The 13th (24 page)

Carrie Sanddanz felt something press against the back of her thigh. Something cold, like steel left outside on a winter’s night. She jerked away, but it followed her, creeping like a frozen noose up her leg to encircle the topmost skin of her leg…and then it released her…and moved to the middle.

“No!” she screamed, and struggled to move away
from the cold that engulfed her most private parts…but she could not move. She could only lie there and accept the fingers that slipped inside her and pressed her flesh with a cold, dead speculum that she could not, from any vantage point, see.

“What the fuck!” she moaned, and stared at her middle, struggling to see the marionette strings. But they were inside her now, and she jerked and moaned to their rhythm, at the same time praying aloud for it to stop.

And then the door opened and she heard the doctor’s voice. He had locked her in this tiny room just barely large enough to hold a cot. No windows. No light. It was horrible…but the threat of the darkness and its invisible creatures was still better than having to see the face of the doctor again.

“So. Ready to take it to the next level?” Dr. Rockford’s voice asked. His body was a blur of shadow in the pitch-black of her cell.

“No,” she said. “I don’t even know what this level is.”

“This level is the important one,” he explained. “Here, we give it all.” He paused. “Or, at least, you do.”

A blade came up to freeze her neck, but in the meantime, something cold pressed between her thighs.

The bandage around her head throbbed as she moved to see him. “Haven’t you hurt me enough?” she asked.

Rockford grinned a row of perfectly white teeth. “The only hurt that is enough is when there is no more possibility of hurt. You seem like you have plenty of capacity for more. Anyway, we’re going to find out.”

He took her by the hand and pulled her from the cot. His touch was warm, but she realized that she preferred the bitter attentions of the ghosts that
had forced themselves on her before the doctor’s presence. They could be trusted…or, at least…understood. They were predictable. She had no idea what Rockford was up to.

He led her out of the tiny room and into a dark hall…but she could hear voices ahead. The din of a room filled with people. Only…these people didn’t sound like they were filling the place with a buzz from casual conversation. These were the kind of chaotic but insistent syllables that one expected from a porno movie…yet the number of voices and their intensity seemed to go beyond simple night movements. At one point, a group of them cheered, and a few steps later, the voices drew a collective gasp.

Carrie’s skin crawled as she heard distant moans change to chants and then to a faraway scream.

“What are they doing in there?” she asked her captor, who kept a grip on her hand tight as a vise. She could almost feel her bones bending.

“Waiting for you,” he said.

She tried to pull away, but his grip only tightened. She felt as if the bones in her hand would snap in a dozen pieces at any moment.

“There is no place to run to,” he warned. “If you go back, you’ll only find yourself trapped in that room once more…and I don’t think you want that. Forward is how we’re doing this now. Move forward.”

The first thing that hit her was the smell. As they rounded the corridor and entered the main room of the basement, the heat and humidity hit her like a wall. And within it, a scent of fertility and death mixed together like sin. Carrie gasped as she saw the Bacchanalian rites on the floor, but it was the smell that scared her—the room stank of evil. She could almost see the devils flitting through the shadows
in the dark air, as candles flickered suggestively along the walls. And at the front of the room, the nurse stood naked, engaged in some strange ritual with another woman.

As Dr. Rockford led her forward, Carrie recognized the girl as one of the hospital inmates she’d seen over the past few weeks. She had painted with her once in what the doctor liked to call “art class.” But it was more like bloodletting class, as all of the patients—most of them semicomatose—had slashed their hands and fingers and bled onto parchment in Rorschach designs that the doctor had collected and framed.

“You will be remembered for your art,” he’d said, as he took Carrie’s halfhearted attempt to smear a picture of him on her paper. In the center of his stick-figure chest, she’d puddled a thick circle of blood with a point protruding.

“Right,” was all she could say to answer him. The drugs left her barely able to mouth a single syllable. The same was true for all of the women…and so it was easiest to simply obey his orders—like, “Paint a picture in your blood for me.”

Carrie had used her own deep humor to turn that command into, “Paint a picture in your blood OF me.” Her stickman writhed on a pointed stake. If he had caught the meaning of her crimson smears, he ignored it.

The scene in front of her now resembled the intent of her stick drawing…only the victim was her former prison mate. The woman struggled to kick and punch at Nurse Amelia, but the defrocked nurse only grinned and pulled the woman closer to her in a twisted chest-to-chest embrace. A man in a butcher’s apron stood behind the struggling women, holding the patient’s arms in a vise grip so that her punches couldn’t land. In a moment, those arms
ceased to fight, as Amelia’s hand plunged a long knife into the back of the other woman. She stepped back, letting the body slump into the Butcher’s arms and turned to the crowd, pressing the red edge of the knife to her lips. When she pulled it away and let her arm hang at her side, her tongue traced the bloody halo from her lips.

“The eleventh mother,” she pronounced. “And”—she brought the arm back up in an attack stance and turned back to the woman who moaned feebly in the Butcher’s grasp, but otherwise didn’t move—“the eleventh child!”

With those words, she plunged the knife into her in the opposite direction, this time straight through the belly.

The room lit with one electrifying scream, as the woman’s eyes popped open, their whites so exposed that they seemed to pop out of her skull. Amelia pulled back the knife and a gush of fluid exited the wound behind it. Without ceremony, the Butcher dropped the body and with his foot, rolled it off the side of the makeshift stage.

The room filled with the chant of “Ba’al, Astarte.”

And then Rockford pushed Carrie to the front of the stage. “The hour is late and the minutes few,” he yelled. The throng around them hushed.

“The blood of the mothers flows heavy in this room. But our time for blood is nearly done. The hour of the Thirteenth is almost at hand. For our last gift to Ba’al and Astarte, I give to you the twelfth mother.”

Strong hands suddenly closed on Carrie’s wrists and yanked her up on the stage. Amelia ran one wet hand down her back as if in comfort as she took over from Rockford. “There are only minutes left in the twelve o’clock hour,” she said. “And all of you must share in our last gift. The twelfth mother gives her life and her baby to all of us.”

“But I’m not a mother,” Carrie gasped. “I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

Amelia smiled and patted Carrie’s tummy. “Dr. Rockford is your boyfriend,” she whispered in her ear. “And don’t worry, I won’t tell him you slept through it.”

Pulling away from Carrie, Amelia called out to the mob again, and this time pointed at the edge of the stage, where a scattering of thin silver rectangles lay.

“You all must draw her blood. Quickly now!”

Carrie’s eyes widened as she saw all of the participants in the blood orgy stand, and line up to pick up razors—one each—from the edge of the stage. When an old lady stepped before her and opened a gash on her thigh, Carrie didn’t even scream.

She was thinking of the baby she didn’t even know she had.

As another wound opened like fire on her calf and one blade bisected her breast like an acid burn across her nipple, Carrie pictured a tiny face in her mind, sucking on a bottle.

Carrie cried.

The door swung open and David pushed Christy behind him. As he did, he smelled the flower scent of her hair, and realized with a pang that this, right now, was probably the last time he would see her. Even if, strictly speaking, he couldn’t really
see
her. He could smell her though, and she was rich and sweet in the dark. And her side felt smooth and velvety where he held it. In two heartbeats David
vowed that he would do anything to protect this smart-ass cop from the murderer he was sure stood before them, and with that he bulled forward like a linebacker.

He crashed into the man in the doorway with his right shoulder, and the guy went down like a feather, with a whoosh of breath and a feeble cry.

David hadn’t expected it to be that easy, and he stumbled and fell to the ground outside the room as he recovered. He had thought that their captors would have sent more than one weak guy to collect them. In the faint flickering light of a candle, David crept back to the man who now lay moaning on the ground and holding his side.

Christy was already at his side.

“Always in the wrong place…” she accused.

“What?”

“It’s Billy, one of the Terror Twins, you dope,” she said. David couldn’t help but notice her breast swaying over the downed man’s face. Lucky guy.

“He was here to let us out,” she said.

David knelt and saw the dark pool of blood on the floor near Billy’s hands, which clasped and kneaded at his side.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But…did I do
that?
”

Billy turned a weak gaze his way and shook his head slightly. “They stabbed me. Left me to bleed. Not dead yet…”

A spasm convulsed his face. When it relaxed again, Billy wheezed, “If you’re going to go, then go. They’ll be back soon. Figured I owed you that much, after what TG did to you.”

David felt a wave of guilt and thanks twist in his heart. He gripped Billy’s shoulder and gave it a slight squeeze. “Thanks, man. Hang in here…We’ll go get help and come back for you.”

“Just get out before I kick your ass.”

David stifled the urge to retort. Billy wasn’t going to be kicking anything but the bucket in the next few minutes, looked like.

“C’mon,” he whispered and pulled Christy’s arm, urging her away from the man. Billy curled in the fetal position and moaned painfully. “Let’s get out of here.”

The room, which just a few hours before had been filled with a dozen nude women, chained to the walls in a scene resembling some mediaeval torture chamber from hell, now was strangely quiet.

David had his hand on the door to the hall when Christy stopped him, and made him look behind them. The candle flames still guttered along the walls every few feet, but the chains and ropes hung slack from their hooks. No women remained. The void was expectant. And eerie.

“They seem to be running low on victims,” David noted.

Christy nodded. “Let’s not fill out the list.”

They stepped into the hallway as one.

Blood is music. It sings of life. It sings of death. It pulses and twists, dances and sways. Blood filled the room of Castle House, and the house sang.

Ba’al heard the call and answered its tribal beat.

Astarte heard the call and joined the dance…Her feet slipped on its love and kicked at its anger. Her heart joined in its demand and she sang in the clouds of
almost.

Because Astarte was not in Castle House. Not yet.
She and Ba’al saw each other across the fog of
nearly
and kissed at the brink of
almost,
as a knife bled yet another mother, and a stab killed yet another infant in their names.

Ba’al slipped her an ethereal tongue and she laughed, biting down as hard as she could. Her teeth echoed like metallic tongs in the dark, and even past the
almost,
the people could hear her humor.

“I’ve missed you, dark lord,” she teased.

“I’ve had better,” he called back. Aloof to the end.

“You’ve had none,” she laughed. “You’ve got no bone.”

He shrugged, a ghostly flip of the shoulder, its backdrop lit by blood. “Maybe not. But I will soon.” He pointed at the stack of women’s bodies piled up on the floor in the Castle House basement.

“All this too shall be yours.”

“I don’t want wormwood,” she complained. “I need flesh to milk.” She flexed a handful of pointed fingernails as if to underscore her point. “I need to reave and suckle.”

Ba’al nodded, his humor gone. “The game is nearly done. And the vessel is nearby. This time…”

“How many times have you said that?” Astarte spat, though nothing material ever touched the floor. “How many times have we been ‘almost there’?”

Ba’al shot her a look that would have wilted milkweed. “And I get to spend eternity with you?”

He pointed at the crowd, lined up to draw blood, one blade at a time, from a blonde woman. The woman didn’t even struggle as their razors ripped and tore at her flesh, until there was no skin unblemished, only a flesh canvas painted in pain. Aphrodisiac of the gods.

“If you want to be real enough to feel it again…
then help,” Ba’al said, and with that disappeared into the ether above Rockford…like a ghost. His voice echoed in the
nowhere.
“Make them feel it. Make them need it. Tonight we
will
be born again.”

Brenda heard the demons.

She’d never much believed in the afterlife. If she had, she might not have taken the bus to Oak Falls as much as she had on Friday nights. Because surely her exploits there qualified her for an eternity in hell.

But now…she thought…she might actually be IN hell. Things touched her in the dark. Things laughed at her from a place she couldn’t see. No matter where she turned, the air seemed to roil and turn…but when she reached out a hand to feel, there was nothing there. Nothing except maybe a whisper of cold…or a faint scorch of heat.

The room was alive, with the sound of demons.

Brenda shivered. In her heart, she prayed to be back in her house, in that place she had tried for so many years and in so many ways to get out of. She begged forgiveness for all of the rude T-shirts she’d worn to spite her parents. She recited the Act of Contrition for all the boys she’d…Brenda shook away the memories of nights on her knees in the shadow of a bathroom stall. If she had just one more chance, one chance…she’d do better.

“God, I don’t want to die,” she whispered.

Around her, the air erupted in laughter.

“God?” a voice tittered. “Goddddd? Did someone invite him here? I don’t think so…”

And then a door opened, and light flickered like the wave of a distant fire into the room. A soft and gentle voice said the words she feared to hear.

“It’s time.”

Amelia’s hands took her arm, and Rockford’s fingers gripped the long silk of her hair, and together they led her out of the darkness, and into…

“Hell” is a subjective term. For some people, hell is an eternity in an office building sitting in a cubicle day after day and churning out pointless letter after pointless report from eight thirty to five thirty every day. For others, hell was coming home after those days in the office to face a loveless marriage and a clutch of thankless kids every night. And still for others, hell was a traditional place of fire and brimstone, flames licking the blistered feet of all who suffered eternity there, in unrelenting physical torment.

Where Amelia and Rockford led Brenda,
that
was hell. As soon as they stepped into the room thick with the scent of blood and smoke and sex, Brenda knew she was going to be punished for all her sins. She would get no pardon from a God she called on too late. She saw the dead women stacked up along the side of the stage at the front of the room, arms splayed over each other and blood covering them all like a drizzle of torment on a human corpse sundae.

This was hell.

There was a mob of naked people clustered around the stage, and Brenda soon saw why. At their center they propped up a woman. She was blonde. Dressed only in her own blood. The blood that the townspeople were drawing. One by one they stepped forward and lifted arms high above their heads, be
fore bringing them down to slip into the skin of the woman. She didn’t scream, only shivered a little at each contact, which released a new river of her life.

“It’s time,” Amelia said, as they dragged Brenda onto the stage. “Have you all drawn her blood?”

The mob answered in a resounding “Yes,” and Amelia abandoned Brenda’s arm to step forward.

“Then I will finish it.” She held her hand out for a razor, and metal glinted like steely fireflies as hands everywhere offered them to her. Amelia accepted one and approached Carrie, who by this point was barely conscious. The Butcher had first held her captive with his grip and now only held her up. She had become immune to the blades after the first dozen slashes. And now her spark drowned in her own lifeblood.

“Carrie,” Amelia whispered. She said it again, louder. The woman’s eyes flickered open and struggled to focus. When it registered on her tormented brain who was before her, who was calling her out of the blissful unconsciousness she’d retreated into, Carrie had just one word to say through shredded, broken lips.

“Bitch.”

“Twelfth,” was all Amelia said in answer. Her lips pulled back in a rictus of a smile as she said it. And then she brought the razor to Carrie’s neck and whispered, “Your blood to mine. My blood to yours. Our blood to Ba’al and Astarte entwined.”

“Fuckin’ piece of shit,” Carrie said for the last time in her life.

Then Amelia’s razor drew deep across her neck and let out the last blood that her struggling heart still pumped. She still didn’t scream…in fact, after the depth of the cut in her neck, probably couldn’t.
Instead she simply slid to the floor. Someone in the crowd began to chant “The Thirteenth. The Thirteenth…”

And in moments, the whole room echoed with the cry.

Brenda felt tears well up in her eyes. She knew what “the Thirteenth” had to mean. It had to mean her. Sliced to bits. And she really didn’t want to be sliced to bits…She may have had a goth thing going on for a bit, but she was no cutter…She hated knives and razors.

“What the fuck did I do?” she said to nobody in particular.

But Rockford didn’t miss the cue.

“You were born, just like all the rest of us. And now it’s time to—”

From the back of the room someone screamed.

“Stop!!”

Rockford held on to Brenda and laughed. “Do you think so?” he said to the interrupter. “I mean…we’ve come all this way, bought a monstrous property that, oddly enough, happens to have ties to the otherworld, spent nine months cultivating and capturing and impregnating a complement of twelve mothers so that on tonight, the night of the Sabbat, we could decide…eh, ya know, we don’t want to do this.” The one-time famous geneticist laughed. There was an edge of mania to it. “I don’t
think
so.”

Rockford pointed and the crowd turned toward the two at the back of the room.

“Bring them up here.”

Christy and David saw the mob turn toward them, and backed into the hallway from which they’d entered.

Christy dug nails into David’s arm and pulled him
backward. “I don’t really want to die,” she mentioned casually, backing up one step at a time.

“That’s Brenda up there,” was David’s response. He didn’t budge even though the mob had turned.

Something in the “We have to save another woman” response didn’t sit well with Christy but she tried not to analyze it too much. If she’d had a gun at her hip, she would have pulled it, but circumstances dictated a different approach. She kicked him in the back of the knee, and he buckled.

“What the…”

“C’mon,” Christy insisted and yanked him back into the dark of the corridor. Two of the naked throng followed them, but these kind of odds she could handle. Christy did a mental “…two, three, four,” and KICKed with all her might at the jaw of the first man. He was tall and bald—shaven—and he really wasn’t expecting the full-frontal-nudity assault on his face. When Christy’s heel connected with his head, there was an audible snap, and he hit the pavement with a wet-sounding slap. The guy following behind him took one look around and saw that nobody else was hot in pursuit and reconsidered his own mission. He backed away.

“Remind me not to fuck with you,” David mumbled.

“Fucking’s okay,” Christy said, and bent down to rub the ball of her foot. “Man…never got that kind of extension before.”

“What, they don’t practice naked karate in the police academy?”

From the main room, Rockford’s voice bellowed. “It is time,” he said, and anyone in the crowd who had taken an interest in Christy and David turned back to the reason they were there. The final sacrifice. But this one would not involve blood.

“It is nearly the hour of the Thirteenth,” Rockford continued. “And it is time to plant the seed of the
god. That piece which will transgress the gate of worlds to bring him fully among us. Ba’al is here now already. I can feel him.”

Amelia grabbed Brenda’s hand and held it aloft for the crowd. “The thirteenth mother,” she exclaimed. Rockford directed Brenda, “Lie down.”

She looked at him in askance. “Lie down?”

“Yes…the only way to bring Ba’al through to us is to make him through you. With the other mothers, I have created their children, my children, and then given them to the god.”

“You murdered babies.”

“Their innocence opened the way,” Amelia interjected. She ran her hands over Brenda’s shoulders and began to pressure her to the floor.

“Now it is your turn,” Rockford said, grinning wolfishly. “Let’s make a god together.”

“What’s in it for me?” Brenda asked, now on her knees with the force of Amelia’s nails. The nurse would draw blood soon with her nails if she kept up the pressure.

“Well…you won’t die, like all the others.”

Brenda considered this. She’d had sex with guys she didn’t want to be with before, but the side effect of incubating a god as a result of the act hadn’t surfaced before.

“You people are crazy, you know that?” she asked before giving in and lying back to the floor. She had seen what happened to Carrie, and presumably to all of the other dead women lying near the stage. Sex hadn’t been part of the ceremony that spelled the demise of Carrie, from what she’d seen, so maybe her penance was to be different. If she could fuck her way out of this…well, it kind of went counter to the promise she’d made just minutes ago, but…this was different.

As she stretched out on the floor, she felt something
cold and wet cling to her back and legs. Brenda closed her eyes. She knew what it was…She’d watched the blood dripping from Carrie’s torso like a faucet.

Brenda was lying in the blood of dead women. Newly dead women. What kind of traitor to her gender was she, to voluntarily lie down in the blood of her sisters—who had been bred and then killed—the ultimate blasphemy against women. What kind of traitor, to lie down in their blood and open her legs to be used for the cowardly purpose of escaping their fate?

Brenda thought these things as she lay back, but the guilt didn’t stop her. In her belly, Brenda Bean was a pragmatist, and the reality was, she couldn’t do anything to bring those women or their babies back to life. All she could do was try to hold on to hers. Even if that meant fucking crazy men on the floor of a sacrificial altar.

Something cold entered her and she clenched her eyes tighter. From above she heard Rockford blathering on about something. A god and an Astarte, whatever that was.

Amelia’s voice whispered in her ear, much closer. “It’s okay,” the nurse said. “It will all be over quickly.”

Brenda felt the warmth of the other woman slip away. But the coldness between her legs didn’t leave. It pressed against her, cleaving her flesh to leave goose bumps on her thighs. If her sex was a flower, Brenda would have said she wilted. She could feel her very life sucked into the cold; her heart seemed to beat harder, as if every pump was an effort. Her eyes wanted to cry, but there were no tears when she squeezed.

Above her, she could hear Amelia chanting something; it sounded Latin. And then Rockford joined in the words, and the crowd echoed their evil prayers,
syllable for guttural syllable. The room was abuzz in words, unintelligible, foreign words, but Brenda lay in the midst of them, totally alone.

Well, not totally. She had lifted her arms to see who was using her, and was shocked to find that her fingers found only her own belly after slapping at the air. She ran those fingers up across her breasts and down to the place where something poked inside her…but instead of hands or a body near her, she found only…herself. As her fingers passed her groin and slipped to her thigh, they came away wet.

“Ugh,” she groaned, as something trembled and kissed inside her. Her body warmed and throbbed in answer and Brenda fought to control herself. “No. I won’t enjoy this…” she hissed.

But despite her words, she
did.
Brenda arched her back to accept whatever was working its way around her secret spot of pleasure; it certainly wasn’t Rockford, who still seemed to be chanting wicked prayers over her. She struggled between crying and moaning and then finally she forced open her eyes and for just a moment, she could see a face before her.

He was dark and full of shadow, but Brenda saw the thin lips and long mustache. A triangle beard trailed from his chin and his forehead looked gashed and crossed with the brands of a thousand burns.

He looked like the devil.

And then he was gone, and Rockford’s face leered close. “Are you ready, my bride?” he asked.

Around them, the room began to cheer, and Amelia’s voice rose higher and higher above them, chanting words that trembled and twisted the tongue like a cascade of lice and larvae; a wriggling horde of infestuous language. The words made Brenda’s skin crawl, but not as much as the touch of Rockford, who lowered himself to a push-up position above her body.

“Now, we will pierce the veil between worlds,” he promised.

Brenda gritted her teeth and closed her eyes tighter, ignoring the cold heat that remained inside her. She didn’t think the piercing was going to have a whole lot to do with worlds, but rather, a whole lot to do with piercing her.