by Jack Ketchum
…into the arms of the black, slithering things outside whose flesh was steaming and oozed to the touch and filled him with nausea and horror…
…and he knew he was making sounds. He did not know what kind of sounds they were. Howls, screams, gibbering. He felt sanity take a leap and leave him behind.
Fingers slid over his bare arms, cold, postulated, gray-black liquid traces glistening in the starlight like tracks of worms.
His mind shut off, staggered. His body went weak. He pushed at them, screaming, slapped at them like a hysterical girl. In his mind he saw the burning hut, the torch. He smelled fire. Fire and the sweet high reek of burning flesh.
Fingers locked tightly on his arms.
They were suddenly all around him, groping, clutching.
He saw Billie break free and stumble out beyond their reach. He felt a wild joy. Yes! Run!
He kicked, shoved, tore a blackened arm off his chest and spun the thing away from him.
“Michelle!”
He saw one move up behind her and wrap its filthy arms around her, saw the black mouth open wide as she struggled. Then Billie was behind her with a rock and she was pounding, pounding, until something broke inside its head and it fell away.
He felt arms slip over his waist, two more of them fumbling at each of his own arms, their grip as slippery as his. He elbowed the one behind him over and over until it went down in a heap, then struck the one to his left with his fist, hit it low in the belly and felt his hand sink deep, the flesh parting, sink straight into a ripped-open tangle of guts through the charred shallow skin and then it fell away too. Only one was left.
He grabbed its slick flesh at the throat, filled with furious power now, a power close to madness and would have tossed it down the path away from him like a stinking sack of garbage except that he looked first into its wide, staring eyes.
And saw Xenia.
And in that moment as he hesitated it threw him down instead. He did not see the rock but only felt it crack hard against his skull.
Then there was only a whirling smoky blackness. And somewhere, far off, the lurid screams of women.
BILLIE
Billie recognized the big Frenchman instantly. And because he was familiar she thought he’d come to help them. So she went to him.
And then looked closer, deeper.
She saw what he was.
Just as the hand shot out sideways and slapped Michelle down.
She screamed as Michelle’s cry of pain rang in her ears and the man advanced on her with a great lumbering lurch and crushed the breath out of her as he took her in his arms.
His hand tore down the back of her shirt and she felt the night air on her spine.
She fought, pummeled him with her fists, kicked him, curled her fingers into claws and went for his eyes. Then his hands were on her throat and he lifted her up and held her until there was no more struggle in her, until her throat and lungs were one great driving agony and she felt her eyes bulge, her tongue move outward through her lips, seeking passage. He dropped her.
She fell limp and choking, coughing spasmodically, helpless as he tore the shirt away from her, as he tore the jeans down through the zipper and then split them along the crotch with his powerful hands, put his foot on her stomach and tore upward through the panties.
She saw none of it, only felt it-saw nothing but a darkness of asphyxia in which a yellow sunburst bloomed and faded. And when he pulled her to her feet again and lifted her by the armpits and shoved her against the cold stone wall she still could not see him, could only gasp for breath, muscles limp, racked with sickness and coughing, while she felt the cold unnatural hugeness of him abruptly enter her.
He took her pressed against the wall like a mounted butterfly and when at last his own dry spasms began, bit her below the collarbone and drank her blood like a suckling baby.
She looked down at him, the sunburst finally gone, the darkness gone, her vision clear again and had one bright thought for Dodgson before the dead yellow eyes stared into hers and she saw his pallor and smelled his stench and something snapped inside her, rocketing her down to where nothing was dead and nothing gave her pain, where there was only a riveting silence.
SADLIER
He hoisted the dark one up on his shoulder, walked to the other and put his hand beneath her and lifted her to his side like a folded raincoat. He saw where the bruise already discolored the jaw of the dark-haired woman, relished the slack nudity of the other.
Like a hunter bearing his kill-though he was not to harm them further, not now-he walked through the ruins to where the great stone stairs led precipitiously to the top of the mountain. Two cats followed at his heels. He ignored them.
The steps were many but he climbed them effortlessly.
Ahead he saw her outlined against the indigo sky, against star clusters thick as clouds. She was naked and her pale arm beckoned slowly, drifting out and back like a feather on currents of wind.
***
He woke alone.
The cats were gone.
The dead were gone.
They lay about him like broken rag dolls, even those he hadn’t touched, black limbs twisted under them. He couldn’t look at them.
He couldn’t look at Danny either. But he walked to where he lay and stood beside him staring at the wall of the House of Masks and moved only when he felt the tears start to come.
Chase lay where they’d left him, unharmed, still burning with fever. He had no time for him now.
Billie was out there somewhere, alive-he could almost feel her reach out to him in fear and pain. He knew she was alive because he knew why Lelia had taken her. To punish him. To leave him wondering, hoping. To make him follow.
It was not in Dodgson to abandon her. If only to help her arrive at some gentler death than Lelia would devise he had to follow.
He had seen what happened to Danny.
They had counted on Chase, but Chase was useless now. He felt sorry for the man. His turn would come too.
He knew his own chances for survival.
He left the ruin.
He could guess where they’d be. On the mountain.
A beautiful place to die.
But I want to live, he thought. I want Billie.
He felt a rash of anger and it helped him. He had always thought anger and resignation were incompatible but they were not. He thought of the tragedy of Prometheus, chained to a rock, his body a feast for birds. Impotent, resigned, able to see his future-yet still raging. He understood that now.
Fuck you, Lelia, he thought. Don’t expect me to come whining.
He stepped off the path and looked around. He found a broken tree limb, hefted it and liked its weight. It felt good-solid and gnarly. It was probably useless but you never knew. It might be better than shouting.
He found the path again and walked toward the mountain. At the base of the stone staircase he looked up and saw nothing but peaks and crags and stars.
He wondered if it was worth it to try to find an alternate route, something less exposed, something a little tricky. He guessed not. She’d had no trouble finding them thus far.
Might as well go up in plain sight, he thought. Club in hand. Just like the ancient Greeks would do.
He swallowed and started climbing.
Call me Hem.
DARK OF THE MOON
She had watched from afar. The rape of the English girl had pleased her particularly.
And now he tossed them down. She saw the bruised, bloody bodies at her feet-and then saw into them.
The French would be first to waken.
She directed him silently and watched while he tied her hands behind her back and trussed her feet together at the end of the long heavy rope he’d taken off the anchor chain of the Balthazar, now moored on the far side of the island. He worked quickly in fear of her displeasure.
As he finished the French girl opened her eyes. She cried, struggled against the ropes.
The rope
s chafed her skin. If she continued she would bleed.
Her breasts tingled with anticipation.
And soon the English girl would waken too.
It was good that they both should see, each what would happen to the other.
She waited.
Soon the eyelids began to flutter-the face took on an expression of pain.
The face was remembering.
She saw where his teeth had tom her and the thin line of blood over one of her breasts, the stains on the inner thighs.
There was movement in the limbs. The eyes opened. She allowed them a moment to take her in-the perfect nudity, the radiant clear blue eyes that met the girl’s own and vanquished them.
Her voice was thicker and deeper than Billie remembered. It almost seemed a ventriloquist’s trick, as though it came less from inside her than from somewhere in the air around them.
Look, said the voice. Look what I will do.
Her fingernails were long, gleaming black.
Billie watched her draw them lightly over her thighs and stomach up to her small pale breasts, caressing them, then dig suddenly deeper and rake down, watched her tear long jagged troughs of red over her breasts to her belly, bloodless, tear wide at the stomach until she could see the gray-white folds of viscera. Then they moved to her face, reached up and clawed for the eyes and ripped them out.
She held one in each hand. Offered them to her. Then closed her hands and crushed them.
The wide luxurious lips parted in a smile.
The hands oozed liquid.
Billie screamed.
And suddenly Lelia was whole again.
The blue eyes blazed as before. The body was perfect and unharmed.
This is how you die, said the voice.
She walked to where Michelle lay cowering, her face muddy with tears, teeth bared and lips trembling in a half-mad grimace that distorted the delicate features.
She peered into the red-rimmed eyes.
And you, she said.
No! thought Michelle, You cannot do this, Lelia! I have children to return to, to teach, to learn from. I have a job I love and I have met a man I loved and I will meet others. She begged Danny forgiveness with all her heart but the will to live was strong-the kindnesses, affections, friends and loves, physical loves-all so very strong. She remembered the small soft tiny arms encircling her neck, the distinctive pungent-sweet smell of the very young, she could smell it even now. It was the smell of life, not death. She could not die. They could not kill her, not when there was so much to go back to and on to, so many good full years out ahead of her…
She laughed as the French woman tried to crawl away. She tugged on the rope. The woman fell sobbing against a slab of rock, her feet pulled out from under her.
She bent low and stared, a cold amusement in her eyes.
You, said the voice. I know what you like.
She opened her mouth and leaned closer so Michelle could see. Her world tilted, fell. Telescoped forever.
Lelia’s tongue was gone.
In its place and gazing out at her was a small black hooded snake.
JORDAN THAYER CHASE
…the fires were a peaceful lapping water now of which he was a part, skin and blood and bone no longer, but liquid fire.
He swam to the god through a sea of flame, through surfaces of suns, and the god toward him. The radiance of atoms imploded in him while he exploded outward and both were one. He felt the power rise inside him, the power he was born to wield far beyond the papier-mache world of deals and stocks and money. He remembered that world but dimly-as a dreamer recalls the soft-edged constructs of a dream. The power lifted and filled him and soon would bid him rise, like Antaeus, renewed by the earth in this place where gods were born and died and then were born again.
BILLIE
Her screams went on and on…
Billie stood swaying, crying at the edge of the pit where they made her stand, weak, dizzy, in danger of falling herself-and she could see them writhing below as the big man lowered Michelle slowly down head-first, dangling, spinning at the end of the anchor rope, could see because they’d thrown a torch down ahead of her to stir them up and so Michelle would be able to watch them slide toward her, gliding angrily along one another’s backs to escape the burning torch, hissing on one another’s flesh. And then would be able to watch them strike and strike…
…as they were doing now.
He heard the screams. Dodgson began to run.
The stairs were steep and there seemed to be hundreds of them. His breath came in short cold gasps. His lungs hurt and his feet felt heavy as lead. But the screams were shrill and final-sounding-wild, primitive. Someone was losing her mind up there. And dying. Both together.
Billie?
He couldn’t tell.
He plunged ahead, stumbled, hauled himself up and continued, his legs pushed almost to the limit. The breeze became a cold wind as he climbed. Still he sweated with exertion and fear. Clouds moved by, blotting out a patch of stars. The screams continued, rising higher, a torture in themselves.
Then they stopped abruptly.
His soul felt colder than the wind.
Bitch, he thought. He took a step. Bitch. The word became a cadence to him.
He ground his teeth together and plodded upward as though slogging through hip-deep snow.
He reached the top.
He heard the wind hiss over the mountain.
His legs trembled. His throat felt raw.
The trail wound over the peak from here but there were no more steps to climb, thank god, just a gentle incline to the summit. He could see nothing, no one, ahead of him.
He took a deep breath and started off at a slower pace. He thought it might pay to be careful now, to avoid tiring further. The screams had stopped in such a way that he knew instinctively whoever had uttered them was beyond his help. It came almost as a consolation to him. For someone terror had ended. For someone else, maybe not.
The trail narrowed to his left past a bold outcropping of rock. From where he stood the summit was almost at eye level. Another few feet and he’d see what was up there-and whatever was up there would be able to see him. He shifted the stick to his right hand, the outside hand.
He ducked behind the shelf of rock and waited. Listened.
At first there was nothing. Only the wind and his own raspy breathing.
And then the wind shifted.
He heard a sound that was familiar, very familiar, but completely out of place here-the silky abrasion of flesh on flesh. He heard strained breathing mingled with a stifled sobbing.
He knew the voice.
God damn them!
Anger warred with elation. Elation because she was alive up there and fury at this abuse to her. And then he heard Lelia’s voice-soft, venomous, chanting.
Cunt. That's all you ever were to him. Cunt.
Timed to the fleshy raping strokes.
He stood and looked.
She was standing on Billie’s hands.
The huge body pumped at her. Long punishing strokes that pushed her back cruelly over the bare rock.
Lelia’s eyes glittered.
He climbed the rock. He made no attempt to hide from them.
He walked to where they were and Lelia saw him and smiled and stepped back. The big man was oblivious, intent only on Billie. Billie’s eyes were closed and that was good. This wasn’t going to be pretty.
He spread his legs to even his stance and took the heavy stick in both hands and brought it down on the man's heaving ribs with all the force he had in him, heard them crack and the man shriek in pain and when he raised it again he saw two bones pushing through the soft sluglike skin like the broken ribs of a wicker basket.
The man looked up at Lelia-it seemed in astonishment to Dodgson-and then rolled off Billie’s body and Dodgson brought the stick down across his face, caved in the front of the wide high forehead and the nose and saw teeth fly off like pebbles around him. And when he lif
ted it away he saw the face crushed completely-eyes askew in their sockets, mouth, nose and chin oozing a foul dark liquid.
The man rolled away and Dodgson twisted the stick around and clubbed him between the legs this time, a sound like chopping wood. The man doubled over, vomiting thick bloody bile. The back of his neck looked good to Dodgson. He raised the stick and swung it down and heard the junction crack, saw the head slide off at an angle, limp, broken, hanging loose over his left shoulder.
The man crumbled and lay still.
For a moment he felt a ringing victory-he felt triumph.
Then he looked at Lelia and realized the man was nothing.
He saw her smiling and knew that this was just one more horror to put him through, nothing more. Like the cats and Danny, like Xenia. Make him kill, yes. It was part of the plan, part of some awful unknowable ceremony, some mad blood passage.
It was not nearly over between them. Not nearly.
Yet she didn’t moved toward him. Didn’t speak.
He waited a moment. Then he knelt down to Billie.
She moaned, barely conscious.
The man had been immense. There was no way of knowing how badly she’d been damaged. He saw the blood on her thighs.
His rage was gone. He felt a chill pass over him.
He looked up. Lelia was gone too.
And suddenly he heard dogs howling-back along the stairs and all across the summit of the mountain. Some distant, some nearer. All of them moving closer.
Not over.
JORDAN THAYER CHASE
The change was full and complete in him.
And it was not precisely Jordan Thayer Chase who rose off the tiled mosaic in the House of Masks and walked through the entranceway out through the winding paths of the city.
This new man glowed with a strange inner light. Her dogs shied away from him.
He sensed his way to her unerringly. He walked the long maze of streets and began to climb the processional steps up the mountain. Inside he felt the power of many suns in many times and places. They had worshipped power like this flowing out of stars a billion miles away and would again, many billions of miles away from that. As once they had here. And he knew what he had been sent to do if not what had sent him. That he would never know.