RITCHIE’S PLACE IS in Laurel Canyon. Back in the sixties, rich hippies, movie moguls, and famous bands lived up here. Between the dope, their biker friends, the Manson wannabes, and all the free love that was never really free, the place turned into The Killing Fields with a Jefferson Airplane sound track. Don’t you want somebody to love? They were Khmer Rouge in designer jeans, and when the dope and the money ran out the canyons and deserts bloomed over the bodies they buried there.
I drive up the winding road to the address Brigitte gave me. I’m in a stolen Lexus because I want to be boring tonight. And I don’t want to take Brigitte back through the Room if I can help it. Eventually she’s going to ask questions I don’t want to answer.
It’s about 2 A.M. when I stop in front of Ritchie’s gates. I can see the house at the end of a long circular drive. It looks like a claw machine in an arcade plucked an Italian villa off a hill in Rome and dropped it down in the middle of the manzanita and coyotes. The place is pretty, but looks ridiculous here. Like something you’d build to win a bar bet.
Brigitte is waiting for me in the shadow of a eucalyptus. She’s holding her leather jacket tight around her to keep out the canyon cold. She should have something heavier, but when you’re sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night like a teenybopper running off for backseat groping with your boyfriend, you can’t exactly take the time to squeeze into Lancelot’s armor.
She gives me a quick kiss when she gets in and immediately starts playing with the car heater.
“How does this work?”
“I have no idea. How is Ritchie not going to notice you’re gone?”
“I put a powder in his drink. An old family mix and not at all harmful. He’d probably approve if he knew. It’s all organic.”
I take her down the hill the way we came, then head for Springheel’s place. The heater is going and she starts to relax. She opens the glove compartment and pulls out the contents into her lap, like a kid going through her Halloween candy. I spot a pack of cigarettes.
“Score.”
“Take them. I quit before coming to L.A. Rich men like their girls pure inside and out.”
“Darlin’, purity has nothing to do with why Ritchie went for you.”
“You know what I mean. Trophy girlfriends have to make you look good in front of your friends. Here that means no smoking. The next place I go hunting, it will be somewhere like France or Japan. Somewhere they don’t believe they’ll live forever if they give up everything that gives them pleasure.”
“Speaking of you hunting, I still don’t know much of anything about you. You’re like Van Helsing in drag, but you have a whole public life on video. How does your life go that way?”
“What don’t you understand? The revenants or the pornography?”
“I understand the porn. Lots of Sub Rosa and Lurkers do it out here. But I’ve never met a professional Drifter exterminator before. How does that end up the family business?”
“The Hussites ate my grandmother.”
“That was going to be my second guess. What are Hussites?”
“Protestants. They were angry over corruption in the Church and the Church rewarded them by burning their leader, Jan Hus, at the stake. My village didn’t care. They were all fools to us. But the Hussites and the government went to war, and monsters, which love nothing more than chaos, came with them. One evening, a Hussite band came to our village. They took as much food as they could carry and some goats and left. We cursed them, but would have saved our curses if we had known what was to follow. More soldiers came, but these were different. They were ragged and stank of death. Some were little more than bones and none of them spoke. Grandmother was a čarodějnice. A witch. She and the other old women, with nuns from a local convent, went together to drive off the ghost soldiers. They carried Bibles and my grandmother and the old women carried potions and magical objects. None of them ever returned.”
“Damn.”
“Two days later, a few of the women and the nuns returned, including Grandmother. But it was not really her. She was nude. The flesh from her breasts, her belly, and her legs had been eaten away. Most of her face was gone, but Grandfather recognized her and went to her. She gouged out his eyes and devoured him in the main room of our little house, under the crucifix her mother had given them at their wedding.”
“You didn’t have to kill them yourself, did you?”
“This happened six hundred years ago, so no, I didn’t, but we still remember.”
“So your people decided to go after the ghost soldiers.”
“The bravest, boldest men went after them that night. They all were eaten or turned into revenants themselves. Other men were able to capture a few of the beasts and, over time, we learned how to destroy them. After that, my family were no longer farmers. We were killers. Like you. And like you, we do whatever we have to do to live and continue our work.”
“You don’t have to justify anything to me.”
“I know. That’s why I’ll tell you this. Normal people, Simon’s sort of people, wouldn’t understand.”
“You definitely win the deep-dark-secrets competition. I never hid anything that good.”
“What about your magic? You must have kept that secret.”
“I didn’t know any better when I was a kid, and by the time I figured it out, it was too late.”
“Poor Jimmy. Full of magic and happy to use it. Doomed to beat the boys at all their games and do tricks for the girls to make them kiss you.”
“I didn’t have a car. I had to do something.”
“I’ll light a candle for you.”
“Don’t waste the wax. They don’t take my calls anymore.”
I get Brigitte to hold the wheel while I tap out a cigarette, light up, and take a big puff. Instantly, I’m Doc Holliday trying to cough up a lung.
“God. They’re menthols.”
I toss the rest of the pack, including the one I’m smoking, out the window. I’m doing the Lexus owner a favor ditching those nerve-gas sticks. He’ll whine when he realizes they’re gone, but sometimes tough love is the only answer.
The street across from the vacant lot on East Sixth is empty. I kill the engine and the lights and we sit for a minute watching the place. In the moonlight the Springheels’ hovel looks like a cardboard cutout left out in the rain. I don’t see anyone standing guard.
Brigitte leans across me and looks out the window.
“That’s the house of an important family?”
“The most important once upon a time.”
“I think you Sub Rosa have a different sense of beauty than other people.”
“You get used to it. Like herpes or a missing leg.”
“I want to see inside.”
“Not yet. I need to do something first.”
I grab a bag from the backseat, get out of the Lexus, and go around to the passenger side. Brigitte watches as I dump a pile of powders, plants, and the piece of lead I use for certain kinds of circles.
“Lovely. I get to see magic?”
“You get to see magic. I hope these ingredients are still good. They’re Kasabian’s. My roomie’s. He hasn’t done this kind of hoodoo in a long time.”
“What kind does he do?”
“He shits out of his neck.”
Brigitte stares.
“I’ll explain later.”
There’s a mortar and pestle in the bag. I pass them to Brigitte along with a bag of ingredients.
“Take these leaves and seeds and grind them up into a powder. I need to go be da Vinci.”
I take the lead and draw a circle in the car’s shadow so it will be hard to see if someone wanders by. The image isn’t complicated. A pentagram facing north inside a double circle. Outside the circle I scribble words in Latin, Hebrew, and Hellion. Not a spell. More a friendly “hi and thanks for stopping by” kind of stuff. It’s pretty random, but better hoodoo than it sounds. If you think it’s easy saying anything in Hellion that doesn’t come off as a veiled threat, you’d be wrong. I suck at milk-and-cookies magic, but I need to attract as much wildlife as possible without blowing it up.
“Your powder is ready. What kind of magic are we doing?”
“The Vigil will have left an alarm on the house. Probably angelic, and those detect conscious life. That’s animals, insects, and us. Anything can go inside or be magically controlled to go inside. We can’t turn the alarm off, but we can give it a migraine.”
The powder goes into the center of the circle and I lean over it to whisper some bits of greeting magic I sort of halfway remember. Brigitte is smiling, trying not to laugh. I look like I’m whispering sweet nothings to a pile of dirt, not exactly the two-fisted hoodoo she was counting on.
When I get tired of cooing to the pavement, I dump powdered sulfur onto the pile and mix it all together with my hands. Get out Mason’s lighter, spark it, and throw the mess up into the air as hard as I can. I touch the flame to the tail end of the cloud and the sulfur catches, igniting a twenty-foot pillar of fire.
The fire is gone as quickly as it came, but by the time the last powder embers hit the ground, I can already hear what I was hoping for.
Around us and above us there’s a rustling sound. The birds arrive first, settling into the vacant lot by the house, chirping, cawing, and pecking at the ground. Rats and mice swarm out of the sewers and warehouses, followed by insects. The crawlers cover the ground like a massive undulating carpet and the fliers drop from the sky like a black, glittering fist. Cats and dogs, the smartest animals of the bunch, so the hardest to convince, get there last. They head right for the house, circle it, mark the boards, and climb onto the roof. The birds and insects finally get the idea and head in that direction. As soon as they’re moving, I grab Brigitte’s hand and we start to run. The animals know we’re coming. Yeah, they’re dumb, but this is hoodoo and it would be a pretty shit spell if you ended up crushing all the wildlife you’d just called.
The bugs and mice and rats part like the Red Sea and Brigitte and I run through the field to the house. By the time we’re there, the walls and roof are a solid mass of feathers, fur, and shiny carapaces. There’s no way the alarm can read and separate this much life at once. I pull out the na’at as we go up the steps and slash the lock. The door swings open on its own. It’s dark inside. Brigitte gets out her flashlight. I take her back to the kitchen and out through the missing porch. She gasps when she finds herself in the Springheels’ sprawling California ranch house.
“This is beautiful.”
“If you’re Ronald Reagan, I guess.”
“The idea of it, I mean. The beauty hidden within the rot.”
“Sure. That’s what I meant, too.”
I find the lights as Brigitte wanders around the living room touching the furniture, then going to the big windows that open out over the desert.
“I’d like to see the desert.”
“It’s not hard to get to from L.A. Maybe I’ll show you sometime.”
“Maybe.”
There’s a big side table against the wall across from the windows. I go through all the drawers. I’m not looking for clues. I’m looking for the half pack of stale Marlboro Lights I find in the middle drawer. I take a long sniff and I’m in love.
“Junkie,” says Brigitte.
“I’m not addicted. I just want to be able to inject these directly into my brain.”
“We didn’t come to the house so you can loot it, did we?”
“No. I did a demon reading where Springheel died. I just want to make sure I was right.”
“Why wouldn’t you be?”
“It was crowded and noisy. Good distractions if you want to keep someone from finding something.”
“Why would you be invited and asked to examine something if you weren’t supposed to find the truth?”
“I’ve been wondering about that. Maybe it was a test to see if a crime scene was covered up well enough. Maybe I’m being set up to be the fall guy if it wasn’t demons back there.”
“I have tools with me that will tell us if revenants were present.”
We go to the room where Enoch Springheel was chewed up like human jerky. I keep an eye on Brigitte when I flip on the light. The Vigil tidied up a bit, but Springheel’s sex magic altar is still there and the bloodstain on the floor is as wide as a king-size bed. Brigitte doesn’t flinch. Her heart and breathing are rock steady. She’s walked into a lot bigger messes than this. That means she’s been telling the truth. Also it means that whatever we find, I won’t have to babysit her.
“What sort of demons do this damage?”
“Eaters.”
She nods.
“This wouldn’t be the first time someone has confused demons and revenants. Or used one to cover up the other.”
“It would be a first for me and it better be the last.”
Brigitte sees Springheel’s altar and heads right for it.
“These things are for very dark magic. Do what you are going to do. I want to watch.”
“It’s not hard, but it’s messy. You might want to step back.”
She goes and stands by the door. I get out a plastic bag of dry skin I scraped off Kasabian’s Hand of Glory and use the black blade to cut my palm and let a few drops of blood fall into the bag. I squeeze the bag to work the blood into the skin, pour the mess into my hand, and then scatter it over the magic hexagon. I take the bottle of whiskey off Springheel’s altar, get a mouthful, and spit it onto the Hand of Glory dust and wait. In a few seconds green and black smoke curls up from the floor like miniature prairie fires.
I look over at Brigitte and shrug. “I wasted your time. I was right. There were demons here.”
Brigitte takes a glass vial about the size of a lipstick container from her pocket. She shakes it and says, “Turn off the light.”
She throws the container as I hit the switch. The vial crashes somewhere on the other side of the room and something begins to glow. Pale blue spots glimmer on the floor like blood spatter. They’re all over the hexagon and extend away into the dark room.
“What is that?”
“The essence left behind by a revenant.”
“Demons and Drifters were both in here? Can you tell how long ago it was?”
Brigitte kneels beside the glowing pattern and smudges some onto her fingers.
“A few days. Less than a week. That’s as close as I can judge.”
“Same thing with the demon marks.”
I flip the light on.
“I’d like to know which was here first and who came after.”
“Does it matter? You have proof now that you were right,” says Brigitte.
I take a shot of the smoke with my phone.
“But I was wrong, too. Demons fade to the immaterial world when they’re not summoned, but if Drifters were in here, where are they?”
“They could have wandered out or been led away.”
“What the hell is going on? None of this makes any damned sense.”
“Let’s discuss it somewhere else.”
“Like where?”
“Somewhere more comfortable. We’re done here, but Simon won’t be up for hours. Take me home. I want to see where you live.”
She reaches down and grabs my cock through my jeans, gets up on her toes, and kisses me. I lean down to her, slip my hand around her ass, and pull her into me.
I see Kasabian’s beer bottle crashing into the wall and me yelling, “Don’t say her name.”
No. I’m not going to feel bad every time I touch another human being. I’m the one who’s still alive on this rock. I won’t apologize for wanting to feel like a person every now and then.
But this is pretty fucked up even for me, making out in the room where someone was ripped to pieces and eaten a few days ago. We’re standing where his blood was pooled like black custard.
“I can’t do this here.”
“Are you sure you’re the man who lived in Hell for all those years? You’re awfully delicate sometimes.”
“And you’re pretty hard core. Does anything get to you?”
“Not this. I was helping my father hunt when I was seven. I’ve seen bodies in every state imaginable.”
“Well, I’ve been the guy torn up on the floor. I don’t want to kiss you here. Let’s get out. I’ll get Kasabian some beer and smokes and he can spend the night in the closet.”
I loop my arm around Brigitte’s shoulder and steer her toward the door. We’re just about clear when she stops.
“What?”
“I want to see something on the wall.”
She swings the door half closed and doesn’t move for a moment.
“This is a very old sigil. A revenant clan. People who took revenants into their families with dreams of immortality.”
“Let me see.”
I step around and there’s the sigil. The writing is different, but the design looks a lot like Eleanor’s belt buckle. But the paint job isn’t right. Everything else in the room, as screwy as it might be, is put together well. The big, toothy monster face on the wall was spray-painted fast and sloppy, like a kid tagging his school at lunch.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Definitely.”
I push the door closed to get a better look. When it shuts, there’s a sharp metallic click. Brigitte gives me a funny look. A thin metal strand leads from the top of the door frame across the ceiling. A tripwire rigged to go off when the village idiot closed the door to look at the wall. This is why I hate working with other people. They see things. I don’t look, so I don’t set off traps. Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. Other people did.
There’s a grinding and the floor vibrates as a section of the far wall slides away. Fluorescent lights blink on in the deep black. It’s just a basement. Springheel’s secret room. The walls look like they’re carved out of solid rock. Someone’s been working down there. A wall is open and fresh dirt and rocks are scattered on the floor.
I hold up my phone to get a shot of the room, but someone gets in the way and it’s not Brigitte.
I don’t have to look to know who. I can smell them.
Zeds pour out of the basement like army ants protecting their territory. There’s just enough time to get out the na’at and collapse it to a couple of feet, leaving the thorns exposed so that when I swing it, it’s like a morningstar.
I catch the first one on an upstroke, crushing its face and jamming its jaw up into the bones around its eyes. The second gets it on a downstroke. One of the barbs catches his skull just above his forehead, his head opens up, and everything inside spills out. After that, I don’t notice individual blows anymore. I’m swinging the na’at like a street sweeper, trying to clear some room on the floor so that I can actually fight. With each swing, the na’at sends bone and meat flying.
“Get the door open,” I tell Brigitte.
“It is.”
There are just too many of them and more pour from the room. I could slash and smash all day and I’d end up right where I am.
I yell, “Get down!” and bark some Hellion arena hoodoo.
All the air in the room gets sucked into a central point above our heads, pulling the Drifters back with it. I knew it was coming, so I leaned the other way, and when the vacuum lets up, I drop to the floor. Brigitte is already down.
“Cover your eyes and hold your breath.”
Above us, all the oxygen sucked up to the top of the room explodes. A fireball blows down from the ceiling, frying everything that’s more than a couple of feet off the ground.
Even with my eyes closed, the flash leaves me seeing spots. The Drifters are a pile of crispy, twitching Manwich meat. I look around for Brigitte. She’s on the floor where she dropped. She shoots me a sooty killer’s smile. She never sees the little girl coming up behind her.
The girl looks like she’s around five or six. She’s in a long pink-and-yellow party dress and there’s a wilted pink rose in her tangled hair. When Brigitte pushes herself up to her knees, she’s just level with the princess’s head.
I’m running, but I know I won’t make it. The princess is too close. She opens wide and digs her rotten teeth into the back of Brigitte’s neck like a dog trying to break a rat’s spine. Brigitte falls and screams with the little girl on top of her.
I swing the na’at like a baseball bat. The princess rears up growling and the na’at slams into her mouth, snapping her head back and shearing it off at the upper jaw. The top of her head rolls away, but the rest of her hangs on to Brigitte. That doesn’t work out so well for her. Brigitte braces her legs against the floor and slams her back into the wall, pinning the headless princess. She spins and pulls her CO2 gun, locks the kid’s writhing body against the wall with her knee, and fires a bolt straight down into the baby Drifter’s spine. Her back blows out and she stops moving.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that more Drifters are stumbling out of the basement. Some trip over their friends’ burned bodies. Some fall to their knees and gnaw on them. Some of the crispy critters on the floor start to move. Charred arms and legs pull away from the pile of scorched bodies and haul themselves across the floor like spiders. This is why fighting corpses sucks. They’re too dumb to know when they’ve lost and dead enough not to care.
“She bit me.”
It’s Brigitte.
“She fucking bit me, James. She’s killed me.”
“We’ve got to get out of here.”
I say it really reasonably, but Brigitte’s mind has gone bye-bye. She wades into the Drifters, kicking and pistol-whipping the ones walking point. She catches others as they come out of the basement, blasting bolt after bolt into their heads. I let her blow up a few skulls figuring it’ll calm her down, but the falling bodies just make her crazier, so I grab her shoulders and pull her to the door. She shoots until her gun is empty.
I get her as far as the living room before she faints. She’s bleeding bad. There’s a kind of shawl on the back of an old chair. I tear off a long section, wrap it around Brigitte’s neck like a scarf, pick her up, and head for a shadow. But there’s no door there. Just wall. Fucking Springheel must have put an antihoodoo cloak on the house. I carry her out through the kitchen.
Extra-crispy and original-recipe Drifters shamble from the back into the living room. Most of them get lost in the furniture and bounce around like pinballs, but some of the smart ones that can follow a straight line stumble after us. Eventually, the pinballs will bounce their way out of the front door, too. Nothing I can do about that now. I get Brigitte to the Lexus, put her in the passenger seat, and buckle her in. I get to the driver’s side cursing Kinski for being gone. We could use you and your magic glass right now, you prick.
Maybe a dozen Drifters are wandering around the vacant lot and there are more behind them. This neighborhood is all warehouses and pretty deserted even in the middle of the day, but it won’t take them long to wander into populated neighborhoods. Someone left them there like a land mine. It was going to go off sometime and I’m the asshole lucky enough to have set it off. How many more bombs did whoever spray-painted behind the door leave around the city?
Brigitte moans. I hit the gas and point the Lexus in the direction of Vidocq and Allegra’s.
