Hellhound on my Trail by D.J. Butler

Author:D.J. Butler [Butler, D.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: pulp fiction, horror, fallen angels, urban fantasy, rock and roll, action adventure, occult
Publisher: WordFire Press
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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