The Siren and the Specter

by Jonathan Janz

  Dazed, bleeding, he retreated toward the window, but the sight that awaited him on the bed blasted away his pain, erased all other thought.

  Judson loomed over Jessica. David expected Judson to reach for her, to defile her the way he had so many others.

  Then he saw the tiny figure climbing onto the bed near Jessica’s torso.

  Ivy braced her hands on Jessica’s unmoving shoulders.

  In a deep, insectile voice, Judson said, “Feed, my child. Feed.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Her white gown stained a rusty crimson, her hair stringy and caked with blood, Ivy opened her mouth. The leering creatures watched with rapt anticipation. Judson gazed beatifically down at Ivy, whose teeth were inches from Jessica’s throat.

  David took two strides, threw a shoulder into Ivy’s side, and knocked the child off the bed. A part of him recoiled at treating a child so roughly, but Ivy was no longer the child she’d been.

  Judson roared, and before David could react, immense fingers closed over his neck and propelled him through the air. He hit the northern wall near the floor, the impact with the plaster dulling his senses.

  Jessica, he thought. Have to get to Jessica.

  He remembered the ravenous look on Ivy’s face, the ceremonial attitudes of Judson and the leering creatures. And though he’d always considered anything to do with the occult unadulterated rubbish, he’d studied it extensively and recalled snatches of it now.

  Judson derived regenerative power from living victims. So did his roasted sex slaves. Of special interest to Judson was the degradation of children, and the more Ivy fed on human flesh, the further gone she would be.

  She’s already gone, a voice insisted. So is Jessica – she’s bled to death. Your only hope now is saving yourself.

  David pushed to his feet, swayed a little. Ivy was turning back to her meal.

  Had she already bitten into Jessica’s flesh?

  No time, he thought. There’s no time.

  He took a step around the edge of the fourth bed and nearly tumbled headlong. The toe of his sandal had landed on something, and stumbling, he realized what it was.

  Honey’s gun.

  Unthinkingly, David picked it up and aimed it at Ivy, whose tiny face was descending, descending. In another moment she’d bite into Jessica’s throat. But though that prospect filled David with horror, he couldn’t pull the trigger, couldn’t murder a child.

  He leveled the gun at Judson Alexander and squeezed the trigger.

  He expected the slug to travel straight through the giant, but Judson’s arms splayed out, the great head thrown back in pain.

  Ivy scrambled to her feet and glowered at David. “Don’t you hurt him!”

  Amazed, David took aim again, thinking that it made a primitive sort of sense: to do damage in the corporeal realm – to bash Ralph Hooper’s brains out on a hospital wall, for instance – Judson had to become physical matter. And as a creature of physical matter, Judson was susceptible to pain, to damage, and David squeezed the trigger again, exulted in the gout of brackish gruel that splashed from the side of Judson’s neck. The leering things were squalling, their lidless white eyes gaping moons. Ivy looked unhinged, her fists bunched and shaking. Her scream was somehow worse than those of the leering things. She was already vaulting off the bed and scuttling toward him.

  Judson did a slow, staggering pivot, and fixed David with a look of outrage.

  David strode closer, took aim, squeezed the trigger and blasted away a portion of Judson’s face, the right jaw denuded of flesh, the roots of Judson’s molars showing like some hideous anatomical diagram.

  A shadow rocketed toward him. Ivy, he knew, the child mad with fury and whirring with fingernails and hair. David started to speak but closed his mouth, knowing no words would halt Ivy’s onslaught, knowing she would have to be met with force. David sidestepped and brought a forearm down against her shoulder. She deflected off him, twisted in the air, and thudded against the brass feet of the third bed. She raised her head slowly and fixed him with a look so fraught with hatred that he almost forgot about Judson.

  The giant drew his gaze. Though bleeding, Judson didn’t appear weakened. To the contrary, his damaged face was spread in a goblin’s leer, his eyebrows drawn downward in wicked glee.

  David aimed, fired at Judson’s face.

  Empty.

  No! David thought. But it was true. He squeezed the trigger again and again, but there was nothing left, nothing to do but throw the gun at the giant’s face. It ricocheted off and landed on the floor.

  Arms extended, Judson started toward David.

  There was no question of evading him. The giant was so broad and his limbs so long, he would snatch David out of the air the moment David attempted to slip past him. Just as troublingly, two of the leering things had arranged themselves before the bedroom door, another trailing Judson like a hungry cur, the fourth perched atop Jessica’s legs like a hyena guarding a kill. And more leering things were forming on the beds, more servants of this deathless fiend.

  Nowhere to go, he thought. Nothing to do.

  From below, like a sick, ghoulish joke, came the sounds of someone battering a window. David heard Harkless’s voice, as if rising from an impossibly deep well, and beneath that, he thought he made out the sounds of Mike Jr.’s pleas, the poor kid having lost his parents, his grandpa, and almost certainly his sister on the same night.

  But the house wouldn’t let them in. Judson wouldn’t let them in.

  Judson’s hands shot out, groping for him.

  David jerked away, his knees nearly buckling. He retreated though he knew there was nowhere to go. Judson towered over him, grinning.

  David’s heel bumped something, and he tumbled backward. With a start he realized he’d fallen against the ladder, and though he detested the notion of abandoning Jessica, his feet began to climb, his hands gripping the ladder’s sideboards as he rose. He cast a desperate glance at Jessica, saw that, for now at least, the leering thing holding her captive was making no move to feed on her. He couldn’t tell whether her chest still rose and fell.

  Judson snatched at his foot. David bared his teeth, climbed faster. Then he was standing in the large third-floor dormer, the A-framed space running the length of the house, the packed shadows only mitigated by the northern and southern windows.

  David cast about for something with which to defend himself. He spotted the globe, the stacks of books, the throne-like chair. There were candleholders and other useless objects, but there was nothing resembling a weapon up here. True, he hadn’t walked the length of the attic yet, but a perfunctory scan told him the remainder of the space was barren.

  David shot a glance at the rafters, where the rope dangled.

  An image of Anna, pinned on the bed, her face straining from lack of air, flashed through his head. In the end, Anna had learned there was no escaping this place.

  And now, he thought, his breath hitching, he was trapped too. He and Jessica were about to die, if she hadn’t died already.

  David was backing toward the window when a thought occurred to him, one so fundamental that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t considered it earlier.

  His hands knotted into fists.

  If Judson Alexander were so invulnerable, why did he need the protection of the house?

  Why hadn’t he, on the night of his demise, just waded into the throng of villagers and slaughtered them one by one?

  The answer was clear: Judson wasn’t impervious. At least, he hadn’t been in life.

  And David had wounded him tonight, had done Judson injury even in death.

  That meant he could be destroyed.

  The giant’s footfalls boomed on the laddered steps. David rushed to the window, saw Harkless gazing impotently up at him, Mike Jr. staring likewise by her side. They couldn’t help him. Any hel
p had to come from up here.

  He cast about desperately, knowing already he wouldn’t find anything, knowing he was wasting precious seconds while the giant ascended. His eyes fell on the stacks of books, and though he knew none of these could help him, one small, green volume caught his eye, stirred a memory that refused to be dismissed.

  John Weir’s diary looked a lot like that little green book. One passage from the diary had seemed unremarkable when he’d first encountered it, but now the passage struck David with titanic force:

  It had been passed down by better men than me, men whose belief in God had fortified them against whatever evil dwelt in the earthly realm. That I was not also a believer was immaterial. Because their beliefs were so unwavering, their faith represented something unbreakable, and that stalwart faith, I believed, had somehow communicated itself to the cane, the secret weapon I kept as a boon companion.

  The cane, he thought. John Weir, Prince of Skeptics, had believed in the cane’s power.

  Deep laughter sounded behind him.

  Judson was coming.

  As Judson’s leering face appeared, an obscenely merry expression arching his thick eyebrows and animating his coal-black eyes, David lunged toward the alcove in which the cane reposed, snatched it up, and turned to confront Judson. Framed as he was by the tunneled darkness of the attic, Judson appeared impossibly large, his shoulders great slabs of meat, his midsection bulging with bands of muscle.

  David backed toward the northern dormer. For reasons he couldn’t articulate he wanted to be closer to the moonlight.

  When Judson spoke, the voice was buzzing and unnatural yet surprisingly urbane. “You carry the walking stick of your fallen hero. What a waste of good birch.”

  David was so taken aback at being addressed by a ghost that he merely stared at Judson a moment. When he found his voice, he said, “Weir was a great man who deserved better.”

  Judson grasped the chest flaps of his open-throated white shirt, set his legs apart as if delivering a public speech. “‘Deserve’ is a meaningless word. A coward’s word. Mice like you can utter it all you like, yet its meaning changes not a whit. I declare such blather false hope.”

  A rustling sound came from below, movement in the long bedroom. David imagined Jessica’s unconscious body down there with the leering things. Were they even now devouring her? He had to act.

  “Yes, make your move!” Judson crowed. “Swing that cane like a brittle old woman. See where your human devices get you!”

  David raised the walking stick, but before he could strike, Judson’s limbs blurred in the gloom, a cudgel fist shooting out and catching David flush on the jaw. He was lifted off his feet, the cane skittered away, the back of his head cracking against the windowsill. He lay several feet from the giant, groggy and, despite all he’d seen, astonished by Judson’s strength.

  The heavy boots clumped nearer. Judson bent at the waist, blotting out most of the light. “I am eternal, Mr. Caine,” he said in his buzzing voice. “I am the god of pain. You have taken my Honey from me, the best of my cherished vassals.” Judson’s grin dissolved. “I will exult in your wails.”

  Judson reached for him. David barely had time to raise an arm, but Judson was unstoppable. The massive fingers closed around David’s shoulder and began to squeeze. Pain like he’d never known flowed through him as the granite-like fingers compressed his flesh, puncturing his skin, splitting his sinew and probing the tender tissue beneath. David was dimly aware of his own shrieks, his head thrown back, his arms palsied and powerless.

  “Ah, a low tolerance for pain,” Judson remarked. “We must remedy that, Mr. Caine. We must burn the weakness away!”

  Giant fingers closed on the sides of his head, the thumbs probing under his jaws, like a potter gone mad and punishing his clay. David shrilled out a scream, pawed at Judson’s hands, but the giant continued his explorations unperturbed. The merry, buzzing voice came to him as through a cotton blanket. “You’re like a fairy tale wanderer, Mr. Caine. You happened upon a lonely house in the woods, and you ventured inside.”

  Torrents of blood spilled from David’s underjaw, a hot drizzling on his neck and chest. Judson had hinted at a protracted suffering, but David knew he couldn’t hold out much longer. This torture was too violent, too barbaric to be sustained.

  “We need to check inside your trousers, Mr. Caine.” A hand went away from David’s neck, slithered toward his groin. “We need to make of you a gelding!”

  Instinctively, David thrust his hands down to cover himself, but Judson’s movements were implacable. The fingers closed over David’s genitals and began to squeeze.

  His consciousness dimmed. He was still screaming, but his cries were no longer his own, were the noises of a dying animal in a steel trap after days of trying to wriggle free.

  “You shall die a failure,” Judson breathed, his iron grip tightening. “Unloved, unmourned—”

  Judson let go of him. So overwhelming was David’s agony that he scarcely noticed. He slumped to the floor, wondered briefly if he’d already died. He opened his eyes and saw with amazement that Judson was striding past the trapdoor to stand on the other side of it, to gaze upon something that approached from the darkness of the southern dormer, from the direction of the river.

  When David beheld what lay beyond Judson, he was certain he’d passed into death. It was surely a vision, David’s last few synapses firing illogically.

  Anna Spalding hovered in the attic, gazing at Judson Alexander. As they’d been in life, her liquid eyes were large and candid, her mouth relaxed yet somehow steely.

  “What’s this?” Judson asked with an interest David judged too keen.

  Anna did not speak. David coughed, his jaws and genitals ablaze with pain. Yet the sight of his former love transfixed him. Grimacing, he pushed to his feet. He retrieved the cane.

  Judson addressed Anna. “Speak, lass. I have seen glimpses of you about, but haven’t yet sampled of your comely form.”

  David shuffled over to the throne in which Judson had so many times waited, peering through the dormer windowpanes for fresh victims. David climbed onto the chair and easily reached the rope, which, many years before, had been fashioned into a noose.

  “I said speak!” Judson thundered. It took all David had not to stare at Anna. Though her form shimmered and pulsed, he felt the undiluted power of her gaze, the innate goodness emanating from her in bright waves.

  David stepped down off the chair, noose in hand. He crept toward Judson, hoping the rope would stretch far enough.

  It did.

  Judson bellowed at Anna, “Get on your knees, wench. I’ll show you how I treat haughty quims such as you.”

  David slipped the noose around Judson’s neck.

  Judson whirled, eyes blazing, and David swung the cane in a vicious arc. Judson was knocked off balance and stumbled sideways toward the trapdoor opening. Righting himself, Judson reached up, grasped the noose, but David swung again, whipping the cane like a baseball bat, cracking Judson in the jaw, where the flesh had been torn away by the gunshot. Judson roared, windmilled his arms on the edge of the opening, then took an ungainly step toward David.

  David plunged the cane into Judson’s chest. The impact stood Judson straight up, made him teeter on the edge of the opening. David gritted his teeth, thrust the cane deeper, the brackish blood spewing over David’s fingers, and then Judson was shrieking, flailing his arms as he tipped backward, his enormous weight hauling him down like a millstone. Judson plummeted through the opening, the rope jerked taut, and there came a bone-chilling snap. The rope strained, the rafter groaned, but the noose held fast.

  David clambered forward to see if Judson were really dead, or if the fiend had found another way to cheat death. The massive form pendulumed slowly, the giant’s boots nearly, but not quite, scraping the ladder. Judson’s body didn’t even twitch.

>   There came a whispering of air. David peered through the aperture into the long bedroom, saw the giant’s long hair rustling, glimpsed the outmoded clothes stirring. The illumination dimmed, went out, and Judson’s body flickered with it. The starlight from the windows darkened, went black, and when David could again see, the noose hung empty.

  Heart pounding, David peered into the long attic and saw, with an indefinable sense of loss, that Anna’s figure, too, had disappeared.

  His breath caught.

  Jessica, he thought.

  David descended the steps, barely noticing the birch cane, which lay on the floor at the base of the ladder. He expected the leering things to dart at him, to finish the attack Judson had begun, but instead was met with a sight so shocking he could only stop and stare fifteen feet from where Jessica lay on the bed.

  Six figures stood on either side of the bed, their faces downturned to Jessica’s inert form. They were cloaked in white gowns not unlike Ivy’s. David judged the young women’s ages anywhere between twelve and twenty. These, he understood, were the leering things as they’d been before the fire, perhaps even before Judson had tormented and abused them. They wore expressions of such empathy that David found a thickness forming in his throat.

  On the edge of the bed sat Ivy, her dress marred with gore but her face pinched with quiet sobs. He stepped closer, and Ivy looked up at him, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “She’s dying, Mr. Caine. We have to save her.”

  He rushed to Jessica, worked his arms under her neck and legs. Despite his wounds, he managed to lift her, and below he heard the front door slam open, heard Harkless’s voice shouting up to him. Ivy’s hand was on his lower back as he came around the corner onto the second-story landing. He spotted Harkless, already halfway up the stairs. Mike Jr. peered up at them from below.

  “Is she….” Harkless began.

  “Start the car,” David said, and moved down the steps.