by Harvey Click
Her arms and legs slowed and stiffened. Her chest shuddered and clutched for air, and then he felt its fierce spasms diminish to feeble tremors, and then the tremors stilled and even her lips stopped writhing.
Angel had moved her last.
Stonebrenner was still lying on top of her, panting like a husband exhausted by lovemaking. He climbed out of the tomb and leaned against the rock wall until he had regained his breath.
A dreadful honeymoon, he thought. He imagined her terrified eyes staring at him in the darkness, so he bent over and shut them with his hand. He placed his lips next to her ear and whispered.
“There’s a saying about digging your own grave, my unfaithful Angel, and that’s what you’ve done. If you had given yourself to me willingly, as an act of love, I would have released you as soon as Newman is dead. But since you were unfaithful to your vows, here you shall lie until time at last, in its slow mercy, releases you to the torments of hell.”
Though her lips were as still as stone, he could still hear her cries ringing in his brain. He stood for a long time, pressing his hands to his ears in the darkness.
“I still hear you!” he shouted, and his words echoed back at him mixing with her keening howls. At last he passed through the tunnel to his laboratory and searched through cupboards and crevices for tools he had stored away four decades ago.
Angel’s voice rang in his brain: “Baby! Help me, Baby!”
Her words dissolved into a shrill sound that Stonebrenner recognized, the sound of sheer terror that had raged in his head for so many dark years, a noise so horrible that he couldn’t bear to hear it again. He tore open cupboards, their jars falling and breaking, their irreplaceable substances wasted on the floor. At last he found what he needed.
He hunkered back through the tunnel and shone the lantern on her face. It was as still as marble, and yet her lips moved in his mind.
“Baby, help me!” they said.
Stonebrenner fumbled in the vague light to thread the thin copper thread into his needle. As he pierced her upper lip, it twitched and seemed to struggle to form a word. He stitched it tightly to her lower lip.
The sewing, he knew, could serve a purpose only symbolic, but much of magic is symbolism. As he pushed the needle through her upper lip again, her teeth flashed white in the lantern light. He pierced the lower lip, stitched tightly, and the voice seemed to grow quieter.
“Baby,” it murmured softly.
He stitched again, sealing the paralyzed lips together. The voice was hushed and muffled, its words no longer distinct, but he could still hear it as a faint moaning, a maddening mumble in his ears.
Somehow her eyelids snapped open, and their frozen stare was a kind of speaking more visceral than words. He stitched both eyelids tightly shut.
Then at last there was silence, except for the roaring of his ears. Even so, Stonebrenner knew that her infidelity would haunt him for many years to come, until it too receded into the tunnel of forgetfulness.
The lid was a heavy slab of rock. Yesterday he had propped one end of it up against her tomb, but the slab was so heavy that he had to use a long steel bar as a lever to lift the other end and slide it over the opening. But before he completely sealed her in, he leaned over and stared bitterly at her face.
“Beddy-bye,” he whispered.
***
Stonebrenner climbed the basement steps to his kitchen with a heavy sense of despair, but as he was climbing the wide stairs to the second floor he felt a tremendous force rush through his body and mind. It was Angel’s fury surging through him, and her fury was power such as he had never felt before, the strength of two human spirits joined in one body.
The power grew even stronger as he climbed the spiral stairs to his watchtower. It came in great waves that felt like rushes of cocaine mixed with something else, maybe a hint of mescaline to fuddle the brain. He realized that hatred was at least as strong as love, and just as his own hatred had once given strength to Newman, Angel’s hatred would give him strength over Newman, who now was weakened because he had lost his cradling.
Stonebrenner felt like a superman, felt that he could do anything. There was a remarkable skill that Newman had tried without success to teach him, and Stonebrenner felt that now he could accomplish even that. It was a skill called levitation, though Newman had called it climbing out of the well of gravity. There were vectors of gravity everywhere, vectors pulling from the sun and moon and planets, even from the stars, and a true adept could use these vectors to swing through the air like a monkey swinging through trees on vines.
A great rush of Angel’s fury surged through him, and he lifted his feet off the floor and climbed up the air until he could touch the ceiling. Amazing. He climbed down and climbed up again. It was easy—anything was easy now.
He opened a window and stared out. Did he dare try it? He sat on the windowsill, his feet dangling out—and then he walked. He was walking above the steeply sloped roof. Did he dare move past the edge of the house, with the yard three stories below?
Angel’s anger swept through him, and using its power like a sail he soared to the nearest tree and perched in one of its high branches like an owl.
Chapter Fifty
The sun was already setting when Ben and Sarah got back to Mount Vernon. Sarah called Ed, and he told her he would be waiting for them in his car out front. Ben stopped just long enough for Sarah to get into Ed’s car, and then he followed the black Mercedes out of town.
By the time they reached Stonebrenner’s road, the sky had faded to near black. When they came to a little rise in the road, Ed shut off his headlights and Ben did the same. The big barn came into view just past the rise, and the Mercedes stopped for a moment so Ben would see the narrow lane beside the cornfield. He turned into it, and the Mercedes continued silently past the house to the cemetery.
Ben parked directly north of the barn, got out and checked to make sure he couldn’t see the tower. He couldn’t, so no one in the tower should be able to see his car. The only sounds came from the crickets in the distance; the ones near him were silenced by his presence.
He stood still for a moment, getting used to the scant light of the rising quarter moon. Too bad he had never ordered the Russian night-vision binoculars he had noticed so many times in his surplus catalogs, but at least the ordinary ones that were slung around his neck had powerful 20x50mm lenses. He shoved the Springfield into the waist of his black jeans, stuck a small LED flashlight in a hip pocket, and eased the car door shut silently without latching it.
It was a muggy night with a rustling of hot breeze that made the leaves of the tall corn wave like arms of a thousand dancing scarecrows. He climbed the rusty wire fence into the field and walked along the fence line until he was past the east corner of the barn, then he pressed his way a few feet into the dense corn for cover. He could see the house now, and there were lights in a few of the windows, but no one was visible through them.
But someone was standing in the tower. It looked like a man, but he was facing east, and even with his binoculars Ben couldn’t tell if it was Darnell or Stonebrenner.
He saw that the field he was in joined another cornfield that lay about 50 yards east of the house and probably continued south past the cemetery. From that field he should be able to see the man more clearly. So he forged his way east, moving against the rows of corn, and the sharp edges of the leaves seemed to mutter and gossip as he fought his way through them.
When he reached the east field it was much easier to make his way south because now he was walking along a row instead of against them. Directly east of the house he stopped and looked at the tower again with his binoculars. There was just enough moonlight shining through one of the high windows to illuminate a ghastly white face staring back at him with button-black eyes.
It was a frightening face, and Ben ducked back into the corn and headed north, back toward his car.
***
Stonebrenner stood in his watchtower, but instea
d of gazing out like a sentry, he gazed inward.
His initial elation had turned into anger, and whether it was his anger or Angel’s he couldn’t tell. It was true that her anger gave him power, but it also made him feel ill. Her wrath was more concentrated now, and when it surged it jabbed him like a spike in his brain, fuddling his thoughts and giving him a pounding headache.
How much better it would be if she would give her power to him in love instead of hatred; then they would be two inseparable allies bound in one body, together invincible against the enemy. Had he not given her life itself, bringing her spirit back from the dead to live again in her brother’s body? Had he not given her the great gift of Longevity? Had he not nursed her through her illness, saving her from a second death when her heart fluttered weakly and wanted to stop? Had he not loved her faithfully ever since she was a child, with the warm devotion of a parent as well as a husband? And had she not turned on him like a viper not even one hour after they were married?
Angel, thy name is treachery, he thought.
Twice within the range of his memory he had experienced love, and twice his love had been turned against him. Treachery was the essence of sorcery, the art that twisted the nature of reality against itself.
Stonebrenner pictured the long chain of treachery stretching from him to Charles Newman, to the sorcerer who had cradled Newman, to whoever stood behind that one, each adept sucking his power from another who in turn sucked it from another, like elaborately crafted Chinese boxes, box inside of box, stretching back long before Simon Magus, long before Solomon himself, even before Lucifer was locked raging inside the box called Hell, for even Lucifer’s dark power derived from the earliest moment of time, a fraction of a second so brief that one needed 34 zeroes to express it, that moment of inflation when the single unifying force split into three and a shadow fell on the texture of spacetime, and from that moment came entropy and the decay of the proton and all murders and all wars and all sorcery and all treachery.
But Angel’s treachery was the worst of all. So I’m alone, he thought. Alone in my high tower. The two whom I loved now hate me.
He told himself that he was better alone. The man who stands alone stands strong. He has no friends to deceive him.
Stonebrenner saw a glint of light in the cornfield east of his house and peered carefully out. Yes, there was a man dressed in black standing out there in the field watching him with binoculars.
The man ducked back into the corn and vanished. Stonebrenner turned to a south window and saw a black car parked in the cemetery and saw another intruder dressed in black standing in front of the car.
He cursed his carelessness. Angel’s treachery had caused him to let down his guard, and now his enemies were closing in. On this his wedding day.
And now a new distraction: he heard someone climbing the spiral stairs to the tower. It was Kathy Beers, still wearing her flowered bridesmaid dress, emerging from the stairs at the floor like a ghost from its grave.
Angel’s fury suddenly stabbed him like a dagger in his heart.
“Viper!” he hissed.
He clamped his hands against Kathy’s temples and forced his anger through the balls of his thumbs in a crackling fury. It was his anger and Angel’s anger joined together in holy matrimony, and within seconds Kathy’s melting brains were leaking out of her nose like snot.
He put his arms around her and embraced her as she went limp. He placed his mouth roughly against hers and tried to suck up her soul as it escaped past her lips. Some magicians claimed to have done so, but most likely they were liars. There was nothing but the last exhalation of her lungs.
He let her body fall and turned back to the window. He felt better now, having righteously vented his anger against another vessel of treachery, for indeed that’s what all women were.
Invigorated, he opened the window and swooped out of it like an owl.
***
Ed was standing beside his car on the side away from the house with his camera sitting on the car roof to hold it steady while he occasionally snapped a photo. Sarah was maybe 20 feet in front of the car, half hidden behind a tree in the cemetery, watching the tower with her binoculars.
There was a man up there, and by the ugly bald head she knew it was Stonebrenner, but there was no sign of Darnell or anyone else.
She put down her binoculars because they were hurting her eyes. She glanced around the big yard and then looked at the cornfield that lay east of it, and for a second she saw some cornstalks moving in an odd way, and then she saw two glints of light that looked like binocular lenses. She put her own back to her eyes and for a split second she saw Ben crouching there in the corn, watching the tower, and then he ducked back into the corn.
“Goddammit, Ed, Ben’s back there in that field,” she said in a loud whisper.
“Shh,” Ed said. “Not so loud.”
“Well, Goddammit, I saw him. He promised he wouldn’t go any farther than the corner of the barn, and now he’s back there in that fucking field.”
“Call him and tell him to go back to his car,” Ed whispered.
She tried to call, but his phone went immediately to voice mail.
“Goddammit, he’s shut off his fucking phone,” she whispered.
Ed didn’t seem to be paying much attention to her—he was snapping another photo.
“Goddammit!” she whispered again, this time to herself, and she scurried east from tree to tree toward the field.
And then something big fell out of the sky behind her and grabbed her around the waist. She tried to scream, but it clamped a bony claw over her mouth and then soared up into the dark air with her like a mammoth bird.
Chapter Fifty-One
Ben was walking north through the field, back toward his car, when the corn leaves started talking to him.
The corn glowed pale green in the moonlight and gestured in the breeze. Though it didn’t seem to him that the wind had picked up, the sharp leaves whipped and slapped against him, cutting his skin. At first he paid no heed to the words he seemed to hear, thinking his imagination was running wild. He hurried faster, the leaves clawing his face, and their rustling became a roaring whisper, a chorus of sharp, dry tongues speaking in unison.
“Where are you going?” they seemed to be saying. “Do you want him to kill Sarah?”
Ben stopped and listened. They couldn’t be ignored, the crisply whispered words rustling through the field.
“Look up at the tower,” the thousand tongues said.
Ben looked and saw that there were two figures up there now, what appeared to be a man and a woman, and they seemed to be dancing. He looked through his binoculars, but the moon was too high now to shine through the windows, and the figures were just dark silhouettes. They swayed and shifted, the two melding as one and dividing again into two, and it seemed the woman was limp in the man’s arms.
“That’s not Angel he’s dancing with,” the corn leaves whispered. “That’s Sarah.”
The voice in the corn could be coming from Darnell or Stonebrenner or maybe from his own imagination, but the figures in the tower were real.
“He enjoys having her body pressed against his,” the leaves said. “He likes her body, so slender and small, but when he’s done dancing with her he’ll kill her.”
Ben pulled his cellphone from his jeans pocket and saw it was shut off—his pocket must have pressed against the button. He booted it up and tried to call Sarah. Her phone rang eight times and went to voice mail. He punched in Ed’s number, and Ed picked up.
“What’s wrong with your phone, Ben?” he said. “I’ve been trying to call you.”
“It was shut off. Is Sarah there with you?”
“No. That’s why I’ve been trying to call. I’m stumbling around out here in the dark hunting for her, but I’m afraid Stonebrenner has her. You’re not going to believe this, Ben, but I think I saw something like a big shadow fall out of the sky and then swoop away with her. I think she’s up in the be
lvedere with him.”
“Ed, I’m going to have to go in the house. I’m going to try to be silent if that’s possible, because I need the element of surprise. I want you to stay where you are and keep looking for her in case we’re wrong. She could be lying on the ground hurt somewhere.”
“Will do.”
“One other thing, Ed. If you find her I want you to get her in the car and get the hell out of there ASAP.”
Ben hung up and looked up at the tower. The silhouettes were still up there dancing. He clambered over the wire fence and ran to the back of the house. He tried the back door, but it was locked. He wanted to kick it in, heedless of noise, but he wouldn’t be helping Sarah if he got himself killed.
He noticed a bulkhead entrance to the basement slanting out from the foundation. The rotting door lifted easily, and he hurried down leaf-strewn steps and tried the door at the bottom. It wouldn’t budge. He switched on his little flashlight and examined it. There was no lock. Peering through the narrow gaps between the planks, he saw that it was barred on the inside with a horizontal wooden beam.
He opened his pocketknife, stuck the blade through a gap, and tried lifting one end of the beam out of its bracket. It was heavy, but it moved. He raised it higher and at last felt it sliding, slowly at first, then suddenly in a hurry. It crashed to the floor, the noise shockingly loud in the dark silence.
Ben pushed the door open and shone his beam around the basement looking for the stairs, but before he found them he saw a dismembered human carcass lying on a wooden table, most of the flesh stripped from its bones.
No time to worry about that now—he found the stairs and quietly climbed them. At the top he switched off his light and pulled the Springfield from his jeans. It was cocked and locked with his thumb resting on the safety lever; he knew from practice that he could flick down the safety and squeeze the trigger in a fraction of a second.