The Demon Pool (5 page)

Bruce parked the Viper outside an old estate, in front
of a modern steel security fence. Coils of razor wire snaked around the top.
Below it, a sign warned that the property belonged to the United States
Government, and that trespassing was punishable by fines and imprisonment.

Behind the modern fence, stood aged stonewalls and
the pillars that had held the original gates. On the pillars, the name
De La
Garza
was carved into stones on each side
.
Below each name, a date —
1892
. Bruce unlocked the heavy-duty padlock securing the chains that
kept the steel gate locked.

Kat sat in the passenger seat of Bruce York’s
Dodge Viper, her hair tied back in a ponytail. This week it was blonde. Bruce
seemed to like it better than her natural brunette.

As Bruce returned to the Viper, she studied his
face. Definitely an average, or maybe even below average, looking man.
Nevertheless, he had a high-level government job and he was not afraid to spend
money. She only had a short time to take advantage of her looks and her body,
and guys like Bruce were easy marks. She needed to make the most of it.

Today was the first time since the breakfast
“date” that Kat had agreed to see Bruce outside of the club. Dating men from
the club was risky, but all of the serial killers she had ever heard about were
middle-class losers who drove crappy cars. Besides, she really liked the Viper.
It had a look and feel that suited her. Even aroused her.
Sometimes a girl
just has to take a chance.

The compound behind the fence was located off a
state road southeast of Ft. Myers. Far enough from the city to guarantee
privacy. Bruce had promised to take her somewhere special, some place no one
ever got to see. Almost jungle-like growth had begun to reclaim the estate
giving it a creepy, haunted house in the woods feel. The highway behind the Viper
was quiet.
Not much traffic out here in Serialkillerville.

Kat ordered herself to stop it. Bruce grinned
like an idiot as he slid into the driver’s seat.

“You’re going to love this place, Kat.”

Bruce drove inside the gate and stopped the car.

“I have to lock the gates. No one is allowed in
here.”

She smiled at Bruce as he got back out of the
Viper, leaving the driver’s door open. He had left the convertible top up on
the drive down from Tampa with the air conditioning set to freeze-your-ass-off.
The hot, heavy afternoon air fought its way into the car. Fire and ice
struggled for control of the car’s interior.

Kat had dressed carefully that morning,
anticipating fire’s victory. She wore a yellow halter mini-dress with sexy
thong sandals, both for the late summer heat and for Bruce’s benefit. Kat
studied his face as he reentered the Viper.

“This isn’t exactly a luxury spa, Bruce, and I’m
not much for playing in the woods with the bugs.”

With the gate now relocked, Bruce seemed pleased
with himself.

“Wait a minute until we get around back. This
place is special. I’m the only person in the state of Florida who can authorize
entry here.”

Bruce steered the Viper around the main house. In
spite of the creepy feel of the place, Kat remained surprisingly calm as they
passed several rundown outbuildings. The Viper followed a faint set of tire
tracks until they were fifty yards behind the house. The brush grew higher and
thicker here, creating a wall of vegetation. Bruce stopped and turned off the
ignition.

“We have to walk a little. But not far.”

Kat opened her door and stepped out of the Viper,
adjusting her dress. She felt alert, but not out of fear. It was more a sense
of anticipation. Like the feeling of being about to do it with someone you
actually wanted to do it with.
God, when was the last time that had
happened?

“I don’t see much. Not too impressed yet, Bruce.”

He took her hand and Kat let him lead her through
the brush, along a faint footpath. Her other hand clung to Bruce’s shoulder and
she pressed up against his back, trying to avoid the vegetation’s thin,
scratchy fingers. Bruce pushed through another wall of brush into a clearing.

Thick, soft grass carpeted the ground and created
a barrier that almost magically kept the wilder growth at bay. Some kind of spring,
a natural pool, sat in the middle of the glade. The rays of the afternoon sun
skipped across the water in a mesmerizing ballet of light and liquid.

The pool seemed to pull Kat forward. She slipped
out of her sandals and the soft, cool grass caressed her bare feet. In the
eerie silence that hung over the clearing, she heard Bruce’s heavy breathing
somewhere behind her. She glanced around, but there was nothing else to see.
Only the pool of water and the unmoving wall of vegetation that surrounded them.
However, an uneasy sense that they were not alone nudged her. That someone or
something else lurked close by. But the clearing was quiet and empty.

Standing at the edge of the pool, she swept the
water with her right foot. The surface was warm and the ripples spread out
across the water. The air stirred around her, driven forward by Bruce’s bulk
and his heavy breathing. Kat turned and faced him.

“Is it safe to go in?” she asked.

“About a hundred years ago, they used to bottle
the water here and sell it up North,” Bruce said. “It was supposed to have some
kind of special properties. The family that owned the estate got rich, but
something happened. Rumor has it they left a lot of money hidden around here
somewhere.”

Bruce’s voice trailed off. He smiled at Kat. “Go
ahead. Jump in,” he said.

Kat reached down and pulled her dress over her
head. She stood in front of Bruce wearing only her thong panties. Stripping
those off, she handed her clothes to Bruce.

“Are you coming in?”

He squeezed his eyes together as if he could not
believe what he was seeing.

“I can’t swim.”

“Your loss, Lover.”

Kat turned, flexed her knees and dove into the
water. In the split second before her body penetrated the surface, before she
closed her eyes, the water stirred beneath her.

***

In the pool, trapped in his liquid prison, suspended
somewhere between heaven and hell, Baalzaric waited.

***

Kat gasped when she saw the eyes staring up from below
the water’s surface. A single thought flashed into her mind. Bruce was some
kind of perverted bastard and had a partner hiding in the pool.

As the water enveloped her, she realized that she
was screwed. Not in a good way.
Stupid girl. You let your guard down.

Kat’s body sliced through the warm surface layer.
She opened her eyes, hoping to see, avoid, and maybe even defend herself
against whoever was waiting for her. As her body cut deeper into the pool, Kat
looked for the man behind the eyes. She saw no one.

Below the surface, it was cold, dark, and deep.
Something struck her body. Not seeing another person in the water, her thoughts
screamed,
Alligator
.

Intense fear numbed her mind. She needed to flee,
to kick her legs and move her arms. Get the hell out of the water. Instinct
fought to override her fear-leaden limbs, to fight off whatever had attacked
her and get herself out of the pool. But her arms and legs ignored the panic in
her mind. Her fear morphed into a blinding terror that ripped away any hope
that she would survive.

She had one option. One final choice of her own
making. She would take a deep breath and let the cold water flow into her
lungs. Better death by drowning than to be torn apart and eaten alive. With one
final all-encompassing act of will, she tried to inhale. She couldn’t. Instead
of cold water pouring into her lungs, she felt something else, as if every pore
in her body had become a receptacle for some unknown energy.

She closed her eyes and tried to relax. Something
filled her, but it was not the water that forced its way into her body.
Something else. Something dark, soothing, and powerful. It spread through her
until it finally touched her mind, embraced her soul.

Her body went limp.

Her mind cleared.

Under the water, she opened her eyes. Bright
light streamed from above her head. Testing her arms and legs, she swam toward
the light, trying to escape the water. Her lungs burned. Breaking the surface,
she gasped, gulping in huge quantities of air. Gaining her composure, she swam
toward the bank where Bruce stood.

Kat felt the bottom under her feet and staggered
to the edge of the pool. She sat on a blanket of grass, shivering in the warm
sun. In spite of nearly drowning, a new strength, a new power, energized her.
Revitalized her. She looked up at Bruce.

“You should try it,” she told him.

The color had left Bruce’s face.

“For God’s sake, Kat, I thought you had drowned.”

Kat searched his face. She saw weakness. It pleased
her. Her mind was on fire with plans and schemes. Cold calculation waltzed with
blazing ambition. Fire and ice. Each with its own power. Each with its own
ability to inflict pain on one’s enemies. That pleased her even more.

***

In a dark place, deep inside Kat’s mind, Baalzaric was
also pleased. As he entered Kat and probed her thoughts and memories, he
discovered that this woman was close to the key that would unlock the secret to
human immortality. One of her employers, Advanced Genetic Technologies, focused
on life-extending research that held the promise of an eternal human host.
Apparently, science had come far in the last one hundred years. Farther than he
could have imagined or dared to hope for.

He knew that hope was not a concept embraced only by the
God-lovers. Even a fallen angel could have hope. Lucifer had hope that he would
someday triumph over God and rule both a kingdom here on earth, and finally, in
heaven above. Baalzaric had hope that one day he would be forever free of the
pool.

***

Kat’s mind had wandered. Unfocused, distant. She forced
herself to concentrate. She recalled what Bruce had said earlier, that the
estate owners were rumored to have left a fortune behind. Now she understood.
Government-bureaucrat Bruce had money to spread around in strip clubs, Bruce
had access to this property, and Bruce had a brand new Viper.

Her experience in the pool had done something to her.
Changed her somehow. She knew things — new things — and she felt more aware,
more alive, more empowered than at any time other in her life, and one of the
things she knew was that Bruce would be useful.
At least for a season.

Baalzaric had attached himself to Kat’s subconscious,
but possessing a human being in a way that was useful required care. Especially
if there was to be the kind of control Baalzaric wanted and needed with Kat
Connors.

In their rush to experience the pleasures of the
flesh, many demons destroyed the flesh and found themselves dispossessed —
exposed to the Avenger, the so-called Son of God, the hated Nazarene.

Even if the dispossessed demon avoided the pit,
the place where the Nazarene appeared to have the power to send some of
Lucifer’s soldiers, it could be years, or even centuries, before that demon
acquired another host. The demon would be disembodied, full of hatred, with no
physical means to express it. That could drive even a demon mad.

The demon had to meld slowly with the spirit of
the host after taking control of the host’s mind. Done too quickly, the host
would often experience a total mental, emotional, and spiritual breakdown,
which led to insanity and even suicide.

It wasn’t always this way. Before the great rain
and its ensuing flood, men and women had become delightfully wicked. Pleasure
was virtually unlimited and life with a host could be long and sensual. Then
the great rain began.

In the ensuing flood, millions of humans died,
and millions of demons lost their comfortable existence. Yet one human family
had survived. The germ of Lucifer’s new kingdom lurked in the seed of the
survivors.

Apparently, the Adversary’s creation had
displeased him. Humankind had chosen knowledge and freedom, following their
desires, instead of following the Adversary’s dictatorial whims.

Since some demons, unfortunately, seemed subject
to the authority of the Adversary and his insipid son, Baalzaric feared
disembodiment outside the pool. He did not know for sure if he had the power to
resist a command by the Adversary or his junior partner, the Nazarene, to enter
the pit. So he took no chances. When he had exhausted the mind, spirit, and
body of his host, he always returned them to the pool.

Yet, even in his watery isolation, Baalzaric had
not been alone. Life thrived in the deep waters of the pool, and, from time to
time, Baalzaric would enter one of the pool’s resident creatures.

Nevertheless, possessing beasts, whether on land
or in water, had little semblance to possessing a human being. Instinct ruled
in place of pleasure and with the water creatures, cold supplanted warmth. The
connection with an animal host seemed tenuous, disjointed.

Worst of all was the cold. It was the one thing
that Baalzaric hated more than the isolation. Almost more than he hated the
Adversary. Finally, after nearly a century of numbing, bleak seclusion, he had
a human host again. He had this Connors creature — Kat Connors — and Kat
Connors was warm. Very, very warm.

***

Kat drove the Viper north toward Tampa. Cognizant that
something had changed, she looked over at Bruce, who slept quietly in the
passenger seat. She had drained him, physically and emotionally. Kat fussed
with the Viper’s satellite radio until she found a darkwave station. She kept
the music low
.

Something supernatural had touched her at the
pool. It must have had something to do with her candle ritual. The magick
worked. She had asked for power and somehow Bruce had led her to the pool. A
tingling sensation, like an electric current, coursed through her body, and her
mind had never been as clear. Yet something troubled her.

Someone or something had attacked her in the
pool. Someone, or something, had been beneath the water, waiting. Kat was sure
of that (or at least she thought she was sure), but maybe it was a trick of
nature. What she thought were eyes staring up at her might have simply been an
illusion caused by the glare of the sun on the surface of the pool. The
ice-cold water lying still beneath the sun-warmed surface could have caused the
shock that made her limbs slow.

Well, it didn’t matter. Bruce’s secret had been
revealed and soon she would exploit it. Kat’s thoughts went back to the pool.
Somehow she understood that the pool was deep, very deep, and whatever someone
buried there, stayed buried. Forever.

 Bruce snorted in his sleep, but did not wake up.
She had drained him, giving him what he wanted in the grass next to the pool.
I
own you, you ugly little man. I know your secret. I will suck you dry and
consume your soul. Then I will bury your sorry ass in that pool.

Her last thought surprised her. While she had
always known she could do whatever she needed to in order to survive, Kat had
never thought of herself as ruthless, as someone who would wantonly kill to get
what she wanted.
At least not before the pool. Not before the magick began
working. Yes, something is definitely different.

A morose song by a band named Dead Faith oozed
from the Viper’s speakers as she pulled the car into her apartment complex and
parked next to her own vehicle, a reliable and reasonably affordable Acura TSX.
Something you might expect an upwardly mobile, lab technician to drive. While
her income from the club added substantially to her nest egg, most of that
money went unreported, stashed securely in a safe-deposit box. No sense in
giving the IRS a reason to question her lifestyle.

She put the Viper’s transmission in neutral and set
the parking brake. She left the engine running, allowing the air conditioning
to keep the Viper’s cabin cool. She closed her eyes and listened to Dead
Faith’s lead vocalist sing about fate, faith, and the uncharted paths of lost
souls.

***

Baalzaric liked this host. She was strong with a warm,
comfortable body, perfectly designed for pleasure. She relaxed as she listened
to the music and he probed her mind, searching her memories. So many years had
passed between hosts that the technological progress humans had made, progress
he had discovered warehoused in Kat’s mind, amazed him. Yet human nature never
changed.

He discovered that human society, once again, was
moving away from the camp of the Adversary. He knew, from his time with the
Spaniard centuries ago, that this time there would be no rain. While the
Spaniard had little use for the priests and conventions of their religion, he
had gone to their schools and knew the stories in their book. According to that
book, God had stupidly promised the survivors that he would never again flood
the earth. That was God’s great weakness. He always kept his promises. Even to
pathetic and unfaithful humans.

Baalzaric linked himself to Kat’s deep memory, a
soft connection that could be easily broken if the host displayed any untoward
symptoms, any disruptions that might lead to a mental breakdown. He triggered
her deep memory synapses and watched Kat’s life play out as if he were watching
a moving picture show. He had seen moving pictures once before. Many years ago.
The projection had been a grainy, black and white image that cost his host ten
cents to see.

He had a different host then. A man named de la
Garza, whose distant ancestor, a captain named Juan Carlos de la Viña, had
served with the Spanish a
delantado
. Unlike the grainy, silent film of
the past, the moving pictures he saw in Kat’s mind unfolded in vivid color.
Baalzaric not only saw, but also experienced Kat’s memories.

The demon watched a dark shadow creep into Kat’s
bedroom. It was an old memory, but Kat’s mind supplied all of the details.
Ten-year-old Kat and her mother lived with Robert Greer, who worked at a garage
and smelled like oily rags and sweat. Kat’s mother worked nights in a hospital
laundry and left Kat home alone with Robert. Robert liked Kat. He liked her
very much. He bought her presents and told her that when her mom was at work,
Kat would be the woman of the house.

Robert’s weight pressed down on Kat’s slender body.
His hand covered Kat’s mouth, keeping her from crying out until he finished.
Hot tears streamed down Kat’s cheeks as Robert led her to the bathroom to wash
away the evidence of the abuse. As the memory played out in Kat’s mind,
Baalzaric stifled his excitement over the depth of this early connection with
Kat. He carefully, reluctantly backed off from the memory, not wanting to push
too hard, not wanting to exchange years of future pleasure for a moment of
lustful indulgence.

***

The memory flooded into Kat’s mind. She pushed it away,
back into the dark mental closet where she hid the ugly parts of her life. She
turned off the Viper’s ignition. With the air conditioning off, the late
afternoon heat began its relentless intrusion into the Viper’s cockpit. Kat
reached over and shook Bruce awake. He woke up with a start.
Poor Bruce.
Dazed and confused. Soon to be used and abused.

“Where are we?” Bruce asked.

“My place, Lover. I have to get ready for work.
You have to go home now.”

Kat’s voice communicated a soft, but unarguable
command.