Wings In Darkness Read online

  He stopped her in mid-tirade with a glare and an upraised finger.

  “No!” he snapped, “Not another word! You just get that shapely, smart little ass of yours in gear and get it down to Point Pleasant on the double, and you come back with an acceptable story, or else you can do what you wanted.”

  “And what’s that?”

  He smirked.

  “That’s clean out your desk. It’s your choice.” He headed toward the door with a spring in his step that made his bubble butt wiggle, then turned back. “Oh, by the way; you have to be there by tomorrow morning, so you’d better get moving. Stop by finance and pick up your travel pack on your way out.”

  “Have they got my airline tickets and hotel reservations?” she inquired, trying to keep the defeat out of her voice, and knew it wasn’t quite over when she saw his smile grow even bigger, making his mustache squirm like a caterpillar.

  “Hotel, yes; that was easy. After all, the town’s so small, there’s only one in the whole place. No plane tickets though; there’s no commercial airport within fifty miles of there, and we’re not springing for a rental car.”

  “Then how am I supposed to get there?”

  “You’ve got a car; drive. Just be sure and save your gas receipts so we can reimburse you when you come back...if you do.” He winked broadly. “You never know; some hillbilly may take a…shine…to you.”

  Grinning stupidly at his self-perceived wit, he started whistling Dueling Banjos and marched out, the conquering fat-ass hero, leaving Fiona glaring daggers at his back...for about a minute. Then she realized just how far away West Virginia was, glanced at the clock, and loudly exclaimed, “Oh shit!”

  CHAPTER 4

  Mason County, West Virginia

  “What is it, Sergeant?”

  Albert Windsor didn’t look up at the Colonel; Davis was a man who preferred action to ceremony, which meant he preferred the communications specialist stay at his console and keep working while making his report. It was what the sergeant himself preferred, actually; besides, he was used to multi-tasking.

  “Sir, Mr. Smith’s...people...say that the weekly tabloid, The Straight Arrow, has dispatched a reporter to this area to investigate the garuda sighting.”

  “Oh, joy!” the officer exclaimed sarcastically at this latest complication, throwing his his left hand into the air before over his iron gray crew-cut in frustration.

  This is just what the hell I need!

  “Sir, Smith suggests that we concentrate on finding and securing the wall weaknesses that have developed in the area since the last test, and he says his people will keep an eye on the reporter and ‘discourage her as necessary.’ His words, sir.”

  Colonel Davis was more than a little concerned about the potentially wide ranging implications of that particular phrase, but there was little he could do about it. Smith was an advisor and liaison, and not in his chain of command. What galled him the most was that, if push ever came to shove, Smith outranked him for all practical purposes, even if not officially, because there was no doubt which of them Washington would back during any major disagreement; there was too much riding on this for them to do anything else.

  Davis settled for dryly observing, “He can find a reporter, but he can’t find the garuda.”

  “On the contrary, Colonel, I have already found it.”

  The officer couldn’t help but jump when Smith’s voice came from directly behind him, where he had approached quietly and unobserved.

  “Hail Satan! Come to us!”

  Even as he raised his skinny, tattooed arms and shouted the invocation from within the pentagram for the dozenth time, seventeen year-old Arthur Barnett was starting to feel a twinge of doubt. He knew the other three teenagers in his coven were feeling even more than that; in the flickering light of the strategically-placed black candles that dimly illuminated the interior concrete dome of the building, he saw Denise Cooper’s glazed eyes and bored expression as she stared off into space, chewing her gum with a metronome-like rhythm; he heard Tommy Losey shifting his weight on the rough cement for the hundredth time, and there was no mistaking the sound of Lester Boggess scratching his fat, chronically-itching ass.

  Sighing and shaking his head, making his long, black-dyed bangs flop over his pale, pimple- and piercing-studded face, he despaired of ever contacting his chosen master as long as these losers were all he had to work with.

  He’s the Prince of Darkness, for crying out loud! If I was Him, I’d be ashamed to be in the same room with these assholes! Hell, they’re my friends, and I’m ashamed to be with them!

  His coven members were the only weak point; he was firmly convinced of that. It had to be them holding him back; certainly it couldn’t be him!

  Nothing could have convinced Arthur of the latter. A social outcast at the small Wahama High School in upper end of Mason County because of his extreme weirdness, instead of responding by trying to fit in, the born rebel’s natural reaction was to become even weirder than before, which pushed people even further away. He adopted a Goth look, with black hair, eyes, and clothes, and tattooed himself with tattooed occult symbols, which did nothing to endear him to his mostly Christian and fairly conservative classmates in the small-town school. Once he embraced open Satanism in his quest for power, their previous shunning escalated to definite attention of the wrong kind, in the form of the occasional ass-kicking when he got too vociferous with his practice.

  Eventually he managed to surround himself with a like-minded crowd of misfits.

  Except for Denise, he supposed, or ‘Harlequin’ as she insisted on being called, since she’d died her hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes black on one side of her head and white on the other. She wasn’t exactly shunned, because, despite being a self-declared vampire and witch, she had the redeeming ‘virtue’ of being a nymphomaniac, kinky as hell and so willing to have any kind of sex with practically anybody, which meant she was tolerated as a community resource. “She’d screw a snake if somebody held it’s head!” one of the football players once declared, while another assured his friends, “If she had as many sticking out of her as she’s had stuck in her, she’d look like a freaking porcupine!”

  Still, whatever Harlequin’s status, the strange quartet was held together by the glue of the ultimate outcast’s religion, of a denomination Arthur himself had created.

  Theirs wasn’t standard Satanism, although it incorporated sections appropriated from the Temple of Set and LeVey’s Church of Satan. One thing Arthur was good at was research, and elements from sources as diverse as European witchcraft and Haitian Voodoo, Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky, author H.P. Lovecraft, and the influence of any number of black metal bands, all found their way into his ever-evolving belief system. Painstakingly covering the curving walls with his mishmash of symbology in an attempt to magnify and focus his power, he had converted an abandoned ammunition storage building into a makeshift temple, and he remained convinced that, if he found just the right combination, he could make it work.

  It sure as shit isn’t working now, though!

  Still, he had one more thing to try. They’d done pigeons, rabbits, cats, dogs, and even a sheep before, as witnessed by the scattered bones in the deep brush nearby, but now he was going to up the ante.

  “It’s time for the sacrifice! Prepare the sacred creature, so dear to our Dark Lord!”

  He put as much bass, importance and authority into his voice as he could, but his disciples were used to it and the ‘sacred creature’ – a stolen black billy goat struggling against the duct tape binding its hooves together – bleated loudly before pissing all over the pentagram, distinctly unimpressed by the solemnity of the ceremony.

  Watching the acrid yellow pool from the stinking animal spreading across his carefully-drawn artwork, Arthur shook his head again.

  It’s just not my night!

  With that thought in mind, he stooped and opened the long velvet bag at his feet, and drew out his sword.

  Th
e sword was certainly impressive-looking: a big two-hander with a wavy, flame-like blade, all finished in black and red. He’d paid fifty bucks for it on eBay, but the quality was distinctly lacking. For one thing, he couldn’t get a good edge on it to save his life, a factor that, combined with his inexperience, made the sacrifice a long, noisy, and very messy affair. He stabbed and hacked and slashed as the goat bleated in agony and fear, its shrill cries echoing back and forth in the old bunker. By the time the animal’s mangled sides heaved its last panting breath, he and everyone else in the makeshift temple, along with the temple itself, was drenched in gore and literally reeked of blood. It didn’t help that Tommy had thrown up on himself, although the clumsy butchery only seemed to increase fat-ass Lester’s already prodigious appetite. He stared at the animal hungrily, apparently contemplating digging into it then and there and eating it raw. When they each used the blood to anoint their foreheads with upside-down crosses, the coven leader had seen him sucking the red stains off his fingers.

  Still, the process had obviously affected someone else’s appetite too; Harlequin had one hand inside her robe in the vicinity of her crotch, her muscles moving rhythmically, her hair, half dyed black the other half white, parted right at the center, swung slowly back and forth hypnotically while her lips parted in ecstasy. Even Arthur found that momentarily disturbing, if it meant, if all else failed, he'd at least get laid tonight.

  “Hail Satan!” he called out again, shouting with his arms upraised like an Evangelical preacher in a service gone horribly wrong, “Your servant commands You to appear!”

  Every head snapped in the direction of the entrance. The steel door, open just a crack, creaked wider.

  A round-eyed Tommy exclaimed, “Oh shit!” and, forgetting his hunger for the moment, Lester scratched his butt again, farted, and muttered, “Cool!”

  There was a shuffling outside, and a dark shadow appeared, reaching around and catching the edge of the door, bringing a louder creak from the rusting hinges this time, and slowly began to swing it outward.

  “He’s...here!” Arthur gasped in disbelief, stunned now that something had actually worked, “He came!”

  Tommy kept repeating “Ohshitohshitohshitohshit” in a machinegun-rapid mantra, and the events finally got Harlequin’s undivided attention; looking up without missing a beat with her busy hand, she asked, “Is it...is it...”

  While she was speaking, the door opened all the way. Looking at the impossibly tall, winged figure, little more than a black, neck-less silhouette with red eyes that glowed like fires in the candle light, Arthur said with a calmness that startled even him, “Yeah...it’s Him!”

  Coming to himself, he slapped Tommy hard on the side of the head to shut him up before ordering, “Bow down! Bow down before our Master!” As an afterthought, he added in a whisper, “be sure and stay within the pentagram; He can’t enter it!”

  “I’ve got something I want Him to enter!” Harlequin declared, ignoring her nominal leader’s order to humble herself and rising to her feet instead, licking her blood-spattered lips seductively and spitting out her gum in anticipation, “To do the Devil...”

  In truth, Arthur had only halfway expected to ever be successful in summoning anything at all, let alone the Prince of Darkness, but that hadn’t prevented him from studying and finding out what not to do just in case it finally worked, and what the girl was about to do was at the top of the list of thou shalt nots if you valued your ass.

  “Harlequin! Don’t go out of the circle! Denise! Don’t!”

  Ignoring him, she stepped out of the star, over the surrounding rings, and held out her arms to the interloper.

  “Take me, Lucifer Morningstar; I’m yours!”

  The figure she called Lucifer spread his clawed, bat-like wings and came to meet her. She put her arms around his waist and he folded his wings around her, pulling her against his downy, charcoal-colored chest, and holding her in place while he lowered his mouth to hers and ripped away the bottom half of her face.

  Amid the screams and blood when the intruder started on her eyes next, Tommy panicked and made a run for it. Darting like a rabbit, he dodged to the figure’s right, and very nearly made it to the door when a long, powerful wing shot out. A single claw on the finger that made up the outer strut of the membranous wing hooked him in the throat just before he was out of reach, then whipped forward with tremendous force, flinging him across the room to slam into the curved wall on the other side. The sound of half the bones in his scrawny body shattering echoed in the half-sphere of the room, circling round and round, even as the last of Denise’s gurgling screams died to fading whimpers.

  “Stay in the circle!” Arthur ordered Lester as the fat boy scrambled to his feet, “He can’t hurt us as long as we stay inside the pentagram!”

  The red eyes shifted their focus to the source of the noise, and the figure dropped Denise’s mangled, quivering carcass before stepping forward, crossing the border of the circle with no ill effects.

  “Oh shit...”

  In the next instant, Lester had snatched the sword out of Arthur’s hand and went lumbering forward, hacking downward at the intruder for all he was worth. Even as dull as it was, the blade brought a spout of black ichor through the thick covering of hair-like feathers covering the thing’s shoulder.

  The creature responded, first with a screech, then with a leap, and its right leg ripped forward and down, the razor-sharp claws parting cloth, flesh, and layers of fat with equal indifference, eviscerating Lester from the hollow of his throat to his groin. The boy stood in stunned dismay for a moment, watching the vast contents of his body cavity fall to the floor before he followed it down and lay there twitching.

  Just as the red eyes turned toward Arthur, he noticed someone else was at the door: a smallish man incongruously dressed in a black suit with narrow lapels, along with a white shirt and tie, a fedora, and sunglasses. He slipped inside and pulled the door shut behind him, causing the hinges to give off a loud squeal.

  The winged thing spun toward the intruder, who pointed something that discharged a blinding flash right in its face. It screeched again and threw its wings over its eyes, but never even had time to fully turn away before the man rushed it, darted directly behind it, and seized its broad, bullet-shaped head with both hands. Despite not being particularly large and nowhere near as big as the suddenly panicked creature, he gave a hard twist and a tremendous wrench, and ripped the grizzly head off its owner’s shoulders. Ignoring the decapitated body convulsing and beating its leathery wings wildly against the concrete floor, he raised his trophy held it above his face, taking a moment to allow the running black blood to pour into his mouth. Finally the flow slowed to a trickle, and he tossed the it to the side before regarding Arthur, who had fallen on his knees before him.

  “Thank you, Master! Thank you!”

  “Master...” the stranger said curiously, rolling the term around on his tongue with the dark blood, and apparently liking the taste of it, “Master? Who do you think I am?”

  The coven leader stammered, “You’re Satan...aren’t you?”

  Pursing his lips in thought, the latest interloper suddenly broke into a broad smile.

  “I have never been called that before.” Mr. Smith unhurriedly closed the distance between them. “But I suppose I could be.”

  Pennsylvania

  The Jaguar purred as it carried Fiona along through the night, the powerful vehicle weaving as gracefully as its namesake around the increasingly sparse, inevitably slower traffic on the interstate. Both hands were on the wheel, her subconscious was alert for warnings from her radar detector and her GPS unit, Bruce Springsteen was singing Racing In the Street, and her mind was bouncing back and forth like a pingpong ball, from where she was coming from to where she was going.

  She was still totally pissed at Sidney; if it weren’t for the damage the impact would do to the Jag, she’d be fantasizing about him magically appearing in front of her on the highway so she
could have the pleasure of running over him. But her boss only had a fraction of her ire; in the darkness, with nothing to see but the lit windows of occasional passing buildings and the territory of road claimed by her headlights as she left Pennsylvania and crossed into northwestern Maryland, her mind kept unwillingly going back to Cliff. Before, she would have pictured him in her favorite mental snapshots: on the Staten Island Ferry, in his favorite cashmere sweater with the wind stirring his hair, over a candlelight dinner with the flame glittering in his eyes...

  She ground her teeth.

  Now the only way I can picture him is looking at me over that whore’s naked ass!

  At first she swore her mother was psychic; Sunday morning she had called Fiona and insisted her daughter come over and ‘talk’ because she knew something was wrong. Once she got there, she found out that the maternal ESP actually came courtesy of a phone call from Cliff looking for her, and mentioning to Maurine Pelligatti that he and her daughter had ‘had a little misunderstanding.’

  ‘No shit!’ she told herself with a grimace.

  Fiona hadn’t wanted to discuss it, but was so tired and stressed she had no choice but to give her mother and father the bare bones just to shut them up; she had walked in on her boyfriend having sex with another woman, end of story, next subject please because I’m not ready to talk about it. She had to admit her parents had both been wholly supportive; Cliff was now ‘that smarmy son of a bitch’ to her mother too, and Frank Pelligatti had even managed to refrain from saying, ‘I told ya so,’ at least verbally, although the look he gave her said it loud and clear.

  Today – glancing at the dashboard clock, she realized it was almost yesterday now – her family had to settle for a phone call, because that prick Sidney had put her in too much of a rush to even swing by their house to say goodbye. Her mother was horrified about her daughter being forced to go such a backward place – ‘Do they even wear shoes down there, honey?’ – and no doubt was picturing her being carried off to a remote log cabin and brutally ravished by some hairy hillbilly in a coonskin cap, despite Fiona’s assurances that she wasn’t ready to be carried off and ravished by anybody just now, and maybe ever.