At first he thought, irrationally, that it was Scarface doing the wailing. But the ugly bastard wasn’t doing anything but convulsing and dying. Joe stepped forward and saw, in the short hallway between the foyer and the living room, a huddled shape near the floor.
The living twin had found her dead sister.
Through a swirling caul of smoke, Joe saw her face come slowly up, her eyes riveting on his. Her lips stretched back in a rictus of hatred.
“You miserable fucker,” she growled and started to rise.
Joe stepped forward and kicked her in the chest.
The twin went tumbling backward and landed in an ungainly tangle of quiltlike fabric and bony limbs. But she was back up in an instant, leveling a knobby forefinger at him and cursing him like some witch in a cheap production of Macbeth. “You won’t touch me, you coward! You won’t dare kill both of—”
Joe swung the sword and lopped off her head.
There was a fountain of blood and a meaty thump as her head smacked the floor. It didn’t roll or anything, the way heads did in movies, but the eyelids did flutter a little, like one last futile mating call from a barfly who’d never mastered the art of picking up men, even desperate ones.
The body crumpled, a maroon geyser spewing out over the floor.
Sidestepping the head and the body, Joe entered the living room, the whole area foggy now from smoke. He should’ve grabbed some piece of clothing off of one of the twins to breathe through, but it was too late for that now. Because he could see someone standing in the center of the room, a tall figure he first mistook for Scarface, despite the fact he knew Scarface wouldn’t be getting up again. At least not in this life.
The smoke shifted, and Joe saw it was Shaun Peterson.
Shaun was whimpering.
“I didn’t want to come down here,” Shaun said, and from where Joe now stood, about eight feet away, he could see something at the young man’s side, something bulky and incongruous at this particular moment.
“That a lamp?” Joe asked.
“It was all they had,” Shaun explained. “They didn’t think there’d be resistance. Said there wouldn’t be much fighting.”
“What you get for trusting a bunch of idiots.”
Shaun sniffed, but the twin worms of snot dangling from his nostrils only quivered. To Joe they looked like diseased grubs. “They sent me down here to kill you, Joe.”
“With a lamp.”
Shaun’s face contorted in a violent sob. “I don’t wanna kill you.”
“Then don’t.”
Joe continued on by the young man, leaving him in the center of the room clutching his pitiful weapon.
“I’m sorry!” Shaun moaned.
“Get out before you die,” Joe said, nearly to the stairs.
“Okay.”
“And Shaun?”
“Yeah, Joe?”
“Fuck off.”
Joe mounted the stairwell, the sword resting on his shoulder like a baseball bat. In fact, he thought, rounding the first turn, the weight of the sword reminded him a lot of the bat he used to use in high school, a size 36 Adirondack. He wished he could go back and tell himself to use a lighter bat, but it wasn’t until he was an adult that he realized that bat speed was far more important than size. Sort of like the penis rule. Michelle told him it was less about a man’s size than his skill and endurance. Or maybe she just thought he had a little pecker and was making him feel better.
Joe was nearly to the top of the staircase when the first cult member appeared.
Joe cocked the sword, planted, and swung. The sword scythed through the cult member’s leg just below the knee. The screaming person—Joe thought it was a man, but it was too damned dark to tell for sure—blundered down the steps caterwauling like a horny panther. Joe was splashed with a brief jet of blood from the man’s hemorrhaging leg, but other than that he got past unscathed. A sentimental impulse in Joe suggested he double back and put the screaming man out of his misery, but then he remembered Copeland and decided there was poetic justice in letting the asshole bleed out.
Joe trudged up the stairs.
And was immediately beset by a pair of psychopaths. This time Joe had no time to react, so he merely thrust the sword straight out ahead of him. The first cult member impaled himself like an energetic hors d’oeuvre, but the force of the impact drove Joe back. Before he could recover, he was canting backward, hitting the stairs with his blistered back, the cult member having sunk all the way to the hilt atop Joe’s sword. For a brief moment they came to rest like that, diagonal on the stairs with their feet higher than their heads, the cult member fixed on top of Joe like a lover too impatient to wait for a more suitable place to screw. Only this cult member, Joe now saw, was a middle-aged man with eye-watering halitosis, several missing teeth, and a wart the size of a swollen tick on his upper lip. And that wasn’t even taking into account the gurgling cry issuing from the man’s mouth or the rills of blood now streaming from his belly onto Joe’s hands.
Joe bucked beneath the dying man’s weight and heaved the man up with his knees. The guy’s body yawed down the steps, described a slow somersault, and the sword unsheathed from his flabby midsection like some lurid version of Excalibur. When the flabby guy’s body tumbled down the stairs, Joe felt like celebrating, but he realized what a bad idea that was when he heard the power drill.
Shit, he thought. That’s what I get for leaving my tools at a work site.
The drill bit darted at him like a screeching cobra. Joe forearmed the drill aside, but not before the edge of the bit tore into the meat of his elbow. It had only grazed him, but it had the effect of waking him up to just how lethal the drill could be. Lying on his back that way, he could no more use the sword than he could dance the fox trot, so he did the only thing he could do, which was to seize the cult member’s pant leg and yank. There was a wildly gesticulating shadow for a moment, then the cult member—it was either a woman or a long-haired dude—began to fall. Joe had hoped he or she would tumble down the stairs the way the guy with the wart had, but instead the assailant tilted sideways and landed on Joe’s belly. The breath whooshed out of him, but he knew he had no time to feel sorry for himself. The man—he saw it was a man now, with hair like one of those eighties glam rock bands—had kept hold of the drill. And despite the weird angle—the back of the dude’s head was resting on Joe’s belly like they were picnicking in a meadow and gazing at clouds—the man still managed to manipulate the drill in Joe’s direction.
Relinquishing his hold on the sword, Joe gripped the shrieking drill with both hands and guided it away from his face. The cult member, who in the semidarkness reminded him a bit of Axl Rose, gasped in fear and began to fight Joe for control of the drill. But Joe was stronger than Axl, and goddammit, this drill belonged to him. He’d be damned if this scrawny psychopath would put a hole in his head with something Joe had purchased at Sears.
The whirling bit hovered nearer and nearer Axl’s face. Evidently realizing the peril he was in, Axl made a shrill mewling sound. Joe’s hands, wrapped on top of Axl’s, depressed the trigger harder. Then the drill bit was entering the man’s forehead.
The bit was a good one, a thick silver masonry bit, either a 5/8 or ¾, and though its tip was wide and blunt, it bore into Axl’s forehead without problem. The skin began to swirl into bloody ribbons, the curls spinning around the descending bit like May Day streamers, and though Axl thrashed to be free of the drill, Joe had both the leverage and the brute strength to drive it relentlessly downward. In short time the bit met the man’s skull, and though the going became slightly more difficult, the drill scarcely hesitated. Joe used the bit for drilling plaster walls, and he figured a skull was spongier than plaster. The man’s legs fluttered in a paroxysm of agony. Axl gave off fighting Joe for the drill and began trying to pinch the revolving bit, which only tore up his fingers too. But the
n the drill was piercing the dude’s brain, ripping and tearing the gray matter in there, or whatever kind of matter Axl possessed. Gray mush, Joe figured.
When the drill sank all the way in, the man ceased struggling.
Joe shoved Axl off, the man’s convulsing body slithering down the stairs like a sack of garbage. Joe rose and grasped the sword. He’d wasted too much time, and the smoke was growing thicker. Within ten minutes, maybe less, the house would be a chamber of roasted flesh and caving walls. He had to find Little Stevie.
He made it to the second floor without being attacked again, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before a new wave of psychos arrived. He thought of Jonestown, of Waco. When a gang of extremists got their hive mind fixated on an idea, they never relented. They’d drink their Kool-Aid and defend their wrong-headed beliefs until the bitter end, which meant he had to be ready for anything.
But that didn’t make it any easier to swallow the sight of the huge black snakes that slithered out of the room ahead.
The snakes reminded him of some nature show about the Amazon rain forests. Only these three creatures weren’t slithering over palm fronds and swallowing hapless squirrel monkeys—they were writhing toward him over an unfinished wood floor in a historical home.
But they still looked hungry. Joe retreated a couple steps before he remembered the sword. His weapon didn’t seem ideally suited to vanquishing the snakes, but it was better than a power drill. Or a lamp.
Joe had raised the sword to lop off the head of the nearest snake when something rustled behind him.
Diversion, Joe thought, but realized even as the cult member crashed into him that he was giving these assholes too much credit. They’d no more know how to stage a diversion like the snakes than they’d know how to solve advanced trigonometry problems.
But that didn’t make it any less painful when he was driven into the wall.
The force of the tackle had moved him forward and to his left, so that the lead snake was now right under his bare feet. From the corner of his eyes he saw the thing dart at him, and an atavistic terror of the slimy creatures made him hop backwards. His attacker had him clutched in a bear hug from behind, but the person was apparently too weak to hold Joe in place. Both of them went stumbling away from the snakes, who proceeded toward them serenely, as if they’d expected a pursuit like this. Joe and his attacker pitched backward, and as Joe’s weight slammed down on the bear hugger, the person grunted and broke wind. The arms lost their grip on his torso, and Joe scrambled around until he had the attacker pinned. It was a woman, he saw, and a fairly old woman at that. Her puckered mouth was tight in anticipation of Joe’s next move, but he was so freaking scared of the approaching snakes that he didn’t have any idea what his next move would be. So he raised the hilt of the sword and brought the base of it down on the woman’s face, her nose breaking like an egg. She screamed and covered her face. Joe pushed to his feet, saw the snakes were already slithering over her legs. The woman’s shrieks doubled in strength, her limbs a sudden whir of terror. Joe sidestepped the long black snakes and managed to reach the next room, the room from which the snakes had issued.
Joe had an inkling of who was in here before he stepped through the door, but it was still a surprise seeing Bridget Martin lying naked on the king-sized bed.
Perhaps that had something to do with the four decapitated heads adorning the bedposts.
The room glowed with candlelight, and it was by this shifting auburn light that he made out Copeland’s face, Louise Morrison’s. Over each of Bridget’s shoulders he spied another head, one Bruce Morrison’s, the other belonging to the erstwhile Shannon, the tattooed man who’d chopped off Copeland’s arm with a machete.
“Lie with me,” Bridget said, and so insane was the request and so unexpected at that moment that Joe found himself starting to laugh.
But Bridget’s languid smile never wavered. She traced the mounds of her breasts with delicate fingernails, her strong pale legs spreading wider. “We’re both going to be consumed, Joe. We should make the most of our time.”
Joe stepped into the room. There was very little smoke in here, but before long there would be plenty of it. “I thought you were supposed to be a goddess.”
A nonchalant flick of the wrist. “I will be reborn.”
He glanced right and left, but saw very little in the master suite other than the closed bathroom door, the nude woman on the bed, and the heads staring sightlessly toward him.
“Where’s Stevie?” Joe asked.
“Does it matter?” she replied, a hand sliding to her bright red snatch.
“Hell yes, it matters.”
“Your priorities are poorly ordered.”
“Says the woman who’s diddling herself while her house burns down around her.”
“Come to bed.”
Joe went to her, positioned the blade against her throat. “Tell me where the kid is.”
Bridget looked up at him like there wasn’t a Celtic sword held to her throat. “Touch me and I’ll tell you.”
Joe didn’t know what to say to that, and it didn’t matter. Because at that moment a figure burst through the door of the master bath, a figure holding something long and slender aloft. In the moment before the object flashed down at him Joe identified it as a towel rod.
Mitch Martin’s aim was off, so much so that the towel rod would have likely missed Joe even if he hadn’t brought up the sword to protect himself. But the steel rod glanced off the sword and Mitch smashed straight into him. It knocked Joe back a foot or two, but not enough to steal his balance. Mitch had lost hold of the rod and was slapping at Joe’s face now, flailing like a berserk schoolboy. Joe realized what he’d suspected earlier was true—Mitch Martin was jealous. His wife was beyond his control and obviously had a hankering for other men. And despite all the talk about rebirth and sacrifices, at the heart of it, Mitch Martin was nothing more than a cuckolded husband.
One of Mitch’s blows broke through Joe’s defenses and gave him a painful clout on the cheek. Gritting his teeth, Joe bunched his fist and aimed a fierce uppercut at Mitch’s face. It caught him lower than he intended, but when Joe’s fist crashed into Mitch’s larynx, the well-dressed stockbroker squealed like a kicked puppy. Clutching his throat, Mitch went blundering toward the dresser, and in his periphery Joe saw Bridget rising from the bed, her body still gliding with the languorous ease Joe found so off-putting. He thought of interrogating Mitch to see if the man would reveal Stevie’s whereabouts, but he suspected that would be a dead end. And anyway, Mitch was turning to face him again, his jealous rage apparently endowing him with superhuman powers of recovery.
Mitch lunged at him just as Joe swung the sword, bringing it around as though he were hammering a high fastball. The blade snicked off three of Mitch’s fingers before slicing through the sides of his open mouth. Mitch brought both his good hand and his mangled one to his lips, garbling out strange oaths Joe couldn’t hope to translate. He knew he should put the man out of his misery, but his nerve suddenly failed him. The sight of the mutilated man turned his stomach, made him sick with dull rage.
A hand fell on his shoulder.
Joe whirled, the sword raised, and saw Bridget Martin smiling at him, the wantonness in her expression advertising plainly that it made no difference whether or not her husband was sobbing in agony a few feet away; she was still up for some good, smoky sex.
“Tell me where Stevie is,” Joe demanded.
“When you kiss me,” Bridget said. She cupped his naked sex. Joe batted her hand away.
A wet arm snaked around his throat from behind.
“Goddammit,” Joe grunted, twisting in Mitch’s grip. With a hard shove, he sent the bleeding man stumbling away, but Mitch had no sooner regained his balance than he was back on the offensive.
“You stupid shit,” Joe muttered and swung the sword. The blade went into
Mitch’s head at a diagonal and got lodged there, between the nose and the upper jaw. Mitch squeaked once, let out a long, squelching fart, and crumpled.
The sword was wrenched from Joe’s grip. Though his gorge threatened to rebel at the sight of Mitch’s disfigured face, Joe reached down to retrieve his weapon. His hands were sweaty, and as he tried to tug the sword free, his fingers kept slipping.
“Joe,” a voice said.
Joe ignored Bridget, planted his foot on Mitch’s twitching head. The blade started to slide out with a vile scraping noise, but the voice spoke his name again, much louder this time. Involuntarily, Joe turned and stared at the woman framed in the doorway.
But it was no longer Bridget.
Chapter Twenty-One
The woman gazed at him. He knew it was still Bridget, yet there was something different about her, something fundamentally altered. And it wasn’t just the hairstyle, though that had undoubtedly changed—how she’d managed to do that while he had his back turned he hadn’t the slightest clue—but her facial structure was slightly more angular. Aquiline. And her green eyes…weren’t they just a trifle larger? Joe thought they were.
“I wanted you to see me as I was fifty years ago,” the woman who was not quite Bridget said.
Joe shook his head. “I need to find the boy.”
“You need to acknowledge there are powers beyond your understanding.”
“Look, just tell me—”
“Back in Kildare they called me Anna Blake, but when I settled in Boston, I changed my name.”
Joe swallowed, peered deep into the woman’s lambent green eyes. “Antonia?”
She smiled softly. “Yes.”
The Nightmare Girl Page 26