The smell of rotting flesh was strong in here today, but it did not bother the General. He stood there, gazing down at the headless corpse on the throne, then back and forth between the carving of the temple doors and the bloody tattoo on his chest. Impulsively, he slipped the lion’s head over his own and waited for the rush of light that told him the door was open.
Nothing happened.
It was as he suspected, the General thought, removing the head. The doorway was broken now. It had lost its power, most likely from a combination of Edmund’s use of it during the day and the Prince coming through it to control Edmund’s actions. But the General couldn’t be sure. There was still so much about the doorways that he didn’t understand. The gash on his chest told him so. It was a message from the Prince as in the old days. A wound that needed to be healed between them; a gap that needed to be closed between the 9 and the 3.
Yes, the General thought. The Prince required a new doorway. That would heal the wound between them and set the equation right again. That would prove to the Prince that the 9 and 3 were together again.
As the General returned the lion’s head to its proper place, he felt a wave of remorse pass through him. He hoped the Prince, wherever he went during the daytime, could feel how sorry he was. He assumed he could; for the Prince and the General were tied together in the stars. Always had been, and both of them were in too deep to turn back now.
What was the line from Macbeth that Bradley Cox said so poorly? “I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
Macbeth. Bradley Cox. Part of the equation? Everything connected?
There was something there.
Flash-flash—A memory? A dream from the night before?—and suddenly the General understood why the Prince had wanted him to go to the cast party.
Bradley Cox.
The Prince had wanted Bradley Cox—the self-worshipping actor, the vain and promiscuous sinner. That had to be it. But the young man named Edmund had let his recklessness and his obsession with Ereshkigal get in the way. And now it was too late. Now, if he were to take Cox as a soldier, because of their public confrontation, the authorities would focus on Edmund first.
Or would they?
The General knew from his previous consultations with the Prince where he desired the next soldier to be sacrificed. And surely, the authorities would never find him there. Plus, the General could make it look as if Cox had disappeared; could make it look as if he committed suicide or perhaps drowned in the Tar River while swimming drunk. Yes, the General thought, as long as the authorities didn’t find Brad- ley Cox’s body they might never connect his death to Vlad the Impaler. And even if they did, the General and the Prince would be long gone by the time they figured it all out.
It made sense—but the General needed to think about this. It was all coming at him too fast. He couldn’t be sure anymore—he had grown too dependent on the doorways for confirmation of the Prince’s messages, needed time to sort it all out. Perhaps Cox should be the doorway itself. Perhaps—
The gash on his chest cried out, and the General understood. He was wasting his time guessing. First things first: he needed to begin with cleaning up his mess.
The General left the cellar and went up two flights to the upstairs bathroom. He turned on the shower and stepped inside. His wound stung painfully under the hot water, but the General gritted his teeth and took it—washed himself thoroughly, then stood there thinking until the hot water ran out. The cold felt good on his skin, helped numb the pain in his chest and stomach. And when his mind had cleared somewhat, the General toweled off and bandaged himself with some gauze and medical tape he’d originally purchased to help his tattoo heal. How ironic.
Once his wound was properly dressed, the General donned a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and went downstairs to the kitchen and made himself a protein shake. He stood there at the sink, drinking and thinking how pleasant it felt to have the line of coolness running behind the burning gash at the center of his torso. There would be no workout in the horse barn today, he thought; no running across the tobacco fields, either, and no push-ups for a long time if he ever wanted his wound to heal.
“But the wound will heal,” the General whispered. “Eventually.”
He rinsed out his glass and headed into the parlor. The room smelled awful, and the General immediately opened all the windows. Then he rolled up the rug and lugged it out onto the back porch. It was ruined, he decided, and would have to be burned in the yard at some point. The General went back into the kitchen, fetched the mop and bucket from the broom closet, and filled it with hot water and Pine-Sol.
He began in the parlor, following the trail of blood and excrement and mopping carefully as it led him through the front hall and kitchen and back down the cellar stairs to the workroom. The General felt calm and at peace. One step at a time, he thought—the beginning of eventually, of solving the equation. Following the trail told him so. Yes, one could find the Prince’s messages in anything—even in one’s own blood and shit—if one looked closely enough.
“C’est mieux d’oublier,” the General whispered as he mopped the workroom floor. He dumped the bloody-shitty water down the drain in the corner and rinsed out the bucket in the slop sink. And when he went back upstairs and looked at the clock on the kitchen wall, he realized he’d cleaned up the entire mess in just over half an hour.
Satisfied, the General took a deep breath and realized that his T-shirt was sticking to his chest. The temple doors were bleeding again. He would have to take another shower and replace the gauze and medical tape.
Before heading upstairs, however, the General returned to the parlor—was about to close the windows, when suddenly he caught sight of a black SUV coming up the driveway.
The General froze as a crippling wave of fear shot through his body. The SUV looked dangerous, and there was no time to change—no time to wash the blood from his chest! He began to tremble—had to fight the urge to flee—when suddenly something unexpected happened.
It came to him in a flash-flash inside his head, and all at once the General’s fear disappeared.
Chapter 61
Andy Schaap parked his TrailBlazer alongside the white truck at the end of the driveway. He got out and peeked through the driver’s side window. He didn’t know what he expected to find—Blood spatters on the dashboard?—and felt foolish when he saw the truck was clean.
Nonetheless, Schaap couldn’t deny the feeling he got when he pulled onto Sergeant Lambert’s property. The old tobacco farm was the most secluded of the homes he’d visited so far. And had he not been taken so off guard by the little spark of hope clicking away deep inside his stomach, perhaps Andy Schaap might have been more careful.
Indeed, he wanted first to go looking in the old horse barn, perhaps even check out the crumbling tobacco sheds he passed on his way in. And if he had, things might have turned out differently that afternoon. Instead, however, Andy Schaap followed protocol—took out his cred case and headed up onto the front porch.
The old, weather-beaten planks creaked painfully beneath his feet as he came upon a little handwritten sign over the doorbell that read, Please ring. Schaap pressed the button. The sound that came from inside was loud—like a buzzer on a game show, he thought—but afterwards there was only silence, no sign of life within.
Schaap rang the bell again and called out, “Hello? Anybody home?”
Nothing.
Schaap opened the screen door and peered through the inside door’s small, beveled-glass porthole. The house was dark inside, but he could make out an empty hallway with a large staircase at the far end. Something about this place gave him the creeps, but he certainly would need more that that to justify his entering without a warrant. He rang the doorbell again—listening, watching for movement inside—when suddenly he heard a creak on the porch behind him.
Schaap turned just in time to see the man coming up the stairs—a tall, muscular
man in a tight black T-shirt. In one moment, Schaap felt a smile form at the corner of his lips; in the next, he saw the man’s gun.
“Freeze!” he shouted, dropping his cred case as he went for the gun beneath his jacket. “FBI!”
But the man coming for him did not freeze.
“Your body is the doorway,” he said, raising his gun.
Time seemed to slow down for Andy Schaap; and amid his terror, he felt the clicking in his stomach travel up his spine and into the back of his head.
That’s a Beretta M9, he said to himself.
A split second later the bullet struck him between the eyes.
Chapter 62
The General squatted down next to the dead man and snatched up his ID—“Andrew J. Schaap,” he read out loud. “Federal Bureau of c’est mieux d’oublier.”
The General took a deep breath and propped the agent’s lifeless body against the doorjamb. He felt strangely calm—his movements both his own and someone else’s as he took off his T-shirt and tied it like a tourniquet around the man’s bleeding head.
His instincts had been correct. He’d known almost immediately that this man was some kind of authority. The man looked it, sure, but the General had also seen the bulge of the gun under his jacket and the ID case in his hand as he approached from the SUV.
The General stepped to the edge of the porch and gazed out across the fields. He could see a portion of the road through the trees at the edge of his property, and he cocked his ear toward it and listened. No one was coming. No more FBI agents on their way.
At least not yet.
But how did the FBI find him? Surely, it had nothing to do with Cox—the FBI coming to his house over a fight at a college party? No, that didn’t make any sense. And the fact that the Prince had not been angry with him for fighting with Cox only proved this point. If the FBI thought Edmund Lambert was Vlad the Impaler, why would they send only one man out to capture him? That didn’t make any sense, either.
In a flash, the General was off the porch and inside the TrailBlazer. He found a laptop and some paperwork on the passenger seat and picked up the first page. Names. Lots of them. All in the Armed Forces. Edmund Lambert’s name was eighteenth on a list with a handwritten title, By City.
The General flipped and scanned some more pages and found another list, this one labeled Unit Probability/Cemetery in the same handwriting. Four names, out of order but in the same general area, were crossed off. The General read the addresses and hit the back button for the open Google Earth page on the laptop’s screen. The address on this page matched one of the addresses on the list. The General hit the back button again, and that address matched another name, too.
“Bad luck,” he said. “Not even a prime suspect. Just a name on a list created from matching up names in the cemetery to members in the Armed Forces. But how did the FBI know I was in the Army?”
Your gun, a voice answered inside his head—but the General did not believe that. He’d read just how popular the Beretta M9 was with the gangbangers in the newspaper article about Rodriguez and Guerrera. And just as the General dismissed this as a possibility, the voice in his head spoke again.
It appears from the names and the order in which the FBI agent was following them that he was trying to give structure to the randomness of his suspect pool.
“Yes, it does.”
That means the FBI has only recently begun exploring the military angle—a fact proved further by this man coming out here all alone.
“No,” the General said, gazing over his shoulder and out the TrailBlazer’s back window. “No one seems too worried about Agent Schaap just yet.”
The General considered this and wondered if the FBI even knew Special Agent Schaap was out here. He felt in his gut that there was still time, that there was no need to panic, and that, even if others in the FBI had copies of these lists, they might not know exactly in what order this man Schaap was questioning the men on them.
“But surely the FBI will come looking for this man,” the General said. “It’s only a matter of time before they track him here. His cell phone, a LoJack in his car or something.”
No, the General thought. He couldn’t stick around the farmhouse forever.
However, the voice in his head said, the doorway can now be repaired. The stars have smiled upon you and brought a doorway—well, right to your doorstep!
With a surge of joy, the General gathered up the FBI agent’s belongings and dashed from the SUV into the house. He dumped everything on the kitchen table and then dragged the FBI agent’s corpse into the parlor—fished out his keys and set his body against the fireplace. He paused only briefly to look at himself in the mirror above the mantel. The gauze on his chest was soaked with blood, but the General felt no pain—only a tingling sensation, which he took as a sign that the doorway was already beginning to heal.
Yes, he thought, everything was back on track. The equation would be balanced again. And in a blur of excitement, the General was back outside.
First he rinsed off the blood on the porch with a garden hose. The he ran across the yard and into the old horse barn, where he started up his van and drove it around to the back of the house. He dashed back to the front yard and moved the TrailBlazer into the horse barn. The FBI would come for their man eventually, the General knew; would search his property and find everything—the TrailBlazer, the body, not to mention the reeducation chamber, the Throne Room, and all his equipment in the cellar.
But when would they come? That was the question.
The General suspected the FBI agent’s laptop would give him a better idea.
He locked the barn doors from the outside and quickly surveyed his property as he ran back toward the house. No, the FBI wasn’t looking for Andrew J. Schaap just yet. Indeed, the way things looked from the outside of his house, no one would be able to tell that the FBI agent had ever been there.
However, all that mattered to the General now was how things should look on the inside of his house when Andrew J. Schaap’s friends finally came a-calling.
Chapter 63
Markham awoke around 5:15 in the evening—would’ve kept on sleeping, in fact, had his mother not knocked on his bedroom door and told him supper was ready.
“Well, it’s going to be breakfast for you,” she added. “Steak and eggs, so call it what you want.”
“Steak,” Markham said to himself when she was gone. “Go figure.”
He lay there for a long time staring up at the glow-in-the-dark plastic stars that his father had pasted on the ceiling when he was a child. But rather than think of the Impaler, Markham’s stomach growled in anticipation of the meal waiting for him downstairs.
He was starving. But even more so, he was amazed he’d slept almost the entire day. He remembered waking only a couple of times to pee, but the heaviness behind his eyes always dragged him back to his bedroom. And the fact that his parents had left him alone meant he must’ve been snoring up a storm.
He thought of Michelle; how, in the middle of the night, she used to tap him lightly on his shoulder to make him roll over. But she never complained about his snoring—never once—and only shook her head and smiled at him in the morning as if he’d done something stupid the night before.
God, he missed her.
Indeed, after the execution Markham felt as if he missed her more than ever. He’d planned on traveling to Mystic on Saturday to visit her grave, but decided once he was back in his bedroom that he would do so early Sunday morning before he left for Raleigh. The cemetery was only about twenty minutes from his parents’ house, but curiously, he didn’t want to leave his old bedroom. It seemed to ease his pain, seemed to gas him into a deep and cleansing sleep broken only by glimpses of consciousness in which he swore he was a boy again—the sunlight streaming in around the window shade from a time long before he knew his wife and her killer even existed.
Markham showered and shaved and arrived at the kitchen table dressed in jeans and a faded Un
iversity of Connecticut sweatshirt that he had found in his dresser drawer. His parents greeted him with looks of both concern and relief, but Markham knew neither of them would mention anything about the execution. It was a mutual understanding among the three of them that went back as long as he could remember. They never asked what was bothering him; seemed to accept that their son, even as a child, would talk to them only if he wanted to. And true to form, Sam Markham rarely did.
“Looks like you’ve been burning the candle at both ends, Sammy,” his father said, holding up his newspaper. “This fella they’re calling Vlad the Impaler—he’s the reason you’re on assignment in Raleigh, I take it?”
A former Navy man and retired real estate investor, Peter Markham had a somewhat gruff, no-nonsense manner that his son had grown to appreciate only after he joined the FBI. Then again, Markham knew that was because his father had grown to appreciate him only after he joined the FBI—de-spite the circumstances surrounding his change of careers.
Peter Markham had never supported his son’s desire to be an English teacher. Of course, he’d never come right out and said anything, but young Sammy had always been able to intuit his father’s opinions by what he didn’t say—like the way he never asked him how he was doing in his classes; like the way he never even asked him if he’d gotten laid yet. “It’s your life,” was all Peter Markham would say, his mind unable to wrap itself around the concept of a former all-star high school athlete like Sammy Markham wanting to teach poetry and shit. Besides, when it came right down to it, how much could a fella make doing that stuff anyway?
“Sammy’s not allowed to talk about his work,” said his mother. “You know better than to ask him, dear.”
The Impaler Page 30