Deal with the Devil

Halibel Lecter

Well-Known Member
#1
For: Iron Fic 2-2

DISCLAIMER:

The following uses no direct canonical content from either The Haunting in Connecticut or Showdown, by Ted Dekker, except for names and certain magical techniques.

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This wasn't how it was supposed to turn out.

This was supposed to be a house that they would get into and out of quickly; like the rest of the team, Jonah had climbed out of their beat-up Dodge van already aching to go home. It had been a hard week with little rest or break time, and they were all sweating in the dry New Mexico heat, wishing this were over and done with. And so they spent a lot of time near the air conditioning unit, and the house seemed fine... big deal, just a house.

Infuriatingly, no one could figure out what was causing the disturbances. The Reverend was busy examining their crosses, hanging all over the walls like some kind of indoor fruit. The couple was old, and their English faltered; the house smelled strange, like dust and mothballs and bleach, and they loved their ornaments dearly: crosses and crucifixes hung from every single wall, sat on shelves, dangled from light pulls. Like they were trying to counterbalance whatever was there. Aickman thought the crosses were causing a disturbance, Matt agreed. Jonah looked around, then back at them, shrugged.

"So what do we do? Take them all out?" She meant it to sound impossible, like examining every face in Times Square for an escaped convict. But the team thought it was a great idea and with the couple's permission, out came the crosses.

Boxes of them.

By the time the house was clear, Jonah was sick to her stomach from the heat and the long, skinny stairwells full crosses, crucifixes, lambs, faces, made of metal, plastic, wood...every kind of material imaginable. The house had no central air, just some scattered window units, and they were all sweltering, and this was the worst assignment possible, in all of ever. She couldn't remember hating a place so much since that place with the horror demons, as she'd learned they were called. They stood next to the most powerful fan and admired their work.

The walls had dusty outlines and the shelves had holes in their fuzzy carpets. There were places that looked bare in their somber coats of sun-faded eggshell paint, and intricate traceries of protected, darker off white in the den. But there were no crosses.

Aickman picked up his ringing cell phone, held it cupped to the side of his face, explained that yes, the crosses were all gone.

"Eh, that is good, but-ah, how dep... how dep? Do you, ah, wahrk?"

"Dep? Ma'am?"

"Dep! Dep like, like, ah, like dep water--how dep do you wahrk?"

"Deep?"

Matt looked over at Jonah and pointed at the floor. She shrugged, but they were beginning to get the feeling that this house was about to get worse. Maybe it sounded like whining coming from a team so used to danger and combat, but the work was miserable, hard and boring, nothing like any normal house.

As Aickman explained to the woman that anything buried in the earth could affect the house, the team waited patiently to hear what he'd say.

Maybe they misunderstood?

"Thye have a basement," he shrugged.

"No. No way, we've been over every inch of this house, where could they possibly hav--" the floorboards under Matt's feet echoed as he stepped forward. "......frak."

"Geek," Jonah coughed, more out of habit than to lighten the mood. She was staring at the boards, too, thick, rough oak that looked like it was more suited for construction. How would they get under?

"This way!" Aickman opened one of the closets and there, behind the coats and jackets, was a dusty passageway, so dark it seemed to suck the light from the living room.

"Necromancers first."

"Coward..."

Matt handed her a flashlight. At least it was cool, and a little more like a normal mission, but the well was soft-walled with age, the drywall was the consistency of thick pudding, and the whole place stank of earth and rot. They nearly choked--both of them--as the shadows opened up around Matt's flashlight, edging their way down a steep, muddy slope about two feet wide and taller than both of them by a lot. Maybe once there had been some slabs of drywall, that's what it seemed to be under the mold, near the top, but at the bottom there was just bare earth. There was no foundation, and they couldn't understand what must be holding the house up. Their voices were swallowed by the shadows. The silence.

For a while, they just stood, waiting for a replay haunting, waiting for a cave-in... checking the place out. Looking at the soft, velvety shadows, feeling the quiet lay against their skin. Jonah wanted to ask Matt if he felt that little prickle, like the psi equivalent of smelling smoke. But he didn't say anything, and his senses were better than hers.

"So... what's with all the crosses?"

She shrugged. "Maybe they just like them. I grew up in a house like that."

"You?"

"I grew up Southern Baptist."

Matt's feet shuffled in reply.

"Some houses have a lot of crosses; it's not a big deal." She shrugged, remembering the house. Its backyard, the shed with no crosses and a concrete floor that held chalk very well. Her teacher made her sweep it constantly, erasing the Marks. Her teacher was thoughtful, reminding her to scatter salt, scatter sycamore ash, light incense and walk around counterclockwise, whatever it took to cleanse the shed for the next lesson. "There's only really one thing it could mean that's not good."

"I thought you said," Matt started, but she began to walk around the cellar, since flicking her flashlight around the shadows couldn't reach any sides of the room but the door edge.

"I did! There's only one belief system that tends to keep a lot of crosses like that with a bad connotation, it's barely worth mentioning, and they're rare, and the stoires are probably not true. You've probably never heard of them." Soft dirt on the first wall. Just like the passage. Jonah started following it to the corner.

"And?"

She sighed. "Matt, there's no use scaring yourself--"

"Talk." He leaned closer. She could feel his body heat.

"...Baaraclecians," Jonah said softly, "Believe in a story found in a certain scroll that is usually not included in the other texts."

Matt nodded and backed off. Why did it feel less safe with him away from her?

"They believe that extended sacrifice here on earth, especially through physical suffering, the courage not to give in and live a life without profound pain, can grant salvation to others. They take their name from Baaracles, a hero in the scroll, who died in battle. An angel appeared to take him to Heaven, and he asked that his salvation be given to the heathen warrior next to him, who had struck the killing blow."

"What happened?"

"According to them, both were saved, and so they... have a very odd way of... Matt, do we have to discuss this now?" She could feel apprehension crickling over her like some kind of sharp, stinging chemical. But as they worked their way along the walls, looking for anything out of place, Matt wouldn't let her go silent. Words wouldn't change what they found.

"Are you scared?"

"No! Th-they, according to the stories, use a device called a Baaracles' Clock..." she explained it, the whole thing as it had been taught to her, a huge twenty-foot grandfather clock used to preserve the dead. The coffin made the horizontal arms, and the way it was constructed ensured a painful last few moments. Jonah detailed it for him, eyes on the soft dirt, reminding herself that the sheer size of it was a factor in why it probably didn't, certainly couldn't, exist.

"So how would we know if these people were like that?"

"Well, they'd have one, and they're pretty hard to hide. Being, you know, twenty feet tall and ten feet wide."

Matt laughed; his voice showed relief better than it showed mirth. "So see? We can't be dealing with that! Because they don't have--"

Jonah's flashlight hit something dark and soft, skipped back. For a split second, maybe because of remembering the house, she thought it was her teacher's boots and the edge of his trenchcoat. The man who taught her everything she knew, before she even met Aickman. If he were here now, he'd know what to do.

But it wasn't a person. It was a shadow, the beginning of a tunnel where they could see there should have been a corner. It was the furthest corner from the door, out of the way of the flashlight until now. They looked at each other and slowly, Jonah edged in first. Combat specialist. Necromancer. Matt didn't need to go first, she did, but she had to fight the urge to stop in her tracks as they started down another slope.

A tunnel.

A tunnel to another room with a clock buried in one wall, a body twisted in agony lying in the preserving vacuum of the arms, the hips skewed with a cross-shaped piece of metal, the face contorted in suffocation-induced agony. The pendulum still, dead from a long time with no winding.

That's what they were both thinking of as they moved carefully down the tunnel, flashlight hitting only the ground at the end, fifty feet and closing. The high ceiling made them feel as if they were about to get yanked up by the hair. For all they had a reputation of fighting like cats and dogs, in that very long five minutes they were a single person, feeling and hearing and seeing the same things.

Except that prickle, which Matt hadn't mentioned. Maybe it was just her imagination and her adherence to Murphy's Law. Jonah couldn't get the thought of him out of her mind, his silky black hair, tan skin, big, expressive hands. His sharp black boots, warm black eyes, his voice like flames trading places in a fire.

The way he appeared out of nowhere, it always seemed, and later in her training, the runes he bore so effortlessly. Giving her the cuts and marks to make her a full necromancer with what seemed like inhuman skill, yes, she'd wondered then. His power, his perspective, the one she had caught like a contagious virus. She'd wondered what made him so sure they were better than the humans... why he called them humans, for one thing, and he just said he was referring to the humanity, the livingness, the innocence.

It had sounded like a load of bullshit, even coming from him, the man who could have talked his way into the Oval Office on 9-11 if he'd wanted. But she hadn't ever questioned it directly.

To a more experienced necromancer, the prickle was subtle, but clear, indicative of demonic or ritualistic magic. Jonah couldn't see it. She wasn't supposed to be able to see those things, not at twenty-three years old, in the heat of July. But someone older and wiser would have known, and backed out. Known what they'd find in that room.

And even though they'd both seen a lot of very bad things before, for a while, they just stared, and took a minute to be ill.

For one thing, it was imposing, taller than either of them. The body was perfectly preserved. There was even a delicate chain from the metal piece that fed back into the clockwork, shadowed in the earth under the projection of the arms, the pendulum that was there but invisible behind dark-shrouded glass, and as they began to creep forward, looking for any other passages, that chain started to move, and the gears began, very slowly, to tick.

"...Matt?"

"I see it too."

The body, as the chain began to work its way through whatever gear system it was attached to inside the clock, started to jerk. It began to dance. Fluid leaked out of it, splattering the glass. Behind her, she could hear Matt backing away.

If the thing had waited until now to start ticking, it wasn't a change in air pressure. It was a being of some sort, whether a spirit or a demon or whatever, and it could see them, and it had waited until now because it wanted them to know it. And as she whispered to Matt to please not go get help, to go out to the main chamber and stay right there, Jonah knew they probably had no chance, because if it was created from within that clock, it was more powerful than anything she'd ever faced up to, never mind what it might be underneath the power ups and the protections and the wards. The stories, it seemed suddenly, had all come true at once, and here they were caught in the middle of a very bad situation with no way out. Matt, true to form, took that moment to protest.

"I can't leave you here!"

"You can," Jonah growled. "You will." She pressed the flashlight into his hands and told him to go. As his courage wavered, and he shakily agreed and ran out, the blackness swallowed her.

And for the first time since she joined 7-20, she didn't know what to do. A bound spirit would be useless. Any spell might just make it stronger, and she couldn't draw a seal in this dirt. Weapons could easily get away from her; acid produced dangerous fumes that might stop the works, but likely wouldn't, and could kill her or Matt, likely both of them.

Whatever was in there knew it had trapped them, and it was laughing its ass off. She felt her stomach twist.

"Jonah?!"

That was Matt's voice. The little idiot had gone for help, she guessed, because his flashlight lit up two figures. The second walked forward, and she recognized the swish of his coat before her whole body went cool with relief.

His hands were just the same. No new calluses, no rings. Big and soft like spiders, even now that she was grown. He still had to crouch to get down on her level.

And now that she was older, she could see the way there was no difference in texture between his pupils and irises. Totally black. A demon from the depths of Hell. Evil, destructive, sin incarnate.

She'd never been so happy to see anyone in her life.

"Why is it that you always get in over your head?" She blinked at him, drawing a slow breath as he studied her, looked past her to the clock. "These people have created a marj, a rebellion, a ghost that will do anything to end its pain. That includes taking over bodies. Matt is safe for now," he whispered. She could see the flashlight retreating.

"O-Okay." Valuable information. She'd need wards, runes, spells of protection... was there time to back off and form a battle plan?

"No. These fuckers just love a game of Tag, You're Mine." He held up a small vial, the liquid cloudy and thick. His voice hadn't changed, it showed no stress, but her body was reacting, heart pounding, as she looked at it.

"You said you'd never use it unless I needed to be punished." Jonah winced inwardly as her voice rose an octave by the end of the sentence, but she held his eyes as she spoke, brows raising and drawing together fearfully. Old fear as much as new, obedience, indignation. Emotions that had no place here, that had come rushing forward because he was really here, and she could relax a little, because it was going to be okay... right?

"You've done nothing wrong."

The grinding sped up. On instinct, she looked back, felt the bile rise as gore mixed like the suds in a tumble washer. "H-How can I trust you? Knowing what you are..."

"Would you rather have them die by my hand, if worse came to worst? Or wind up helpless victims, trapped down here for the rest of their lives?" He turned her back toward the clock, hands on her shoulders, forcing her head toward the sight. Rotten flesh, rancid fat, blood that had long clotted and blackened with decay. Brains that had molded to a deep purple. "Well, Jonah? You can't do this alone. You won't win."

Any ritualist knows that sometimes, a human's low place in the spiritual hierarchy forces them to take a raw deal. A compromise with an entity they wouldn't turn their back on for the whole world. It's just a part of the practice.

But she never expected this. Never thought she'd have to swallow that vial, a hallucinogen-sedative that made its victim controllable by spell [for example, he'd often threatened, suggestable to shoving something very large into something very small as punishment for an infraction]. Even as the glass touched her bottom lip, she flinched.

"I'll give you back, Jonah. I won't hurt you."

The clock's grinding fell into a rhythm. The pendulum began to swing.

"That second hand should start turning any time now. It releases itself by working the machine. Swallow."

A deal with the devil. She was standing on the edge of a cliff.

"Jonah. It's my soul or the marj."

Matt, Aickman, the Reverend, they would all wind up like that pile of mush if she didn't make the deal, but how could she trust a demon? Letting yourself be possessed was hardly a compromise. What if she never woke up?

Then they wouldn't ever rest. Ever.

The contents of the vial tasted like nothing. She swallowed hard, body growing heavy, mind hazing. Felt him pulling her closer.

"Good girl."

A deal with the devil. But as the old saying goes, the devil you know beats the devil you don't.





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