The 13th

by John Everson

  When he struck, the blood flowed fast.

  David closed his eyes and swore silently. He didn’t want to watch this. But he couldn’t interfere. To try to stop the murders now would only mean his own death…To try to free at least some of the women—including Brenda—meant waiting here until there was an opening to retrieve Rockford’s coat—and more to the point, the keys that it held.

  As the Butcher raised his knife to draw another cut down the body of the trembling blood-drenched woman, David looked away and instead located the doctor and Amelia. The crowd was edging around them, moving closer to the murder in progress, as Rockford and Amelia stayed in place, fingers tracing the flesh of each other’s bodies in a private, twisted orgy with bloodstained nails and long, bloody kisses.

  David saw the Butcher raise his long red-tipped knife in the air again, and this time he looked forward to its down swipe. Not for the pain of the woman, but for how he could use it. If this woman had to die, at least her death might pay for someone else to live. He tensed and stole a look at the white coat on the side of the stage as the mother let out one horrible, quavering cry.

  “Peeez s’oppp,” she begged, red saliva spilling across her lips like a grisly fountain. Her blood and spit coated the floor at the Butcher’s feet, but he took no notice. Arm like a derrick, he lifted the knife again.

  When the candles glimmered on the silver of the killing blade, and the knife’s edge began to fall, David eased forward. He ducked low to the ground, and stepped closer to the impromptu stage, as the bodies around him surged forward at the same time, intent on seeing the stroke of the blade as closely as possible. He used their perverse interest to move past the Butcher along the wall. Praying that Rockford wouldn’t notice that he’d advanced beyond the throng, he stepped on the coat and then eased back toward the crowd, dragging the white coat with him.

  The Butcher’s amorous attention to his prey shielded David, just as he’d hoped. The man had stopped his live fillet to take the bleeding, shuddering form into his arms. Her wrists remained shackled but still she tried to pound on his back. Her reaction didn’t slow the Butcher, who only leaned in closer to her until the pale carmine of his lips pressed hard against the glistening blood sheen of her own.

  David saw her eyes shoot open when the Butcher’s tongue invaded her mouth, touching the horrible wound of her amputated tongue.

  “Stop,” Dr. Rockford yelled.

  David’s heart stopped. He’d been discovered. Frantically his eyes searched first one side of the room and then the other, trying to decide where to run. There was certainly no exit—only a rock wall at the front of the room, and a solid mass of bodies between him and the stairway.

  Assured of defeat, he looked for the doctor, and saw him pushing his way through three or four rows of the crowd that had surged closer to the stage. The Butcher held the mother close, pressing the cuts in her flesh against his own chest, opening her wounds to bleed faster against his skin.

  “She is an offering, not your whore,” Rockford said, pushing the Butcher back from his bloody kiss. “Give her to Astarte. Feed us her screams.”

  David almost gasped with relief. He was still safe!

  The Butcher’s thin features seemed to broaden and crease…as if he was about to cry at the reprimand. But then he steeled again, and with a grin uncoiling across his face like an unstitched wound, he lifted the knife to strike again.

  David took the opportunity to bend and pull the white coat closer. He searched with his hand and found the pocket, and then while staring ahead at the Butcher and the doctor, his fingers slipped in and felt around to look for a metallic ring of keys.

  “For Ba’al!” Rockford proclaimed, as the knife came down again.

  “For Brenda,” David whispered in his mind as his fingers closed on something cold and metallic.

  “Ahrraaaawhhhh!” screamed the poor, bloody woman as the Butcher stabbed his blade into her throat, and then dragged it across her neck and down the slope of her chest to peel back the skin of her breast like a slab of chicken.

  David dropped the coat while holding on to the metal. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, as he saw the woman convulse with the last pumps of her heart. The crowd only pushed closer, as if she were a rock star they needed to touch. Those in the front row were quickly slick with the dying woman’s blood, and moans of excitement began to rise again from the crowd.

  “Drink her life and taste the sin!” Amelia’s voice called from somewhere behind him. But David didn’t stop to see from where. He had already wound his way through four rows of demonic nudists and was headed toward the back hallway. He hoped that he had the right keys.

  He couldn’t afford to go back.

  As he slipped into the dark hallway in the back of the room, David heard the doctor call out five words that would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life:

  “And now for her child.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  The corridor felt cool and smelled wormy dank after the cloyingly heavy scent of bodies and heat and candles in the main room. David breathed it in like the purest drink of air ever.

  He made a left when he reached the corridor branching, figuring that it would only help to have the assistance of the guys trapped down here when he went to rescue the women chained in the other room. Call it “David’s Gang.” He laughed. Better than chain gang, anyway.

  He only hoped they really would help.

  He found the key to the lock on the first try. The guys within hadn’t even time to heckle him before the door was creaking open.

  “Told ya I’d be back with a key,” he announced.

  “Took you long enough,” a dirty voice growled from inside.

  “Ungrateful bastard, aren’t ya?”

  “You want to keep using those lungs, or wear them?” This time, the owner of the voice strode into the dim shadow just bright enough to allow David to see him. He stood a full head taller, and probably a whole person wider than David did, but oddly enough, the smaller man was not intimidated.

  “Gimme a fuckin’ break,” he said disgustedly. “I just let you out of the goddamn cell, which, I’ll point out, you and your behemoth muscles were unable to accomplish. So quit giving me shit and give me a hand so we can all get out of this hellhole.”

  Billy stood behind TG and at the start of those words he was convinced that the little guy was going to be the flattened guy in about thirty seconds. But instead, a slow grin crept across TG’s face. And his hand clapped David on the shoulder.

  “Yeah, little man,” TG growled. “I gotcha. And I’m still gonna rip your lungs out. But not until we’re all topside, right?”

  “Whatever,” David said. “Just help me get my girl out of here and you can do whatever you want to me.”

  “Thanks for the offer,” TG answered. “But I don’t do guys.”

  David just shook his head and started toward the prison of the thirteen mothers. “C’mon.”

  He led them down the dark corridor and across the hall leading back to the main room. The echo of screams and ecstasy bled down the shadowed bricks to meet them.

  “Someone’s having some fun,” TG said. His face lit up when a woman’s scream rose and fell.

  “You wanna beat up on some chicks, or you wanna beat up on Rockford?” David asked, as he fumbled for the keys. They stood in front of the door to the prison room.

  “Can’t we do both?”

  Billy punched TG in the shoulder. “Conserve your energy,” he cautioned. “We can always beat on some chicks.”

  Somehow, despite the vileness of the comment, David got the feeling that the other man was arguing on his behalf, and he silently thanked him as the door swung open.

  “Holy shit,” TG announced as the three stepped inside the prison room. Naked women seemed to be chained to the walls everywhere, most of them with ragged black stitching across their lower abdomens. Some of those stitches still leaked blood from the struggles of the women against their bonds.
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  “Are you here to help?” one of the women asked as they entered the room. “You’re not the doctor,” said another.

  “Not the doctor,” agreed TG. “Here to help, is another story.”

  Billy elbowed him.

  “One more time with the elbow, buddy, and yer gonna be using that beer-tap contraption back at the shack as a die-ally-sis machine.”

  “Impressed that you know the word ‘dialysis,’” Billy answered, and quickly dodged a fist.

  “Help me get them off the walls,” David said, staying out of it. At the same time, he was again scanning woman to woman to woman, looking for a darkhaired sylph with a lock of pink hair. While none of them were looking themselves—most hadn’t probably bathed in days, most were discolored and bruised across their midsections from surgery and most hadn’t used makeup or a hairbrush in weeks—David was sure he’d recognize Brenda at her worst if she were here. And he was convinced that she wasn’t.

  His heart sank.

  “What do you want us to do with them?” Billy asked.

  David was tempted to say, “Nothing.” What did he care about all of these anonymous women? He was here for a reason…

  “David!” a voice called weakly from the farthest corner of the dark room.

  “Help them down,” he answered Billy, and turned in the direction of the voice.

  He almost didn’t recognize her naked. Her arms were bound above her head in thick, rough knots of rope, and the darkly trimmed finger of her pubic mound was not the color he would have expected from the sun-blonde knotted hair that streamed from her head to lick at her shoulders, but there was no mistaking the upturned tease of her pert nose or the deadly bright blue of her eyes.

  “Christy!” David grinned. He left TG and Billy and ran to her, throwing his arms around her as if they’d been intimate for years. She was the only hint of the world as he’d always known it that he’d seen in hours.

  “I’d blush, but I’m too fuckin’ worn out to care,” Christy whispered in his ear.

  “I’d get excited, but I’m too freaked out right now,” he answered, eliciting a slight laugh from the young cop.

  “They’re killing all of the women, aren’t they?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I saw them kill two so far,” he said. “And I think they’re going to work their way through this whole room. They say they are performing some kind of ceremony of the Thirteenth.”

  Across the room, TG and Billy were working on the ropes that bound some of the women to hooks dangling from the raftered ceiling.

  “This ain’t easy,” TG declared.

  “It was pretty easy when you decided to hit me up in a bar and drive me home,” a voice came from the opposite wall. “Oh, that was easy as pie.”

  “Hair pie is always easy,” growled TG. “Shut up, bitch.”

  David stayed out of it, and worked on Christy’s knots. “Brenda’s not here,” he said, as he leaned closer, straining to unthread the heavy rope. The touch of her cool, but velvet soft breast slid across his arm like an evil tease.

  Christy fought to ignore the touch, as much as desire for more vibrated through the wracked wreck of her physique at that moment.

  “No, she’s not,” she agreed. “I haven’t seen her since we left her room.”

  “Where else could they be holding her?” he asked.

  “There’s another room I saw, when they brought me in here,” she said. “You’d think it’s a closet, but it’s just another entry behind the door over there.”

  She tried to point with her free arm, but it didn’t budge. Pins and needles swallowed her up in an ocean of sensation, none of it pleasant.

  “Why isn’t she here with the rest of you?” David asked, undoing the other rope.

  Christy shrugged. “I’d guess they have something special in mind for her.”

  “Like what?” he asked, pulling the last loop from around her wrist.

  Again she shrugged.

  “Something worse than death?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Brenda had never really been afraid of the dark. If anything, she embraced it. The dark was a walk down First Street at midnight, savoring the taste of heavy rain in the thick night air, sensing more than seeing the wave of the trees along the railroad line. Dark was the place she lived in after her parents were asleep, and she felt an itch, no, a drive that couldn’t be denied and so her hands dragged wet, sticky ecstasy across her thighs as she writhed alone on her bed. Dark was the moments she lived in alone, and alone was a feeling she knew and felt safe in.

  “Safe” wasn’t a word you could have used to describe Brenda’s emotional landscape right now. Rope chafed painfully against the soft skin of her wrists and ankles. The bindings held her back to the cold, rough stone wall. The doctor had brought her here and disrobed her with a cold efficiency that was frightening in its speed and complete lack of emotion.

  Now the dark was a palpable force of evil around her, not a friend at all. Brenda tried to break the pall by forcing her mind to relive the time down at the Clam Shack a couple weeks ago when a woman billing herself as “Johnny Cash with titties” sang a set and alternated between a raspy feminine contralto and a damned-impressive deep-voiced rendering of the Man in Black’s “Jackson.” There was something just so wrong in seeing a broad-shouldered, redhaired Irish girl singing in a range below where most men could reach, that the show had left an indelible mark in Brenda’s brain.

  But the novelty of the singer’s meandering through an eclectic catalog of Allanah Myles, Billy Idol, Janis Joplin, The Style Council, and the aforementioned Cash didn’t ease the atmosphere in the dark for long. Pretty soon Brenda was back to feeling the air swirl around her without a body to move it. And from there came the touches, feather soft on her neck and breasts. And after that, the more demanding pinches on the inside of her thighs. Brenda would have chalked it up to…mosquito or spider bites…if it hadn’t been for the laughter.

  And the voices.

  They whispered in the air like the scratching of leaves on a shutter. Or the gentle tapping of branches on glass.

  Only…she wasn’t near a window. She was locked in a tiny, dark, damp room in a basement, and the air shouldn’t have been moving at all. And it certainly shouldn’t have been colored by the sighs and moans of spirits in flight.

  And the whispers of leaves on windows didn’t usually translate in your ear to the faintest encouragements of “Soon, you’ll be with us” or “Soon, I will be in you.”

  But that’s what she heard.

  The voices made Brenda shiver, and for the first time in her life she was petrified of the dark. At the faintest stir of air in the tiny room, her skin goose-bumped and crawled. When the soft, fluttery touches reached her lips she hissed, “No,” in answer, but the pressure only grew more intense until she felt as if her lips had met the pull of a vacuum.

  Once she would have welcomed the kiss of the dark; it had been her lover through so many months and years of emptiness. She had never been the popular kid in Castle Point, and life after graduation hadn’t improved her social standing.

  But now…those midnight touches filled her with fear. There was something out there. And that something now was…here.

  “You will be ours,” the voice whispered in wasp-wing scratches in her ear. “You will be the Thirteenth.”

  Brenda pulled against the knots on her wrists until she felt warmth dropping down the inside of her forearms. She pulled in vain.

  Around her, she could hear the echoes of laughter, though there appeared to be nobody else in the room.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  TG could only take so much shit. He was in the business of doling it out, not taking it. And for the past few days, he’d been on the receiving end entirely too much. First, Billy started cutting him crap, and then the damn doctor had shot him up with something raw and tossed him in the fuckin’ basement. But the capper was when this little twerp turned up to act like his rescuer and mouthed of
f at him over and over again and expected to get away with it.

  Now the goddamned sluts on the walls were pissing in his face when he was trying to cut them free.

  “You’re the asshole who…” one of them had the unfortunate audacity to say at this particularly inopportune point in TG’s train of thought. TG didn’t even think twice. The back of his hand shot out and cuffed her across already bruised lips. His hand came away wet, and he didn’t bother to see if it was from saliva or blood. He thought the perfect follow-up would be a left hook to the jaw, and after the satisfying crack of that action against her jaw, her tits seemed to hang even more slack as she relaxed against the wall, supported solely from the ropes around her wrists.

  “Nobody calls me an asshole,” he pronounced. “In fact…” He turned to pick out David across the room. “Nobody gives me shit. Not now, not ever.”

  Tapping one thick fist in an open palm, he sauntered across the room to where a naked blonde was wrapping two pale arms around the bare and equally pale skin of David’s back. TG considered doling out his lesson on the little prick with just his bare hands…but then saw a better option. Stepping over to a segment of the wall that had obviously seen some recent repair, he picked up a brick from a pile of masonry and debris on the floor. Then he turned toward David.

  Billy staggered over then with a trembling woman wrapped around him like a leech…or an octopus. Her legs scissored around his waist as if she was trying to fuck him while he walked. She slowed him down, but Billy didn’t seem to mind. After all, the woman was naked, and pressing everything she had against him.

  “What are you doing, man?” Billy asked his partner in crime when he finally shuffled close enough. The woman kept her face buried in Billy’s shoulder and refused to look up.