HELLz BELLz (26 page)

Real.

Not real.

Never mind, just crawl.

The sword-wielding bikers had broken off their attack just when Harry thought they were coming back to take off his head. As if in response to a sudden summons, they had flown down the street and disappeared around the corner, leaving him to crawl home.

Crawl, humpy, crawl on home,
the Lurker mocked.

* * *

Cradling the rifle in his arms, James watched the bookstore guy work the CAT’s levers in his attempt to knock the bell tower off the church, but his mind was making rhyme—a rap so dope he wished he had paper and pen to scribble down the words before they were lost to him. He saw the Night Riders before he heard the whine of their Harley hogs above the roar of the CAT’s engine. The two bikers came flying up the street, and for a moment, James thought they were flying
above
the street. He tugged on Josh’s shirtsleeve and pointed with the barrel of his weapon at the motorcycle dudes.

Josh shouted, “Let’s waste ’em!”

James thought that was a fine idea. The bikers’ sudden appearance had made him lose the thread of his rap, and he was mightily pissed. His itch to go Slim Shady on somebody’s ass reasserted itself, and he raised the rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the fat biker. Moving targets were a bitch to hit, and the fatter the target, the more likely you were to hit it.

“Oh dear,” said the chubby, goateed professor when he saw James and Josh drawing beads on the bikers.

The bikers came straight at them. If they saw the rifles, they weren’t afraid of them.

James fired. Josh fired. The bikers came on, apparently not hit. The one with the dark glasses had a length of fire in his hand. What the hell
was
that? James wondered. He worked the bolt, jacked another bullet into the chamber and fired again.

Josh broke and ran to get out of the way of the fire-wielding Night Riders. James was sure his second shot had hit the Porky Pig biker, but the guy was still in the saddle, still bearing down on him, and now Porky had firebrand of his own.

From the corner of his eye James saw the arc of flame from the bald biker’s hand lop off the professor’s head. James ducked under Porky’s sweeping fire, dropped to his knees and found himself staring into the wide eyes of the professor’s severed head. The head’s lips were moving, but James couldn’t hear what they were saying.

* * *

Joe drove the CAT forward about three feet, then lined up another shot with the wrecking ball. “This time, for sure,” he shouted to Suzie. He jerked the lever and the crane moved and the iron ball swung slowly toward the bell tower. “Come on, come on,” he said to the ball. Joe could feel the kinetic energy in the ball, just as he might’ve felt the potential force in a perfectly thrown powerhouse punch as it crosses space to point of impact. It was as if the huge ball was at the end of his arm and he was delivering a knockout blow in the biggest bout of his life. This one was for all the marbles.

He heard the gunshots and looked back over his shoulder. Saw two guys on motorcycles riding down on Woolrich and the boys like horse soldiers in a cavalry charge. But he had to swing his head back around to see the ball strike the tower. That was the important thing. Right now, nothing else mattered.

It was a perfect hit. The ball struck the tower at its base and crumpled it as if it were made of Popsicle sticks. The top of the belfry canted right, falling lazily toward earth. “Gotcha, you son of a bitch,” Joe said to the unseen bell within it.

The belfry hit the ground and its white wood splintered. At last Joe saw the dark iron of the demonic bell. He shut off the CAT’s engine so he could hear the bell’s silence.

Suzie kissed his cheek. Then she said, “Oh my God,” and pointed behind them.

Joe turned just in time to see Woolrich’s head spinning from his shoulders to the ground.

* * *

Sara was motoring up Myrtle Street when the bell stopped tolling. She stopped the car, powered the windows down, shut off the engine and listened to the heavy silence. There was one last pop of gunfire somewhere out in the night.

Then only ominous silence.

A chill crawled up her sweat-swamped back, and she shuddered violently.

* * *

Harry Loveless hugged the cardboard box containing his five-hundred-page manuscript to his chest, then curled into a fetal position on the floor and shut his eyes. The box was slick with his blood, but that was of little consequence. The pages of his carefully prepared masterpiece were clean and dry.

He knew he was dying, but that was all right. The stench of his decomposition would eventually bring someone to investigate, and his bodily remains and his novel would be discovered. Ironic, he thought, that his stinking decomposition would lead others to his typewritten composition. The note on the table gave clear instructions. The contents of the box were to be sent to his agent in New York. The note bore his bloody signature.

Harry was going to die at peace.

But then the bell ceased its tolling.

And the gravity of its sudden silence pulled him into a black hole of unimaginable terror. When he saw the
real
lurkers at the edge of time, he knew there would be no peace.

* * *

Kneeling with one knee on the wet ground, James brought the Ruger to his shoulder and snapped off a shot at Porky Pig as the fat biker with the flaming sword was turning around for another deadly pass. The slug must’ve hit the fuel tank because Porky and his motorcycle were all at once engulfed in flames. But the burning biker came on, roaring directly at James.

Josh ended his brief retreat directly behind the CAT, turned, aimed and fired more shots at the skinhead biker speeding toward him. One of the slugs punched through the biker’s forehead and blew off the back of his head. His bike slid over the grass on its side and crashed into the side of the CAT. James ran for cover behind the CAT, and the bookstore dude and his woman started firing their pistols at the rolling pig flambeau. The firebrand fell from his hand as Porky roared past them and crashed into the fallen belfry. The shattered wood housing the bell quickly went up in gas-fueled flames.

No one said a word.

The rain stopped falling.

The bell started screaming.

Joe Carr blinked. A world gone suddenly surreal winked at him. He opened his jaws wide to make his ears pop, thinking that might ease the sharp pain in his ears. It didn’t work. The shrill keening of the flame-licked bell made him feel as if hot needles were piercing his eardrums. He stared at the severed head on the ground beside the headless body. He knew he was looking at the remains of his old friend John Woolrich, yet he couldn’t really believe it. A man on a motorcycle had hacked off John’s head with a flaming sword. How could he believe
that?

Seeing was believing.

And screaming was keening.

And
keening
was a wailing lament for the dead, according to the dictionary. But Bookstore Joe was well beyond the realm of dictionary definitions.

He raised his gaze and took in the whole of his surroundings. Bodies littered the city’s streets and sidewalks. Wrecked or abandoned vehicles blocked streets and intersections. Storefronts had been smashed, his bookstore among them. Alarms whistled or beeped. The western sky was aglow with light from distant fires.

Druid Hills was burning. Hell was real, and Hell had come to earth. Ordinary citizens had turned demonic. He had knocked down the bell and now it was screaming within the flames, and he was close to losing his frail grip on reality. He tightened his grip on the 9mm pistol in his right hand. He had killed tonight. Killed men, and killed sword-wielding bikers who were something other than human. The girl beside him had helped him with the killing. But she was demonic too. She was the slutty temptress who had driven off his wife. He glanced at her. She was staring blank-faced at the burning corpse on the ground. It would be easy to kill her. All Joe had to do was put his pistol next to her head and shoot. She could just as easily do the same to him with her pistol.

“Make it stop,” she said, turning her glassy glowing eyes on him. She held her hands to her ears, pressing the handle of her Glock against her head. “It
hurts.
”

Of course it hurts, Joe thought. The world is made of pain. Of suffering. Of degradation and humiliation. Why shouldn’t it hurt? We’re born into blood and pain, and if you think life is about anything else, you’re living in illusion. From the moment we’re born, we begin the long process of dying. Our pitiful bodies are well on their way to rot and ruin, and we live our rotten lives accordingly. You bet it hurts.

Joe looked at her and laughed. “Life is hell,” he shouted to be heard over the screaming iron.

Then the world before his eyes wavered and flickered in and out of existence, and Joe was suddenly overwhelmed with the sensation of falling. The earth beneath his feet was no longer solid, and he was falling through a crack in time and space.

* * *

James watched Josh unzip his jeans and whip out his dick, its bulbous head thick and pink, its shaft ridged with bluish veins. The crazy fuck was whacking his willie right out in the open. Then he saw things crawling beneath the loose skin of his friend’s face and he knew the shrieking bell had claimed Josh as its own.

He leveled his weapon hip-high and pointed it at Josh’s cock. It occurred to him that he could shut up the goddamn bell by blowing off his crazed pal’s prick. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he was almost sure it would work.

Josh was holding his rifle in his left hand while he jerked his cock with his right fist. When he saw James drawing a bead on his manhood, he squalled, “Whatafuckyadoin, man?” And let go of his penis and grabbed for the stock of his Mannlicher so he could defend himself.

James pulled his trigger and the Ruger coughed.

The slug hit Josh’s weapon and knocked it into his belly and out of his hands, and Josh reeled backward and fell on his ass. Stunned, he looked up at James with a stupid expression on his face. His erection was already flagging between his skinny thighs.

“Fucking pervert,” James said. He looked hard into Josh’s face, looking for the demon beneath his skin. “I know what you are.”

“What the fuck…?”

James stuck the muzzle in Josh’s face.

Josh stared into the dark hole where his death lived.

But James didn’t grant him his death. Something made him look down the hill, all the way to the neon sign on the storefront cattycorner to the Jiffy-Quick. The sign flashed: Okey-Dokey Karaoke Lounge
.
A man stood in the doorway, his face mostly hidden by his sweatshirt’s gray hood he wore over his head. Just for an instant, James thought the dude was the one-and-only Slim Shady. But that was wack. No way would
he
be caught dead in a Podunk place like Druid Hills, Rhode Island. But the guy was signaling to him, beckoning with a crooked bony finger. So who the hell was he? And why was he summoning James?

James looked down at Josh and at the lumps crawling beneath the flesh of his face and into his bugging eyeballs. Disgusted by what he saw, he shifted the rifle in his hands and butt-stroked the side of Josh’s head, then jogged down the hill to see what was up with the hooded dude.

As he ran, he began to understand. It was perfect! The Okey-Dokey Karaoke…

* * *

The wailing banshees called her and Sara went toward their screaming. Shadows were glowing now, alive with radiant energy—shadows broken free from the things that cast them. Every shadow had a life of its own, and they all were following her to the source of the screaming.

She motored up Holy Cross Hill, drawn to the dancing firelight in front of the church like the proverbial moth to the irresistible flame. A boy with a rifle darted across the street in front of her, and she raised the pistol in her right hand, ready to shoot him, but he ignored her and ran on down the hill.

Then she saw her husband standing next to Suzie the slut. Saw they were both armed with pistols.

She cut the wheel, left the road and drove across the church lawn, stopping right in front of them. She slid out of the car, holding her pistol against her leg so they couldn’t see it.

“The fuck’re you doing here?” the slut shouted above the shrill screaming.

Sara ignored the big-tittied bitch, and addressed her husband: “Joseph? Get in the car. We’re leaving.”

He stared ahead with a blank expression. He didn’t seem to see or hear her.

The church lawn was littered like a battlefield with bodies, but Sara didn’t let herself be distracted by the carnage, or by the screaming fire. Those living shadows capered all around her, and she knew she had to get her husband and go before they started closing in for the kill. “Joseph! Listen to me! Get in the car. We have to go.”

The slut pointed her pistol at Sara and said, “I didn’t appreciate being dumped on the side of the road, bitch. We coulda been killed.”

“I’m not talking to you,” said Sara. She put her hand on Joseph’s arm and pulled him toward her. He stepped forward like an awkward drunk, his eyes glazed and unseeing.

“Get your hands off him,” Suzie yelled, jabbing her gun at the air. “He’s with me now.”

Outraged by the cunt’s bravado, Sara raised her .38 and stuck it in the other woman’s face. “Fuck you!” she screamed.

* * *

Joe moved through the syrupy darkness of the slanting tunnel without knowing where he was going or why. Whispery voices caressed him, urging him on. They instructed him to ignore the terrible screaming that howled like a fierce stormwind through the tunnel. Firelight flickered on the membranous walls, casting sticky shadows. Joe sensed that he was moving sideways in time—not forward, not back, but laterally, beyond the dubious boundaries of bleary chronology and inexorably into the Infinite. The mucus-glazed tunnel walls reflected the fragmentary ephemera of his life. The seething futility of his existence overwhelmed him. His reflections multiplied madly, creating kaleidoscopic collisions: hall of mirrors: infinity of doomed possibilities. He was at once a child, an old man, a walking embryo. Sara’s voice cut through the whispering and the screaming, but when he tried to focus on the mewling sounds singing from her vocal chords, her voice faded, evaded. The head of John Woolrich floated before him, his charred and ragged neck dripping putrid ichor. The head said:
God is one brutal bastard. He’s the bogeyman we loved to fear. And He will never let us go.