Lucifer's Lottery

by Edward Lee

  A HAUNTED house. Terrific, Hudson thought. “Most of these houses don’t seem to have addresses, even the ones that are obviously lived in.”

  “Shee-it, sure. They take the numbers off so the pigs get confused,” she said. “You gimme twenty dollars’n I show you where the house is.”

  “I’d be much obliged.” Hudson slipped a twenty from his pocket and gave it to her.

  She grinned, stuffing the bill into her top, and pointed to the small, boarded-up house right in front of him.

  “That’s it? For real?”

  “Fo’ real, man.”

  At first Hudson thought he was being taken but when he peered over the door, he noticed a black metal number six but also the ghosts of numbers that had fallen, or been taken off, a two and a four to the left, and a five and a one to the right.

  “Thank you,” he said but the girl was already walking away.

  Hudson peered at the squat house. It looked in better repair than many of the others on the street, even with its windows boarded over. Clapboard siding, fairly faded, portico over gravel where a garage should be, one level save for an awned attic. Screen door with a ripped screen.

  What should I do, now that I’m here? he quizzed himself. Was he really going to break into a house where murders had occurred? And what if there were homeless people inside, or addicts? Am I REALLY going to do this?

  But then he thought: The Senary . . .

  The instructions, however, mentioned after sundown. Hudson still had about an hour, he thought. I’ll get something to eat and think this over.

  He jaywalked to a Zappy’s Chicken Shack. Six patrons stood in line, and five of them appeared to be African American prostitutes. When his turn came, a Hispanic woman with half of one ear missing asked if she could help him.

  Hudson ordered the Number Six special: three wings, a biscuit, and a drink. There’s that number six again, he reckoned. Just as he would sit down with his food, one of the prostitutes, a scarily thin woman with huge eyes and pigtails, slipped beside him and whispered, “Gimme a wing.” Hudson did; then she whispered lower, “Why’n’cha lemme put some sizzle in your swizzle, man, like I’ll lay some bigtown xtralicious super gobble game on you for, like, twenty-five bucks.”

  What, is that the patented line around here? Hudson politely informed her that he had no interest in her proposal, and edged quickly out of the restaurant.

  God, these are good! he thought, scarfing his remaining wings and biscuit as he walked down the street.

  He still had time to kill, but he didn’t want to get killed himself as sundown approached. He walked down Central a ways, trying to look inconspicuous and knowing he wasn’t doing a very good job. Sirens rose and fell in the distance, and then he jumped a bit at either a faraway gunshot or backfire. Hurry up, sundown, he thought, and patted his wallet to make sure it was still there, then the other pocket where he’d slipped a slim flashlight. At the corner a dark hulk loomed, and then a shadow covered Hudson: the shadow of a cross cast by the sinking sun. A church, he noticed next of the drab, pilelike edifice. For no apparent reason he stopped to study it. The sign read: GRACE UNITARIAN CHURCH OF ST. PETERSBURG, but a smaller sign in magic marker added, CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

  This is the deaconess’s church!

  An old building of streaked gray stone. High, double-lancet windows framed mosaics of stained glass that looked black, and drought had killed most of the ivy that crawled up the walls. Hudson was surprised to find the large front door unlocked, and even more surprised by his lack of hesitancy in entering. Fading sun tinted the nave with reddish light; as he approached, his nostrils flared at a smell like urine and something more revolting. He passed empty pews, crossed the chancel. Several apsidal rooms arched behind the altar, two empty but on the floor of one he found, oddly, a coping saw. Hudson ran his fingers along the thin blade and found it tacky. Could it be blood? No, no, that’s ridiculous, he felt sure. It was probably tar or something, resin, maybe. Nevertheless, the saw irked him and he stepped quickly out.

  Tires crunching over gravel alerted him; he hustled to a rear window in the dressing room where, in fading light, he saw a black car pulling out.

  What would I have done if it was pulling IN?

  And who might be driving it?

  Probably just smoochers, he resolved. Or, in this area? A drug deal.

  A draped baptistery stood to his right. Did he hear something? Hudson put an eye to the gap in the scarlet drapes, and seized up.

  “Yeah, yeah,” a man with his pants down huffed. He was in his fifties, graying hair on the sides of a bald pate, and he wore a dress shirt and tie. His cheeks billowed at the obvious activity at his groin. He stood before another man who was on his knees—a fetid, homeless man. Hudson could swear he saw flies buzzing around the bum’s horrifically sweat-stained ball cap. Six inches of dirty beard jutted from his chin as his head bobbed frenetically back and forth.

  Hudson pulled the curtain back. “This is a church, for God’s sake!”

  The corpulent client’s face turned sheet white. “Shit! Shit shit shit!” he shrieked. He yanked his overlarge slacks up and barreled out of the baptistery, stumbled down the nave, and banged through the front door.

  The homeless man raged. “You fucker, man!” Spittle flew from his chapped lips. “That was my trick, man! He was gonna pay me twenty bucks! I ought to kill you, man!”

  Hudson stepped back, not nearly as afraid as he’d expect himself to be. “Relax.” He kept his cool. “I was just looking around. Here.” He handed the bum a twenty-dollar bill.

  The bum turned instantly joyous. “Cool, thanks. Gimme another twenty and I’ll do you, too.”

  “No. No, thanks,” Hudson said, realizing now that the man’s beard was one of the scariest things he’d ever seen. “Who are you?”

  “Forbes,” said the bum.

  “Forbes? So . . . Forbes, this is where you . . . do . . . business? A church?”

  When the bum scratched his beard, dandruff fell like salt from a shaker. “Aw, Deaconess Wilson, she’s cool. Let’s me sleep here at night as long as I’m out by five in the morning.” Now he lifted the liner out of the baptismal font and drank the water in it. “I feel bad ’cos, see, she sleeps upstairs and sometimes I sneak up there and watch her take showers and shit. She’s got the best boobs—”

  I know, Hudson thought.

  “—and this big, gorgeous fur-burger on her, man. Blonde. And I just can’t help it. I see that all wet and shiny in the shower, I just gotta beat off. Shit.” He grinned, showing rotten gums. “Guess I’ll probably go to Hell, huh?”

  “They say only God can judge,” Hudson said lamely.

  The bum scratched his ass. “She gives me canned food a lot, too, makes me feel even guiltier. I guess I’m just a shit. It sucks when ya have to eat your own nut just for the calories, ya know? You ever do that?”

  Hudson paled. “Uh, no.”

  “Yeah, man, when you’re homeless ya gotta do it ’cos there’s, like, a couple hundred calories in it. Been times it’s the only thing that kept me from starvin’.”

  Hudson felt staggered. “There’s a soup kitchen on Fifteenth Street. Forbes, please. Go there instead.”

  “Really?” The bum beamed. “Didn’t know. But what’re you doin’ here, man? You a friend of Deaconess Wilson?”

  Finally a topic of conversation he could take part in. “Not really, but I did meet her once. Do you know where she is?”

  The bum reached down into the front of his rotten jeans and scratched. It sounded like sandpaper. “Disappeared, they say, but . . . I don’t know about that.” He pulled his hand out and sniffed it. “See, when I’m sleepin’ in here at night, sometimes I think I hear her coming in. I can hear her car.”

  “A black car?”

  “Yeah. Old black car.”

  Interesting. “I just saw a black car pulling out of the lot behind the church.”

  “Shit! Really?” The bum scampered past Hudson, le
aving dizzying B.O. in his wake. “Ain’t there now,” he said, peering out the window.

  “Maybe she’ll be back,” Hudson contemplated. “Or maybe it wasn’t her.” He eyed the bum. “Say, did she ever mention a strange word to you? The word Senary?”

  Forbes was only half listening. “Naw, never heard no word like that.” He picked his nose and nonchalantly ate what his finger brought out.

  What am I DOING here? Hudson asked himself.

  The window was turning dark, and at once the bum seemed edgy. “Shit, it’s sundown—”

  Sundown, Hudson repeated.

  “—and I gotta get out.”

  “But I thought you said you slept here.”

  “Yeah but I ain’t gonna do that no more,” Forbes said, and shuffled back toward the chancel. “Every night since the deaconess been gone, I have me these really scary dreams.”

  Hudson didn’t know what compelled him to ask, “What . . . dreams?”

  The bum’s eyes looked cloudy. “Aw, weird, sick shit, man, like in some city where the sky’s red and there’s smoke comin’ out of the sewer grates on every street, and black things flyin’ in the air and other things crawling up and down these buildings that are, like, a mile high, and people gettin’ their guts hauled out their asses and these big gray things eatin’ girls’ faces off their heads and drownin’ kids in barrels’a blood and playin’ catch with babies on pitchforks’n shit, and then, then this giant statue with the scariest face—oh, yeah, and a house, man. A house made of heads . . .”

  Hudson stared.

  “—and, fuck, last week, right before Deaconess Wilson disappeared, I was sleepin’ in the pews and dreamed that these monsters were fuckin’ with her, and reading all this evil shit like Latin or something.”

  “Monsters?”

  “Yeah, man. Like, just skin-covered bones and horns in their heads. Had teeth like nails made of glass. They hadda bunch of candles burnin’ in a circle and layin’ inside the circle was Deaconess Wilson with no clothes on, man.” Now Forbes looked sickened in the recollection. “They started writin’ on her, man. They’re writin’ on her, with shit, but it wasn’t just any ole shit—it was Satan’s shit. Somehow I knew that in the dream.”

  Hudson was getting unnerved. He didn’t believe in shared delusions or shared nightmares. But . . .

  Forbes started toward the front door, but kept talking. “And last night, shit. I dreamed I seen the deaconess walkin’ around here buck naked with her big tits and bush stickin’ out, but ya know what she was carryin’?”

  “Whuh-what?” Hudson grated.

  “A coffin, man.” He kept walking, his voice echoic in the nave. “But it was a little coffin. Like a baby’s. So, shit on that, ya know? I ain’t sleepin’ here no more ’cos this place gives me fucked-up dreams.” Rotten sneakers scuffed as the bum pushed open the front door and left.

  Jesus, Hudson thought in the fading light.

  He had every intention of following the man out, but for some reason his steps took him not toward the door but to the left, along the sides of the pews. He shined his flashlight beneath one, caught a breath in his chest, then knelt.

  A shovel had been stashed there. Hudson fingered the earth on the blade and found it—

  Fresh . . .

  There was also a pair of work gloves on the floor that appeared soiled but recently purchased.

  What the hell is this?

  Stashed under the last pew in the farthest corner was a coffin.

  A little coffin. Like a baby’s.

  The sun had sunk quickly, like something trying to escape. Hudson looked up and down the street to find it oddly vacant. The drab housefront peered back at him as if with disdain. The Larken House, he thought. A MURDER house.

  Of course, Hudson didn’t believe that a house could influence people by the things that had happened in it. A HOUSE can’t have power . . . But maybe belief was the power. Could a person’s conception of terrible events create the influence?

  Hudson wasn’t sure why he would even consider such a thing. It simply occurred to him.

  He traversed the weed-cracked front path, surprised by his boldness, and opened the screen door. No way the door’s unlocked, he predicted. That would be senseless.

  The oddest door knocker faced him. It had been mounted on the old door’s center stile, an oval of tarnished bronze depicting a morose half-formed face. Just two eyes, no mouth, no other features. The notion made Hudson shiver:

  I knock on the door and Larken answers . . .

  “Here goes,” he muttered, then thought a tiny prayer, God, protect me. He grabbed the knob and turned it.

  The door opened.

  An unqualified odor assailed him when he entered. Not garbage or excrement or urine but just something faintly . . . foul. Hudson snapped on his flashlight, panned it around the empty living room. His stomach sunk when he discerned brown footprints tracked over the threadbare carpet. Old blood, he reasoned. From the murder night. The compulsion to leave couldn’t have been more pronounced but, I have to stay, he ordered himself. I have to find out what this is all about. He followed the footprints to a begrimed kitchen and was sickened worse when he saw great brown shapes of more dried blood all over the linoleum floor. The footprints proceeded to the microwave. Larken must’ve killed his wife and the baby in here. He eyed the kitchen table and gulped. In the corner stood a chair directly under a water pipe. And that’s where he hanged himself . . .

  Then Hudson froze at a sound: a quick snap!

  A cigarette lighter?

  That’s what it reminded him of. His heart hammered. This was crazy and he knew it. An abandoned house in this neighborhood? Vagrants, addicts, or gang members . . .

  Yet he didn’t leave.

  He turned the flashlight off and walked down a shabby side-hall toward the sound. He paused and, sure enough, in a dark bedroom he detected what could only be the flicker of a cigarette lighter. In addition, he heard an accompanying sound, like someone inhaling with desperation.

  I could be killed . . . so why don’t I leave? Hudson had no answer to this logical question, save for, God will protect me. He HAS to. When he took a step forward, the floor creaked.

  His heart nearly stopped when a woman’s voice shot out of the dark. “Oh, good, you’re back. I’m in here.” Then the lighter flicked again but this time to light a candle.

  In the bloom of light, Hudson couldn’t believe his eyes.

  A woman sat on a mattressless box spring, holding a crack pipe. A white woman, with dark lank hair, wearing a bikini top and cutoff shorts. The hostile face glared at him.

  “Shit, you’re not her,” she complained. “Who the . . .” But then she squinted. “Wait a minute, I remember you . . .”

  Indeed, and Hudson remembered her. It was the pregnant prostitute he’d seen in the Qwik-Mart last night. It didn’t take him long to realize why she looked different.

  She was no longer pregnant.

  “Yes,” Hudson droned. “At the store. And I see that you’ve had your baby.”

  She maintained her glare. The huge breasts hung satcheled in the faded top. Her exposed midriff below the top looked corrugated now, rowed. All she said was, “What the fuck are you doing here? Are you with that woman?”

  That woman, Hudson’s brain ticked. “Do you mean . . . a blonde woman in a black gown? A white collar?”

  The prostitute idly fingered groovelike stretch marks on her belly. “Yeah, like what a fuckin’ priest wears, but it’s a chick, not a guy.” Then she calmly lit the pipe, inhaled deeply, then collapsed against the wall. Her expression turned to a mask of oblivion.

  “What is this woman to you? Deaconess Wilson?” Hudson actually raised his voice.

  The prostitute slipped up the stuffed bikini top to cover a great half circle of nipple. “She paid me six fuckin’ hundred bucks, that’s what.”

  Hudson was dismayed. And I got 6,000. “So, you’ve won the Senary as well?”

  “I don’t
know what the fuck you’re talking about. All I know is what I’m supposed to do.”

  “And what was that? What did you do for the six hundred?”

  She shrugged. “Dug up a grave. Think I give a shit?”

  Hudson stared in the flickering light, thinking of the article. “Was it . . . a child’s grave?”

  “Yeah, man. A baby’s. She said the baby was murdered in this house, had its head cut off. Said she needed the head.”

  Confusion circled round Hudson like a feisty crow. “But . . . what happened to your baby? You were pregnant last night.”

  “I popped the kid out behind the Qwik-Mart,” she said, pressing another piece of crack into the pipe. “Fuckin’ mess. I dropped it in one of those blue bins the recycling trucks pick up; then I split. Couple hours later, I met her.”

  “And she—”

  “Paid me six hundred bucks to dig up the grave.” She sucked off the pipe and chuckled. “Kind’a weird, you know? An hour after I dump my own baby, this chick pays me to dig up somebody else’s baby. Ain’t that a trip?”

  “Yes,” Hudson uttered. “A trip . . .”

  “She waited for me in her car. Didn’t even take as long as you’d think, and the coffin was tiny, barely weighed anything. They always say six feet under, right? But this was like two, three. So I put the coffin in the back of her car, and she drives me downtown . . . and gave me six hundred bucks. Said she’d give me another six hundred if I showed up tonight. Said she needed me, said she needed my milk.”

  “Your milk? What on earth for?”

  She shrugged again, and reloaded the pipe. “Said ’cos I was lactating. You think I care?” She held up a baggie full of pieces of crack. “I mean, look at all this rock, man. And when she lays another six hundred on me tonight? I won’t have to blow another guy for a month. Fuck, I hate it. Crack doesn’t leave a woman with any choice. You have to suck ten dirty dicks a day at least, just to keep up your jones. Think about that, buddy. Ten dicks a day. It’s like letting guys blow their nose in your mouth for money. Every time I see another dick in my face I wanna cut my throat but I know that if I do . . .” She jiggled the bag of crack. “I’ll never be able to get high again.”