Dead Souls (29 page)

He paced down the hallway and stood at the bottom of the steps.

He gazed up toward the landing. He could hear baby Bryan whimpering from behind the closed door of his room.

He hesitated, licked his dry, scabby lips.

Then, firming his grip up on the knife, started up the stairs.

"Y
ou've got to get out of here!" Elizabeth whispered urgently, her catatonia seemingly shattered. "Now!"

Eddie jerked his gaze around, at the sick woman on the floor in the bathroom, then back toward Elizabeth's tortured eyes. "Who is it?"

"He's coming up!"

"Who?"

"My father…this…this is all his doing…"

Eddie heard the approach of footsteps on the stairs, slow, heavy, and urgent. "Elizabeth, listen, you have to come with me…"

She shook her head, the fear of fleeing her father's wrath painted heavily upon her grief-stricken face. "I…I can't…" She gazed down at her body, and was visibly aghast with her dire appearance.

Eddie peered back down the hall, then grabbed Elizabeth by the shoulders. "Help me, please…I don't know how to get out of here!"

She pulled away, and opened the door across from the bathroom. "In here, now!" She motioned frantically with her arm. Eddie followed her lead, looking over his shoulder. Keeping her gaze down, she said, "Quickly, hide under my bed."

He entered the room. She immediately shut the door behind him, placing him into near darkness.

In a panic, Eddie rushed to the bed, conscious of a stale burnt smell in the air. At the foot of the bed he saw an occult-like painting on the floor, centered with a small mound of charred remains.
Jesus, what the hell is going on here?

He kneeled down alongside the bed. He could hear the minister's plodding footsteps, now moving slowly down the hall. He dropped to his stomach and wriggled under the bed, head toward the footboard. He could feel his heartbeat thumping in his head now, pushing a headache into his harried mind.

The footsteps ceased. From the hallway he could hear a muffled cry. A shuffle of panicked feet. Then, a loud thump.

A few moments of threatening silence followed.

Suddenly, slowly, the door to the bedroom creaked opened.

Elizabeth's dirty bare feet came into view. Directly behind them, a pair of muddy brown work boots. He could see out the side of the bed as Elizabeth's feet rose up off the ground. They hung oddly motionless, like slabs of meat in a slaughterhouse. For a moment he thought about leaping out from beneath the bed and braving a rescue attempt…until he saw the blood, thin winding lines of it dripping down over her ankles to the floor.

Eddie cringed back. He attempted a deep breath but his lungs were constrained from being weighted so close to the floor. The dripping blood began to pour, and then her body collapsed to the floor. First he saw her limbs, twisted in a broken heap. Then he saw her head as it came into hard contact with the wooden surface.

Its appearance…it was so immediate, so shocking, that Eddie could only shudder and stare at the horror Elizabeth had suddenly become: her eyes, pinging back and forth; her lips, twitching, as though she were trying to whisper something; and…her wound, a thick purple gash running across her neck from ear to ear, pumping blood out onto the floor toward him.

The minister's boots moved off to the left, deeper into the room. Keeping one ear to the floor, Eddie rolled his eyes to follow them, his squashed heart beating furiously against his ribs. The boots stopped before the charred mess inside the painted circle at the foot of the bed. The minister kneeled down before it. A blood-coated hand came into view, sifted through the ashes, and removed what appeared to be a black feather.

At that moment, Eddie felt something warm and wet against his cheek. He jerked his eyes back toward Elizabeth.

She was no longer alive, that much was clear now. Her eyes were glossed over, lips unmoving and spilling saliva. The blood draining from her wound…it had traveled under the bed and was now
puddling
against his face. He tightened his lips, but could still taste it, sharp and metallic against his tongue.

The booted feet moved across the room, back alongside Elizabeth's dead, bloody, staring body; in their wake, Eddie could see bloody tracks on the floor.

A knee came into view.

Eddie shuddered, feeling sick and lightheaded.
Dear God, help me! He's going to find me here, and he's going to murder me like he has his children.

His children…

Oh…my…dear…God.

The baby!

He couldn't hear the baby crying anymore, unsure if it was due to his secreted position in the house, or if the baby had indeed ceased its wails. He prayed for the latter, guessing now that his purpose in being here had not been to rescue Elizabeth from the clutches of this madman, but to save this poor innocent babe's life.

More tears welled in his eyes and blurred his vision. He blinked frantically in an effort to clear them away, and saw the minister's ashy, bloody hand grab Elizabeth by the hair and drag her out of the room. Eddie heard a thud in the hallway. Soon thereafter, the door to the bedroom slammed shut, the discordant sound nearly wrenching Eddie's heart from his throat.

He waited…his instincts told him so, keeping himself tightly sequestered in the refuge beneath the bed. He would have to wait here until a lengthy stretch of silence passed, giving him a chance to get the baby and flee.

If I get to the baby first. The minister might be out there right now, plucking the baby from its crib in preparation to bestow his evil goods upon it. Dear God…am I a coward for placing my safety before that of the baby's in the other room? No, no…if it weren't for my bravery, my courage, then I wouldn't be here in the first place.

Yet, despite Eddie wanting to face the threat, to get to the baby as quickly as humanly possible, he could do nothing but remain beneath the bed and listen to the horrors persevering beyond the closed door: to the gruesome sounds of the minister murdering the sick woman in the bathroom.

B
enjamin swung the knife around and plunged it into Faith's chest. All twelve inches of it went through her scar, her sternum, and perhaps her spine as well. He twisted it back and forth, and with a quick flick of his wrist, jerked it out.

He watched with fascination as his wife dropped face-first onto the slimy-wet floor. He slammed the knife into her upper back, just to the right of her spine. Droplets of blood flew across the room like spittle. He twisted it, then let go. The handle jutted crookedly out of her back like a tombstone marker.

He leaned down and grabbed Faith by the hair. Making certain not to slip on the wet tiles, he dragged her out of the bathroom. Her legs made loud knuckle-cracking sounds as they snapped back against the floor. A thick crimson swath trailed out behind her that gathered up as he halted to take hold of Elizabeth, also by the hair.

Struggling to harvest his strength, and his inner voice,
guide me Osiris
, Benjamin leaned his weight forward and dragged both bodies down the hall. He was able to peer down the hall as he went—its perspective seemed skewed, the walls too tall, the distance too far along. Even the floor seemed to slope up and down. All these manifestations made the journey a slow and arduous one, and he parted each heavy-footed step with a few seconds of rest.

Eventually he reached the top of the landing. Here he stopped and listened…listened to baby Bryan's exhausted whimpers seeping out from behind the closed door of his room; he sniffed the air, seeking some form of guidance from his newfound faculty, but his senses were clogged from the sooty, ashy stench in Elizabeth's room. He couldn't smell the baby.

Or the intruder
, he thought.
If there is one
.

His mind asked:
maybe I should check on Bryan?

Then he thought of the ritual this morning, how it had played out so perfectly until…until…

Commence with the ritual, Benjamin…

Heeding the warning in his head, Benjamin pulled the bodies across the hall. One at a time, he shoved them down the stairs. Elizabeth tumbled head over heels like a sack of potatoes and hit the bottom in a twisted, bone-shattering sprawl. Faith's arm got caught up in the banister about halfway down. The crook of her elbow tore open, but her withered, bloody body traveled no farther, and remained stretched out on the steps like a fallen tree-limb. Benjamin lumbered down after them. He unhinged Faith's arm and pushed her down on top of Elizabeth, then moved down to the bottom step. Careful not to fall, he climbed over their twisted bodies, re-secured his grasp on their tangled manes, and began dragging them across the living room floor.

In the kitchen, he saw it was going to be a tight squeeze. He gave it a shot anyway, attempting to work himself and both bodies between the refrigerator and the table. His leg struck one of the kitchen chairs as he went by, which tipped up against the heavy table and pressed against the wound on his arm. Hot and spastic pain lanced through his body like a poke from brand, and he howled out.

He sidestepped the chair and shoved the butcher block table aside with his hip, never once unlocking his hair-bunched fists. He managed to work the bodies past the table, then slammed into the back door and went outside.

At once he saw the black bird. It was standing on the wooden porch railing beneath the dreamy moonlight. It tweaked its head and contemplated Benjamin with beady, oil-drop eyes.

"Osiris…" Benjamin whispered.
 

The bird flew off toward the barn and Benjamin watched it as it settled on the apex of the roof.

Keeping his eyes on the bird, he pressed forward, hauling the bodies down the porch steps, and without stopping, across the backyard. By the time he reached the barn, both of the bodies were coated with soil and grass, and had stopped trailing blood behind.

He gazed up at the bird, then, despite a wave of grayness trying to overwhelm him, dragged the bodies inside and placed them before their designated crucifixes.

He took a moment to gather his breath, standing there in the back of the barn, gazing at Daniel, now nailed upon his very own cross. The boy's face was gray and riddled with splotches of blood, eyes yellow and starting to bulge from their sockets. His tongue was black and swollen, peeking out from between his bloated lips like a piece of liver.
 

What a fine job I've done
, Benjamin thought.
Osiris will be proud.

He said a prayer to the Spirit God, performed the sign of the cross, then sent the souls of Elizabeth and Faith Conroy to join Daniel in his wait for ancestral afterlife.

A
s silently as possible, Eddie made every effort to relieve the cramps in his body. He twitched and jerked and flexed his muscles, but it did him little good.

Through the solid, incessant beating of his heart, and the agony ripping into his stiff limbs, he'd heard a variety of hurting sounds in the house: thumps, crashes, and inhuman grunts—the after-effects of death's duty. He'd felt utterly helpless, lying there under the bed, feeling as though he were withdrawing into an unseen abyss where he would remain until the minister abandoned the scenes of his crimes. He also realized that by doing this, he would most assuredly witness the death of the baby in the other room—why would the murderer spare this particular child, when the lives of his others were deemed so insignificant?

There'd been a banging noise downstairs, a grunt of pain, followed by a loud slam, which Eddie recognized as the screen door in the kitchen slamming shut.

He'd waited, breathing a bit more heavily now that the minister was outside. He darted his eyes back and forth, moved his arms and legs. The seconds trickled down his neck like phantoms, the long stretch of silence he'd hoped for now at hand.

Finally, he slid out from beneath the bed and rose into an immediate stoop. He stared at the door, nearly invisible in the shuttered gloom, listening for the minister's slow plodding footsteps to emerge once again in the hallway. But he heard nothing. All was silent, like a mountaintop beneath a sky of summer stars.

He looked down and saw that his feet had come to rest in the drips of blood on the floor—Elizabeth's blood. He touched his face and could feel her blood on his cheek, his lips. Feeling sick, he stood up. A surge of lightheadedness beset him, and he had to outstretch his arms for balance. His feet slipped
 
in the blood and made a loud squeaking sound that echoed about the dark room. He pitched forward onto a patch of dry floor, and froze as he regained his balance.

He waited. Heard nothing.

He tread softly to the door, pressed an ear against the jamb.

Still, heard nothing.

The minister went outside
, he thought.
I heard the door in the kitchen slam shut—and I know how it sounds because I came in through that door myself. Yes, he's outside, he can't hear me. He doesn't even know I'm here…

He gripped the doorknob with his right hand, and slowly turned it. The latch made a gentle popping sound. He cracked the door and peered out into the hallway, visible beneath the glow of the bathroom light. On the floor, he could see thick streaks of blood like skid marks leading down the hall toward the landing, where the baby's room was located.