Evil Dark Read Free Page A

fire truck and those black-and-whites had more important things to do than wait for Butch to make up his fucking mind. It offended my sense of… I dunno, efficiency, I guess."
      "My partner thinks he's Batman," Karl said in mock despair. "And I thought I was the vampire on this team."
      "You are, and besides–"
      That was when McGuire came out of his office and yelled, "All right, everybody head to the media room. Let's go, people."
      There was a general shuffling of chairs and feet as detectives got up, most of them grumbling a little.
      "Time for the dog and pony show," Karl said.
      I walked with him to the door. "Didn't you tell me that you saw one of those once, in Tijuana – a dog and pony show?"
      "Nah, that was a donkey and a midget. A couple of chicks were involved, too, although it turned out one of them was a dude."
      "Hope this exhibition's gonna be better than that," I said.
      "It could hardly be worse."
      How wrong we were. How fucking wrong we were.
     
    We sat in darkness for maybe half a minute. If we were watching old-tech VHS, I would have figured it was just leader tape we were looking at. But this was a DVD, which doesn't need blank space at the beginning. I guessed the darkness was part of the program – a way to build suspense, maybe. If so, it was working.
      Some people like total darkness – they say they find it restful. Me, I slept with a nightlight on when I was a kid, and I still do. Complete darkness freaks me out. I read once where Freud is supposed to have said that fear of the dark is subconscious fear of death, which the dark symbolizes. Of course, a lot of people think Freud was full of shit.
      Personally, I think it goes back to prehistoric times, before man figured out how to make fire. The blackness between sundown and sunrise must've been an uneasy time for Joe Caveman, especially when there was no moon. Most predators see better at night than people do. In the dark, a man can't tell what's creeping up on him with dinner on its mind – until it's too late.
      Some things never change, I guess.
      Suddenly, a light illuminated the video screen – bright and sudden, like you find on a film set. You know how it goes – some guy yells "Lights!" and, boom , the sun comes out. What I was looking at on the screen didn't exactly fill me with eager anticipation, however.
      The red circle, which was maybe ten feet across, looked like it had been carefully painted on the concrete floor. The five-pointed star inside it had also been done with care, probably by someone who understood the consequences of getting it wrong. It was easy to see the detail under those bright lights.
      Inside the circle squatted two heavy wooden chairs. One of them was stained and splattered along its legs and side with a brown substance. When it was fresh, the brown stuff might have been red – blood red.
      A man sat in each chair. There was nothing remarkable about them – apart from the fact that they were both naked and bound firmly to the chairs with manacles at hands and feet.
      Not far from the chairs stood a cheap-looking table, its wood scarred and pitted. Someone had laid out a number of instruments there, including a small hammer, a corkscrew, a pair of needle-nose pliers, a blowtorch, and several different sizes of knives.
      A man's voice could be heard chanting, in a language that had been old when Christianity was young. This had been going on for several minutes. The men in the chairs sometimes looked outside the circle in the direction of the chanting, other times at each other. The one with dark hair looked confused. The other man was blond and clearly the more intelligent of the two, because he looked terrified.
      Then came the moment when the air in the middle of the pentagram seemed to shiver and ripple. The ripple grew, but never crossed the boundary of the circle. After a while, some thin white smoke began to issue from that shimmering