The night chill woke me seconds before my cell phone rang—
“Crane here,” I answered, half-asleep.
It was well past 2:00 a.m.
Friday night.
Sitting up in bed, I tried to breathe my way to wakefulness, taking in the crickets and the pattering rain outside, reflecting on just how different the world was out there.
“Sorry about the late hour, Chief.” It was Stinson, my deputy, out of breath. “But we’ve got a situation and I think you oughta be in on it.”
“Ongoing?”
“Suppose that depends on your beliefs.”
“About what?” I asked.
“The devil.”
I put Stinson on speaker and got dressed as he filled me in on the particulars: the address (over on Highland Crescent); the fact the house was sealed off “just in case”; and that “two of ’em are dead already—and how. It puts the fear of God in me just to remember the bodies.”
I slid on my boots. “And the others?”
“Alive and in the house. One banging on the window to get out. What should we do with them?”
“Nothing, but don’t let anyone leave. The killer—”
“—could still be inside.”
I exited by the front door and got in the car. Coaxing the engine to life, then pulling out the driveway, “OK, now tell me who called the police and everything you know so far,” I said.
“Caller was a small fellow called Uriah. Nervous, from what I seen. As to what happened, like I told you before, we got two bodies, one of ’em with his head off, a bloody table and six people who don’t want to talk about it much except to say it’s the devil did it. Pale as ghosts, all of ’em.” I turned onto the highway. “Oh, and there’s a bunch of, how you call it, Satanic paraphernalia all over the place.”
When I arrived, the scene was relatively quiet. Two police cruisers, lights off; a few officers loitering outside; neighbours starting to gossip on their front lawns; and a face in the window, banging on the glass. “That there’s Samara,” said Stinson.
“Let’s go in.”
Although I said it, for perhaps the first time in my police career I didn’t feel it. I didn’t want to go in. I didn’t feel my usual sense of duty. There was something off about the place—about the whole situation. There also arose other thoughts in my head: Walk away. Retire. Forget about it. I put those ones aside.
Stinson followed me in.
“Jesus,” I said, overwhelmed by the sudden, unexpected heat.
“Quite the first impression, eh?”
Stinson closed the door. Wiping droplets of sweat from my forehead, “Crane, Chief of Police,” I announced to whoever was inside.
No response.
We passed from the hallway to the living—
Corpse. Charred. I—
“Sorry,” said Stinson. “Forgot to warn you about that one. Son of a bitch got me too.”
I looked it over. Burnt to a charcoal crisp. “Got an ID on it?”
“Nothing conclusive. The others all claim it’s a guy called Lenny, but no one recalls his last name.”
We walked a little further. “This next one I did warn you about,” said Stinson. “Again, no actual ID, but everyone agrees he was one Tikhon Mayakovsky. That includes his supposed sister. Mr Mayakovsky happens to be the owner of this property. You’ll find his head in the corner over there.”
Happened, I thought.
As promised: a man’s bloody, clothed body sitting, almost casually, against the wall—headless; neck sliced clean off; and the head smiling, upside down, from across the room.
“Jesus.”
Just then a dry chill passed through me in the otherwise humid room. “Feel that?” I asked.
“Sure. Maybe A/C acting up?”
“Maybe.” I kept wondering why no one was coming out to talk to us. “The last time we had a killing in town was—”
“Bakerfield, 2003.”
I was surprised it was that long ago. “Winter murder. Crime of passion. Open and shut,” I said.
“No burning. No decapitation. No—” He bent down to pick up a metal pentagram covered in wax, and a few spent matches. “—Devilry.”
Next, Stinson showed me to what, perhaps with a touch of the unsubtle, he referred to as the murder room: small and windowless, containing a heavy, round oak table covered in stains (wax, blood, who knows what else) encircled by eight chairs, one of which had been knocked over. The stale air smelled of death, incense and sulphur.
“And now,” he said, “the suspects.”
I paused before entering the room in which they waited, noting only that the door had been padlocked. I could hear banging from inside.
“Was the lock necessary?”
Stinson shrugged. “I had to improvise, and one of them was intent on leaving. Didn’t want her disturbing the crime scene.”
“Six are inside?” I asked, pulling out my notebook and pen.
“Correct. Samara, that’d be the one claiming to be Tikhon’s sister, Milton, Naomi, Pearl, Raymundo, and the small fellow who called it in, Uriah.”
I finished writing the names. “Any impressions?”
“Either they all did it, or they’re all mad. Or both,” said Stinton.
He unlocked the door and we entered.
Six people indeed.
“Good evening. Name’s Crane. I’m the Chief—”
Anger! “What’s the idea, keeping us locked in here like this, like kept animals, with the portal open and it loosed and awaiting its due. Let us be! Let us all be, then get out. Leave! Leave here and never come back!”
“I—” I said.
Stinson took out his gun.
“Calm down, Samara,” said one of the five people seated. “They won’t believe you anyway. They think one of us is the killer.”
Samara waved her hand dismissively before returning to her window. “Why would I do it? Why would I kill my own brother,” she said with her back turned.
“More than that—we’ve a spiritual obligation,” one of the women said. “To see it through.”
“No chance of that now that he’s ruined us all,” Samara sneered. At the back of the room, a small man, presumably Uriah, chewed his fingernail.
I approached the man who’d spoken (“Crane. Chief of police.”) and held out my hand. He shook it, saying, “Raymundo.”
“What I want are the facts,” I said.
“Facts,” Samara said with audible distaste. “Always with your facts, your reason. That’s precisely what’s wrong with you people. That’s what Tikhon was learning how to overcome.”
“Just tell me what happened in the order it happened,” I said.
“Promise to hear us out?” Raymundo asked.
“Yes.”
He patted down the front of his shirt for a pack of cigarettes. “Do you mind?” After I shook my head, he carefully took one cigarette out of the pack, held it between two fingers, lifted it into the air, made a guttural sound in no language I’d ever heard—and the tip of the cigarette ignited, just like that. “Do you see?”
Behind me, Stinson gripped his gun.
“Is that a trick?” I asked.
“No,” he said, stubbing out the cigarette. “It’s a demonstration of the properties of a portal.”
“You think you can persuade him, explain it to him step-by-step, when he lacks the one thing he must have to understand: faith,” said Samara.
I asked, “A portal to where?”
“Hell.”
“Told you they’re mad, the lot of ’em,” said Stinson.
“Everything rests on faith,” Samara was saying. “Tikhon knew that better than anyone.”
“Tell me from the beginning,” I said.
One of the other women in the room piped up: “It was a séance. We were having a séance.”
“And you are?”
“Naomi.”
“For God’s sake, it wasn’t a séance!” Samara walked decisively away from the window. “A séance is a communication with the dead. We weren’t communicating with the dead. We were communicating with the never-living.”
I looked at Samara, then at Naomi, who was looking down, and finally at Raymundo, who said, “Samara’s right. This wasn’t a séance.”
“Sorry,” mumbled Naomi. “It was my first time.”
“Sometimes we spoke with the dead,” said the third woman, who I deduced was Pearl. “Or rather they spoke to us.”
“That wasn’t the point,” said Samara.
“It happened,” said Pearl.
“Were you speaking with the dead tonight?” I asked.
Stinson scoffed.
“No,” said Raymundo. “We were gathered tonight to commune with, as Samara called them, the never-living, to open a portal to their world. The demon world. The dead did not interfere.”
“How did you open that portal. Did it involve—”
Samara: “We didn’t kill anybody!”
“Opening a portal requires eight humans performing a ritual. There is no death involved. The details of the ritual are arcane and rather unimportant. What’s important is that we opened it.”
“What happened then?”
I felt another dry chill come over me. Samara laughed, and Uriah, at the back of the room, shook with terrible fright.
“You felt that, didn’t you?” Samara said to me.
“What is it?”
“The never-living passing through the world of the living.”
“So this portal is still open?”
Laughing furiously, “Of course it’s still open. That’s the entire point. That’s the problem we should be solving,” said Samara.
“I’m here to solve two murders,” I said.
“You shouldn’t be here at all. If he hadn’t felt the cowardice, none of this would have happened. You wouldn’t be here, and we’d be dealing with the true problem.”
“That’s not fair,” said Uriah in a thin voice. “It was already happening. Tikhon lost—”
“Shut your mouth!”
“Let him speak,” I said.
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And he’s not even a neophyte—” Samara’s eyes passed briefly over Naomi with a certain disregard. “—so he has no excuse. He’s a dilettante, and he’s always been nothing but a dilettante.”
Uriah muttered something under his breath.
“What happened after you opened the portal?” I asked Raymundo.
“Tikhon made contact with a demon.”
Suddenly, the only person in the room not to have said anything, Milton, stood up. He was older than the rest, white-bearded. “It’s coming back,” he said. “It said half, and it’s coming back.” Stumbling forward, he tripped and fell, and I realised he was blind.
Uriah helped him back to his seat.
“What’s coming back?”
“The demon,” Raymundo said.
“We wanted to summon a minor demon, something we could control, but the demon we summoned wasn’t minor at all,” said Pearl. “Once it got into Tikhon—I’ve never seen such a possession.”
Milton was rhythmically tapping his feet against the floor, repeating: “Two more. Two more. Two more.”
Outside, the rain had picked up, drumming on the roof, gargling down the eavestroughs. “Two more what?” I asked.
“Two more victims.”
“The demon demanded payment,” said Naomi without looking up. “Payment for using the portal. Payment in blood. It said we’d been using the portal without paying the toll.”
Milton, singing: “Fifty for the farmer, fifty for the red hen.”
“How did the demon say this?”
“Through Tikhon,” said Pearl. “It said that the blood price is half the quorum, and the quorum is eight.”
“So you’re admitting Tikhon threatened you!” Stinson burst out.
“It wasn’t Tikhon. It was the demon speaking through Tikhon,” Raymundo calmly explained. “Tikhon was no longer present.”
Samara sighed. “This is all pointless.”
“What happened after the demon, speaking through Tikhon, threatened you?”
“It wasn’t a threat. It was a statement of price. Does a shopkeeper threaten you at the register when you’re purchasing from his store?” Samara asked.
I corrected myself. “What happened after the demon made its statement?”
“Wait—” Naomi rose, looking at Samara, then around the room. “—you knew about this? You knew there would be a price, a half to pay the red hen?”
“We’d done it before without a price,” said Uriah quietly.
“We knew,” said Samara.
“What happened next?” I asked.
Naomi: “You used me!”
“Oh, don’t be so naive. Everything has a price. You wanted knowledge, you assumed the risk. Every single one of us assumed the risk.”
I repeated my question—louder.
“He killed Lenny,” said Uriah, his voice shaking. A tree branch smacked against the window. “He set him on hellfire.”
I looked to Raymundo for confirmation. “I’m afraid that’s true. After stating his price, the demon began collecting it. The price was four of eight and Lenny was the first of the four.”
“What did you do while Lenny was burning?”
“We continued the ritual,” said Samara. “That was what we had agreed to.”
“Some of us,” said Naomi.
Pearl said, “He didn’t burn long. Hellfire is within us all. The demon merely freed what was already within Leonard. Some sin or secret. It took him quickly. He didn’t even make it to the front door.”
“Then Tikhon started talking in some other language, and he put his hands on either side of his own head, grabbing his ears and started turning—”
“The demon,” said Samara. “Not Tikhon.”
“…turning and turning…”
Milton: “Put the bird upon the stone, sharpen your axe and bring it down. Cleave the body from the head, and watch it run until it’s dead.”
“—until it came off, and then he grabbed it by the hair and held it up like a lantern, the mouth still wet and alive and talking, and it said: ‘Either you or Samara are selected, or both,'” said Naomi.
Samara raised an eyebrow.
Uriah was speaking: “The blood was pouring out his neck, just pouring and pouring, all over the table and the candles, and the flames had turned red as the blood, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I just couldn’t.”
“Coward.”
“What did you do?”
“I blew them out, the candles. Then I got up—”
“He interrupted the ritual,” said Samara. “One must never interrupt the ritual. The ritual must always be seen through to the end.”
“He was going to take another.”
“He will take another regardless, you fool. He must get his due. All you’ve done in your stupidity and weakness is put innocents in danger!”
“And what did you do after getting up?” I asked.
“I watched… Tikhon, stumble—collapse in on himself, like a punctured balloon,” said Uriah, “and stagger toward the door. He got through, then slumped down against the wall, rolled his head across the room and died. And as it rolled, the head spoke, telling me that if Ray was given to the red hen, so would I be.”
“Soon the police came,” said Raymundo.
“And here we are.”
Stinson tapped me on the shoulder. “Does it sound like a murder-suicide to you? Because it sure sounds like one to me.”
A man burned alive but no other signs of fire. A man with his head separated from his body, but no sign of the blade it was done with. The witness who called it in: in agreement with the other five witnesses that it was a demon who killed both.
“The longer we wait, the more angry he becomes,” said Pearl.
“He always gets his due,” said Samara.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
“We didn’t. The demon did it. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you from the very beginning. He took two, and he’s owed two more.”
“Not the killing,” I said. “The ritual, the opening of the portal. Why do that?”
“Why split the atom?” Samara answered, as the wind threw rain drops against the glass. “Why suffer to discover the source of the Nile? Why methodically map the human genome? To understand the world. To know existence.”
“I think it’s going to be me,” Uriah said, biting his fingernail again. “I feel dead already.”
“But the ritual was broken—doesn’t that mean it’s all over?”
“The ritual is broken, but the portal remains unsealed. The demonic debt remains outstanding. The never-living flow through and among us.”
“Can you close the portal?” I asked.
“I can’t believe you’re humoring these loons,” Stinson barked, but I could hardly hear him.
“We can’t,” said Samara. “That’s the problem.”
It was unbearably hot.
Raymundo said, “Although Samara is correct, it isn’t true that the portal cannot be closed. Simply that we can’t close it. It can still be closed from the other side, the demon side, if the demons so choose.”
“Which is why we must pay the red hen what is owed,” said Samara.
I looked over my notes. “The quorum was eight, the price was half, and two have already died. So two more must die to satisfy the debt?”
“I say we do the world a favour and kill all of ’em,” said Stinson, keeping a firm grip on his gun.
“Not any two,” said Raymundo.
“Only the chosen two,” said Samara. “That is the conundrum.”
I glanced at my notes again. “Does anyone remember anything else said by the demon?” Although part of me felt ridiculous for taking these occultists at their word, another part—the part that had felt the coldness passing through my warm, living flesh—knew there were darker recesses of human experience yet unplumbed.
Milton began tracing lines in the air in front of him. “Not something heard, but something seen.” As he traced, he spoke, and as he spoke I wrote: “If I am indeed to go to Hell, I shall in fair company be, for into flames I shall damnate Pearl and Tikhon alongside me.”
“That’s what the demon showed you?”
“I reckon,” said Milton.
“There’s also what Lenny said right before he caught fire,” added Pearl. “His eyes—they opened wide as saucers—and he asked with this great misunderstanding, ‘What’s it mean that I’m a quarter unless Pearl is?’ A moment later he was ignited.”
“I remember that too,” said Naomi.
“Anything else?”
Silence.
Not just among the eight of us in the room, but total and complete silence: no rain, no wind, no tapping branches, no breathing.
“What in God’s name—”
Stinson didn’t get a chance to finish his question, because just then the door to the room was ripped out, and Tikhon entered, headless, from the black, infinitely dense, infinitely deep, void on the other side of the doorway, where the rest of the house used to be.
Stinson shot!
Once!—Twice!—And a third ti—
But Tikhon, or the demon possessing him, absorbed the bullets, stepped toward Stinson, screaming, terrified, placed one hand on each of Stinson’s shoulders and tore him in two, just like that.
The two halves of Stinson fell to the floor.
I could not shriek.
Or cry.
“I,” said the demon in a voice which sounded like a thousand ancient beasts slaughtered on a thousand stone altars, emanating from everywhere at once, a voice I felt through all my senses, “always—” I saw: Samara crying tears of joy; Uriah peeing his pants; Raymundo overawed; Naomi trying to pull her lips over her face; Milton’s eyes rolling and rolling in their sockets; Pearl laughing hysterically. “—get my due.”
Then the demon strode toward the nearest wall, bent forward so that the bloody stump of Tikhon’s neck was pressed against it, and wrote the following on the wallpaper:
4 – 2 = 2
When he was finished, he turned back toward where Stinson’s halves were lying, and consumed them: the way a snake consumes a rat: by distending its own elastic body with the fullness of its prey. When both halves were in him, he said, “That one was for my pleasure. I am temporarily satiated. Deliver unto me precisely the sacrifice you owe and the portal shall be shut. Deliver unto me what I am not owed, and I shall devour this town and all within it, depriving it of existence and purging it from memory. Such is my power, for I am the God of Annihilation.”
Then the world returned:
First the rain,
followed by the house beyond the door—now open on its hinges—and all of us in it: all seven, for Stinson was no more. Only his gun remained, discarded on the floor, touched by no one.
Time passed and we did not speak.
On the wallpaper, the bloody numbers slowly trickled into incomprehensibility.
“There is one more thing,” Samara said finally. “Words Tikhon whispered to me when we first began our experiments. ‘If the Devil takes you, he will not take me too.'”
Then, staring at me, she asked: “Do you believe us now?”
“My duty is to protect. I must not let the city or its citizens come to harm,” I said.
“Have faith.”
In my notebook I wrote:
Who else must die?