by David Beers
The woman’s mouth twitched as she spoke, the corner of her lip looking like it wanted to pull back and touch her ear.
“I’ll come with you,” Patricia said. “You don’t have to hurt me or my son.”
The woman’s head cocked sideways. Her eyebrows started dancing just like the corner of her lip.
“Hurt your son? I’d never hurt him. I’ll only hurt you if you try to hurt him, Mrs. Windsor.”
Patricia watched as the thin woman walked toward her. She said a small prayer and then closed her eyes, hoping the panic she’d kept at bay for Christian wouldn’t now rise.
“I-I’m sorry about this,” Lucy said, and she was. She didn’t like doing it, but she also couldn’t simply let Mrs. Windsor sit in the passenger seat. Christian’s mother was in the back, her wrists and ankles taped together. Lucy couldn’t bring herself to tape the woman’s mouth shut, not given her place in the Lord’s plan. She was, after all, Christian Windsor’s mother.
A black pillow case rested over her head, and Lucy had asked her to lie down across the backseat, which she did without any hesitation.
Lucy liked her, as she thought she would. She hated that she’d brought the freaking knife. She just didn’t know what else to do. Lucy was actually beginning to doubt what the demon had told her to do, though it made so much sense at the time.
It makes sense now, she thought. His mother needs to see what Christian’s becoming. He will love that you involved her.
And that might be true, though God had said nothing on the matter.
She had to work tomorrow and wasn’t quite sure what to do with Mrs. Windsor. She didn’t want to tie her up in the storage unit; that was no way to treat someone of such royalty.
Oh goodness, Lucy thought. God, I need your help here.
She parked the car outside the storage unit.
“I-I’ll b-be right back. Puh-puh-please don’t luh-luh-leave.”
Her stuttering was getting worse. A definite sign she shouldn’t have done this. The demon was tricking her. Lucy got out of the car and unlocked the unit’s door, slipping underneath as usual.
“Y-y-you’re not to talk to me anymore!” she shouted.
The man still sat in the chair. His lip was swollen as was his left eye, but he smiled despite the pain he must have felt.
“Did you get Christian’s mother?”
Lucy’s head jerked to the side, fast and hard, then just as quickly jerked back to looking at the demon. She, of course, didn’t notice.
“S-s-s-shhhh.”
Lucy paused and thought about the word she wanted to pronounce.
“Sshheee’s in the car.”
“Good. That’s important for what you’re about to create. Are you going to bring her in here?”
Lucy felt lost. She came in here wanting the demon to shut up but now he was … trying to help her?
Her head jerked the opposite way, as if someone slapped her. It snapped back forward just as fast. “Nuh-no. I’m not putting huh-her next to you.”
The man nodded. Lucy kept finding herself drawn to his eyes, even with one of them swelling. “Where will you keep her?” he asked.
“At my place.” She didn’t know why she was answering him, or even why she was still here. Why she had come to begin with.
“Are you sure that’s wise? Here, it’s unlikely someone will find her.”
“SHUT UP!”
The man did as she said.
Lucy needed to think. She didn’t want to leave the woman with this hell sent creature. But if she did bring Christian’s mother home … God helped those who helped themselves. If she did something stupid in His service, He might find her unworthy.
“I’m sure you’ll figure out the correct path, but there’s one more person I think you may want here when you crucify me.”
“Who?”
“Her name is Veronica Lopez. She and Christian are beginning a romantic relationship.”
Lucy felt the air leave her lungs, as if someone had slugged her in the stomach.
“She’s an atheist,” Titan said. “She doesn’t believe in God.”
Lucy could barely believe it. This hadn’t been part of the plan. Christian Windsor having a heathen girlfriend? That wasn’t what God wanted, and it sure as hell wasn’t what Lucy wanted.
Her face danced in different rhythms, creating something truly frightening.
“I-I-I-I’ll be back.”
Chapter 16
“Thanks for seeing me,” Christian said.
“Of course,” Melissa said from her chair. “What’s going on?”
“We haven’t released anything to the news yet, but Luke’s been kidnapped.”
Christian watched Melissa’s eyes widen. “Your partner?”
He nodded.
“You’re sure he was actually kidnapped? He didn’t just … I don’t know, leave?”
“There was blood in his house, but there didn’t appear to be a struggle.”
“Does that make sense to you?”
Christian shook his head, but said nothing else.
“What brought you in today? Was it Luke, or something else?” Melissa asked.
“You’re good at your job, you know that? You’re perceptive.”
“So are you.”
“In a different way,” Christian said. He leaned back in the chair and stared out the window in front of him. After a few seconds, he said, “I haven’t told you about this because I’m too scared to really talk about it … I haven’t gone to my mansion in six months. The last time I was there, something was waiting for me.”
“Something?”
“Yes. A voice.”
“What did it say?” she asked.
“That it liked the mansion. That it wanted to stay.”
“That place is yours, Christian. Whatever is in there, it’s simply a part of you. It’s not something foreign or separate.”
“That wasn’t part of me,” he said. “It’s someone else. Something else. It shouldn’t be there.”
His psychiatrist nodded for a few seconds and then said, “Think about this logically. What’s inside your head is simply a way to categorize how you see the world. Nothing else. If something in there is talking to you, it’s not a supernatural being. It’s your mind categorizing something you’ve experienced, but maybe in a way you don’t recognize.”
“The thing is, I have to go back in there. The Priest took Luke, at least I think so. Luke believed the person was creating sacrifices for me, and now he’s going to be the sacrifice. If I don’t go back in the mansion, I won’t … I won’t be able to stop him.”
“What do you think will happen if you turn inward?” Melissa asked.
“I might literally lose my mind.”
“What did you see when you were in there last?”
He shook his head, not wanting to remember the scene inside that room. He hadn’t thought about it in months, not until he saw the blood across Luke’s pillow.
“You can talk about it, Christian. It’s not going to hurt you.”
“There were statues. All of them kneeling before a statue of me, and my statue stood in the middle with its hands out and palms up. Blood was dripping off the palms, and it was smiling. That’s not how any other room is organized, Melissa. The rest of them are like you said, categorizing and arranging the outside world so that I can examine it when I want. This … This was saying something about me. It wasn’t a categorization, but a prediction.”
“I’m not sure that’s true.” Melissa paused and Christian looked from the window to her. “It’s fear, Christian. Do you know these are sacrifices to you for sure? I mean, is there any real evidence to point in that direction besides Luke’s suggestion?”
“There’s not much evidence at all, on anything the Priest has done.”
“So, maybe your mind created what Luke said was happening. Maybe your fear made what’s in that room. Perhaps you should go back and see if anything is different.”
Ch
ristian gritted his teeth. “I have to go back. I don’t have a fucking choice. Luke’s time is running out by the second. I shouldn’t even be here. I should be at the office right now.” He looked up at the clock on the wall. “It’s ten at night, and I know Tommy is there. He’s working the case, and I’m here talking about my fucking feelings.”
“It’s a big improvement, Christian. When you started coming here, you couldn’t express anything out loud.”
“I don’t need improvements right now. I need to save Luke.”
Tommy watched Christian walk across the office floor, the lights above him dark. He moved like a shadow, quiet, with his head down. The kid was taking this personally; he felt responsible, and maybe he was. Maybe they all were, because when the murders stopped, so did their investigation. They abandoned it while the killer wasn’t finished, not even close.
And now Luke was missing.
“Hey,” Christian said as he entered Tommy’s room. “Anything new?”
“Getting back preliminaries from the techs. They’ve found some hair, and they’re running DNA on it to see if it crosses with anyone already in the system.”
“How long will it take?”
“We should know tomorrow,” Tommy said. “What about you? Did you go back to your mansion?”
“No.”
“What did the shrink say?”
“A bunch of stuff.”
“Descriptive,” Tommy said.
“Look, I’m going to do it here. You don’t have to pay attention to me, just keep working. If you think something is wrong, though, I want you to come shake me, okay?”
“What exactly would ‘something wrong’ look like?”
“I don’t know.”
Tommy shook his head. He had actual work to do. He was poring over the case file from six months ago, and now Christian wanted a damned babysitter. “Alright, man, but I’m literally not going to be paying attention to you.”
“That’s fine.”
Christian slumped down in his chair and closed his eyes. His body went completely still, and Tommy felt as strange watching him do it this time as he had the first. He understood a lot about Christian, but not this. Not truly. Whatever the kid saw inside himself was something Tommy would never experience, and given Christian’s problems, he’d never be able to truly explain it.
There was a gift in it, though. Tommy couldn’t deny that.
He looked back at his computer. The lights in his office were off, just like the rest of the floor—the computer screen creating the room’s only illumination.
Tommy had never experienced anything like this. He knew that agents died; it was a part of any job where you tried to stop criminals, but it was a relatively rare thing. Luke had been missing for sixteen hours so far, and everyone knew the first forty-eight were the most important (thanks to the damn television show). That put them with only thirty-two hours left.
Was he strung up already, being pseudo-crucified like some kind of Roman criminal?
Tommy closed his eyes and tried to push the thought away, knowing it was cancerous. If he let it spread, it’d fill his whole brain with thoughts of what might be happening to Luke—none of which would help him find his partner.
When he opened his eyes, he went back to work, studying everything he could find on the Priest.
Christian stood outside the room. The blood still dripped from the name above, and the pool at his feet had grown large. There was no stepping over it this time. No avoiding it.
Blood covered the entire hallway. He stood in it, and because he never wore shoes in his mansion, he felt the warmth against his skin. Despite how long it sat here waiting on his return, it still felt freshly spilled.
Christian swallowed, determined not to throw up. The blood was so prolific because he’d refused to come back. This was his fault.
He pushed open the door and went inside. The vents above were silent, thank God. The door closed behind him, and Christian saw that the blood dripping from his statue’s hands had progressed as well: it covered the floor, and when he picked up his feet to move forward, tiny droplets fell from his skin.
This place had changed drastically in six months.
Of course it has. It didn’t sit static while you fell in love with Veronica.
The walls in most rooms were digital, allowing him to pull things up and manipulate data or maps. He could usually read entire case files by simply telling the walls to display them. Not in here.
Large murals surrounded him, showing painful tortures. He saw the iron maiden, ready to close on a woman, her face a twisted view of terror. Knowing that when it closed, her life on this planet ended.
He saw a person being stretched across the rack, mechanical wheels pulling his body apart.
The torture went on and on across the walls.
Yet, his statue still stood in the center of the room. Blood didn’t only drip from his hands now, though. It also rolled out of his eyes, down his face, over his lips and then along his neck. It kept falling until it met the floor’s red tide.
“You’re back.”
The voice came from above.
Christian didn’t answer, though he studied the word patterns and cadence.
He turned to the wall, and where a digital read-out should have shown the intricacies of this other’s words, Christian instead saw a man’s entrails being ripped from his stomach.
So, I’m not in control, he thought, feeling relatively calm compared to the last time he’d been here.
He turned from the statues and exited the room. He moved down the hall, the blood splashing against the bottom of the walls as he walked. He found Luke’s room and turned the knob.
It didn’t budge.
He pushed on the door with his shoulder, but nothing happened.
“What is going on?”
“Why do you want to go in there” the vent asked from above.
“What are you?” Christian didn’t look up as he spoke, but stared at the unmoving door.
“I’m you. Or what you’re becoming.”
“You sound nothing like me.”
“You won’t resemble much of your current self when this is done,” it said.
“When what is done? The Priest?”
The voice laughed, sending a chill across Christian’s entire body. His feet the only part of him that didn’t grow cold, the surrounding blood keeping them warm.
“This didn’t begin with the Priest, and it certainly won’t end with him, either,” the vent said as its laughter subsided. “This is your transformation, and when it’s over, you won’t recognize this place. Or rather, the old you won’t. The new version will love it.”
“I need to find Luke,” Christian said. “I need this place to work until I do, and after that, you can have it. You can do whatever you want with it. But I have to find him.”
“You’ll find him. I promise.”
Christian went back to the Priest’s room once more, the door already open for him.
It wants me in here, he thought.
“Yes,” the vent said. “It does.”
Christian walked to the statues, stepping between two kneeling women. He stood directly in front of himself, looking at the bleeding eyes. “So that’s what I’ll become, someone bathing in blood?”
“Aren’t you already? You try to wash it off with Veronica Lopez and your two partners, but didn’t you start bathing in it the moment you became a field agent? Bradley Brown’s dead, but that doesn’t mean your guilt vanishes. The people he killed, the responsibility lies as much on you as anyone else.”
Christian shook his head. “Then that is on all of us. Tommy and Luke, too.”
“Yes. You get it now.”
“No one else in the world would say that. Our entire society is built on the premise that each of us control our own actions.”
“And what about the Priest?” the vent asked. “Is he controlling his actions? Or is he driven by something else? Look around you. Look at the wa
lls. Were the people that performed those acts under their own control, or did something else drive them?”
It sounds like Luke, Christian thought. He’s the only person who could make thoughts like these sound rational.
“Maybe there’s more of Luke in you than you realize.”
The voice fell quiet.
Christian turned, looking for another door, something that might lead to a room where the video would play—the one which would give him insight into the killer.
“There isn’t another door, Christian. There is no video to watch. How much time have you spent around the crimes? How long did you stare at Ryan Goleen’s murder? How many minutes did you give Mrs. Brown’s decapitated head? You’ve avoided this and your great mind can’t do anything for you, or Luke.”
Christian’s movement pulled Tommy’s attention from his computer. He wasn’t getting anything from the files anyway. Sometimes detectives and agents missed things the first go-around, but the mind kept working even when the consciousness had moved to something else. Sometimes, when Tommy went back, he saw something new.
Not this time, though.
“Are you okay?”
Christian blinked slowly before straightening up in his chair.
“No … My mind is like a computer file that’s got a virus in it.”
Tommy shook his head, unable to smile as he normally might when Christian said such ludicrous things. There weren’t any smiles inside Tommy right now.
“So, basically, we’re right where we started.”
“We need to watch the Goleen murder,” Christian said as if Tommy was hardly in the room. “You have the video on your computer?”
“I’ve watched it ten times, Christian. Others have scoured it. There’s nothing to see. The room is nondescript, all you can tell is that it’s some kind of storage unit. Even the instruments used, ropes and pulleys, they can be bought anywhere.”
“I need to watch it again. If you don’t want to, fine, but I don’t have it on my computer.”
Tommy was quiet for a moment. He knew Christian’s modus operandi. He nearly had a fetish with being around crime scenes—if Tommy didn’t know him, he’d think the kid got off to it. However, Christian remained near them so long, and with so much interest, because it allowed his mind to do what other’s couldn’t.