Killing Rites

Chapter Three

Since Uncle Eric died, it felt like I’d spent more time traveling than being anywhere. I tried to count up the hours I’d spent in airplanes and airports, and came to the rough conclusion that I could have gone around the world five times. Marco Polo and Magellan were homebodies compared to me. I expected the drive north to Taos to be just another trip: a couple of hours in a vibrating metal box, ending someplace I didn’t know. Instead, going down the two-lane highway pointed out something I hadn’t realized. Pretty nearly all the places I’d been to in my long, slow survey of my domain had been cities with airports. With big hotels filled with smartly dressed people lining up to give me whatever I asked for because I’d bodysurfed in on a wave of money.

Now we drove through a handful of towns that were barely more than a few hundred yards where the speed limit went down. In a couple, I could have counted the buildings on my fingers. Twice, we passed little houses set back from the highway like some kind of suburban dimensional warp. I imagined some anonymous subdivision, thousands of identical houses with one inexplicable lot of mountain and grassland. It wouldn’t have seemed any stranger than this.

The cottonwoods by the roadside were black barked and dead looking. The names on the signs were places I’d never heard of, some of which seemed like jokes. I had a hard time believing there was a Rat, New Mexico, even if they were saying it in Spanish. Ex pointed out that there was Boca Raton in Florida, and Rat’s Mouth wasn’t particularly more dignified.

After we passed through Española, I let Ex change the road music from Pink Martini to the jazz piano that he preferred. There was more snow on the ground. At first, it only clung to the shadows where the sunlight couldn’t reach it, but every northward mile gave it more courage. By the time we were threading our way along with a frozen river to the left and sheer and towering cliffs to the right, there was as much white snow as brown earth or green pine.

I wondered what it would be like to live out here, away from the world. I had a reflexive longing for it, as powerful as hunger. To fill up the heating oil, haul in a stack of books as high as my head and enough food to get through the winter sounded like a little slice of heaven. If I’d tried it, I’d probably have been walking the fifty miles to Starbucks within the week. It was a nice fantasy. That was all.

I’d also thought that we’d stick out on the road, a gleaming back sports car twisting through the back roads of rural New Mexico. We spent about half the time from Española to Taos between a silver Lexus and a Cadillac Escalade with a ski rack mounted to its roof. The closer we got to the city, the more the traffic seemed divided. Beater pickup trucks and fifteen-year-old Saturn sedans grudgingly made way for hundred-thousand-dollar SUVs.

The car had a GPS, but Ex didn’t use it. We went straight through town and out the other side before we took an obscure fork from the main road. The road angled north and west, winding along the contours of the land. The asphalt didn’t look like it had ever been adulterated by paint. The roadside was mottled with snow and ice, but the pavement was clear. A chain-link fence rusted in the middle of a field for no discernible reason. The traffic signs we passed were crusted with old snow, the top half of the speed-limit numbers fading to gray. I didn’t realize we were getting close until Ex pulled the car to the right, eased down a short road, and killed the engine.

San Esteban spread out before us. Three streets with a few buildings on each one, like a giant had scattered a handful of gravel. About half were clapboard with pitched roofs. The others were flat-topped adobe with brown stucco and windows so deep that birds had built nests on the sills. A couple of metal Quonset huts crouched together at the north end. Once, they’d been painted in psychedelic swirls that still hung on as paint flakes. One had a gas pump out front so old it wouldn’t read credit cards.

Ex had stopped by one of the adobe buildings with the deep-set windows. At a guess the sanctuary might have been a school once. Or a nunnery. There were no signs on the building to say what it was used for now. There were no street signs. When I looked at my cell phone it was wavering between digital roam with one bar and no service. The whole town was well on its way to not existing at all. Ex put the keys in his coat pocket, took a deep ath, and nodded to himself.

“Stay here,” he said.

“Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.”

I thought he smiled a little as we got out of the car. I trailed him down the walk to the blue-painted double doors. They were wood, and so worn by the years it looked like the paint was holding them together. The air bit at my earlobes and made my nose run a little. I kept my hands stuffed deep in my pockets and reminded myself to buy gloves next time the occasion arose. And maybe a scarf. A motorcycle blatted past, the only traffic sound there was. Ex knocked on the door.

We waited. I looked around. Across the street and about twenty yards farther along, a small house hunkered down in the snow. The windows had sheet plastic over the screens and a television flickered inside, blurred to mere light and movement. On the street, a beat-up gray Yukon and a sedan that had first hit the road when I was getting out of grade school.

Thirty or forty crows perched in the bare cottonwood across the street, calling to one another and shifting uncomfortably like old men at a bus station.

There was something wrong. It wasn’t the stillness, exactly. Or the cold. Or the quiet. The world felt thin here, the spiritual world just outside ours—the place that we called the Pleroma or Next Door—close enough to touch. The sanctuary at San Esteban felt like magic, and it made my flesh crawl. Ex knocked on the door again.

“Maybe they’re out doing the thing,” I said. “Wind demon busting.”

“They’re here,” he said, nodding toward the car and Yukon.

The crows clacked at one another accusingly. There was a term, I thought, for a group of crows the same way there was for a school of fish or a pride of lions. It was right on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t quite remember it. With my black coat and hair, I felt like I should be able to spread my arms and fly up to the winter-killed tree, squat on the branches, and look down at the world.

As if alarmed that I’d even think it, the crows took to the air, cawing and beating their wings. They circled up into the hazy white sky, turned south, and departed. I watched them go, and behind me, the blue doors opened. The man who stood in the shadows beyond was maybe thirty. His skin was the brown of eggshells, and his black hair was combed straight back. A sense of weariness weighted down the air around him; I kept expecting him to sway on his feet. He wore the Roman collar under a thick wool sweater. When he spoke, it was with an accent that made me think of being eight years old with a crush on Ricky Ricardo. Old Havana, as romantic and unreal as Middle-earth.

“I’m sorry. You’ve come at a very bad time. You’ll have to go away. Come back later.”

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” Ex said.

The man in the doorway looked up, shocked. His eyes were so brown they were black, and his expression changed from a shock that was almost fear to disbelief to an incandescent joy in the course of a single breath.

“Chewy? Is that you?”

Chewy? I thought, and Ex grinned and held his hands out at his sides as if say, Here I am. Old Havana stepped out into the light. In the sun, the few gray hairs at his temples shone in the light, but they didn’t make him look old so much as prematurely gray. He took Ex in a bear hug, and I stepped back in case his enthusiasm spilled over onto me.

“What are you doing here?” Old Havana said as he returned Ex to the ground. “I haven’t heard from you in years. Not since Isabel—”

“It’s been a long time,” Ex said. “Chapin didn’t mention me, then.”

“No. Except … Were you the mysterious errand down in Santa Fe?”

“If it was yesterday, then I probably was.”

Old Havana nodded more to himself than to Ex. Looking at him more closely now, I saw he was less Desi Arnaz and more Benicio Del Toro. He had the same distance in the eyes and the same well-worn masculine pretty. He looked at me as if noticing that I was there.

“This is Jayné,” Ex said. “Janyé, this is Miguel Contreras. Father Contreras, I guess.”

Old Havana—Miguel—nodded to me, smiling. I pulled a hand out of my pocket and waved.

“Hey,” I said.

“She’s why we came,” Ex said. “We need to talk to him.”

“We’re in the middle of a ceremony.”

“Akkadian wind demon,” Ex said.

Miguel nodded, paused, then nodded again.

“We’ve been going for three days. The girl’s in the back, and the devil wants her bad. Won’t give her up. We’ve been pulling shifts.”

Ex frowned.

“You mean he came down to see me in the middle of a rite?”

“We thought it was strange too,” Miguel said. “Maybe a little less strange, seeing it’s you. Are you here to help?”

Ex laughed softly. When he sighed, his breath was a plume of white.

“No,” he said. “I came to make demands, actually. But I’ll help if I can. If he’ll let me.”

“Come in,” Miguel said, gesturing toward the still-open doors. “Both of you, please.”

As if he’d said the magic word, about half of my anxiety faded. The sense that the town was malefic and aware of me didn’t vanish, but it faded. The crows—gone now, anyway—

seemed less like they’d been talking about me. I followed Ex through the doorway and into the warm darkness. The interior was all brick floors with thick Navajo rugs. The white stucco walls were wavy and uneven in a way that spoke of handcraft, and the dark wooden doorways were set so low that even I had to duck a little when I went from room to room. Religious paintings and sculptures hung in every room. Christ hung from His cross of wood or ceramic or worked iron. Mary wept or looked on serenely while her son died. A few of the paintings were bleak images of hell, heavy with threat and misery. I wondered who had painted them. Men’s voices rumbled in the distance, talking low among themselves. The air smelled of wood smoke and old incense.

There were no corridors or hallways, just one room following on another like a maze. They were all lit, but the wiring was stuck on the exterior of the walls and painted white; the building was older than electricity. We passed a window that looked out into bare courtyard, and I could feel the cold pressing in from the glass. Miguel led us through four or five doorways, Ex sometimes going ahead of me, sometimes behind. At one door, we passed through almost together.

“Xavier, I get. Ex, I get. But Chewy?” I said softly.

He actually blushed a little.

“Long story,” he said. “Tell you later.”

“Promises, promises.”

The kitchen was as small as any of the rooms we’d been through. An enameled gas stove sat in the corner like a refugee from the 1920s. A mini-fridge out of a dorm room hummed to itself on the opposite wall. A fireplace had a high, roaring fire in it, and iron fixtures somebody could hang a pot of gruel from. The worn gray couch on the far wall didn’t go with the decor, and a small dinner table with a motley variety of straight-backed chairs had been shoved a little to the side to accommodate it.

An older man—fat, but also tall and solid—lay on the couch with his arm over his eyes. Two others were sitting at the little table, an interrupted game of dominos spread out between them. Between the roundness of the table and the weirdly organic shape the tiles had taken, I thought of mold growing in a petri dish. Which made me think of Aubrey and the research biology labs he’d worked in. And then about breaking up with him in the darkened hospital in Chicago. For a moment—less than a breath—I was under Grace Memorial again, my hands bloody and an innocent man begging that I not bury him alive. And then I was back in the real world. Nauseated, my heart racing. But back. No one noticed.

One of the men at the table—thin and Anglo with close-cut sandy hair—yawped with delight and came toward Ex with open arms. The other one—young-faced, with a weak chin his goatee couldn’t quite apologize for—looked on in benign confusion. The big one on the couch grunted and tried to turn away from the noise, sleep more important than anything except maybe a fire. Thin Man took Ex in his arms, thumping him soundly on the back. Unfortunate Goatee smiled at me, and I nodded back.

“Chewy was Father Chapin’s star student when I first joined up,” Miguel was saying to Unfortunate Goatee. I felt like the new kid at school, left out and alone and vaguely threatened by how happy everyone else seemed to be. I balled my fists in my pocket and willed myself to be calm. There was nothing to be afraid of. I was being stupid.

“The prodigal returns, returns, returns,” Thin Man crowed. “I’d kill you the fatted calf, but we are a strictly lentils-and-greens affair these days.”

“Dinner at O’Keefe’s?” Unfortunate Goatee said.

“Yes, that!” Thin Man said through his grin. “You’ll love the place. Utter hole. Looks like food poisoning on a stick, but they̵re wonderful. What are you doing here? Where have you been?”

The sleeping man gave up, rolled to his side, and squinted up at Ex through red-rimmed eyelids.

“Xavier,” he rumbled.

“Tamblen,” Ex said. It seemed to exhaust the conversation between the two of them, and Ex turned back to Thin Man. “I’ve been … I’ve been traveling. I was renting a garage in Denver for a few years, using that for my home base.”

“Keeping out of trouble, I hope,” Thin Man said.

“Wouldn’t go that far,” Ex said. “This is Jayné Heller.”

The men’s collective attention turned to me. The silence was fraught, and I didn’t understand the weight it carried. I wasn’t the only one to notice either. Unfortunate Goatee was looking at the other priests in confusion. Thin Man let go of Ex and smiled at me.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose abandoning one’s vows does carry certain benefits.”

“Carsey,” the big one—Tamblen—said, and the Thin Man held up a palm to stop him.

“Joking, Tamblen, my dear. Only joking,” he said, and then held his hand out to me. I expected a false, bitchy smile, and so the naked sorrow in his expression was off-putting. “You’re Chewy’s girlfriend?”

I shook his hand. He was strong despite his build, and his skin was warm.

“Employer,” I said. Thin Man—Carsey—blinked at me as if he hadn’t understood. I clarified. “I’m his employer.”

“Jayné hired me and a couple of others,” Ex said. “We’ve been helping her put some things together. It’s a long story. I talked to Father Chapin about it yesterday, and we came up here to … follow up.”

Tamblen sat up, chuckling. Carsey’s smile warmed and he made a little bow. Touché. I didn’t know what point I’d scored, but I nodded back.

“He’s with the girl,” Unfortunate Goatee said. “Him and Father Tomás.”

“Out soon,” Tamblen rumbled.

“I didn’t know that the exorcism had already started,” Ex said. “Or that it was going to be so long.”

“This one’s rough,” Miguel said. “But we’ll beat it. She’ll be free by Sunday. We’ve been tracking this demon for months. Its spawn are sent back to Hell. There is only this one left, but it was the source of all the others.”

I had to check my phone to be sure, but it was Wednesday. Miguel and the others had been working, and it looked like around the clock, for three days. They were thinking it would be finished sometime in the next four.

Ex stared at the floor, struggling with something. I’d been with him long enough to understand. He’d brought me here to have a confrontation with his old master, and now it looked like said old mastead a solid reason for putting us off. He didn’t want me to feel like he didn’t have my back, but the second thoughts were building up fast. On the timing if nothing else. I let him off the hook.

“Look, why don’t we head back down for Taos,” I said. “You guys can find us there when—”

Somewhere in the maze of rooms, something banged. A door opening. The sound resonated more than it should have, echoing through the space like we were in a cathedral and not crowded into a tiny kitchen. A girl’s voice screamed, fury and violence. The raw power of it washed over me like heat from a furnace. There was nothing human in the roar. Nothing benign or rational. It was the voice of a rider, deep and thundering and soaked in hatred. A man’s voice rose, opposing it.

“—by whose might Satan was made to fall from heaven like lightning, I humbly call upon your holy name in fear and trembling—“

Unfortunate Goatee blew out a breath. His face had gone pale. Carsey turned to him, nodding, and then back to me.

“Stay a few minutes. Father Chapin’s just coming,” he said. And then to Unfortunate Goatee: “Rise up, my boy. Break’s over.”

From the moment he staggered in, I could tell Father Chapin wasn’t pleased to see us. He went from surprise to disappointment in a flicker. I could see Ex hunch in a little at the old man’s disapproval, like a schoolboy bravely facing his father’s punishment.

Chapin looked like crap. Sweat wet his skin, the veins in his temples and neck were discolored and proud as welts. He looked at Ex and then at me. Carsey and Unfortunate Goatee—I really needed to find out his real name—walked out, heading toward the commotion. The unearthly howling kept roaring for a few seconds. Then a deep, resonant boom like the gates of Hell closing. And then silence. Shift change.

Father Chapin walked to the minifridge, took out a bottle of water, and drank it, squatting there on the floor. Miguel and Tamblen watched him. No one moved, waiting for Daddy to say something.

“We didn’t know you were in the middle of a thing,” I said.

Father Chapin ran a hand over his head and took a long, shuddering breath.

“Come with me,” he said without looking back at us. “We can speak.”

He walked like an older man than he’d been the day before. It was more than just fatigue. The way his hips tried not to move, the care with which he put weight on his knees. He was in pain. He led us to the room with the window that looked out on the courtyard. A crucifix of carved oak bore a Christ dripping with red paint. His crown of thorns was a real crown of thorns. Father Chapin leaned against the wall.

“I assume you have not done as I asked you,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Ex said, and the distress and embarrassment in his voice reminded me of about half of my own childhood. “I only thought—”

“It’s not Ex. It’s me,” I said. “I’m not going to see a shrink. I don’t have a psychological problem.”

Father Chapin smiled and swung his eyes toward me. A blood vessel in the sclera of his left eye had burst, staining the white red. He looked like he’d been beaten.

“You sound quite certain, Miss Jayné,” he said. “You have murdered. You have compromised the temple of your flesh. You have lost faith in both God and the uncle you most admired. And you tell me you are unscathed, yes?”

“Well, okay, I may have some issues to work through, but I’m not crazy,” I said. And then, “Wait a minute. Compromised my temple? Are you talking about sex?”

“There is a reason for the things I ask of you,” Father Chapin said, leaning against the wall. “There is a process which we must follow. Not only for you, not only now, but for everyone. Every time. We do not cut corners, take the easy way …”

The contempt he shoehorned into the words easy way was pretty impressive. Ex was staring at his own toes, his face pale as the snow outside the window. An odd smell wafted through the room, hot and metallic, like a skillet left on the burner for too long.

“Xavier of all men should have explained this. What we do here,” Chapin said. “It will not heal those wounds. If you are possessed by the minions of Satan, I may be able to help you to redeem yourself. But to be here now is a distraction, and to commit to these rites without need would damage you and degrade these ceremonies.”

I crossed my arms and leaned against the wall next to Jesus. My scowl was etching itself into my skin. The weird smell was getting stronger.

“Well, I don’t want to degrade any ceremonies,” I said. “But whether I feel emotionally at peace with—”

Something detonated. Dark webs cracked the pale stucco, and the crucifix beside me swung like a pendulum. Father Chapin’s mouth was a tiny, surprised O. Ex was the first to recover, but Chapin and I were after him almost as soon as he moved.

The kitchen was in disarray: table toppled and domino tiles scattered on the floor, minifridge door open and its internal light flickering wildly. The others were gone. Someone screamed from the other side of the building. The door Father Chapin had come through stood open. The door Carsey and Unfortunate Goatee had gone out when they were going to take his place in the exorcism. As I paused, I heard other voices—men’s voices—raised and shouting as if from a long way away. And something that was like a girl’s voice and also like a forest fire roaring above them. The air felt tainted. Something unreal brushed against me and blundered away again like a fish in a pond.

“Possessed girl got loose?” I said.

“Yeah,” Ex said.

“Spiffy.”