The Chosen

by Edward Lee

  Except…

  He peered down, shivering. Through branches of winter-starved trees he spied what seemed a curving sweep.

  It was the snow, he realized. Glittering on…pavement.

  He followed the incline down farther, then pushed into the woods. Something was there, he just didn’t know what. Was it some kind of hiker’s trail? A service road, he realized once he’d trundled through the net of trees and vines. The light snow sparkled like halite on fresh, new asphalt. He followed the road around the bend.

  Deeper, he discovered an embankment, a man-made one judging by the way it was cut against the declivity of the landscape. What he was looking at now appeared to be a loading dock, which made sense in a way, because all hotels had loading accesses. What didn’t make sense, though, was the distance. Why put the loading dock here? Paul at once questioned. It was a good hundred yards from The Inn. Almost as if the building’s designers had—

  Hidden it, Paul realized.

  Why hide a supply access?

  Then he saw the stranger part.

  Obscured amongst leaveless tree branches was the mouth of a great sewer pipe. A sewer pipe at a loading dock? It didn’t fit. A shiny white van had been parked next to the pipe’s exit, and that was the part that seemed even stranger. It wasn’t really an exit drain for a sewer pipe. There was no receptacle, no means for waste waters to exit. Then he thought:

  If it’s not an exit… maybe it’s an entrance…

  It made as much sense as anything could at this moment, before this bizarre sewer pipe in freezing cold. Paul walked toward the cement mouth of the pipe, then stopped—

  Shit!

  —then ducked back around the side of the embankment.

  A sound had issued from the pipe, he felt sure of it.

  Footsteps.

  And a moment later, he knew he hadn’t been hearing things. He hunkered down, one eye peeking beyond his cover…

  A figure emerged from the exit or entrance or whatever it was.

  Bags of some sort seemed slung across the figure’s back. The figure was bald, Paul saw in the dim light, though he appeared youthful, strong, a spring in the step. But what struck Paul even more immediately was that the figure wore only a pair of jeans. No shoes and no shirt, though, in this killer cold. Paul watched, deflecting his breath…

  The man disappeared down a thin divide in the trees, then reemerged a minute later, minus the bags he’d been toting. He was whistling. He paused a moment on the pavement, and in that moment Paul noticed something else:

  A sparse pendant about the man’s neck, and at its end, laying between well-developed pectorals, hung a shiny, dark-purple gemstone.

  Amethyst, Paul suspected, remembering the transom.

  Then the shirtless figure reentered the sewer pipe and disappeared.

  Who the fuck was that? Paul thought the logical question. Was he The Inn’s garbage man? And why dump garbage back here? There’d be a dumpster, wouldn’t there?

  See for yourself.

  Paul stepped into the narrow divide between the trees.

  A scratch of a trail descended; leafless branches threatened to claw Paul’s face. The footpath wound down further, then opened into a large dell encloaked by trees. Paul noticed steam…

  He couldn’t see much, but he could see enough. A faint stench drifted up in the biting cold air. Bags, he realized.

  A pit had been dug out of the dell, and the pit was full of large, stuffed, plastic garbage bags. And the two bags nearest the top…wafted steam.

  Paul climbed down.

  His fingers, like cold prongs of stone, tore open the uppermost bag.

  Paul gazed down.

  Focused.

  Then gasped.

  His feet took him briskly back up the narrow, tree-lined trail. His heart raced, and his eyes, even if he closed them, refused to release the image…

  The bag he’d torn open had been full of steaming human body parts.

  — | — | —

  GOING… DOWN…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Reality check, Vera, she implored herself.

  After reading the occult text, she stood in check.

  What was she thinking now? What could she possibly be considering? Coincidence, she determined at first. What else could it be?

  All the things mentioned in the book she just read, certainly, were seriously coincidental. But…

  Consciously, at least, she didn’t think for a minute that any of it could be true.

  Demons?

  Satanic servitude?

  Amethyst, the source of their power?

  The only one that really bothered her was the reference to Magwyth, in ancient times, being executed upon a slab of—

  Feldspar, she remembered.

  Don’t be ridiculous, Vera!

  But the dreams she was having, every night nearly, somehow beckoned her.

  She could not describe the impulse just then, nor any motivation she could fathom.

  Nevertheless, her mind still ticking against her will, she pulled on her robe, paused another stifled moment, then…

  She walked out of her bedroom.

  ««—»»

  Skinned skulls. Long arms and legbones clipped at the tendons of their muscle meat. Emptied ribcages and plundered abdominal vaults…

  These were the steaming things Paul had glimpsed within the black-green plastic garbage bag.

  Back up at the loading dock—or whatever it really was—he prepared to flee but then something flagged him. What? he thought. Initial impulse told him to get the fuck out of there, sprint back to the car, head on down the highway, and find the nearest state police barracks. After all, he knew what he saw.

  Or did he?

  Shock, sometimes, proved very elusive. He got to thinking. Maybe it wasn’t what it looked like, he suggested to himself. Come on—human body parts? That seemed a bit far-fetched. The eyes were known to play tricks sometimes. It must’ve been a trick, he thought. Suddenly he felt convinced of this.

  Or…did he?

  The round maw of the sewer pipe seemed to call to him. The shirtless bald man, he remembered, had disappeared into it.

  Where’d he go? Paul wondered.

  Then a more stolid thought flashed in his head.

  Vera’s in there. Somewhere.

  Vera…

  I still love her, he realized.

  And then, with no hesitation whatsoever, Paul Foster did the least logical thing he could do under the circumstances:

  He entered the great pipe’s entry and began to follow its dark, damp course up into the ridge, toward The Inn.

  Instantly he felt drowning in moist darkness; the concourse of the sewer pipe seemed like a spectral esophagus into which he was being swallowed. Just as he thought he could walk no more, due to the cloying dark, gobbets of light rasped his eye. He knew he was walking upward into the ridge. Eventually he detected the most diminutive illumination. Light, he thought. Yes, it was definitely light…

  Paul followed the light.

  After what seemed a hundred yards through the bowels of the ridge, the round, cement concourse left him standing in a warm, wanly lit corridor. He heard the faintest humming, like machines far away.

  He walked on, eyes flicking back and forth. What if I get caught in here? he wondered. What will they do? Process trespassing charges? He didn’t much care, though. Some unbidden curiosity urged him on. Some query, some dementia.

  He wasn’t sure what it could be.

  The corridor turned. Doors lined it, on either side. He peeked into one and saw something that looked almost like a cave: rough rock walls lit only by sputtering torches set into sconces. A large bed of pillows lay in the center of the cave-room.

  But the room, other than that, was empty.

  A dream, he thought when he looked into the next room.

  Not men but things fornicating frenetically with two listless women tied down to a similar bed of pillows. Others stood round watching, an
eager glint in impossibly huge eyes. A few of these watchers masturbated erections the size of rolling pins…

  Yes. It must be a dream.

  It had to be.

  In the next room a similar scene ensued, only some of the queer-looking spectators seemed to be engrossed with plates of food. Women, however, moaned in unison as still more figures with strangely warped heads steadily performed cunnilingus. Inordinately large tongues, like pink snakes, delved without reluctance into the spread, moist fissures. One figure admitted an entire hand, while its glaze-eyed recipient tossed and turned in heady bliss…

  A dream, he thought a second time.

  In the next room, a bald woman seemed to be cleaning up, placing large, smudged platters into a plastic bustray. Her pubis was as bald as her head, and large, pert breasts seemed erected on her chest.

  There was something—

  Something, he slowly thought.

  —that seemed uneasily familiar.

  Then she turned and looked at him. Recognition widened her eyes.

  “Paul!” she acknowledged.

  Paul’s sight seemed to droop like warm putty.

  “You,” he croaked, and in the same instant of grim recognition he was grabbed from behind, by the throat.

  ««—»»

  The Inn felt dead, its long halls muted, vacant, and quiet as a crypt. Vera couldn’t quite calculate what impression coaxed her on. It seemed to be a cluster of thoughts so swarmed together that none of them could be singularly deciphered. Down in the atrium the great fireplace exhaled dying heat from its pile of embers.

  Her nightgown and robe shifting, she traipsed around the front reception desk. To her surprise, behind the back hall, one of the room-service elevator’s yawned open when she pressed the up button. Generally they were locked. She got in and went up.

  Feldspar said The Inn was closed, she remembered, so she needn’t worry about any guests popping up to spy the restaurant manager wandering about in her nightgown. She got off on the third floor and found it immediately cold.

  No, very cold.

  What the goddamn hell? she wondered.

  She peeked into each suite on the floor and discovered them to be not only empty but barren. No furniture, no carpet, no fixtures. And each suite felt as cold as the walk-in freezers downstairs.

  Same thing on the fourth floor. Each suite empty, unfurnished, obviously never occupied.

  Just like Feldspar’s suite, she recalled.

  Feldspar certainly had some explaining to do. What could he possibly say? Why were all the suites empty?

  One thing was clear: despite The Inn’s being open now for months, no one had ever rented these suites.

  So where did the guests stay?

  The elevator took her back down to the atrium.

  She cut through the darkened restaurant to the kitchen, flicked on the overhead lights. The kitchen’s long rows of stainless steel sparkled cleanly. Then, in another unbidden impulse, Vera approached the inner door to the room-service kitchen. What are you doing, you idiot? she asked herself. That door’s always locked—

  —click.

  Vera’s hand froze when she pulled back on the handle.

  The door was not locked.

  How do you like that? Look’s like Kyle’s getting careless.

  The room-service kitchen sparkled back similarly, a carbon copy of her own kitchen for The Carriage House, if not slightly larger and better equipped.

  What am I doing here?

  She had to admit, she had no idea. And just as she prepared to leave, she heard—

  A distant, long drone, which seemed to be moving closer. And then—

  A thunk.

  Indeed, a familiar thunk, like the strange thunking she’d been hearing every night.

  The room-service elevator, she realized.

  But it couldn’t be. For she was standing beside the room-service elevator right now.

  It was dead silent, obviously not in use.

  Then where’d that thunking come from?

  Not the pantry—that would be impossible. Nonetheless, she pulled on the door’s metal latch—

  And found it locked.

  Another impossibility. The hasp on the door hung open. No padlock. Which could only mean—

  Locked from the inside?

  There could be no other answer, which made no sense at all. How on earth could anyone get into the pantry if it was locked from the inside? And who could possibly unlock it?

  Unless…

  Shit! her thoughts shrieked. She heard a quick rattling now—from behind the pantry door. This is crazy! she thought, ducking madly behind the service line.

  Someone was in the pantry…

  Squatting, she peeked over the stacks of gray bustrays beneath the cold line. Sure enough, the pantry door opened. Someone walked out, whistling some twangy C&W tune. Vera spied jean-clad legs and typical slip-resistant workboots. But from her low vantage point, she couldn’t see who it was.

  “Goddamn it,” a voice muttered. “What a fuckin’ mess.”

  Vera recognized the voice at once:

  Kyle.

  Next she heard a quick clang, as though Kyle were rummaging for a steel mixing bowl or carry-platter. Then the booted feet tracked back to the pantry. Vera risked giving herself away when she raised her eyes over the top of the cold line and peered across the walkway. It was only a glimpse: Kyle carrying some pan-pots back into the pantry cove. Yes, it was definitely Kyle, all right.

  With just one incongruity—

  He’s…bald, Vera dumbly realized.

  Had he shaved his head? Had he been wearing a wig all this time? One or the other had to be true. But—why? Vera wondered.

  And as he disappeared back into the pantry, he pulled the door to it behind him. Vera, finally, was in luck.

  When the door closed, it didn’t catch.

  Wait, wait, she ordered herself from her squat. Don’t move. Don’t get up yet. Wait and see if you hear the—

  th-thunk

  Then: the motor drone.

  She knew now before she even entered the pantry herself. There was an elevator in there—another elevator that no one knew about. She couldn’t imagine a reason for this, but now she felt determined to find out.

  She skirted in. As expected, at the end of the pantry stood a closed elevator door. Along the walls were shelves full of marinade buckets. A reach-in fridge lined the other wall, and through its glass doors she saw typical dinner preps in trays, kabobs, meat rolls, and lots of steaks, though she didn’t recognize the cuts. She hadn’t even been aware of this particular refrigerator, nor could she guess why it had been hidden in the pantry.

  None of that, however, was the point. Right now only one thing interested her:

  The elevator.

  Vera, dressed only in a sheer nightgown and robe, approached the end of the pantry. The elevator’s brushed-steel face returned a vague reflection. This was the elevator, she knew now, that she’d been hearing all along, running into the wee hours.

  And whatever the reason, she was about to discover it.

  Vera pushed the button.

  The doors thunked open.

  Then she got in and began to go…down.

  ««—»»

  The revel reared. Mist seemed to seep from the rock walls, shiny condensation trickled. A melee of aromas rose: spiced candlewax, musk, cooking smells…

  Paul regained consciousness to discover a hideous woman sitting on his groin, fornicating with him. Her strange hand clamped just under his jaw, and Paul felt himself oozing in and out of sentience. Because of this semiconsciousness, he knew that his eyes deceived him, for the woman sitting on him scarcely even appeared human.

  Gray, taut skin flecked with crust. Only patchy ribbons of frizzy black hair. Her sex, which now fully engulfed his erection, felt like a gnawing mouth, and her avid eyes looked huge and faintly yellowish. And her breasts…

  Her breasts, though high and large and firm, shone gray ben
eath the sheen of musky sweat. Paul tried to focus up, to glean the details, but he couldn’t quite believe it.

  Blurred vision, he thought.

  The woman’s breasts sported multiple nipples. More nipples, puckered and blood-red, ran down her sides to her thighs. Eventually she leaned over, offering a breast to his mouth. Despite Paul’s disgust, his lips sucked in the clustered nipple, and he could swear it voided milk, however foul. And when he could look up again, as the hideous woman stepped up her shrieking intercourse, he noticed one more thing—

  What are…those things…on her head?

  Even in the shifting dark he could make them out. The strange light made a silhouette of her large, runneled forehead. My God, Paul thought, I’m gonna be sick—

  Small, rounded nubs seemed to jut from the forehead.

  Small, rounded nubs…like horns.

  ««—»»

  Vera’s descent in the pantry elevator seemed grievously long, and the motor’s hum was hypnotic. Is it ever going to open? she couldn’t help but wonder. Down, down, down, it went…

  Then it jerked to a stop.

  And, at last, opened.

  Heat blew in. Vera looked forward and saw a rough stone wall. When she peered out she saw what looked to be a long aisle through a cave. This is no basement, she realized. She took a left and walked down, the hot air making her sweat. Crude doors had been fashioned along the corridor. And under their gaps, light flickered.

  Vera stopped. She faced one wood-plank door.

  She turned the brass knob and pushed it open…