A Lower Deep

where you're from, I can teach you things the girls don't do there at all, or at least not half as well.'

The baby gazed about the restaurant with a cool reserve. Walt kept staring at me as his parents held hands and ate cheesecake. I worked Bridgett back into a nearby table just hard enough to knock its flower holder to the floor. Her heel crunched squarely on the oddly shaped wild roses, grinding them into the carpet. 'Hey, honey, watch where you're swinging me,' she said. 'I already made you the offer. No need to get pushy now.'

'Sorry.'

I braced her against the seat and stooped to check the roses, interpreting their position using a Romany version of phyllorhodamancy-divination through crushed flowers-and saw in the petals something about worshipers of toads, worms, and the gnawers of the dead.

The Rumseys gathered their toys, stroller, and diaper bag, and put Walt into his winter gear until he was packed up like a Power Ranger-loving Eskimo.

'Come on,' I told Bridgett. 'Let's go.'

'Whoa, boy, you're a little slow out of the gate but you're a racehorse when you want to get moving. Give me a second here.'

I left Jake a tip that would lighten his heart and when the psychic cord leading from the back of his head came around toward me I caught it in my concentration and snipped it with my mental teeth, allowing his dead brother's portion of their soul to at last let go.

Bridgett drew on a leather coat loaded with studs and buckles that clashed with her evening dress. She laughed humorlessly at nothing, grinning wildly and weaving with little excited steps as if imagining what her fiance might do after finding us together in the morning. I pictured a guy in a large red truck backing over me a couple of times and it didn't put a smile on my face.

The parking lot was a blinding swirl of thrashing snow, and the few cars still remaining were almost buried by four-foot drifts. Rumsey carefully brushed off his station wagon.

'The blue Mazda's mine,' she said. 'It's not very practical in winter but I like it and . . . well, anyway-' She made a fluttery motion with her hand. 'It's over there someplace, I think.'

We got in just as Rumsey turned east onto the highway. It took me a minute or two to rock the Mazda out of its spot where the snow had bunched high around the tires. I followed at a fair distance with no other traffic in view. Bridgett kept trying to fondle me, still muttering about Jerry Terry, his Dodge, and broken promises. His mother would be pissed too-the old lady liked Bridgett and wanted grandkids soon before her bad hip completely gave out.

With her face planted in the side of my throat, those lips were like passionate razors cutting deep that reminded me of another lady from the dead past. I put my arm around her and listened to her sighs, until at last she slept.

The Mazda handled poorly on the slippery highway, fishtailing and skidding all over. One headlight was out and the other pointed under the grille. I had trouble keeping Rumsey's station wagon in sight. We drove for twenty minutes before he pulled into a sparse hillside area and backed into a lengthy driveway, the house secluded by acres of brush on either side. I turned around and parked at the far edge of their property.

Even with the fierce wind blowing, a stench of blood and burned flesh bloomed over the house. Between that and the heady aroma of church I had barely enough time, as the nausea hit, to open the door and vomit outside the car. Spasms wracked me and I reached down to get a handful of snow and washed my face with it.

My second self uncoiled at the pungency in the air and pranced up my back. His mouth watered for bonemeal, Bridgett's sexuality, and the Fetch-lit doomed. Self nuzzled my neck, his tongue working at my skin the way Bridgett's never could, his breath warm in my ear and mind. He plucked at her coat, claws clinking rhythmically on the metal studs. Hot-chee Mama. Nice winnebagos. Now you're thinking, boy!

We've got problems.

He scrambled back and forth across the dash, his arousal overpowering. Hey, no problem here!

Finally he wheeled from her and splayed himself against the passenger window, sniffing and mewling. His eyes could pick up the Fetch-light glowing where mine no longer could, the flaming portent of murder spinning lazily in the night. Warmed in his blood lust, growls of ecstasy escaped him as he dreamed of what might be shuddering, pleading, or eviscerated inside. His thoughts pounded vindictively at me, showing images that made my already queasy stomach tumble further. Cold sweat exploded across my body. Quit it.

Good stuff going on in there, he said, but weird.

How so?

Can't tell yet.

You yipped a name before. What was it?

Did I?

I got out and left the car running, heater going full blast to keep Bridgett warm. The woods were filled with tree branches so heavy with ice that they blocked my passage as I stumbled through hip-deep snow.

The first floor was brightly lit, every room blazing. Smoke rose from the chimney but no fire burned in the living-room fireplace. Two calico cats slinked across colonial furniture made by Sears. The Rumseys were nowhere to be seen. I tried the front and back doors and found them both dead-bolted. At the other side of the house, grades in the snow showed a few inches of shuttered windows at the stone foundation. I got on my belly and dug a corner of the shutter free, planted my feet, and pulled. The wood splintered and enough came away for me to see the painted black glass of a cellar. Self spat on the window and the paint on the inside bubbled and ran.

'Holy God,' I whispered.

Self guffawed at the sight. You've got to be kidding me. This? In Billings, Montana?

Burning coals in a circular brick pit at the center of the cellar threw fingerlicks of shadow along the walls. A teenage girl lay gagged, naked, and tied spread-eagled to an old-fashioned metal box spring standing against one wall. Thin and gangly, her ribs pressed out sharply beneath her small breasts. It looked as if she'd been holed up here for at least a week. Intricate braids of lengthy red hair had come loose and curled down past the butterfly tattoo on her left thigh and the blackly emboldened name MEL on the right. She was covered with gashes, bruises, and burns from melted wax.

Gouged patterns of cabalistic symbols confirmed she'd never wear a bikini again. Copper wire had been strung so tightly around her wrists and ankles that the crusty skin had sealed over the wounds and her extremities had turned blue. She might not ever have the use of her hands or feet again. Self slurped and jitterbugged beside me, in his element now and wanting a taste of everything. He crooned, begging for entry. Mel-or Mel's girl-looked up. She spotted me and moaned, unsure of whether to cry out from beneath her gag, half expecting me to be just another form of agony.

At the opposite end of the basement, Fred and Kathy Rumsey sat in a poorly drawn chalk majik circle, a variation of Baphomet's inverted pentagram: The customary nine-feet of circumference had been whittled to five, and titles of the Infernal hierarchy had been misplaced between the tetragrammaton of Jehovah's holy name along the inner edge; along the outer ring Hebraic figures at each point of the pentagram incorrectly spelled out Corozon instead of Leviathan.

The Rumsey's wore cheaply sewn, hooded gray robes, turning pages of a book and reading aloud in badly accented French. I recognized passages from the eighteenth-century grimoire called La Petite Grossetete written by Emile la Duc, a charlatan hoping to cash in on the depravity of certain French nobility of the time. His wife had killed him with a broom handle.

Walt sat in his stroller, still silently staring.

If not for the girl, it would have been laughable. Another couple of ridiculous modern Satanists, and poorly adept ones at that, wearing Halloween costumes and humping books on the occult back from the library. Not too uncommon a sight in the Manhattan or LA underground club scenes, with parlor games, group sex, blood fetish, and a modicum of Anton La Vey's Satanic Bible special effects tossed in for good measure. Shops in Greenwich Village and on the Sunset Strip stocked eyes of newt and devil's chalices, catering to the social fringe. But . . . Christ, in Billings, Montana? None of this accounted for the signs I'd seen in the roses. The Rumsey's weren't witches, only perverts, kidnappers, and possibly killers.

The two-sided blade Rumsey used proved to be a true athame-a witch's knife- sharply honed as he stood facing his wife from across the circle, chanting an invocation so garbled I couldn't make