Then he saw the trail of blood leading up to it.
But Sam Markham did not pause. And without thinking he rushed up the stairs, his hammer poised to strike even as he assured himself that he would have to go back to the workroom for something bigger to break down the door.
Chapter 87
Cindy cried for help again and again as Edmund carried her down the hallway—her screams echoing in the emptiness as he kicked open a door and threw her down on the bed. The room was dark, but a shaft of light cut across the bed from somewhere to her right—the outline of a doorway and the wall of another hallway beyond.
Without thinking she scrambled toward it—then thwack!—a hard backhand across her cheekbone sent her flying onto the bed, the room at once turning from black to bright orange pain.
“Edmund, please,” Cindy cried, holding her face. “Don’t do this!”
Edmund passed through the shaft of light and disappeared back into the shadows—a belt unbuckling and the sound of it hitting the floor. Cindy screamed, but in a flash Edmund was on top of her, his breath hot and foul on her mouth as she struggled against his nakedness. He was incredibly strong, and with one hand he pinned her wrists above her head while the other tore at the zipper of her jeans. She could hardly breathe.
“No,” she managed to squeak out, and Edmund stopped.
“Not here,” he whispered. “Not on Mama’s bed.”
He left her, and Cindy gasped for air—had little time to move before she felt the cold barrel of his gun under her jaw. She was being lifted off the mattress, was being pushed toward the light.
“Carry that rope for me,” Edmund growled. Then the light, the hallway—not a hallway, Cindy realized, but a long and narrow closet with stairs at the end—rushed past her in a blur. In her terror, she seemed to arrive at the top of the stairs in a single bound. But what she saw there sent her spinning, made her legs feel like electric spaghetti.
It was Bradley Cox.
I HAVE RETURNED! George Kiernan cried out from the theater in her mind, and Cindy felt as if she would vomit. But there was no time to vomit—not even time to scream—for Edmund scooped her up and hurled her across the room.
She landed on the floor in a crack of crushing pain. Her elbow, her left arm had to be broken—but she could not cry out, her mouth twitching like a fish out of water as her lungs went into spasm.
Edmund came for her again, set down his gun on the floor, and stood over her roaring loudly. It was the sheer terror of that roar that finally brought her wind back; but before Cindy could scream, Edmund Lambert was upon her, tearing off her blouse.
“Edmund, please,” she whimpered, trying to rake her nails across his cheek. She felt no pain now, could even move both her arms, but Edmund Lambert was too quick and too strong for her—only snarled and grabbed her by the wrists and pinned her hands behind her head as he buried his face between her breasts.
Then she felt his teeth sink into her flesh.
Cindy thought for the briefest of moments that she had been teleported outside her body—watched the scene below as if from the attic ceiling, and thought it strange when she heard the girl on the floor howl like a coyote. But then came the pain, and in a lightning strike of unimaginable agony she was back inside her body and staring up at the twisted visage of her attacker.
He was chewing.
Dear God! she cried out in her mind, the blood running warm across her chest. He’s going to eat me alive!
“My body is the doorway,” Edmund said. And then he swallowed.
Cindy’s muscles went rigid and the room began to spin. And amid a swirling kaleidoscope of pain, she could hear a young woman begging God to make him stop.
But as Edmund Lambert sank his teeth again and again into her flesh, a voice that sounded a lot like her father’s told her that God was busy elsewhere.
Chapter 88
The taste of the goddess’s flesh was indescribably delectable—sent shock waves throughout his entire body—and brought with it the chorus of the god’s return.
C’est mieux d’oublier! C’est mieux d’oublier!
The General saw it all so clearly now. There was no need for the lion’s head. The Prince had made that clear when he came through the doorway—a flash of revelation that was for the General both momentary and endless.
And now the Prince had transported them both back in time. No, the General understood—outside time. They were still in the attic, yes, but also in the Underworld palace of Ereshkigal, their surroundings both familiar and strange—the stone pillars, the high vaulted ceilings, the lush fabrics that adorned the goddess’s bed chamber. And there on the other side of the room was the bathtub in which the goddess had let the Prince glimpse her nakedness for the first time.
The General could feel the eyes of the dead, the eyes of the other gods on his back. But his mother was there, too—hanging by her neck from the rafters, watching him. And there was the little boy looking up at her, smiling with under- standing as the lines of the impaled stretched out along the road as far as he could see. There was no fear now. Only the end of the road; only the temple at Kutha and the hordes of worshippers calling his name; the battlefields and the souls of the impaled rising in the smoke to join with him in the stars.
C’est mieux d’oublier! C’est mieux d’oublier!
The twinkling stars—so many of them now that the sky looked silver—swirled around them and penetrated their flesh. The General could feel them inside and out; and suddenly he understood that the stars were not twinkling—they were trembling with fear!
I have returned! the entire universe seemed to cry, and all at once it was laid out before him; everything one in the same now amid the unimaginable bliss of total understanding—time, place, even his body did not exist for him anymore. Everything had been given up for the Prince; the scales had fallen from his eyes and the Prince had rewarded him with the vision of the gods. Soon his flesh would fall away, too. Soon, the doorway would be open for him, and he would join with his mother in spirit—a sense of joining that he did not understand until now.
“C’est mieux d’oublier,” he heard her say, and the General understood that the Prince had been the true path all along. Ereshkigal was the enemy. Ereshkigal had tried to trick them. And the Prince had brought her to the attic, to the threshold of the doorway to devour her into his spirit just as he had devoured Edmund Lambert and his mother; just as he most certainly would devour the General. The nine and the three, the return, the dots connected to make a new equa-tion—an equation that the General could not have possibly understood until now.
“My body is the doorway,” said the General, said the Prince.
And then he bit into her again.
Chapter 89
Markham closed his fingers around the cold steel knob and pushed. The door cracked open. The Impaler, in his haste, had forgotten to lock it. Thank God!
He stepped cautiously from the cellar into a pool of blood. There was blood everywhere—on the walls; footprints and a thick smear tracking away from the cellar door as if someone had been dragged across the kitchen floor. Not Schaap, he thought. No, this mess leads to someone else!
He took another step, wincing as his shoes peeled from the linoleum—then he heard a dull thwump from above his head. He stopped and listened, then saw the handguns on the kitchen counter: FBI issue, .40-caliber Glock 22s. His own and Andy Schaap’s.
Markham traded his hammer for the guns, checked the ammo, and followed the blood trail from the kitchen into the hallway. Now he could hear whimpering and squealing coming from the second floor. He mounted the staircase—when suddenly a deafening roar sent a shiver through his veins.
“Please, God, no!” the woman screamed, and Markham flew up the stairs like a ghost—kept his ears trained on the cacophony of crying and growling and roaring and quickly negotiated his way through the darkened upstairs hallway.
He ended up in one of the bedrooms; saw light coming from the closet and went for i
t. He stood there for a moment, panting in the doorway as he gazed down the long, narrow passage to the door at the far end—open, light streaming downwards, and more stairs. They were in the attic.
Markham swallowed hard—could hear muffled sobs and grunting and then the word “Ereshkigal” spoken in that low, growling voice.
Ereshkigal, he thought. The Nergal myth—the rape of the goddess in the Underworld!
In the next moment he was bounding up the stairs with his pistols thrust out before him like an outlaw. The old boards creaked noisily beneath his feet, but what greeted him in the attic froze him dead in his tracks.
It was a young man—naked, bloody, and impaled on a stake that had been driven into the attic floor. There was a large, gaping hole in the ceiling, and the young man’s neck had been broken—his head tied back so that his lifeless eyes stared toward the stars. On his chest, in streaks of blood still shiny, the words I HAVE RETURNED had been carved into his flesh.
Markham, his veins running cold, digested the entirety of the scene almost at once—but it was still enough time for the Impaler to react.
Another scream, and at the far end of the attic, on the other side of the impaled young man, Markham saw move-ment—a blur of bloody-sweaty muscles that glistened in the light from the single overhead bulb.
The Impaler growled and gnashed his teeth.
Then he fired.
The first shot burst through the dead man’s side—missed Markham’s head by inches, and buried itself in the wall behind him. Markham dropped to his stomach and slid back- wards down the stairs—returned fire blindly as two more bullets whizzed past him. The Impaler kept firing—three more shots and the woman began screaming hysterically. Then the sound of movement—creaking and something falling—and Markham peeked his head over the top step.
A ladder lay on the attic floor.
The Impaler was gone.
Markham sprang to his feet—could hear footsteps above his head as he covered himself with his pistols. He skirted around the impaled young man, around the hole in the roof, and headed for the girl. She was on the floor, naked and sobbing and curled up in the fetal position near a stack of trunks—her face, her arms and legs, almost her entire body a glistening crimson.
Markham, his eyes darting back and forth from the hole in the ceiling, was about to speak, when two more shots from the Impaler rained down on him. He dove to the floor, knocked over an old dressing dummy and covered the young woman. More bullets buried themselves in the dummy’s heavy torso, while others popped and splintered the exposed wood beams on the wall behind him.
A brief silence, and then Markham heard the Impaler scrambling across the roof. He fired both pistols, sending a trail of bullets through the attic ceiling in the direction of the footsteps—then a loud thump at the other end of the house.
Markham paused, wondering for a microsecond how many bullets he had left. Fully loaded, his Glocks held sixteen rounds apiece. If the Impaler was using his M9 Beretta—well, Sam Markham couldn’t remember how many rounds that model held.
“Please, help me,” the young woman whimpered.
“Are you wounded?” Markham asked her. “Are you shot?”
“It was Edmund Lambert,” she sobbed. “It was Edmund….”
Markham took off his jacket and covered her. She had bite marks on her neck and shoulders; large patches of flesh missing from her breasts, too. She was bleeding badly, but he could tell for the time being she was going to be okay. She would have to be.
“What’s your name?” Markham asked.
“Cindy Smith.”
“Sam Markham, FBI,” he said, checking his pistols. “Hold my jacket against your chest to slow the bleeding. You’re going to be fine.”
“It was Edmund Lambert! He killed Bradley—”
“I need you to find a phone, Cindy Smith,” Markham said, tucking the pistols into the small of his back. “Call 911. Wait until I’m gone, then—”
“Don’t leave me!” the girl cried, reaching for his leg—but Markham ignored her and replaced the ladder.
“I need you to be strong,” he said. “Call 911—the kitchen. I saw a phone in the kitchen downstairs. You understand me?”
“No—he’ll come back for me!”
Markham stepped onto the ladder. “All right, stay put,” he shouted as he climbed. “You’ll be safe here. I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.”
“Don’t leave me!”
But Markham was already at the top of the ladder. He poked his gun out of the hole and stepped up onto the roof as the girl went on screaming beneath him.
He was in the middle of nowhere; didn’t know which way to turn—the silvery farmland stretching out for what seemed like miles in every direction—when suddenly he heard the sound of a car starting behind him.
Markham scrambled over the roof peak and headed to the other side of the house—jumped onto the porch overhang just as the headlights of the Impaler’s pickup began backing away from him down the driveway.
Markham leaped from the porch roof and fired after the truck—broke a headlight on the first shot, then heard the windshield shatter and the hiss-pop of the radiator bursting as he emptied one of the pistols. He let it fall in the dirt and began firing with the other.
He’s going to get away, he thought—when unexpectedly the truck spun out and plowed backwards into one of the old tobacco sheds.
The weathered boards crumbled down and bounced off the hood as the truck came to a stop—its one remaining headlight cutting through the swirling dust like a laser beam. Markham ran for it, his stomach in his throat, as the old Ford’s engine whined painfully, its tires spinning in the dirt.
He fired one last time—heard a loud crack—and then everything cut off into a long, menacing hiss.
Markham slowed as he drew closer to the shed; took cover behind some remaining wall planks and checked his pistol.
The clip was empty. Only one bullet left in the chamber.
He pointed his gun at the driver’s side door and shouted, “FBI! Come out with your hands up!” His heart was pounding. He was a dead man if the Impaler called his bluff and decided to shoot it out with him. But there was nothing, no sound at all except for the hissy sputtering of the F-150’s radiator.
Markham approached the driver’s side door, leveled his gun, and quickly peered inside. The pickup’s interior light was on, and he could see blood on the front seat—but the passenger door was open, the Impaler nowhere in sight.
Markham dropped his head and ducked behind the truck bed for cover. Silence—only the crickets, his breathing and the faint hissing of the truck’s radiator dying out—when suddenly, he heard what sounded like boards cracking inside the shed.
He’s trying to break out the back, Markham thought. He craned his neck—peered over the truck bed into the dark- ness—and saw the outline of the missing boards against the moonlight. No sign of the Impaler.
He squatted back down—closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “Come out with your hands up!” he shouted, frightened and feeling foolish. “There’s nowhere for you to run now, Edmund Lambert!”
You sure that’s his name? a voice taunted in his head. Edmund Lambert. You sure that’s what the girl said?
Another board—Crack!—then a scraping sound.
Markham swallowed hard, and then he was moving, covering himself as he circled around to the rear of the tobacco shed.
C rack!
Markham stopped, listening.
Silence again, only his breathing.
He sidled along the wall—thought he heard a thumping from around the corner—and stopped short at the rear of the shed. He could see the field stretching out in the distance beyond the trees; could hear nothing now but his heart throbbing in his ears. The Impaler was on the other side of the wall—he was sure of it—and in a burst of adrenaline, he wheeled around the corner and dropped to his knees.
Nothing.
Markham rose to his feet, saw where
the Impaler had broken through the rear of the shed, and moved away from the wall. There was an old oak tree only a few yards away. The Impaler might be behind it—but he hadn’t heard any footsteps in the dry grass.
And then Markham understood.
He turned just in time to see the Impaler jumping from the low roof of the overhang. Instinctively he raised his gun, but the Impaler came down on him hard, his forearm slamming into Markham’s face as the gun went off.
Then they fell together to the ground.
Chapter 90
Now he is Edmund Lambert again, a boy on the road holding hands between the General and the Prince. He knows they are there but makes no attempt to look at them; understands that he is too small to see their faces, and keeps his eyes fixed on the light in the distance as they escort him past the lines of the impaled.
But the boy’s steps are their steps. Giant steps. And before the boy can wonder at it he has reached the temple doors at Kutha.
The Prince and the General leave him. The boy feels their hands slip away.
Now he is alone. Now there is only his mother, standing with her arms outstretched high above him at the top of the stairs—a silhouette in the temple doorway with the light of a billion stars behind her.
“Be a good boy and carry that rope for me,” she says.
“It’s not my fault,” the boy replies. “I only did what they told me.”
“C’est mieux d’oublier,” another voice echoes from somewhere, and his mother beckons him, disappearing slowly into the light.
Now the boy is climbing the stairs—black stairs, like rows of forgotten pictures in a yearbook—when all at once, it seems, he is standing in the doorway.
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