Thoughts of Quid surfaced but I pushed them aside. I could only hope after what they’d done to him he’d died quickly. As for Party Boy, who could be sure? He might still be up on that ridge watching things and waiting for the right time to make his move, or for all I knew he was dead too.
Until I saw proof otherwise, I was on my own.
As I started toward the altar something crunched beneath my feet. Pieces of broken glass were scattered about the floor, several stained with blood. It had been thrown down to form a path to the altar, most of it crushed and small, with a few larger shards in the mix as well. I picked up the largest piece I could find, wiped the film of dirt away on my pants then angled it toward the sunlight until I could see my reflection.
I hadn’t shaved in some time, but my few days’ growth had done little to protect my face, which was horribly sunburned, chapped and peeling. My lips were swollen, split and covered with tags of loose skin, and dark circles hung beneath red and glazed eyes. My hair was mussed and dirty; my clothes soiled, torn and still caked with dirt from the burial, and my wounded ear was caked with dried blood. I looked dead, like a not quite ripened version of the thing in the cellar. I fired the shard at the wall. It smashed to pieces, rained across the floor.
I stood in the center of the church, waiting.
Martin finally rose to his feet and acknowledged my presence. Still in his robe and sandals, this time his long filthy hair was back and away from his face, revealing a version of him that didn’t look so different than the one I’d known years before, just older, leaner and clearly more brooding. He’d also grown a beard that reached a few inches below his chin. I couldn’t imagine how he dealt with the desert heat with all that hair. Slowly, and with a calm stride, he walked toward me, stopping when he was within reach, his expression aloof.
“Are you feeling better now?” he asked.
“You nearly killed me.”
“Before I could reach you, it was necessary to break you.” He looked up at the ceiling and smiled. “Your friend died screaming, weeping hysterically like an old woman.”
“You didn’t have to do this.”
“No?”
“I came here to help you.”
He smiled like I’d said something amusing. “Yes, you did.”
We watched each other awhile without saying anything more. A lifetime passed between us, unspoken but understood. Two frightened boys lost in the rain and covered in the blood of angels, now two crippled men, broken, battered and still trying so desperately to outrun their nightmares and sins.
“Your mother—”
“My mother is sacred.” The smile was gone. “I’ve cut the tongues from people for uttering her name before they were worthy of speaking it. And do you know the best part? They let me. They laughed while I did it, honored to be chosen, to be touched by me and brought into my eternal kingdom.”
“She sent me here to find you.”
“Yes. She doesn’t understand yet. She will soon.”
“What happened to you out there?”
“Out where, Phil?”
“What happened that brought you to this?”
“Long before we were even imagined, it was decided. It was written.”
I was afraid of him but didn’t want to admit it, so I tried to humanize him by remembering him as the Martin I’d known, playing with Jamie and me at the boulder and acting out our favorite television shows and movies. I couldn’t. It was no longer possible. He was no longer possible. “It’s me you’re talking to now,” I reminded him. “Not one of those brain dead motherfuckers.”
He looked away, preoccupied perhaps with other thoughts.
“I know who you really are,” I said.
“Do you?”
“Look what you’re doing, Martin. Look what you’ve done. Open your eyes. Look around you.”
“This is just a beginning.” He raised his arms, holding them out on either side of him. “One day I’ll be worshipped by millions as the true god I am.”
“Is that what you are, Martin, a god? You’re God now?”
“I’m a messiah.”
“You’re a disturbed child playing in a sandbox.”
“Madness is all that’s left.” He dropped his arms and wandered away, closer to the altar. “Life takes the rest.”
“You kill your own people.”
“Some. Others they run and fetch for me like good little dogs, happy to deliver me whatever, whoever, I ask for.” With one hand he pushed his hair from his face and gazed lovingly at the cauldron. “The power comes from their flesh. Man and animals, their strengths and talents captured then boiled to a nice frothy pulp. And then those strengths and talents belong to me.”
I looked to the cauldron. What I guessed to be the leg bone of a human being extended beyond the edge of the pot as it floated near the top.
He delicately touched it with his fingertips. “This one was a college girl on vacation with friends. They fetched her for me one night, brought her here to fulfill her destiny. She was a brilliant girl, med student. Now that brain belongs to me. With each new spell I cast, exactly as they’re written, I grow stronger. Blood is what gods like. Sacrifices and torture, disasters and destruction you can only dream of, they all thrive on it. Why should I be any different? Heaven and Hell are bloody palaces, places of war.”
“I don’t see a god, Martin. All I see is a butcher.”
He walked by me and stepped outside, leaving me alone in the church.
I held my ground, but I was throwing punches in the dark. Martin was irrevocably insane and unimaginably evil. There’d be no coming back from where he’d gone and what he’d become. There was only one solution, one way out for him, maybe for us both.
I knew then why I was there. I suppose I always had. I’d have to betray Mrs. Doyle, but her son no longer existed. Not as she’d known him. Not as any of us had. But she was his mother, she’d made him. Deep down she had to realize the real reason behind sending me to her son.
I hadn’t come here to save Martin. I’d come to kill him.
He’d known it all along. He dreamed of me. He dreamed of this.
TWENTY
Outside, the fires burned even in daylight.
The followers were busy preparing for something. There was a buzz in the air I hadn’t felt previously, a sense of anticipation, as like bald-headed insects they hurried here or there, some carrying various items and tools, others whispering to each other and looking at me with a peculiar cross of reverence and disdain. Though no one spoke to me, a lone, painfully thin woman approached with a wooden bowl of steaming rice in hand and offered it up. I didn’t want to take it, but I was starving, so I did. I had no idea why but she was clearly in awe of me. She quickly touched my forearm—the way a fan might touch someone famous—then ran off.
After shooing a few flies away I pushed the rice around with my fingers to make certain there was nothing else in the bowl. It looked all right, just basic steamed white rice, but I wasn’t about to trust anything these people gave me. I scooped some up and sniffed it. Seemed OK. Despite the revoltingly gruesome smells permeating the compound, I ate voraciously. The others bustled about, and I noticed several followers gleefully carrying a large makeshift table to the side of the church. Apparently the festivities would take place outside. I tried to focus on them but was distracted by the dead bodies…the crucified, the impaled torsos, the discarded piles of limbs and heads.
Holly Quinn rounded the side of the church, the camcorder still fastened to a strap around her neck but now in her hands and aimed at me. “Don’t worry,” she said, “Papá approved it, there’s nothing to worry about at all!” She dropped the camera and smiled. “Battery’s been dead for weeks anyway! Old habits, you know? I still—I have it all here.” She patted the camcorder. “It’s all here and it’s all in my head and in my heart and soul! The world’s falling down. Somebody’s gotta be there to catch it. See how that works, how it all fits so perfectly? Papá, he’s the o
ne, he’ll be the one to do it.” She shook her head like it was all too much to comprehend. “He’s a genius, a brilliant prophet so far beyond the rest of us, I mean, it’s just—how do we even begin to understand what takes place in a mind as deep as his? It’s like we’re a bunch of—I don’t know what—toads, how about toads? Simple toads hopping around at his blessed feet, and he can step on us and squash us whenever he wants to, or he can pick us up and love us because it’s not about us, it’s about him! Just boggles the noggin, doesn’t it?”
For a second I thought about maybe killing her first. Instead, I choked down another handful of rice then tossed the bowl aside, scattering some chickens that had congregated near my feet. My stomach churned and nausea drifted up the back of my throat, but miraculously the food stayed down. “You have a cigarette by any chance?”
Holly plucked a pack of Marlboros and a lighter from her shirt pocket.
I took one, lit it, and handed the items back. Initially the cigarette tasted like shit, and I coughed out the first drag with such force it made my lungs ache, but it killed the horrible withdrawal pangs…at least for nicotine. “Any chance you could find me some booze? I could really use a drink.”
“I can’t get you any alcohol right now,” she said with a mindless grin, “but of course there’ll be wine later. You know, at the supper.”
“Yeah, of course,” I answered, too weary to push for further details. She made Hardy Brunner seem positively lucid. The memory of Brunner brought me to thoughts of Party Boy. I shaded my eyes with my hand and gazed out at the ridge. Nothing. Even the possibility that he was still out there somewhere left me with a modicum of hope that I might make it out alive. In the light of day the rocky hill Quid and I had come down when we’d first entered this place was significantly larger than I realized. In addition to being in front of us, the hill also ran nearly the entire length of one side of the compound, and at its base was a cave I hadn’t noticed the night before. Before the opening, a wooden stake with a bald human head impaled on it had been driven into the ground. The eyes were gone, the skin decayed and the mouth frozen wide in a death screech.
“That’ll be later,” Holly went on, distracting me. “You know, tonight. It’s so exciting! Your arrival ushers in the end. It all ends and begins tonight!”
“What do you mean, it ends tonight?”
“Like Papá teaches, we have to die before we can truly be reborn.”
It was a suicide cult then. Sooner or later, weren’t they all? I took a pull on the Marlboro, my mind awhirl. “So this is Drink-the-Kool-Aid Night?”
“I don’t think we have any Kool-Aid,” she said with sincerity so genuine it would’ve been funny had it not been so creepy. “But I could find out for you.”
“Yeah, look into that, would you?”
“Absolutely!” Holly hurried off toward the church.
If what she’d told me could be believed then Martin planned to kill himself and take the rest of these demented bastards along with him in one bloody grand finale. And if everyone else was slated to die tonight so was I.
I scanned the followers, so many all around me, and couldn’t help but feel sorry for them. They’d been stripped to the bone, robbed of individuality and free thought so they’d all seem the same. But they weren’t the same, not really. They were people. Horribly misguided, sick and damaged people, but people nonetheless. They’d loved, had families, dreams, hopes, aspirations. They’d once been babies, innocent children with entire lives ahead of them and no idea that one day they’d end up in this hellhole. What had gone so terribly wrong in their lives to bring them to Martin? What wounds had they sustained that could only be healed by his madness? How had he done it? How had he convinced these people to believe in him to this extent, to follow him to the ends of the Earth and to give themselves to such violence and depravity? What did they gain from him that they couldn’t find anywhere else?
And what of the dead, those mutilated, tortured and maimed for whatever evil purposes Martin saw fit? The same held true for them, perhaps even more so. What was the point of their mistaken lives, what purpose had they served if they’d been destined to wind up here, a madman’s demonic ornaments scattered about with the rest of his forsaken playthings?
I tried to turn away from the dead bodies, but everywhere I looked there were more. Martin was right about one thing. The world often was a meat grinder. But breaking people apart was never hard. Putting them back together was the real trick. Any fool could destroy. Few could heal. Ironically, Martin was by far the most damaged and broken of the lot. Yet he was the one in power, the madman at the controls. Was he a true antichrist, casting his black magic spells, practicing his blood creed and using the secrets of an ancient and divine tome to further his own evil vision, or just one more insane cult leader, a deranged dictator sick with power and delusions of grandeur? I still wasn’t sure.
In the end, did it matter? Did it make a difference to the souls of those men nailed to the crosses just feet from me? Did it matter when the spikes were driven into their flesh, when their legs were broken and their sides split? Did it matter to their families, their friends, their gods?
I walked slowly, like someone in a funeral procession, looking around as I went. Several additional fires were going strong, over which followers prepared quantities of chicken and rice for the supper Holly had spoken of. There was no sign of Martin anywhere. I watched the cave without trying to be too obvious.
Acting as a sentry, what remained of Detective Thompson stood in front of the opening. Unlike the others he continued to glare at me as he had the night before. It seemed Martin’s newest recruit was also one of his fiercest.
I moved a good distance away from everyone, careful not to leave the confines of the compound, settling on a patch of dirt parallel to the church. I sank to the ground and watched the followers hustle about in preparation for what would undoubtedly be a big night. But I also kept an eye on that cave. From what I could tell the followers probably slept in the church and on the ground outside. The cave had most likely been set up as Martin’s personal quarters.
That’s where it would happen, I decided. That’s where I’d kill him.
TWENTY-ONE
I’d been in their midst for hours. Strangely, I felt both a part of them and even more removed than when I’d arrived. Inside me, storms raged, reminders of nightmares I’d never awaken from whether I survived this horror or not. These atrocities were imbedded in me, fused pieces I could not discard any more than I could hack off my own arms or legs. What I wanted, what I needed, hadn’t changed. I’d come for deliverance, but I’d never be completely free. Even the sanctified were haunted. Like the damned, they had to be. It’s what kept the righteous holy and the wicked evil: the residue of ghosts, the echoes of fear. Even babies couldn’t escape the consecrations in blood. They entered the world covered in it. It was all a matter of source, origin and one’s definition of salvation. As I’d been an executioner once before, albeit mistakenly, and it had destroyed me, this hardly came as a revelation. I always swore I’d never assume that role again, yet there I was with deliberate intent, confident committing murder was justified this time around. And wasn’t it? Wasn’t there a significant difference between shedding the scarred man’s blood and Martin’s? Wasn’t one a sinful, murderous act and the other a just and necessary one? Didn’t it matter who one killed? Didn’t the deeds of the murdered somehow curse or exempt them as well as the murderer? Isn’t that what we all tried so desperately to believe whenever someone needed killing? Or was an open vein an open vein? In the real world stipulations were placed on violence every day. Each time a nation went to war and set out to slaughter other living beings, wasn’t the carnage somehow justified in the minds of those dropping the bombs? Weren’t those acts of murder even considered heroic? In his own twisted mind the things Martin had done made sense, they were essential, correct and even divinely inspired. Was he really so different then, from the rest of us? Acceptable vio
lence, necessary violence, defensible violence, did such things truly exist? If so, who made those determinations? I couldn’t say. I only knew what had to be done. Right or wrong, Martin had to die, and I had to kill him. We’d both accepted it, him even more than I.
But it didn’t seem right that Jamie wasn’t there. He was as much a part of this as we were. He’d been there at the beginning and had lived through the horrors since, why should he be exempt now?
One will deny him, and Jameson is that one…
I imagined Jamie drugged out of his mind in that brothel in Tijuana, praying for rescue from the demons even if only for a little while, and then I remembered he was anything but exempt. In a sense, he was there with me. His presence and memory was strong. Even now he’d be trying to convince me there might be another way, looking to God for forgiveness and to make it all right, to bail us out, to carry us away from the flames lapping at our feet.
Poor Jamie, I thought, such a sweet and innocent little boy.
He’d never stood a chance.
Jameson dies soon thereafter, alone, frightened, lost…
Maybe he was already dead, fulfilling Martin’s cruel prophecies, OD’d in some filthy backroom, a once-mad priest lifeless as straw, his secrets revealed and spilling from him across a soiled floor. Maybe he was finally at peace.
The day was coming to an end, churning down into night. The desert didn’t seem to care.
As dusk settled in, Thompson finally left his post, crossed the compound and joined the others, who were busy outside the church readying the area for the supper.
I got to my feet and started for the cave. I knew Martin was in there, and I knew he was waiting for me.
Neither of us had much time.
* * *
Though cramped and claustrophobic, the inside of the cave had been cleaned out, modified and made livable by his slave labor. In the main open area a desk and chair had been placed. Candles covered the back of the desk, and the rest was covered in dog-eared paperbacks, old newspaper clippings, a frayed photograph of Martin’s mother from when we were children, a clay pitcher of water and a wooden cup. An old and dirty mattress had been positioned against the cave wall directly across from the desk. An equally grimy pillow lay atop it, and a crate sat next to it, another candle at its center. Beyond the living area was a narrow passage that led down deeper into the cave, but I couldn’t make anything out other than the opening and a bit of dirt floor descending down into darkness. Over the desk, and on the wall over the mattress, inverted crosses had been painted in blood.
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