by Rob Zombie
She switched on the TV and started surfing channels, but nothing was on. Absolutely nothing. She left it on one of the shopping networks, which was running an ad for huggable hangers. Why the hell would you want to hug a hanger? she wondered. Turns out they were fuzzy for some reason, and that the claim was that clothes would never slip off them. A woman wearing a pair of ugly slacks kept demonstrating them, showing how even if there were a major earthquake your clothing wouldn’t fall off the hooks. They came in packs of twenty-four, and you could get them in sage, or bright gold, or black, or silver, or turquoise, or…
“And to complete your collection,” said a strangely distorted voice, “meat hooks.”
Her head snapped up. On the screen now was a bald man wearing an eye patch, half of his head covered with hideous burn scars. He was stripped to the waist and was grotesquely muscled, tattoos with intertwined demons winding over his chest and arms. In one hand he held a meat hook by its wooden handle. His other hand gestured around it, outlining the blade. The inside of the hook had sharp, smaller barbs lined backward along it.
“Now, most meat hooks, you get them hooked into a good chunk of flesh and wave them around a little and the meat just slides right off,” said the man. His voice seemed to be subtly slowing down and speeding up, as if she were listening to a warped record. “But not this little baby. Once you get this one in, it just isn’t going to come out.”
He walked over across the stage, the camera slowly following him to a door marked five. He slowly opened it and entered. Inside was a poorly lit room where a man sat with his arms tied behind his back and his legs duct taped to a padded vinyl chair. His hair was rumpled and his face red, and duct tape had been stretched around his mouth to gag him, too. It took her a minute to recognize that it was Chip. Her boss was famous! He was on TV!
As the tattooed man approached him, Chip struggled and tried to speak through the gag, his eyes vivid with fear.
“Now, take a situation like this,” said the tattooed man. “We’ve all been there. You’ve got a man tied up in a chair. You’re not quite ready to dismember him, but at the same time he’s at one side of your deserted factory space and you want to drag him over to the other side of your deserted factory space because you’ve got your dismembering and other torture equipment over there and, plus, the video camera is already set up. It’s just more convenient to have him over there.”
He bent over a little, pressed his hand against his back. “But your back has been acting up on you,” he claimed, looking straight into the camera. “Not too bad, not enough so that you’re going to have to let this guy sit for a few days, but enough that you don’t want to have to bend over to pull him.”
He raised the meat hook in the air, and the camera closed in on it, held it in close-up.
“Ordinary meat hook and a guy struggling as much as this little bastard’s going to be in just a moment and it’ll slip out maybe five, maybe ten times on your way over,” his voice said from off-camera. “You’ll have to put so many holes in the guy that by the time you get over there that it’s hardly even worth it—he may even be dead by the time you arrive. And you won’t have captured any of it on film. What fun is that?”
He put one hand on Chip’s triceps, caressing it, examining it.
“But a meat hook like this,” he said. “Well, it’s special.” He raised it high in the air and with one sharp, hard movement drove it through Chip’s upper arm. Chip screamed into the gag, his eyes rolling. Holy shit, thought Heidi. “Now that,” he said, grabbing the handle and jerking on it, “that’s a meat hook that’s secure.”
She jerked awake. Shit, she thought. More nightmares.
Almost without thinking, she reached for her lighter.
Friday
Chapter Forty-three
It was close to noon before Francis got out of bed. Once up, he puttered around the house a while. He looked for Alice, but she’d left a note on the counter saying she had an appointment with her hairdresser and wouldn’t be back for a few hours.
Hairdresser, he thought, somewhat amused. How could a woman go revel in B horror movies by night and go to her hairdresser by day? But maybe that was why he liked her.
He looked for the paper but it wasn’t in the kitchen, not in the living room either. Maybe she’d taken it with her, but that didn’t seem like something Alice would do. No, she knew he liked to read his paper in the morning. Admittedly, it wasn’t actually morning anymore, but to him it still was. In a way.
He poured himself some cereal and sat down at the table to eat it, then looked around for the paper again. Maybe she’d forgotten to bring it in? He opened the door, but it wasn’t on his mat. Sighing, he went back inside and put on a shirt and some trousers and then went down the stairs in his slippers, but it wasn’t downstairs. And when he opened the door and looked out on the porch, it wasn’t there either.
So he trudged back upstairs, irritated now, and put on his shoes and jacket, grabbed his wallet. A little walk wouldn’t hurt him, he told himself. True, usually he took a walk at some point in the day, but why should he have to take it before he’d read his paper?
He walked out the front door and down the street. The low autumn sun was out and shining. It was still cold outside, but not as cold as it had been a few days before. It was completely bearable. He walked down the street, through beautiful historic Salem. A little trash-ridden, admittedly, but still beautiful. He crossed the street and moved toward the downtown—probably likely to be crowded with tourists, considering it was a Friday and that Halloween wasn’t all that far off, but he knew at least he could get a paper there. He’d just try to avoid all the somewhat irritating witch tourism. Or try, at least, not to let it make him angry.
He followed Mason Street as it curved along the perimeter of Mack Park. At the edge of the park he came to a Labrador retriever who had been tied off to a No Parking sign. The poor animal had gotten tangled up so much that he could hardly move.
“Are you all right, boy?” asked Francis. The dog just wagged its tail. He looked around for its owner, but didn’t see anybody—probably off in the park somewhere. But if that was the case, why not take the dog along? Francis let his arm fall limp and brought it close to the dog, watching for signs of aggression, ears dropping back or lip starting to curl, but the dog just sniffed his hand and licked it.
“Maybe I can untangle you,” he said. “How would that be?”
He knelt down and helped guide the dog’s legs free of the leash until he was doing all right again. One of the dog’s haunches was a little bloody and at first Francis was worried, looking for a wound, but no, there was nothing there. The dog wasn’t cut; something had gotten blood on the dog. Maybe it had been in a fight with another dog? It didn’t seem like the fighting type.
The owner hadn’t come back by the time the dog was untangled. He looked at the dog’s collar, but there wasn’t an address, only a phone number and a name: Steve. Steve, what kind of name was that for a dog? He stood up, patted the dog on its head. Steve just wagged. Well, if it was still here when he came back, maybe he’d take it to the house and call the number on the tag. He chuckled. That would certainly surprise Alice, him showing up with a dog.
He continued down Flint Street and crossed over the river and the local train tracks, then from there went left on Essex Street until he was at the Salem Library. For a moment he thought he’d remembered wrong, but no, there it was, partly hidden behind the bicycle rack: a newspaper vending machine.
He put his coins in and opened the gate, took the top newspaper. He’d folded it up, put it under his arm, and was starting to walk away when he suddenly stopped stock-still, wondering if he’d actually seen what he’d glimpsed. He stood there on the sidewalk and unfolded the paper. The headline read:
SECOND NIGHT OF RITUAL MURDER IN SALEM
“Oh my God,” he said aloud, and read on.
For the second time this week, Salem was rocked by murder.
Virginia Williams
, 51, a lifelong resident of Salem, has been arrested for the murder of her husband, Keith Williams, 60.
“I don’t know what came over me,” responded Virginia Williams to this reporter’s question, “Why did you do it, Virginia?” She continued: “I mean, I really don’t. I was resenting him or whatever and then suddenly things got out of hand. But I don’t even remember that happening. It was like I just woke up in a pool of blood.”
Mrs. Williams is alleged to have repeatedly stabbed her husband with a knife, and then to have mutilated and dismembered the body.
Friends of the Williams’s report that Keith allegedly had a history of abusive behavior. Said one, who wished to remain unidentified, “I’m not surprised. He sure had it coming.”
This murder is remarkably similar to the murder of Jarrett Parsons by Maisie Mather earlier this week. Police have speculated that there is a link between the two murders.
Said Chief of Police Jon Greenhalgh, “We have no doubt that a connection exists between the two murders, and even that Mather and Williams conspired in the killings.”
When asked to be more specific, he mentioned that both women had carved the same symbol into their own chests before committing the crime.
According to another member of the police department who wished to remain anonymous, there is clear evidence that these murders are ritual in nature.
Police are not releasing more specifics at this time.
Another murder, thought Francis, and this one identified as ritual. Or rather as a second night of ritual murder, so that means the first was ritual as well. Williams, though—it was a common enough name, but not a name readily identified with the witch trials. Maybe Maisie Mather had just been a coincidence. But still, it was strange. And he was willing to bet that the symbol they’d carved in their chests was a symbol he’d seen before: the Lords symbol.
Lost in thought, he hurried home.
Chapter Forty-four
Steve?” Heidi called. She was lying slumped on the bed, a little confused. “Steve?” Where was that dog? She’d had him just a minute ago, had been walking him, and then things got a little blurry, a little fuzzy, and well, she was back here now, wasn’t she, and so Steve must be around here as well. That made sense. No, Steve was a good dog. He was around here somewhere. She didn’t have to worry about him. He probably was just in the kitchen or something, sulking. And she was okay now, too. All she needed was another hit or two, something to calm her down, and now she felt great.
The TV was on. On the screen a group of ballerinas ran down a staircase and fluttered by a giant devil’s head with a gaping mouth large enough to swallow any of them. They clung to one another in fear. She pressed the channel changer and with a click the TV switched to local news, a picture of a woman in handcuffs being led into the police station. She pressed it again and the channel changed to the opening credits for Bewitched.
Fuck me! thought Heidi, giving a weird laugh. I was just looking at your statue! She tried to smile, but it didn’t come off right. There was a dead look in her eyes and her mouth had gone slack. She stared at the screen, hardly seeming to see it. Meanwhile, her hand was feeling around next to her, first on the blankets and then on the bedside table. When it returned, it was holding her lighter and a small piece of tinfoil, and a glass tube.
She shook a little onto the tinfoil, then grabbed the square by one edge. She flicked the lighter on. Her eyes still on the TV she fired up the tinfoil, then sucked in the fumes with the glass tube. God, it felt great. She held the smoke in until she could feel her blood slowing down, beating slower and slower in her ears. Her vision had begun to go dark around the edges, and then she exhaled and fell back against the pillows.
How had she lived without this? Now she felt good again. Now she was sure everything was going to be okay.
From the other room she heard a knocking at her front door. She ignored it, began to drift off. When the knocking came again, she slowly lifted her head and gathered her lighter and the drugs. She felt like she was moving underwater, or in a dream. Thinking about dreams gave her, deep below the blissful surface she was riding on now, a stab of anxiety. Slowly, she slid the drawer of the bedside table open and dropped everything into it. Closing it was a little harder, but she managed.
The knocking came at the door again. Mumbling to herself, she managed to get her legs off the bed and her feet under her and wove her way across the room and into the living room. From there, she could move along the wall of records, dragging her hand over the milk crates to get to the kitchen and from there to the door.
The door turned out to be harder to open than she remembered. It was like they had made it more complicated since the last time she had had to use it. She played with the knob for a bit but nothing was happening. Finally, she remembered she had a peephole and slid her face up to it, found it, managed to get an eye to it. Outside was her landlord Lacy, and to either side of her those weird sisters of hers. What were their names again? The blonde was Sonny. She remembered that because the sun was yellow and Sonny’s hair was, too. The other was named Morgan or Megan or Mona or something like that. Lacy was holding something, a small tray with a teapot and cups on it.
She moved her head back and tried the door again. Oh yeah, locked. She turned the dead bolt and now it opened just fine.
She swung the door open. “Hey,” she said, her voice hoarse.
Lacy gave a big smile. “I might be wrong, but I had a feeling that maybe you could use some company,” she said.
Heidi gave a slow smile back to her. Wow, she thought, she can’t even tell that I’m high. Or maybe she doesn’t care. “I definitely could,” she said, struggling to keep them in focus.
And then she just stood there. It took Sonny coming forward and pushing her gently to the side for her to understand that she was blocking the door.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the teapot.
“This?” said Lacy. “Oh, just a little something I put together. Calming tea, I guess you could call it.”
“Calming tea,” said Heidi, and nodded.
Sonny suddenly popped into her vision. “But more important,” she said, “there are chocolate chip scones.”
“Nice,” said Heidi. “You ladies know just what I need.”
“Indeed we do,” said the other sister, the one with the name she couldn’t remember. She was the strange one, Heidi remembered, but she couldn’t quite remember what made her strange. She took Heidi by the arm. “Now, let’s see about making you comfortable,” the woman said.
Chapter Forty-five
Francis had spent the day wondering about the killing, going through the meager article, looking for clues. He pulled down book after book, trying to find a link between the name Williams and the witch trials, or something to tie Virginia Williams in some way to Maisie Mather. But there didn’t seem to be anything. The two women were different ages, lived in different parts of town, seemed to be from different social classes as well. But the link had to be there; he was sure of it.
Alice at first wouldn’t talk to him about it, and then when he finally got her to listen she wasn’t much help at first.
“It’s not healthy, Francis, getting obsessed over a murder,” she claimed. “You should just leave it alone.”
But he couldn’t leave it alone. That was the problem. There had to be a connection; even the police knew that. And everything about it pointed back to the witch trials.
“Maybe you wouldn’t think that if you weren’t a historian of the witch trials,” suggested Alice.
“Maybe not,” admitted Francis. “But that’s what I am. There’s got to be a historical link between the two women. There’s a captain mentioned named Williams, but he wasn’t involved in the trials as far as I can tell.”
“You’re looking for the name Williams?” said Alice, surprised.
“Yes, of course,” Francis had said. “Shouldn’t I be?”
“Oh, honey, isn’t that her married name?” said
Alice. “Shouldn’t you be looking at her maiden name?”
Yes, of course, how could he have been so stupid? He must be getting old to have made such a ridiculously dumb mistake. But when he managed to track down her maiden name online in the marriage archives of the Salem News, it didn’t tell him anything either.
It was only after poring over dozens of reference books that it occurred to him that her maiden name might not be the right name either. With Alice’s help, he managed to find a website called FIND YOUR FAMILY TREE and after having paid a so-called nominal fee he had Virginia Williams’s family history. He followed the tree back step by step until he came to the name Magnus.
“I’ll be fucked,” he said. “Dean Magnus.”
There was the link. And yes, it was about the witch trials after all. Which meant that Adelheid Hawthorne, as a descendant of Hawthorne’s, was no doubt in a whole hell of a lot of trouble.
“But you don’t believe in witches,” Alice said.
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t.” He pondered. “But it could be something else. There could be a logical explanation for it.”
“What sort of explanation?”
“I don’t know,” he said evasively. He was having a hard time reconciling his satisfaction of having discovered the link with his skepticism about witches. “Somebody setting these women up, maybe. Manipulating them in some way. I’ll know when I see it.”
Chapter Forty-six
On the television Elizabeth Montgomery twitched her nose and her husband found himself unable to get off the couch. It was like he’d been glued to it. The studio audience laughed.
They were watching the TV in Heidi’s bedroom. Heidi had tried to suggest that they could sit in the living room, but one of the three women had said, “Nonsense, dear, we should go where you’ll be most comfortable,” and they’d ushered her through the apartment and back to her bedroom. Sonny had helped her into the bed and fluffed the pillows behind her, and then had taken a seat beside her. Lacy had served Heidi tea and had put the tea service on the floor next to the bed. Then she’d climbed into the bed on the other side of her. It made her feel cozy. The other sister—Megan, it turned out her name was; why had she thought it was Morgan?—brought in a kitchen chair and sat off to one side.