Incubi

Chapter 36

They lashed her to the floor, to iron lugs. She felt submerged in an utter blackness that was somehow beautiful and bright.

“Pater terrae,” she heard.

The three figures looked down. They’d splayed her over the Trine, her head at the top point, her feet at the lower two. Her lashed hands formed two more points. She was a human pentacle.

“Give us grace,” spoke the Prelate.

“We are risen in thy grace,” answered the surrogoti.

Sweat licked her naked body. The wavering candlelight looked far away, like dim stars. The darkness was showing her things — she knew now, and she was not afraid. She felt risen, too: her tininess and insignificance gently lifted to a higher stratum.

“Protect us.”

“We beseech thee, in our love.”

Love, she thought. She’d had love once, hadn’t she? She closed her eyes and looked back on her life. Love? At least someone had loved her here. Greater love awaited, though, infinite love.

“Protect us.”

The Prelate’s voice sounded graven. Something was wrong.

“No one must interfere.”

Interfere? She closed her eyes more tightly.

Then she saw.

She saw a man. The man was tainted yet radiant. He shined bright above whatever error she sensed. It was love that purged his taints. It was love that made him seem so bright in her mind.

“Kill him with these, if you must.”

The Prelate was handing dolches to the pair of surrogoti. “Go,” he bid.

The surrogoti turned and left.

But where were they going?

More confusion. She saw the man very closely now; he was walking through some image in her mind. It was not memory. It was not the past. The man she saw in her mind was Jack.

He was here. Now. He was coming for her.

“Flesh through blood. Body through spirit.”

The Prelate knelt at the base of the Trine, between her legs. His aura radiated about his head like black sparks, like a halo made of twilight.

He raised a third dolch and kissed it.

He looked down at her then, in all his truth—

Truth? she questioned.

— but it was not truth she saw when she looked back.

She saw through it now, to the core of what it really was. Not truth at all, but a spurious replica — a fake behind a facade.

It was corruption. Total. Final. Black.

It was the antithesis of truth.

Veronica tried to scream, but no sound came out.

The Prelate grinned, a grin not of wisdom, but of perfect evil, and in a voice thick as smoke he began the Invocation to Baalzephon, Sentinel Apostate of Creativity, the Father of the Earth, which would be followed by the Final Rite of the Transposition.

Jack stood cruxed in the room of mirrors. Its bright silver walls enticed him to look at the thousand facsimiles of himself; he couldn’t help it. He saw himself in the veins, disheveled, eyes propped open by weird fascination, and the Remington at port arms. Why had Khoronos built such a room? And what could it possibly have to do with the basement?

His reflection returned his confusion. But suddenly a darker reflection joined his own.

“So cometh the Vindicator?”

Jack spun, racking the shotgun. The reflections stifled him; it took a moment to pick the one that was real, and he knew that in that moment he could’ve been killed.

“We are risen,” the figure said. “We never end.”

A young man stood before him, in a black cassock and lowered hood. French accent, Jack thought. Gilles.

The young man’s hand gripped a knife made of black stone.

“I have seen ages,” he intoned, “and through those ages the inquisitors never change… But, then, neither do we.”

Jack stared. Someone cut this guy bad. A blade had riven him cheek-to-cheek; it made his mouth look huge and phantasmal. One eye socket had been plugged up with tissues.

“Inquisitor. Leave while you still can.”

“You’re about six months early for Halloween, fella,” Jack said. “Tell me where Veronica is or I’ll blow your shit clear to gay Paris.”

“You can’t hurt us. We don’t want to hurt you. Tomorrow we’ll be gone, and your life will remain. You can’t hurt us, believe me.”

“I’m not gonna hurt you, pal, I’ll gonna kill you. So start talking and maybe I’ll decide to be a nice guy.”

The figure took a step forward. The black knife glittered.

“Are you pure-ass crazy? One more step and I put a hole in your chest big enough to drive a bus through.” Jack brought the shotgun up, eyesighting down the bead. This was the motherfucker who’d raped Ginny. Had he done the same to Veronica?

“Let’s try one more time. Where’s Veronica?”

The figure lunged, wielding the knife. Jack squeezed off a round, which slammed into the Frenchman’s right elbow. The knife flew away with his forearm. Pellets cracked the mirrors behind the man; sprays of blood drooled down the glass.

Yet Gilles remained standing.

Jack racked up the next round. “What’s it gonna be?”

“All the truth that you can bear is yours. How much, inquisitor? How much truth can you take before you see what you really are?”

Jack veered the bead to the figure’s chest.

Gilles lunged again, reaching out with his remaining arm.

Jack put the next round into the kid’s 5x, racked a third, and put that in the lower abs. The dual report slammed Gilles to the glass floor as if a pallet of mason blocks had been dropped on him. The floor spiderwebbed amid spatters of blood, and smoke rose as Jack appraised the broken corpse. So much for him.

Then he noticed the gap.

He racked up round number four. Behind the body, a panel seemed to lean open, a black seam in the room’s silver glare.

Jack squinted. A door.

He nosed the Remington into the gap. A dark stairwell led down.

Veronica’s down there.

He opened the door fully, took a step—

“Holy fuck!” he shouted, and squeezed off another round.

A second cloaked figure had lurched out of the doorway and grabbed the shotgun barrel. Ginny wasn’t kidding when she said this fucker was big. He was huge, and worse, he’d taken the shotgun blast full in the gut and didn’t drop. The guy’s hands grasped the barrel and slide: Jack couldn’t feed the next round.

Then the figure chuckled, levered upward, and tore the Remington from Jack’s hands.

The fuckers must be wearing vests under the getups, Jack thought. His heart slugged when the figure broke the slide off the gun.

“Gilles vaz too merciful,” the German said. “He gave you a chance to leave. I vill not.”

“Fraus Herren,” Jack muttered. He shucked the Webley and stepped back. “The false man.”

“Nein. I am more real that you could ever know.”

Careful, Jack warned himself. If they had vests, he’d have to go for a head shot, and that would not be easy with this big, top-heavy revolver.

Marzen lowered his hood and smiled. He withdrew and identical black dagger — a dolch, Jack remembered — and ran his finger along the cutting edge. Blood oozed from the German’s fingertips, and on his own forehead he christened himself, drawing a crude inverted cross.

“I vill cut off your skin. I vill dig out your eyes and eat them. I vill feed your insides to my god.”

“This is a gun, dickbrain,” Jack pointed out. “It shoots bullets. That little nail file you got doesn’t mean shit to me. I’ll shove it up your ass after I blow your head off.” But then he thought: What the hell am I waiting for? He cocked the Webley and sighted down on the German’s head. Marzen didn’t move — he just stood there, grinning. “See you at your autopsy, pal,” Jack said, and squeezed the trigger.

The glass room shook at the big pistol’s report. It sounded like an ash can going off. There was one good thing about the Webley: when it hit, it hit like a runaway truck. The big hot-loaded.455 caught Marzen in the throat and blew him down the stairs. The dolch clattered after him.

How stupid can guys be? Jack wondered. They’d both just stood there and let themselves be shot.

“Jack, what the—”

Jack twirled, aiming the Webley.

Ginny screamed.

“Goddamn it!” he bellowed. “I told you to wait!”

She stood teetering. “I was scared. I heard shots.”

“I just got done killing those two guys. And there’s one more to go. Khoronos.”

“Jack,” she faltered. She held the Smith snub by the edge of its grip. The dried blood on her legs looked like tempera paint. “I told you, they’re not men.”

“Get out of here, Ginny. You’re delirious—”

“They’re devils.”

Jack stared at her. The dock bum had said the same thing. Devils. He pointed to Gilles’ corpse. “See that, Ginny? It’s not a devil. It’s a dead man. There’s another dead man downstairs.” He threw her the keys to his unmarked. “Go down the road and wait in the car.”

He stepped over Gilles’ corpse and headed for the opened mirror panel, but she rushed after him. “Don’t leave me alone!” she pleaded.

He turned, infuriated. “Get out! I got no time to—”

— but what he saw as he turned paralyzed him. He saw Gilles’ corpse lying behind Ginny. Then he saw the corpse…get up.

“Look out!” Ginny was in the way; he couldn’t shoot. Gilles’ hand snapped over her shoulder, grabbed Jack by the collar, and threw him to the floor. Jack heard the Webley slide out of reach.

Ginny’s screams sounded like screeching tires. Jack rose to hands and knees, and looked up. Gilles had straddled Ginny on the floor, clamping her neck down with one hand. These guys aren’t wearing vests, Jack realized. The Frenchman’s cassock hung open, showing meaty shotgun craters. And there was something else—

Ginny screamed and screamed—

My God, the thought poured across Jack’s mind.

He was not looking at a man now, he was looking at a nightmare. The Frenchman’s hand seemed cloven, taloned. And his face—

Sweet Jesus…

— was no human face at all. It seemed barely a face of any kind. Spheric yellow eyes glinted from the malformed cranium. The huge mouth protracted, full of teeth like cracked glass. Two stubs jousted from the runneled foreskull.

A devil’s face, Jack thought.

The Webley had slid across the room, and he didn’t see where the Smith had landed. All that lay between himself and the thing that was killing Ginny was…

The dolch. It glinted blackly just feet ahead of him.

But Jack thought he was going to be sick as he crawled for it. Ginny’s machinelike screams burst out of her throat, flaying the air. They sounded mindless. The thing that had once been Gilles unhinged its wedged jaw. The bezeled teeth shimmered. Jack’s hand landed on the dolch, and he lurched forward just in time to see the gaping maw close completely over Ginny’s screaming face.

Her fists and heels pummeled the glass floor; her body twitched like electrocution. Teeth ground against bone and blood poured as the thing ate Ginny’s face off her skull, like someone eating the icing off a cupcake.

Then a black forked tongue extracted the lidless eyes…

Jack plunged the dolch into the thing’s knobbed spine.

Its howl blasted him across the room. Then the room exploded. Jack covered his head against the rain of glass, squeezing himself into a corner under the avalanche of sound — a tremor like a thousand screams in unison, which rose and rose—

And then stopped.

Then: silence. Like the silence after a bomb going off.

Jack opened his eyes. Ginny’s bare feet twitched a few more times, then she died. Jack did not look at the sloughed red mask of bone where her face had once been. And the thing—

The obscenity in the black cassock was Gilles again. He lay skewed across the floor, dead.

Jack did not reckon this madness. Glass slivers slid off his back as he rose. He picked up the Webley and headed down the stairs.

They were narrow and dark. They turned at what must be the first-floor landing, and suddenly he detected light. It wavered dimly. Candlelight, he realized. The basement.

And he knew what to expect.

Marzen would be waiting, slightly more or slightly less than human.

The words turned about her head like quiet birds—“Pater terrae, per me terram ambula”—and then yes she thought she saw a bird a beautiful black bird rising like light from a chasm and something else even more beautiful rising behind it and then she heard more words smoking words I am Baalzephon, Father of the Earth. Be one with me and my minions, my love. Be with me forever.

The man made of flames took Veronica’s hand and kissed it.

Jack picked up the German’s fallen dolch on the first landing. Again, he did not even attempt to sew reality into the madness he’d witnessed. Perhaps he was mad himself by now.

The guns had only slowed them down, but it was the dolch that had killed Gilles. Jack stuck the Webley in his belt and gripped the black knife. It felt like sleek ice in his hand. It felt reverberant with some unearthly power.

He scanned down the stairwell. Nothing.

“Come on, you ugly fuck. I’m here. Come and get me.”

But only silence hung in the stairs, and flickering light.

Then the tremendous weight slammed down on his back.

Jack’s lungs voided. The thing had dropped itself from the ceiling of the staircase. Entangled with it, he rolled thumping to the bottom of the steps.

Pressure ballooned his face, the cloven hand latched to his neck. The candlelight licked Marzen’s primeval visage. Dog-like jaws snapped twice, then it grinned. The light made a shadow of its horns against the wall.

Jack couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t even move under the muscled, inhuman weight. He felt encased in cement and smothering but somehow he was able to think: I’m dying.

The huge mouth spread wide, showing a black pit full of teeth. It began to lower to Jack’s face. Its breath stank of all the evil in history.

Visions unfurled. Stars burst into bright colors and beautiful kaleidoscopes. Jack saw things then, as his mind blanked out. He saw love and graciousness. He saw wonder. He saw the old man Carlson trotting docks in rotten clothes, hungry and poor but smiling, each broken step a celebration of life. He saw Faye’s sweet smile, the sun shining in her hair, and then he saw Veronica and all the love she’d had for him once. He saw all his flaws destroyed by the simple, bright light of joy and all the treasures of the world. Trees, the sky, starry nights and kisses — all these things and millions more in what would be the second before his death. Jack was dying now, at the filth-encrusted hands of an ageless evil, yet all he could see was jubilation. No, he was not scared, and he did not see devils.

He saw angels.

The roars deafened him. The ground beneath him shook like demolition as the incubus unloosed the bellow of its agony. Jack felt flattened by the tumult of noise; the taloned hand came away from his throat and the crushing weight sidled off him.

Gagging, he opened his eyes. Blood pulsed back into his brain and he could see again. Jack was alive, but Marzen lay dead at his side, the black dolch buried to the hilt in his belly.

I’m still alive, Jack thought.

He got up and turned.

A figure stood like a chess piece at the end of the light. It was waiting for him.

“Khoronos,” Jack said.

“Inquisitor. Welcome to the temple of my god.”

Jack stepped up, drawing the Webley from his belt. “You’re not like them, are you?” He pointed the revolver at the figure’s cloaked head. “I know you’re not.”

“The flesh falters, but the spirit goes on. No, you needn’t a dolch to kill me, inquisitor. Kill me with your guns, your crusader’s tools. Kill me with your prisons, your poison gas, and your electric chairs. You may kill me with your bare hands if you like. It hardly matters.”

Candlelight glistened on the lean face. The candles sizzled. Khoronos stood perfectly still and did not blink. His smile looked like a concession, a lament.

“Where’s Veronica?” Jack demanded.

“Instead of fighting us, why not join us? Be one with us in the temple of our god. We never end, inquisitor.” The clement voice drifted. “Infinity can be a beautiful thing.”

Jack’s heart felt dead. “Where’s Veronica?”

“She’s gone,” Khoronos said.

His hand bid the floor. All that lay within the shape of the Trine was a large pool of blood.

“She is with the Father now, the Father of the Earth.”

Baalzephon, the word whispered in Jack’s head.

Khoronos spread out his hands and looked up. Only the whites showed in his eyes, and a gentle smile touched his lips.

“Aorista,” he said.

Jack dropped the Webley’s hammer.

In this bizarre transition of bullet to flesh, Jack heard only a bang that seemed far away. A flash popped. Khoronos’ face split in the sack hood. The bullet mowed him down like a tall weed.

Footsteps pounded behind him. Stewie and Randy and several uniforms burst into the basement. But Jack didn’t see them, he didn’t care. They seemed to sense this and stayed themselves to give Jack room.

Jack approached the Trine.

Khoronos lay dead on his back. Blood leaked from his cracked head within the hood.

Jack knelt at the Trine.

He put his hands in the blood — Veronica’s blood. It had no heat in it at all.

Goodbye, Veronica.

He brought his hands to his face and began to cry.