Humming, Augustine slides her key into Paul’s lock, just as a sneaky someone appears behind her. She whirls around, ready to drive the one and a half inch key into The Eye Doctor’s own eye socket, when she catches herself at the last moment. The tall black haired girl in front of her doesn’t so much as blink. Instead, she slowly smiles.
“I’m Lacy. Is now a bad time to surprise Paul?” she asks, her eyes roaming up and down Augustine’s body. That’s right, Augustine thinks. She’s got nearly a decade on this girl, but if anything, she’s fresher, fuller, with all of this tall girl’s silly youth plus the sophistication that comes with an extra decade in life needed to actually pull it off.
“It’s actually the perfect time. Won’t you join me?” Augustine flashes her teeth. She likes making the young girls do what she says. She’s not into fucking women—she’s tried more than enough times—but there are plenty of ways someone can please you without touching you.
She unlocks Paul’s door, quickly surveying Paul’s sparsely decorated living room. There’s a shining old clock on the wall, made of bronze, and there are photographs of—is that Federal Hill, back in the olden days when the brick on the buildings was still fresh? She ignores Lacy behind her, taking in the kitchen and the sink without any plates or half-eaten scraps of food lumped atop one another. Even Augustine’s private room at the Miskatonic, separate from all the fun of the flesh, is dirtier than this place. Does his TV still have the plastic sticker over the screen?
Lacy takes a seat on the couch behind her. That’s right, Augustine forgot about her. “So, are you here to fuck Paul?” she asks, relishing the discomfort the girl will feel. But Lacy doesn’t react to her question.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” Lacy says, looking her dead in the eyes. Girl’s young, but not young. Augustine grins. Of course, Johan knows how to pick them. What had he said about her?
“I thought you weren’t allowed in Providence?” she asks, but Lacy only shrugs.
“I’m not much of a wanted woman by the police anymore. Nor anybody else for that matter,” she says, looking to the harborside out the window. A runaway—Augustine’s seen her type before. They always have their secrets.
A cough comes from Paul’s bedroom, and Augustine grins. Could there be another girl in there? She walks halfway through the kitchen to his half ajar door before it opens. A tall, tall man in a wooden mask steps out.
Eyeing a knife rack on the kitchen counter, Augustine lurches forward, her hand draping across the handle of the biggest, closest blade, and the satisfaction of having reached it momentarily stalls her defensive strike. She pushes back, and Lacy’s beside her. Good. Augustine reaches an arm around Lacy and pushes the girl toward the masked man. He’ll attack her, Augustine figures, and then she can go in for the kill.
The tall man grabs Lacy’s face, turns it left then right, grumbles from beneath his mask, and then tosses her to his right with more strength than Augustine reckoned. Lacy’s head smacks against the corner of the kitchen island, and Augustine has no choice. She lunges forward with her kitchen knife. The man hunkers down, thrusting his wooden mask toward her, the tip of her blade sinking uselessly into the wood. He kicks her feet out from under her.
The back of her skull bounces off the floor, and she is floating, swaying, swinging, hanging upside down, watching the floor swirl around her head. Lacy screams, dragging the block of knives to the floor in a serrated rain as she slashes the masked man across the collar with one of the knives. She’s aiming for the neck, but he’s leaned back. Those long arms of his grabbing her are a scrambled blur Augustine can’t make out clearly.
“Not you,” a warped voice grumbles. A knife punctures a windpipe, and from there, Augustine hears only wet choking sounds from the dying runaway girl. She’s heard that plenty of times before. Upside down, the featureless wooden mask hangs above her head as the tall man peers down at her.
***
Back at Otis’s house, they had been going over all the possible ways they could abduct somebody without getting killed or hailed down by the cops when Otis bolted outside like a dog hearing some kind of invisible whistle, only to return and slam a well-wrinkled newspaper down onto Hap’s lap. “You remain nameless. Either good or very, very bad.”
Never mind just what the fuck that means. There’s no mention of any police slayings or suspicious Indian boy suspects in the news. The cult’s web extends further than a corrupt sergeant or two.
The first name out of Hap’s mouth, after Otis asked him who he knew at the Miskatonic, was “Paul Jones.” When Otis shook his head, muttering he’d never heard of the man before, Hap asked him just who Otis knew was associated with the cult. Hap then mentioned Augustine Sanfresco and the incident where he got stripped naked. But again, Otis gave him the shoulder shrug.
“You know the boss, good ‘nuff. We partners—I know, you know, we know. A Miskatonic face all the same. We take him, peel his skull back, see what’s beneath it. I’ll show you how to take a man from his home.” At the idea of actually abducting Paul, Hap’s stomach started doing a series of flops, like he was a Lego piece being rearranged by an indecisive toddler. How many innocent people could Otis be talked into attacking as easily as Hap had convinced him to go after Paul? Then again, anybody who even so much as shines the shoes of the people who took Tiff probably deserves what’s coming to them in the form of a crooked-toothed killer with an affinity for eyeballs.
It’s Hap’s shitty job to take point, making sure the hallway and back stairwell are clear as Otis takes Paul. When Otis appears with a woman slung over his shoulder, Hap knows everything has gone to shit.
Leading the way into the back alley, he sprints over to the Caddie’s driver’s side door, dropping the key that’s oh-so-inconveniently lacking any sort of chain or grip. His knuckles scrape when he picks it up from the asphalt, but he manages to slide into the driver’s seat and back up to the side door.
Beyond the two rows of parked cars, there’s a rundown field that covers about four blocks’ worth of uncut grass in front of the closest building to the apartment’s back lot, a gas station. As far as operating in Providence goes, this is a nice place to abduct a cult-sympathizing wacko. The highway that extends through the East Providence Bridge is close by, but someone would have to be walking and peering over the sides of the bridge to catch a glimpse of them. Hap’s heart beats hard enough to feel as if it’s going to erupt out of his mouth as Otis lumbers out the door and his big legs pull him right to the trunk they left partially open. He dumps Augustine out of sight. Hap barely has a second to scoot across the front seat before Otis barrels into the car, grinning and panting.
Over the rock-and-roll-static remix on the radio, Hap can hear Augustine punching away in the trunk. Not for the first time, the thought of what’s actually happening makes him want to hyperventilate.
Once they reenter the countryside, it’s a relief that there aren’t cops tailing them, but it’s not the relief to end all reliefs. Given what Otis has told Hap about the Moon Shack’s followers, any vehicle behind them could be the harbinger of their demise. Despite their caution, any number of eyes could have settled on them from the shadows as they fled Paul’s place.
There’s no doubt their victim is a living thing, as she continues banging against the trunk. Otis stands beside Hap with his knife drawn and watches his Cadillac shake. Globs of runny ink and Hap’s blood still stain the floor. Having a burning, sore arm, inflicted hours before the most potentially perilous thing he’s ever willingly done, goes to show that he has to sharpen his thinking because Otis will only encourage the dull mind to act first and worry never.
Before the abduction, Otis seemed proud when he showed Hap the simple white, wooden mask he was going to wear that vaguely resembled the tragedy and comedy theater icons. Then he started telling Hap all the options they had for abducting Paul; all the sneaky, wicked ways they could rip a man from his
own home. With those thoughts swirling in Hap’s head, Otis pulled out the tattoo kit; the drill was whirring before Hap could refuse. Otis said, “For Tiff,” just once, as a loud grunt over the whine of the needle gun. The killer remembered her name. After a few minutes of agony, as if Hap stuck his wrist into the maw of a many-toothed reptile, a tingling sensation replaced the pain; it was almost like he was getting a new-age massage. If only it weren’t for the blood that still dripped out of him.
Now that Otis has cast his mask aside, it’s clear he has no intention of letting Augustine go. Hap’s not dumb. This woman who once grabbed him by the crotch and attempted to mate him with a masked female is going to die. Jeez, they haven’t even let her out of the trunk yet.
Bumping Hap’s shoulder, Otis seems free from any moral turmoil. “Women, ‘specially pretty ones, can be more dangerous for boys like you and me than men, ‘cause we designed in our blood and brains to be lil’ puppets ta what reminds us of mum. How many women killers you ever heard about? At the drive-in? How many women wear a mask or swing a blade? There ain’t less of ‘em, just less that get caught. A woman in they group means she done more than the men ta earn her place. You ever hear of Lizzie Borden? Fall River gal, not far from Providence, by no coincidence. With an axe, she gave her mother forty whacks. When she looked at what she done, she gave her daddy forty-one. We can’t be fools now.” Hap wants to believe Otis’s logic is for the greater good, but there’s a hungry look to the killer’s eyes, and all Hap can think of is that old Snickers candy bar commercial. “You’re not yourself when you’re hungry.”
Following a creaking pop of the trunk, Otis’s hand is a Kung Fu snake-strike that instantly grabs Augustine around the jaw, squeezing her mouth and cheeks as he hauls her out by her neck until her nose nearly touches his. “Your eyes is dim, but your tongue is fat.” He turns to Hap with a dreamy smirk before grabbing her by the face and dragging her across the driveway and into the house. This time, Hap can’t even pretend to help; he can’t watch those squirming, long, pretty legs before they’re slurped into the front door of Otis’s own killing shack…which also just so happens to double as Santa’s Workshop.
Now comes the part that Hap hasn’t thought through. He follows the sounds of screaming into the small bathroom, where Otis is binding one of Augustine’s hands to a pipe along the wall, forcing her to sit on the toilet as he does so. There’s nothing she can reach except the ceramic back of the toilet seat that Otis preemptively picks up and tosses past Hap. The noise it makes when it clatters against the floor sends one of the cats bolting out of the house.
Hap’s sensation of doing something irreversibly wrong is dulled by Augustine’s lack of fear as Otis takes a step away from her. Her face is a frozen snarl, her words on the verge of hysterical laugher. “Are you a fucking hipster? Is that why you can’t join the party, you evil fucking hypocrite? How could you betray everybody like you? You share the same dreams!” She’s standing, turning as much as she can to face Otis, despite her arm being shackled to the wall. She cranes her neck just enough so her eyes catch Hap’s stare. Her laughter, beyond ridicule, is a taunting flag of all the secrets she must know. Hap swallows and waits for Otis to make a move.
“I see a lot of little boys, but I remember your limp dick.” The punctuation of her lips is heightened by her smeared lipstick, and Hap feels an old shame that comes with being spoken to as if he is indeed a timid little boy.
“I knew you wouldn’t be the real hard cases because I’m friends with them and the things they do to people like you. You think taking eyes is some kind of message? Some kind of ritual, right? You fucking pagan losers.” Otis reaches for her, and she spasms, her whole body convulsing as she shrieks, “Don’t touch me! I’ll pop my cherry, I’ll fucking join them and bash your fucking head in. I’ll bite your neck out and tear your prick off.” She’s screaming so hard her voice begins to crack. Hap is suddenly glad for Otis’s presence.
“Boy, your teeth are pretty.” Otis has a foot-long knife drawn by his side that Hap doesn’t remember seeing at any point in the day. Could it have been on him the whole time, tucked away somewhere? Otis lunges, wrapping an arm around Augustine’s neck while he plops down onto the toilet seat, cradling her onto his lap. His arm twists, and he points the tip of his knife on her forehead. Like dashing a checkmark, Otis quickly notches a backwards crescent moon into her forehead. Otis mentioned earlier that the backwards crescent is “to mock them,” but now, even with Tiff potentially dead, Hap doesn’t understand the need for cruelty. There’s a need, and then there’s desire. Surely, Otis derives his own sick pleasure from this ritual he’s sharing with Hap.
“My skin!” Augustine reaches for her face as if to rub away her new scar. “You’re the end of my virginity. Oh, you’re the boys; yes you are. I’m going to feel your skulls crack. I’m going to feel your brains. They are going to welcome me in that pale hall, oh, you darlings.” Augustine licks her lips and moans.
“Darling, threaten to hit me again, and I tear your straightened teeth out, press them into your eyes. Nothing wants to see what you see.” Otis holds his knife against Augustine’s throat, and she goes still. “We want information. You a blowup doll. Time to let out yer air. Who blows you up at the Miskatonic? Who’s the boss?”
“The man whose apartment we were in!” Augustine shrieks.
“No, no, no,” Otis coos and Hap has to lean against the wall because a rush of sudden vertigo seems to want to lift his brain out of his skull. Something awful is going to happen right in front of him, but he needs to hang onto this woman’s words. He needs to get his say in, but there’s no talking over Otis. “I need his boss. Come now, sit on my lap like a good girl and write me a nice little list.” Otis giggles, causing those Christmas decorations in the living room to go from sad to vile. Otis, for all he has lost, is clearly enjoying this, and he hasn’t even touched her eyes…yet.
Augustine snaps, “Names? What kind of pagan are you? You know names are useless. They can’t even begin to sum up…you want names? Johan Weissbekoff, Elliot Sampson, Taylor McKinley, ha-ha, Charles fucking McKinley.”
“The necromancer is dead,” Otis snarls.
Augustine is cackling now, but it’s a defeated sound, not a joyful one. Is she okay with dying? Is she on drugs? Hap suddenly remembers, they are all crazy. This isn’t a real person. This isn’t just some woman.
“The old man lives,” she says. “I’ve seen their grandfathers and great grandfathers, undying generations. Hah! You want any of them? Come on, all you’ve gotta do is ride that glass elevator and knock on a couple of doors. Some of the rooms at the Miskatonic have been checked out for almost a century. You’re so tough, why don’t you go do that?”
Otis turns to Hap but nods his head in Augustine’s direction. “Hap, look it this girl, friend of man slayers. Look at her nails, done up all colorful.” Otis puts his mouth to Augustine’s ear, and is there even a point where this can go too far? “I’m gonna take um, put ‘em in a jar on the windowsill over there, let you look at em.”
“You think I haven’t been tortured before? By men? By women? How about you take off my clothes and run your little knife over my scars?” Augustine moans and leans her head back to brush her cheek against Otis’s, and Otis seems to go rigid for a moment. Hap isn’t sure what the fuck is happening if they’re about to kiss or not, but then Augustine’s teeth are flashing toward Otis’s neck. With his left hand, he throws her off him, and she’s crying out, twisting the arm attached to the pipe along the wall to the point that something must be broken or dislocated because the waves that ripple across her vocal cords is that of a wounded animal, confused and bleeding in the middle of the road.
Otis tilts her head back, letting the knife negotiate gently against her throat once more. “Those are fine names, powerless and fake as they may be. Give me a place that’s no hotel. Give me a place, and I won’t carve up yer face. I’ll leave it slick
and just kill yer quick.” Otis giggles, rhyming now, practically singing like a goblin from some Brother’s Grimm fable. Hap tries to speak, but his throat is drying up.
“Sure.” Augustine’s spewing sarcasm, hunching up, leaning back against the wall as Otis moves away from her. “There is a church along a popular street. A hundred people walk and drive by it every day, and its doors are always closed to the curious. I’ve been in there, just like I’ve toured the Acropolis, the Pyramids, and the steps of Giza. You’re the type of freak who likes old, dirty things, huh? Let me guess, I don’t remind you of your mother enough?”
Hap feels the sledgehammer of memory striking Otis in the belly. The killer recoils and then delivers a fist to her face faster than Hap can turn his head to look away.
Hap keeps his eyes closed as Augustine goes on, telling them about a church that the citizens wish they could burn down but don’t. She doesn’t elaborate. “Looking through the ruins will be right up your alley, huh boys? You know what? I’m gonna tell you. Hey, limp dick! Open your eyes.” Hap blinks in Augustine’s swelling face, running with mascara and smeared lipstick. Her eye will be black before long. Otis is a rotten woman-beater, but she’s sick and evil, right? “There you go. You’re gonna find some kind of hope there, in the church. I want you to find it.” She licks away some of her lipstick—or is that blood? “It’s good you get some more of that in you because you know what’s going to happen eventually when they find the two of you?”
“What do they do with the missing girls?” Hap asks quietly. He stands beside Otis; maybe it’s because she called him a limp dick again, but he’s feeling the hatred now. “There is a girl, Tiffany, tall with blonde hair. What did you do to her?”
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