Satan's Servant, page 1
SATAN’S SERVANT
By B. W. Battin
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright 2014 / B. W. Battin
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Meet the Author
B. W. Battin grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After serving four years in the U.S. Coast Guard, he graduated from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He became a reporter at KOAT-TV in Albuquerque, then moved on to TV stations in Shreveport, Louisiana; Rapid City, South Dakota; and Duluth, Minnesota, where he wrote his first published novel, Angel of the Night. After it was published, he became a full-time writer. One of his novels, Smithereens, was made into a TV movie for NBC. His novels and short stories have been translated into various languages, and he has ghost-written novels for other authors. He lives in Belen, New Mexico, with his wife Sandy, whom he describes as the love of his life. They met in Albuquerque while they were both in the news business.
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SATAN’S SERVANT
Prologue
In a place of neither time, nor space, nor matter, nor dimension, the following conference took place. It was never recorded, and the creatures living in the physical world never knew what transpired. But for the beings in the Other World, the event was a momentous occasion because it was the first such meeting since the Great Agreement establishing all there is.
“You know I don’t like coming here.”
“Yes, but the Agreement must be preserved, and this is a most difficult matter.”
“But the troublemakers are under your jurisdiction. Why don’t you just handle it?”
“It’s not so simple. They were improperly called forth.”
“But they went anyway?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you allow them to go?”
“I didn’t. When I found out about it, it was too late.”
“Is it a clear violation of the Rules?”
“Yes.”
“So why don’t you handle it?”
“Because according to the Rules, exorcising them is your responsibility.”
“You mean it’s come to that?”
“Yes.”
“You know, if you treated them better, you might not have these problems.”
“I didn’t want them to begin with.”
“Yes, I know. But I made some handsome concessions in the Agreement to get you to take them, and they remain your responsibility.”
“Yes, yes. Let’s get back to our problem. There is simply no provision in the Rules for a situation like this. I’m responsible for all action to be taken in the matter, but my hands are tied. I’m not permitted to exorcise the troublemakers.”
“Yes, it is a problem. I’m not allowed to intervene in a disciplinary matter between you and your charges.”
“And I’m not allowed to dislodge them so I can deal with them.”
“Hmmm. Must we act quickly?”
“From my standpoint, the sooner they are punished, the better. From your standpoint, haste is advisable because they’re very destructive, and they will cause great damage to the place they inhabit.”
“I think you should handle everything. I yield my authority to you in the matter of the dislodging.”
“Very well. Now, should we also suspend the Rules so I can act immediately?”
“We’d better not. The Rules have served us since the Beginning, and we’d best not tamper with them any more than we have to.”
“That could mean a long delay.”
“I don’t like it any more than you do, but I don’t see how we can suspend the Rules.”
“I suppose you’re right. I’ll wait.”
“By the way, where is this place they’ve escaped to?”
“It’s called Rancho Lucero—a small town in New Mexico.”
“Hmmm. Well, is all agreed then?”
“We are agreed.”
Part One
… Rancho Lucero
While ritual magic has been practiced by man ever since the beginning of his existence, so little has been learned about the art that even the most experienced of its practitioners are delving into things about which they know very little. And few magicians, no matter how learned, fully realize the extent of the powers they are attempting to manipulate.
—translated from the Theurgicon
Chapter One
1
“All right, Mr. Thompson. All right. I’ll come take a look.” Mike Ryan hung up the phone, ran his fingers through his sandy hair, and grimaced. Oswald Thompson was a pain in the ass.
The man was so conservative that he probably considered Ronald Reagan a liberal—which was his business. The problem was he kept trying to make it Mike’s business. Once, he had come into the office bearing an armload of papers which he dumped on Mike’s desk—proof, he said, that zip codes were a communist plot.
This time it was chickens. He wanted Mike to come look at a bunch of dead chickens in a deserted area along the river. As far as Mike was concerned, a few dead birds dumped where no one was likely to find them were not that big a deal. But they were to Thompson, and that meant Mike would investigate. There were a lot of crazies around who felt the same way Thompson did, and the entire pack of them showed up at town council meetings, loudly denouncing whatever upset them at that particular moment. Mike did not want it to be him.
He sat for a moment, staring at the office. Dirty beige walls. Green floor tiles. Two wooden desks facing the door, a two-way radio squeezed between them on a small table. To his right, beyond the vacant desk, was the cooking area with its tiny stove and refrigerator, a small counter with a sink and worn-out red linoleum. His eyes continued travelling around the room, taking in a stand of gray metal filing cabinets, beat-up wooden chairs along the walls, the doors to the storage room, bathroom, and jail. A hot, dingy office two or three times as large as it needed to be and a jail that was almost always empty, that was all there was to the police station in Rancho Lucero, New Mexico.
Oh, well, the facilities were adequate and beyond that unimportant. A shiny new building would not make the police department one bit more efficient.
And efficient policemen did not sit and stare at the walls when they had calls to respond to. Even when the caller was Oswald Thompson.
With a sigh, he pulled his 175 pounds up to its full six feet, grabbed his khaki hat off the two-way radio, and walked out the door. It was already hot at nine in the morning; the day promised to be another scorcher. It was going to be one of those days.
He backed the patrol car away from the “Police Vehicles Only” sign, plowed through the deep gravel in the parking area, and pulled onto Rancho Lucero’s main road.
He passed a small, deteriorating adobe house sandwiched between a gas station and a fast-food restaurant. On the other side of the road, a flatbed semi carrying a bulldozer chugged by. The bulldozer seemed to eye the little house greedily, as if to say: Your time will come. I’ll be back.
Rancho Lucero was in a state of transition. It had been a sleepy little adobe village; it was becoming part of suburbia.
Twenty miles away, Albuquerque was doing what most major southern and southwestern cities were doing—expanding madly. But New Mexico’s largest city had problems its counterparts in other Sun Belt states did not. It was trapped, hemmed in by mountains, military reservations, Indian land, and large tracts of acreage of dubious ownership because of ancient Spanish land-grant deeds. So the city seeped out through mountain passes, squeezed around the lands it could not claim, and generally spilled out anyplace it could find to go. One of those places was Rancho Lucero.
For years, the town had been not much more than a few farms and a general store, a place where people from the city could come in the fall and buy vegetables from roadside stands. Now the farms were becoming subdivisions; the roadside stands were becoming gas stations. In twenty years or so, freeways, shopping centers, and tract houses would probably hide all traces of what had been there before.
There were some people who said the town should try to preserve some of its old streets and buildings before it was too late. As far as Mike could tell, it was already too late—not that he really cared. Things had worked out well enough for him.
Six months ago, the old town marshal had died in office—of natural causes—and Mike had become Rancho Lucero’s first police chief.
The marshal had been a one-man department; now the town had two policemen. Mike had hired Erminio Gabaldon, a local resident whose only experience had been working as a security guard and, briefly, as a sheriff’s deputy. The latter position ended after seven months when the voters ousted the incumbent sheriff. But none of the applicants for the job had had any better experience, and Mike found Erminio to be a good, hard-working officer—for six-hundred-fifty dollars a month, he was damn good.
The Rancho Lucero police chief’s job had great career possibilities. All Mike had to do was wait; as the town grew, the police department would grow—one officer under him now, maybe two in a year, maybe ten in five years.
And there was another advantage to being in Rancho Lucero. The thirty-minute drive to the city gave him an excuse to see less of his mother. She had always wanted him to be something on the order of a happily-married, devoutly-Catholic, neatly-dressed accountant who lived in a big suburban house, had three kids, and belonged to the PTA. And she took every opportunity to remind him of it. Mike, of course, failed on every point. He was a single, nonreligious, casually-dressing policeman who rented a small apartment, had no desire to raise children, and would never even dream of belonging to the PTA. Rounding out his faults were his hair—it was on the shaggy side—and his sleeping habits—around, until he got a steady girlfriend.
2
Mike slowed the patrol car. Was this where Thompson had said to turn? It must be. He pulled off the highway onto a small dirt road which narrowed into a pair of ruts after the first hundred feet. The foliage got denser as he neared the river; bushes screeched against the side of the car, and the two-way radio antenna rattled and vibrated with each slap of a branch. Then the road turned left into a clearing.
There was Oswald Thompson—wiry, tanned, western hat and boots, standing beside his red four-wheel-drive pick-up with “Thompson Land Surveying” on the doors in white lettering.
“Over here.” He started across the clearing. “We’ve got to go down by the river bank.”
Mike climbed out of the car and followed him.
Thompson carefully picked his way around bushes and cacti until the river was in full view. This time of year there was very little water in the Rio Grande; most of its wide bed was quicksand and puddles. A muddy brook wandered where it pleased between the banks.
Thompson pointed. “Down there.”
Mike stepped up beside him and looked down. There in the muck at the river’s edge were thirty or forty chickens in varying stages of decomposition. Groaning, he eased himself down the small bank and bent over for a closer look. The stench hit him squarely in the nostrils, and he immediately straightened up.
“Ha,” Thompson laughed. “The breeze is behind us. There’s no warning until you’re right on top of it. Then it hits you.”
“Yeah.” Mike looked up at Thompson. The surveyor was standing three or four feet above him at the top of the bank, leaning forward, watching him closely. Looking up at Thompson from that angle—the long, weathered face, the thin, tight lips—Mike thought he knew how a dying animal must feel being watched by a vulture. The only thing wrong was the eyes. A vulture’s weren’t blue.
“After I called you, I examined some of them. Their throats had been cut—each and every one of them.”
Mike cautiously sniffed the air and decided it was safe as long as he remembered not to bend over for any more close inspections. “The way they look, they were dumped here one at a time over the last several weeks. Some are badly decomposed, and others look almost fresh. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would anyone make all those trips down here with one or two dead chickens at a time?”
“You don’t know?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked.”
“It’s them—the Devil worshipers.”
“How do you know?”
“Hell, man, the chickens are used for sacrifices—some kind of black magic they believe in.”
“That church of theirs is—”
“Church?”
“That’s what they call it. Anyway, the place is a good three or four miles from here. Why would they come all the way down here to dump off their dead chickens?”
“How the hell would I know? Maybe they think the Devil won’t like ’em unless they take their sacrifices at least four miles away for disposal.”
Mike was not sure just how all this was going to come out, but he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was not going to be able to forget about the damn dead chickens until he did something to satisfy Thompson. Mike had no desire to get involved with the Church of the Four Elements. The Satanists had never caused him any problems, and their church was out of the town limits. It was not his concern. But the goddamn chicken carcasses were within the town boundaries, and to Thompson, the only thing worse than communists was Devil worshipers. It was definitely going to be one of those weeks.
Mike scrambled up the bank. “Come on. Let’s get out of here before the wind shifts.”
“Aren’t you going to pick up the chickens as evidence?”
Oh, boy. Here we go. “Listen, Mr. Thompson. What the hell would I do with them? They’d rot and stink. Where would I put them?”
Thompson nudged his western hat a little farther back on his head. “I’m sure you could find a place. You could freeze them.”
Not in my freezer. “You don’t understand. I have no reports of any chickens stolen or anything like that. The only apparent crime here is littering or maybe illegal dumping. Even if the Devil worshipers did sacrifice the chickens in some sort of ceremony, I doubt there’s a law against it—unless the chickens were stolen. I’m not even sure it would constitute cruelty to animals. Believe me, there’s not enough indication of any serious crime here to merit taking all those rotting chickens back with us.”
Thompson sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”
They walked back to the clearing and stopped beside Thompson’s truck.
The surveyor pulled off his hat and mopped his brow with his sleeve. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I was doing here?”
“Is there any reason why I should know?” Mike asked, noting Thompson’s close-cropped gray hair. The flattop was a badge of membership, just as long hair had been for the hippies. It proclaimed: I am a conservative!
Thompson fanned himself a couple of times with the hat, put it back on his head, and ignored Mike’s question. “I’m checking out the area because I’m going to run a line through here to a brass cap about a mite up the river. It’s to tie in the boundaries of the River Estates subdivision.” His sun-parched face beamed with pride. “It’s the biggest contract I’ve ever had. Not many small surveying outfits like mine ever get a contract like that. You’ve got to spend years building up a good reputation. You know, I’m going to have to hire two extra crews. It’ll really be big time.”
“I’m sure it will, Mr. Thompson.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me where I telephoned you from? There’s not hardly any telephones here, you know.” He motioned toward the river.
“Okay, how’d you do it?”
“From right in here.” He slapped the door of his truck. “I figured I’d need good communications with a big job like that subdivision, so I had a mobile phone installed. How about that!” He checked his watch. “Oh, oh. I’ve got to get going. You’ll let me know if you find out anything about what those Devil worshipers are doing, won’t you?”
