The 13th

by John Everson

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  There were few things that TG respected in life, and a smart-ass sure as hell wasn’t one of them. “Billy,” he said. “You hear that twerp? Tell’d me my mama fucks roaches?”

  Billy didn’t budge from his slump against the wall on the floor. He’d rarely moved since the doctor threw them in the cell a couple days ago. “She smoked roaches,” he mumbled. “Maybe that’s what he meant.”

  “T’ain’t what he meant and you know it. When he gets back here and gets us out, I’m gonna ram one up his gut good.”

  “Serve him right for rescuing us,” Billy slurred.

  TG thought about that one a minute, and an eyebrow crept upward on his forehead like a spring caterpillar. “You sarcasming me, po’ boy?”

  “Naw, TG, ya know I love you like an illegitimate brother whose mama—”

  TG kicked his partner in the ribs and Billy shut up.

  “When we get outta here, I’m gonna give that doctor all the love he’s been givin’ those women we brought him.”

  Billy stirred and groaned. “You turning homo on me, TG?”

  This time, when TG’s boot headed toward Billy’s ribs, he was ready. The taller man went down hard, and offered a colorful—and astonishingly multilingual—stream of curses to commemorate the fall.

  “Don’tchoo ever pull the rug out like that again,” he hissed, once he’d regained his feet.

  “Keep your toes away from my rib cage, and we’ll get on just fine,” Billy grumbled. It didn’t even occur to him that this was probably the first time he’d stood up to his partner in crime…even if it hadn’t involved actually standing up. The effect of the meds the doc had shot him up with still lingered, which was why he’d stayed crumpled on the floor all this time. His head alternated from feeling light as a helium balloon to heavy as a block of wood with an ax gouged into its center.

  “Point is,” TG said, “we given that doc a bunch of fine women to play with, and you know what he’s done with ‘em.”

  “I don’t have a clue,” Billy said.

  “You’ve heard ’em screaming down here. He’s roughing ’em up. When we get out of here, we’re giving him exactly what he’s given our girls.”

  Billy shook his head. “You ain’t pissed off about what he’s done to those girls,” he said. “You just wanna get at his liver for what he’s done to you.”

  “Same thing.”

  Billy laughed. “You just focus on Rockford and leave the kid alone if he ever comes back, and we’ll be just fine.”

  “I’ll let him walk us outta here. I’ll let him take us to Rockford. But after that…Well, if he loses a couple feet of gut, I hear you can live without that.”

  Billy felt the world swim again, and didn’t answer. He suddenly found he didn’t care who lived or died in this ridiculous mess. Including himself. Leaning to his side, he proceeded to allow the bile that had been gathering in the back of his throat to release, and the smell filled the tiny cell in a heartbeat.

  “You stupid fuck,” TG raged, and raised a boot to kick Billy in the ribs again. But even in the throes of puking, Billy’s sixth sense of paranoid fear protected him, and his hands were ready.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Amelia had not always been evil. And maybe there was a part of her still that was not. But since she had first felt the whisper of the voices in her mind, and the touch of their ethereal, yet still-powerful fingers on her breasts, on her ankles, on her belly, inside her crotch, teasing and slicking and seducing, she had surrendered any pretense of goodness. She didn’t believe in a God, but she believed in gods. There were forces—call them elementals, call them devils or dark angels—that still cavorted invisibly in the affairs of men. And she had been sensitive to their touch for years. She had felt them in the room when her father had taken his time while spanking her, making sure to pull down her panties to her ankles, and making sure to feel the red swelling after he’d slapped her bare ass with the palm of his hand to make sure that he hadn’t hurt her too much. “Does this hurt?” he’d say, palming over the heat of the back of her ass after a beating. Then he’d run his fingers down her thigh to where the flesh grew cooler, and more private. “How about this…” She endured his touch by leaving the room, at least in spirit. And that’s when she felt, somehow, that there were others who were there for her. Others who reached out to hold her as her father slipped his fingers around that special place as he mouthed in her ear, “You were a bad girl, you know…”

  She’d just been a teenager the first time she heard the voice of one of the invisibles. She’d been making out with a Valley High basketball player in the woods near her house, and he’d gotten just a little too pushy for her liking. But when she’d pushed back and told him to cool it, he’d instead simply pulled her hair and pressed her to her knees in front of his crotch. “C’mon, baby,” he implored, yanking down his jeans to expose a blue-veined and pink-capped sausage of growing meat. “Just do me.”

  That’s when she’d first heard the voices. “He can’t hear us anymore,” they said. “But he can feel us, if you help. Don’t you want to help? It’s time to show him a lesson.”

  She had shown him a lesson. One that would last a lifetime. When she spit out the shriveled lump of his cock at his feet, blood drooling like thick red cum from her lips, she had grinned, just a little bit, while he grabbed at the stump of his dismembered orifice and complained, “How can I play now?”

  “Should have thought of that before you forced it in my teeth,” she laughed, and behind her a chorus of voices laughed in unison. She heard them and felt warm, throughout her belly and breasts and mouth.

  The boy heard them, and curled into a bleeding ball as he cried, and cried and cried.

  She still heard him from near the doors of the old venerable hall.

  But for the first time in her life, she didn’t feel threatened, or cornered, or unhappy. The taste of the iron from his cock in her mouth lingered. And Amelia realized she liked the taste better than cum. A lot better.

  Her tongue flicked like a cat’s across her lips, and instead of spitting out the last of his blood on him, Amelia swallowed.

  Then she stepped naked across the bleeding rapist and took the long way home.

  She never looked back.

  Amelia had studied the occult since high school, and she’d grown to know that those voices who’d been her only friends in the darkest hours of her life could be reached in the brightest rays of daylight, with the right intention. She had dedicated her life to knowing of them, enrolling in a university with the deepest research base on spirituality and religion, which is how she’d come upon the rituals of incubation for the mother and the father, Astarte and Ba’al. Among the stacks of protected “historical” documents, she’d found numerous references to the cults of the two ancient demons of fertility and hedonism and violence of the flesh.

  In an age when all belief was fading, she had become a dark light of faith. She knew the spirits were there; they had seen her through the darkest scenes of her life. And now, she only wanted to do what they needed from her…that which she could give.

  “I am your handmaiden,” she’d promised one night on her knees in the dark. She’d been naked in the forest, and had felt their hands caress her with the softness of the wind, and the sensuality of the most tempestuous of lovers.

  “Help us then,” they had whispered in her ear. “Bring Astarte and Ba’al into the world once more, so that we can make you our first witch of the new century. You can be she who is the mother of all darkness, the whore of a god.”

  She had leaned back and felt their feathery touches ripple through her hair, and across her chest, pinching and sucking, before other touches slipped to the velvet skin of her nether regions and the sensitive hair of her sex shivered in a vibrating breeze that oscillated in a frequency no mortal ever normally enjoyed.

  Her orgasms wet the forest with pleasure.

  Her orgasms made her their instrument.<
br />
  Her orgasms eventually won over Barry Rockford to the cause.

  Her orgasms were tonight to be baptized in the blood of a dozen mothers and their babes.

  After years of subjugation, whatever humanity and empathy had existed in Amelia, had bled away. She relished in the death of the women she cut. She would relish in the death of Rockford, when it was time.

  Her fingers found the only pleasure that mattered to her anymore, and pinched. Hard. She licked blood from the knife she still carried and grinned, red speckles fading slowly from the whites of her canines.

  “Let Ba’al come,” she begged, loins parting and trembling in anticipation of his incorporation. “Let him be mine, as Astarte allows.”

  She laughed as the taste of metal filled her mouth, and closed her eyes as she swallowed.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  The basement stank of the iron of blood mixed with the offal of spilled intestines and the smoke of candles burned hours to their core. The perfume evoked something primal, ancient. And the room’s inhabitants echoed that sense of secret history, dark history, in their Bacchanalian aesthetics. Nude, but clothed in a dead woman’s blood, they kissed and rubbed flesh indiscriminately. Old fat banker with young coltish girl, young frat boy with swarthy hairy man. Grandmother with greasy mechanic.

  David saw the bob of an old woman’s gray bun in the lap of Captain Ryan and felt his gorge rise as he realized that the wrinkled shoulder and old-woman ass he saw across the room belonged to his dear, sweet aunt. That woman who’d laughed naively just the other night at the kooky antics on Cheers and who had so lovingly cooked him the ultimate cure for a hangover not so long ago.

  Amelia and Rockford had decked the space in hundreds of burning candles, and hung purple curtains at the edges of the front of the room to enclose the line of infant incubators along the wall there. A wooden platform had been raised before the children, draped with black sheets, and it was here that the victims were to be killed. The basement had become a twisted church, and hung from their wrists on either side of the altar were two women. Both were nude, but untouched. Thick, corded rope ensnared their wrists and held their arms high. Their heads lolled back while gravity stretched their chests taut. David hated himself for admiring the curve of the girls’ bellies and the tight, yet outthrust breasts. One of the women was a natural redhead, and he didn’t have to get close to her to verify that. Her eyes were closed and she didn’t move as the throng rutted before her on the floor, against the walls, on the step to the altar. The other, a brunette, hung on the opposite side of the altar, and appeared equally oblivious to the scene before her, though her eyes were open as her head lolled against a shoulder, and long lengths of raven ringlets streamed down her ribs like sultry feathers.

  On the back wall of the room hung the totem of the god or demon David supposed they were here to worship. At first glance, the statue appeared to be a vandalized woman, face of thinly chiseled white stone, with stylized curls draping across naked shoulders and teasing at the start of full, heavy breasts that poised above a rounded classical belly pierced with a thin belly button. But the breasts did not end in tips, as they should in life. Instead, where the areolae should have capped were deep black holes in each.

  To make matters worse, the cleft of her thighs were adorned not with simply a patch of carven pubic thatch, but with a spiked penis, its mushroom head also excised and hollowed. She…it…was a hermaphrodite.

  David had slipped along the wall of the back of the room and up the side, trying to keep in the shadows of the guttering candles so that perhaps nobody would recognize that he still wore his pants and had not painted himself in the blood of the sacrificial lamb.

  Amelia and Rockford were attaching the new victim’s arms to rope that hung from the ceiling, and so David slipped closer to the altar. It grew harder to walk, albeit slowly. Whether it was the sight of the naked bodies, or the smell of their sex, or the influence of the evil that simply lived in this old hotel, David’s hard-on was painful against his belt. The room felt fogged in his mind, as if he were looking at it through a prism of sexual smoke. Primal need filled his mind, pulsing through his veins like a fifth of X-rated liquor. He was losing himself in the invisible power that held the room in thrall. As he slipped around and behind a tall golden post that held a candelabra of white flaming candles, his hand moved to massage his crotch absently. He had unzipped his jeans and slipped his fingers inside before he realized what he was doing.

  “Fuck,” he whispered, and yanked his hand back out as if electrocuted. He knocked the back of his head against the stone of the basement wall to clear his head, and for a moment at least, the thickness that had been growing in his lips abated, and his vision sharpened. After the stars behind his eyes cleared anyway.

  “What are they burning in these candles?” he murmured to himself. He didn’t expect an answer, but there was one.

  “It’s not in the candles,” a purring voice whispered in his ear. “It’s in us.” A hand slipped again inside his pants, and he felt something cool grip him with a slow turn of fingers. He almost let go and closed his eyes, but again he caught himself and looked down, expecting to see the hippy chick from earlier taking advantage of him.

  But instead, when he stared at his crotch, he saw nobody. In fact, there could never have been anybody, he realized, because the candleholder immediately in front of him would have toppled if anyone had tried to wedge between it and him.

  “Whoa,” was all he could say.

  As he looked at the throng writhing together and apart on the floor, he realized that he wasn’t the only one to have felt phantom hands. There were several people standing and lying down on the floor who were twitching and moving as if in full copulation, or fellation…but they were, in fact, alone in their own space.

  The new victim at the front of the room was ready. Rockford and Amelia stepped back from where she thrashed helplessly from the ropes, which ascended to a metal bolt on the ceiling. Standing next to the woman, they began to undress each other, Amelia casting Rockford’s coat to the victim’s feet, and then unbuttoning his shirt. Rockford stopped her at his belt and instead helped her to shimmy out of the devilish dress she’d worn for the special evening. When their privates both dangled in the warming moist air of the room, they knelt face-to-face at the feet of the new victim, and kissed with abandon.

  Amelia’s hands slipped around Rockford’s back and traced passionate trails of white in his skin as her nails gouged and gripped him as she moved against him. Her moans could be heard above the grunting, gasping sighs of the throng that copulated throughout the room, and when she at last broke the kiss, it was Rockford’s breath that gasped loud and hard in the air.

  David couldn’t help but murmur, “Get a room.”

  Dr. Rockford stood then, apparently unashamed at the prominence of the promontory of his nakedness, and addressed the crowd. With a bobbing pointer below his midsection accenting each word.

  “What we have begun here, you must finish. The ceremony of the Thirteenth is not my ceremony, it’s not Amelia’s. It is all of ours,” he said. “We have gathered the mothers…we have birthed the children…and we have sacrificed the first offering. But now, we turn the night over to you. The offering of the second mother is yours. Who will take the knife?”

  With that he held up the long silver blade in the air, and the noises of passion from the floor disappeared. The room slipped to silence. And then a heavyset man stood up from a tangle of bodies on the floor, and walked to the side of the room where he shrugged on a white apron over his bare flesh. Nobody spoke as he walked back across the room.

  When he reached Rockford, the doctor held out the knife, but the man waved it away, holding up his own silver staff capped by a long, arced blade. “I brought my own,” a gruff voice announced.

  Amelia ran her hands across the pendulous breasts of the second mother, who struggled to keep her eyes closed. Unlike the last woman, this one seemed resigned to her fate�
�or perhaps she was simply still drugged. She stood before the crowd, nude and limp, making no attempt to hide or protect her body. Her eyelids fluttered open and then closed, as if she was fighting sleep—or perhaps fighting being awake!

  David stayed still behind the candle as the man raised a blade quietly, smoothly high above his head, and then brought it down cleanly, without wavering.

  The woman lurched backward as if electrocuted, and the reason bloomed instantly from her left breast down to her left knee. Her executioner’s blade had carved a long, steady cut all the way down her body from point to point, and as David watched, its edges turned from a sliver of red to a river.

  The woman began to shudder and cry…but still she held her eyelids shut. “Puh-puhlease,” she moaned. “Don’t hurt me anymore. Please don’t hurt me anymore.”

  The Butcher—David had begun to think of him as a thing, not a man—put a gloved hand to her cheek and stroked it. The second mother’s pleas changed, and instead of asking for her life, she began to lean her face forward to rest on the hand, taking comfort in the strength of her torturer. “Please don’t hurt me,” she said over and over.

  The hand did not show mercy. The Butcher slid a finger across her forehead, tracing the line of her scalp, before slipping his other hand around her to hold her lower neck. The knife haft pressed against her throat as he held her. Without warning, he slipped two fingers into her moaning mouth and moved them around a bit. His face betrayed the struggle within, but then his fingers reemerged, the pink flesh of her tongue held tight between them.

  That’s when the other hand with the knife left her neck and in one swift stroke, severed the tapered front half of her tongue in a flash of silver and red.

  The mother’s whimpering turned to claustrophobic gurgling cries, and the Butcher wiped his bloodstained glove off on the pale flesh of her breast before making his next move. It was no mystery to anyone what that move would involve. The Butcher drew the tip of his blade from the curled hair of her pubes to the hollow of her throat in a slow dance of razor danger…and then he dragged the tip back again. And again. And again. The crowd had ceased all amorous attentions and instead began to inch closer and closer to the front, anticipating the first spray of blood.