Helltown (28 page)

“Huh?” Cleavon said, as if coming out of a trance.

“Do you desire this woman?”

“I, well…I guess.”

“The Dark Lord Lucifer has granted you all that you desire. Now take her!”

“I don’t know—”

“Lonnie? Quick! We must conclude the mass. Take her!”

“Hell ya!” Lonnie Olsen said, coming forward, unbuckling his belt. He was fully aroused as soon as his pants hit his ankles. Then he was on his knees before Mary’s prone body, his pasty, pockmarked buttocks clenching in rhythm to the thrusting of his hips.

“
Eva, Ave Satanas!
” Spencer chanted. “
Vade Lilith, vade retro Pan! Deus maledictus est! Gloria tibi! Domine Lucifere, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen!
”

Moments after Lonnie removed himself from Mary, Cleavon took his spot, then Jesse, then Weasel, then Earl, and finally Floyd. When they had all been sated, Spencer knelt next to Mary with the kitchen knife. Before anyone could protest, he sank the blade into her chest, into her heart. Her eyes popped open at this, and he watched as her life drained from them.

“And so it is done,” he said softly.

Afterward, in the guilty, bewildered silence that followed, Spencer held each man’s gaze in turn and said, “Thank you, gentlemen. It is as she wanted. She is at peace.” He hesitated before adding, “And you all must know, of course, that in the name of your self-preservation, what happened here this morning can never be spoken of to anyone, ever.”

Two months later Spencer read a story in the Boston Mills
Tribune
about a young couple who had disappeared while visiting “Helltown” in the hopes of spotting the mutants said to inhabit the national park (the Satanist rumors wouldn’t begin in earnest for another year or so). Nevertheless, Spencer didn’t think much about it. When he read a second story two months after the first about another missing couple, he had his suspicions. These were confirmed a week later when Sheriff Humperdinck discovered a number of makeshift crosses and Satantic graffiti at several different abandoned houses in the national park, which he attributed incorrectly to “troublesome out-of-town folks coming here and giving our town a bad name.”

Spencer thought long and hard about what to do before visiting Cleavon at the House in the Woods and telling his brother, “If you and your friends are going to keep this up, you may as well learn to do it right.”

Since that encounter Spencer had inducted the six of them—Cleavon, Earl, Floyd, Weasel, Jesse, and Lonnie—into his “club” and had led them in eight other black masses, all of which he had enjoyed tremendously, especially the psychodrama involved, which he’d never incorporated into his private killings but which was proving to be wonderfully erotic. As an added bonus he no longer had to leave Boston Mills to find his victims. Weasel took care of this in the ugly black hearse Cleavon had picked up from some junkyard.

Even so, Spencer had always understood this convenient arrangement wouldn’t last forever. There were too many people involved, too many chances for something to go wrong.

And that something had gone wrong tonight, very wrong.

Ever the cautious man, however, Spencer had prepared for this eventuality from day one, prepared and planned, and he knew exactly what needed to be done.

Ahead, through the gray drizzle, he spotted Mother of Sorrows Church jutting from atop the small rise on which it had been built, and he went over for the final time the massacre he was about to commit.

CHAPTER 23

“I think people should always try to take the bad things that happen to them in their lives, and turn them into something good. Don’t you?”

Orphan
(2009)

Mandy crouched next to the bus’s window, peering out into rain-swept forest, searching for the source of the scuffling she’d heard again. Seeing no animal or person, she made her way quietly to the front of the bus and exited through the bi-fold doors. She wanted to run, disappear into the mix of evergreens and deciduous trees, but then she spotted eldritch blue cigarette smoke drifting out from behind the end of the bus. She started along the flank of the rusted yellow relic, suddenly, happily, convinced she would discover Noah back there. He and Steve had returned from the hospital with the police. They had come looking for her. Noah found her sleeping inside the bus, didn’t want to disturb her, and so decided to hang around outside it until she woke.

“Noah?” she said.

Noah didn’t answer.

Perhaps he was listening to his Walkman through a set of headphones? Or perhaps it wasn’t Noah but Austin. He had escaped from Cleavon and his brothers after all, and he was ignoring her because she told him to stop slapping Jeff’s cheek.

“Austin?”

No answer.

Collecting her nerves, Mandy peered around the bus’s rear quarter.

A man sat on the jutting metal bumper. He was looking away from her so she could only see the back of his head. He raised the cigarette to his turned-away face.

Mandy noticed blood dripping from his hand—and just like that she had an epiphany. This man had slaughtered the children who’d once occupied the bus. She didn’t know how he did this, or why, but he did it, he butchered them, then he killed himself, and now she was seeing his ghost, haunting the spot of his passing, as ghosts tend to do.

The apparition turned to face her. Where its face should have been was a spiraling black void, and that spiraling black void terrified Mandy more than anything had in her life, because it wanted to suck her into it, and this would be worse than death, for she would not merely disappear, cease to exist, she would be
undone
, erased, so she had never been born.

Mandy turned to flee, but her legs had become elephantine. She managed to lift one, to take an impossibly slow step. Her foot sank into the ground all the way to her knee. She glanced over her shoulder, through her stringy bangs and the falling rain, and saw the ghost floating toward her. The black hole that was its face was expanding, cannibalizing its neck, then chest, then arms and legs, consuming its entirety. Then it slipped over her, silently, painlessly, consuming her too,
undoing
her—

Mandy heaved awake, her breath trapped in her throat. She lay on the floor of the bus where she had fallen asleep. Rain drummed on the roof. The wind howled.

A dream
, she told herself, exhaling all at once.
Just a dream, a horrible, horrible dream
—

Her relief wilted.

The car accident wasn’t a dream. Jeff paralyzed from the waist down wasn’t a dream. Nor was Floyd playing baseball with Austin’s head, or whatever happened to Cherry to make her scream the way she had.

Despair swelled inside Mandy, despair as cold as the bony finger of death. She fought the tears that once again threatened to burst from her eyes, because if she started crying, she wouldn’t stop, not for a long time. Instead she tried to think about something nice, but this proved impossible, like trying to look at the positive side of a funeral. She had no nice thoughts inside her right then.

In her bleakness Mandy sought refuge in her childhood memories. They were neither good nor bad. They occurred too long ago to pass judgment on. They were merely a distraction, a picture of a simpler world when all that mattered were toys and candy and the love of her parents. This was all she’d needed to be happy, day after day, year after year—until when? When had the innocence ended and the real world kicked in? Probably around the time she became interested in boys. That’s when “important” things began to matter, like the clothes she wore, or how she did her hair, or who in her grade was developing breasts first, or who was cool and who was uncool.

Nevertheless, the
real
world didn’t kick in until her mother’s death. Tragedy matures you, ages you, makes you wiser, and thus more cynical. At least it does when it strikes at such an early age.

All of Mandy’s priorities went out the window. Her wardrobe became a triviality, boys a nuisance, popularity—she couldn’t care less. In fact, she stopped caring about everything. She became petty, self-centered, and bitter. She was miserable, and she wanted everyone else to be miserable too.

But I changed
, she told herself defiantly.
I got over all that. I’m a different person now
.

But was she? Was she really?

Because if she had changed, why was she still not speaking to her father? Why was she still angry at him for kicking her out of the house, out of his life—when she had known for some time now that while he had indeed kicked her out of the house, she had deserved it, and he had certainly not kicked her out of his life. It was the other way around.
She
had kicked
him
out of her life. After all, he was the one making the effort to get back in touch. He sent her a letter every month, asking her how she was doing, telling her what he was up to. She kept them all in a folder beneath her bras in her dresser drawer. But she never replied to any…because she was still that selfish little girl who after all these years still wanted someone to blame for her mother’s death, something to which no blame could be attributed.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she mumbled softly to herself, and now the tears came. They flooded her eyes and streaked her cheeks. Yet they were good tears. She had wanted to say those words for a long time, but she always told herself there would be time enough in the future, naively believing there would always
be
a future.

As Mandy wiped the wetness from her cheeks, the despair inside her withered into a profound loneliness, and she wanted nothing more than to see her father again, to tell him the words she had just spoken, to ask forgiveness for being a terrible daughter, for rebelling against him when she should have been mourning with him.

Mandy closed her eyes, steepled her hands together, and for the first time in memory, she began to pray.

CHAPTER 24

“You gotta be fucking kidding.”

The Thing
(1982)

Beetle thought he heard knocking and opened his eyes. He was right. Someone was at the door to his motel room.
Wrap, wrap, wrap
. Pause.
Wrap, wrap, wrap
.

Shylock and his sons? he wondered groggily. Would they be stupid enough to return? Or had they called the police? Shit, the cops were the last thing he needed. They’d run his name, he’d come up AWOL. He’d be shipped back to Hunter Army Airfield where he’d face a court-marshal and likely get tossed in the brig.

Beetle sat up on the bed and swooned with lightheadedness. A dull pulse thumped inside his left temple. The Beretta, he was surprised to find, was gripped in his sweaty hand. The last thing he remembered was thumbing off the safety, pressing the barrel beneath his chin, and counting to ten. Apparently, however, he never reached ten. Or if he did, he wasn’t willing to squeeze the trigger. And despite feeling sick and shitty, like he’d just woken up the morning after the bender to end all benders, he was relieved this was the case, otherwise he wouldn’t have woken up at all.