Diabolical (42 page)

“And I'm supposed to believe this?”

“Well, on the one hand, yes,” the man said, shrugging. “On the other, it doesn't really matter.”

“Let's say I play along for now. If you're a demon, and demons live in Hell, then what are you doing here?”

“My dear fellow, I'm always here.” Raum tapped his index finger against his temple. “The Carnates simply saw fit to let you have a glimpse. Just the right mix of herbs and an ancient incantation. I was more than happy to oblige.”

“And why would they do that?”

“To fuck with your head. Why else?”

Hatcher lowered his gaze to the knife in his hand. “So, you're not real.”

“Oh, I'm very real. You might say I'm as real as it gets. What is reality, after all? Is the color red real? Does it even exist as you know it? What is anything outside of what your brain tells you it is? How do you know someone else sees the same thing you do? If everyone were color blind, would colors still be there?”

Hatcher rubbed his eyes. “I'm hallucinating.”

“No. Deluding, perhaps. But not hallucinating.”

“This is not real.”

“Here we go with the ‘real' again. How's this for real.” The man tipped forward and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I know everything that terrifies you.”

“Is that so?”

“That's so.”

“And I'm just supposed to take your word for all this?”

“No,” Raum said. “That would require faith. Not something we deal in.” The man's lips tensed into a humorless grin. He raised a hand from his pocket, bending his arm at the elbow, and snapped his fingers.

Hatcher tightened up, surprised and disappointed in himself for doing so. But nothing happened.

“Is that all you got?”

The man didn't move. In fact, he didn't even blink. Or twitch. Or breathe. He was completely still. Unnaturally motionless. Like a statue.

Hatcher leaned closer. Something was wrong. He took a step, then another. Not only was the man not moving, Hatcher realized he wasn't even a man anymore. A two-dimensional, life-sized cardboard cut-out stood in his place, a photograph, perfectly duplicating his last pose. Hatcher took a few more steps, reached out and touched the image.

A pair of arms burst through the picture, long and gray, clawed fingers, raking and snatching. Thick hairs protruded from the leathery skin, the hide pulled tight around narrow ropes of corded muscles and knobby bones. The hands cuffed Hatcher's wrists and jerked him forward into the photo. The picture shattered, cardboard exploding into a thousand fragments of glass, and Hatcher found himself tumbling, flailing, falling. He was passing through himself, through his future, through settings and events he could barely conceive. All of it alien, all of it unreal, all of it chillingly familiar.

Faceless creatures fed on human flesh, close enough to touch, yellow eyes and black gaping maws, heads draped in layers of long, stringy hair, teeth like piranha. He knew these things, had seen them before. Seen them, fled them, feared them. In nightmares, as a child. Same for the things that looked like snakes with daggered limbs and human faces, sporting blue skin and cat's eyes, tearing at a carcass, flinging viscera haphazardly over their heads, an orgy of insanity. All of them things his mind had conjured in his youth, what he pictured the first time he'd heard the word “ghoul,” his imagination giving form to the kind of thing suited to such a name. Or the product of a movie he could hear playing on the TV while he was huddled in his bed down the hall and his father snored in the recliner, something about a crazy doctor turning people into snakes.

Even now, these scenes seemed to reach an icy hand inside him and squeeze. He tried to tell himself they weren't real, but he knew better. These were more real than anything else he could think of. Solid. Three-dimensional. Alive.

A crazy woman with matted, wild hair squatted over a corpse, stabbing it with a fork over and over, giggling. The sight revived his fears of insanity he had as a kid, sent the same weakening tingle through his spine, the same spike in his heart rate. The thought of a person who wasn't really there, whose brain was not quite human, a person who couldn't be reasoned with, whose homicidal mind he couldn't comprehend, still made his skin squirm with unease.

Each world staked its own claim on him, quickly dissolving into the next, lasting just long enough for Hatcher to take in every detail as he passed through, a piece of him knowing he was damned to return.

The victims all seemed to look vaguely the same, but it wasn't until the last scene that Hatcher was able to recognize who it was. A man, arms and legs missing, two stones in place of his eyeballs, with irises and pupils painted on them. He was being raped by troll-like men with jagged buckteeth as they drooled over his writhing body. The man was Hatcher. So, he realized, were the rapists.

Unable to take it, Hatcher shut his eyes, pushing at them with his fingers, trying to squeeze out what he'd seen. The worst part was the feeling that swelled and churned inside him, a feeling so strong it seemed he was immersed in it, a radio signal bombarding every corner and cranny, boosted and rebroadcast internally from his crown to his heels. A jittery, helpless feeling, the result of millions of neurons firing and misfiring, bombarding his senses into overload. The entire universe narrowed, compressing into the space around him, existence now defined as the complete absence of anything but horror and despair. Pure terror.

When he opened his eyes, Hatcher found himself balled on the ground, apparently in the same place he'd started.

Raum looked down at him from his position leaning against the desk. There was no indication he'd ever left.

“Hope you enjoyed that. I figured I'd skip the maudlin stuff you saw the other day and go for the visceral thrills. That's the beauty of where you're going. You'll never be bored.”

Hatcher said nothing. He shut his eyes, tried to catch his breath.

“I'm supposed to tell you to take the ring,” Raum said.

“What ring?” Hatcher said.

“They'll offer it to you. Take it. It will make you powerful enough to do almost anything. I'm bound not to lie.”

Hatcher held his breath for a moment. “And if I don't?”

The demon shrugged. “That wasn't part of my message.”

The shaky feeling in his gut and limbs started to subside. Hatcher shook his head, trying to clear it, rolled to his hands and knees and pushed himself off the ground. He started to speak as he stood, but stopped before any sound came out. Raum was gone. So was the desk, and the black expanse. There was only the tunnel, flickering in the light of the torch that lay near his feet.

HATCHER REACHED THE NEXT HUB IN LITTLE MORE THAN AN hour. He'd left the torch—again—and was following the bouncing sphere of brightness from his flashlight. Firelight glowed in the distance. As he drew closer, he shut off the flashlight and hugged the tunnel wall. He crept forward until he could see what lay beyond.

A woman was standing next to a stone slab, leaning over it and looking down, her back to Hatcher. Platinum blonde, perfect figure. Tight leather outfit. He had to force himself not to look at her ass. And not looking didn't remove the image of it from his head.

Soliya
.

Hatcher scanned the area. This hub was similar to the prior one, just a space with more tunnels branching out like spokes. There was no one else there but her.

To keep going in the same direction, he'd have to take the tunnel directly across. On the other side of her. Sneaking to it looked impossible.

Carnates were tough. Hatcher knew that from experience. They were strong and agile and skilled fighters. He'd seen one flip out of an armlock in a way that had to have dislocated her shoulder. She didn't so much as wince.

His hand slid to his jeans, felt the firm outline of the knife clipped to the belt line.

She didn't seem to be paying attention. He could sneak up to her, slow and quiet, stick the long blade deep into her back, straight into her heart. Would that kill her? Edgar had said it would, but he wasn't sure how much of what he'd been told—if any of it—could be believed.

But he tended to think it was true. They were still living creatures with beating hearts. If it had a beating heart, stabbing that heart would kill it.

The question was, could he do that? Kill a woman in cold blood? Even one that wasn't really a woman? Or at best half a woman?

He slipped the knife out from where it was tucked. He opened the blade slowly, let it lock in place with a muted snick.

An image of that Afghani boy flashed through his head.

Just a kid, and he'd covered his mouth, pulled his head back, and cleaved his arteries open. Stabbed the blade into the space behind his clavicle, worked it forward and back to sever the connections to the heart.

He hadn't realized just how young he was, or at least hadn't considered it, until he saw the eyes. So wide open, so terrified. Realizing he was dying, but too young to really grasp it. The eyes of a child. A little boy playing terrorist, recruited by diseased minds. Dead in five seconds.

It was a memory Hatcher had assumed he'd locked away, one he'd gotten rid of a long time ago. He'd gone years free of it, not letting anything remind him. Until that glimpse of damnation at the hands of Sankey.

He closed his eyes.
She's not human, damn it.

He forced himself to think of Vivian, of Lori. Lori, dead and mutilated. Vivian, possibly still alive.

This was no time to lose his nerve, he told himself. Arm around the neck, pulling her up and back, curving her spine, then one, hard upward thrust of the knife, just to the left of her vertebrae, right below the scapula. Not difficult. Just very hard.

The pistol-grip handle snugly wedged in his fist, he stepped from the shadow of the tunnel into the torchlight.

One step, then another, weight on the balls of his feet, legs bent, ready to spring.

Hatcher stopped, squeezed his eyes shut. He had to quit thinking this way.

He took a quiet breath, let it out slowly. Sure, that was war. And war was hell. But what's this? Is it the same thing? What choice was there? They'd killed Lori, taken Vivian. Who knew what they were up to?

He mopped his face, thinking. Maybe he didn't have to kill her. He had a knife, he could put it to her throat. Stab her in the heart only if she resisted. Riskier, yes. But Carnate or not, she was still an unarmed woman. Sort of.

Another breath, then another step. The decision calmed his nerves, let him focus. She was only a few feet away now, completely oblivious. Unmoving.

One more step, and he lunged forward, thrust his left arm across her neck, cupping his hand back to pull her head and expose her jugular, bringing the knife to it, pressing it just hard enough so there would be no mistake—

The body swung woodenly with his movements, rattling. Stiff arms, slightly crooked at the elbow, pointing outward. A solid, fleshless face. Molded composite material under a wig. A mannequin.

“I trust you weren't planning on slitting my throat.”

Hatcher dropped the mannequin and wheeled around. Soliya was standing against the rocky wall, hands linked casually behind her waist. Her lips were curled at the edges, a bemused twinkle in her eye. Same red leather outfit.

“I mean, really, Hatcher—after all we've been through?”

First the stuff with Raum or whoever he was, now this. Hatcher fixed his eyes on hers, taking whatever measure he could, then slowly let his gaze drift around the chamber. Three torches guttered on the walls. Nothing else but a slab, and a mannequin.

But it wasn't a mannequin a minute ago. That much he was sure of.

“You drugged me.”

“Did I?”

Hatcher said nothing. If she did drug him, she would have had to touch him, inject him. Give him something to drink. Or inhale. In the cave, it would have been easy. The bangers could have done it on the way. But here?

He glanced around the chamber one more time. Nothing but torches.

Torches.

Fire. She'd lit a fire at the cave, and now torches. The drug was in the smoke. Had to be. He'd even smelled it. Made it easy for them.

“Where is she?”

“It just so happens, I'm here to take you to her.” She paused, apparently considering her words. “In a manner of speaking.”

She pushed away from the wall, smiling as she sashayed past him. Her eyes dropped to the knife in his hand. She arched a brow and winked.

“Don't cut yourself,” she said, stepping up to a torch and pulling it off the wall.

She ventured into a tunnel, an orange glow throbbing off the walls in her wake. The chamber dimmed slightly. Hatcher watched her recede into the distance, shadows filling in behind her. Something had to be in those torches, some fume in the smoke. Something he shouldn't be breathing.

“These are just plain old torches,” she said, as if hearing his thoughts.

He didn't have much of a choice. He stepped into the tunnel and followed, keeping his distance and forcing shallow breaths.