There are minutes when you are out of contact with the rest of your world’s movements.
His mother and father, the lighthouse, Panecraft, this cancer spreading through the centuries but waiting to be unleashed by him, now come collecting.
In the air and … under his feet.
“The catacombs,” he whispered, looking at the floor, with all the slain in the cellar with him now. “My God, how far do they go?”
And his head splintered with memories, the Goat’s mouth hissing its unhuman knowledge, teaching him about the inferno.
At the bottom he swung, looked back up the stairwell, and saw Helen staring down at him.
Her turquoise eyes didn’t share the weak humor of her thin smile. She flipped an auburn curl off her forehead and his entrails bucked: On another woman a move like that would have seemed an obvious sensual gambit for power, but he recalled how her bangs made her eyebrows itch. It had the same effect on him, a little thing like that making him sweat so much.
There was nothing obvious about Helen, despite his being so familiar with her. Years had refined and cultivated her teenage cuteness into beauty. She took a step down to him, her mouth moving silently as she struggled with what the first words would be.
A sort of erotic groan escaped her, and he took a deep breath. She looked at him to speak first, but must have realized from his awestruck face that he wouldn’t be able to say or do anything again unless she helped him along.
“I saw you,” she said. “People have been talking, and I wasn’t sure if I should believe them, or whether it was true you were back. Bobbi May had me cornered in the dining room, telling me what a horror Jazz was, and then I watched you cross the room and slam a couple of beers back. You really needed that drink, didn’t you? I followed you here.”
She came down the stairs as slowly as he had. “I needed to talk to you, Mattie, I …”
He saw the other man he dreamed he might be, taking her now with a sigh and a laugh, always laughing that one, to sweep her into his arms and cuddle her now as she stroked his cheek, and he swept her hair off her eyebrows. She might urge him to make love to her against the stone wall, lunging forward to mash her lips to his, stifling all complaints, promises, and pleas, though this other man with the other life would have nothing to complain, promise, or plead for.
She would giggle madly and he would laugh against her throat and bury his face in her breasts, and the wild passion would pluck their heartstrings to an even more wild tune. Her voice would not fade out with the other Matthew Galen, as it did now with him, bottom lip trembling until whatever stoic mask she wore crumbled in the cold reality of his presence.
With her eyes set that way she moaned once, from deep in her chest, and tears ran down her face. She kept her arms folded over her breasts to hold in the grief and anger, acting so much like she did in the shared nightmare where she cried in the snow before the whirling pages of the book of his life and death.
He couldn’t take it anymore, and whispered, “Come here.” She turned and turned again, as if to go back up, then wheeled and flew down the stairs.
He opened his arms to hold her to him, a sob breaking in his chest. “Helen …”
She kept coming at him until she was too close, drawing back but not fast enough as she hauled off and punched him in the face.
Then she viciously backhanded him.
She wound up her arm, hand hard as stone, and brought her fist to his chin again, then backhanded him once more until he took her wrists.
“Why?” she cried, breaking loose and clenching handfuls of his sweater. Red-faced, he held her as she furiously pounded her fists against his chest, sobbing as he stared off behind her.
Jesus, he’d gone so far into the fantasy it shocked him to rewind back into his own body, and know that none of that other man had ever been real. She cursed him until the fury seemed to burn out, and she weakened enough to slink forward into his arms.
He could do it now, live out part of the lie if he was a great enough failure, and he was. They might all die, but he had to press his mouth over hers and hold her as their tongues met and they had this moment. Their bodies swayed in the damp air, rocking back and forth as their passion resurrected itself from the dead past. Her thighs ground against his. He tasted her sanity, sweet and delicious. He pulled her backward, his fingers scrawling curing charges and sheltering stamps of the agnus dei upon her forehead.
They broke and gasped, both whispering. She still hated him and always would, and he murmured against her cheek and begged forgiveness in a child’s voice he hadn’t heard in decades. She said, “Your hair, it’s so gray …”
“I love you,” he told her.
From above came to the scream.
Screeches so full of blood lust, desperation, and despair that he didn’t understand how a human throat could have held them. Startled, Helen moved closer as the shrieking continued, seething and agonized, echoing from far off, and now followed by other screams. She pulled from him.
The rest of the pieces of evil dropped into place.
With an almost sympathetic grimace he knew who it was who hated him enough to give the Goat more than its due.
“What the hell is that?” she asked, clutching his arm, realizing it had something to do with him, of course.
“Let’s go.”
“But what’s happening? This is because of you, isn’t it? Who is that?”
“I love you, Helen. Despite all that’s happened, you have to believe that. I love you and always have.”
She gave a sigh of exasperation. Words were easy, but real, and he knew she believed him. In one regard, that was all that mattered, and part of the battle had already been won. He felt the silver chord of her soul tighten further to him. Thank God.
She ran with him up the stairs. As they emerged into the banquet hall they witnessed their neighbors bursting open like the poked bellies of dead animals.
Hidden infection of insanity leaked out and seeped to the surface, gangrenous, leprous.
They performed the waltz as some of them yelled, chortled, and bubbled with glee, others eating food until awareness grew from within as much as without; arms and legs thrashed on their own accord as though tiny creatures hung inside muscle and ligament, testing each tissue. Severed souls, as other personalities stepped forward to claim what they’d been waiting for. All the Hydes emerged, smiles widening even greater than that of Mauels, all the infection rising like cream floating to the top. He’d seen them dance like this his entire life, in the halls of Panecraft. His mother had heard the music, and taught him the song.
Dementia remained the same here as it was behind the rows of cube windows, not so different from the rest of the turnings of the world, just kicked up a couple of notches. He understood why: The tunnels below the lighthouse extended farther than he’d thought possible, the catacombs trailing under the entire town, dozens of miles’ worth of twisting, diseased veins spreading the arcane cancer from house to house like paperboys delivering the news. They’d had to stew in their own mad juices for more than a decade, unaware of any change, all of them too bent already to notice the difference. He recalled Cherry Laudley’s baby, and the matronly voice on the other end of Judy Ann Culthbert’s telephone, the look in the fish-boy Elemi’s gruesome gaze.
“What’s happening?” Helen moaned, trying to find her friends in these unrecognizable faces as they let loose with greater laugher and more shouting. “What’s going on? What are they doing?”
“At last,” he said. His redemption was at hand.
They drooled and babbled like infants, squealing and biting their own wrists, muscles locked like those of epileptics caught in seizure, but laughing too, having so much fun. They fell to the floors groping one another, some dropping to make a careful and precise kind of love, others masturbating and bleeding. They’d be going for the knives and forks next.
Not everyone, though: Some still hadn’t been overtaken by the Goat, even after all these
years. Thank God, he and A.G had actually managed to do some good, countering the hexes. Pregnant pauses bore the damned. It took only a minute.
Mr. Spinetti threw up when he saw Mrs. Needlebaum using a pair of cleavers to hack off her own drooping, wrinkled breasts. Helen gagged and wheeled, but Matthew yanked her close. Gigantor Davidson guffawed on the floor, his pants around his ankles—all of this so infantile when you thought about it, the devil took great pride in the adolescent and inane—fumbling at the empty spot of his crotch while the mewling Mrs. Farlessi snugly fit his castrated penis into her own ample cleavage.
Helen screamed, and he held her wrist tighter as she tried to make for the door, dry heaving in his arms. He wouldn’t let her hand go the way he’d lost his grip on Debbi. Outside the tempest roared, sheet lightning slamming down like a guillotine time and again, shearing the grove.
“You think you know how to hate,” Matthew whispered to the human agent who listened from afar. “Maybe, but not nearly as much as I do.”
There were more ugly scenes, but he didn’t linger on them: white, headless dervishes like nerve stems wrapped about his ankles, daemonic familiars that wagged their tongues at him, some form of hybrid djinn grown here in Summerfell instead of in the infernal hierarchies where they belonged. He blew them off with hexes flaming in his fists, hoisting guttural names and words of power. Helen jerked away, and he had to grab her by the hair to keep her from flailing into a murdered man. Buzzing green flies stuck to the contours of Frank Farlessi’s face, eating his nose and lips off while he happily hummed the Our Father.
And it would get worse if he didn’t move fast. More symbolism had been made into truth, the same lack of subtlety turning lethal: Robbie Landon had a three-pound leech draped around his neck—no, not around, but issuing from him like his bottled anguish—driven to hack Terry Mareco’s head off with a butcher knife. Matthew caught Robbie’s arm and brought his knee up into the guy’s nose, even while his spells discharged across the room. He stuck his fingers down into the leech’s back and watched it blacken and curl. Terry picked up the knife, gushing blood, and slashed at Matthew until he was forced to pop her shoulder out of the socket.
More entities from the other side emerged into the mansion, appearing like smears of blood across the living: Giles Corey, the only real witch of Salem, his body crushed by the rocks placed upon him by the judges, now holding fist-size stones and hobbling forward to smash in skulls; Father Urbain Grandier and Jeanne des Anges straying in together, his skin still bubbling from the flames of his enemies, clenching the rope about her neck and twining it tighter, tugging the Mother Superior behind him as she dropped to her knees and crawled behind him throughout their mutual, eternal damnation. She clambered to the table, filled her hands with ice water from the melted swans, and poured it over his charred face. Both of them turned their gazes upon the rest of the screaming room, their sorrowful smiles working into smirks, then leers, realizing that now they could share their vicious devotion with others. They stretched the rope out between them and began strangling women.
“No,” Matthew said, reaching for the noose.
Emma Carmichael turned to face him, ice riming her wrinkles, opaque eyes as ugly as Joanne Sadler’s as she approached from across the room, limping slowly but then faster, showing her teeth as her mouth widened, a clawlike finger outstretched to point and accuse him, coming for Matthew, who had found her body and shut the freezer door again.
And the maniac, Beast 666, Aleister Crowley, looking like he did more at the end than the beginning, in a stupor and swaggering drunkenly, naked with an erection. He scrambled atop Kathy Marinello, ripping out handfuls of her hair as he tore her panties away and guided himself into her. Matthew growled and kicked Crowley in the chin, relishing the contact between the soon-to-be-dead and the dead. He rushed forward and grabbed Crowley by the throat with one hand, clenching the back of the dead bald head with the other. He wondered if the Beast 666 was actually the reincarnate Eliphas Levy, if this foolish caricature before him was somehow truly the father of Baphomet. Someone in hell had carved swastikas into the jelly of his eyeballs, and ichor streamed from the ghost’s face and ran onto Matthew’s fists.
With a roar he flung Crowley aside.
Bosco Bob’s piano playing continued, pounding out a sick and deranged song that everyone by now knew by heart.
“Stay close!” he ordered Helen.
She paled, her chest heaving in the throes of hyperventilation—all of this occurring in a few minutes, only seconds after seeing him again. She tried to run again, and he yanked her to his side again, hoping she wouldn’t pass out. “What are you doing, Mattie?” she shouted. “Christ, your hands are on fire!”
Hysteria wasn’t so much a mindless orgy as it was a well-performed melody, orchestrated by the conductor of daemons. Jeanne des Agnes tightened her own noose. Ballet became liquid, coordinated and exact, movements beautiful in their own revolting fashion.
“Don’t move from my side. It’ll be all right, I won’t let anything happen to you, Helen.”
“Oh God,” Helen said. “Why did you come back to do this?”
He tugged her down the hall, muttering counterspells and defending her from whoever wandered into his path, whatever attacked. On the floor, in front of the fireplace, Jello Joe struggled with one of the Friedman twins, while her sister struck at him with one of his football trophies.
“Joey!”
The sister turned, hissed, and raised the trophy over her head to kill.
Matthew dodged and held the girl off, as she cocked her head and grinned in ecstasy. A scorpion with a lascivious smile crept from the trophy and stung his hand … twice, three times … until he could hear its mind plainly in his blood. The Baal-birth, it called itself, infecting him. It giggled and uttered, You’re mine, Mage, before he could crush it in his burning fist. The third stab had left the stinger embedded between his thumb and index finger, and from that source he found the daemon’s circle, a lower-caste beast without much real power.
Jello Joe kicked the feet out from under the Friedman twin he still wrestled and sucker-punched her as she sat up. She twisted once more and continued to club at him, but he caught most of the blows on his arms.
Helen said, “You,” and struck the girl on the shoulder. When the Friedman girl spun, Helen drove a fist into her stomach, brought the butt of her palm up under her nose, and dropped her.
Dazed, Jello Joe looked at Helen. “Rape defense course,” she said, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes.
“I’ll bet,” Jello Joe said. “Thanks.”
Matthew wondered how insane Joey might be, and as the awful infirmity hit he managed to inscribe a partial sigil in front of his friend. Pain flowed up his arm.
“What in the deepshit is happening, Mattie?”
Helen said, “Can’t you tell us?”
A stab of agony hit his belly. Doubled over and gripping his stomach, Matthew fought off the shock of Baal-birth’s stings. The scars vividly described all of Helen’s sexual encounters in his wake, all the men who’d loved her. His skin grew ashen, turning splotchy for a moment, as he dropped to his knees. His bones creaked as he collapsed, elbows and knees thick with arthritis, his body so slow he already felt like a corpse, as Joe and Helen stooped beside him.
He wouldn’t speak the name of God; Baal-birth could hurt him but not damn him, and the Goat would rest with nothing but completion. Carefully, even as his jaw went numb, Matthew pronounced the nineteen keys of Enochian magik—speeding his pulse and driving the stinger up out of his hand with a loud splash. He rolled onto his back, and Helen took his head in her lap and tried to lift him by the shoulders.
“I’ll be okay,” he said.
Jello Joe punted more of the filament, nerve-stem djinn hybrids into the fireplace, where they burned. Real djinn had been created in fire before the creation of Adam; his foe had been experimental and brilliant but hadn’t proved infallible. Matthew gasped for air, his breat
hing returning to normal and blotches fading.
He stood, and Helen fell against him, and they both nearly went over. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “It’s awful outside, but we can make it, I think. They’re out on the lawns, the storm is right above us, but come on, we can make it.”
“No,” he said, “not yet.”
“What’s happening outside?” Joe asked. “Where’s Jodi? And my sister, and my dad? Where’s Jazz?”
“I haven’t seen any of them,” Helen said.
“Hallucinogens,” Jello Joe said, in shock. “We’ve all gone fuckin’ nuts, no other way to think through this, nothing else it can be. I’ve got to find them. Go get some help!”
Before Matthew could stop him Joe ran off, hurling bodies out of his way.
“We’ve got to leave!” Helen shouted.
“It’s even more dangerous outside, Helen.”
“It can’t be!”
Matthew dragged her up the stairway, tossing hexes when he had to, wondering where A.G was and whether another disaster loomed ahead. Blood spattered the walls, never dripping naturally, but forming phrases from the Goetica and the black grimoires, painting faces from Hell. Someone had nailed Winnie Sackett to the banister by her lower lip. Frank Farlessi, without much of a face, was too busy humping her to care about the ravens tearing at the side of his head, eating at the maggots. Winnie thrashed, eyes wide with terror, mumbling and pleading with Farlessi right up to the moment that he orgasmed, already brain-dead, wrenching her hips in some expired ecstasy as he fell backward, a happy vegetable. Her lip stretched until snapping, leaving her with only the grinning lower half of a skeleton’s shrieking smile. She crumpled to the carpet semiconscious. The scene grew worse yet even more ridiculous, as disgusting as it was horribly misplaced here at the end of their battle, the Goat without enough respect for him to even keep it at some level of esteem. A decapitated head with a large section of clavicle still affixed bounced down the steps and landed in the crook of Farlessi’s arm.
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