Lords of Salem
Page 28
At first, when she first entered the Palladium, her body did not seem to want to go where she wanted it to go. As Heidi tried to maneuver it into a seat near the back, next to where Herman was, something kept trying to turn her feet and steer her forward, down the aisle and toward the front of the stage. It was odd, but not too insistent, something that with a little effort she could control, but strange nonetheless and a little disturbing. Even once seated she still felt the pull, something calling to her to get up, to rise to her feet and walk down to where the other women were, circulating in front of the stage or sitting in the seats near the front. My sisters, she thought, and then thought: That’s weird. Why would I call them that?
And so she had to focus on staying put, on keeping from moving, and that was where other things began to slip. Herman asked her something and her mind thought of something witty to respond, but her voice didn’t say it. Her voice said something else, something it had answered to a question that he’d asked her before, when she’d been outside. Even when she’d said it outside it hadn’t felt like something she’d been saying but something being said through her. What was wrong with her?
Come to think of it, most of the way over she hadn’t felt like she was the one walking. One moment she’d been in her apartment and something strange and troubling had been happening. What was it? She’d been trying to get out, but she couldn’t get out. Each time she’d opened the door something had been wrong.
No, she must have dreamed that, right? That sort of thing wasn’t real, just simply couldn’t happen. She’d been having bad dreams lately. That was simply one of them.
But then again, she couldn’t remember leaving the house. She could remember little bits of the walk over, but only bits. Could remember, if she thought hard enough about it, talking to Herman outside, but there, too, it had been as if she was watching her body talk rather than being in the body itself.
And then, inside the theater, Herman said something else, obviously surprised by how she’d answered, and she felt her mind again composing a response but her tongue was already operating, already speaking, giving again a piece of language it had already given, something that was wrong for the situation. She tried to turn toward him and explain that something was wrong, that she couldn’t figure out what was happening to her, but her head refused to turn away from the stage. No matter how hard she tried, it remained fixed there, motionless, staring on. All she could do was desperately flick her eyes his way, try to get Herman to see the panic and fear in them. But before he saw it, the music started.
And then things got really strange. The draw of the stage on her body was nearly physical now, as if someone had looped a rope around her waist and was beginning to tug on it, slowly pulling it tighter and tighter. Or, more than that, much more: like someone had cut her belly open and pushed out loop after slick loop of her intestine and was using that as the rope, pulling on her own flesh to drag her forward. She had to hold on to her chair tightly with both hands just to stay put. She felt, too, as if her vision was becoming smaller, as if she had been looking through a mask and as she moved the mask farther away from her eyes the holes she looked through showed her less and less. She could see the stage but it felt distant now, as if she had shriveled up, receded into her own body.
And then her eyelids blinked, and with that blink something else blinked inside her. It was not just that she was receding into her own body, she realized. It was that something else—something that she had never seen, hadn’t realized was there—was growing, had switched places with her. So that while before it had been a hard tumor or fistula deep within her, now it filled her whole body and she was the tumor; she was the fistula.
Help me, she tried to say, but nothing came out.
The creature within her laughed. Something you’ve never seen? it said. Sweetheart, you created me. You brought me to life. And she saw flashing through her mind a cascade of images, of every way she had lied or cheated or stole, the dark days of using especially, her last time with Griff when she had curled up beside him and slept and then woke up and left, only later hearing he was dead. Did he die from that fix, because of her? No way to know. So that, above all, but also the innocent enough things that she had done that slowly had made her a sort of monster. That had made her into this.
But no, another part of her said, or tried to say. This wasn’t her. This was all a trick. It was something else trying to take control of her.
As the music started, the beating of a lone drum, she kept hold of the arms of the chair, and the thing inside her let her. No, it was happy to wait, to let her resist until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She suddenly realized it believed this holding back would tire her, make her more pliable, and reduce the last of her resistance. But still she couldn’t help holding on.
When the creature took charge, it took hold first of her throat and mouth. She was trying to scream Help me, but the creature kept the words back. Instead, it offered its own dark chant, a glorification of the Satanic majesty. She saw Herman give a start, confused by what she was saying, and she was confused, too, but she could not stop. And then the creature crept into her extremities, seizing control of her hands, slowly prying her hands away finger by finger from the arms of her seat. Then, tingling, it moved into her legs, tightened the muscles in them, made her stand up, and she was heading stiffly down the aisle, still trying to resist but hardly with any control at all now. She felt her arms groping her body, then slowly pulling pieces of her clothing off, her coat, then her sweater, then her shoes and socks, until all that was left was a sheer see-through shift. She looked down, saw that the Lords symbol was inscribed upon it, written in dark red paint or in blood. When had that happened?
“Heal me, Satan,” she heard her voice saying, as inside she screamed for help. “Heal me of these mortal wounds inflicted by the Christian faith. I hold in contempt all of its symbols of the Creator.”
She was among the other women now, swaying and dancing with them, her body no longer her own. The figures onstage all at once stripped off their masks, revealing them to be her landlord Lacy and Lacy’s two sisters, Megan and Sonny. But no, Lacy wasn’t Lacy, she realized, but Margaret Morgan. How could she not have seen it before? And these two other women, her “sisters,” were other witches from Salem’s past. No, not exactly—they were still Lacy and her sisters, too, but there was something else there now, and that was what she’d seen. Their eyes were crazed, and their smiles seemed painted on. They raised their hands and the flames around them rose. Fires, too, began erupting all around the theater, seeming to burst up spontaneously here and there. The floor began to vibrate, rumbling. The hall began to fill with smoke and she could hardly see. She could feel her eyes tear up and her throat burn, but the creature held her where she was, gripped her throat and prevented her from coughing or choking.
She heard Herman’s voice calling her name. No, she tried to say. Run. Save yourself. But nothing came out.
“Hear me, Lord,” said Margaret Morgan from the stage, her voice as clear as a bell. “I am ready to bring your blessed child to this world! It shall burst forth from the body of your enemy, Hawthorne!”
The three sisters kept playing. The volume of the music grew louder. More and more women began shedding their clothes and now they began to caress one another, writhing and moaning with ecstasy and lust. She, too, Heidi realized with a start, was doing the same, caressing the woman next to her, the creature inside of her slavering. She tried to stop but could not.
She felt her body pulled forward, forced to the edge of the stairs, led now not only by the creature within her but by the call of the witches on the stage as well. They brought her body up and held it there, forced her head to look up, look at them.
“Adelheid Elizabeth Hawthorne,” Morgan said, gazing down at her contemptuously. “Your forbear John Hawthorne cursed and tortured us in the name of the lamb. But now, through you, we shall have our revenge. We have claimed you. We have made you our own.”
All around her the air was black with smoke. The theater itself had changed as well, had begun at first to waver and shake and then to blur around the edges until it was no longer a room at all. The walls fell away or dissolved into black smoke and Heidi found herself feeling she was outside, in a clearing in a forest, the moon blazing overhead. Just behind her, close enough that she could feel its crackling heat, was a bonfire. Around her were the same women she had been standing with before. Many of them now wore animal skins and cloaks, though some of them had stripped these off and had let them fall in heaps on the ground to reveal their naked and grimy bodies painted with strange symbols and daubed in blood. Before her, the three women had lost any resemblance to Lacy or her sisters and had now become, fully and truly, the witches of Salem’s past.
“At last thou hast come!” Morgan said. “Hawthorne: I, Margaret Morgan, claim thee for my master the Lord Satan.”
Heidi tried to move but couldn’t, was barely being allowed to breathe. Margaret passed her hands back and forth, inscribing in the air a symbol that momentarily seemed to glow and flicker.
“Blessed be a thousand times more than the flesh and blood of life,” she intoned. “For you have not been harvested by human hands nor did any human creature mill and grind you. Take this noble disciple! Take her, my dark savior! Bring her home!”
Around her the other women, caressing one another and writhing, suddenly began to hiss. They began instead to attack one another, rending and tearing. Some of them groped on the ground for rocks or stones or bits of weapons and when they found them they set about trying to bash one another’s skulls in. They shrieked and yelled, and here and there Heidi caught a glimpse not of the hillock and the bonfire but of the inside of a dilapidated theater.
She watched the carnage go on around her. Still she did not—could not—move.
“It was our Lord Satan who took you to the mill of the grave,” said Morgan from the top of her hillock, “so that you should thus become the bread and blood of revelation and revulsion.”
The two women beside Morgan reached into their robes and removed glittering knives. These they pressed into the hands of two of the struggling women. The noises grew louder and more terrible, as the women became even more violent and the two chosen women began to gash and stab anyone coming close to them. For a moment the creature within her released her and she thought she had control again. She turned her head and tried to move away, but no, it had her again, and now she was watching Herman pushing and fighting his way through the carnage and mob scene, trying to get to her. No, it hadn’t released her, she realized, but it was letting her see Herman, letting her watch what was going to happen to him.
He darted closer to her and she saw a woman’s knife pass close to his neck, almost cut through it. His jacket had been torn and his face was bloody, but still he kept coming. Tough fucker. He took a knife through the hand, but didn’t stop. A moment later he was there, beside her, close enough that he could reach his arms out and grab her. No, Herman, she tried to say again. Save yourself. But he yanked her to him. Picking her up, shouting, he began to run for his life.
Goddamn, it was some weird shit, and then they’d set fires out in the house, too, likely to burn the place down. And then the whole place shook, and there was a pretty good chance the whole building was going to collapse. He was ready to get the fuck out of there. But he had to get Heidi. He hadn’t spent all these years trying to save Heidi to lose her now. He didn’t know how much she was in on it or what sort of deprogramming it was going to take, but hell no, he wasn’t going to abandon her now. That wasn’t how he was built.
So he started up the aisle, coughing and pushing through the smoke. He was going to grab her and pull her away, get her out of there and talk some sense into her. The show could go on for all he cared, as long as he wasn’t part of it anymore. All he had to do was grab her.
And then he started seeing what was going on. The women had gone crazy. First they’d been all caresses and lovey-dovey, but now they were bat-shit crazy, trying to scratch out each other’s eyes. Some weird shit was going on, he understood, but he didn’t realize how weird until he saw one of the women take a knife and plunge it deep into another woman’s chest. Holy shit, he thought.
The woman was dead, blood at first spurting from the wound and then, as she died, slowing, simply oozing. The woman with the knife had already gone on to someone else, had sliced open another woman’s cheek. But the weird thing was the woman being stabbed didn’t look upset about it. No, she looked ecstatic.
Fuck me, thought Herman. They’d drugged him. That was what it must be. This couldn’t be really happening. Something in the smoke was messing with him and making him see things that weren’t there. And indeed, as he continued to look, the old peeling walls of the theater seemed to grow transparent and thinner until he could see through them.
He closed his eyes and when he opened them he was no longer in the theater at all but outside, in a forest, in the open air. In front of him a huge bonfire crackled and on the other side of it raged the carnage: the women struggling with one another, killing one another. Beyond that were the three musicians, seemingly unperturbed. And Heidi: motionless, and so far untouched.
He made a run for it, skirting the edge of the fire and pushing his way through the women still standing, punching and knocking his way through when they tried to grab ahold of him. A knife struck at his side but was knocked away by his leather jacket, which it tore. Another jabbed right into his hand, and it hurt like hell, but he managed to kick the woman in the face and knock her down. And then he had reached Heidi. She was still standing motionless, unmoving. What was wrong with her? He wrapped his arms around her and took off running.
In a moment he was around the fire and had left the clearing. He threaded his way through the trees, fighting still with the dense black smoke that billowed off the bonfire, trying not to get lost, when suddenly one of the crazed women sprang out of the darkness and came at him, trying to claw his face away. He struck her hard in the face with his own forehead, cracking down, and she fell back. He kept running, but a moment later with a hiss she had sprung onto his back and by damn she had bit him, had torn a chunk out of his neck.
He screamed, stumbled. He let Heidi fall and reached behind to grab hold of the crazed, thrashing woman’s throat. She flailed ropily, almost like a snake in his hands, scratching and clawing wildly as Herman, blood pumping from his neck, squeezed harder and harder.
There was a snap and she jerked once and went limp. Herman let her fall from his hands. He stumbled forward, attempted to pick up Heidi, and then sank to his knees. He reached up and tried to staunch the wound in his neck but the woman had bitten into the jugular and the blood kept spurting through his fingers.
In front of him, Heidi calmly gathered herself, rose from the ground, and stood. She remained there, motionless, staring down at him.
Herman lifted his head. Her eyes, he saw, were white, without pupils, as if she were blind, or as if there was nobody home. She stared down with a beatific smile on her face. Then she reached slowly out and touched his face.
“Heidi,” he said. “Heidi,” he repeated. He tried to speak further but blood began to drip from his mouth. Slowly, he fell and lay faceup on the ground, staring at Heidi. His vision grew dim and hazy, and before he knew for certain what was happening he was dead.
For a moment Heidi stared down at the body, and then she turned and faded from sight into the smoke. She walked with a slow and measured tread through the broken bodies and the few woman who still stabbed and tortured the bodies of the dead. But Heidi they ignored. And as she passed, they seemed to recoil a little and offer gestures of obeis
ance. They stopped their slaughter and followed her.
From deep within her body, Heidi watched it all happen. She could see it all, smell and hear and experience everything around her, but she was powerless to do anything to stop it, and she had no control over the body that now held her. She moved forward toward the leader of the witches, Margaret Morgan. She took her place in the center of the circle, facing the witch.
Around her the remaining women gathered. They bowed and reached out to touch her, kissing her feet and the edge of her robe.
“Take me… take me to hell,” Heidi heard her voice say. “I am your godless whore.”
Morgan nodded. She took up a knife and grabbed one of the remaining women by the hair, pulling her to her feet. The woman moaned in pleasure as Morgan drew the knife across her throat, spraying Heidi’s face and body with blood.
“By the blood of the damned, I do baptize thee and accept thee into hell,” the head of the witches said. “Christ, I spit upon you and I cast you down! Satan, we live on the blood of your oppressors!”
And with that the women started up again, howling and stabbing and assaulting one another, kissing each other and then killing each other, not caring if the person they stabbed or embraced was alive or dead. They thrashed and bit and tore, and when there was no corpse or other person close before them, they tore away at their own bodies, stabbing themselves, trying to bite off their own fingers, snarling and growling.
Then suddenly, in an instant, they stopped and fell into silence. As if one individual, they froze and waited in silence.
The flames of the bonfire began to surge upward to a great height and when they fell again, a shadowy figure standing eight feet tall stood within them.