Part 17 (1/2)

The room was quiet then, apart from the muted sounds of gunplay, macho dialogue, and the film's tw.a.n.gy soundtrack. A couple of hours later, Charles Bronson was just about to face off against Henry Fonda in the film's final showdown when Morris said, ”Libby.”

There was something in those two syllables that caused Libby Chastain's eyes to snap wide open. In a voice that did not sound sleepy at all, she asked, ”What? What is it?”

”Do you hear something?”

Chapter 14.

Roderico Baca stood on one of the hills overlooking the Shady Tree Motel and prepared to release h.e.l.l-or a reasonable facsimile thereof. He had arrived a bit later than planned, having spent too much time enjoying himself with the late Tristan Hardwick. Thinking about that, he smiled to himself, wondering what the stupid police would make of what he had left behind.

But despite the delay, plenty of time remained for Baca to do his work. He knew that Chastain was down there-he could smell the b.i.t.c.h. He would a.s.sume, for now, that the man was with her. The two might even be f.u.c.king, right this minute. If so, they were about to gain a whole new understanding of coitus interruptus.

Baca had spent almost an hour in preparation, once he had set upon the method by which he would destroy Chastain and her companion. Several others might well join them, const.i.tuting what the U.S. military calls ”collateral damage.” Baca was not bothered in the slightest by this prospect.

He had chosen the spell he was using with great care. Pardee had said he wanted Chastain's death to be nasty.

”Nasty” was one of the things that Roderico Baca did best.

He had drawn the necessary symbols in the earth, using a silver dagger he had made with his own hands. Then he mixed four of the key ingredients in proper proportion, all without the use of any kind of light. Baca had acquired the ability to see in the dark. That was appropriate, since, in a sense, it was where he lived.

Once the dry ingredients were mixed, to the accompaniment of the proper incantation, Baca was ready to add the final component. He reached into his leather bag and produced a small gla.s.s vial of baby's blood. The ancient spell specified that this ingredient be fresh-blood that is not refrigerated tends to congeal into an unworkable sludge very quickly.

Baca had made one stop on the way here from Hardwick's place. He knew the ingredient was fresh.

Although it is theoretically possible to perform black magic at any time, Baca much preferred the night for his work. Quite apart from the symbolism (and in magic of any kind, symbolism counts for much), it was known that the Dark Powers were stronger and more active after the light had fled. The darkness was also beneficial for a more pragmatic reason: some of the creatures that a black magician will call to do his bidding only come out at night.

Bats, for instance.

Despite their a.s.sociation with vampires in popular culture (which was a laugh, because, as Baca knew, vampires had no power to take the form of these creatures), bats are generally harmless to humans, the exception being the rabies virus that they sometimes carry. But rabies takes weeks to incubate before it kills, although its victims' final hours are very painful, indeed.

Disease aside, bats const.i.tute no threat to people. They are generally small creatures, and most species eat nothing but insects or fruit. Even the fabled vampire bat, native to South America, will take less than a fluid ounce of blood from its host, whether animal or human.

But just because bats were harmless by nature didn't mean that they had to remain so.

Baca first sent out his power to call the bats to him, and from the skies for miles around, they came, by the thousands. Soon, they were flapping in the air above Baca in a great, circling cloud. He had them flying high above, lest the squeaking they use to navigate be heard on the ground and give warning of what was to come.

The Summoning was done. That was the easy part of the spell. Now for the Transformation. Baca spread his arms wide apart, summoning the power of the Dark Master he served, directing that power into the great ma.s.s of bats above him, causing the creatures to transform.

To grow-the bats began to double in size-some of them, to triple.

To change-even the largest of the bats had fangs less than a half-inch long. But no more. Under the command of Baca's magic, the bats' teeth grew, until they looked like parodies of Halloween decorations. The teeth were long now, and they were pointed, and they were very sharp.

Then, to become savage-bats have little capacity for emotion, but Baca's spell increased that capacity, then filled it with rage and the need to destroy. Any moment now, they would start fighting among themselves. But Baca had better quarry in mind.

Finally, he said a word of power five times and pointed at the motel room where Chastain and her boyfriend were staying. The bats could not see him point, of course; Baca's purpose was to focus the bats' energy and fury on one place.

And so he did.

Thousands of the devil bats dived, almost as one. Their goal was the building down below. Their need was to use their new, razorsharp fangs to kill the warm-blooded creatures inside.

They descended on the Shady Tree Motel like a great, black tidal wave of death.

Small, powerful flashlights are standard equipment for FBI agents operating out in the field; Colleen and Fenton got good use from theirs as they made their way down a rickety ladder and into the underground chamber that had been Annie Levesque's workroom.

It smelled like old death down there.

The room appeared to be about half as large as the main floor above, which made it about thirty feet by twenty. Several wooden tables, both large and small, were placed about, and something that might have been an altar occupied most of one wall. Fenton noticed that there were thick, partly burned candles all over. Although not a smoker, he usually carried a small plastic lighter for emergencies.

Approaching the nearest candle, he flicked the lighter into life, its small flame adding little to the illumination provided by the flashlights.

”Don't do that.” It was the first that Colleen had spoken since they'd arrived, and the small s.p.a.ce seemed to magnify both her voice and its urgency.

”How come?” Fenton let the lighter go out. ”It's not like we couldn't use some extra light in this s.h.i.+thole.”

”No-this is her place, her special place, and you never can tell what... look, just don't light any of her candles, okay? I've got a bad feeling about it.”

”Okay.” Fenton put the lighter away. He had learned to trust Colleen's ”feelings.” He might make jokes about her being a half-a.s.s psychic, but her intuition had saved their lives twice, in the eight months they'd been partners. Fenton wasn't so dumb as to reject out of hand things he couldn't explain-especially after some of the stuff he'd seen in the last year or so.

For Colleen, the room was pretty much what she would have expected. It was neater than Annie's living s.p.a.ce upstairs; but then, what Annie had been doing down here probably mattered to her a lot more than watching TV or masturbating to kinky p.o.r.n. The sheetrock walls were covered with cabalistic symbols, drawn in some kind of brown substance. Colleen didn't think it was anything made by Sherman-Williams or Glidden; she knew what color blood becomes when it dries. That, like everything else she could see, was pretty standard for practice of the black arts. Then her flashlight beam shone on one of the tables, and Colleen saw something that drew her closer. She played the light over the table's rough surface.

Fenton put down the book he'd been examining and came over. ”Something?”

”You recognize the symbol.” It wasn't a question.

”Sure, a pentagram. These occultists always have one, or several. Are you surprised?”

”Not by the thing itself, but the construction is interesting,” Colleen said. ”It's actually been carved into the table, rather than drawn on the surface, the way they usually do.”

”Okay, sure, and that's important because...”

”In black magic, pentagrams like that are used for something, not just as decorations. So they have to be constructed very carefully. The length of the sides, the angles, auxiliary symbols, and so on, have to be exact. Get it wrong, and the results could be... unfortunate.”

”Or so these people believe.”

”Yes, of course, that's what I meant. So, if you carve the pentagram into wood, a.s.suming you do it properly, you don't have to reinvent the wheel-or the star, in this case-every time you want to do a working.”

Fenton looked at her oddly, although he was in shadow and Colleen couldn't see him. ”All right,” he said, ”so this proves that Annie was punctilious, or obsessive, or paranoid, or maybe all three. Like I said before, are you surprised?”

”In a way. This technique is uncommon. In fact, I've only seen it once before. There was a woman in Ma.s.sachusetts, Salem in fact, who had one of these carved in her workroom. This was last year, before you and I started working together. Abernathy, her name was. Christine Abernathy.”

”Yeah, I remember hearing about that case from somebody at Quantico. Didn't they find her dead, in that 'workroom' you were talking about? There was something weird about her death, but I forget what.”

”Weird is a good word for it,” Colleen told him. ”The M.E. determined that she'd died of a ma.s.sive infusion of snake venom. Made sense, since there were fang marks all over her.”

”Nasty way to go.”

”Yeah, but here's the weird part: no snakes were ever found on the premises, or any kind of cage where they might have been kept. And most of the venom that killed her wasn't from any of the poisonous snakes native to North America. She had cobra venom in her, Dale. Not to mention several other kinds that were never identified.”