The Devil's Equinox Ch. 01

"You don't suppose your uncle was kidding?" Baxter wondered, peering through the gray and empty wood suspiciously. If there was a house there, he couldn't see it. Neither could she, but she had followed these directions precisely. She was not used to making mistakes.

"He's not the kind of man to kid around," Shari said. "Based on what I've read in the papers." She glanced down uncertainly at the slip in her hand. "But the fellow back at the gas station confirmed it was back here."

"Yes, but on which road exactly?" Baxter said. "There are plenty of roads here; the area was once heavily logged, you can still see the hundred-year-old stumps. We could have taken a wrong turn almost right at the highway. No way of knowing without GPS coordinates." He leaned back against the rented Toyota and crossed his arms, his eyes slowly doing a circuit of their surroundings.

Shari studied him. She knew that under his long overcoat, his arms were more thickly muscled than any plain old engineer had a right to -- that kind of muscle was reserved for lumberjacks and wrestlers. He joked that it was a result of his Nordic genes, but Shari suspected that he either trained hard in a gym for three hours a day, or that his work somehow generated that physique. They knew so little about each other, after all; it made perfect sense to her that he was keeping secrets from her.

They had met a couple of years ago, at a grief counselling group, after their spouses were erased from their lives by the banality of simple, violent, car crashes. All she really knew about him was that he was a perfectionist; that he kept himself scrupulously clean; that he liked chicken, and beef -- but not steak; that he liked to be in control, but that he had learned over the years that there were some things that people needed to be involved in, even if they were not in charge.

Her position at the hospital demanded a certain amount of committment, so their acquaintance had only grown slowly. They would meet for dinner and drinks somewhere, always near the medical center, whenever he was in town. Sometimes it was six weeks between visits. She flirted with him, and he was perfectly charming and devilishly cute, but then afterward ... nothing. One time about three months ago -- after they had both gotten more than a little buzzed over dinner -- she had paraded around in front of him in her underwear, claiming it was too hot in his hotel room. She would have been delighted -- no, excited -- if he had tried to get a peek into her g-string, but not a hint of it.

Shari wasn't self-conscious enough anymore to worry about her physical beauty. That adolescent habit was long gone. But she was aware that she had managed by exercising and eating right to keep a figure that had once allowed her to think seriously about becoming an exotic dancer. That one summer she spent at the Balmoral had paid for her first year in medical school, after all. She knew she was attractive enough to turn on any particular male, as long as he was awake.

Baxter did laugh and throw a pillow at her, so she knew her little game was doing something to him.

It might take a while to get him to feel something again, and in the meantime she found him utterly fascinating. So much so that he had been the first and only person she called when her uncle Ernie -- who happened to be billionaire philanthropist Ernest Vayle -- contacted her through his legal representatives; by way of some byzantine tax law she was to be the new owner of some odd property in these thickly wooded hills. It would never cost her anything, not in taxes or upkeep. All that seemed to matter to Vayle was that it was off his books officially.

But now they were here in the hills, and had presumably gotten lost. Suddenly Baxter's head snapped over to one side. "Do you hear that?" he said. "There's a vehicle in the woods over there, not far from here. I bet you at that last fork in the road we should have turned right instead of left."

They got back into the rental and drove back about a kilometer. The bottoms of the clouds above them were darkening, threatening an early evening downpour. Shadows stretched long about them, the autumn light already fading as the sun dropped below the surrounding hills. Soon their little rental was bouncing along in an ever increasing cloud of dust. "Probably a truck ahead of us," Baxter explained. "But they'll know about the place, for sure."

Suddenly Shari wrinkled her nose and opened the window to get a better whiff. "Someone's smoking a lot of dope," she smiled, the scent calling up fond memories of her earliest college days. How many years since she had grown out of that habit as well?

The Toyota lurched as Baxter applied the brakes heavily. They skidded a couple of feet in the gravel, but still stopped quickly enough to avoid the folk that were walking the road ahead of them. Shari's mouth hung open in amazement and awe.

Immediately in the road ahead of them a ragtag group of folk, maybe three dozen, walked, following slowly in the dusty wake of a semi-tractor pulling a flatbed trailer with some sort of structure on it. "I'm seeing, but I'm not believing," Baxter said quietly. Shari nodded mutely, utterly fascinated. The group appeared to be following what was more cage than trailer that had been loaded onto the flatbed. The top half of the trailer was completely open to the elements other than a roof and sturdy steel bars that had been inserted between it and the solid bottom half every six inches or so.

It was hard to tell from this distance, but it seemed to Shari that there was a nude woman somehow suspended from the ceiling of the cage. She couldn't see a face anymore, but could still make out the definite shapes of heavy breasts and nipples swinging with the soft motion of the truck.

Not one of the men and women in front of them were wearing any clothes, other than shoes. Some walked hand in hand; most were excitedly chatting to each other. When Baxter and Shari slid to a halt behind them, one young couple turned and walked back to them, smiling openly. Each puffed contentedly on their own marijuana cigarette.

The tall young man leaned down to blow a little smoke into Baxter's window. "How you guys doing?" he wanted to know, an impish grin breaking his features wide open. "Dusty, huh?"

Baxter laughed with a deep, rich sincerity that Shari had slowly discovered was one of the only ways he was capable of emotionally connecting with others. If he laughed like this he was truly amused, and present in the moment. "Aren't you all cold?" he wanted to know.

"Hence, this," the young man explained, indicating the weed and raising his eyebrows. "Not exactly beach weather, I know."

"Last year it snowed," the young woman added, leaning down to chat with Shari. She seemed not in the least concerned about her nakedness. "I was on snowshoes. Just once I wanna have one of these on a tropical island, or something, in summer." Shari nodded automatically but was too bemused to create a coherent thought in her head.

"What a drag you are, girl," called the young man, straightening up suddenly. "It's got to be now, in the fall, or it wouldn't be the right time, would it?"

"Oooh, aaah, I'm so scared," the girl joked light-heartedly. "It's gotta be at the exact time of the Equanotica Satanicum, or it's useless." She took a big puff on her cigarette. "Whatever, you big wuss. You're more of a pussy than I am, and I'm nothing but pussy!" She grabbed herself and threw her head back in laughter. "Come here and eat me, you big wuss, I dare ya!"

"Fuck you," the young man laughed.

Her knowledge of latin honed in medical school, Shari finally broke through her initial amazement. "Do you mean, Devil's Equinox?"

The young man leaned in Baxter's window a little more. "Yeah, right. Some crazy middle ages thing, beats me what it was all about. But what it's about now is a lot of fucking. I'm telling you, guys, this is one party you don't wanna miss. 'Course, you wouldn't be taking part in the actual ceremony, but still, what else you gonna do out here, eh?"

"Are you some sort of ... nudist colony?" Shari wondered.

"Oh no, nothing like that," the young man said. "Nothing even remotely like that. Anyway, it's just around the corner there. We got a gate and everything. You wanna check it out, believe me." Suddenly he pulled his head back out of the window and looked down. "No cocksucking outside the fence, girl! You know the rules!"

"But I wanna suck your cock! At least you're cute," came the young woman's reply from just out of sight under the car window.

"You're scheduled to suck twelve other cocks tonight alone, and that's just the opening ceremony. Get up you lawless perp!"

"I've been thinking about that, baby -- you know they won't let us smoke weed inside, especially not during the ceremony. But I like cock better when I'm smoking weed during it, so I wanna have just a quick fuck in the road before we go in, okay? Come on, baby, you love me, right?"

"Hey, I gotta eat ass all night and you don't hear me complaining."

"Well at least it's girl ass."

"You got that right. But with all that pussy two inches over and being forbidden to eat any of it ... "

"You're gonna be on the verge of exploding all night, if I know you, and I know you."

"Yup, it'll be cum city all right ... "

"Eventually, anyway ... "

They were moving slowly down the windy gravel road, following slowly behind the playfully arguing couple. Shari was shocked to the core of her being. She had never heard such dirty language before, let alone heard it used in such a context, in front of complete strangers. Even strip club language had a certain politeness to it, a deference for the performers. As a physician she was no stranger to nudity, but again, in the appropriate context.

"Nothing like a nudist colony?" Baxter wondered quietly. "It's got to be at least ... something ... like a nudist colony, don't you think?"

The road widened and turned right into a driveway the size of a four-lane highway, and also continued straight ahead, out of sight through thick stands of fir. A massive sign carved from a thousand-pound block of fir confirmed that they were at Vayle House. A much smaller sign attached to a stake driven into the ground beside it read, "Delivery trucks please use access road 1.2 kms north." Shari clenched the post-it note confirming the address, in denial.

"Oh no," she breathed. "This can't be." Her fingers began tapping against the hard leather upholstery nervously.

"Is this the -- " Baxter wanted to know. "Of course it is," he grumbled, turning their rented Toyota into the huge drive.

"This can't be," Shari repeated. "This is a mistake. There has to be some other place here at this address."