The 13th (23 page)

Chief Maitlin tiptoed through the black hallway of the old hotel and gritted his teeth. It had been a lot of years since he’d been in this building, and he hadn’t missed it one bit. The last time he’d been inside, he had been just a rookie cop, following the captain on an emergency call and stifling the urge to puke at the warm smell of feces and blood that thickened the air like a foul perfume. He had walked through the foyer and gagged at the sight of dismembered arms lying broken, like old toys on the floor, as they’d slipped deeper inside the nightmare. Somewhere in the basement, he remembered, a horrible twisting scream had echoed so loud it raised the hair on the back of his neck…

Now things were different. The hotel had been silent for half of his life, and he hoped that its core remained so…He hoped that it was just some fool who had tried to recapture the evil that once before had painted the walls here with entrails, and not someone who knew what he was doing. Because there
was
an evil here, something ancient. Something that had driven men to kill and kill and kill over and over again. Every generation had a story about Castle House. The bloodbath that the chief had seen a quarter century before was not the first. But he desperately wanted to make sure it remained the last.

His black-booted feet stepped carefully across the thick old carpet, as if trying to hide from whatever lay ahead. He knew in his heart that if the evil had awakened, there was no hiding, no hiding at all.

From somewhere down below his boots, a scream erupted.

“Oh bloody hell,” the chief whispered, his voice quiet in the shadow. “Why me?”

When he had walked through this corridor the first time, a quarter century ago, his daughter had been just a baby; blonde curly locks crowning her tiny head like wreathes. Her mother, Tricia, begged him to “Just do your job and come home.” She thought that a cop could just go to the office and come home again, without ever involving his family. “Leave us out of it,” she’d said once. But when you’re a cop…your family is a cop’s family. They can’t hide from who they are. And he couldn’t hide them.

He had done his best to keep them out of it, but in the end his career had caught up to Tricia. One August night while he was running the front desk at the station, an old con whom he’d sent up the river for ripping off the general store had come back to town after serving his term. The guy knew who the cop was who’d put him away. He knew who the cop’s wife was too. And he’d shown Maitlin a thing or two about crime and punishment.

Maitlin’s crime had been putting away the local who had broken the law. The criminal’s punishment had been putting a steel pole through the belly of the cop’s wife in the middle of a city sidewalk.

They’d found her body the next morning…a wild halo of blood surrounding her like a sainthood.

Maitlin had never really been the same. But in the two decades since, he’d done his best to shield Stacy from the danger of what he did. And so now he wanted to call out his daughter’s name in the
shadows. He wanted to hear her voice that he knew must be suffering in silence here somewhere. He wanted to grab her and just take her home, regardless of what the other people here might need.

But in his heart he knew he was sworn to protect. And while he first intended to protect his daughter, he also intended to protect his town. His fingers slipped inside his jacket pocket to fumble for the book of matches he’d slipped there before he’d left the office. He gripped the pack hard and gritted his teeth to steel his courage. There was one thing that would protect his town more than anything else, he thought. The destruction of Castle House.

Ba’al.

Amelia grinned. She could feel the demon in the air now…His touch permeated every pore. As she walked, his feather touches stroked her face, and hair and…

She had grown up dreaming of the satyr incarnate, fucking her to submission beneath soaking sheets. She had begged her dreams to make him real. She had traveled to Ireland and spent weeks studying in forgotten carrels of old libraries. She had studied every ancient myth and legend in handwritten tomes locked away in private collections to find out how. The things she had done to get access to those texts would make a whore blush.

And finally, tonight, with the cooperation of Astarte, he would be hers, at last.

Rockford was a prop, in the end, but a necessary
one. He provided the focal point. The fulcrum. The means.

And the people of the town—the energy. With every sacrifice they sent a dissonance into space; a rift in the very matter that held soul and serendipity in its hand. With the blood of mother and child, mother and child, mother and child spilled again and again in this room, the dissonance grew until it could not be contained any longer.

“I hate you,” Amelia whispered at the doctor’s hairy back, as he walked ahead down the shadowed hall, the girl struggling feebly in his grasp.

“When Ba’al comes, I will make you the first offering to his reign. And Astarte and I will serve the god as concubines.”

In the main room, the townspeople groaned as one…It was as if the soul of the goat lived in them all, as one.

“There’s nobody there,” David insisted. His fingers touched the cool skin of the policewoman’s shoulder with trepidation. The faintest fear slipped through his brain and asked, would she arrest him for assault?

“It’s just you and me. In a closet.”

Christy sat up and pressed her face close to his. “There was
someone
here. Some
thing.
There was…”

David nodded. “I know.” He shivered as he thought of the cold weight that had thrust at his back. “I felt it too. But…they’re gone now. We should find a way out before they come back.”

In the faintest light of the room, he thought he saw her face grimace.

“I didn’t ask to be in your nightmare,” he told her.

Christy laughed. “And I didn’t ask to feel your nightstick.”

She coughed. “Um…please get it off my thigh.”

David laughed. Then he crawled back to the faint light creeping in from beneath the door. With a fingernail he traced the indentation along the floor and followed its unlit gap up to standing level. After a little work, he found the door handle with his hand, which didn’t budge in the slightest. He said, “Right here. We need something to slip up and into the lock.”

“Oh sure, let me just get my hairpin,” Christy said. David could almost see her smirk in the dark.

“Just feel around on the ground for a piece of paper…I think it’s just a latch on the outside. If we can slip something in here and flip it up…we’re home free.”

“Just crawl around naked on the dirty floor of a basement with the spiders and bugs feeling around for garbage…Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, just wanted to be clear.”

Christy felt in the dust for…anything. Her knees scraped against tiny stones and grit as she crawled. David did the same, working his way around the small room. From a few feet away Christy let out a small scream.

“What’s wrong?”

“I think a spider just crawled across my ass.”

“Ugh. Hope you don’t get pregnant.”

“Hey, a kid with eight arms and legs could be useful.”

“Yeah, especially in searching for needles in haystacks.”

“Or scraps of paper in the dark. This is disgusting. I feel like things are crawling all over my skin now.”

“They are. You just crawled across a lice pit.”

“Fuck you. I’m going to make sure to give you a big hug and infest you with them just for that.”

“Ha,” David laughed. “You just want to get your hands on me. I knew it.”

“You wish.”

David didn’t answer. His fingers had just slipped over something that wasn’t cement. He traced its edge until the back of his hand touched the wall.

“Did you hear me, I said—”

“Shh,” he cut her off. “I think I found something.”

In a second a warm hand grasped his shoulder. “What?”

He caught the edge with his nails and lifted it from the ground. It wasn’t large, but it bowed in the air instantly, the top edge bending to lightly brush his arm.

“Not sure. A piece of plastic I think.”

David stood and crossed to the doorway. Carefully slipping the edge of the thin material into the crack, he moved the edge very gently up and then down, teasing it through the gap.

“Is it working?”

“Not sure,” he said again. “I…”

They both heard the sound of metal clinking against the door frame.

“That’s it,” Christy enthused. “You did it! We can—”

“That wasn’t me,” David hissed, pushing her back as the door burst open.

The stairs were original. While the doctor may have renovated everything else aboveground in the old hotel, the steps into the basement creaked and moaned like they were a hundred years old. And perhaps they were.

Chief Maitlin took them slow, listening carefully to the din somewhere below. There were voices, a lot of them, in the basement, and most of the words coming from them were unintelligible. But passionate. Moans and sighs whispered through the stairwell like forbidden perfume; invisible, deadly, but alluring.

Maitlin reminded himself that he was here for Stacy’s sake. In his mind he could see her in their kitchen as a child now, clasping the brown matted fur of a teddy bear to her side and asking, “Daddy, is it time for bed?” He had scooped her up with the promise that “Yes, yes it is…and it’s time for sweet dreams.”

He had never imagined then that she could be sucked into a dream as dark as this one. He was supposed to protect her from shit like this. He swore at himself for that failure, and stepped off the last wooden step to the concrete below. The moaning was louder here, the crowd like a single organism, gasping and moaning and sighing all in unison. A gestalt of evil sexual release. As her father, he prayed that she was not witnessing whatever was
going on just a few yards away. But as a cop, he knew in his heart of hearts that she was more than witnessing it. She was a part of the action. She had to be. Why else would they have taken her, if not to be a part of this…this…whatever it was.

He drew his gun and poked his head around the corner to see just exactly what
it
was.

The room undulated in red. Smoky red-orange light flickered and swam through air that seemed alive with shapes. In the air, Maitlin smelled semen. And lilacs. And iron. And something thick and intoxicating. It made his head dizzy from just one deep breath as he tasted and tried to identify what it was exactly that smelled sooo good. So good it made him want to disrobe himself and join the other aspect of the room—the herd of copulating bodies that swam and moved across the floor like the kitchen floor of a cheap motel at dawn. The shapes moved and quivered like cockroaches, tasting the air and diving in to suck one more crumb of life from their feast.

He was immediately embarrassed to see what he saw…but even as his face reddened, his crotch responded.

“Damn,” he murmured. “I haven’t felt like this in twenty years. I could…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he brought up one wide hand and slapped himself in the face, forcing the inexplicable feelings away with pain. The lust retreated, for the moment, and he squinted through the shadows to scan the forms before him. If Stacy was somehow out there on the floor…he didn’t want to see. But he had to know. He couldn’t help her if he couldn’t see…

His stomach trembled as his eyes roved over the bodies on the floor. They were a mass of bony shoulders and fat, rippled thighs. And on nearly all
of them rested a splatter, or a smear of something that could only be blood. But he knew without question that it wasn’t their own. They were too involved in their rutting to have any mortal wounds among them. From somewhere a female voice called out in orgasm, “Oh yes, yes…Ba’al is here. Ba’al is in me.”

The former exclamation made sense, though he wished he hadn’t heard it. The latter however…seemed puzzling. Ba’al?

“Chief,” a familiar voice said.

Maitlin pulled his eyes off the buttocks of one slender woman, and met the face of his captain. Castle Point’s second-in-command was disturbingly…naked.

“What are you doing here?” Captain Ryan hissed. “I’ve been working at getting accepted here…They think I’m one of them. But if they see you…”

The chief’s gaze had left the body of his bloodied captain to take in the rest of the room. It curved around a wall in an L and just at the edge of his sight he could make out a wall, and the flickering light of hundreds of candles. And an arm, with ropes around its wrist.

From somewhere nearby a male voice called out: “To Ba’al, a mother. The Tenth.”

And then, a scream.

Maitlin started forward, but Ryan held him back. “Wait!” he hissed. “You’ll blow my cover.”

“Someone’s hurt,” the chief said.

“Lots of people here have been hurt. But if you just dive right in, all that’s going to happen is you’re going to join them.”

Maitlin looked his captain up and down, noticing the glistening sheen of sweat and other substances he didn’t want to consider coating the cop’s hairy legs and chest. He shook his head.

“My daughter’s here, Matt. I can’t sit back and wait on this one.”

“Chief, you’ve got to trust me on this one…”

Again the horrible scream, this time ending in a gurgle that could only be the drowning choke of blood.

Maitlin pushed Ryan aside and stepped into the room of flesh. Because that was what the room had become. Flesh copulating. Flesh bleeding. Flesh fellated. Flesh filleted.

The miasma of sex and blood hung like smoke, but in that cloud there was something else. Something dead that…wasn’t quite.

Maitlin looked confused as he squinted through a fog that wasn’t quite candle smoke to see the source of the screams. The air seemed to move around him like a living presence. In his head, he heard not only the moans and cries of the room, but something deeper. Something like…laughter.

At the center of it all, a man’s arm raised high in the air, and then brought a flash of silver down through the thick air to stop with a wet thunk in the neck of a naked brunette. But even as the horror of the action registered on the chief’s mind, something even worse blotted it out.

Just to the right of the sacrificial stage, a body hung from ropes tied to hooks in the ceiling rafters. A body that the chief knew only too well…but didn’t want to be seeing like this here. Now.

Stacy.

“You bastards,” he breathed, as he saw his daughter’s body displayed like a pornographic bit of meat for the crowd, breasts spattered with the blood of the stage, pubes wild and damp in the heat of the hell that the basement had become. Her eyes were closed, and for that Maitlin was glad. But he panicked that her apparent unconsciousness might be death.

“Stacy,” he called out without thinking. In a heartbeat, Ryan’s hand was over his mouth, and the chief shrugged him off.

“Back off, Matt. I mean it.”

“Chief, she’s all right. I made them promise that they wouldn’t hurt her.”

“You made them promise?”

“A bargaining chip,” Ryan said. “I told them if we held her here and warned you off as part of the deal, they’d be left alone for the ceremony. And Stacy would walk away free at the end.”

“Are you mad?” Maitlin turned on Ryan, eyes blazing. “There’s going undercover, and there’s joining the gang. You had no right to drag my daughter into this. How dare you—”

The chief’s words were cut short by yet another scream. And this time, the crowd responded with a chant.

“Ba’al, Astarte. Ba’al, Astarte. Ba’al, Astarte…”

“What the hell is going on here?” Maitlin whispered.

“‘Hell’ is a good word for it,” a new, high-pitched voice whispered in his ear. At the same time, something cold and stinging kissed his neck.

“It’s all right,” Ryan warned the man off.

“I don’t think so.”

Something bit the chief then, and he spun away from the bite…but as his hand slapped at the pain in his neck, he found it instantly wet with warmth.

“What did you do?” he heard Ryan yell. But Chief Maitlin didn’t look back. He couldn’t turn his neck, didn’t dare. It felt hot and bloody, and his hand struggled to hold the pumping life in as his legs struggled to move him away from his turncoat captain and toward his naked daughter, hung like sexual meat for the whole room to sample.

“Stacy,” he called, but it came out in a hoarse gurgle.

He stumbled over a man and woman on the floor who rolled entwined as if they were joined at the elbows and knees as well as groins. His foot kicked the man in the face as he staggered toward Stacy, and the man responded with a punch to the back of his calf.

Maitlin stumbled, and sank to the floor, one hand on his neck, the other grasping through bodies for the cement of the basement. He felt weak…dizzy. Something warm rubbed against the hand that steadied him on the floor and he looked to see the ribs and heavy breast of a fortysomething checkout woman from the grocery writhing beneath the body of a tattooed stick of a woman.

“It’s wrong,” he gasped, and brought the hand away from his neck to steady himself on the floor, which seemed to spin away from his grasp. Again he heard laughter. From behind, he heard the captain’s voice arguing with someone, and then the chief found his legs again. He staggered up, slapping a hand to the wound on his neck to hold his blood, some of his blood, inside.

“Stacy,” he called again, and this time, her eyes fluttered open as he stepped over another body to arrive at her feet. The ungodly shrieks on the stage were slowing to infrequent cries, and the crowd in the room still chanted, “Ba’al, Astarte, Ba’al, Astarte…”

“Dad,” she cried out. “Oh my God, Daddy’”

Maitlin staggered to stand at her dangling feet and grasped for her arm, tethered to the ceiling by heavy twined rope. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “I’ll get you out of here…”

“You’re hurt.”

“So are you.”

“No, they didn’t hurt me; they’ve just hung me out here…kind of like a bad load of laundry.”

“I warned you to stay out of this,” Ryan’s voice came in his ear. “You’ve got about thirty seconds to get out of here, and then…”

From the stage, Dr. Rockford’s voice boomed coolly.

“Chief, thanks for joining us. Your daughter is delicious, if I do say so myself. You should try her out while she’s all trussed up. I’m sure you’ve always wanted a piece of her…or did you get some on your own?”

Maitlin lunged away from Stacy toward Rockford, but Ryan grabbed his elbow with two hands and jerked him around. The chief staggered and almost went down. His clothes were dark with blood now, and he found it difficult to see. There were shadows at the edges of his vision, and faces that seemed to grin with teeth too long for their mouths.

“You should have followed the deal,” Ryan hissed. “I didn’t want to have to do this.”

“Stop them,” Maitlin gasped, crimson gathering like frost on his lips. “Matt…stop them, please.”

Captain Ryan shook his head slowly, sadly. Then his hand came up in a sudden, deliberate jab to the police chief’s middle.

Only, the hand was holding a knife. The Butcher’s knife. Twelve inches long if it was a millimeter. The captain twisted it back and forth inside the chief’s gut as his old friend’s eyes widened and his brows creased in confusion.

“Our time here is over,” Ryan said. “Castle Point won’t need the police anymore. Ba’al will guard us soon.”

The chief’s eyes only had a second to register their incomprehension when the blade connected with his neck from the uninjured side.

The man with the apron and long knife grinned like a schoolkid at recess as his giant butcher knife hacked into the police chief’s neck, and easily brought it through the vertebrae to come out clean on the other side. The chief was still opening his mouth to speak when his head toppled to the ground, and was instantly gathered to the breast of an orgasming woman as if he were her lover. She kissed his still-warm lips and grinned, and her lover shook her from below, and the chief’s neck dripped hot on her breast.

The chief’s headless body wavered for a moment and then slipped in slow motion to the ground.

Ryan shook his head at the Butcher. “You could have let me finish it. He was
my
problem.”

The Butcher grinned and said in a girlish voice, “Everybody needs a little help dealing with their elders…” He turned toward the woman hanging from the ceiling and crying in great, wet sobs. “…or their daughters.”

“Not her,” Ryan said, bringing his blade, still wet with his old friend’s blood to the side of the Butcher’s neck. “I promised that she would be okay.”

“Promises, promises.” The Butcher laughed. His voice was so high-pitched he could have auditioned as a ‘20s flapper, so long as you couldn’t see the portly frame and deep shadow of beard.

“Would you rather I fuck her, or kill her?” The Butcher batted Ryan’s blade to the floor and held his own at the cop’s shoulder. “I fancy the bitch, and tonight’s the night for whatever you fancy. Isn’t that right?”

He nodded at Elsie, who still lay prone on the floor where Ryan had left her when he went to deal with Maitlin.

“Come back,” her lips mouthed to him. They almost looked unreal…as if a shadow moved them
while the thin, pale lips remained closed and dead. But Ryan only followed the call of the foggy words.

Ryan felt the fight drain out of him then, as the voices behind his eyes whispered to him to
fuck, fuck, fuck
and the wrinkled breasts of his one perverse lust rippled on the floor before him. He never gave a second glance at the perfect globes of the chief’s daughter, who any man in his right mind would have paid a fortune to bed. The waves of demonic obsession rode over him, and in moments, he rode over Elsie, as the Butcher lifted a blade to trace the beads of sweat down the center of Stacy’s chest.

“Yesss, my love,” he whispered to her as she quavered and struggled to pull her arms from the nooses anchored above her head. “You only get to lie with your father’s corpse once in life, I always say…” he told her as he cut her down and dragged her kicking and screaming to where her father’s dead body still bled in a widening pool on the floor…

As the Butcher forcibly pressed her lips to the wound on the stump of her father’s neck, behind them, the nurse called for the next sacrifice:

“To Astarte. A mother. The Eleventh.”