Helltown (32 page)

“A sore thumb.”

“A blue thumb doesn’t stick out?”

“I guess. But the saying is a sore thumb.”

“I like blue thumb. I think a blue thumb sticks out more than a sore thumb.”

“Why would you have a blue thumb?”

“Hey,” she said, “do you think if we had babies, they would be tall too?” Her eyes shone with bright mischievousness. “Don’t worry,” she added, “I’m not proposing we have a baby. I don’t even know you. And you’re too quiet to be my husband. I’m just wondering if you think we would have tall babies.”

Beetle shrugged. “Babies aren’t tall.”

“Some are.”

“No, they’re not—inherently not. The same way ice isn’t warm.”

“Are you making a joke?”

“I’m pointing out a truism.”

“No, I think you made a joke.” She clapped her hands. “I can’t believe it! Herr Beetle has a sense of humor. Tell me something else funny.”

“It wasn’t a joke—” Beetle stopped abruptly. Aside from the machinegun-like patter of rain he thought he could hear the sound of an approaching engine. “A car’s coming,” he said.

“So?” Greta said.

Headlights appeared from around a bend ahead of them. Beetle took Greta’s arm and steered her into the vegetation lining the verge until they were concealed behind a large tree.

“Kinky, mister,” she said.

“It’s coming from the direction of the church.”

“Oh!” she whispered. “You think…?”

The headlights merged into a blinding white light. For a moment Beetle felt unacceptably exposed. He pressed his body against Greta’s, wanting to blende further into the shadows. The car roared past, the sound of the engine faded, then they were alone once more.

Beetle realized his lips were inches from Greta’s, his chest pressed against hers. Embarrassed, he led her back to the road. Her cheeks were flushed. Her erect nipples pressed against the fabric of her drenched shirt. She noticed him notice this.

Beetle looked away. “Guess we missed it,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The mass,” he said. “If that was one of the Satanists, it seems the party’s over.”

“We don’t know who that was. It could have been anyone.”

“At this hour—?”

“
Sue dumm fuhrt!
” Greta said. “Don’t give up so easy on things, Herr Beetle.” She took his hand in hers. “Now come on! There still might be time.”

CHAPTER 27

“Sometimes dead is better.”

Pet Sematary
(1989)

Cleavon had been the first to smell the smoke. They had replaced the blonde with the Asian on the altar—she’d been a bitch to tie down, fighting as if she really did have a demon inside her—and as Cleavon stood in front of her, trying to think how to begin the black mass, he detected the unmistakable smell of smoke. For a moment he wondered if someone was burning leaves before remembering the nearest neighbor was the motel some two miles away. He said, “Can you smell that?”

“That ain’t how you start the mass, Cleave!” Earl said. “First you gotta cross yourself backwards, that’s what you gotta do first—”

“Jess,” he said, “you smell that?”

Jesse was sniffing the air. “Sure do, Cleave.”

“Something’s burning, I reckon,” Weasel said.

“What the fuck’s Spence doing?” Cleavon growled. “Staring a fuckin’ signal fire for the girl?”

Tossing aside the little bell he’d been holding—it landed on the altar with a small
ding!
—he snatched the flashlight and marched up the aisle to the front doors. Jesse and Weasel followed close behind him, with Earl and Floyd bringing up the rear. He gripped the brass door handle and immediately released it, crying out in pain. He spun in a clumsy pirouette, flapping his scorched hand in the air. “
Jeeeeee-zus!
”

“What is it, what happened?” Earl asked, reaching for the handle next.

“Don’t touch that!” Cleavon said, slapping Earl’s hand clear. “It’s hot!”

“Why the hell’s it hot?” Jesse said.

Cleavon kicked the door hard with his right foot. It didn’t budge.

“It’s stuck?” Weasel said, kicking the door himself to no avail.

“Mr. Pratt?” Jesse called. “Hey-o! Mr. Pratt!”

There was no answer.

Understanding dawned on Cleavon, and a body-wide coldness slipped beneath his skin. “The motherfucker!” he mumbled.

“Who?” Jesse asked, staring at him with eyes expecting the worst.

Cleavon, however, barely heard him. He was numbed. His goddamn bastard of a brother had double-crossed them all! No wonder he hadn’t given a damn about finding the bitch who’d gotten away. She’d never seen
him
.  

“Cleave?” Earl said, worried. “What’s happening, Cleave?
Cleave?
”

“Bust them down, Earl!” Cleavon told him, pointing at the doors. “Bust them hard as you can!”

Earl shoved Weasel aside and raised his massive boot and slammed it into the crack where the doors met. The doors shook but held.

“Again!” Cleavon shouted.

Earl kicked a second time, and a third, and a fourth.

“It ain’t working, Cleave!” he cried. “They’re too strong!”

Cleavon’s shock and anger was quickly giving way to blistering fear.

They were trapped.

They were going to roast alive.

Spencer wouldn’t have attempted something like this had he not been convinced it would work.

My brother!
he thought, his mind reeling.
My own fucking brother!

Then again, was he really surprised Spencer could orchestrate something so heartless? Two years ago he would have been, back before Spencer showed up at the house with that Mary woman, both of them bloodied and smashed up. Because before then Spencer might still have been a holier-than-thou asshole, but that had been all. After that night, however—that’s when Cleavon began to see his older brother in an entirely new light. It wasn’t the revelation that Spencer was okay with killing. Hell, as it turned out, the whole merry lot of them were okay with killing. Life was a spiteful whore, and you had to do what you had to do sometimes to make yourself happy. So it wasn’t that Spencer was okay with the killing; it was that he actually
enjoyed
it. Jesse and Weasel, Earl and Floyd, himself too, they were in this devil worship stuff for the sex. That first woman, that Mary, she got them hooked on the black masses like junkies on heroin. This was not so much the case with Spencer, who always seemed more interested when he was looking in the women’s eyes in those last few seconds before they died, as if he were seeing something there no one else could see.

So, no, maybe Cleavon wasn’t surprised to discover Spencer had it in him to murder his own brothers. Maybe he wasn’t surprised at all.

Cleavon directed the flashlight beam around the church’s sanctuary. Three stained-glass windows lined the east wall, three the west wall, each a dozen feet tall, two feet in diameter, tapering to pointed tips. Earl could boost him up to one, but it would do not good. They were all secured with steel mesh on the outside to protect against vandals and the elements.

“Well don’t just stand there looking pretty, boys!” he quipped. “Get looking for another way out!”

They searched every dark corner of the church. The only other set of doors they found turned out to be locked as tightly as those at the front.

Think, Cleave!
he told himself, turning in a circle, panicking.
Think!

 But how could he? The scene was chaos. Earl wailing like a little kid. Floyd holding his ears and making that retarded deaf sound he made. Weasel and Jesse both shouting for instructions.

“Shut up!” he exploded, wiping sweat from his brow. It was as hot as hell in summer. “The lot of you! Earl! Shut the fuck up!”

They went quiet.

Cleavon’s eyes fell on the dead blonde. A great sadness welled inside him. Not for her. For himself. Because shortly he was going to be dead too. Dead and crisped so black the sheriff will be identifying him by his teeth.

And I just unloaded two hundred bills on a new carburetor for the Mustang in the garage, and I ain’t even gonna get a chance to install it. Ain’t that a bitch, ain’t that just a goddamn, motherfucking bitch.

His eyes drifted to the pew the blonde was lying on, then the pew’s clawed wooden feet.

They weren’t bolted into the floor.

An idea forming in his mind, Cleavon rushed to the pew, shoved the woman’s body to the floor, and gripped the pew beneath the seat. He managed to rock it back an inch. “Boys!” he rasped in the dry air. “Give me a hand here! We got ourselves a battering ram!”

With Cleavon and Earl on one side, Weasel and Jesse and Floyd on the other, they lifted the pew between them, swung it perpendicular, and carried it up the aisle. On Cleavon’s instruction they set it down still some distance from the front doors.

“This is it, boys!” he said, shaking his spaghettied arms. “On the count of three we charge those doors like it’s nobody’s business! Y’all ready?
Y’all fuckin’ ready?
”

“Ready, Cleave!” Earl said.

The others concurred with equal enthusiasm.

“On the count of three!” Cleavon said. They lifted the pew simultaneously. “One! Two! Three!”

They rushed the double doors, shouting like a pack of crazies.

The front of the pew crashed into the doors straight on—and came to a bone-jarring stop. Everyone’s momentum caused them to release the pew and torpedo into the doors themselves. Cleavon and Earl bounced backward, lost their balance, and collapsed to the floor in a mix up of limbs.

“Shoot, Cleave,” Earl said after a dazed moment. “That didn’t work real good, did it?”

CHAPTER 28

“We all go a little mad sometimes”

Psycho
(1960)

Beetle and Greta stared in disbelief at the white wooden church with the upside down crosses incorporated into its architecture. It was engulfed in a glowing red fire that blazed against the black night. The flames, undeterred by the downpour, licked as high as the overhanging soffits, crackling and popping as they consumed the buckling weatherboards. Clouds of thick, acrid smoke streamed upward into the sky.

Beetle and Greta had frozen at the sight of the inferno when they’d breasted the summit of the hill on which the church had been built. Now they rushed past the two parked cars toward the front doors, where they stopped and stared again at the chain wound through the door handles and cinched together by a large bronze padlock.

“What the hell?” Beetle said.

“Hey!” Greta shouted, cupping her mouth with her hands. “Hello in there! Hey! Can you hear me?”

A chorus of weak croaks erupted from the other side of the doors, followed quickly by an equal number of gut-wrenching coughs.

“We need to help them!” she said as thunder crashed overhead, so loud it seemed to shake the ground. Forked lighting flashed moments later, searing the sky a blinding white.

Beetle was already reaching for the Beretta tucked into the waistband of his pants. “Step back,” he told Greta, aiming the pistol at the padlock.

“You have a gun!” she exclaimed. “Why—?”

“Stand back!”

Greta backed up.

Beetle squeezed the trigger.

The first bullet ricocheted off the padlock, pock-mocking the metal but otherwise leaving the lock intact. He fired two more rounds—
pop
,
pop
—both direct hits. The second smashed the tumblers inside the lock to pieces and left the lock dangling by the hook.

He tucked the pistol away, snapped a branch off a nearby sapling, and poked it through the ribbon of flames, lifting the dangling padlock free of the chain. The padlock struck the cement pavers with a metal clack. He worked on the chain itself next, unraveling its length loop after loop until it was free from the handles and dropped in a slinky coil beside the lock.

“Try opening the door now!” he shouted to those trapped inside the burning structure.

For a long moment nobody replied, nothing happened, and Beetle feared he and Greta had arrived too late. Then, abruptly, the right door swung open. In the hazy gray smoke that filled the church a man stood hunched over, the hooded black robes he wore pulled up over his mouth and nose to form a crude mask so only his eyes were visible. He leapt through the flames, took several drunken steps, as if he’d forgotten how to walk, doubled over, and vomited.

A second man clad in black robes—he must have been close to seven feet tall—followed the first. He carried two unconscious men as if they weighed nothing.

“Nuh…nuther…” the big man said between poleaxing coughs. The two men slipped from his grasp like ragdolls. One landed on his back, his arms spread out at his sides, the other on his chest, his arms folded beneath him.

“Another inside?” Beetle said.

The man’s head bobbed.

“Help them,” he told Greta, nodding to the unconscious men. Then he covered his mouth and nose with the crook of his elbow and ducked inside the burning church.

The heat hit him like a physical force. The cloying gray smoke stung his eyes, causing them to blur and water. He dropped to his knees, so he could see in the space where the smoke had risen off the floor. He spotted the last man. He was several feet to the right, lying motionless on his side.

Beetle seized him by the wrists and dragged him toward the door. At the threshold he scooped him into his arms, stood—and heard coughing from deep within the church.

“Shit!” he mumbled. Leaping through the flames, Beetle deposited the man next to Greta and returned inside the church, thinking,
So this is what a firefighter feels like—only firefighters have fire retardant suits and oxygen masks and powerful water hoses.

Crouched low, he scrambled on all fours down the main aisle, and discovered a woman atop a candle-lit altar. She was naked. Her wrists and ankles were bound with rope secured to the eyelets of four iron stakes hammered into the floorboards.