The limo waited.
In his head:
Come to me
Bevant
.
Detective Frederick Grover breathed in the car’s interior darkness and watched with curiosity as the limo waited, lights out, in Bev
Mathers’s
driveway. Only moments earlier it had pulled in, perhaps a minute or two after Grover had decided that nothing of further interest was going to happen at the
Mathers
apartment.
He adjusted his rearview mirror to show the road behind him. Apparently
Mathers
had lied about staying home all night, and now Grover wondered if someone else might be showing up in addition to those in the limo. The presence of the limo meant that there might very well be some ritzy plans for Bev
Mathers
, something he presumably did not want the detective to know about. Grover frowned...something smelled wrong here. He shifted his position on the seat slightly, getting a better view of the limo and its dark windows. As of now, no one had emerged. The driver had probably cell-phoned
Mathers
, alerting him of the car’s arrival.
Grover closed his eyes for a moment, then mentally reviewed the chain of events. Jake Ritchie’s death had been tied to the desecrations at St. Michael’s, that much was for certain. There’d been the pentagram at the crime at the rectory, patterned with the entrails of the animal. Ritchie had been nearly decapitated with a guitar string (note: the same type Bev
Mathers
used), he too gutted, his intestines shaped into a pentagram twenty feet away in the grass. Still, there’d been no blood present anywhere in the house—not even a spotting according to the forensic scientists working the scene. Which meant, most assuredly, that whoever committed this particular crime had left immediately thereafter, perhaps cleaning themselves off in the pool before fleeing. Bev
Mathers
had allegedly awoken in bed, alongside Rebecca
Haviland
—this, they both corroborated. So, the more-than-likely scenario here was a methodically planned group degradation and killing—not uncommon considering the obdurate cult-like nature of the crimes—that may have included Bev
Mathers
and maybe even Rebecca
Haviland
. Was Bev
Mathers
involved in some sort of Demon-worshipping cult?
That’s crazy! Far-fetched logic! Christ, I need some sleep. Better yet, retirement
. Still, the details haunted Grover’s mind: the priest, Father Thomas Danto, had had a great deal of educational experience in demonology and devil worship, as confirmed by some of the guests who’d overheard his conversation at the party. He and
Mathers
and Ritchie had engaged in a lengthy discussion on the black arts, the priest doing most of the talking. Should the police be sniffing Danto’s trail as well? Perhaps. But then again, his innocence seemed overly apparent, given his willingness to offer information from the onset.
And, for Christ’s sake, he a priest!
There were fingerprints found at the scene of the crime at the rectory, none of which belonged to any of those in residency, Danto included. At the scene of Ritchie’s murder, shreds of skin and blood were found on the ends of the guitar string that was used to choke the victim. Grover took notice: neither Danto nor
Mathers
possessed any visible lacerations on their hands. Still, something seemed amiss.
Grover let out a deep breath, keeping his eyes on the motionless limo. He rubbed his forehead. Light rain started to fall and he used the wipers to clear the windshield. He waited, fifteen minutes or more, staring at the Limo, staring at Bev
Mathers
’ apartment. Waiting for something to happen.
He rubbed a solid knot in his jaw with his thumb, eyeing the quiet scene and knowing, just knowing—call it gut feeling, or detective’s intuition—that something would happen very soon.
Yes
, he thought,
something is going to happen very soon
.
Come to me
Bevant
.
Bev fought back, biting his tongue, drawing blood. He lurched away from the window, raced back into the bedroom, feeling partially in control of himself once again—the evil embodiment seemed distant. Still, in his head, the voice chattered, over and over, calling his name, and he beat it back with his fortitude. He hollered into the air, threw a frame and then a vase across the room in utter defiance of that which pursued him, the shattering and the clanging sending jolts of lucidity into his brain. In a desperate longing to flee, he opened the back window, crawled out onto the wrought-iron fire escape, catching a suddenly cool draft, wet and penetrating against his skin. His shirt billowed in the wind, the rain starting to fall freely from the darkening skies. He peered down; behind the apartment house, the woods stretched out, perhaps a half mile’s worth before they let out onto the freeway—from this height he could hear the collective roar of the distant rush-hour traffic. He released the ladder, realizing now that running to the highway gave him no opportunity for shelter. To the north was the shopping mall. The south, additional homes.
He had friends in those neighborhoods. Jake was one of them; but he was dead.
Dear God, Jake
. So, who else? He clambered down the ladder, feet slipping from the bottom rung about five feet in the air. He landed on the soft earth with a thud, then straightened up and stared into the darkening gloom of the woods, keeping his thoughts away from the waiting limo, away from his familiar world, wondering where he could possibly go, and what might happen when he got there.
My name is Legion, and we are many.
—Mark, 5:2-5:9
In Hell, anything can happen.
Gripping the rusted cross in his closed palm, the man cried, his prayers deep and intense, begging for mercy.
He knows, he knows
, he realized with dismay, trying desperately to shutter his true thoughts, to keep them masked by false pretenses: an honest willingness to proceed with the Legion. He placed the rusted cross in his pocket, then laid down across the Limo’s seat and peered at the clock: 6:14 PM. Will the thirteenth be captured now? Only Allieb—
Belial
—knew for sure.
Lordy
,
Lordy
, what would dear Satan think of me now?
The man prayed that the intervention would prove successful, as his very soul was at stake—who knew what tortures Allieb would inflict upon him? Still, he had strong doubts.
The demon has spared me so far, despite my shortcomings, and his apparent knowledge of my ongoing faith in God. I can still believe, even after all this time, that he has an affinity for me because I am the boy’s father—even putting aside the lack of a bloodline. I have stood by Allieb, although I fear he knows that my allegiance to him is a cover while I plan for his demise
.
Rubbing his eyes, he stretched out on the seat and sought sanctity in the blackness of his closed lids. Instead, he found only harsh memories: three weeks after returning home from the doctors—after they’d promised that Allieb would be okay...
~ * ~
Again Allieb refused his medicine. He remained in his room, unwilling to allow the presence of his pestering parents. He howled like a wolf and crawled into the darkness of his closet, remaining eerily silent behind the closed door, save for his chanting and tapping out of odd rhythms against the wall. He cared little for food; the raw vegetables and meat he demanded at times were his only nutrition.
His mother and father opened the closet and pleaded with him to take the pills. He leaped forward and swatted at his mother’s hand, the pill bottle flying from her grasp, showering capsules everywhere. She cried, imagining sharp talons swiping at her from the tenuous wrist of her adopted child—a child who’d never showed her an ounce of the love she’d been willing to give. Now? She prayed for something terrible to happen, a quick and sudden death, taking him away from her to end all misery. He’d read her ungracious thoughts, and his response was brutal. Sharp poundings resonated from the walls, like the fists of giants attempting to break through their cement bonds. The boy screamed, mouth twisting in agony and dread, his child’s voice temporarily escaping its unseen barrier, pleading for mercy.
The man yelled at the boy, the woman shrieked, falling back against the wall in a near faint. She crawled for the door, tried to escape the sudden chaos: inanimate objects in the room, leaping through the air, hurled by unseen forces; the lone window, slamming open, sharp wintry gusts blowing in; the curtains, swept from their rods, sailing about the room like ghosts. There was a loud crash, the door slamming shut before she could reach it, the sharp cracking of the wood splintering away from the brass hinges. The man stood solid ground, gasping dreadfully at the insanity as the poundings grew heavier, cracking the ceiling, the walls. The furniture in the room: two end tables, the bed, a bureau, heaved and rocked in erratic semicircles, carving gouges into the wood floor. And the boy, here, fully possessed by something otherworldly, now hiding, back in the closet amidst his tattered things, laughing in a deep and strident voice, eyes bulging in an ashen face, the closet door slamming open and shut and open and shut, revealing to his horrified parents a now bloodied torso, slashed at repeatedly with a straight-razor gripped in his white-knuckled hands, blood pooling out in a glistening red wash, dousing his body.
The woman screamed,
No! No!
, and then,
Do something!
, directed to her husband who stood trembling, paralyzed with shock. The man stepped forward toward the closet, beseeching Jesus Christ through weak-willed prayer. The closet door fell off its hinges with a deafening crack, revealing in full the horror within. The boy, flinging the straight razor toward his father’s feet, lubricating his penis with the blood seeping from the wounds in his chest, masturbating furiously, exhibiting an impossibly-sized erection, blackly engorged with blood. “Come suck my cock, daddy,” he growled, voice seething with malignancy, while his features contorted into something repulsively vile, seemingly layered with undulating scales.
“
No!
” screamed the woman.
The boy crawled from the closet, trailing his feces behind like a slug track. His eyes were a distinct hue, reptilian, green irises ringed with yellow, the odor rising from him hideously foul, strangling the room. In an instant of fear, the flying objects in the room fell from the air in scattered heaps. The poundings in the wall stopped, bringing the room into eerie silence—silence, save for the sobs of his parents as they sought each other’s arms for security and comfort.
The boy kneeled, hands stroking his engorged erection, laughing deafeningly in that horribly deep voice that wasn’t his. “Fuck her daddy! Let me come on her tits!” A bellow of malevolent howls followed, his penis spitting copious amounts of semen as both parents cried inconsolably.
The parents remained a single passive unit, arms embracing each other’s bodies as the horror commenced, the boy, laughing...laughing...laughing, tongue lashing out and gushing blood as his teeth chomped down upon it. The woman, in a maniacal state of fear, rushed the boy, screaming “
Stop!
” in throat-tearing fury, her hands shaking, grasping at his bloodied body, the boy releasing the grinding howl of a monstrous being, spouting his ferocity toward her, reaching up, grabbing her ears and shoving her face into the spew on the floor; her forehead split open and blood splat out into the wicked mixture. “Swallow my
jism
, you fucking whore!” Allieb yelled, his evil eyes pinned on his father who remained frozen in fear, a witness to his wife’s barbaric thrashing. Allieb smashed her face repeatedly against the floor, over and over and over until it was a massive bloody pulp of indistinguishable features. The man, breaking his terrorized inaction, finally lurched forward, and was sent back with a splintering blow across the face. He slammed against the wall in a haze, a storm of horrid visions and sounds coalescing into an outrageous vista of mad realism, his gaze reaching past the fervent torture toward his son who had twisted his mother’s head unalterably around so that the neck was a twisted purple rag bursting with blood-soaked flesh.
“Daddy, it’s time to play the game,” sniggered the foreign voice.
Open mouthed, heaving, disbelieving, the man stared unblinkingly at his son’s lunatic face: the torn bloodied lips, the thick, alabaster skin, the snake-like eyes, until he crumpled down into a black-filled heap of bitter nothingness.
~ * ~
The man startled awake, rubbing his eyes. He looked at the clock: 6:28. He’d nodded off, for only a few minutes it seemed. Still, the reminiscing dream played out once again in its entirety, all the way to its horrid finale. He remained lying on the seat, breathing heavily, waiting; waiting.