The 13th (12 page)

Officer Christy Sorensen slowed the squad down to fifteen miles an hour and crept along the side of 190. The call had come in just as the chief had started to bawl her out for endangering herself and the department on a breaking-and-entering charge. When Matt had stuck his head into the office to say that a car had been reported as crashed off the road just a few miles outside of town, Chief had had only one more thing to say to her:

“Go check it out,” he growled. “I was thinking of busting you down to traffic patrol anyway.”

Traffic patrol in a town the size of Castle Point was a cruel sentence of boredom. The department didn’t bother with it unless there were reports of teens drag-racing in a particular area, because basically all it meant was sitting in your squad on the
side of Main or 190 and watching the dust blow by most of the day.

The tip had come in from someone on a cell phone while on the way out of town, so Christy only had an approximate location to go on…but if someone else had spotted the crash from the highway just by seeing the sun glinting off the silver of the car’s chrome, she figured she ought to be able to find it if she was looking hard.

The gravel crunched beneath the tires in a low, steady rhythm, when suddenly Christy hit the brakes. Something reflected in the late-afternoon sun like light in a mirror.
That must be it,
she thought and pulled off the road.

She walked along the shoulder until she saw the source of the light. The tip had been correct; a car lay at the bottom of the hill, half buried in the brush and small trees. But standing here, it was easy to see the tracks where it had gone over—the grass and bushes had been broken and ripped from the car’s passage, and the trees below were singed from an apparent fire. She stepped carefully along the rocks, zigzagging her way down the hillside to the wreck, holding on to tree trunk after tree trunk for support so that she didn’t stumble and land in a heap on top of the wreck herself.

Christy was winded by the time she reached the bottom; at times she felt like if she let go of the tree she was holding that she’d plummet!

But once down, she circled the wrecked car, noting that its entire outside was scorched and blackened, and the interior was charred beyond recognition. While the front windshield was a mess of spiderwebbed glass, one of the passenger windows was completely blown out, and Christy was able to peer inside to assess the cab.

She steeled herself for the horror she knew would
be inside. There was no way the driver had walked away from this one, and her stomach turned a little as she peered in through the open window.

She saw the long strips of rubber hanging in hardened teardrops from the steering wheel, where the flames had melted it. She saw the springs exposed beneath the blackened seats like a 3-D picture of how a car was put together.

But nobody was inside.

She pushed back, and walked around the car again, staring hard at the matted grass for some evidence of a wounded driver. Blood spots. A severed limb. Something. Maybe the driver was trapped beneath the car, she thought, but a closer investigation negated that theory quickly. She walked in a widening circle, and then stood still, staring up the rocky hillside to try to see any color that didn’t belong there; evidence of ripped shreds of clothing…or perhaps an intact body that had been launched far from the impact. She cringed at every step, expecting the grass to part on a bloodied, blue-tinged hand.

Nothing.

She spent more than a half hour poking around the hillside, and finally decided that this was maybe a job for a search dog. Or someone with better shoes. She almost left the scene without performing the most important task. But thankfully she remembered just as she’d begun to climb back up, and pulled the notepad out of her pocket to scribble down the license plate number.

Wouldn’t do to confirm a report of a crash without being able to look up whom the car belonged to, would it?

Back at the top, Christy walked around the area where the car had gone over. If you knew what to look for, you could just barely see the displaced
gravel where the tires had ground through it. She paced the shoulder for a couple minutes, not knowing what she was looking for, but looking just the same. That’s how she found the screwdriver. It was just lying there on the gravel at the side of the road, not far from where the car had plunged to its fiery death. She reached down to pick it up, and then thought better.

Unreported accident, car burned to ruin, no victim in sight? Christy walked back to the squad and retrieved an evidence bag from the glove compartment.

You never know when you just might need to dust for prints, that’s what her instructor in the academy had drilled into her class, over and over. Laughing at the unlikelihood, she scooped the abandoned tool into the bag and got back in the car to call the station.

“Hey Matt,” she said. “Can you run a plate for me?” She read him the numbers, and waited for his reply. As he looked it up, he asked if it was an abandoned vehicle.

“Yeah,” she said. “Pretty burned up, and nobody around.”

“Is it a Nova?” he asked after a moment of silence.

“Yeah,” she said. “Older one, I think.”

“License says it belongs to one Carrie Sanddanz of Oak Falls.”

“No way,” Christy breathed.

“What’s a matter?”

“Matt, Carrie Sanddanz is the woman that was wandering around town the other day after escaping from the asylum. She’s been reported as a missing person by her family.”

“Weird,” Matt said.

“More than weird,” Christy agreed.

“Christy?”

“Yeah?”

“Chief’s standing here at my desk. Says to tell you not to even think of heading over to the asylum right now.”

“Wouldn’t think of it,” she said sweetly.

From the background she heard Chief’s voice: “I mean it, Sorensen. My office, fifteen minutes.”

She pulled a U-turn on the highway and headed back to Castle Point, only slowing a little bit when she passed the cutoff for the old Castle House Lodge.

“I promised I wouldn’t go there right now,” she said. “But I made no promises about later.”

David finished cutting the seemingly endless grass around the asylum at dusk on Friday. He honestly only knew it was Friday because, for the first time in weeks, he was actually looking forward to a paycheck. And payday was Friday.

He put the mower away in the gardener’s shed and let himself into the asylum through the back door. Sweat ran down his back in steamy rivulets and he could feel the heat radiating from his face. It didn’t get that hot in the summer at this altitude, but when you’re pushing a mower up a hill, it quickly started to feel like a one-hundred-degree day.

He started the water, let his soggy clothes fall to the floor and stepped into the tiny shower and pulled the curtain closed. He was tilting his head back, letting the hot water run over the knotted heat of his shoulders when he heard the scream.

He wasn’t sure it was a scream at first; maybe it was a rusty pipe that just whined for a minute? But as he rinsed his hair, he heard it again. And again. Short, guttural complaints of pain from somewhere close.

He remembered the zombielike patients he’d seen in the front foyer the day he’d been brought here after the accident, and frowned. His impression was that the patients were all kept pretty well dosed up.

David finished rinsing off with a renewed speed, and toweled off quickly, stepping into his underwear and clean jeans without pause. He stuffed his dirty laundry in the duffel bag that the clean clothes had occupied, and stepped out into the hallway. Leaving the bag in the hall near the exit, he walked down the dark corridor to the center of the old hotel, listening for the screams. They didn’t come again.

“Hmmf,” he said, standing in the middle of the open lobby near the front reception desk. Nobody was there. In fact, nobody seemed to be around at all.

Not inclined to leave without the paycheck he’d been looking forward to, David decided to check the second floor to see if Dr. Rockford or his nurse were up there, dealing with a difficult patient. He walked up the long staircase, whose thick carpet seemed to absorb his footfalls instantly. He was a ghost on the landing, gliding upward to uncover a mystery…

The long hall was empty at the top of the stairs, and all the doors seemed to be shut. All but one. He stepped over to the entry to room two, where the door was ajar, and peered inside. A small table lamp was lit next to the bed, which was unmade—a rumple of sheets and comforter were tangled together in a heap halfway down the mattress. Other than that…it looked like any other empty hotel room.

He stepped back out and walked down the length
of the hall, passing the corner and turning to see that the door numbers ended with thirteen before reverting to an older numbering designation.

On a spur-of-the-moment thing, David reached out and turned the knob of room thirteen, and when it turned, he eased it open a crack.

On the bed, a woman lay sleeping, black hair cascaded over her breast like garland. Feeling like a Peeping Tom, he quickly eased the door shut.

He rounded the corner and peeked inside room twelve. Another woman dozed inside, but no doc. He moved to room eleven and paused. Should he check all of these rooms for the doctor?

David reached out for the knob, but then thought better of it. The last thing he needed was to wake up a bunch of mental patients and start a new batch of shrieking. He pulled his hand back and decided to go back downstairs.

Inside room eleven, Brenda Bean shifted and moaned slightly on the bed. In her drug-enhanced dreams, she saw a beast with horns and a leering grin advancing on her with a club. She laughed and pointed at the weapon suggesting, “I hope you know how to use that thing.”

David descended the stairs and again looked in the office. The asylum seemed abandoned. Now and then the dull whir of an air-conditioning unit broke the perfect silence, but that was all. He paced back and forth, stopping in an alcove where a bunch of old paintings were hung. The images were predominantly of pastoral scenes and hillsides, but one, obviously newer creation struck him. The artist displayed far less skill than most of the paintings, but the picture was striking nevertheless. In it, a tiny baby lay in a wicker basket. The style was almost cartoonlike, but the impact of the art was
striking. The naked child stared at the onlooker with wide black eyes. And in the center of its chest, a circle was drawn. Within the circle was sketched an upside-down cross.

David got a chill just from staring at those dark eyes and the dark tattoo. He backed away from the painting and shook his head, willing the image to go away. He stepped down a side hallway, on the way back to the main office, he thought, but then realized that no, it had been a wrong turn when he exited into a waiting lobby. He almost turned back to retrace his steps when he saw the door at the end of the corridor.

A door with a faint, but distinct red
X.

From somewhere deep within the bowels of the building he heard the faintest hint of yet another scream. Not hesitating or stopping to think, David stepped forward and grasped the knob of the strangely marked door…and turned the handle.

The stairs that led down were shadowed in darkness, and David stepped carefully to avoid having them creak and give him away. In seconds, that fear became moot, as from beyond the stairwell, a woman began to scream.

The horrible shriek sent the hair on the back of David’s neck to standing. He paused, and waited for the cry of pain to diminish, but instead it seemed to only grow more intense, wavering and holding in the air like a terrible, suspended spray of the darkest, deepest blood. Finally the horrible sound quieted, but the woman continued to cry out, harsh, grating sounds of anger and pain.

David held the wall with one hand and stepped down another wooden stair, and then another. When he came to the cement floor at the bottom, he held his body tight to the wall and slowly edged his way to the corner, holding his breath as he did so.
Finally, he got a clear shot of the room, and he almost choked trying to hold in a gasp.

An old steel hospital bed was set against the long wall of a room lit by dim bulbs hung from the rafters. A ring of guttering candles surrounded the bed, set on small tables and a wall shelf. Above the bed, a crucifix hung upside down. But the shocking part was not the candles and the antireligious iconography. David’s throat caught when he saw the woman thrashing around amid white sheets stained a wet, deadly red.

Dr. Rockford was at the bedside, and when he lifted a hand in the air to accept a shiny instrument from the rubber-gloved hands of Nurse Spellman, David could see that the doctor’s hand and forearm were smeared in the woman’s blood.

“It’s time,” Rockford said, as he slid the bloody arm forward, back between the legs of the woman on the bed. The silvery spatulalike instrument disappeared between her thighs, and David saw the woman writhe and buck on the bed as it did. Her wrists were tied to the head of the bed, and her feet were likewise strapped into a set of stirrups extended from the foot of the frame. She could bounce her head and back as much as she wanted, but she couldn’t move from the center of the mattress.

Nurse Spellman stepped back from the bed and picked up a black bound book from one of the candlelit tables. She quickly leafed to a ribbon-marked page in the center of the book and began to read in a strange language.

“Ei’ mi lord Ba’al,”
she said, as the woman on the bed screamed
. “In du Astarte, est ei’ no hebarti’l sem’jen. A la virgo d’ daemon er’ Ba’al incorpus.”

Next to her, Dr. Rockford echoed her words, raising crimson hands in the air to call out “Hail Ba’al” and “Hail Astarte” at moments where Spellman paused.

“What…the…fuck,” David whispered to himself.

Spellman’s voice ascended, spreading a stream of dark words that to David sounded like a strange mélange of church Latin, guttural German and exotic Egyptian. Whatever language, it sounded cruel the way she pronounced it.

As her voice reached a climax, so did the voice of the laboring woman. And then with a final yell, the patient fell silent. As the echo of her voice faded, Dr. Rockford held a small, bloody body up in the air, umbilical cord trailing to a mass of crimson meat spread out on the sheets between the woman’s legs.

“I baptize you in the name of Astarte,” Rockford said. “Let him be named after the day on which he was born.”

Spellman grinned. “His name shall be Friday. And by the time his day of naming rolls around again, he will be a child of Ba’al.”

“And we will finally offer him the Thirteenth,” Rockford agreed.

Acid boiling now in his stomach, David pulled back from the room, and carefully stepped up the stairs, setting his feet down as if he were walking on glass. When he reached the top stair, he stepped out of the basement and carefully closed the door with the red
X.
He leaned his back against the wall for a moment, heart beating like a machine gun in his chest.

What the hell should he do? Who could he tell? Who would believe him?

From the basement, he heard the tiny cry of a newborn infant, and taking a deep breath, David sprinted away from the door and down the hall of art, barely slowing to pick up his backpack of dirty clothes before exiting the back of the asylum.

Suddenly getting his weekly paycheck didn’t seem terribly important.