by Blake Banner
I fell and she fell on top of me. I felt the warm blood oozing down my arm. She put all her weight on the knife. The big, silver blade was just inches from my face, smeared with my blood.
Was it just my blood? Past Karen’s frenzied face, I saw Abi reaching down for her. I shouted, “Sean! Check Sean!”
She hesitated a moment, then vanished, running for Sean’s room.
Everything had happened in a few seconds, and suddenly I knew, either I could do something now or in the next couple of seconds, Karen would kill me. All I could do was go as crazy as she was. I roared in her face and bucked my hips like a bronco, wrenching her arms to one side. She fell. I struggled to get to my feet but she was thrashing like a hooked fish, trying to slash at my hand where I still held her wrist. She gashed me. I let go and stood back.
I was at the top of the stairs. My arm was bleeding profusely. She switched the knife to underhand, screamed like a banshee and rushed me. I grabbed her arm, felt the blade cat into my chest and we both fell. As we went down, I yanked her around so I landed on top of her, keeping the knife away from my body. I heard her groan and her eyes rolled. I grabbed her baby finger with my right hand and forced it back, trying to release her grip on the handle. She started to thrash and kick and scream again. A voice somewhere shouted, “I can’t get past you!” But before I could make sense of it, we had started to slip and slide down the stairs.
We hit the bottom. And I felt a body move past me. Vaguely, I was aware of Abi having jumped over us. I pinned Karen’s right hand to the floor with all my weight. She wriggled her hand, sawing at my arm with the blade. I ignored the pain and tried to pound at her face and body with my right fist, but she gripped my arm, sinking her nails into my flesh.
I managed to maneuver my body around until I could plant my right foot on her arm. I knew the Sig was down there somewhere, and now I had a chance to look for it. Abi was standing there, in front of the reception desk holding it, trying to aim it at Karen. I snapped, “Don’t!”
She glanced at me. I stood and made a big stride toward her, took the gun from her hand and turned. Karen was scrabbling to her feet. She still had the knife in her hand. She lunged and I fired, double tapped right into her forehead. Her head rocked and a big plume of gore sprayed from the back of her head. She stood for a moment, looking like she’d just received some shocking news, then keeled over backward, like a dark parody of a slapstick faint.
I stood looking at her for a moment. I was lightheaded and realized I was losing blood. I shouted up the stairs, “Don’t come down! Stay there…” Then to Abi, “They mustn’t see this.”
She was staring at me. I knew she was in shock. A voice in my head was telling me this was all wrong. I needed to get Karen out of the house. I had to protect the kids from the horror. It was imperative to protect the kids. I stepped over to what was left of Karen. I bent and took hold of her ankles. My head swam and I took a moment to steady myself. I heard Abi’s voice. “Lacklan, you’re bleeding. You’re bleeding badly. You need a doctor…”
“Not yet…”
Somehow I found the strength to drag her body out and dump it in the snow. I went back in and closed the door. Abi came to me. Her face was drawn with anxiety.
“Lacklan, you’re very badly hurt. Look at you! I have to stop the bleeding. Come into the kitchen.”
She led me through the living room and back into the kitchen. I sat while she found the first aid kit. I heard myself say, “Stop the bleeding first, then we’ll clean the wounds.”
She stripped off what was left of my shirt. I had a three-inch gash on my right lower arm that was bleeding profusely. She tied a tourniquet just below my bicep, then bound the wound. “You’ll need stitches. I’ll have to get the doctor.”
I shook my head. “Not yet. I’ll go to him, but not yet…”
I still had the feeling that something was wrong. Abi was kneeling beside me, patching up the cut in my side. “It’s not as bad as the one on your arm, but your hands…” She stood and took my hands. I looked at them. She was shaking her head, fighting back the tears. “Your poor hands.”
Something was wrong. The nagging sensation in my mind was getting worse. I stood. The adrenaline was pumping hot in my belly. I said, “Abi, where are the kids?”
She frowned. “You told them to stay upstairs. Sit down, Lacklan. I’ll call them.”
“No.” I grabbed my gun and went out to the reception. I stared up the darkened stairs and shouted, “Primrose! Sean! Come down!”
There was no response. Abi came up by my side. “Lacklan, for God’s sake, what is it?”
I looked into her face. I knew what was wrong. I ran up the stairs. Sean was lying face down on the landing. I knelt, felt for a pulse. He was alive. I could hear Abi running up after me. I moved quickly to Primrose’s room. Behind me, I heard Abi scream, “Sean!” and a rush of feet. I pushed open the door and froze.
She was lying motionless on her bed. Her eyes were open and staring. Arnold was lying curled up next to her. He was naked. His skin was very white and strangely luminous in the darkened room. He had one leg across both of hers, and he held a long, slender blade to her throat. He didn’t look at me, but he hissed in his throat, “Get out…”
I had no shot to his vertebrae. I had no way of disarming him or killing him without risking her life. I spoke quietly. “Give me the knife, Arnold.”
I saw his eyes shift. He looked at me sidelong and there was contempt in his face. He said again, “Get out. I am not done.”
Primrose was staring at me. I met her eye. “Has he hurt you?”
She whispered, “No, but I am very scared… Please stop, Arnold…”
He smiled. “Shshshsh… We’re going to play. It’s a nice game. You’ll like it. It’s my special game with Mommy.”
I spoke more loudly, “You can’t play that game anymore, Arnold.”
This time he turned his head, lifted it off the pillow. His expression was ugly. I forced myself not to look at the knife.
He said, “I told you to get out!”
“What will you do to me if I don’t?”
“I am not done here! I am playing my game!”
He was a four year-old having a tantrum in the body of a twenty year-old. And whatever his hysterical paralysis did to him most of the time, right now he didn’t look emaciated or weak at all.
“Your mommy is downstairs, Arnold. She wants to see you.”
He sneered and shook his head. “No, she doesn’t. She likes it when I play our game.”
“I can hear her calling. She says she wants you to go downstairs.”
He shook his head again, raising it a little more off the pillow. “You’re lying! She said I could play with Prim! She said I could! And you can’t stop me!”
“Your mommy says you can’t now.”
“I’m not done!” His voice was changing, becoming petulant, whining, “Get out! I wanna play with Prim. Leave us alone!”
I took a step into the room as I answered him. “I’ll tell you what, Arnold, how about this? You come downstairs with me, we talk to your mom, and Prim waits right here. If your mom says it’s OK, then you come right back up and finish your game.”
His head flopped back on the pillow. He pressed up closer to Primrose and hugged her tighter. The blade nicked her skin and I saw a tear of dark blood run down her neck and onto her nightdress. I saw her tense and heard her whimper. My heart was pounding hard in my chest. I was as close to panic as I had ever been. But I smiled, snorted, and shook my head.
“She’s going to be mad at you, Arnold. She won’t be happy.”
“I don’t care! I don’t believe you! Leave us alone!”
“I can’t do that.”
“Leave us alone!”
“Your mommy won’t let me.”
His voice was becoming shrill. “Leave us alone!”
“Mommy won’t let you!”
He sat up. His face was crimson with rage. The tendons in his neck stood
out like rigid cords. His veins bulged. He screamed at me, “Leave us alone! Leave us alone! Leave us…”
The double crack of the Sig silenced him. I put both rounds through his throat and shattered his vertebrae, paralyzing his body from the neck down and killing him almost instantly. Primrose screamed and covered her face. I stepped forward, grabbed him and yanked him from the bed before he could fall back beside her. Then I picked her up in my arms and carried her, weeping and trembling, to the door. Abi was there, reaching for her. “Oh God, please say she’s all right. Please tell me she’s all right.”
“She’s safe. She’s unhurt.” I pushed past her. “Get Sean. Bring him downstairs. It’s all over now. Now it’s all over.” I carried Primrose down the stairs to the living room, where I settled her and Sean on the couch and made a fire, while Abi brought down blankets and made strong, sweet tea.
While the three of them sat, huddled together on the sofa, holding each other, I got dressed. Then I went and got Arnold’s body, carried it down, through the snow and the screaming wind, to the Q7 and put it in the back. Then I returned, got Karen’s body, and put it next to his. Finally, I set off toward the intersection. On the way, I collected Al and drove all three of them to the snow plow, where I dumped them on the road. Like I said before, it would be a nice mystery for the Feds, but there would be no suspicion on Abi. She and the kids would not be involved. Now, nothing pointed to them.
After that, I started the long, freezing, two and a half mile walk back toward the Pioneer Guesthouse. It would be almost an hour’s walk in good weather, double that in the storm. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t make it. I had tapped and exhausted the last reserves of strength I had. I would walk as far as I could. At some point, I knew I would start to hallucinate, then I would grow very sleepy, and finally I would pass out. And I wouldn’t wake up.
The hallucinations started sooner than I had expected. I told myself it was because of the loss of blood. I could see the lights of Independence flickering through the falling snow up ahead of me. They started to move and shift, like a UFO through the drifting flakes. An agreeable sleepiness was creeping over me. I thought maybe checking out now was not such a bad thing. I was tired. Tired of the killing. Tired of man’s inhumanity to man, and woman, and child. I could check out of the Pioneer and lie down to sleep in a drift, and drift, drift away into peaceful, dreamless slumber. Check out.
Still I walked, in a trance, putting one foot in front of another, just one more time before lying down.
The lights grew and I wondered if I was seeing that light at the end of the tunnel that some people report. Through the howl and wail of the wind, I heard a grinding, whining, and then I began to laugh. Because I was not dying. I was not checking out just yet. It was the Dodge RAM, and Abi, Primrose, and Sean had come to get me.
Epilogue
The sheriff didn’t arrive until late afternoon the next day, and the Feds arrived the day after that, and by then the storm had abated and the snow had started to thaw. We had plenty of time to wash and bleach the bed linen and the floor, and to remove the spots of blood from the carpet, along with any trace of the drama that had unfolded in that house.
The sheriff and the Feds had no reason to link what had happened at the farm and the mine to Abi, the guesthouse, or myself; plus there was not a witness left alive to make that connection for them. So they didn’t call until late on the second day. They didn’t expect to discover anything from us, and they didn’t. I was a guest at the Pioneer, trapped by the storm, and hadn’t left the place for the last five days. None of us had. And we all corroborated each other’s stories. The village was, as it had always been, closed and silent about its pain and its traumas. They told the agents nothing.
I have no idea if they ever closed the case. It must have looked to them like a war had broken out between Al and Vasco, and they had all killed each other, though the details of how it had happened would be forever a mystery, to be written up in the Fortean Times and no doubt attributed to aliens or an avenging ghost.
It was after the Feds and the sheriff had finally packed up and left, and Abi and I were sitting over coffee after dinner, that she asked me, “How could he do it? He was so weak. Most of the time he could barely walk.”
I nodded. “I am no psychologist, Abi, but my guess is that Karen, who was herself deeply neurotic, drove him into a state of hysterical paralysis. She denied him every natural desire and emotion, especially sexual and romantic ones. She put him in a kind of double bind. If he wanted his mother’s love and approval, he had to deny himself his natural desire for love and approval from other women. In the end, his internal conflict was so severe he literally paralyzed himself and became all but a cripple.
“But by the time he was fifteen, when she finally allowed him the company of girls, it triggered a kind of Jekyll and Hyde split personality in him. Because his weakness was mentally induced, when he was with girls he liked, driven by his emotional and sexual frustration, he was overcome by his desires, drew physical strength from those desires, and raped and killed them.”
She frowned. “Did he kill them, or was it his mother? Or Vasco?”
“I think what he was telling us when he said it was their game, was that he was allowed to be with the girls and rape them, but the girls had to die afterwards. With the Mexican girls, I think that was Vasco’s job.”
“Why?”
“It’s sickening,” I said, “but the fact is that he didn’t enjoy the Mexican girls as much. He liked blonde, blue-eyed girls, like his mother. Serial killers often have a particular, preferred victim. And that’s just what he was, a serial killer.” I sighed. “But the problem was that the girls he liked were high risk, and not only that, Karen was jealous of them, because he liked them too much. Things went to pieces when, just before the storm, he escaped and went after Peggy. Vasco was ordered to clean it up, but he was lazy and careless. He didn’t want to go digging a grave in the storm that was coming, so he dumped her by the road, probably hoping it would look like she’d been hit by a truck. If I hadn’t happened along, he might have got away with it.”
She nodded. “Probably.” She reached across the table and took my hand. “I’m glad you did happen along.” She hesitated a moment. “Will you stay for Peggy’s funeral? It’s in a couple of days.”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
“Then I guess you’ll be going on, back to Wyoming.”
“Yes.”
She looked out the window, at the small square where the snow glowed blue under a luminous moon. She was still holding my hand, and I was holding hers. “I don’t know anything about you, who you are, what you do… if there is anyone in your life…”
I placed my other hand on top of hers and was quiet for a long while. Finally, I sighed and shook my head. “I’m not sure I know the answer to those questions myself, Abi. My life is more complicated than you can imagine. It’s no accident that I killed all these men. It’s what I am trained to do.”
She smiled. “I had worked that much out.”
I hesitated a moment, then said, “I don’t know what happens next. I can’t explain, but I have a job I have to do.” She nodded that she understood, but her face was not happy. I went on, “Let me help, Abi. Let me help to put Primrose through college, and when the time comes, Sean, too. Let me be an uncle or a godfather.”
She smiled and stroked my face. “And to me, Lacklan, what will you be to me?”
I thought of Marni, in Oxford. I thought of my unending pursuit of her, holding her only for fleeting moments just so that she could slip through my fingers again. I thought of the unending, unwinnable war against Omega; and I looked at this good, beautiful woman, with her beautiful home: a place where I could be useful, a place that was wholesome, where I could stop killing. I took hold of her hand and kissed it. Then I stood, but I didn’t let go of her hand. Instead I led her upstairs to her room.
BOOK 6
TO RULE IN HELL
One
I was in that place between waking and sleep, where everything is feeling. You do not imagine in pictures: Your mind is dark. There are no voices: your mind is quiet. And in the dark silence, you feel. I could feel Abi’s back, pressed close against me. I could feel her hair on my face. I could feel the fresh linen of the bed, a cool breeze from the window on my face. For the first time in my life I felt I was home and safe. So I kept my eyes closed and held on to the feeling.
Slowly sounds began to filter in. Outside, March was melting the winter snow and the birds were celebrating loudly. A transmission complained in low gear as a truck moved down Main Street toward the farm. Across the road the doc told somebody it was a fine morning—if you wanted to freeze to death. There was laughter and that made me smile. I felt Abi chuckle and I opened my eyes, raised myself on one elbow to look down at her. She was smiling but still had her eyes closed and spoke in a sleepy voice.
“He’s such a grouch.”
I kissed her shoulder. “You seen the time?”
“It’s Sunday.”
“Tell that to my stomach.”
She opened one eye to look at me sidelong. “Your stomach?” She began to turn. “Come here and let me explain something to your stomach…”
I should have ignored it. I should have let it ring. But it had been too many years of training and conditioning and I had turned and reached for my cell before I knew what I was doing.
“Yeah…”
Marni spoke and I went cold inside. “Hi Lacklan, it’s been a long time…”
For a moment I felt sick. I could feel Abi’s eyes on me, curious. I said, “Yeah, where are you?”