Frank had the bags on the bed and they both stood still looking around. The room was huge, cavernous. It had to be twenty feet across and thirty wide. The overhead light hardly reached to each wall and it left the corners in deep shadow. The wallpaper was a very old pattern of country houses in brown and rose. The bed was covered with a rose coverlet with matching pillow shams. It was a four-poster bed, high off the floor, the mattress two-feet thick. Each post was carved with galloping horses, leering faces, and what appeared to be Egyptian calligraphy. On each side of the bed were tall tables with spindly legs, each topped with a fresh vase of deep red roses. A chair stood off to the side, plump with brown velvet cushions. A chest stood against one wall, a bowl of roses on top. A closed door led to what they believed to be the bath.
"Wild," Frank whispered.
"Weird," Dina said. "Cold as a freezer. Brrrr." She hugged her coat around her, having never taken it off since entering the house.
Frank slapped the bed. "Feels soft and plush and it has plenty of covers on it. We'll warm up."
"I'm taking a bath," she said, taking her bag and heading for the door. She didn't want to talk about warming up together, that just depressed her.
"Fine, I'll see if I can make some calls."
Dina shook her head and went into the bath. She saw it matched the room in that it was over large, with a claw-foot porcelain tub, a toilet with a pull chain hanging down from an elevated tank, and a pedestal sink. She closed the door. When she turned the taps in the tub, it gushed steaming water that made her smile for the first time in hours. She would take a hot, leisurely bath, at least, and hurry under the covers once she was done.
She could hear Frank in the room talking low, calling his pals, arranging...what? Nothing to do with computers, that was for sure. She had never seen him even use a computer, not even her laptop in her apartment. He was definitely not who he said he was.
Shrugging it off, knowing she'd find a way to extricate herself from him, she began to undress and breathe in the steam from the big tub.
#
The trouble began when Dina, bathed, warmly wrapped in a thick cotton robe and fuzzy slippers, couldn't get the bathroom door open.
"Frank?"
She heard his footsteps as he came to the door. "Yeah? Give me a minute, I have to finish up this call."
"No, wait. I can't get the door open." She jiggled the door knob, but it seemed loose and it wasn't working properly.
"Oh shit," Frank said.
She heard him ending his phone call and come to the door. He tried the knob. He turned it this way and that, but nothing happened.
"Open it from in there," he said.
"I've been trying!"
"Christ, Dina, you bitch about every little thing." He kept rattling the door knob and cursing softly.
Dina heard a sound behind her and, startled, turned. The light over the sink dimmed and the shadows at the back of the bathroom came to life, the shadows on the wall behind the tub writhed with energy. They all gathered as if a whole group of dark creatures had come alive and were starting not only to form, but to move. Dina tried to scream, but the shadows leaped across the space with incredible speed and with shadowy hands covered her mouth, with shadowy hands covered her eyes, and with shadowy arms caught her fainting body before it hit the floor.
#
"Dina? Dina, baby, why are you so quiet?"
When she didn't answer, Frank mumbled to himself as he kept wrestling with the door knob. Crazy bitch, nothing's ever good enough, nothing's ever right. Goddamn door knob is just stuck or something, just a loose mechanism, I'm going to complain about this...
A knock on the door of Room 12 caused Frank to jump. He let go of the bathroom door knob and quick-stepped to the door, ready to give Abaddon an earful.
He swung open the door and there stood...
The true Abaddon. The great Satan. The undisputed master of hell. He was no long a thin man with a full head of black hair. He was no longer human in any way. His head was the size of three human heads and the mouth was wide with a grin that showed two rows of razor teeth. The eyes were blazing orbs of molten metal. The creature was eight foot tall, with arms longer than they should have been and his body was a naked, slimy red thing, bunched with muscles, steaming with heat. "Oh my God..."
"Go to sleep, Frank."
Frank fell back first with fear that suffused his whole brain and then he fell to the floor when his brain went black, taking his consciousness with it.
#
Room 12 began to sparkle, little firefly lights winking in and out, spreading across the surface of the walls, creeping across the carpet on the floor, covering the windows, changing the bed to a rack and the entire room to a dungeon. There were no windows now and no doors. This was a place where imagination could not perform to make comparisons to anything earthly and reality was warped beyond thought. Shadows slipped from the dank walls to slink around the rack, their forms as tall and forbidding as that of their master.
Abaddon lifted the unconscious Frank from the floor and carried him to the rack. He situated the man, clinking shut an iron collar around his neck, iron cuffs on each wrist and ankle. An iron bar went across his midsection and, thusly, he was held fast.
Standing back to look at his handiwork, Abaddon grinned with a grin that would have frozen the heart of any human being. "Keep him quiet," he said to his shadow helpers.
He went through the wall and in the bathroom he scooped Dina into his arms to carry her downstairs. As he moved through the hallway to the stairs, he changed, and was once again the host of a bed and breakfast inn.
He lay Dina on the velvet settee before the fire in the great room and caressed her cheek until her eyelids fluttered and she came to herself. She struggled to sit up. He helped her by taking an arm and lifting. "What? What happened?" she asked, fear making her voice high and reedy.
She looked down at herself and saw she was dressed in the red sweater and black jeans she had brought in her bag. She had on her coat and her boots. Her purse lay next to her.
"I was...but, I was..."
"Yes, dear, but now you're ready to leave Stonyhart, aren't you? You're awake, you're dressed warmly, and it's time to leave."
She looked at him in pure terror. Her eyes were so round the white showed all around her pupils and her mouth hung open.
"You must listen to me now," Abaddon said, leaning forward and staring into her eyes. "This young man of yours--you don't love him, do you? You don't even like him. He's become a burden to you and you don't know how to rid yourself of him. You know him for what he is, don't you? He's a bad human. A corrupt soul. You know that."
She wanted to nod, but she couldn't move. She remembered being in the bath, wearing her pajamas and terrycloth robe, her fuzzy slippers.
"How do you know what I think?" she asked finally in a small, child-like voice.
"It doesn't matter how I know, just that I know. I want you to take the keys in your purse and go to the car and leave now. The snow has stopped, but it will return. It will come so hard and be so deep it will cover this house, it will completely submerge it so it won't exist anymore. You don't want to be here when that happens."
Dina jumped to her feet, her head twisting on her neck as she looked all around the room. "Where's Frank? What have you done with Frank? This is insane..."
Abaddon sighed and reached out one thin hand to take her wrist. Upon his touch Dina calmed and her breathing slowed. Her eyes glazed. She said, "Yes, I understand. I need to reach my parents. I'm going home for Christmas."
"That's right. And Frank never came with you. You never knew a man named Frank. You're going home alone and that's all right, isn't it?"
Dina nodded. She took up her purse, opened it, found the keys. Abaddon handed her the bag with her things in it. He walked her to the door and stood watching as she got into the Nissan and drove away into the still night.
#
Frank Nesbeth woke in Hell. Over him s
tood the devil.
"I am Abaddon. It's my true name. I am sometimes called Satan, the great Lucifer, Beelzebub, Father of Lies. But you may call me Abaddon, Frank."
Frank began to cry, tears rolling down from the corners of his eyes and into his hair at his temples. "No," he said, blubbering and beginning now to strain at his iron straps. "I picked this place. You can't be the devil. I can't be here. I have things to do. Let me go!"
"But you're my guest, Frank."
Abaddon began to sparkle. His flesh, impossibly red and inhuman, sparkled as if lit from within. The shadows gathered.
"You were given to me," Abaddon said. "Can you guess why? And answer truthfully. This rack is not for your entertainment. It will stretch your neck until it snaps, until it tears from your body."
Frank was weeping openly, his face blotched, his nose running, his fists closing and opening. "I sold some drugs! I'm just a middleman! I get them from out of state, I distribute to sellers, I set up the whole structure."
One of the shadows came to his side and Abaddon stepped back. The shadow thickened, grew into a form, and like fog hugging the ground, it settled into a short human, became transparent flesh. A face came into being. It was a boy who was not yet a teen. "You killed me," the shadow person said. "They gave me some pills at school. They came from you. I died. I'm dead. I'm stuck in limbo because of you and I can't get to heaven."
Frank flung his head side to side denying it. "I did no such thing! I never gave a kid drugs."
Abaddon moved the small shadow aside. "You did it the way any man does any terrible thing. You did it faceless. You were behind the scenes, the puppet-master. Without you, they don't die. You were the...facilitator, Frank. And you plan to do more. You aim for an empire. That can't happen, not in this place at this time. So you were steered here. To me."
Another shadow came forward, holding out a hand, pointing a dark, accusing finger. "He killed me, too!"
Frank had his face turned away. He turned it back, staring in stupefied fear. "Gran? Gran, I didn't mean it. I was playing a practical joke!"
The shadow changed, took form, and a little old woman with wispy white hair glared at Frank. "I loved you, boy. I did everything I could to make you right. To make you right. And to pay me back for caring, what did you do? What did you do, Frank!"
"It was a starter gun! It's used at track meets. It wasn't a real gun, Gran. I never would have shot you!"
Her eyes narrowed. She pursed her lips. "You knew it would kill me, regardless. Didn't you? Didn't you, Frank? And that was your intention because I'd punished you, isn't that right, Frank? You can't lie to us." She turned to look at Abaddon who stood quietly behind her. "We all know your whole heart, your whole intention, your whole...evil."
The hours in the dungeon droned on beyond time and space, shadow after shadow coming forward to accuse Frank with crimes from negligence to murder, from sadistic thoughts to monstrous actions. Frank was shown to himself as heinous and unconscionable. He wept and begged and denied, but he knew better than to ask for mercy from shapes of darkness and a master who had no forgiveness in them.
#
Abaddon relished his role and in that way was no different from Frank Nesbeth, but then he was not human and never had been. His was the way of the dark, his minions the displaced and ruined souls, his business to take in the humans who were engaged in something that just did not fit the plan. Oh, there was a plan. The whole universe operated under a spectacular, choreographed program that could not be changed or interrupted. Now and again along came a human who would ruin everything and throw all creation into chaos. A man or woman of that sort had to be stopped. Frank was one of those people. Once he grew in power, he would have affected thousands upon thousands of lives, setting into motion events that changed the entire world. He seemed to be nothing, a nobody, a man like many others who had committed some evil, but his future held much more than that, so much more. That was not to be countenanced. It never had been and never would be. Humans had free will, but when that will came between creation and plan, then Abaddon was instructed, and given the freedom, to step in.
Abaddon ruminated on his role as the shadows came and went, shifted and formed and blew away into nothing. It had all come from a spark, the first sparkle in space, what people call the Big Bang, but was really nothing more than the first sparkle in the creator's eye. Every atom, proton, electron, quark, lepon, every string, every membrane in every universe depended on how well Abaddon performed his duty. It was almost holy.
He made a motion now, standing back from the rack holding Frank's body, and the gears began to grind, the levers slipped into place, the rack moved with a jerk, then smoothly worked to pull the man apart. It was an ancient torture, but a truly dark and deadly man-made and man-conceived weapon of destruction. Abaddon could have used fire or water, air or earth. He could have used napalm or plutonium or acid--a million things, a million weapons. And some of those things he had employed before, but none pleased him more than the Medieval rack. So personal. So intimate. So...destructive to flesh and bone.
Frank screamed like a siren, his scream filled the dungeon until it dripped from the walls and puddled on the floor. He screamed until his neck was stretched so far his larynx snapped and he could scream no more. His neck muscles split and snapped like rubber bands. His flesh was rent, blood was spilled, blood spurted into high red arcs, blood pooled on the damp brick floor, and then his head came clean off his body.
Abaddon grinned, the shadows shifted closer. One of them picked up Frank's head and put it back on the neck. Instantly it was fused and whole and Frank was screaming, screaming, his eyes bulging, spittle flying from his lips.
Again, Abaddon gestured and the gears began to grind, the levers clanged, the wood timbers groaned, and Frank screamed while again he was torn asunder, only to be made whole over and over again, to be torn asunder time after time after time into eternity.
#
Abaddon--the Abaddon not busy with Frank Nesbeth (for there were legions of him)--heard the phone ring and picked up the receiver from the table next to him before the hearth. The Stonyhart Bed and Breakfast was no longer in Connecticut, but in California along the coast of Big Sur. He took the reservation and hung up. The couple would be arriving tomorrow. The woman was going to stay. Her companion would be allowed to leave and Abaddon was glad for that.
His house was warmer now, though chilly enough with the stone floors and stone walls. He kept a fire going just the same as before. Guests seemed to like it. And how they loved the look of the house with the turret and the gables and the dormers. Not all of them learned of the dungeon.
Outside were palm trees, mimosas, bougainvillea, the backs of tumbling mountainsides, and the wide Pacific ocean rolling softly onto white beaches. Sometimes Abaddon walked there at midnight, staring out to sea and imagining the sea's transformation to tidal waves and the earth to crevices and craters. It pleased him to see it beautiful and to imagine it demolished. When or if that happened in the future was not up to him, but if it was he would destroy it tomorrow.
As twilight came close, inching through the lead-glass windows with long fingers of darkness, and a frail wind whistled around the eaves, Abaddon reviewed in his mind the woman who was coming to him. She owned a company that would invent a chip that would control the thoughts of every citizen in every nation. She was buying another company, a pharmaceutical, that was on the verge of making a drug that could be put into water supplies--just drops of it--that would carry a virus never imagined and impossible to stop. Oh, she was a cunning monster, and determined, and rich enough to do everything she ever wanted to do to the human race. She threw the whole plan into chaos. She was a wild card and he had to shuffle her back into the deck.
Abaddon smiled and templed his fingers together to form a steeple. It was wonderful to have such purpose, to be such a utilitarian devil. He helped to correct the universe and got fresh souls in the balance. True scions of evil turned into his slave
s. In a month his house would dissolve and reappear elsewhere in the world as if it had existed forever in another country, in another city. He had been promised Beirut--or was it Berlin? For the time being he had taken care of the natural born world killers in the United States--at least he would have after dealing with the woman coming to his bed and breakfast tonight.
He glanced about, feeling a little lonely, and drew the shadows to him. They came from out of the corners and off the ceiling, they crawled from beneath the settee and his chair, they burst from out of the flames of the fireplace. He watched them begin to move and sway and form into beings, into infernal, frightful creatures.
They knew how to dance for him. It was something they could do that lessened his misery. And if they did it well, sometimes they were unchained and sent away from the duty and drudgery of the house of Abaddon, the house of Hell.
They knew how to make their master happy...
...and how to sparkle like all the stars of heaven.
THE END
INTERVIEW WITH A PSYCHO
BY
Billie Sue Mosiman
Copyright 2011 Billie Sue Mosiman, All rights reserved
Published first in PSYCHOS by Robert Bloch, re-published in DARK MATTER by Billie Sue Mosiman (available in hardcover from John Betancourt)
***
The place was Alabama, a hundred miles north of Mobile, the village named after Paul, one of the apostles. It was 1965 and the young people hadn't deserted yet to make their marks on the world. More than three hundred souls inhabited the surrounding small farms and homesteads. In Paul stood two country stores, one with two gas pumps selling overpriced fuel, an ancient one-room unpainted house that served as the U. S. Post Office, and two churches, the Pentecostal Holiness and the more sedate Baptist.
THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go Page 5