Chapter Six
“Anyone got anything long and thin?” Mike asked, cold sweat bursting out all over his body. He regretted losing his switchblade in the melee at Butcher’s.
“Not at the moment,” Twitch snickered.
Mike felt himself blushing. “No, I mean like a bobby pin or a knife.” It had been a while since Mike had picked a lock, but in his day he’d picked a lot of them. Jimmied open and hotwired a lot of cars, too, picked a pocket once or twice, and broken a lot of windows and legs. Besides, the keyhole was huge, a keyhole for an old-style warded lock rather than a modern tumbler, which probably meant that the lock was easy.
Eddie slapped a pocketknife into Mike’s hand, still shaking from his encounter with the ghost.
“Thanks, Eddie,” Mike said. While he snapped the blade open, he heard a ripping sound from the darkness where Eddie stood. He shone his light on the guitarist and saw Eddie strapping his Maglite to the underside of his shotgun with a strip of duct tape.
“You carry a lot of stuff in those pockets,” he observed. The sweat on his body was drying and he started to shiver from the cold.
“Man of action has to be prepared,” Eddie sniffed.
“Maybe you should MacGyver open the door.”
“You MacGyver the door,” Eddie chuckled. “I’m gonna MacGyver me a little Baal Zavuv.”
“I don’t think MacGyver used guns.”
Eddie’s eye skewed sideways and then he gritted his teeth and blinked. “I don’t think MacGyver was ever on Hell’s Ten Most Wanted list.”
Eddie and Jim turned back to face the oncoming creatures and Mike knelt to look at the lock. “Can you hold the flashlight?” he asked Twitch.
“Son,” Twitch said to the little kid, “hold the man’s flashlight for him, will you, honey?”
The boy dutifully took the light and shone it on the keyhole, and Twitch went back to slapping Adrian’s face.
Mike held the door handle down while he slipped the knife blade into the lock and probed around, feeling for the mechanism. “Where you from, kid?” he asked, and then, in case the boy’s English wasn’t so good, “de dónde eres?”
The kid shrugged.
Boom! The report of Eddie’s shotgun was deafening inside the tunnel.
Mike worked faster. Eddie fired again and again. Twitch stroked Adrian’s brow and murmur-sang a strange, modal-sounding lullaby. The mode didn’t sound familiar, and Mike concentrated on the door, shutting the music out to avoid distraction.
“The rabbi was good to you, was he?”
The kid nodded. “He took me from the sisters,” he said, in a high, piping voice. “I helped him around the temple. He taught me to walk in the path of knowledge.”
“Oh, yeah?” Mike found a point inside the keyhole that resisted with some spring, but responded to pressure. He thought it might be the mechanism, and he worked on it. If he could get it to turn far enough, even if he couldn’t rotate it all the way around, the door ought to open. “So you know the place pretty well? What’s your name, so I can stop calling you ‘kid’?”
“Rafael,” the boy said.
The door in front of Mike face suddenly lit up with orange firelight marred by his own shadow, the source of the light behind him. With the light came a bellow that sounded inside the tunnel like the eruption of a volcano.
The boy trembled and stared up the passage at what must surely be the advancing Hellhound. Mike heard the rasp of metal-on-Hound-hide, and guessed that Jim had entered the fray. He also heard the buzzing of flies, and felt a little sick.
But he didn’t see Chuy, and that was good. That was an improvement.
Adrian sat up. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“What’s always going on?” Twitch countered.
“Right.” Adrian dug into his suit jacket as he climbed to his feet and came out with his machine pistol. “The more things change, and you know the rest.”
Mike could hear the kid’s knees knocking together. “Keep your eyes on me, Rafael,” Mike urged him. “Did the rabbi give you that name?”
“The sisters did,” Rafael said shyly. “But Rabbi Feldman thought it was a good sign.”
“It is a good sign,” Mike agreed. He didn’t mean anything by it and the name meant nothing to him; he was just making small talk with the kid, to keep both the boy and himself distracted. His fingers were slippery from sweat and he had difficulty seeing through the fog of his own breath.
ROAR! Buzzzzzz!
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat! Boom!
It sounded like a full-blown battle had broken out behind Mike, Adrian, and Eddie, supporting Jim. Mike resisted the urge to turn around and see how it was going.
“You can call me Rafi.”
Click. The door handle popped down several extra inches and the door cracked open.
“What’s behind the door, Rafi?”
Rafi shrugged. “This is as far as I’ve ever been.”
Mike lurched to his feet, holding the door. “Well then,” he said. “You’d better stand behind me, just in case.”
Rafi stepped back, still shining the light on the door. Twitch moved to Mike’s side, clubs in her hand. Mike pocketed the knife and palmed his pistol. He nodded to Twitch, then threw the door open.
On the other side waited cold, dark silence. A breeze cooled Mike’s already chilled face even further, smelling faintly of some far-away waterhole. Behind him, the battle still raged, squealing and roars and bellows mixed in with the constant coughing of firearms and the gigantic buzzing of flies.
“Rafi,” Mike said as gently as he could, “can I have the light?” He took the flashlight and shone it into the darkness ahead. “Stay close behind me,” he told the boy.
He moved through the door. Beyond was a broad chamber, its walls of yellowish sandstone brick and its ceiling just over Mike’s head. Facing him in the wall were three arched doorways. “Come on!” he hollered to the others, and stationed himself to the side so that he could see both the door he’d come through and the three new passageways. He didn’t want anything sneaking up on him from behind.
Twitch pulled Rafi over to one side and perched next to the iron door, clubs raised over her head. “Come on!” she yelled.
Adrian backed through first, wiping sweat from his face and holstering his pistol. “That’s me out of bullets then,” he said glumly. He rummaged through pockets as he backed away from the door, pulling out bits of string, a stump of a candle, a little bone that might once have been part of a human finger.
Two Zvuvim buzzed in through the door after Adrian, and Twitch leaped to intercept them. She knocked one sideways and into the wall, where it hit with a thud and then slid to the ground making a sound that was part buzz and part whimper, but her swing at the second devil-fly missed. She whirled past the creature, overextended and vulnerable. It dove for her neck, buzzing like a power saw—
bang!
Mike splattered black dusty bits and goo all over the wall.
Twitch nodded quick thanks and resumed her position inside the door. Jim backed through next, ducking to get his head in under the doorframe. A Zavuv whizzed clacketing past his guard on the right, and as he stepped into the chamber Jim spun backward with his left hand snapping out in a roundhouse punch. He pummeled the Zavuv with his knuckles, pinning it against the wall.
It bit his forearm, drawing rivulets of bright red blood, but before Mike could get a clean shot, Jim punched the devil-fly in the center of its face with the hilt of his sword. Its eyes burst like Christmas tree ornaments hurled into a brick wall and sprayed thick, sour-smelling fluid on the floor.
Eddie stumbled back into the room, pulling his head down low in the collar of his army jacket like a turtle, and a spout of flame followed him. He tripped and fell flat, hitting the ground hard on his back, and aiming his shotgun at the shadow behind him. The huge black and gray Baal Zavuv rammed its head in through the doorway, its shoulders straining against the top of the frame. Tusks slobbered yellow and thousand-faceted eyes glittered like glass and the Baal bellowed, flies buzzing and swarming around it and erupting from its mouth.
Click.
Eddie’s shotgun was out of shells.
Twitch slammed her batons on the Baal’s eyes. They looked like glass, but they must be as hard as steel—she bounced off like she’d been kicked back. Jim stabbed at the Baal’s neck from the other side; he drew blood, but the Baal didn’t pull back.
Chingón. Mike started firing.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Click.
The Baal squealed, straining with its shoulders in the top of the doorframe like it might rip the wall open to get through. Zvuvim crawled through at its feet, buzzing ferociously. Mike thought he could taste his own heart in the back of this throat, even over the horrible rotting stench of the Baal and its horde of flies.
“Per Volcanum ignem mitto!” Adrian shouted.
A hot wind, full of fire and gold-red light, burst from the bit of candle and the glass lens Adrian held in his hand, slamming into the door. The Zvuvim caught in the blaze disappeared instantly into ash and were swept away. The Baal bellowed again and flailed its dagger-taloned hands, trying to bat away the stream of fire, or grapple it, and then the current swept the big demon out of the doorway.
Jim slammed the door shut.
The fire-wind turned off and Adrian staggered. Mike rushed to throw an arm around the shorter man and prop him up. “Good job,” he complimented the organist.
“Yeah?” Adrian murmured, yawning and pinching himself. “I thought fight fire, et cetera …” He yawned again. “Damn this curse!”
“Stay awake!” Twitch snapped at him, and rapped him on the forehead with her baton.
“Ouch!”
In the outer passage, their demonic pursuers still raged. Mike eyed the door nervously, wondering how long it would hold.
Adrian shook himself and stood. “It’s not my fault,” he said.
“Nothing ever is,” Eddie observed, standing and brushing himself off.
“What’s the magic?” Mike asked Twitch. “Is it in the stick? Touching him on the head with the stick wakes him up?”
Twitch laughed. “I just like hitting him in the face,” she said. “There’s no magic. The poor idiot tries to cast spells, especially under pressure, and he gets suddenly very sleepy. You just do what you can to keep him awake.”
“But what’s the thing with the picnic?” Mike was puzzled. “The whole we’re all alone and it’s nice here, Adrian bit?”
“You’re not my mama,” Rafi said to Twitch.
“No,” she agreed. “I’m too tired to be your mama anymore.” She nodded at the iron door as it reverberated with another combined roar-bellow-buzz. “But I’m better than any of those things out there, aren’t I?”
Rafi nodded.
Eddie limped over to join Jim, who stared at the three passages. Eddie shone his bayonet-flashlight over them by propping the gun in the crook of his arm as he reloaded it. “Does the boy know which door to take?”
“No,” Mike and Rafi said together.
“But there’s a breeze,” Mike said, shuffling over to point at the passageway on the left, out of which he felt the air flowing. “See? This has to lead out.”
“I ain’t at all sure that where we want to get to is out.” Eddie and Jim looked at the passages further. “You see the glyphs, Jim?”
Jim nodded.
Mike looked to see what they were talking about, and realized that each passage had a symbol scratched over the top of it in the stone, and painted at the bottom with a white coloring, like clay. Petroglyphs, he thought they were called, though he’d never been a boy scout and had tried to avoid the deserts of Texas and New Mexico as much as he could. Each passage had a different symbol.
“A serpent,” Eddie said. “A star. And what do you think that one might be?”
“A tree,” Twitch guessed. It looked like a circle with a line coming down out of it, like a kid’s stick-figure drawing of a tree.
“Does it mean anything?” Mike wanted to know.
Adrian shrugged. “They’re all in Genesis, aren’t they?”
“More Bible?” Mike groaned.
“Everything’s always Bible in this band, Mikey,” Twitch laughed lightly. “More’s the pity for those of us who’ve never read it.”
“You could call me Mike,” Mike suggested.
“I could.”
“The star is the Host of Heaven,” Adrian continued. “The serpent tempted Eve. And the tree is the Tree of Life.”
“Knowledge,” Eddie corrected him. “The knowledge of good and evil.”
“Life,” Adrian insisted, and deep inside Mike’s fear-chilled and whisky-sodden head, a light bulb went on.
“Knowledge,” he said. “We have to follow the path of knowledge.”
“You read that in a fortune cookie?” Eddie asked.
Mike jerked a thumb at Rafi. “The boy told me. He’s never been down here before, but Rabbi Feldman raised him to walk in the path of knowledge.”
The boy nodded. “It’s true.”
Jim and Eddie locked eyes for a moment. Jim nodded, grabbed Mike’s flashlight and started deliberately down the passage on the right, through the arch under the stylized tree. Adrian followed on the singer’s heels.
“Let’s just hope it is a tree,” Twitch said impishly, “and not the famous lollipop of creation.”
“There aren’t any lollipops in Genesis,” Eddie grumbled. “Creation or otherwise.”
“Really?” Twitch grinned. “That’s a shame. I like a good lollipop.”
Something heavy slammed against the iron door and it groaned and buckled in response.
“Get moving,” Eddie ordered, pumping his shotgun. “I have the rear.”
Twitch jogged up the passage, followed by Mike and the boy Rafi, who ran with them now without anyone holding his hand. Mike let himself get distracted by the sight of Twitch’s horse’s tail bouncing from side to side like a tassel fixed to her leather pants as she ran, until he remembered that whatever she was, she wasn’t quite a woman—not exactly. For that matter, he wondered now whether the tail really was attached to her pants, or what precisely he would see if she weren’t wrapped in leather and spikes.
He cleared his throat and shook his head.
“What’s with … the tree?” he huffed and puffed to Eddie, who jogged two paces behind him, and in the light of whose flashlight Mike shuffled along. His heart pounded, and almost immediately he got a stitch in his side. He needed to drop some weight and get into shape.
Couldn’t quit drinking, of course.
“It’s a marker,” Eddie said. “Like a code. Like blood on the doorposts on Passover. Let him who has ears hear.”
“A tree?” Mike followed Jim and the others ahead, through a series of quick turns. The passages all looked the same to him, carved sandstone bricks like he was inside one of the pyramids of Egypt, and he had to trust that Jim was on the right track.
“The tree of knowledge of good and evil,” Eddie said. “The tree that is the candlestick that is the woman that is the river, et cetera. Not to sound too much like Adrian.”
“All that stuff is the same thing?” Mike tried to clarify. “You look for a tree or a river or a light, you’re going to see them all over the place.”
“Context matters,” Eddie said. “And symbols matter. You live long enough, Mike, you realize that there’s a whole world underneath the world that we see, and its symbols that tell you how to get around it.”
“Who are you guys?” Mike asked. “I mean, really?”
Eddie chuckled. “That’s a lot of story you’re asking about,” he said.
A distant bellow echoed through the labyrinth, and Mike wondered if the demons had broken through the iron door. “Can they follow us by smell?”
“The Hound can. The Baal, too, maybe, if our smell is distinctive enough.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means through a crowded city, maybe not, but through a labyrinth where almost no one ever goes, yeah, the Baal Zavuv might be able to sniff us out.”
Mike squeezed the grip of his pistol once to reassure himself that he still had it. “You’re not a rock band.”
“Sure we are,” Eddie said. “We’re a hard working rock band, too. It’s how we pay our way, limited engagements, strictly cash. Hell, we’re even good, in our fashion. New name for the band every gig, of course, so we’re harder to track, and that makes it impossible to build up a fan base, as does the fact that we can’t record.”
Mike rattled down stone steps. “And what’s with the tambourine?”
Eddie was quiet for a moment. “Everyone in this band,” he finally said, “has a bone to pick with Satan. The tambourine is mine.”
Mike almost laughed out loud. “Do you have any idea how stupid that sounds?” he asked. “What does that even mean?”
“It means I’m the best damn tambourine player in the whole damn world,” Eddie said gruffly. “Bar none, nobody else is even close.”
Mike remembered the agent at Butcher’s and the pleading look in his eyes. “I still don’t get it.”
“What I wanted to be was the world’s best guitar player,” Eddie said. “I was okay, starting to make a name for myself in some of the bars around Chicago, but I needed to get much better, and much faster than I could on my own. I needed it for my kids, you understand? For my family. It wasn’t an ego thing, I didn’t want screaming fans or limousines or coke to snort off the backsides of expensive hookers. So I did like all the songs said. I let a hoodoo woman take me down to the crossroads.”
Mike stumbled and almost fell. “You mean you sold your soul to the devil?”
“Keep running!” Eddie was quiet again. “Yeah,” he continued, “only I screwed up.”
Mike said nothing to that. He’d screwed up plenty, himself.
“I told Old Scratch—or his errand boy, anyway, you hardly ever get to meet the poobah himself in person, not on Earth and not in Hell, either—that I wanted to be the world’s best rock and roll musician. Damn me, if I’d just said guitar player it would have been all right. Instead, I sold my soul and just about lost my sanity, and all I got for it is that I’m the world’s most amazing genius at rock and roll tambourine.”
Mike gulped. “Lost your sanity?” he was ahead of Eddie, and after the story he’d just heard, didn’t feel really comfortable looking back.
“Out of my left eye,” Eddie said, in a voice that sounded like gravel and razor wire, “I see Hell. All the time. And when I sleep, I dream my death.”
“Mierda,” Mike muttered. He thought of Chuy and shuddered.
“One thing you’ll learn quick in this band,” Eddie added somberly, “if you ain’t learned it already, is that Satan’s got game.”
Abruptly they caught up to the others. At a final arch, the labyrinth ended, and they found themselves standing on a rough sandstone shelf under an immense stone overhang. Off to their right, Mike could see what looked like a dark-walled canyon, its depths choked with boulders and desert scrub, and a few winking stars peeping down on it from above. The light of the stars and moon was silvery and faint, but it gave Mike more ability to see than he’d had since they’d slammed the trapdoor shut in the synagogue, and he was grateful for it.
In front of them, below the overhang, lay a long strip of packed sand. At the far end of the sandbar, maybe as much as half a mile away, was a brick building. It looked like a cube that narrowed as it rose, like a ziggurat or a pyramid with its tip knocked off.
Mike smelled water.
“That’s gotta be it,” Eddie guessed, shining his flashlight on the stone structure.
From within the labyrinth, Mike heard the squealing of the Baal Zavuv and the roaring of the Hellhound.
“Let’s not stop here,” he said, and followed Jim, who was already trotting toward the pyramid.