by John Everson
Skip it. Maybe there was no boulder at all. Just a bloody hole in the middle of his brain.
“Damn,” he moaned to nobody. Only someone answered.
“Seems like…every time I have a nightmare anymore, there you are,” a female voice whispered.
David tried to sit up, but the pain intervened. “I never asked for a female cop to be my torturer.”
“Torture you?” Christy asked, slowly propping herself up on an elbow. “You should be so lucky.”
“Are you okay?” he asked, while gingerly exploring his scalp to find the steel pick that had to be protruding from it somewhere.
“Yeah,” the cop said quietly. “What about you? I wasn’t the one moaning like a dog in a bear trap.”
“Been better,” he admitted, pulling warm, wet fingers away from his scalp. “But I seem to be alive.” He sat up, feeling the room spin just a bit even in the cloak of complete darkness. “Wow.”
“What?”
“Drunk and clobbered seem to share a few things in common,” he explained. Then he saw the faint sliver of light in the wall and began to crawl toward it.
“Like what?” Christy’s voice whispered.
“Like the room spinning?”
There was quiet for a moment, and David’s fingers found the gap in the wall where the faintest light crept through. They followed it along until the gap suddenly took a ninety-degree upturn. A door. Then from behind him, Christy gasped. “When the room spins for you, does it hold on to you too?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Christy yelled. “Back off, asshole. These hands are licensed in five states.”
David pulled his hands away from the crack in the wall. “Christy, what’s the matter?”
“Some asshole’s trying to feel me up.”
David turned around and crawled back from the door and in just four turns of the knee had collided with Christy’s foot. He pressed forward until he straddled her body on the floor on all fours.
“Nobody’s here,” he whispered.
“Someone was.” Her hands reached up to hold his shoulders and he leaned in to listen.
“His hands were…”
“What?” he whispered. His voice still sounded loud in the black room.
“His hands were inside me.”
“Lucky hands,” David answered, instantly regretting it.
“Pig. I knew I should never have told you.”
David pulled back from her and crawled past. In three pulls of his legs, his shoulder met the wall. He turned right and repeated the action and in just a couple movements, had found a wall again. He repeated it again and found himself back at the crack near the floor.
“Look,” he finally answered. “There’s nobody in here. It’s you and me. And I wasn’t feeling you up.”
Behind him Christy answered, but in a way he would have never expected.
She moaned. And not in pain.
She moaned like a woman in orgasm, with a tongue stuck way up her…
“Oh, yeah,” she told the dark room.
“Is this a lost scene from When Harry Met Sally?” David asked. “I’d just like to point out once again that there’s nobody in the room but you and me.” His voice quavered, just a little. And he crawled from the door back to her feet. His hands found her ankles in the dark, and he could feel her trembling as she gasped and groaned.
“There’s nobody here but us,” he said again.
“Oh, fuck!” the cop in front of him screamed, her legs tensing and pressing against his grip.
He crawled over her until he could feel her panting breaths on his lips. “There’s nobody here,” he whispered.
“Oh yes there is,” she gasped, her voice mounting the scale in hitching moans of increasing volume. “He’s here and he’s inside me…”
David considered the proximity of his penis, currently dangling somewhere about an inch or two above her crotch and found that normally easily erected appendage suddenly squeamish.
He slapped her gently on the side of the face. “There is nobody here but you and me,” he insisted.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Oh yes there is.”
David moaned himself then, and collapsed on top of her, both in frustration and in response to a sudden stimulus.
Something cold had just slipped between his legs. Something cold had just touched his…
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Chief Maitlin tiptoed through the black hallway of the old hotel and gritted his teeth. It had been a lot of years since he’d been in this building, and he hadn’t missed it one bit. The last time he’d been inside, he had been just a rookie cop, following the captain on an emergency call and stifling the urge to puke at the warm smell of feces and blood that thickened the air like a foul perfume. He had walked through the foyer and gagged at the sight of dismembered arms lying broken, like old toys on the floor, as they’d slipped deeper inside the nightmare. Somewhere in the basement, he remembered, a horrible twisting scream had echoed so loud it raised the hair on the back of his neck…
Now things were different. The hotel had been silent for half of his life, and he hoped that its core remained so…He hoped that it was just some fool who had tried to recapture the evil that once before had painted the walls here with entrails, and not someone who knew what he was doing. Because there was an evil here, something ancient. Something that had driven men to kill and kill and kill over and over again. Every generation had a story about Castle House. The bloodbath that the chief had seen a quarter century before was not the first. But he desperately wanted to make sure it remained the last.
His black-booted feet stepped carefully across the thick old carpet, as if trying to hide from whatever lay ahead. He knew in his heart that if the evil had awakened, there was no hiding, no hiding at all.
From somewhere down below his boots, a scream erupted.
“Oh bloody hell,” the chief whispered, his voice quiet in the shadow. “Why me?”
When he had walked through this corridor the first time, a quarter century ago, his daughter had been just a baby; blonde curly locks crowning her tiny head like wreathes. Her mother, Tricia, begged him to “Just do your job and come home.” She thought that a cop could just go to the office and come home again, without ever involving his family. “Leave us out of it,” she’d said once. But when you’re a cop…your family is a cop’s family. They can’t hide from who they are. And he couldn’t hide them.
He had done his best to keep them out of it, but in the end his career had caught up to Tricia. One August night while he was running the front desk at the station, an old con whom he’d sent up the river for ripping off the general store had come back to town after serving his term. The guy knew who the cop was who’d put him away. He knew who the cop’s wife was too. And he’d shown Maitlin a thing or two about crime and punishment.
Maitlin’s crime had been putting away the local who had broken the law. The criminal’s punishment had been putting a steel pole through the belly of the cop’s wife in the middle of a city sidewalk.
They’d found her body the next morning…a wild halo of blood surrounding her like a sainthood.
Maitlin had never really been the same. But in the two decades since, he’d done his best to shield Stacy from the danger of what he did. And so now he wanted to call out his daughter’s name in the shadows. He wanted to hear her voice that he knew must be suffering in silence here somewhere. He wanted to grab her and just take her home, regardless of what the other people here might need.
But in his heart he knew he was sworn to protect. And while he first intended to protect his daughter, he also intended to protect his town. His fingers slipped inside his jacket pocket to fumble for the book of matches he’d slipped there before he’d left the office. He gripped the pack hard and gritted his teeth to steel his courage. There was one thing that would protect his town more than anything else, he thought. The destruction of Castle House.
CHAPTER FIFTY-
THREE
Ba’al.
Amelia grinned. She could feel the demon in the air now…His touch permeated every pore. As she walked, his feather touches stroked her face, and hair and…
She had grown up dreaming of the satyr incarnate, fucking her to submission beneath soaking sheets. She had begged her dreams to make him real. She had traveled to Ireland and spent weeks studying in forgotten carrels of old libraries. She had studied every ancient myth and legend in handwritten tomes locked away in private collections to find out how. The things she had done to get access to those texts would make a whore blush.
And finally, tonight, with the cooperation of Astarte, he would be hers, at last.
Rockford was a prop, in the end, but a necessary one. He provided the focal point. The fulcrum. The means.
And the people of the town—the energy. With every sacrifice they sent a dissonance into space; a rift in the very matter that held soul and serendipity in its hand. With the blood of mother and child, mother and child, mother and child spilled again and again in this room, the dissonance grew until it could not be contained any longer.
“I hate you,” Amelia whispered at the doctor’s hairy back, as he walked ahead down the shadowed hall, the girl struggling feebly in his grasp.
“When Ba’al comes, I will make you the first offering to his reign. And Astarte and I will serve the god as concubines.”
In the main room, the townspeople groaned as one…It was as if the soul of the goat lived in them all, as one.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
“There’s nobody there,” David insisted. His fingers touched the cool skin of the policewoman’s shoulder with trepidation. The faintest fear slipped through his brain and asked, would she arrest him for assault?
“It’s just you and me. In a closet.”
Christy sat up and pressed her face close to his. “There was someone here. Some thing. There was…”
David nodded. “I know.” He shivered as he thought of the cold weight that had thrust at his back. “I felt it too. But…they’re gone now. We should find a way out before they come back.”
In the faintest light of the room, he thought he saw her face grimace.
“I didn’t ask to be in your nightmare,” he told her.
Christy laughed. “And I didn’t ask to feel your nightstick.”
She coughed. “Um…please get it off my thigh.”
David laughed. Then he crawled back to the faint light creeping in from beneath the door. With a fingernail he traced the indentation along the floor and followed its unlit gap up to standing level. After a little work, he found the door handle with his hand, which didn’t budge in the slightest. He said, “Right here. We need something to slip up and into the lock.”
“Oh sure, let me just get my hairpin,” Christy said. David could almost see her smirk in the dark.
“Just feel around on the ground for a piece of paper…I think it’s just a latch on the outside. If we can slip something in here and flip it up…we’re home free.”
“Just crawl around naked on the dirty floor of a basement with the spiders and bugs feeling around for garbage…Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, just wanted to be clear.”
Christy felt in the dust for…anything. Her knees scraped against tiny stones and grit as she crawled. David did the same, working his way around the small room. From a few feet away Christy let out a small scream.
“What’s wrong?”
“I think a spider just crawled across my ass.”
“Ugh. Hope you don’t get pregnant.”
“Hey, a kid with eight arms and legs could be useful.”
“Yeah, especially in searching for needles in haystacks.”
“Or scraps of paper in the dark. This is disgusting. I feel like things are crawling all over my skin now.”
“They are. You just crawled across a lice pit.”
“Fuck you. I’m going to make sure to give you a big hug and infest you with them just for that.”
“Ha,” David laughed. “You just want to get your hands on me. I knew it.”
“You wish.”
David didn’t answer. His fingers had just slipped over something that wasn’t cement. He traced its edge until the back of his hand touched the wall.
“Did you hear me, I said—”
“Shh,” he cut her off. “I think I found something.”
In a second a warm hand grasped his shoulder. “What?”
He caught the edge with his nails and lifted it from the ground. It wasn’t large, but it bowed in the air instantly, the top edge bending to lightly brush his arm.
“Not sure. A piece of plastic I think.”
David stood and crossed to the doorway. Carefully slipping the edge of the thin material into the crack, he moved the edge very gently up and then down, teasing it through the gap.
“Is it working?”
“Not sure,” he said again. “I…”
They both heard the sound of metal clinking against the door frame.
“That’s it,” Christy enthused. “You did it! We can—”
“That wasn’t me,” David hissed, pushing her back as the door burst open.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
The stairs were original. While the doctor may have renovated everything else aboveground in the old hotel, the steps into the basement creaked and moaned like they were a hundred years old. And perhaps they were.
Chief Maitlin took them slow, listening carefully to the din somewhere below. There were voices, a lot of them, in the basement, and most of the words coming from them were unintelligible. But passionate. Moans and sighs whispered through the stairwell like forbidden perfume; invisible, deadly, but alluring.
Maitlin reminded himself that he was here for Stacy’s sake. In his mind he could see her in their kitchen as a child now, clasping the brown matted fur of a teddy bear to her side and asking, “Daddy, is it time for bed?” He had scooped her up with the promise that “Yes, yes it is…and it’s time for sweet dreams.”
He had never imagined then that she could be sucked into a dream as dark as this one. He was supposed to protect her from shit like this. He swore at himself for that failure, and stepped off the last wooden step to the concrete below. The moaning was louder here, the crowd like a single organism, gasping and moaning and sighing all in unison. A gestalt of evil sexual release. As her father, he prayed that she was not witnessing whatever was going on just a few yards away. But as a cop, he knew in his heart of hearts that she was more than witnessing it. She was a part of the action. She had to be. Why else would they have taken her, if not to be a part of this…this…whatever it was.
He drew his gun and poked his head around the corner to see just exactly what it was.
The room undulated in red. Smoky red-orange light flickered and swam through air that seemed alive with shapes. In the air, Maitlin smelled semen. And lilacs. And iron. And something thick and intoxicating. It made his head dizzy from just one deep breath as he tasted and tried to identify what it was exactly that smelled sooo good. So good it made him want to disrobe himself and join the other aspect of the room—the herd of copulating bodies that swam and moved across the floor like the kitchen floor of a cheap motel at dawn. The shapes moved and quivered like cockroaches, tasting the air and diving in to suck one more crumb of life from their feast.
He was immediately embarrassed to see what he saw…but even as his face reddened, his crotch responded.
“Damn,” he murmured. “I haven’t felt like this in twenty years. I could…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he brought up one wide hand and slapped himself in the face, forcing the inexplicable feelings away with pain. The lust retreated, for the moment, and he squinted through the shadows to scan the forms before him. If Stacy was somehow out there on the floor…he didn’t want to see. But he had to know. He couldn’t help her if he couldn’t see…
Hi
s stomach trembled as his eyes roved over the bodies on the floor. They were a mass of bony shoulders and fat, rippled thighs. And on nearly all of them rested a splatter, or a smear of something that could only be blood. But he knew without question that it wasn’t their own. They were too involved in their rutting to have any mortal wounds among them. From somewhere a female voice called out in orgasm, “Oh yes, yes…Ba’al is here. Ba’al is in me.”
The former exclamation made sense, though he wished he hadn’t heard it. The latter however…seemed puzzling. Ba’al?
“Chief,” a familiar voice said.
Maitlin pulled his eyes off the buttocks of one slender woman, and met the face of his captain. Castle Point’s second-in-command was disturbingly…naked.
“What are you doing here?” Captain Ryan hissed. “I’ve been working at getting accepted here…They think I’m one of them. But if they see you…”
The chief’s gaze had left the body of his bloodied captain to take in the rest of the room. It curved around a wall in an L and just at the edge of his sight he could make out a wall, and the flickering light of hundreds of candles. And an arm, with ropes around its wrist.
From somewhere nearby a male voice called out: “To Ba’al, a mother. The Tenth.”
And then, a scream.
Maitlin started forward, but Ryan held him back. “Wait!” he hissed. “You’ll blow my cover.”
“Someone’s hurt,” the chief said.
“Lots of people here have been hurt. But if you just dive right in, all that’s going to happen is you’re going to join them.”
Maitlin looked his captain up and down, noticing the glistening sheen of sweat and other substances he didn’t want to consider coating the cop’s hairy legs and chest. He shook his head.
“My daughter’s here, Matt. I can’t sit back and wait on this one.”
“Chief, you’ve got to trust me on this one…”
Again the horrible scream, this time ending in a gurgle that could only be the drowning choke of blood.