It ended with silent intensity while rain sprayed the windows. The candles had burned down to nearly nothing, but lightning still blinked, illuminating the room every few seconds. Exhausted, we drifted off to sleep, her body draped over mine, head on my chest, breasts crushed against my stomach, our nude forms slick with sweat, warm and wet, entangled from head to toe.
In the night I lost my way, wandered from our sanctuary to the murky borderlands of sleep, where all that was ghastly and unclean waited for me.
I groggily opened my eyes. Claudia was still wrapped around me, her breath hot and steady on my chest. The storm clouds had dissipated and the rain had softened, giving way to the moon. Shadows moved along the walls. The floor creaked. I sensed movement before I saw it sweep past the corner of my eye.
Blended with darkness, new moonlight revealed several figures shrouded in black silently circling the bed, dancing around it like part of some ancient ritual. My muscles constricted in terror. I tried to sit up but my body remained paralyzed, stuck to the mattress and pinned beneath Claudia. I tried to call out to her but the words stuck in my throat, and the harder I tried to speak the worse it became. The figures continued their dance, increased their speed and began to violently convulse.
Claudia’s head suddenly jerked up, her chin in my chest and her eyes alive and wild. “Ever wonder what happens when you close your eyes?” she giggled. “What comes awake once you go to sleep?”
I struggled to get her off me but my arms and legs wouldn’t respond, and the more I attempted to thrash about the harder Claudia laughed.
“Get…off,” I finally managed to choke out.
“Ever wonder what that odd feeling is you sometimes get in the night?” she whispered, looking over her shoulder only long enough to grin at the beings still circling the bed. “The feeling that you’re not alone, that there’s something in the room with you once the lights go down and it’s quiet? We all feel it sometimes. Like maybe somebody or something is standing right next to your bed? We all open our eyes and look even though we know we won’t see anything. But deep down you know you felt something, and it scares you. Know why? Because something really is there.”
Suddenly I was able to move, and my arms pushed her away with such force that she became momentarily airborne before crashing back onto the mattress beside me. I scrambled from the bed, swinging punches at the darkness and releasing a primal scream. But the shadows were gone.
I staggered across the room, still off-balance, and crashed against the wall.
Claudia remained on the bed, sprawled out on her back. Snarling whispers filled the room as smoke rose from her body and it began to convulse. The cottage followed suit, shaking as if from an earthquake. Terrified, I scanned the room and ceiling, half expecting things to fall on me from above. I clutched the gold crucifix hanging around my neck. It had been a gift from my mother just months before her death. I held it tight as tears filled my eyes. Do you still believe? My mother’s voice, from so long ago…
“Are you all right?”
The sound of Claudia’s voice stopped it all as quickly as it had begun. I traced her voice to the bed. She was sitting up, watching me with a confused look on her face. “Are you dreaming?”
“I don’t know,” I said, voice breaking.
“It’s OK.” She crawled to the edge of the bed and sat back on her knees. Her body was still damp. “Keep the evil in your dreams and nightmares, whether you’re asleep or awake, it makes no difference. As long as it’s there its bound and you can control it. If it gets in here,” she said, pointing to her temple, “it’s in control. Once you let it in your head, or it fools its way in, once it’s there for real, it can do whatever it wants.”
Slowly, I moved back toward the bed, still uncertain of who or what I was dealing with. “Am I awake?”
“Remember what I told you.” Claudia opened her arms. “It’s all deception.”
As I leaned in to accept her embrace I heard a strange cracking sound, like small bones or pencils being broken, snapped in half, cracked and splintered.
Before I could process any of it an appendage burst through her abdomen. Warm blood sprayed my face, and I threw myself backward to the floor as more jointed and furry appendages burst from her stomach and chest. Coated with blood and bodily fluids, her body glistened. With more cracking sounds her back arched and the spider-like legs clicked into position to support the weight of her torso.
I scuttled across the floor to the door, but it slammed shut before I could get to it. Behind it I could hear growling and scratching. On the other side of the room Claudia’s destroyed body had transformed into some bloody, writhing and macabre hybrid of human being and arachnid.
Flames appeared, encircled the bed and rose nearly to the ceiling. The thing that Claudia had become was gone. Her normal form had been restored, but impossibly, she began to climb the wall like an insect might, scaling it slowly, as if crawling across the floor. When she reached the ceiling she stopped and looked down at me.
Her eyelids were gone.
From the darkness behind me two bloody hands grabbed either side of my face and pulled me back. I fell against whoever was there, and their clutch tightened, the blood from their fingers sliding across my cheeks. In a voice that sounded like he had just gargled cut glass, he said, “Don’t you know who I am?”
I struggled to break free but couldn’t. The hands shook me, gave my head one quick but savage jerk, and I went limp. “Bernard,” I gasped.
“Wrong,” the voice whispered in my ear. Something wet touched the side of my neck. A tongue. Gliding upward. Hot. Moist. Fetid. “His father.”
* * *
It was no longer night, but not quite morning either. Dawn was moments away, and the rain had stopped. Though the sun had not yet broken through the darkness, in the distance I could hear birds singing, welcoming its approach. I was still covered in sweat and had come awake not with a sudden jolt, but gradually, the way one might emerge from a peaceful sleep. I slung a hand out for Claudia but found only mattress and pillow next to me. My heart still racing, I rolled over. She was sitting near the window in a small wooden chair, smoking a cigarette and watching the sky. Nude, with her tattoos and dark eyes, she reminded me of a vampire anticipating sunrise and contemplating her escape.
Without looking at me she said, “You were having a nightmare.”
“Yes,” I said quietly.
“You were thrashing around.” She drew on her cigarette. The orange tip glowed bright in the fading darkness. “Couple times you called out.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“It’s better to let these things run their course.”
My body was sore and despite the nightmare I could have easily gone back to sleep. “Been a long time since I’ve woken up anywhere but next to my wife,” I said.
She looked at me. “Is she coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want her if she does?”
“We’ve been together a long time.”
“Do you love her?”
I nodded.
“Does she love you?”
“Used to.”
“But she doesn’t anymore?”
“I don’t know.”
She turned back to the window. The sun had just begun to break over the horizon. “What’s it like?”
“Being married?”
“Being loved.”
I went quiet, unsure of how to answer. Had she still been beside me I would have pulled her in close to me and held her a while.
Eventually she said, “Did you dream about the dark?”
I sat up, swung my legs around until my feet touched the floor. “Claudia, remember before when we talked about Bernard’s father? Do you know who it was?”
“No.”
“Bernard never told you?”
“He made claims, but Bernard was a liar.”
“Who did he claim his father was?”
She smoked h
er cigarette a while before answering. “The Devil himself.”
Fear scraped my spine. “Did you believe him?”
“Of course not.” She crushed her cigarette on the windowsill and tossed the butt to the floor. “But it doesn’t matter if I believe it or not.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s all a mind-fuck, Plato.” She crossed her legs, folded her arms across her breasts and sat forward a bit. “I think his mother got gangbanged like all the rest of them. Lots of guys, probably an animal or two—those types are into that stuff—could’ve been any number of people or things. All that matters is what she believed. And what he believed. That’s what evil lives on—belief. You either believe it or you don’t, can’t change it either way. It just is what it is. That’s where people fuck up. They think they can control what they believe. They can’t. They can pretend they do, convince themselves they know what’s real and what isn’t, but they’re just blowing smoke up their own ass. I told you before, the dark knows us better than we know ourselves.”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “This evil, Claudia…can I kill it?”
“It’s already dead.”
“Can I stop it? Destroy it somehow?”
She smiled, but it was a helpless gesture. “Believe.”
“Is it still Bernard I’m dealing with? Was it ever?”
“It’s more about you at this point than you realize,” she said. “In ritual black magic, human body parts are powerful ingredients, all with different uses. The first thing Bernard did to his victims was to take their eyelids. He made his prey look into the afterlife for him. Whatever he is now, he was once a man, so his struggles and obsessions are still those of Man. He’s more powerful now, but he’s not without weakness. He’s faithless, and the faithless are weak.”
“Why the hell is this happening to me?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It’s the way of the world, his world.”
I held my hand out. After a moment she stood up and accepted it. “If I asked you not to leave town,” I said, “if I asked you to stay, would you?”
Claudia ran her fingers through my hair with her free hand then sat next to me on the edge of the bed. “If I asked you to come with me, would you?”
I managed a cowardly smile. “I feel a closeness to you I can’t explain.”
“I’m part of your nightmare, Plato. And you’re part of mine.”
She was right. More had existed between us from the very start than we’d realized, and even on this night more had transpired than just sex. Pieces of us had passed from one to the other, body and soul, kindred spirits clawing their way out of a shared hell. And wherever we were going, both of us knew then that regardless of final destination, we’d never be coming back. I touched her tattoo, ran my fingers along the bend in her thigh then kissed her on the forehead. She leaned into me and we fell back onto the bed together, quiet and holding each other as the sun continued its slow climb over the city.
For the first time in recent memory I slept peacefully, and for hours, through the morning and into the afternoon. When I finally awakened, Claudia was gone.
CHAPTER 32
As Rick’s Cherokee pulled away I watched Donald grow smaller and smaller in the side mirror, receding into the distance the further we got from his cottage. Standing in the driveway, watching after us, the look on his face was a mixture of disapproval and guarded relief. None of us knew what Rick and I were walking into, and while Donald felt reticent about speculating, he had made it perfectly clear earlier that he wanted out. This time around I didn’t blame him, but I could tell he felt guilty staying behind, so I didn’t offer it as an option, which spared him having to reconsider while also providing a graceful way out.
The plan was simple. While the town was distracted with the evening festivities, Rick and I would check out the remains of the Buchanan Mill on the outskirts of Potter’s Cove. Donald would stay by the phone and wait to hear from us. If there was no word by nine o’clock the following morning, the decision was his from there on out, either follow us to the mill and take his chances, or notify the police and tell them everything.
We took a corner and I quickly inspected my 9mm before returning it to the holster on the back of my belt. Rick brought along a large scuba knife he strapped to his calf whenever he went on one of his diving excursions. The weapon was double-edged, one side smooth and the other serrated, both razor-sharp. It lay in its scabbard on the console between the seats. In a sullen tone he asked, “You think we’ll need any of this shit?”
“I don’t know. Let’s hope not.” In truth, I felt like an ass. Two grown men with knives and guns on their way to a rumble with demons or ghosts or God knew what, going to war with the past, with some dark demented corner of ourselves. Straightjackets all around, please.
It was already growing dark. The sky had taken on a strange fiery glaze, streaks of red and orange mixed with rolling black along the horizon like brushstrokes from an ethereal painter-gone-mad hidden in the outlying clouds.
The fireworks were set to begin soon after nightfall, so the streets leading to and near the public beach, where tourists and residents alike gathered to watch the display, were already packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic and a bevy of pushcart vendors selling everything from flags to inflatable animals to food to glow-sticks. Luckily we were headed in the opposite direction, farther down the coast, and skirted the congestion easily.
We rode in silence for several minutes, the neighborhoods becoming more and more desolate the further we went. “When you hit the woods, pull over.”
“We can drive right up to the gate,” Rick said. “Hop the fence and—”
“I got a plan.” I turned and looked out the window, wrestling the tension, the fear. “Just do it, OK?”
“Sure.” Rick gave an awkward nod. “OK.”
The old mills had all been built inland along a series of bluffs overlooking the Atlantic. They’d been constructed in a cleared out section of state forest, one after another, to form a line of enormous old structures on huge plots of paved land. The Buchanan Mill was first in line. Prior to the property was a fairly dense but minor section of state forest, and behind the mill was a short stretch of land followed by the cliffs then the ocean below and beyond. The next mill was nearly a full mile away, separated by an enormous expanse of parking lot and another small patch of forest.
We pulled onto an old service road, the pavement cracked and littered with potholes. “So what happened with you and that chick?”
“Claudia?” Before leaving Donald’s I had gone over our conversations and all the things she’d explained to me. “I already told you everything she said.”
“You believe her?”
“Aren’t we beyond all that by now?” I asked. “Yeah, I do.” I remembered waking up in her cottage to find nearly all trace of her gone. The candles were burned down and extinguished, and even the poster of Florida had been removed from the wall. The rain had stopped but puddles littered the area and water still dripped slowly from the gutters and dead tree branches. The sun was blanketed in a hazy glow as the heat again began to rise and burn away the remnants of the storm the night before. I wondered if Claudia had sat on the bed and watched me a while before she did it, contemplating the evening prior, or had she quietly slipped away while I slept, already thinking of other things, other places?
Visions of her flashed before my eyes, accompanied by images of Toni, and eventually, Bernard. We were all tied together now—forever—and I could no longer separate the three, could no longer think of one without also thinking of the others. When I’d been inside Claudia, her past—and those who had been there before me—didn’t matter. It wasn’t until I thought of Bernard having been there too that for one brief but brutal moment I’d been sickened, and from that point forward I knew that even if Toni and I ended up back together, I’d never be able to look at her again without also experiencing these spectral memories.
“So she’s gone now, huh
?”
I saw her in a blink, the towel pressed against her chest, her face washed in candlelight. You’re running into the dark and I’m running away from it.
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s gone. She wanted to go someplace else and start over. She believed she could, anyway.”
“Must be nice.”
“Starting over?”
“Yeah.”
I nodded. “Guess it all depends on how you do it.”
“Think we’ll ever get the chance?”
“Think we’ll take it even if we do?”
“Probably not.” He laughed lightly, ironically. “This fucking town’s all we know, all we’ve ever known and probably all we ever will know.”
“Kind of sad,” I mumbled.
“It’s not so bad. This is our home. Where the hell else are we supposed to go?”
The road had grown a bit more uneven and rugged. The Cherokee jostled us about and Rick slowed his speed. The beginnings of forest awaited us in the distance. “Pull over,” I said. “We’ll walk in from here.”
We locked up the Jeep and stood near the edge of the woods. Just over the treetops, the highest points of the Buchanan building were visible in the distance, an unnatural glitch in the otherwise pristine skyline. The sun, all but swallowed by the horizon, continued to sink, a final hurrah of red glowing radiance filtering through the trees as it gradually slipped from sight. We watched the sky without speaking. Before we reached the end of the forest and crossed onto the Buchanan Mill parking lot, it would be completely dark.
Rick clutched his scuba knife in one hand, a large flashlight in the other. He held them both up, as if to remind me that he had them. In a sleeveless, skintight black shirt, black jeans and black hiking boots, hair slicked back and skin tan and muscular, he looked like some special ops commando on a night raid. But the usual expressions that colored his face, those of confidence bordering on arrogance, enthusiasm and an ease with himself and his surroundings, the premeditated satisfaction he had always drawn from being in control and self-assured, had gone missing. The last thing I needed at this point was a paper tiger.
The Bleeding Season Page 33