Lords of Salem (13 page)

When the hit man responded, it was in a digitally distorted voice, unnaturally deep, almost demonic. “Not just any shotgun, a sawed-off,” he said. “He was at a red light and I pulled up alongside him and fired both barrels. He never saw the green. I wasn’t expecting the blast to tear his head off.”

And then, for just a moment, the screen seemed to shift as she watched, flashing strangely, giving her a glimpse of something else. In the place of the hit man she had a brief glimpse of a human skeleton, several holes broken through its skull.

She blinked and it was gone, the shadowed hit man in its place.

She groped for the remote, but couldn’t find it. She closed her eyes, tried to trick herself into sleep but it wasn’t working. She heard, from the TV, in that same distorted voice: “I expected them to die… But I didn’t realize I would grow to enjoy the killings.”

She opened her eyes and looked at the TV, but instead of the hooded hit man, she saw a filthy room. Hanging from the ceiling was a wrought-iron cage, crudely made. A chicken had been crammed into it. The creature filled the cage so fully that it was unable to move or turn around. Its feathers bowed against the cage’s bars or poked out. Only its head and neck could move. Its head darted desperately around, its movements shaky, its eye darting about. And then suddenly there was a rapid movement, a flash on the screen and the chicken was gone, the cage bent and torn open and half gone, with blood dripping slow down the bars.

Did I change the channel?
she wondered. But the voice that was speaking over the image of the cage was that of the interviewer, rambling on. Maybe something was wrong with the TV.

Or maybe something was wrong with her.

And then the camera angle slowly shifted to reveal a strange face very close to the lens. It didn’t look quite human. It was oddly colored, almost brick red.
Maybe a trick of the light,
she thought, and then thought,
What the hell is this?
The face smiled and the teeth the open mouth revealed were long and sharp, filed. No, definitely not human. Some sort of network problem where two signals had gotten crossed.

“After a while,” said the distorted voice—and strangely enough the demonic mouth on the screen seemed to be moving in time with it, as if it were actually the one saying the words—“I started taking a few liberties. I wasn’t killing just for hire. I did that, but I’d also just drive around until I found someone and if it was safe, well, I had my sawed-off handy.”

The eyes were red and glowing like two coals. The whole time the voice was talking, these eyes seemed to be staring straight at her. Like they saw her through the TV. It felt like they were trying to suck her in.

Fuck
, she thought,
what’s wrong with me?
She groaned, searched
again for the remote. When she didn’t find it, she rolled over and reached for a glass of water on the bedside table. She drank from it, but there was almost nothing in it, just a half a swallow.

“Fuck,” she said. Still thirsty, she got out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom, turning the TV off on the way.

The bathroom light nearly blinded her. She stayed still, blinking and staring down, letting her vision adjust, then moved to the sink. She filled her water glass and took a long drink.
Forgot to call my mom,
she realized as she drank. She filled the glass a second time and then exited the bathroom.

But on the way back to the bed, something felt wrong. The space felt different. It
was
different. There was something different that she couldn’t quite put her finger on for a moment and then she realized what it was: no dog smell, no dog noises, nobody rubbing up against her leg and asking to be petted when she was on the way back to the bed. Where was Steve?

She whistled but Steve didn’t come. She looked around the bedroom and then wandered out into the front part of the apartment. But Steve didn’t seem to be there either. And the apartment door was open.

“Aw, man, what the fuck?” she said.

Just to make sure, she went through the apartment again, whispering his name. But he wasn’t there. So she threw her faux fur coat over her pajamas and stepped out into the hallway.

Steve was there. He had gotten out somehow, or maybe the door hadn’t latched all the way when Whitey had left. He was at the end of the hall, scratching at the door to apartment five.

She leaned out in the hall and hissed at him. “Steve,” she whispered, “get over here… Get over here!”

But Steve ignored her. He just kept scratching at the door.

She tried a few more times and then gave up, began tiptoeing down the hall toward her dog.

“What the fuck, man?” she whispered to him once she was there. “You’re scratching up the wood. Lacy’s going to kill me.”

Steve whined and tucked his tail down but wouldn’t look away from the door. She bent down next to him and grabbed him by his collar.

“Buddy, how did you get out? Let’s go back to bed.”

She tugged on his collar and slowly pulled him away from the door. He didn’t seem to want to go, and at first braced his legs. But after a while she got him moving. He kept whining, though, all the way back to the apartment.

She was just reaching her own door when she heard something behind her, a slow creaking sound. She turned to see the door to apartment five slowly sliding ajar, finally falling fully open. Was there someone in there after all? Yes, there was definitely a light, dim but there, and pulsating a little, and reddish as well. She couldn’t see the source of the light exactly, just the throwback of its glow. The source of the light itself was somewhere deep within the apartment, out of sight.

She stayed staring at the open door for a long while, wondering what to do. After a moment she realized she was still half bent over, still gripping Steve’s collar. Steve, though, she realized, was no longer whining. Instead, tail between his legs, he was shivering.

“It’s okay, boy,” she said. Quickly she opened up her apartment and thrust him inside, closing the door after him. Immediately, once he was in, he began to scratch at the door and whine. Heidi ignored him, instead turned to face apartment five.

Yes, a reddish glow, but the glow somehow didn’t seem to illuminate the apartment. She could see the light, but somehow it didn’t make it easier to see anything in the apartment. It was almost like darkness, a reddish darkness that hid things rather than revealed them.

Heidi took a step forward. Then another. She found herself drawn
toward the apartment on the one hand, and repelled by it on the other. She hesitated, but felt one foot, almost in spite of herself, slowly lift from the floor and slide forward, dragging her closer. And then again.

As she neared the apartment, the red glow grew stronger.
I shouldn’t do this
, she told herself.
I should go back into my apartment and wait for morning to come, then talk to Lacy
. But she was too curious to know what the light was to be able to stop now.

As she came closer she slowed down, barely moving now, staying close to one wall. The glow was still there and now she could see a little of the apartment in it. What she could see of it was bare, empty. She came closer, and then slowly leaned around the door frame and peered in.

The glow wasn’t even coming from the apartment, she realized, but from a window in the back corner of the apartment, from something behind the window that was partly covered by ragged curtains.

It was a relief to know the source of the light wasn’t within the apartment, but she still couldn’t help but wonder what it could be. There wasn’t anything out there that she could remember that would glow like that. Maybe an ambulance light or the light from the top of a police car? But if that were the case, wouldn’t it be flashing rather than pulsating?

For a moment, she hesitated. She almost returned to her apartment, called it a night, and curled up with Steve. That would be the smart thing to do rather than wandering around in a strange apartment at night.
Or at the very least,
she told herself,
I should go down and knock on Lacy’s door, get her up here to have a look, too. Safety in numbers.
It was late, sure, but this was important.

She stayed there on the threshold, hesitating, holding to the edge of the door frame. But then curiosity got the better of her and instead of turning around and leaving she went in.

Inside, she could smell the dust. The air, too, was thick and stale,
as if it had been trapped there for too long. She shuffled in slowly, crossing the room and moving toward the pulsating light.

She reached out and parted the curtains, brought her face close to the glass so she could see. There, on the back of an old brick building, was a flickering red neon
Jesus Saves
sign. She stared at it. No, that was wrong, she told herself. It couldn’t be there. She knew what was behind the house, and it wasn’t that. Something was wrong.

And as soon as she began to think this, the
Jesus Saves
sign began to change. It almost seemed to melt, the words beginning to shift and change, the neon staying lit but flowing like water along the wall to become a series of strange, incomprehensible symbols.
What the fuck?
she thought, beginning to feel apprehensive. She rubbed her eyes, but when she opened them the symbols were still there.

I’ve got to go
, she told herself. She turned from the window and made for the door, but before she could reach it she heard a rustling from the shadows. There was something there, or maybe someone.

“Hello?” she said, but nobody answered.

But something was moving there, she could hear it, and as she stared, something came stumbling out and into the red light.

It was not a person, though it had once been one. Now the face was charred and burned, little more than bone, the body mere bone as well, though bits and pieces of withered and charred flesh still clung to it here and there. It was dressed in nothing but a few blacked scraps of tattered fabric. It stared into her eyes—or at least would have if it had had eyes. Instead, it turned two blackened sockets in her direction. Its jaw clicked and then opened. When it did, a black liquid began to spill from the mouth.

Heidi just watched, horrified, paralyzed. She couldn’t breathe, felt like the wind had been knocked out of her.

Then the creature hissed and lunged at her and she came to herself enough to stumble back and away from it. But there was another one behind her, this one charred but with more flesh, a woman obviously,
her body still warm and smoking as she clawed at Heidi and made a noise a little like someone suffocating might make. Black fluid was pouring from her mouth as well. Heidi struggled to get away, feeling both creatures tear into her with spastic motions, almost as if they were puppets or sleepwalkers. They shredded her clothes but didn’t stop there, continuing to rip and tear at her, deeply slashing her skin with their charred and bloody hands. She cried out in pain, struggled to get away. The sharp nails of a hand clawed deep into her forehead, tore her scalp partly off.

She cried out again, pushed and shoved violently and managed to break free. She ran toward the light of the open door, but before she could reach it something struck her hard in the side and knocked her off balance. She missed the door and hit the wall hard, unable to stop, and quickly the hands were upon her again, dragging at her, pulling her down onto the floor as she screamed and cried. She could feel them clawing at her, caught glimpses of their hideous bodies and burned flesh, their strange fleshless grins, as they set upon her.

She lay there. She didn’t know how long she had been unconscious, nor, to tell the truth, whether she was alive or dead. She wasn’t sure when they had stopped tearing at her, nor if they were still there, hovering over her, just waiting for her to move before setting on her again.

The floor was wet all around her, her body wet, too, but it took her a moment to realize that it was with her blood. She rolled to one side and felt her whole body blaze up with pain. She stopped there, hesitating, but there was no movement in the apartment, no sign that they were still there. Perhaps they had thought her dead and had retreated to their shadows. Or had gone elsewhere to make others their victims.

Very carefully she got her limbs under her. She felt something tear painfully in her arm, a wound ripping open again. She thought of standing up, but no, she wasn’t sure she could manage, and she
worried she would be too visible. No, she needed to be as inconspicuous as possible, needed to try to make it out before they realized that she wasn’t dead after all.

There it was, the door to the hall, light coming through it. She put one hand out in front of her and dragged her way a little closer to it. Then she waited. When nothing happened, she pulled herself with the other hand and then managed to get her legs partly under her and begin to crawl.

It didn’t seem like she was the one crawling. The pain made her feel so distant from her body that it felt like she was a ghost hovering above herself, somewhere near the ceiling, watching someone else crawl. She kept the body below her moving toward the door, trying not to feel its pain, trying just to keep it moving.

Her fingers crossed over the threshold and pulled her partway out.
I might survive after all
, she thought. All she had to do was drag herself the rest of the way out and down the hall and into her apartment and call 911, then staunch her wounds and try to stay alive until they sent an ambulance for her.

Then she was all the way out and into the hall. She came back from where she was hovering like a ghost over her body to occupy the body itself and had to stop herself from screaming in pain. But being in the body made her feel more capable as well. She could feel the adrenaline pumping within her and she managed to crawl up the wall and pull herself to her knees. From there, with a tremendous effort of will, she stumbled to her feet and stood there, braced against the wall, out of breath. The wall was all bloody, she saw, from where it had touched her, and she knew if she turned around she would see a swath of blood along the hallway floor as well from where she had dragged herself.
Don’t look back
, she told herself.
Move forward.