“No,” she said through clenched teeth, fighting back the urge to scream. She yanked at the gruesome needle, pulling it out of the doll’s breast. She threw the doll and needle onto the floor and, lifting the candelabra, hurried through the door into the bathroom and out the door on the other side into Dakota’s room.
What she saw made her retch. She clamped her hand over her mouth to keep the bile from spilling out. She wanted to scream but didn’t dare unless she wanted the entire household running into the room.
Dakota lay on the floor, Roland de Winter’s hideous ritual dagger protruding from her breast. The blood gleamed where it pooled onto her black sweater. Elizabeth caught sight of herself in the mirror above the bureau which was defaced with that same obscenity which still haunted her days and nights. The pentagram appeared to have been drawn in lipstick, and her reflection was framed by the foul inverted star.
She sank to her knees, setting the candelabra on the floor beside her as she knelt over Dakota’s body. Dakota’s blond hair fanned out from her head like a giant halo. She appeared to have been stabbed only once, directly into her heart.
A fount of blood gurgled up from Dakota’s mouth. Incredulous, Elizabeth bent over her. She was still alive! Dakota’s head jerked to one side. Her eyes locked with Elizabeth’s, desperate, pleading.
Elizabeth wrapped her fingers around the knife. She grabbed the hilt in her fist and pulled with all her might. Dakota convulsed in a spasm of pain which Elizabeth could not even begin to fathom. Blood surged up from her mouth and from the wound as Elizabeth yanked the blade from Dakota’s body.
“Elizabeth, what have you done?” Her head whipped around at the sound of the voice.
Bryce stood above her, eyes wide and disbelieving.
“Elizabeth, give me the knife.”
She looked down at Dakota.
She looked up at Bryce.
“I didn’t do this. I swear to God I didn’t kill her.” Her face was wet with tears and fluid from her nose. Instinctively she raised her hand to her face to wipe away the wetness. The dagger fell from her hand.
Through tear-blurred eyes she saw Bryce reach down for the knife. His hand emitted a soft squeak as his fingers closed around the knife. Elizabeth blinked her eyes, hands wiping at the tears.
She heard the soft squeak again and saw his bright turquoise fingers. Why was Bryce wearing rubber gloves?
“No, Elizabeth, you didn’t kill her.” Bryce said and plunged the knife back into Dakota’s chest. Another spray of blood erupted from Dakota’s mouth. Bryce pulled the dagger out and thrust it into her again…and again, and again.
Overwhelmed with the horror of what she was witnessing, Elizabeth opened her mouth to scream, but before she could utter a sound, she saw Bryce’s rubber gloved hand roll itself into a fist and slam into her face. The pain was so intense when she began to recover a moment later that she could barely understand what had just happened to her. Her body was a limp rag doll as Bryce pulled her up from the floor and then shoved something drenched with a foul chemical smell against her mouth and nose. She fought against him, thrashing, trying to claw him, beat him, anything…but her strength ebbed quickly.
Not you too, Bryce, I trusted you.
*****
When she came to, her face stung where Bryce had hit her. She could barely open her left eye. Her hand instinctively wanted to touch the swelling, to feel how bad it really was, but she was unable to move her hand. Her arms were stretched to full length on either side of her body. She felt rope digging into her wrists. She tried to move her legs and realized that her ankles were bound as well. She felt weak and sluggish, as though molasses had been poured into her veins.
She was lying on her back on a cold slab, smooth as marble beneath her skin. The sensation against her skin caused her to realize that she was naked. She shivered and once again her instinctive reflex was to wrap her arms around herself, but she could not. She tilted her head downward, looking to her left and to her right. She was indeed bound on some sort of slab, in a small chamber with stone walls, stones which reminded her of the stones used to build the wall along the edge of the driveway at the top of the plateau.
She could hear thunder in the distance, still strong, buried beneath a surging rhythm that pounded relentlessly at her brain. What was this sound? Was it the ocean? It must be. The sound of the sea endlessly sweeping against the shore, the sound she had heard so often at La Casa del Mar, louder and more intense than ever. Where was she? Was she… underground? Had Bryce brought her to some subterranean tomb? Dim candlelight emitted just enough light that the walls and ceilings were drenched in heavy shadows.
There was some sort of business happening on the other side of the chamber, figures and candles and other things which didn’t make sense to Elizabeth. She tried fixing her gaze on something in the room, but nothing would focus in her field of vision. A blurred figure in front of her appeared to raise its arms, the figure swathed in black, as something amorphous filled the air, smoke or incense by the smell of it. The figure turned around and approached Elizabeth from one side. Enough light fell on the side of the figure’s face for Elizabeth to see.
It was Jewel!
She struggled to say the woman’s name, struggled to form one of a thousand questions in her sluggish mind. She tried to speak Jewel’s name, but no sound came from her mouth, no vibration from her throat. Yet there was Jewel looking down at her. Jewel’s face was shadowed by a hood pulled up around her head. Jewel leaned over her with a candle and passed her hand in front of Elizabeth’s face. The candle’s flame left a trail of sparks as it passed, blazing yellow and red like embers from a fire. The sparks appeared to stretch and elongate and then hang delicately in the air before dissipating into nothing. It made Elizabeth think of a time lapse photograph of traffic, like tail lights from a car that left red trails imprinted on the negative.
Jewel, why are you dressed like that?
The words didn’t come out of her mouth, but she heard them as distinctly in her mind as if she had spoken them out loud. Jewel must have heard them too, for she lifted her chin in that haughty way she had.
“I am a Priestess of Satan. I have waited long for this moment.”
A second figure dressed in the same sort of black robe came and stood at Elizabeth’s other side. The movement left trails in its wake, leaving Elizabeth at once dazzled and frightened.
Is that it? Have they drugged me with some sort of hallucinogen? Have they finally, really, done it?
If they did, would I know it? Would I be this aware of it?
“We didn’t drug you with anything other than good old-fashioned chloroform.” Elizabeth recognized Bryce’s voice. “We left the rest of it up to Abernathy. He’s pumped you so full of Morphenol and who knows what else the past few days it’s no wonder you’re stoned out of your mind.”
Why are you doing this?
“Why? You know ‘why’, Elizabeth, you know perfectly well ‘why’.”
And she did. She knew where she had seen the black robe before. That night, in June, stepping back into the shadows of the blood spattered living room of the house on Mulholland Drive, that gray, unfocused shape which for so long seemed to be a blur in her memory eye had at last, finally, come into focus.
But I never saw your face. I had no idea it was you.
“Sooner or later you were going to remember. Once you were admitted as a patient to the prestigious Abernathy clinic you’d have fingered me out in no time at all. This made it so much easier, didn’t it, Mom? Delivered right into our trap.”
Bryce turned back to Elizabeth. “You fell for me rather easily, didn’t you? Not very respectful to your late husband, is it? I thought I was going to have to work a lot harder, considering how much Abernathy resembles Sven Lindstrom. But the man doesn’t have an emotional bone in his body, does he? He may have gotten the brains, but I got the looks and the charm. Oh, don’t look so surprised, Elizabeth, it should all make perfect sense to you now. My
dear Mother, here, was one of Roland de Winter’s protégés, and yours truly a little keepsake from the casting couch. Half-brothers. Who knew?”
He laughed as he leered into her face, relishing each bizarre revelation. “Still with me? Good.” He reached down and tweaked her nose. “Such a good little actress. What a shame that you won’t live long enough to get one of those little gold statuettes. Admit it. You’ve always wanted one, haven’t you? But this is so much better, Elizabeth. It’s just like a movie, isn’t it? Not one of these new ones with grainy, washed out color and a rock and roll soundtrack. No, this one is filmed in glorious black and white, with sweeping melodramatic music, romantic outings in lush vineyards and cryptic dream sequences filmed in soft focus, all starring Elizabeth York as the frightened heroine stalked by a psychotic killer in a gloomy old house by the sea. And what better place for you to die than right here in Roland de Winter’s ritual chamber. Roland de Winter, my father - one of the greatest followers of Satan in all of Hollywood. Human sacrifice is so hard to accomplish these days, don’t you agree? It has to be trussed up to appear to be the work of some mad serial killer, or next thing you know they’ll be hunting us down and burning us at the stake in Pershing Square. We may be living in an age of enlightenment, but the public still enjoys a good witch hunt. Just ask Joe McCarthy. Wouldn’t he have a field day if he caught on to us?”
“Shut up,” Jewel cut him off, “we haven’t got all night.” She threw back the cowl from her face and turned toward the altar. Bryce lifted what appeared to be an enormous headdress and fitted it down on top of her head. He led her by the hand back around to face Elizabeth. Two great horns curved away from Jewel’s head and a matting of course hair covered her forehead and nose. The masque was vulgar, a blasphemy befitting a Priestess of the Satan.
“Mom,” said Bryce. “Isn’t she stunning?”
Beyond the thickness of the stone walls, thunder boomed as the storm raged on.
Bryce and Jewel turned their backs on her again, facing the altar at the end of the room.
The cloudy effect the drugs had on her mind was beginning to wane and now Elizabeth could see the altar at the end of the room more clearly. There was a great black throne, carved from some sort of light colored wood, curved and bulbous in places. The wood reminded Elizabeth of bones. Slowly she realized it was bones. It was a throne made of human bones!
To the left and right of the throne were great iron braziers burning with the flames of hell. Billows of smoke rose up from behind the altar, some sort of noxious incense, perhaps the drug that was keeping Bryce and Jewel in their state of ecstatic arousal.
She heard a strange babbling sort of noise, a familiar sound, but one she couldn’t quite identify. Then she saw an animal standing over her. She looked up at its tiny horns and its black eyes and the tuft of hair beneath its chin.
A goat. Dear God, what did they intend to do with this creature? What did they intend to do with her? The goat was bleating and babbling and tearing at the rope bound around its neck. This was sheer madness. Utter depravity.
Jewel stepped toward Elizabeth with an ornate chalice in her hand. She placed the chalice on Elizabeth’s naked stomach just above her loins. Bryce held the goat by its rein, and then Jewel reached forth with her ritual blade and drew the sharp edge across the goat’s throat. The goat screamed and thrashed about, but Bryce took firm hold of its head, wrenching it upward. A gaping wound opened at the base of the poor animal’s neck and its blood poured forth into the chalice.
Elizabeth tried to pray, but she could remember no other words other than the name of God Himself. Her tongue would not form words so she said His name over and over in her mind, God, oh God, oh God! But it was useless. God had forsaken her, abandoned her to be sacrificed by these blood thirsty lunatics. She could smell the acrid copper aroma of the goat’s blood as it filled the chalice, and then realized with revulsion that the animal’s blood had filled the cup to the brim and now spilled over onto her flesh. Damned, she was surely damned to hell along with these madmen.
The goat’s carcass was thrown to the floor. The High Priestess lifted the teeming chalice of blood above Elizabeth’s body, muttering unintelligible satanic gibberish. Jewel put the chalice to her lips, allowing the blood to fill her mouth and spill down her chin. She passed the cup to her son who uttered his own blasphemy before putting the cup to his lips and partaking of the goat’s blood.
They finished draining the chalice, and Bryce once again turned to the altar and raised his hands in a gesture of supplication. He turned back to Elizabeth and she saw that he had lifted a brand from the brazier. The end of it glowing red hot and the symbol that would be branded on her flesh forever was revealed to her: a pentagram, the devil’s mark that would defile her body and make her one of the Devil’s Own.
Elizabeth’s body writhed and thrashed on the altar. Beads of sweat peppered her forehead. The rope cut into the flesh of her wrists.
Another thunderbolt echoed about the small chamber, nearly deafening her. In the next moment a red rose blossomed from Bryce’s throat. His eyes grew impossibly wide. The fiery brand clattered to the stone floor as his hands flew up to clutch at the place where blood poured from his throat.
Jewel screamed. Bryce’s body pitched forward out of Elizabeth’s line of sight. She heard a strangled gurgle as his body hit the floor. Jewel recovered from her shock and raised the dagger to plunge it into Elizabeth’s body, but in the next instant Clark Abernathy stepped into the chamber with Mrs. Valdez behind him. Dr. Abernathy held a pistol in his hand which was trained at Jewel’s heart. He was less than six feet away. If he fired a bullet, she would die instantly.
“Drop the athame, Jewel.”
Jewel feinted as if to carry out her plan.
“I said drop it.”
The arm holding the knife arced through the air.
Dr. Abernathy fired.
Jewel’s eyes bulged as if they would pop out of her face. She opened her mouth in a silent scream. A trickle of blood spilled over her lip and down her chin, and then the life went out of her and her body slumped to the floor.
“Carlotta, quickly,” Abernathy commanded. “Help me untie her.”
The two of them worked at her bonds, the doctor using the athame to severe the ropes. Mrs. Valdez pulled Elizabeth close to help mask her nakedness. Elizabeth could no longer hold back tears and buried her face against Mrs. Valdez’s shoulder as the woman held her in her arms and whispered soothing words to her.
Clark Abernathy lifted Elizabeth in his arms and carried her up the stairs, following the light of Mrs. Valdez’s oil lamp as she led them through the narrow passageway. When they emerged into the courtyard, Elizabeth saw it was bathed in wavering light, orange witches leaping about a bonfire, and her nostrils were assailed with thick smoke. Serpent tongues of flame hissed in and out from the windows and balconies of the old house. Billows of reddish-black smoke the color of blood mushroomed towards the sky.
The doctor set her down beneath the shelter of one side of the house and then dashed into the burning house.
“What’s happening?”
“Mr. Chet, he crazy man,” said Mrs. Valdez. “He set fire to the house.”
Crazy. Elizabeth hadn’t the strength to laugh at the irony of it anymore. We’re all crazy, aren’t we? Every last one of us.
The doctor reappeared with one of the Native American tapestries which had hung in the parlor and wrapped around it Elizabeth’s body. He put his protecting arms around her and led the two of them to the back of the courtyard away from the burning house. The rain was now a steady drizzle, enough to dampen her hair. It felt so cleansing on her skin, but it did little to battle the flames that greedily devoured La Casa del Mar.
Mrs. Valdez fumbled with a handful of keys and unlocked the door to the security house. She pressed her shoulder to the door but it refused to open. Dr. Abernathy threw his full weight against it, and again. Finally the door relented to the force of his body. Once insi
de, Mrs. Valdez led the way up a narrow flight of stairs until they were safe in the shelter of a large room where they could watch the conflagration gnaw at the old house.
The room was empty. There was no security guard. No bank of television monitors. The room was as much a ruse as everything else.
Dr. Abernathy acknowledged the bewildered look on Elizabeth’s face as she glanced around the room.
“I’m sorry you had to find out the way you did, Elizabeth.”
“None of this is real, is it? This has all been a plot against me. Are you even a real psychiatrist?”
“Of course I am.”
“But you are Roland de Winter’s son?”
“I am. Do you blame me for hiding something I am ashamed of?”
“Did you know it was Jewel and Bryce all along?”
“I suspected her from the beginning. I knew Jewel had been one of my father’s ingénues. But I didn’t know Bryce was my half brother, at least not when I accepted him here as a patient. You must believe me, Elizabeth. It was not until I entered into therapy with him that I began to formulate an understanding of what was going on and began to extract the clues that helped me place him as Jewel’s son. That’s when I knew something terrible was happening. Why would mother and son both come here, yet keep their relationship a secret? If Jewel had ties to Hollywood’s satanic underground, then it stood to reason Bryce did also. With a bit of probing while I had him under hypnosis I was able to connect them both to the cult your husband was involved with. Don’t look so surprised, Elizabeth. Surely you must have suspected something at some point?”
Night of the Pentagram Page 23