Then he saw her—
In the bed—
The mattress soaked
What the—
What the fuck—
What the fuck did they do to her?
Then, he thought the wildest craziest thought—
Van had lied. He killed himself in front of me, but he fuckin’ lied! That bastard!
Lourdes lay on the blood-soaked bed.
Lourdes, alive...
But her body—
“My god!” he shouted, “What the fuck have you done to her?”
—like a whitish pink larva of pulsing liquid around her face and neck.
Through a layer of mucus-scum, her face. Her body, covered with translucent skin, with a clear liquid—
Veins running outside her body—
—Two areolas and what seemed to him like the abdomen of some kind of insect larva—
Like a coating around her—
Like a protective shell—
But her eyes, fluttering open—
Beneath the layer of pulsing clear liquid, and blue-red veins branching out to the edges of the new skin that covered her from head to toe—
Blood pumping—
She can’t even see me.
She doesn’t even know where she is.
She’s in some kind of womb.
She’s—
A nearly clear pinkish liquid drained from the six dark areoles on the left side of her body. The liquid environment that covered her seemed to flow upward to her face.
Her mouth opened slightly, and for just a second he hoped—no he prayed—he would hear her voice just once more—
But then, her lips shut slowly, almost a smile on her face, almost a look of perfect calm across her features, and her eyes closed again.
PART THREE
OUTCAST
* * *
“The Storm King, weakened by the Outcast’s Moonfire sphere, cannot bring himself to save his earth-parents’ farm. The earth is doomed...”
From THE STORM KING: THE BURNING CITADEL, Vol. 2
INTERLUDE
THE VILLAGE
Chapter Twenty-Seven
TWELVE YEARS LATER
* * *
1
* * *
“Holy—” Stony shook his head. It all came back: the year, his age, the moments...
Her face beneath the watery pulp that covered her like a mucus membrane clouding over a wound.
But he was older now, late twenties; the past was a whisper, a photograph.
The pictures on the boy’s back stopped moving, a last image of Lourdes’ face still there, her face beneath the yellow-white pulsing sac. She looked strangely peaceful. She was at peace. Some kind of peace in the picture. It had to be peace, he told himself after all these years.
The boy called Prophet pulled his shirt back down. “Seen enough?”
“This is evil,” Stony gasped. “All of this. Coming back here, what you are.”
“What I am is what you made me,” the boy said.
“Smoke?” Stony asked ironically, drawing a pack out of his breast pocket. The car smell came back, the filthy old Mustang, then the road they were on, at the rundown bridge overlooking the cove.
“Kids can’t smoke.”
“Most kids can’t do a lot of things that you can do.” Stony lit up the cigarette. The smoke filled his lungs, but tasted awful. “Christ, Steve. I can call you Steve, right? I don’t go in for this Shiloh or Prophet stuff.”
“Yeah. Sure. I like Steve.”
“Christ, Steve, that’s some etching you got on your skin.”
“As long as I can remember, I had it. The Great Father said that it was the map of the world.”
“He would say something like that.” Stony felt the sweat soak through his shirt. “I wish Mr. Fairclough were still around, Steve. I’d like to expand his horizons, so to speak.”
“What are we gonna do here?” Steve asked, almost innocently. He glanced around the battered chain-link fence that had been clumsily erected with its no trespassing sign, and then some wiseass, probably kids, had cut through the chain-link and made it look like a big exploded spider web. On the road, the fence had totally been torn apart. Hungry vines pulled back at what was left of it.
“We’re gonna go look at the houses.”
They drove down what had once been Water Street, its dark pavement potholed, roots jutting from the great oaks. The Common was nothing but dirt, and the trees that had been torn out at the roots lay rotting, sprouting lichen and fern as if the woods just to the northwest of the village would take it over after all these hundreds of years. What had been the Stonehaven Free Library was a pile of rubble. “That’s where the P.O. was,” Stony pointed across the Common, “Three churches stood over there.” But the churches were still there; only their steeples and crosses had come down, their doors torn off hinges, their stained glass windows blasted out years previous.
“I want to see the ocean,” Steve clapped his hands together. “I never saw the ocean.”
“Okay,” Stony said. He drove the Mustang out to Land’s End. The car was on its last gasp. Stony could feel it in the bump and lurch as it moved over the jagged road. He thought he smelled oil burning, but none of the warning lights worked on the car, so he could not tell what precisely was going wrong. Everything was shot on this old classic, but it had done the job that Stony needed doing. It got them here.
Along the road, nothing but the foundations of houses, rubble, as if the bomb had been dropped. Nature had begun to reclaim this territory. A slender new growth of trees grew above tangles of berry vines and dried grass. Hedges had gone wild, and snaked and burst around the old granite stones. Then, they came to the seawall, and the Sound.
“Wow!” Steve shouted, rolling his window all the way down. “Look at that! I never seen the Atlantic Ocean!”
“You still haven’t, this is just Avalon Sound,” Stony said. “See those islands?”
“Barely.”
“That’s where you were born,” Stony said, closing his eyes, trying not to bring it back.
He didn’t want to remember it.
“Let’s get out of here. We have somewhere else to go,” Stony said after a minute. The air was fresh and clean, and as it pushed out the cigarette smoke in his lungs, it brought back too many sensory memories. The taste of fresh fish, of saltwater when he and Lourdes swam on the small beach, the same air he breathed when they made love and created this boy.
* * *
2
* * *
The car died a quarter mile down Juniper Point, so they got out to walk. Stony wrapped the small bomb in newspaper. Then, he brought his bags out and put them on the hood of the car. Opening them, he brought out the hunting knife.
“This was my brother’s,” he said. “Before him, it was my father’s. It is soaked in the blood of innocence. I figure that’s as good a mythological weapon as any. You ever hear any Greek myths?”
The boy—No, think of him as Steve. You can. He is Steve. He is your son—shrugged.
“Well,” Stony said, as he drew the gun out and stuffed it into his belt, “there was this guy who had to go kill this really awful woman. She had snakes in her hair, and half of her was lizard, and her eyes turned men to stone. She was a monster called a Gorgon.”
“I knew women like that in the Rapturists,” the kid joked.
“Yeah, well, this one was dangerous, and this guy had to go cut off her head without looking her in the eye.”
“Kind of cowardly you ask me,” Steve said.
“True,” Stony laughed. “See that house down there?” He pointed with the knife.
Steve nodded.
“It’s the house were they kept your mother.”
Steve took this in, and then looked up at his father. “Why are you doing this? You brought me all this way, and I can’t figure out why.”
Stony opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it.
* * *
* * *
“I’ve made people die before,” the boy said as they began walking towards the ruins of the Crown place. The morning sunlight slanted across the horizon and seemed to flatten the woods to their left. It was almost like the picture on the kid’s back. It was almost unreal. “I’ve made them hurt.”
The magnificent day was a good one for confessions.
“I know,” Stony said, nonchalantly. “It’s the Moonfire.”
“The what?”
“Moonfire. It’s like exhaust. Those people back in Texas, where I took you. They were already dead when I came, weren’t they?”
Steve nodded, a tear coming to his eye. “They called it Azriel Light. The light from the Angel of Death.”
“Shit happens,” Stony shrugged. “They brought it on themselves. You can’t turn the key in the door of the tiger’s cage and not expect that maybe now and then the tiger’s gonna jump you.”
When they reached the house, Steve said, “You’re gonna kill me aren’t you? You brought me here...to kill me.”
“You don’t even know what you are,” Stony said. “After all you know, you don’t know that much.”
“I know they worshipped me.”
“Weaklings. Idiots. Fools,” Stony nodded. “And those who weren’t, like Alan Fairclough, used you. He was weak in his own way.”
“I am a prophet,” the boy said.
“Of what?” Stony spat, almost laughing.
“Of...of...”
“They sold you a bill of goods, kid. Truth is, you’re my son, but you should never have been born.”
“They told me my father was evil.”
“Did they? What’s evil? Hurting? Killing?”
“If killing is righteous—” the boy began, but Stony reached out his free hand and grabbed him by the shoulder.
“What do you mean by righteous killing?”
“If killing is ordained by the living god and if it flies like a lightning bolt to sinners!” the boy shouted, as if by rote.
“Then kill me,” Stony shook his head. He chuckled mostly to himself, remembering the drama of childhood and how it made every kid feel like the center of his or her own universe. “Kid, you have a lot to learn about how people sometimes use you, don’t you? People who claim they believe in Jesus and God and then they do really terrible things because bottom line, Steve, everybody wants to be King of the Mountain. And to be King of the Mountain, you have to kick everybody else in the ass.”
Steve looked hurt. His face crumpled as if he were going to cry. They had spoiled him, those cultists. They had massaged his little growing ego until it was stunted and misshapen. Fuck you Alan Fairclough for doing this.
“They didn’t use me. They loved me.”
“And you loved them,” Stony nodded. “I saw that old woman in the shack I got you from. What, you call her Gramma? She take care of you when you were sad? But still, when I went in to get you, you’d already killed her. Okay, maybe it was the ‘Azriel Light’. Those biblical names sure cover up a lot of sin, don’t they? She hemorrhaged right there. I didn’t even have to fight her. She was gone.”
“Sometimes...” the boy said. “Sometimes it gets out.”
“Yeah, it leaks, I know. I learned just like you did. Sometimes, when you do something you think is good, it leaks. You think you’re healing somebody, or making the rain come down on parched land, or you—”
“You save a puppy’s life. That’s what I did, I saw a man beating the life out of a puppy, and I—”
“Sure, I know,” Stony cut him off. “Been there. You think: if I just get him to stop, if I just make the puppy all back in one piece again, no bleeding, then maybe it won’t leak this time. If I just make it so that little girl’s legs aren’t all twisted, it won’t leak. If I just help that old man with his pain, maybe...” Stony let his voice trail off. “I’ve lived as far away from other people as I could most of my life. Just so I wouldn’t let it leak.”
“You said, you said you were from some town.”
“Yeah, but when you’re like us, kid, you’re not from anywhere. My P.O. Box is in Winslow, Arizona. But I live up in the desert, farther out than that. Away. But even then, it’s not far enough.”
“How do you stop it from leaking?”
Stony squatted down in front of the boy. He held his shoulders. Tears came to his eyes without him even knowing why. He blinked them back. “Son, you can’t.”
* * *
4
* * *
The sign in front was no longer there, and the house itself resembled the Parthenon after the centuries and the tourists, for its columns stood, its roof had been rebuilt, the walls were still up, but it looked as if its meat had been sucked right out.
They walked in silence through the gaping hole of the front door.
A purple darkness permeated the house. Some windows were boarded up; others still were rimmed with the jagged teeth of broken glass. Rat and bird droppings were everywhere, as was trash—moldy bits of food, torn and wadded papers, something that might’ve been human excrement wiped across the walls as someone tried to write an indecipherable graffiti phrase. Tattered curtains fluttered like moth wings in the morning breeze. The stench was strong and rose and fell with the air.
Finally, Steve looked up at his father and grabbed his arm for comfort. “It’s breathing.”
Stony glanced down at him.
“The house. It’s breathing.”
Stony felt his skin change, and goosebumps rose along his arms just with the kid’s voice. He glanced up at the ceiling that undulated slightly. “It’s her,” he said. “It’s like residue is still here.”
“Who is she?” Steve asked.
“She is what we’ve come to destroy,” Stony said. He hefted the thing in his left hand, the thing wadded up in newspapers. “In this unclean house. Your Great Father and the others were here. I even had a hand in it. Look—” He pointed to a corner of what had once been the living room. It dripped with some viscous liquid, like a light slow drizzle of rain.
He felt the hallway tremble slightly.
“I’ll bet some Crown heir is still around, keeping track of this place, watching for omens.” Stony heaved a long drawn-out sigh. Christ, this was the moment he’d always dreaded, coming back to this place. “There’s a chapel here. That’s where we need to go.”
* * *
5
* * *
NOW! He thought, do it NOW!
When he walked in behind his son, into the darkness of the Crown chapel, Stony set the newspapers down on one of the pews. Then he reached into the pocket of his leather jacket and withdrew the handcuffs. When they clinked together, Steve turned. His face, even in the shadows of the chapel, was visible. His expression was not one of shock or fear, but of resignation. He held his hands out.
Stony got down on one knee, and looked up at his son’s face. His beautiful doomed son. The boy who should never have been brought into this world, and was not meant to be here, just as Stony should never have been born.
He handcuffed the boy’s left wrist to his own right wrist.
“Bound together forever,” he whispered, and touched the side of his son’s face. “You and me kid.”
“I guess we’re gonna kaboom?” Steve asked. “That’s why you brought me.”
“We have to,” Stony said, reaching up to comb his son’s wild hair from around his eyes.
“Is it ‘cause it’s evil? The Azriel Light?”
Stony thought a moment. “No. It’s because it was never meant to be here. It should never have been here on earth.”
“Yeah,” the kid said, sighing.
“You know how different you are?”
Steve nodded slowly.
“Do you love me?”
Steve nodded again. “I always wanted a dad.”
“I love you too, Steve. You are my only child. Your mother was beautiful then. She was the most wonderful and beautiful human being on
the planet. You look a little like her.”
“But I should never have been born,” the boy said, his eyes glistening with tears. Stony could not resist. He tugged his son close to him, and hugged him hard. Perhaps the tears had all been cried out, for his eyes no longer filled with them, but he felt as if his soul were weeping, he felt as if his entire flesh and spirit cried out to the universe: Why have you led me here? Why have you done this? What did this boy ever do to deserve it?
He squeezed his son until he was afraid he would hurt him. When he drew back, his son’s inner translucent eyelids closed over his eyes briefly; then, opened. The tears were gone in him, too.
“I always thought I was some kind of alien, like from another planet,” Steve half-grinned, but then his face fell again, a flat-line. He was resigned to this fate.
“No, you’re not from another planet,” Stony comforted him as best he could. “You’re from me and your mother. But you were part of something terrible, like an experiment these people did. You know the Rapturists? How they used you for their beliefs? Used the Azriel Light too until it got some of them? Well, these people, that Fairclough and the Crowns, they had tried to do to others what they did to me, and to your mother and you. But it never worked. It never ‘took’. It almost did sometimes I guess. They tried it before, but—”
And the images came to him, images he couldn’t possibly know, but they came nonetheless as if the history of what was within him showed him the attempts—the girls with their bodies burning, the boy of sixteen who caught on fire at his crotch and it spread up his belly, up to his face until he was a pillar of fire— “It didn’t work, not until the rituals were used, and then all they needed was one or two, just enough to bring it into the world. Just enough to make it flesh where it was not wholly flesh before.”
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 25