by Edward Lee
Because she wasn’t human, not anymore.
Taloned, long-fingered hands padded at the dark corner, searching hungrily for the amethyst that Paul’s teeth had divorced her from. By now her skull looked warped, with a long fissured forehead. And horns.
Strike when the iron’s hot, he reasoned.
Beside the bed lay a tray of sadomasochistic instruments: knives, thumbscrews and nipple-clamps, and long, long needles. Paul stuck one of the needles into the thing’s back, about where the kidneys might be. She screamed like a machine, faltering. Then he inserted several more needles in a random pattern about her back. She convulsed, wailing like an animal on fire, and collapsed onto her belly.
Hmmm, Paul thought. This looks like it has some possibilities.
Then he picked up the heavy stone tray on which the torture instruments had been lain. He hefted it in his hand, raised it up—
“Here’s some head for ya,” he remarked.
—and brought it down on top of her head. The head burst, splattering a plume of black brain mush across the earthen floor.
“There. Blow yourself.”
The corpse began to fizz, as if effervescent. In only moments it seemed to dissolve to a crackling discolored fluid which, in turn, was then absorbed into the floor.
And in one more moment:
Gone, he observed.
Nothing at all remained of her. Nothing.
He was not sorry to see her go. So much amassed in his mind, however, that he couldn’t even contemplate what he was in the midst of. I’m crazy, that’s all, he thought. I’ve gone insane. That was some consolation, at least.
At the far end of the hallway, he found an elevator which took him up to a normal, paneled hallway. Around the corner, he found himself standing in a spectacular hotel atrium. This is it. This is The Inn. But where was Vera? He didn’t even know where to begin looking, but given the hour, he suspected she’d be asleep. A banistered staircase swept up to the next floor; Paul noted a tiny plaque: employee suites. If she’s here, this is where she must be. But a glance down the wing showed him a dozen doors. Which one was hers? He couldn’t very well just barge into each room and wake people up, could he? Then he laughed at the absurd reservation.
Why should I give a shit if I wake people up? I can do anything I want—I’m insane. Jesus Christ, I just killed a female demon with a penis and I’m worrying about being polite? It made sense. Each suite he stepped into, however, was untenanted. He peered through closets and bathrooms, hoping to recognize something of Vera’s. And in one of the suites farther down—Eureka! he thought—he spotted her purse, and her name and face on the enclosed driver’s license verified what he needed to know. She’s here, but… where?
The big four-poster bed lay unmade, yet all else appeared in order. Why would she have gotten up this late? Where could she have gone? It was going on four in the morning.
Then he noticed the book.
It lay opened amid rumpled covers.
Holy shit, he thought when he began reading the text.
««—»»
“Yeah. Attitude adjustment. That’s just what little, pretty Vera needs, I’d say.”
Kyle, then, quickly grabbed a shock of her hair and dragged her to the rubber-matted kitchen floor. He’d lowered his jeans, and though flaccid for the moment, his penis hung at his groin like a slack summer sausage. Vera squealed at his fist’s grip on her hair hauled her immediately to the floor. Tears blurred her eyes. He slapped her once so hard in the face, her consciousness reeled.
“You’re such a bad little bitch, “he whispered to her, lowering his jeans further. “I could get in trouble for doing this, but…but…”
His open palm cracked her across the face again—
“—but I think I really do love you. And now I’m going to show you, Vera.” He jerked up her robe and nightgown, baring her raw hips. “If you think Feldspar was good, well…you don’t know what good is till you’ve had a good, hard fucking from me.”
In her terror, though, Vera managed to ponder, Feldspar?
Kyle, now grotesquely erect, pried apart her thighs. The glans looked as large as a billiard ball, throbbing on the end of a veined shaft more stout than a stair prop.
If he sticks that thing in me, Vera thought, I’ll throw up and just die…
“It’s only because I love you,” he whispered some more. “You’ll understand. We’ll keep it a secret, okay?”
Vera’s face felt pinched shut.
Kyle’s open palm cracked her against the other cheek.
“Okay?” he whispered.
She’d never felt so helpless. She felt a thousand times worse than every other woman in history who’d been raped, because she was about to be raped by something far different from a man…
“I’m gonna come in you, Vera. I’m gonna make a baby in you…”
Just let me die…
And if she had the means to kill herself, she knew she would. She’d lay open her throat without hesitance. She’d jump from a one-hundred-story window. She’d gulp down gasoline. Anything—
Anything to prevent this.
Kyle’s impressive pectorals flexed above her. The amethyst pendant swayed. He slapped her once more in the face, this time so hard she blacked out for a moment.
“Baby? Baby? I know you like it, that’s the only reason I do it. I’m gonna make love to you now. I’m gonna make you come—”
At the same moment, though, he…shrieked. High and hard like he’d just been gelded. A stubby hand reached around and snapped off the amethyst pendant. Two stubby fingers sunk into Kyle’s eyes, like fingers sinking into bowling ball holes—and then Kyle’s shriek hitched up to a full, chest-heaving scream. He was lifted off her. One stout hand bent his head back while another hand stuck the end of the big, antique pistol into Kyle’s ear, and—
Ba-BAM!
The pistol-shot’s concussion made Vera’s ears ring. At once she was speckled by dots of black ichor. Kyle’s body collapsed to the matted floor. More black gruel slid out of the ruptured skull.
“The amethyst,” she was told by a high, articulate voice. “It’s a gift from our lord, our safeguard. And it protects the underlings from all physical harm. But without it…”A leather-thonged foot kicked Kyle’s broken pendant across the floor. “They are as mortal as you are.”
Vera feebly tried to wipe Kyle’s strange blood off her face. Her savior, whose own face she still could not see from the harsh backlight of the overhead fluorescents, continued in something of a remorseful tone: “The Kyl-Lemi served well, but he was becoming unreliable. He’s back now, from whence he came.”
A sizzling, like bacon frying in a pan way too hot, crackled in Vera’s ears. What had been Kyle’s corpse only a moment ago was quickly reverting to bubbling black slime before her eyes. Soon it evaporated altogether.
“Questions now? Of course. I will answer them all.”
Vera slid up to her feet against the service line. She could see now, the features of the man who’d saved her from Kyle. The short figure wore not the typical fine, custom-made garments but a mere sackcloth frock. He was completely bald and bereft now of the neatly trimmed goatee she’d always known him to wear. Yet despite all this, his identity was undisputable.
“Feldspar,” Vera whispered.
His words seemed to nod in the air. “Yes. But you may call me by my real name. You may call me Prince Magwyth.”
— | — | —
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“It’s all relative, Ms. Abbot. It’s all the same in a way, isn’t it? Think about that.”
Flecks of gore began to dry on Vera’s face as she numbly stared back at Feldspar.
“We’re all servants, are we not?” he suggested. “You are, I am, only to different degrees. All of life is experience, as they say. The same applies to infinity.”
In silence, Vera’s eyes darted about for a weapon. Feldspar had set the big revolver beside one of the Jenn-Air ranges, far out of her
reach, and just as out of reach now as the cutlery rack. But what could she be thinking of anyway? She’d seen how useless the knife had been on Kyle; certainly it would be even less effective on Feldspar, who was obviously the core of power in this place.
Unless—
His amethyst, she reckoned.
She remembered what she’d read in the book, that amethyst was their protection. And Kyle had been destroyed only after Feldspar had removed the amethyst pendant. And…
Feldspar wears one too. In fact he always had, since the first night she’d seen him.
And that same amethyst sparkled at her now from the ornate pinky ring on Feldspar’s hand…
“Kyle said I was set up,” she told him. She needed to divert him, she needed to keep him talking and distracted. “How?”
“I should think it would be obvious to you by this point,” Feldspar replied. “I needed someone very badly to run the restaurant, and when I found out about you, I knew that you were the one. I also knew you’d be reluctant to leave your fiancé, so I simply made certain arrangements.”
Vera’s eyes thinned. “What kind of…arrangements?”
Feldspar smiled, as if at a naive toddler. “I instructed the Zyramon, via her own sense of creativity, to effect a situation that would induce you to leave your lover.”
“The Zyramon,” Vera repeated dreamily. She’d read about this person in the book. “It said she was a—”
“She’s a synoec, a hermaphrodite. The beautiful woman with red hair? Surely you’ve not forgotten your encounter with her. I believe she engaged the services of a particularly seamy prostitute to lend assistance. They drugged your beloved fiancé, seduced him, and made sure that you would have the opportunity to bear witness.”
Vera’s mind seemed to swim suddenly in obscure, dark clouds. Paul wasn’t lying. It was all true…
“A fine ploy that proved to be quite effective, wouldn’t you say, Ms. Abbot? But I had no choice. You were the one, and I was determined to have you regardless of the means.” Feldspar’s brazen bald head shined like a shellacked orb. “And as for the matter of finances, I should also think that that, too, would by now be more than apparent. Our—shall we say—enterprise has access to unlimited financial resources. And I suspect you can guess from whence these resources originate.”
Vera felt sick, her mind still aswarm in the tarn of confusions and impossibilities…
“And we have access to far more resources than mere financial ones,” Feldspar went on, unconsciously eyeing his amethyst ring. “Power, protection, knowledge. And an array of intricacies.”
“Intricacies?”
“Coercions, instigations, influences,” he defined. “Your dreams provide a sound example.”
Merely the word—dream—set her mind off yet again. What would Feldspar know of her dreams, her fantasies? The Hands, she grimly remembered. And the lewd nightmare that always followed. The faceless night-suitor violating her in ways she’d never imagined…
“It was me,” Feldspar said.
Her glare turned to stone.
“I’m very…fond of you, Ms. Abbot,” he confessed. “I’ve always been. Our lord purveys certain provisions—certain elixirs, emulsions, and ointments—which serve our needs well, which make people exceedingly desirous. We enhance things with it, our liquor, our food, massage oils, etc.”
This revelation unreeled in her head like a roll of ribbon tossed off a precipice. Drugs, she realized. Like the drugs that hideous redhead had spiked Paul’s drinks with. Feldspar put the same drugs in my drink. Drugs which made her confuse reality with fantasy, which made her want things she’d never really wanted: rape, sadism, masochism. And when she thought back further, it made even more sense. The only nights she hadn’t had the fantasy of The Hands were nights she hadn’t drunk any of the Grand Marnier Feldspar had given her, or taken a bath with the lavish bath oils. And the night Kyle had given her the back rub at the pool—He used massage oil…
So they’d drugged her, to be more responsive. None of it had been a dream at all. Every night Feldspar had been secreting into her room, to rape her…
“And I know what you may be thinking,” the squat, frocked man went on. “But it was all bound to one very important consideration.’’
“What!” she spat.
“I love you.”
Her rage roiled, but she knew she mustn’t show it. She must not let herself break. She needed to think, didn’t she? She needed to calculate—
The sick motherfucker…
—a way to destroy him.
And the cutlery rack wasn’t that far away.
She knew what she must do.…
Keep talking, keep distracting him.
“And The Inn itself,” she said. “I don’t understand. None of it makes sense. All the money you pumped into the place and it seemed from the start that you wanted it to fail.”
“Of course I did,” he answered. “We needed a sufficient cover.”
“A cover? What are you talking about?”
“We needed camouflage. A fine restaurant backed by a lucrative holding company provided that. But we couldn’t have it become too successful, could we? We couldn’t have too many people coming here. After all, they might take note of our real services. You do know, Ms. Abbot, why we’re really here, don’t you?”
Again she remembered the book. Magwyth. Servant of Demons. Banished to earth as penance, to provide gluttonies for Satan’s hirelings.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
“Then likewise you can see our need to do things the way we did. The Inn needed to provide a legitimate, expensive restaurant. Yet on the other hand it had to fail, to keep out an influx of local residents. No one makes queries when the bills are paid and the books are in order, Ms. Abbot. We chose The Inn’s remote location deliberately, for the same reason. And as for The Inn’s checkered past, the same reason too.”
Now Vera understood. “And you chose me, a legitimate restaurant manager, to cover for you without even knowing it.”
“That’s…correct, Ms. Abbot,” Feldspar admitted. “And I hope you will forgive me. In time, I’m sure that you will, when you fully realize what I can offer you ultimately.”
Vera sneered. “And what’s that?”
“Eons, Ms. Abbot. I can offer you eons. We’re both alike, you and I. We are both servants, in a sense.” His eyes pricked into her. “Love me, Vera, and serve with me. And I will give you anything you’ve ever wanted and a million times more. Forever.”
She knew what he was implying, the same thing he’d so discreetly implied all along. She knew there was only one way out:
“All right,” she said.
The shiny face peered back at her, skeptically hopeful. Was he actually shaking, he was so nervous?
“Do you think—” he faltered. “Do you think you could love me?”
“Yes,” she said.
He expression blanked. “Then prove it.”
Vera approached him, willingly, and with desire. She didn’t flinch at all when she noted a white marinade bucket on the cold line—a marinate bucket containing Dan B.’s head.
“Make me immortal and I’ll love you forever,” she whispered, and with that confession she wrapped her arms around Feldspar and kissed him on the mouth—an eternal mouth—a mouth that had reveled in the utterance of blasphemies for a thousand years. She kissed that mouth with all the voracity and passion that she’d ever kissed anyone in her life…
Feldspar returned the kiss. He began to weep.
“Make love to me,” she whispered. “Just like you did all those other nights. Here. Right here.”
Vera sat upon the service line, and with no hesitation whatever she pulled up her nightgown to bare her sex.
“Now,” she breathed.
Feldspar, teary-eyed and in bliss, stepped up between her spread thighs. He placed one hand down, and with the other began to unsash his frock. Between the sackcloth divide, his erection sprouted: a pale and h
ideous tuber with dark blue veins, pulsing upward.
Vera spread her legs further, to offer herself as fully as any woman could…
“My love,” he whispered and closed his eyes.
Instantaneously her hand snapped up, plucked the shiny rib cleaver from the cutlery rack and brought it down on Feldspar’s hand, which remained opened on the wood butcher block beside the range—
chunk!
His scream sounded disappointingly human, and when he raised his hand, backing away, Vera saw with great satisfaction that three of his fingers remained on the butcher block, his ring finger among them, the finger that sported the big, faceted amethyst…
She swung the cleaver in a lateral arc. It’s bright blade sunk inches into Feldspar’s stout neck, releasing a spray of brackish, black blood. He howled further, shuddering.
And with all her might, Vera brought the cleaver down with both hands—
swack!
—into the center of his bald forehead.
He teetered back, arms reeling. The cleaver’s formidable blade had bitten into Feldspar’s brain no less than three inches, the great cranial fissure oozing the midnight blood.
Then he collapsed.
Vera squealed. I did it! I did it! I—
Then her squeals of victory corroded.
Feldspar got up.
The look on his halved face was not one of rage or betrayal or anger. It was a look of wounding, or heartfelt hurt.
He removed the cleaver from his head and tossed it aside. Then, his other hand—the hand whose fingers Vera had so expertly chopped off—he turned over and looked at.
She’d separated him from his power, from the amethyst, and had buried a Sheffield meat cleaver into his head to boot, but he didn’t even seem to care.
“Kyle was just an acolyte, a weakling,” Feldspar said with a vast sadness in his voice. “My power here—my fortitude—comes from a far greater source.”
Vera screamed, a reasonable thing to do under these newfound circumstances. Feldspar’s good hand snapped to her throat. He raised her up fully off her feet, then threw her down. Her head smacked the tile floor, her vision churned, then darkened. She knew she was passing out.