And the neighborhood. God. Did it crumble more in the couple days since he’d last visited? Tom noticed indistinct shapes eyeing him from apartment windows. He assumed they were human.
No traffic on the street. Unreal, even if it was drop-dead hot. How could an area be this densely populated and you not see a single person outside? The sidewalks were gone. Roads had lost all traces of cement or asphalt. They were paved with stones or were dirt ruts. Way easier just to hoof it.
He thought, What are they hiding from? Maybe if my neighborhood started growing crumbling castles and gauntly vertical bell towers, I’d be under the bed, too.
Coming to the end of that particular block in The Cove was like walking right up against heat generated by a four-alarm fire. It stopped Tom in his tracks.
Horseshit, he told himself. He put up his hands, feeling flat dimensions of roasting pulsation.
He eyed the building. It was covered with a fine black ash following its straight-edged lines to a few feet away, never straying into the street. The ash didn’t blend with whatever else polluted The Cove. The smell was different, too: a scent of roses in high summer, or fermenting pollen of other, more flesh-hungry… flowers to lure dragonflies and shrews, fruit so ripe it popped off trees and lay split upon the ground until even the worms drowned in its oozing sugars.
Tom’d brought a flashlight but didn’t need it. The building was incandescent. He tried to peer around the shutters. There were no windows behind. He hovered his palms across its walls, following it around past the doorless streetside front and into the alley, not able to touch it. Blisters still puffed his skin. He found the brass plate at the back where the only door was.
X-IS-THE-DARK
No buzzer. So hot Tom couldn’t knock.
“This is the police. I’d like to ask some questions. Open up!”
A minute passed. No sound. It was late; maybe they were closed. Tom knew he should just return to the station, try to get a warrant, and some help.
But he needed to hurry, worried about his partner. No way Ed Poe just up and quit the force, quit him. Ed was a good guy, a good partner, and he loved his work—wouldn’t catch Ed mumbling jazz notes to free his mind from the carnage.
Tom remembered Ed mentioning this place.
X-IS-THE-DARK.
He remembered when Ed mistook a billboard advertising Trammel’s Jewelry for the phone service. And Ren admitted Ed’d called them. There’d been something else, too—something terrible—that she didn’t want to talk about.
Ed had also been weirded out the last week or two. Started smelling like Calia Abrams did. Not simple blazing June sweat, but crazy sweat.
Tom’d looked down from the roof after chasing the skinhead. He’d seen his partner’s head thrown back, howling Wolfman…or plain old dog. Tom figured he’d just seen and heard it wrong. Ed had only shouted a warning to him. Watch out! Or maybe, Don’t let him take you down with him!
There’d also been a hissing from inside the building, a viper pit below. Steam heat.
No way was Tom getting inside again. There was no door handle. The door didn’t appear to be separate from the wall. Even the iron shutters were part of the solid structure, molded from the rest of construction in a single piece.
He heard a bark and turned to see a white-haired figure down the fully cobbled street.
A young girl was draped across its hunched shoulder.
The figure veered around the maggot-ridden corpse of a donkey lying in the street, and toward a hole in a shadow. A doorway? Tom pursued across the road, noticing the change in scent from sickly perfumed around X-IS-THE-DARK to the just-plain-sick of the rest of Nubbing Cove.
When he got to the building, he used the flashlight, directing its narrow beam at the opening the man took the girl into. Rats squealed, running over one another to escape the sudden light. He felt for his gun, and stepped inside.
No door to the first room. It was a mess, littered with soda cans and beer bottles, piles of cigarette stubs, used intravenous needles, fast food wrappers, a dog-eared copy of Gothick Nights.
Nothing alive in the room but rats. Except for a snake in the corner, bulging, having eaten rats.
Tom found a toggle switch. It didn’t work. He swerved the flashlight beam, locating a stairway leading up and another going down. Which way?
A whimper came from below. The girl? Sounded more like a hound. Tom took the steps going down. He smelled male canine, the musk of marking territory.
He was in some sort of basement. No white-haired man, no dog.
Just bodies.
Young female children running the gamut from about eight- or nine-years old to maybe fourteen. Not old enough to be called women, just someone’s babies. Each girl was fastened to what once had been decent knotty pine paneling, nails through slender twigs of wrists and through each finger. Or strung up, dangling from beams by light cords until bodies swung. Even the ones tacked to boards appeared to turn: right/left/back/forth.
Tom’s vision swam. “Nothing’s more evil than this,” he said under his breath.
Burns on flat chests or on just-starting-to-bud breasts, burns between thighs and at ass cracks. Electric burns. Little firecrackers… He nauseously groped the air for equilibrium.
In blood on the walls was painted:
Dance, Maiden.
Mother hasn’t time, busy with her babies.
And Grandmother is busy with our graves.
He glanced back. Firecrackers. And enough entrails to spell out I AM A BOMB.
Tom checked some for a pulse, hoping to find anybody alive. There was the girl he’d seen carried in. The monster must’ve run out of nails and cord. He’d stapled her to the wall, and the staples were already pulling free. She was about to fall. Tom gently pulled the rest of the staples from her soft flesh, wincing at each wet sound. She was warm yet there was no pulse, no breath. He laid her on the floor.
Mysterioso hummed out from between his pressed-tight lips.
Shut up! he chastised himself. Is that the best you can do for a prayer?
How had the beast put her up so fast? And where had he gone? Certainly not past Tom. If Tom had seen, smelled, or heard him again, he’d’ve straightaway blown the son-of-a-bitch’s head off.
The only bodies were of these children. And a wallet on the floor… with Ed Poe’s badge inside.
Tom reached for the cell in his pocket. Had to get some backup. Needed a wagon out here.
It rang. Like it had at the prison earlier with Calia Abrams.
It might be his wife. Or the captain. Or Renae.
Tom answered, hand greasy with perspiration. He almost dropped it. “Yeah?”
Them.
From that building just down the street. Voices giggling, like these kids used to do when feeling silly, crying as these little girls must’ve as the monster shocked them to make them dance. Voices of luring sirens, in high sweet warbles or husky contraltos. Tell us your compulsions, what you fear to do, long to do, your deepest secrets and crimes…
Tom snorted, contemptuous. “Sorry, ladies. I’m afraid I’ve nothing to confess.”
He turned off the phone, set it on the floor, and stomped his foot on it.
Tom wearily climbed the steps from the basement, flashlight beam swallowed once he reached the first floor. There was light, gray but plentiful. Streaming in through an oriel window.
And there were people. The room was filled with them, dressed in sordid brocades and shabby velvets, candles guttering on tables not doing much to brighten sallow complexions. One or two glanced at him without much interest, their terror focused elsewhere. There was now a front door, being slammed shut and pounded from the outside. Timber was hoisted across the big bay window. Tom saw the men through the window, fastening the planks, avoiding looking in at who they trapped inside.
A woman screamed and fainted. A cleric in faded vestments cried out, “Ye cannot seal us hence! None have sickened herein! None here hath the plague! And Black Pirsya
never visited!”
Tom gasped, turned to retreat back down the basement steps. But the steps had vanished.
It did no good to question it—there was no way out.
– | – | –
Chapter 27
Marty knocked on Robin Pittman’s front door. He felt vulnerable on the porch where anyone might see him. After the thing with Rita at the van, the police might be after him. At least one witness in the mall’s parking lot had photographed him with their cell as he ran off, big blue 69 gun in his hand.
Confused and lonely, having come an inch away from committing murder, he was scared. He needed to talk to Robin, like he used to when he was a child, going to her with problems instead of his uncomprehending grandparents. Marty needed to tell her how Rosie’d saved him. How Roseanne Bunny may have been a young whore but it was Marty who’d had no innocence. Even if Rosie had been his first—and only—sexual contact.
He needed to tell Robin about necrOmania seXualis and how Rosie’s severed toe with its ring was the saintly relic that protected him.
He knocked again. The place was dark. She usually worked the graveyard shift. Except he’d called the hospital first only to be told she had the time off.
Where’d she keep the extra house key…? Oh, yeah. Hidden between an eavesgutter and porch overhang. He grabbed a three-legged stool—weathered from years—might’ve been the same he’d used as a boy, to reach the key.
And Marty Hardisty let himself in. Robin would understand. She always had.
Marty’s worry overtook for a moment. Would that witness’s picture of him be on the 11:00 news? If his grandparents saw it, would Mason Hardisty suffer another heart attack, dying this time?
He took a breath and switched on a light. The place was neat. Robin’s family was gone, nobody to mess it up. There was a framed photograph of Seuter on top of the television set. There were other pictures of Robin with Seut and Calia, smiling together, Marty standing with the three during a summer barbecue.
Robin must be lonely, too. He wished he’d visited her earlier, after she’d invited him at the hospital. Hell, Marty hadn’t been at the house since Seuter died, nearly a year ago.
His fingers shook, tracing the outline of their faces. Then he touched the white paper lying to the side.
A letter to him from Robin:
Dear Marty,
I knew you would come eventually. I am sorry I can’t be here to tell you everything in person. Do look in the top desk drawer after you read this…
Marty read through it all, trembling. He felt sick, legs wobbling until he almost couldn’t stand up. Finally he dropped the letter and slipped to his knees in a swoon, vomiting into a nearby wastebasket. Bile brought tears to his eyes, burning as acid rain. He heaved until there was nothing left inside, literally and figuratively. He squinted at the mess.
He wanted to leave. Just exit the lies and insanity, without looking in that desk drawer. But he was beyond redemption. Perhaps salvation existed for no one.
Marty crawled to the desk, too dizzy to stand. He reached up, grabbed the handle on the top drawer, and slid it open. He felt inside and brought out necrOmania seXualis. Hadn’t he already received this from her when Robin brought him Seut’s trunk? She must’ve had two copies. Probably all the copies she’d ever want. Calia Abrams had been her significant other. Calia Abrams, the Triple X Slayer. Calia, who became Thelonious Spunk, the grimoire’s illustrator and photographer.
One of the items in Robin’s letter was about the night Calia was brutally attacked. Just about an hour before Calia arrived at the hospital, Robin attended a woman who’d had surgery for serious injuries suffered in an auto accident and who now lay in recovery. Robin had entered the room, finding the patient conscious, gown off, fingers plucking out the X-shaped sutures.
The woman told her with a loopy grin: “Honey, you know you’ve got to pick up every stitch.”
The letter went on. She spoke of how maybe the world really was about horror, light being a joke of darkness, a trap leading to security’s false sense. Believing we’d evolved beyond that black horde of barbarism we spurted out of. How we’re born to suffer and die, every blasted one of us. And born to make others suffer.
She said: Marty, your attraction to this darkness is normal. Your primal death wish. After sensing the kindred savagery in humanity, blood and rust are easy.
The rest of her letter went like this:
I met Profana before Calia did. It was arranged. That night. I’d gone to work, asking Calia if she’d go to the market. I had to do something to get things going. She was too straight to call X-IS-THE-DARK.
As for myself, I pretend I’m the woman in white with a friendly tray of feel-better pills. I imagine I’m the bird goddess with a nice fluffed pillow of my own feathers to end their misery. Or I become a vulture-headed queen, turning off their life supports for a few critical seconds to watch them flop. I want to be the blister lady, pressing lovers to me until the blisters break, drowning them in serous ponds. Who defines what is murder and what makes murder?
Long ago, there weren’t nurses to help at hospitals. There were nuns. Profana knows who belongs to her and who doesn’t, no matter their religion or deeds in this incarnation.
Some see her in ways she’s seen herself. As a variety of symbols and women through history.
I see her as La Que Saba. The One Who Knows. The Mother Of Days, Mother Nyx. Dawn and night and nothing: nix.
She’s says it’s impossible to be wrong about her, no matter what you believe she is. She is all of it.
Seuter never expected me. I’d fixed him a soda filled with pulverized Halcion. As he began getting sleepy I told him, “Mother has murdered you.” I smoothed stray hairs from his brow. Yes, Marty, Mother can be very hard on Her children. Mother gets tired. Mother gets cranky. Mother knows our tomb is between Her legs.
I remember Seut’s face. It was stricken. I distinctly remember his eyes, as sad as they were terrified. How could I rip my love away? they said. I chanted as his breath shallowed, wisping to nothing.
Lullaby, scream and cry,
Go to hell my little baby.
It took Calia a while to catch on to my having killed our son. But she was so far into her own slide, having done the work for Profana’s book. What started as a dark yet harmless expression of primitive art vortexed into something terrible and thrilling… to me anyway.
Birthing of anything is a brutal epiphany, sparked in brain and gut, tumultuous. The child tears at the mother’s insides and she casts it out!
Calia left when I questioned her about starting the artwork for a second grimoire. “Did Profana authorize this?” I asked her. Profana had not, and dogs must do as they’re told.
In time, I sent Seut’s stuff to you, including a copy of the book. I already knew what a sick little jerk-off you were. I hoped the book would help you to make the world a more interesting place. But you were the same disappointment you’ve always been. Lost the grimoire to your grandshits, consigned to flames. You were a gutless wannabee, all lust and no fangs.
nOt eXactly with lOve but what the heX?
Robin
After he puked and retrieved the book from the drawer, Marty knew what he must do.
He picked up the phone.
He’d never done this before. He’d never called X-IS-THE-DARK. Nothing happened, though. Space didn’t turn on a dime. No voices whispered. No Red Sea gushed up to submerge the floor and invoke shark women. Marty wasn’t aroused with tumescent mania nor was he compelled to mayhem. Nobody lured this boy. They’d already taken what he had to give. The phone remained quiet, and he hung up.
Marty clutched Rosie’s toe and gold ring amulet.
He held necrOmania seXualis in the other hand.
“Profana, if ya really are all of it, help me.”
He turned off the light. Then he dialed the number again. He recognized the answering voice.
“Marty, I am your lover waiting,” Rosie whispered.
He asked her, “Can ya feel me smiling in the dark?”
“Yeah,” she murmured. “Can you feel my kiss pressed against that smile?”
Her voice was rich and pink, the breath of it hot against his mouth. Marty felt the phone move from his hand to his lap. He felt her stumps in the hollow of his crossed legs, then slip to the sides of his waist. Her crotch was damp and sweet, Rosie’s teeth sharp.
Sometimes being able to die for love was the best thing anyone could wish for.
««—»»
Robin drove them to Nubbing Cove, through pollution’s dense wall, like entering a whole other world. The nurse had advised Renae to confront X-IS-THE-DARK, to face head on the evil people and their hold over her. Over Eddie. After Renae freaked and smashed the mirror, it had been simple: hug her, mother her, bandage her cut hands. We’ll find him, baby. We’ll just go find him.
She parked her car although there wasn’t a curb. The women sat silent for a moment, taking in the scene. Nothing resembled streets as they’d once been. Mostly filthy gutters, overflowing with shit and rivers of urine, refuse piles of bones and carcasses, slick rotten onions. Swarms of rats crawled like ivy up and down walls of degraded squats. Doorways were impenetrable rectangles, cards from a shadow Tarot. Inside these, they glimpsed rubies, always in glowing pairs.
No modern architecture. Domes and dolmens, an occasional portcullis with only darkness peeping between bars, spires and roofs clearly filled in with straw. Old trees, some with massive trunks, branches curling with flat black leaves when there were leaves at all. Others were spindly willows, skeleton-limbed.
But down the narrow streets—for they’d withered, hardly fit for cars—the nurse spied the glowing shuttered building. She started the engine again, parking as close as she could. She didn’t want Renae changing her mind and running off. The less distance Renae had to walk, the better.
Season of the Witch Page 35