The 13th

by John Everson

  As he cautiously placed his foot on the first step, a noise interrupted the sudden quiet and he froze, sweat breaking out instantly on his brow.

  The noise rumbled louder, and then broke. Then it happened again—almost like the sound of a faraway crowd at a sporting arena.

  Below the stairs, the throng was cheering.

  David reaffirmed his haste and instead of tiptoeing up the stairs, he kicked into gear and took them two at a time.

  He wasn’t surprised when he threw open the doors to rooms one, two and three and found them empty. But he moved faster down the hallway then, and grew more nervous as four, five and six also lacked a woman in the rooms’ beds. After he discovered room seven was empty he skipped straight down the hall to eleven.

  Empty.

  They’d already taken her downstairs, along with all the rest of the women. David didn’t want to think about what they were going to do to her. What they might already have done.

  Below the floor, another cheer reverberated.

  Shit, David thought. He couldn’t just walk in front of a mob of bloodthirsty devil worshippers and steal away their victims right before their eyes. He’d been hoping to slip her out the back door without notice. But now?

  Maybe they would have robes or something, he hoped, imagining a druidic rite. After all, they were down there to worship demons, weren’t they?

  He slipped quickly down the carpeted stairs, and then stepped more slowly down the first steps to the basement. When he reached the bottom, he took a deep breath, and then stuck his head around the doorway to look into the open room.

  Getting through the crowd unnoticed was going to be more difficult than he’d thought.

  They weren’t wearing black robes and hoods, like demon worshippers in some dark Hammer horror movie would.

  They weren’t wearing anything at all.

  The floor near the entrance was piled high with discarded shirts and shoes and pants. And the room was filled with naked or nearly naked people, in various states of carnal excitement. He pulled his head back and considered his options.

  He wasn’t going to doff his clothes to join the crowd, but he couldn’t walk through them fully dressed.

  The stairwell echoed with another cheer and David’s stomach quailed. Not from the cheer, but from what came before it.

  A woman’s scream.

  David knew without a doubt that it was just the first of many. And sooner or later, it would be the screams of Brenda and Christy.

  “Raise your glasses to the sky,” called out a voice from somewhere around the corner. “Speak his name: Ba’al!”

  David peered around the wall again and saw the crowd following the command, wineglasses glittering with ruby and gold sloshing and dripping on the bodies below as they raised their hands as one, swaying together and calling out again and again: “Ba’al.”

  There were still some women and a couple men in the throng who wore shorts and sandals, and David made up his mind. With a silent gulp, he pulled his T-shirt over his head, and balled it up in one hand. Then he steeled himself and slipped into the room, carefully positioning himself in the back of the crowd, behind the hairy buttocks and back of a fat fortysomething man who was far too busy pawing the equally naked (but most oppositely nonhairy) ass of a younger woman at his side. She slid her free hand through the fur of his apelike back and knocked her hips to his as she steadily tilted and emptied her glass of red wine.

  When it was empty, she put her mouth to his ear and whispered something, and his mouth met hers in a wet animal kiss before he showed a swath of wide yellow teeth at her and relieved her of the empty glass.

  He disappeared to their left, leaving David with a clearer view of the front of the room, and he instantly regretted the clarity.

  To the left of the basement stairs stood Rockford and Amelia. Both remained dressed, though the doctor’s white coat was already smeared with blood across his chest. The reason struggled in his hands.

  She was dark-haired, with skin of almond…breasts were full but small, and the shiny black thatch of her pubic mound glimmered in the uneven light of the flickering candles. But the beauty of her nakedness was not what drew David’s eyes.

  It was the blood streaming from the many slashes on her nakedness that he stared at.

  And the knife in Amelia’s right hand.

  “The first one is mine,” she announced to the crowd. “Death by a hundred cuts. We will bathe in her life, warm as the wine settling in your stomachs, and then it will be your turn,” she promised.

  With that, Amelia held the long silver blade beneath the woman’s left breast, touching its edge to the pendulous flesh like a gentle kiss…before she pulled the knife back, fast, opening a slash of red.

  Again, a scream. But this time, David was the witness, and he quailed at the sight as the crowd surged forward slightly, again celebrating the violence with a communal shriek of delight.

  Amelia brought the knife to bear again, this time defacing the woman’s other breast, and soon both bled slow rivers of red down her belly, joining the already opened slashes on her ribs and hips.

  Something tugged at his belt, and David’s gaze returned from the front of the room to see a hand on the front of his pants, long kinked hair hanging over the woman’s arm as she worked to undo his jeans. It was the same woman who’d sent away the naked bear man for more drink.

  “No, that’s okay,” David said awkwardly. He put a hand on her naked shoulder to push her back, but instead was met with a surge of sultry flesh as she raised her head from its attention to lean all of her flesh against him. Reaching up with her mouth she planted a warm, wet kiss on his lips and whispered, “I want you to be one of my chosen tonight.”

  David didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but if the outcome was anything like what was happening to the bloody woman up front, he wanted none of it.

  “Not now,” he said again, and pulled her hand away from his crotch.

  “Soon?” she implored, blackened eyes beaming like cat’s in the shadow.

  “Yes,” he lied. “I’m just a little shy.”

  “Wine.” She grinned. “We’ll get you going in no time.”

  “I’m sure,” he agreed, as her hands slipped up his chest. She pulled herself to him in a body hug, and the press of her silky, sumptuous breasts was almost more than he could bear. But then the focus of the show changed from demonstration to interactive.

  “Come and feel her life,” Amelia called out to the room. “Taste her, breathe her, wear her. Make her blood your own.” She pressed her own palm to the woman’s side, and held up a glistening hand to the crowd in evidence.

  An old man approached first, shriveled genitalia hanging useless as chicken jowls beneath his silver-haired liver-spotted torso.

  He pressed his face between the woman’s cleavage and shook his head slightly, as if burrowing into her bosom. Then he turned to face the crowd and grinned, white teeth gleaming evilly from a face dripping with blood. With his fingers he rubbed her life away from his eyes, and then smeared it in turn across his wiry chest and belly.

  “At last, we can begin,” he cackled.

  David hadn’t recognized him without his clothes on, but with the voice, he recognized the man as Mr. Tamarack, from the post office.

  Next, one of the managers from the grocery ran his thick hands up and down the poor victim’s body, smearing her blood equally across her flesh and his own. He pressed his privates against hers, and then backed away, to display his sickly white skin spackled with glistening gore.

  The crowd surged forward, eager to be the next in line to bathe in the woman’s pain. A raven-haired woman was next, licking the blood in long rakes of her tongue from the woman’s breast like an erotic vampire.

  Then a man grabbed her as she turned from the dying woman and instead of taking the blood from the source, he ran his tongue across the vampiress’s lips as he massaged the globes of her bloodstained breasts.

  She grabbed hi
m by the growing leash between his legs and led him off to the side of the room. David couldn’t see what happened next as the crowd closed ranks, but he did see who the next person was to christen himself in the victim’s blood.

  Captain Ryan.

  David couldn’t watch the cop feel up a dying woman as if she were some kind of sensual hors d’oeuvre.

  Instead he looked around to see where his own seductress had gone. He quickly located her by the long-nailed fingers slipping around and up and down the hairy beast’s back, who’d apparently returned with more wine.

  But now at the front of the room, a line was forming, to bathe in the blood of the moaning, dying woman.

  Amelia held up a crimson hand and held back the crowd for a moment, so that she could carve a fresh font of blood, this time sliding the knife across the woman’s belly, opening a deep gash, which bled fast and dark. “Oops,” Amelia giggled, as the woman bleated briefly, incoherently, before her eyes rolled back to whites, and she slumped unconscious against Rockford.

  “Quick, my loves,” Amelia called, as the cut woman mewled and shook in Rockford’s locked hands.

  “She will go fast now,” Amelia said. “You must all taste her before she’s gone.”

  One by one, the people in the room wrapped their arms and legs and lips around the dying woman as if she were just a piece of meat for the taking.

  David slipped back from the crowd, before he could be drawn into the line. He knew there were rooms in the corridor behind him, and he prayed that in those rooms were the rest of tonight’s planned victims. He managed to disappear into the hallway at the back of the large room without being noticed, and breathed a heavy sigh.

  Maybe this would go easier than he’d thought.

  From behind him, the sudden shriek of the woman and the answering roar of the crowd brought a shiver to his spine. The end for her was no doubt near. And that meant the next victim would be brought out.

  He didn’t have much time to find the “holding pen” where Rockford had hidden the women.

  David turned down the dark passageway and found his way back toward the room in which he’d seen Rockford butchering another woman the day before.

  He found the room quickly, but this time, he couldn’t simply slip in the back. Because this time…the door was locked. He had no doubt that the women were on the other side of the heavy wooden door, but there was no way he was budging the door without a key.

  From behind him, the crowd screamed out again, and this time, it lasted longer than before.

  David knew without question that the woman was dead. Which meant that Dr. Rockford would be back in the catacomb of hallways any minute to retrieve his next victim.

  Again he wrestled with the doorknob. It was cold and hard and didn’t budge a centimeter. Finally he admitted that there was no way it was going to move through brute force, and David slipped back down the short hall.

  Just in time.

  He heard the footsteps from just a few feet away, and his heart leaped. He had to get out of this hallway, or there was no way that they would miss him.

  David ran in the dark, praying that he could find the other hall without stumbling and falling. He’d hidden there when he’d been here the day before; it was where he’d seen them take Christy away.

  Voices carried like smoke in the darkness, and he heard someone say, “The next needs to die faster. We only have an hour.”

  David pressed himself to the wall at the edge of the main hall just in time. The black of the night got blacker as Amelia’s lace passed, followed by the white and red slash of Rockford.

  David waited until they passed, and then slipped back into the hall to the torture room behind them to see what they did.

  Rockford paused at the door, and pulled a key from the pocket of his doctor’s coat. In seconds the heavy door creaked open, and Amelia and the doctor slipped inside. David stole to the doorway to see where they went, and saw a room more disturbing than the one he’d just left. Torches guttered from six steel holders spaced around the room, throwing a flickering orange light on the skins of the prisoners David had known would be there. Tied to the walls all around the room were a dozen women, as naked as the victim in the previous room, but unlike her, this group all seemed drugged or already dead. They hung from the ropes tied around their wrists and attached to spikes in the stone walls without complaint or struggle. Most of their heads hung down, hair draping at least some of their body in the shadow of privacy.

  David’s eyes searched the room quickly for a girl with a single pink strand in her hair, but didn’t see her on first glance. He didn’t have time for a second look as Amelia was already leading a slumped figure with brown hair and stumbling feet back toward the exit. He backed away from the door and then turned and softly ran back to his hiding hall again until the deadly duo passed.

  After they did, he slid to the floor and put his head in his hands.

  He couldn’t get into the room without the key. He couldn’t get the key without Rockford. Or at least Rockford’s coat. Unconsciously he moaned.

  “Hey—who’s out there?”

  The voice came from farther down the hall. David stood and walked back into the dark. He remembered that there had been men locked back here when he’d found this hall the day before. “Who’s in there?” he answered in a whisper.

  “TG,” came the answer. “You want to let us the fuck out of here?”

  “Don’t have a key.”

  “Excuses, excuses. Hey, weren’t you here yesterday with the same cock-and-bull story? Who are you?”

  David leaned into the small grill opening at the top of the dark wood door. He could only see the glimmer of light off the eyes of the man who harangued him from inside.

  “I’m here trying to find my girlfriend,” he whispered back. “They’ve got her locked up down the hall.”

  “Yeah, her and a dozen others,” the man replied.

  “If I can get you out, will you help me get her?” David asked.

  “Sure, what the fuck. But you gotta get us out first.”

  “Working on that,” David said. “I’ll be back.”

  “Yeah, we’ve heard that before.”

  “Shut up and wait.” David wasn’t sure where that last bit had come from, but somehow it felt right.

  “Fuck your mother and the donkey she had you with,” the man answered.

  “At least my mama had a donkey. Yours fucked a cockroach. So shut up already. I’ll be back.”

  David grinned at the rude interplay, in spite of himself, and slipped back down the hall toward the main assembly room. He had no idea what he was going to do, but whatever he did, he had to get his hands into Rockford’s coat.

  It occurred to him that this may have been the first time he’d ever wanted to get into another man’s clothes.

  He hoped it would be the last.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Brenda tried to scream but the hand tightened across her mouth. “Shhhh,” a woman’s voice hissed in her ear. “I’m a friend.”

  She struggled to answer, but only succeeded in gumming her captor’s palm.

  “Promise me you’ll stay quiet and I’ll let you go,” the woman whispered.

  Brenda vigorously nodded her head up and down.

  After a second, the hand slid off of her mouth and Brenda turned around to see who’d grabbed her. Even in the dark, she could tell her abductor was slim and blonde, probably about her own age, maybe a little older.

  “Hi,” the woman said, offering a thin hand to shake. “My name is Christy. And if we don’t get out of here, I’m pretty sure we’re going to be killed.”

  Brenda couldn’t argue with that. “So how do we leave? There’s a mob of people downstairs. And I don’t think they’re inclined to let us leave.”

  Christy shrugged. “We’ll think of something. First thing is to get out of the place where they’re sure to come looking for us.”

  “I’m all for that,” Brenda said. “Se
ems like I’ve been here for weeks.”

  “Three weeks,” Christy affirmed. “I’m with the police. We’ve been looking for you. So has your boyfriend.”

  “My boyfriend?”

  “Yeah, David?”

  “The guy from the Clam Shack?”

  Again Christy shrugged. “That’s where he said he lost you.”

  Brenda laughed. “Wow. That’s pretty cool that he looked. I mean…we didn’t even do anything. I just met him that one night.”

  “Yeah, well, for whatever reason, he’d like to see you alive again.”

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Brenda could have sworn that someone in the room laughed quietly at those words. But before she could look around, Christy reached out to open the door. “There’s a back staircase,” she said. “From there…I don’t know where to go, but once we’re off this floor, we at least have a chance.”

  She pulled open the door and the light from the hall splashed into the dark room. So did a familiar voice.

  “Going somewhere, my angels? I don’t think so.”

  Barry Rockford held up a syringe and smiled as Amelia, no longer decked out in nurse’s whites but in a black form-fitting goth dress, grabbed at the arm Christy had used to open the door. She held it steady just long enough for Rockford to plunge in the needle, and thumb down its plunger.

  “We’ve been looking for you, my dear,” Rockford said. “You see, our previous candidate for the Thirteenth turned out, unfortunately, to already be pregnant. And you, ironically, have resisted my best attempts to put you in that state. So I’m afraid you’ll be switching roles this evening.”

  Amelia laughed. “Tonight, and for the rest of your life.”

  Brenda ducked beneath the nurse’s arm and bolted toward the hallway, but Rockford didn’t miss a beat. He simply stuck out a quick foot, and Brenda—still unsteady from the weeks of drugged bed rest—went down like a sack of rocks.

  “Knock her out for a bit,” she heard the doctor say, just before a cold pinch stuck the back of her thigh. “We have a ritual to perform. And our star performer can sleep through the first act.”