The bullet flicked Ray’s shirt. Ray bellowed with hatred, and with all the strength in both his hands tried to fold the man’s wrist back in on itself.
A crack of bone again. The goateed man released Ray’s hair, reached with his free hand down between them and switched the gun to this hand before he could drop it. The butt of the screwdriver pushed painfully against Ray’s upper chest, as he now had the man partially pinned against the stove. There wasn’t enough room between them for the goateed man to turn the gun into Ray’s stomach, and frantically Ray pushed at the man’s arm as he stepped back to give himself the room he needed. Ray’s arm swept left to right in a karate block. The gun barked and the third bullet raced past his right shoulder into the bathroom, striking the medi-cine cabinet’s mirrored door, shattering it.
Ray flung both his arms around the extended arm, hugging it, twisting. The gun went off a fourth time, close to his face, loud, the bullet again plunging into the bathroom. The goateed man tried to claw at Ray with his free hand but the broken wrist was too much. The gun was shaking from strain, starting to swivel despite Ray’s hold. The barrel’s side was eight inches from Ray’s nose, and he could begin to see the black hole at its end. Their legs were wide for the best planted stance, feet shuffling on old linoleum, Ray panting and hissing but no sounds from the goateed man. Ray saw the barrel still moving in at him slowly despite his hold, and he felt his strength draining from him as if sucked into that vam-piric black hole.
Ray let go of the man’s wrist.
His hand shot up to the pistol’s cylinder, his fingers deftly finding the cylinder’s release catch. His thumb pushed the cylinder out of the gun, and not being hinged like that of his .38 or the Magnum, it fell out of the gun’s frame, striking his foot and then rolling away somewhere. Ray let go of the man’s arm as soon as the cylinder dropped out and shoved him away from himself.
The goateed man thrust his arm out still gripping the pistol’s handle, and the end of the barrel smashed into Ray’s face just below his left cheekbone. It felt like a bullet going in. A white nova of pain burst behind Ray’s eyes and he backed off, lifting his arm too late. The goateed man raced past him for the door and Ray whirled after him, clutching air after him. “You fuck!” he cried, almost in tears from pain. The goateed man disappeared out the kitchen door.
Ray lifted his shotgun from where he’d quietly laid it behind the stove, thinking to conserve his final shell. He glanced around briefly for the .22’s cylinder, didn’t see it…he’d have to come back. He heard the goateed man pounding downstairs.
Ray hit the top of the stairs just as the goateed man leaped off the bottom step. The shotgun blast was deafening in the enclosure of the staircase, a demon trumpet amplifying Ray’s roar of fury.
The scattered shot caught the goateed man and spun him. He went down, but instantly he scrabbled around the corner out of sight on hands and knees. Damn. Last shot. But he was wounded. Ray pounded downstairs with the empty shotgun to finish him off and get that pistol frame.
With the blood splashed about and the glass from before, it looked like there had been a car crash in the hallway, and its injured survivor had scurried on hands and knees into the downstairs kitchen. Ray saw the door close as he jumped onto the crunching strewn glass. He ran at the door and stomped it. It opened a foot but struck something, started to close again. Ray drove his shoulder against it, the tormented old wood cracking. He rammed it again. Crack. Again. No resistance. He fell inside to the floor as the door slapped open. The air was driven out of him. The goateed man was scurrying off toward the livingroom, crab-like, his black robe leaving a long brush stroke of blood on the gold-flecked dirty white canvas of linoleum. In falling Ray had clipped his chin on the hammer of the shotgun, gouging flesh. He was getting madder by the minute.
Ray loomed up over the crawling man, brought the shotgun’s barrel spear-like down into the center of his lower back. The man went flat on his face, arms out, as if he had splatted from a great height. Ray raised his weapon again. The man rolled onto his back. That face; fury, agony, fear—and all cranked to a high volume of desperate insanity, the fury awesome like that of the statue of a snarling oriental demon, but the agony and fear like that of Munch’s famous painting, one of Ray’s favorites. So terrifying was this face that Ray hesitated in slamming down his makeshift lance again, Medusa-stricken.
A foot stomped up into Ray’s crotch. The goateed man snatched at Ray’s shirt and hair as he jack-knifed forward in pain, and pulled himself quickly to his feet. He then clamped his teeth on Ray’s infected ear and like a dog worrying a cat yanked his head from side-to-side. Ray screamed. The spent shotgun clattered loudly to the floor. Talons in his hair, the other hand clawing at his balls for a hold. It was as though Ray were trapped in the legs and mandibles of some gigantic spider, just some helpless fly. His hands clawed, pushed and pulled frantically. Their entwined bodies stumbled and fell together against the stove, two locked as one, monster and victim, like violent lovers.
Ray heard his own agonized voice cry out for God in a high pitch. He was sure he had jabbed the man good once in the eye but the clamped teeth didn’t relent. He was growing dizzy, soon to lose consciousness…no doubt a last futile attempt by his sanity to escape behind a safe locked door. But if he fainted he would die. Well, maybe that was the idea. But the mind isn’t a dictatorship, it’s a dissenting, debating assembly. Ray’s hand shot up from the swirling black vortex that was sucking him down to drown him. His fingers found a plastic dial, turned it. His ears, even down in the suffocating whirlpool, detected the soft poof as the beautiful blue of the gas jets came to life.
The claw at his crotch finally closed on a handful. Ray slapped his hand up to cup the goateed man’s crotch, and it fit in his palm like it was made for it, and he crushed. They both crushed. Ray pivoted his entire body and the goateed man’s back was against the stove. Ray leaned into him, pressing his entire body down against him, leaning his burning ear down into him. If he was going to pull himself out of the vortex he must first pull this being down into it with him.
Ray abruptly dropped his hands from the man, reached down with both and cupped his buttocks, hoisting him up off his feet. The teeth raked his ear as they pulled away. It felt like the ear went with them.
The goateed man fell back against the stove top, across the one jet-ting burner Ray had activated. Ray thrust him down further and pinned him by gripping his throat in his left hand. With his right hand he punched the man in the face, again, again, driving him down like a hammer driving a nail into the fire of the burner. Ray felt that he was smashing and ruining his thin, bony hand forever but he didn’t care. He was in so much pain from so many parts of his body that it had all become one brilliant blaze that fueled and inspired him.
Smoke. Black. The man’s eyes rolled like those of a dying horse, and his mouth flew open and snapped shut erratically. He twisted and seemed to coil snake-like under Ray’s body but was pinned, his legs locking around Ray’s waist pincer-like, squeezing his insides, the spider’s mandibles. Burnt smell. The smoke alarm went off in the livingroom, a wailing banshee. Ray couldn’t punch anymore, could only do his best to hold the man down. The legs sucked him closer, one foot hooking over the other. Ray looked down between them to see what was jabbing into his mid-section and saw the black robe tented out from the creature’s full spear of an erection.
The creature bolted up at the waist, wrenching its hands free, seized Ray by the hair and locked its open mouth over his. Ray tasted its blood, its thick bleeding tongue crammed solidly into his mouth, pressing toward the opening to his throat, choking him. Gagging, he shoved the face away with a supreme effort and gasped desperately as he broke the water of the vortex for air. The creature thrashed under him, began to roll free from under his weight. Ray saw the eaten hole in the back of its robe, the skin a black crust like barbecued chicken but for two huge greenish blisters. The legs had unfolded from around him, the feet almost touching the floor. Ray
bore his weight down on it again, locked his arms up under the armpits and laced his fingers over the back of its neck in a ull nelson hold. He forced its face down into the burner. Made it look into a window at the hellfire into which it and its kind had been meaning to cast him. He rode a wild horse for a minute or so then, pressed his cheek against its back, felt the heat burn his arms. Then finally the creature went slack. Though the smell of burning flesh had grown strong, Ray doubted that the fire alone had defeated it; the shock and pain had worn it out and finished it after its other serious injuries.
His hands were red and tender. He let out a great shaky sigh of release. And then he realized that he had an erection, too, trapped inside his clothing, that had leaned its weight against the monster as well, pinned and grinding between himself and the rear end of the creature locked in his embrace.
Ray stepped back, releasing it, horrified…more horrified at himself than at it; on the surface, more horrified at the fact that the subject of his arousal had been a man (in form at least) than that the arousal had come from killing (such is the priority of social taboos). More horrified at his erection than at its black gaping scab of a mask as it slid from the stove and crumpled dead on its back at his feet, the beautiful blue gas jets still softly purring. Ray stood over it, his brain a spinning centrifuge while his body was locked in a numb mechanical equilibrium. No triumph in its death. Just this horror. The ejaculation that would have been a burst of triumph had dwindled back into his recesses and faded away, barely averted. He felt that if he hadn’t caught the ejaculation and swallowed it back before it was too late he would have gone mad, and there would have been no coming back. So he had won, for now, over the triumph of madness. But the horror…
Suddenly, Ray looked over his shoulder. My God, my God. All this frenzy and chaos; the smoke alarm still howling, and there was still one of them left alive. It wouldn’t have fled in fear; this was a battle to the death. There was still this one last demon to destroy—but where? He had no more weapons, he had no more strength.
He walked mindlessly, tiredly deeper into his house.
257
Chapter
12
Tar-Fiend obviously liked to play. He could very easily have reached out one long arm and lifted Paul off the ground as he scrabbled backwards away from him on his feet and ass and elbows, and holding him before his skull face, twist him and break him like a doll. In one sweep of his arm, backhand Paul across the head and cave in his skull, snap his neck. But Tar-Fiend only advanced at the rate Paul withdrew, biding his time, savoring Paul’s maddening suspense. All along, Tar-Fiend had had fun playing with them, hadn’t he? Making use of his hideous imagination, his more hideous sense of humor. Somehow that skull face retained enough tendon and muscle action to spread its grin further back under the empty sockets.
Paul knew he didn’t have much further backward he could go. Lift me up, lift me up, he thought. Paul was going to loop his pentagram necklace around its neck, shove it down its fucking throat if he got the chance. Fucking fire sprinklers! Somehow Tar-Fiend, clever and imaginative as ever, had anticipated his intentions and done something to disable them. The fires grew behind Tar-Fiend, and Paul knew it was only a matter of minutes before something else in here exploded, and something else…until the whole place was consumed. Maybe then the town would know what was happening in here. Up until even now, neighbors in their homes had gone on living their lives, arguing with their spouses, snapping at the children, complaining about their jobs and sitting down to numbly stare at inane TV programs, as unaware of the nightmare life and death battle that had been raging in here as riders on a subway train are of the rapist-killer sitting amongst them.
Tar-Fiend leaned forward at the waist and his black teeth came away from each other, his mouth opening. Oh God, oh God, Paul thought, and in backing away his hand came down in some of the liquid foam Tar-Fiend had sprayed at him. It was still searing. Paul cried out and rolled away from the puddle onto his side, whimpered, glanced over his shoulder up at Tar-Fiend, who had come to a stop also, leaning over him, mouth opening wider. The pentagram! Throw the pentagram…
Tar-Fiend let out a long rumbling belch, and a spurt of black vomit drooled out of his mouth in long strings that broke away to fall on Paul’s pant legs. Smoke or steam curled out of the wide cavernous mouth; the stomach heaved, the throat rasped/gurgled, and a smaller spurt drooled out. Paul drew his legs up to his chest, almost in a fetal position.
Pentagram, pentagram…
Tar-Fiend snapped his jaw shut, reached down, caught Paul by the ankle, lifted him upside-down from the floor. Turned and walked toward the fires. Paul kicked and screamed, the chain of the pentagram falling across his face. He grabbed it, unhooked it from around his neck, blindly lashing it at Tar-Fiend like a whip, connecting a few times, causing Tar-Fiend to flinch it seemed—but not to stop walking toward the fire. Tar-Fiend raised and lowered his arm as he walked to tease Paul, swung his wrist around in circles to twirl him pendulum-like.
Through this activity Paul began to retch again, couldn’t bend at the waist to grab at the creature’s wrist. He lashed the pentagram at it. Tears streamed down his forehead, snaked into his hair, which dangled inside-out. And now they had reached the head, the hose-like instrument inserted into molds to inject the molten plastic. Despite his terror and pain, Paul felt a shock of surprise to see that the head to the black foam area wasn’t exploded, or even on fire; it was surrounding stacked boxes of parts that had caught flame, a tabletop covered with tools and a blown-over radio, and anywhere on the floor and on one wooden support beam where foam had pooled and sprayed. Tar-Fiend lifted the head from where it lay dropped, a metal piece with multiple holes like gun barrels connected by black snaking foam-crusted tubes to a control panel. Tar-Fiend carried him to the panel, and turned his back to Paul, holding him away from his body due to Paul’s lashes. After a moment Tar-Fiend turned back to Paul, who saw as his blood poured into his head like sand in an hourglass that Tar-Fiend had unhinged his jaw and somehow taken the entire metal head into his mouth, crusty black throat bulging, the black hoses hanging out over his teeth. The head was activated. Tar-Fiend was gulping down the hot black liquid plastic, reloading so to speak, and Paul realized why the spraying foam before had been projected such an astonishing, uncharacteristic distance, and why it had been so especially and weirdly flammable.
Paul had bumped into Abby a few times, turned his head now and looked into her face. Her hair was very singed and she had burned where foam had hit her from the explosion in Tar-Fiend’s mouth, but she was more intact than he was. A terrible guilt blew through Paul, even with the blood ballooning his skull, the pain, the fear, the knowledge that Tar-Fiend intended any moment to cover him in the lava-hot foam. But the guilt blew away as quickly as it had come—mercifully. Paul turned to face Tar-Fiend and swayed his entire body, rocked closer, grabbed a fistful of Abby’s shirt blindly, reached out with his other hand and slid the pentagram into a fissure in the creature’s burnt skin just at the base of its remains of a penis.
That did it. Tar-Fiend let him go and now it was his turn to scream—that high-pitched tea kettle whistle. Paul fell hard on his shoulder but ignored the pain, rolled and rolled away as the head fell out of that doorway of a mouth, the foam inside it spraying out. Paul was splattered but made it to his feet—and fell, the blood still heavy in his head.
Snapping his jaws shut, Tar-Fiend glared blindly down at him, no longer grinning, and spread his long talons in the air, shaking violently as if to explode. Paul heard the rumble in Tar-Fiend’s belly, a growing gurgle as foam rushed up through the creature’s throat. The head lay near Paul, spraying some table legs. Paul dragged the head to him and pointed it up at Tar-Fiend’s descending face.
The monster reeled back, lifting its arms too late, the wall behind it now a rough Tar-Fiend stencil. The head stopped launching foam, the reserve at last run out. Paul let it go and was on his feet and running. Tar-Fiend flung himself aft
er him, whistling. Paul ran for the back dock area. Plummeted through the hanging plastic strips. Tar-Fiend flung out an arm, no longer playing, and raked Paul’s back. He almost stumbled. Paul plunged into the paint room, whirled and shoved over a drum of paint into the monster’s path, another. Another. Tar-Fiend stepped over them. Paul lunged at a long bench, flung smaller paint cans, darted around the room tipping over more barrels. Thick syrupy paint oozed out onto the floor…brown, black, now white. Something exploded upstairs and the building shook. Now that finally had to pierce through the fog of situation comedies.
Enraged, Tar-Fiend tore and unhooked Abby viciously from his body and flung her across the room at Paul, who ducked her behind a row of drums. Paul had got his hands on a plastic jug of lacquer thinner and splashed that about. He dumped over more barrels. Tar-Fiend was beginning to rumble again.
The floorboards outside the bedroom creaked, but the being inside the room didn’t look around at Ray. It was a black lump huddled against the glossy black wall as if to blend in or merge into it, back to where it had come from. The last of the thirteen. Ray had expected to finally confront some smirking, looming arch-priest, goateed, with peaked eyebrows and blazing Rasputin eyes, some lofty and powerful evil wizard, Lovecraft’s Abdul Alhazred, the commander of those who had come before him, twice as vital and lethal as they had been. But the black draped form, a forlorn mass of protoplasm, was cowering. And the fat nickel-plated .357 Magnum lay on the floor in the center of the room.
Ray hesitated in stepping over the threshold, through the doorway, as if the floor beyond would fall away into a pit of spikes or turn to acid as soon as his weight rested on it. It had to be a trap. They wanted to kill him…that was their mission, that was why they had come…
The black molten vomit erupted into a powerful hose-like spray, which Paul again ducked behind more paint drums. His eyes burned feverishly in his intense bony face, but he was half smiling. It had to be thirty to forty minutes to clock out. He wasn’t going to make it…
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