by Hal Bodner
“You are disgusting.”
Mark nodded amiably. “And you’re pathetic. Does that make us even?’
“I already told the guy at the front desk what happened. The police will be here any second,” Jake told him smugly.
“Be sure to say hello for me.” Hartner didn’t seem to be concerned. “I wish I could stay and watch you struggle with your conscience. Will you give them the name of a dead man and risk them shipping you off to a rubber room? Or will you claim ignorance and provide them only with my description?”
Jake felt a sinking feeling. Hartner was right. When he told the police who was responsible for the massacre, it would take them mere minutes to discover that Mark Hartner was several days dead. If he insisted and brought forth his wild story about Hartner’s resurrection, even if he refrained from repeating what Tyler had told him, they’d think he was crazy. They might even try to blame him for the deaths. He was sure he’d be freed eventually. Undoubtedly the boy at the front desk would be able to confirm that Jake had only been there a few moments before the discovery of the bodies, not nearly enough time for him to have been the killer. Thus, an alibi was assured. But the process would take time and, while he was occupied with explanations, the demon would continue perpetrating his foul deeds.
“We’ll meet again soon,” Mark assured him.
Jake went to grab him and prevent him from leaving but a shout of alarm from down the hall stopped him. An older man, overweight and not very attractive, stumbled out of the shower room, a look of horror on his face. He clutched spasmodically at his chest and his breath came in harsh gasps. As Jake watched, the man sank to his knees, eyes bulging, and his face, already pale, started to turn blue. The shock of discovering the dead men had triggered a heart attack. Jake quickly squatted at the man’s side and prepared to administer CPR; his fury at not being able to tear Hartner limb from limb instead was all too obvious.
Hartner saw his dilemma, and threw back his head and began to laugh.
“Compassion, dear Jake?” His words were rendered almost incomprehensible by his giggling. “That may yet be your undoing.”
His fingers waggled a jaunty goodbye and, once again, Jake found himself indecisive. The man he was cradling needed help. From the clamminess of his skin and the way he was laboring to take in oxygen, Jake knew he could not abandon him.
Hartner seemed to bask in Jake’s frustration. “I’ll see you at home, lover boy. After you’re finished with the police.”
“Lucy...” Jake breathed, grief struggling with his anger and gaining a brief prominence.
Mark pretended to misunderstand and couldn’t resist needling Jake some more.
“Don’t worry. If I was going to rape her, I would have done it before I killed her. Cold, dead holes...” He shuddered dramatically. “Not my style at all.”
“You sonofa...”
Hartner’s voice grew soft and intense. “You hold on to that rage, boy. You’re going to need it for what I’ve got planned for you. You hate me, don’t you? Good. You just keep it up.”
He snatched up a bloody towel and wrapped it around his waist before pausing in the doorway at the end of the hall to wave. “See you at home!” Jake wanted, more than he’d wanted anything in his life, to follow Mark. His fingers itched to grab that perfect throat and squeeze until Hartner’s angelic face turned purple and his tongue stuck out. He wanted to snatch up the nearest heavy object and bash his skull until the last light faded from those beautiful grey eyes. He wanted to rip Mark’s perfect body limb from limb, to rend the muscles and skin with his bare hands until there was nothing left of the beast but torn scraps of bloody pulp.
But he could not ignore this indirect victim of Hartner’s spree, terrified and slowly dying. He knew, unless the paramedics arrived instantly, he was the man’s only chance for survival.
Jake put Hartner out of his mind for the moment to concentrate on the older man.
In with the good air, out with the bad. He counted silently to himself while he gave him mouth-to-mouth. Soon, the man spasmed and drew in a great lungful of air. Jake stayed by his side, talking to him in soothing tones, trying to dispel his panic.
The police and the EMTs burst onto the scene a surprisingly short time later. Jake allowed two of them to take the heavyset man from his lap and permitted another to guide him to a seat though he protested he was unhurt. As they busied themselves with fussing over him and he watched them get the heart attack victim set up with an oxygen mask, Jake fought to fix the face of each of Mark Hartner’s victims in his memory. He wished he could have gotten there sooner; perhaps there was something he could have done to stop Mark’s depravities. Perhaps the three men might still have had their lives ahead of them.
His impotence saddened him. But maybe, just maybe, Tyler’s gods, gods in whom he was still not quite sure he really believed, would smile down upon them. Perhaps the souls of the dead men would be rewarded for the sacrifices they had made in the furtherance of some strategy in which they had no interest and could not understand.
Somehow, even as the thought crossed his mind, Jake was filled with a strange inner peace which penetrated his anger and sorrow. If was as if someone, someone who was not physically present but who was communicating with him from a great distance away, was sending him a message. Maybe it was Tyler’s gods. If so, Jake hoped they could be generous to those who helped them, however unknowing. Perhaps with their guidance, and the help of the ghosts he’d met in the cavern, he might be able to survive this nightmare after all.
CHAPTER 7
Mario was in shock, though he didn’t know it.
He’d come to the door of Jake’s cottage with a bouquet of flowers. He felt a little silly about bringing flowers to another man but he wanted to make amends for his initial reaction to the photos on Jake’s wall. He liked Jake – a lot. If truth be told, he liked him a hell of a lot more than just “a lot”! There seemed to be a connection between them and, in his heart, Mario was beginning to wonder, even after only a single night, whether or not Jake Marshall might be the one for him. The roses, however clichéd they might be, were the only thing he could think of that would communicate what he wanted to say.
Mario wasn’t a particularly complex person. Nor was Jake, at least on the surface, but Mario had caught a glimpse of depths underneath – a quiet, committed intensity. Jake was like one of the knights in armor in an old movie with a buried strength about him, a nobility hidden beneath a skin of what at first looked like nothing but a lazy, quiet contentment. The mortician was easygoing, to be sure, but there was a wild passion within him, as Mario had discovered in bed the night before.
Physically, Jake was stunning. Looking at him naked had taken Mario’s breath away. But the young Greek had bedded many a beautiful man before and, though impressed, was not usually smitten merely by the physicality. It was the eyes that caused his heart to flutter and his knees to go weak. Not only had he never seen eyes of such an unusual blue before, but he had never seen the inner emotions so forwardly displayed in the way Jake Marshall’s soul, and what he was feeling, showed in those cerulean orbs.
He knocked on the cottage door and, getting no answer and seeing it was getting on towards evening, he figured Jake might be finishing work in the main house of the funeral home. He mounted the stairs of the porch and pushed open the big white-washed wooden door to stand a little uncomfortably in the front hall. He fidgeted, uncertain, for a moment. He’d never attended a funeral and so he had no idea what to expect of a place where the dead were prepared and sent off with appropriate ceremony. He was surprised, pleasantly, but a little put off by the incongruity between what he expected to see in a funeral parlor and what he actually found.
The place was light and airy. There were none of the heavy velvet tapestries lining the walls he’d thought he’d see. Instead, the windows were hung with curtains in a light, unobtrusive floral print. The furniture in the living room to his right looked plush and comfortable; the upholstery
in shades of soothing green and beige, the wood a light oak, polished to a gleaming shine.
Mario had imagined the walls lined with ponderous portraits of stern, long-deceased ancestors hanging in heavy gilded wood and was met instead with a few tastefully framed prints of pastoral landscapes and a sunny still life or two. There were no coffins propped up in corners, no glass jars filled with indescribably disgusting bits of bodies floating in noxious fluid, no hunchbacked servants bowing and scraping and urging him to, “Walk this way.” Instead, it was as if he had entered the comfortable home of a fairly affluent person of modest tastes which, he realized with a grin at his own silly preconceptions, was exactly what he had done.
The only thing about the place that was remotely off-putting was a faint odor, lightly astringent and definitely chemical, overlaid with something that reminded him of new copper pennies. He sniffed, unable to put a name to the smell, knowing only that it would grow more unpleasant as he approached the source – whatever that might be. He moved further down the hall, glancing through the doorways into the rooms on each side. Mario supposed he might call out, but there was an aura of respectful silence about the place and he was loathe to disturb it.
He passed the open door of what looked like an office and peered briefly inside. He’d already moved on when what he’d seen registered and froze his footsteps. Jaw agape, he turned around and forced himself to go into the room he’d been about to pass without entering. On the couch an elderly woman sprawled dressed in a demure tailored gray jacket and skirt, her hair carefully pinned into a tidy bun. Her feet were splayed wide; one shoe had fallen off. Arms dangled limply and her eyes stared dully and sightlessly into space. The conservative cream-colored blouse she wore beneath the jacket was drenched in blood, semi-dried and an unpleasant brownish-red. Spatters of it marred the pale blue fabric of the couch and a pool of it clotted on the polished wooden planking of the floor beneath.
Mario had seized the phone receiver on the desk and pressed 9-1-1 before any hesitation about sullying the scene by leaving fingerprints on it occurred to him. It took him several seconds to discover that the line was dead, and when he glanced behind the desk, he saw that the cord had been yanked from the wall. Frightened for himself – the killer might still be around – and concerned for Jake’s safety, he dropped the receiver and crept carefully back out into the hall. The thought that Jake might have been responsible barely occurred to him, and then only briefly, before being banished utterly. Though Mario did not yet know the blue-eyed young man very well, and though he did not fancy himself as a particularly astute judge of character, he knew one thing: Jake Marshall, the man who had held him so tenderly last night with so much loving hope in his eyes, that man could never have committed such a terrible crime.
A sound came from the rear of the house, the whine of hinges and the jingle of a little bell as a door opened and closed. Either the killer was running away, as Mario hoped, or someone – maybe Jake! – had come home and would help him summon the police. Quietly, he crept down the hall, thankful the wooden floors were well maintained enough to prevent any giveaway squeaks – just in case someone was lying in wait to ambush him – and had a carpeted runner down the center to muffle his footsteps. He reached the room where the door had opened – the kitchen, it turned out –and carefully poked his head around the corner of the doorjamb. He could see no one, and so, cautiously, he stepped onto the linoleum.
Still finding himself alone, he allowed the door to swing shut behind him, puzzled. He knew he’d heard the back door open. In fact, he could see it even now, slightly ajar. Suddenly, he sensed another presence and he stiffened.
“My, my, my! Look what we have here! Aren’t you a pretty one?”
Mario’s mouth struggled to form words as a young man rose up from where he had been crouched behind one of the counters. He was frightened, to be sure. This man could be the old lady’s killer. But what really held him speechless was the stranger’s amazing looks; had Mario met him in a bar, he would have been intimidated by the other’s beauty, lowered his eyes and scurried away. The guy was unearthly handsome, his medium-blond hair framing a face that Mario imagined painters would want to use for a model.
The strangest image flashed across his mind for an instant. He saw this young man, clad in a flowing white robe which left one of his alabaster-skinned shoulders and part of his chest bare, his firm-muscled legs encased in golden sandals. Huge white wings soared behind him and, in one hand, he held a little golden harp. An angel! Yes, that was what he reminded Mario of. Yet, even as the thought became conscious, the Greek boy’s fantasy image blurred and he shuddered. In his mind’s eye, the beautiful angel had turned into something else. The pristine wings had darkened, the feathers curled and tattered as if they’d been singed in a fire, the fine linen of the robe grew rough and leathery, the gilt wood of the harp splintered and warped, and the gray eyes smoldered with an eerie red glow which was comprised partly of lust – and partly of something even more sinful and downright evil.
“Are those for me?”
Eyelashes fluttered coquettishly over big, grey flannel eyes, and though the tone was mocking, the stranger’s flash of a brilliant smile held Mario captivated. The dark youth looked down at the flowers he clutched in his hand, the stems now crimped by the tightening of his hands, the blooms spattered with crimson. He must have dropped them onto the bloody floor when he’d discovered the old woman, then picked them up though he could not remember doing it.
“Ja... Jake,” he stammered.
The beautiful man frowned. “Go figure,” he said dryly. Then his face lit with that dazzling smile again. “He’s not home just yet, though I’m pretty sure he’ll be here very soon. I’m Mark, by the way.”
Mark stepped from behind the counter. Involuntarily, Mario retreated until he was backed against the kitchen door. He didn’t know why he felt threatened, but he did. Mark took the battered flowers from his hand and placed them on the counter. When he returned, he stood so close to Mario’s cowering body that their chests were almost touching and the darker boy could smell Mark’s breath – a scent that was so intensely sweet it was almost nauseating.
Mark’s hands gripped his shoulders and Mario whimpered. He looked into the man’s smoky eyes and saw beauty corrupted and befouled. Though Mark had as yet done nothing overtly to harm him, Mario felt his knees quiver and his shoulders started to shake.
“Now, now...” Mark crooned. “We’re much too big of a boy to be such a crybaby.”
He had been weeping silent tears without even knowing it. When Mark grabbed his dick through his pants and squeezed it hard, he yelped in pain. He certainly felt those tears coming.
“Let me see...” Grey eyes probed into Mario’s dark brown ones, searching for something. “Mario!”
“How...how...?” He felt paralyzed, his mind foggy, his body too languid to move.
“I know lots of things.” Mark smirked. “Just like I know you and I are going to have a really good time together while we wait for your hunky but dumb boyfriend to arrive. Or, at least...” Mark seemed to reconsider. “I’m going to have a good time. As for you...well...tools don’t always get the chance to pick what they’re used for, do they?”
Mario recovered his facilities and slapped his hands against Mark’s hard chest, trying to push him away. But the taller man didn’t budge.
“None of that, handsome.”
The Greek boy’s arms were tugged behind his back, both his wrists firmly captured, and he was twisted to face the kitchen door. Though it had been stuck closed only a moment before, it now swung free and Mark pushed him through it, marching him down the hall. He felt a coldness in his soul at his abductor’s next words.
“I am so looking forward to getting started. Aren’t you? Jake is going to be so...” Mark giggled and Mario flinched at the way the sound made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “So surprised.”
****
Lucy’s body was undisturbed, although
from the tacky footprints in her drying blood, Jake could tell someone had come into the room. He darted down the hall and into the kitchen, seizing the largest knife he could find from one of the drawers. He was looking forward to carving the smug smile right off of Hartner’s face just before he carved up the rest of him.
His arm brushed something and he looked down at the bedraggled bouquet of blood-spattered flowers he’d knocked off the counter, not understanding what they were doing there. He stooped to pick them up, noticed the tiny card tucked between the blooms, and opened it.
“FOR LAST NIGHT...” it read.
Jake’s blood froze in his veins. “Mario?” he whispered, in horror. “Oh no!”
Throwing aside all caution, he burst into the hallway, screaming for Hartner to show himself, and when he got no answer, he rampaged through the main house looking for him. He checked every room in the living quarters and when he was done, searched the embalming room, the casket showroom, and the receiving areas and chapel as well. With no sign of Hartner, he stormed out through the kitchen and to his cottage. In minutes, he’d searched it from entrance to attic, but Hartner was nowhere to be found.
Frustrated and growing more furious by the moment, Jake slammed open the front door to stand on his porch, inhaling the slight perfume from Lucy’s flower beds, trying to steady his breathing and calm himself down enough so he could think.
Where the hell was Hartner? More importantly, what had happened to Mario? Had he come over to see Jake and, not finding him home, dropped off the flowers and left safely? Had Lucy still been alive when he arrived? If so, how did the blood get on the bouquet? Good God! Had Mario been the one to discover her body? The bloody footprints in the office looked a little small to be Hartner’s.