with his gun in his hand, or pissing his sheets, or the meds he went to four different pharmacies to fill. Maybe he’d finally lost it. Who knew if any of this was real? Who knew if . . .
Then he began to remember. He remembered Jimmy screaming as he gutted him in his shower, his intestines spooling out like a garden hose. He remembered Laura looking up at him with childlike surprise as blood soaked her clothes and her skin turned to chalk. He remembered Bernard moaning, his face in tatters, as Sam spun his head around till his chin rested on his back. He remembered splitting Evan in half like a piece of firewood, shearing Paul’s head from his shoulders, and being elbow deep in Dale, his viscera every color of the rainbow, spattered in a prismatic arc that violently clashed with the subdued autumn earth tones of the surrounding woods.
And he remembered coming there. He remembered opening his eyes and seeing the body of the ten-year-old boy, Izzy, white as milk, his throat cleaved nearly to the spine, his blood dripping from the knife in one of Arundel’s massive hands, his blood coating the basin that it had recently filled, his blood warming the chalices into which the basin had drained, his blood staining the lips of the witches who raised their chalices to Sam, slick like a newborn, dragged from Hell to serve them.
Sam was on his knees, his face in his hands, screaming and sobbing and pounding his forehead against the cold stone slab. “God,” he said . . .
And then he remembered. The most beautiful creature he’d ever seen, who’d opened his eyes and filled him with such hope and purpose. Tall, and golden, and proud, with wings of stardust, saluting them all with his great flaming sword and the crest of the serpent. And Sam in the crowd, his eyes wet with love, raising his own sword and his own serpent crest, in salute to Lucifer.
Sam ground his forehead against the stone slab, the fight gone from him. “Please . . .” he begged.
But he remembered. He remembered the shout that was all words at once blasting them from the celestial city like motes of dust. He remembered screaming and reaching out toward the heavenly light as it grew smaller and vanished, and he remembered plummeting into the endless, swallowing dark.
The chants grew louder, and the stone at Sam’s feet turned to mist. The mist began to swirl and sink, trapping his feet and dragging him down. As Sam fought to hang on to this world, his great claws found the familiar grooves he’d worn down deep into this stone slab over the centuries and screeched down them as he was pulled into the vortex.
“We return you now, to your master in Hell,” the headmaster said.
Through the swirling mist, Sam could see the fires of Hell. He began to fall. . . .
36
EMBEDDED
Harriet had followed the faithful through the winding tunnels and emerged near the dock. She’d remained at the rear, mummering along with them as the sea grew rough and smashed Sam’s boat against the rocks. She’d followed as they’d carried Sam into the Devil’s Vale and placed him on a stone altar. She’d watched Headmaster Arundel approach the altar and speak to Sam.
They were going to kill him, this guy who had saved her life. That much seemed clear.
Then again, he was pretty badass. She’d seen that. Maybe if she gave him a fighting chance.
She softly swept together a pile of leaves with her foot. She picked up a leaf and held it over her candle. When it caught, she dropped it into the pile. As it began to smolder, she edged toward the altar.
She fingered the loose brick she’d pocketed in the tunnels. The fire would cause a diversion. She would bash the headmaster over the head with the brick. She would help Sam flee and . . .
. . . and then Sam started to change.
