—and then I do fall, hard, and my face cracks against this goddamned floor with enough force to clear my head, if only for a moment, and I see that I’m only a single step away, but I cannot make myself roll over to reach. The tears have won, my muscles are seizing, and I feel blood running freely from my nose, but I don’t think it’s from the impact. I am being killed with memory, each single image a knife of shame so sharp and pure that I nearly welcome it into me, and then I look back and Risa is crying, Wally looks green, and they both avert their eyes in what looks to me like dismissal, and my failure buries me in a torrent of all that I have ever done wrong, and all that I was too weak to resist. I buck with a keening that sounds like someone else, and realize that the skin on both hands is worn off, but I can’t recall how. Please, let me do this, I ask to anyone who will listen, and in a wretched moment, something answers.
Do you want to know how she died? It was slow, so slow, you wouldn’t think that a small body could hold so much blood but it does, it’s really just a bag of blood when it comes right down to it, but I am still so pleased when I see what I can siphon from them, even the ones who scream so that I cannot enjoy their taste—and somehow I see my mother’s face. She is talking about my mother but where is my father and who—oh, he’s there, don’t worry child, both of his femurs are sticking out of his legs and he, too, is screaming, but I cannot reach him without upsetting the scene, so I must let such precious, delicious blood, hard-won, fall to the scorched concrete spangled with all of that gorgeous glass from their windshield—windshield? My parents died at sea. There was no—oh, precious, they never went to sea. They left you, dearest, left you far behind. You were to stay with that stodgy old uncle and be none the wiser, you see—they never wanted you. Only one child? A forgotten baby, left to his own devices to grow up alone? How can you not see that?—shut your fucking mouth. They loved me, and I know who you are, Elizabeth. I’ve always known who you are—shhh, not now. It’s not too late for the truth but you can just let it go, lie down, let it go. This is the place for you to give in and come to the truth. That day on the rocks by the water, that old ghoul that wanted to fuck you and eat you, you didn’t think that was an accident, did you? – and I’m screaming so hard my vocal cords give an audible pop and only a rusty wheeze comes from within me—they would have mourned you for nearly a day, Ring, then they could have gotten on with their lives, the life they thought they could have without the burden of . . . you—they loved me, I whisper, for that is all I can do, but I feel my legs going, gone now, and—no love. Ever. You’ve never been loved, Ring, and they were too busy wishing you had never been born to—fuck you, I know love, I am loved right now— then there is ghostly laughter, but something is wrong, like there is a section of time missing and I feel my hand claw towards the edge of the bed—no love, only being left behind, fondled, pissed on, why the whole world pisses on you because you deserve it—- and I see Wally’s tears and Risa’s hands reaching to me as her shoulders are wracked with an ache and longing—stay down, Ring, it’s for the best—fuck you. I know love—
My hand pulls me up on the bed, and a curtain of night covers me as I spit one last sob and then, nothing.
It is dark when I regain my mind, and my sight, and the comforter is stiff with blood from my nose and mouth. I pull a chain on the small lamp and light floods the cavernous room that seems like an eternity across now that I have crossed it. Wally and Risa sit up, bleary-eyed and faces puffy from both sleep and tears.
“Ring, honey?” It’s Risa, in a quavering voice I can barely hear.
“Yes,” I croak, and knives slash inside my neck. I have done something bad to my vocal chords and it feels like sand and acid are spinning inside me, ripping me apart. “Can’t talk much.”
“Okay, okay,” Wally says, her voice sick with relief, “just stay there. We’ll think of something.”
I shake my head and pick up the diary, trying to stand once but falling back on the bed. My pants are stiff with dried urine and my shirt is white with tears. I am as close to broken as can be without letting go, but I try to stand anyway. I rise, more slowly this time, and manage to confirm my suspicions. The floor is a one-way street, and I can leave unmolested. Both Risa and Wally gasp loudly but I walk, unsteadily, and then charge the remaining steps in a headlong rush, falling into their arms and sagging against them, shattered, stinking, and sore, but alive.
“A favor, please?” I ask, in a voice that sounds like the whisper of a ghost.
“Anything. Say it.” Risa is tearfully happy. Wally just grins like an idiot.
“Take me to that big ass tub, and dump me in it.” We make our way, wounds and all, to the door, vowing never to set foot in that accursed place again.
68
From Risa’s Files
Paris, 2007
Daughter,
This will be our last communication. I have invested so much of my precious time only to see you actually become a caricature these past decades. You are, if anything, even more soft-hearted and addled with thoughts of love, a condition which cannot be allowed to continue.
What I had planned for you is beyond your comprehension. What I have planned for myself is of a scale that will finally satisfy the greatness that I know resides within me. There is to be no mercy, no kindness, and no end to my reign. I will mark this land with my foot and place a brand on the face of every single slave that falls beneath my feet. The cries will reach the heavens and the stars will turn a deaf ear to the weak and the just. There is only me, and soon, there will be only my will to shape this pit.
Your end will not be comfortable or kind. I have planned your place at my feet for centuries, even millennia, and yet there will be nothing for you. You should know that rather than meting out my justice, you will now feel the full lash of that same, merciless hatred that I have saved like a precious elixir to be used exclusively on your insolent carcass.
Your death will be measured in the lives of stars, and the songs of your agony will make the dead rise again if only to see my truth firsthand. I will rule with a brand of the purest pain, and you, child, will be the first so honored to experience such attentions from the new Queen of All Worlds.
Expect me soon. I will have your sorrow for eternity, or until I tire of causing your suffering. Do not imagine that either will end.
Elizabeth
69
New Orleans
It doesn’t take me one day to heal, it takes three. It isn’t my body as much as my mind that has taken a beating like never before, and only after the second day did I really think that I would recover fully. Risa and Wally guard me like lionesses over a cub, but the hotel is quiet, and we neither see nor hear anything except the normal noises of the city. Delphine’s diary is remarkable, beyond anything that I ever dreamed possible in this world, and we all go page by page, slowly, with each entry in her looping script pulling us further from the depths of time. Some are in English, some in French. There are sketches, quips, remarks, and directions. Pressed herbs and flowers, a scrap of silk with water wheels on it, clearly Japanese and older than any empire we have known. There are names, some drawn through with lines, the blotches of tears, and even a spray of blood that has dried rusty over the outline of a royal sigil from a house that has been lost for centuries. She’d known Napoleon! Yet for every revelation, there is loss. For every joy, there is decay. Delphine’s life has been woven with pain that should have killed her outright, but she persevered. Her children, her husband, the whole reality of her life, all stripped away in a storm of blood and violence.
And yet, she went on. True, her aversion to murder fluctuated over the centuries, but in her own words, we sense the underlying truth that Delphine hates herself for what she has become. To say that I’m sympathetic is an understatement of grand proportions; I would deny my enemies the details of her life if only for the sake of knowing that I spared the world some great pain. Delphine is tough, but inside, she wants the same things so many people have spe
nt their lives chasing. A home, a family, which will never happen again, and maybe, just a chance at knowing the feeling of peace after so many interminable years of living on the verge of death.
It’s a heady read, even in my best condition, and I find myself taking breaks to clear my conscience of the echoes of her life. Risa tears up regularly, and Wally had a face so disgusted that I took the cursed book from her and ordered her to get out of the room for a while. But the cost is not without reward because the faint echo of an idea begins to tickle my memory, only to flee every time I try to bring my concentration directly upon it. Like a will-o-the-wisp, something dances in the periphery of my thoughts, but after a long night chasing ghosts, I decide to let it come to me instead.
We search the houses Elizabeth’s proxy agent purchased, and, to no one’s surprise, they are empty. Still, devoid of even the feel of life and almost scrubbed of any evidence that anyone had ever stepped foot in the structures. It’s a bizarre antiseptic sensation that makes for an unquiet mind as we leave, all of us crowding closer together from sheer instinct. Elizabeth has been here, but whatever she achieved is now in the wind. I curse my own weakness, thinking that had I been tougher, I would not have needed healing time, but I know I’m wrong. She would have avoided us no matter when we arrived. Our presence was a harbinger, not an end, and once again, Elizabeth left us playing catchup as we simmered in our own frustration.
“How many left, just one, right?” I asked Risa. I was tired of creeping around abandoned crime scenes, no matter how nice the neighborhood, and I was hungry, and I was pissed that we were beaten, again.
“One. Turn right here. Fifth house, left side. There’s a driveway but let’s park and walk to it. I need to be out of this car.” Risa was squirrely, too, after our fruitless day chasing down old, out-of-date leads, and Wally looked bored and more than a bit hungry. I parked and we all exited the car without a word, deciding to approach the house from the back.
It was too stately to have filthy windows, but that’s what greeted us as we walked inside the small, private garden cozied around the enormous French doors that gave access to the back of the house. I turned the heavy iron handle and what appeared to be dirt buzzed away in a mass of fat, bulbous green bodies, leaving the window relatively clear. Flies. Hundreds of them, and well fed on something. Risa shuddered and Wally turned her head for a moment as we considered what the presence of so many carrion feeders could mean. I did not hold out hope for Tyler, but the door pushed soundlessly open, and I made to step inside, only to stop as surely as if I had been kicked in the mouth by a boot. The smell was beyond putrid, a physical presence that muscled its way into my senses and made my eyes water with revulsion and despair at exactly what could be causing such a repulsive wave.
We three froze, partially from the physical shock of the invasive stink, and also from the consideration that there might be a danger from actually breathing what was a form of decay beyond anything we had ever imagined. I pulled my shirt over my nose, to scant effect, and Risa did the same, while Wally just held her nose and gasped like a dying fish as we went cautiously forward, but in seconds, it was apparent that such care was futile, and we would find no threat of Elizabeth within. The house was empty. Not just free of belongings, but swept clean, sterile, or nearly so, despite the stench. A cavernous kitchen with acres of granite and stainless steel sat in perfect disuse; not a single cooking implement or cup or anything personal lay about. Dark slate tiles ran the length of the kitchen, bending, unbroken, into the next room, where floor-length windows lay open to the sun, with no shades or drapes to cut the harsh afternoon glare down to size. With each step, we heard the intense busy chatter of the flies increasing, until, just before we rounded the corner to peer into the room, I spied a rivulet of tarlike soup running in an angular, opportunistic path across the slate, following the natural pull of gravity as it wended its way to the lowest point on the floor.
Tyler was there in a challenge to every one of our senses. He was either hanging or sitting— we couldn’t really tell at first, as it was difficult to tell where he began and the wild protrusions of growth that covered him ended. One arm pointed skyward, sadly triumphant, stiff with suppuration and rot and seeping a deep, jewel-black discharge down the ruins of his ribcage, from which a jungle of vein-like tubes sprouted, one on each bone, with a series of small tributary tubes fighting for purchase on the remaining patches of his skin. Risa gagged, and I felt my head growing dangerously light as a single choking sob burst from Wally who leaned against my left side, heavy with the weakness of someone who is seeing violation that is of such an inhuman level, it sledgehammers the senses in blow after merciless blow. Tyler’s hair was rudely patched on his head, where stubby pustules now ruled on a skull that was partially collapsed, as if he was being pulled inward by tiny, brutish hands. He was standing, we could now tell, and the glimmer of chains hooked onto bolts driven into the wall shone through the destruction of his body, giving testimony to an incarceration against his will. Black, wet tubes, curled and somehow poised like centipedes, wrapped both of his legs in a constriction that held him aloft despite both femurs being obviously broken by the embrace of the growths that lay obscenely along the length of each extremity . A nest of moist, flapping tendrils appeared to fight for access to his penis, or perhaps they were bursting from within, and a whitish mass of wormy, pulsing structures exited his anus, and then, after several feet, plunged back into the remaining muscle above his knee, only to exit from his foot and then trail off into desiccated, feathery ends on the floor some ten feet away. I could not—would not—believe that anyone, no matter how riddled with sin, could be deserving of this type of complete invasion and consumption. A competitive mass of pipettes tended what was left of the planes of his face, draining, or perhaps pumping the viscous fluids from him, and only a small area around his right eye lay exposed— an eye that wept pus from under a sclera raised by a brutal, bloody infection. Sympathetic in the face of his torture, Risa reached out to him, unbidden, from across the room, which was as close as we dared come to this horror that had been a young boy, and then his remaining eye blinked, and he arched his back against the constriction of his doom like a dying dog on a chain, and in an unending, wet, ripping sound of all the pain that has ever been in the whole world, Tyler began to scream.
70
Florida
Kevin’s face was lined and grave after hearing the details of what we had found. The flight back from New Orleans had consisted of the three of us pounding every alcoholic beverage that could be bought from the flight attendants, who believed our lie that we were returning from a particularly terrible funeral. In our minds, we were, and our arrival at the airport necessitated a cab home, hot coffee, and some soul-searching with our dog while staring mutely at the water of the canal. Kevin, responding to a call from Suma, had visited, poured more coffee, and listened to the entire surreal affair with a patience that only reinforced my opinion of his value as a friend and mentor. I spared him the details of being forced to plunge my knife into Tyler’s heart and then falling to my knees in his ruinous gore, overcome with shame and disgust at what Elizabeth forced us to do.
“Do you think she is near?” Kevin’s mobile face radiated worry and anger. The affront to humanity that she represented had wounded him as a priest, and as a man, it violated everything he had known prior to our revelations. It was only his strength that let him calmly ask questions about a demon’s whereabouts. I shook my head in amazement. We were lucky to have someone like Kevin on our side.
“No, she got what she wanted. Those . . . I feel like a liar calling them angels, those victims, the poor souls that she consumed? That was her game. We were a sidebar, I think, but given the chance, she’d take us out. You too, to be truthful, but I’m sure you already suspected that,” I admitted angrily.
Risa echoed that sentiment, and Wally’s face flushed a deep red. Threatening clergy was the last sin in her estimation.
“Well, then I
hate to ask something so blunt, but what are you—rather, what are we going to do about it?” His voice had a note of something dangerous, something new that I had not detected before. “What about Delphine? Will she be forgotten?” The strain in his voice was thick. He thinks he can save her, and I think he’s right, I mused.
I glanced askance at Wally, and Risa spoke up. “I found something. Something in the diary and in the letters, and I think, well, I think Ring can put it together, but we’re going to need a few things. For Delphine, we’re just going back through everything we can think of, but I suspect that Elizabeth wants her alive and in pain. For eternity, if it can be arranged. Kevin grimaced again. This time, it was a sour expression of fear and duty that a priest would know as he felt a soul slipping away. Risa leaned toward Kevin and her eyes sparkled, “Elizabeth isn’t nearly as smart as she thinks. We found . . . many things, but as I said, we’re going to need assistance.”
Kevin considered her devious tone. “How can I help? Bear in mind, while I am willing to, let’s say stretch the parameters of my commitment to God, I cannot abandon my principles or commit a direct sin.” He raised his brows inquisitively and sat back to listen.
I held my face in one palm, tapping a finger on my jaw, and then thought of the one thing that Kevin could contribute without violating his vows. “Father Kevin, “I began ostentatiously, “Could I ask you to rent a van for a few days?”
Box Set: The Fearless 1-3 Page 48