Dave Butler Writes

The two lovers stood in a central space empty but for the dog on the table.  Surrounding them was a crowd, chanting words Eddie didn’t recognize, beating small hand drums and playing sistra.  Sistra were brass rattles from ancient Egypt that looked something like the hollow metal head of a hairbrush with loose rods jammed through it; Eddie knew what they were because of Bible class, way back when, and he knew what they were because they were related to the tambourine.

Damn tambourine.  Should have said guitar player.

At the edge of the crowd, standing in four points that approximately made the four corners of a square, were totem poles.  They were wooden and crude, and each had only one figure carved on it.  The nearest look like a monkey’s head, and, taking them in at a glance, Eddie thought he saw a dog and a bird and a human.  All of them had long strips of cloth bandaged around their eyes.

The dog on the table whined, and only then did Eddie register what was actually going on in the scene in front of him.  The dog was alive, but its ribcage was cracked open, exposing heart, lungs and other things Eddie couldn’t immediately identify.  Ropes held the dog to the table, but it might also be sedated—it wasn’t struggling.  A row of stone bowls lay on the table beside the animal, and each bowl held a little puddle of meat, like sorting bowls for a butcher.  Miriam—the lamia, Eddie forced himself to call her in his mind—stooped and grabbed the heart out of the dog’s chest, severing the connecting arteries with a single swift slice of her stone knife.

“Ayayayayayay!” she wailed, and in a single gulp she devoured the heart while it was still beating.

The dog’s whine became a yowl, but then Aaron leaned over it, the snakes’ mouths that served him for fingers snatching what must be a heart out of one of the bowls and massaging it into the cavity from which the dog had lost its natural organ.  The replacement seemed to fit, and the dog still moved, though its new heart looked smaller to Eddie’s eye.

It’s a snake’s heart, he thought.

“We consecrate thee Wepwawet, opener of the ways,” Aaron chanted.  “Thy heart is pure in the ways of the serpent, thy breast nourishes all his words.”

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Eddie knew that to everyone else, he looked like he was walking drunk.  But the others couldn’t see the frozen heads, and he couldn’t bring himself to just walk through them.  In his rational mind, he knew that the sun overhead was fierce, but the cool desert breeze bit into his flesh like a piranha.  He shuddered under the black-eyed stares of the damned and tried to stay focused on the crumbling brick cube ahead of them.

Jim put a hand on Eddie’s shoulder and Eddie looked up, catching a quizzical look from the titan of a singer.

“Same old bullshit,” Eddie lied, shaking himself.  “A little worse than usual, maybe, but nothing new.”

“What do you mean, worse?” Mike asked.

“What is it, your job to ask all the dumb, irritating questions?” Eddie snapped, but then he felt bad.  “I don’t know,” he grumbled.  “Something bad happened here.  Some kind of terrible sin, maybe.”

Twitch laughed lightly.  From someone else, it might have sounded like mockery, but it lifted Eddie’s spirits a little.  “Sin,” the fairy giggled, “is for humans.”

“Yeah it is,” Eddie agreed.

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A tiny hall ended in a scratched dark brown door with a flaking plastic knob.  Irving pulled at the handle and squeaked.  “It sticks!” he exclaimed.

The trailer shook and its wood groaned.

“No time!” Eddie shouldered Mike aside, pointed the shotgun at the doorknob and boom!, blew it to pieces.  Then he muscled past Mike and Irving both, pushing himself first through the door.

He hopped down a cinderblock step and into the tent, leading with his weapon.  There were a few benches, rough-cut and dirty, and the back end of the white canvas sagged to the ground, but there were no snakes.  An iron tube sunk into a poured puddle of concrete served like a flag stand, and stuck into it was a wooden pole.  The wood looked so ancient it was almost petrified, and nailed to the top of the pole, coiled around a stubby crosspiece, was the desiccated body of a snake, six feet long and a brilliant red that managed to gleam through layers of sand and dust.  Eddie could smell the antiquity.

He blinked and tried not to focus on the infernal feast he saw at the back of the tent, haggard women ladeling soup from a huge cauldron into bowls that they handed to a line of equally haggard men.  The soup, Eddie saw, was awash in tiny fingers and toes.

“Clear!” he shouted, and stepped forward.

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“What are you doing to stop the summoning?” Eddie asked.  He knew this was a distraction, and that he should be focused on his real challenge—Adrian, and getting the wizard cured—but the thought that some sort of snake-worshipping sex cult was trying to summon its demon-deity caught his attention.  “Was that the idea behind stealing the Nehushtan?”

“Yeah,” Irving looked depressed.  “But I can barely get it to flicker.  It’s the real deal, all right—but I’m not.  Funny thing is, if our positions were switched, Aaron could probably use it like a flamethrower.  He was always a believer.”

“Still is,” Eddie pointed out.  “Just in the wrong stuff.”

Irving nodded.  “And the spells.  The summoning—I think—is a sort of group performance and incantation.  I think I have some ideas about how to throw a monkey wrench into it, but I’d need to have access to their props and scripts beforehand.  Well,” he chuckled uneasily, “or else be present at the ritual.”

“Would that be another orgy?” Mike asked.

“Boobs,” Twitch said.  Mike turned his palms up in an innocent shrug.  “We all know what you like, is all I’m saying,” the drummer added.

“Yes,” Irving answered.  “And at the end of the orgy, Apep is supposed to appear.  Surviving worshippers will be touched by him—like Aaron and Miriam were touched.”

“Surviving?” Eddie asked.

“Most of the worshippers will be eaten.”

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Eddie turned from his band mates, saw the Sears—

and was stunned.

Ice swept the ground around the blocky retailer, thick as a Minnesota lake in winter, with bodies stuck in it.  Faces emerged from the ice, hundreds of them dotting the frozen plain like geese on a pond.  Blue lips moaned soundlessly, and a bitter wind ripped through and around the heads, tearing at their ears and noses and ripping away bits of flesh.

“Damn,” Eddie shuddered and looked away, rubbing his eyes.

“Where do I turn?” Mike asked, and Eddie had to look back.  “There’s only a parking lot.”

He still saw the sheet of ice and the tortured heads.  The sight of it hurt Eddie, and it frightened him.  His glimpses of Hell were constant, but they were rarely sustained.  He saw a person or a small knot of people being tortured by Azazel’s minions and then his vision passed on.  He never saw this many, and he never held a vision this long.

“Am I the only one seeing this?” he asked.

Mike shrugged.  “What, the crappy run down Sears with the dirt parking lot and no right turn?” he asked, and then he understood.  “Oh.”

“I’m the only one,” Eddie said.

Jim pointed past Eddie’s shoulder.  Out his Infernal Eye, Eddie saw only the glacier of the damned and the wind that gnawed at their heads, but if he concentrated on the other eye, he thought he saw a dirt road exiting the parking lot at its far end.

“I see it,” Mike said, and turned the van into the lot.

The heads stared at Eddie as he drove through.  His vision was silent, but the frost-furred lips and bluing flesh were so vivid, he imagined he could hear the crumbling, terrified moans of the damned souls.  Eyes sunk deep into black pits, their lashes ripped away by the frozen wind, rolled in their sockets to stare at him as the Dodge trundled across the parking lot.  They were so close, and so many, and had been there so long, that Eddie began to feel cold.

And then they were gone, and the van was back in the griddle-hot and griddle-flat desert of the Oklahoma panhandle, rattling along a dirt road between two fields of burnt-brown wheat stalks.

Eddie sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“What the hell is wrong with that Sears?” he asked.

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