The House of Thunder (35 page)

The church
was
warm. It felt wonderful.

She shuffled through the vestibule. Into the church proper. Down the center aisle. Toward the altar.

It was a pretty church. Lots of wood, marble, and brass. During the day, when light was coming in through the stained-glass windows, painting everything in bright hues, it would be beautiful.

She heard Carl Jellicoe and Herbert Parker enter the church behind her.

Her aching, quivering legs supported her all the way to the front pew, but she knew they would crumple under her if she took another step.

“Hey, slut,” Jellicoe said from the back of the church.

She refused to turn and face them, refused to acknowledge her fear of them.

She sat down on the first, highly polished pew.

“Hey, bitch.”

Susan faced forward, staring at the large brass cross behind the altar. She wished she were a religious woman, wished she were able to take comfort from the sight of the cross.

At the front of the church, to the left of the altar, the door to the sacristy opened. Two men came out.

Ernest Harch.

Randy Lee Quince.

The extent to which she had been manipulated was clear now. Her escape hadn’t been her own idea. It had been
their
idea, part of
their
game. They had been teasing her the way a cat will sometimes tease a captured mouse: letting it think there’s a real hope of freedom, letting it squirm away, letting it run a few steps, then snatching it back again, brutally. The mezuzah hadn’t been dropped accidentally in the bathroom. It had been left there on purpose, to nudge her toward an escape again, so that the cats could have their bit of fun.

She’d never really had a chance.

Harch and Quince descended the altar steps and moved to the communion railing.

Jellicoe and Parker appeared in the aisle at her side. They were both grinning.

She was limp. She couldn’t even raise a hand to protect herself let alone to strike out against them.

“Has it been as much fun for you as it’s been for us?” Carl Jellicoe asked her.

Parker laughed.

Susan said nothing. Stared straight ahead.

Harch and Quince opened a gate in the communion railing and walked up to the first pew, where Susan sat. They stared down at her, smiling. All of them smiling.

She stared between Quince and Harch, trying to keep her eyes fixed steadily on the cross. She didn’t want them to see her quaking with fear; she was determined to deny them that pleasure, at least this one time.

Harch stooped down, squarely in front of her, forcing her to look at him.

“Poor baby,” he said, his raspy voice making a mockery of any attempt at sympathy. “Is our poor little bitch tired? Did she run her little butt off tonight?”

Susan wanted to close her eyes and fall back into the darkness that waited within her. She wanted to go away inside herself for a long, long time.

But she fought that urge. She met Harch’s hateful, frost-gray eyes, and her stomach churned, but she didn’t look away.

“Cat got your tongue?”

“I hope not,” Quince said. “I wanted to cut her tongue out myself!”

Jellicoe giggled.

To Susan, Harch said, “You want to know what’s going on?”

She didn’t respond.

“Do you want to know what this is all about, Susan?”

She glared at him.

“Oh, you’re so tough,” he said mockingly. “The strong, silent type. I
love
the strong, silent type.”

The other three men laughed.

Harch said, “I’m sure you want to know what’s going on, Susan. In fact I’m sure you’re
dying
to know.”

“Dying,” Jellicoe said, giggling.

The others laughed, sharing a secret joke.

“The car accident you had,” Harch said. “Two miles south of the turnoff to the Viewtop Inn. That part was true.”

She refused to be prodded into speaking.

“You rolled the car over an embankment,” Harch said. “Slammed it into a couple of big trees. We weren’t lying about that. The rest of it, of course, was all untrue.”

“We’re all shameless fibbers,” Jellicoe said, giggling.

“You didn’t spend three weeks in a coma,” Harch told her. “And the hospital was a fake, of course. All of it was lies, deceptions, a clever little game, a chance to have some fun with you.”

She waited, continuing to meet his cold gaze.

“You didn’t have a chance to languish in a coma,” Harch said. “You died instantly in the crash.”

Oh, shit, she thought wearily. What are they up to now?

“Instantly,” Parker said.

“Massive brain damage,” Jellicoe said.

“Not just a little cut on the forehead,” Quince said.

“You’re dead, Susan,” Harch said.

“You’re here with us now,” Jellicoe said.

No, no, no, she thought. This is crazy. This is madness.

“You’re in Hell,” Harch said.

“With us,” Jellicoe said.

“And we’ve been assigned to entertain you,” Quince said.

“Which we’re looking forward to,” Parker said.

Quince said, “Very much.”

“Never thought you’d wind up here,” Jellicoe said.

“Not a goody-goody bitch like you,” Parker said.

“Must have all sorts of secret vices,” Jellicoe said.

“We’re really glad you could make it,” Quince said.

Harch just stared at her, stared hard, his cold eyes freezing her to the core.

“We’ll have a party,” Jellicoe said.

Quince said, “An endless party.”

“Just the five of us,” Jellicoe said.

“Old friends,” Parker said.

Susan closed her eyes. She knew it wasn’t true. It
couldn’t
be true. There wasn’t such a place as Hell. No Hell or Heaven. That was what she had always believed.

“Let’s fuck her now, right here,” Jellicoe said.

“Yeah,” Quince said.

She opened her eyes.

Jellicoe was unzipping his pants.

Harch said, “No. Tomorrow night. The seventh anniversary of my death. I want it to have that significance for her.”

Jellicoe hesitated, his fly half undone.

“Besides,” Parker said, “we want to do it to her in the right place. This isn’t the right place.”

“Exactly,” Harch said.

Please, God, please, Susan thought, let me find my way back up the rabbit hole... or let me just go to sleep. I could just lay back here against the pew... and go to sleep... forever.

“Let’s get the bitch out of here,” Harch said. He stood, reached down, seized Susan by her sweater, dragged her to her feet. “I’ve waited a long time for this,” he said, his face close to hers.

She tried to pull away from him.

He slapped her face.

Her teeth rattled; her vision blurred. She sagged, and other hands grabbed her.

They carried her out of the church. They weren’t gentle about it.

In the ambulance, they strapped her down, and Harch began to prepare a syringe for her.

Finally, she rose out of her lethargy far enough to speak. “If this is Hell, why do you need to give me an injection to knock me out? Why don’t you just cast a spell on me?”

“Because
this
is so much more fun,” Harch said, grinning, and with savage glee he rammed the hypodermic needle into her arm.

She cried out in pain.

Then she slept.

17

Flickering light.

Dancing shadows.

A high, dark ceiling.

Susan was in bed. The hospital bed.

Her arm hurt where Harch had stabbed her viciously with the needle. Her entire body ached.

This wasn’t her old room. This place was cool, too cool for a hospital room. Her body was warm underneath the blankets, but her shoulders and neck and face were quite cool. This place was damp, too, and musty. Very musty.

And familiar.

Her vision was blurry. She squinted, but she still couldn’t see anything.

Squinting made her dizzy. She felt as if she were on a merry-go-round instead of a bed; she spun around, around, and down into sleep again.

Later.

Before she opened her eyes, she lay for a moment, listening to the roar of falling water. Was it still raining outside? It sounded like a deluge, like Armageddon, another Great Flood.

She opened her eyes, and she was immediately dizzy again, although not as dizzy as before. There was flickering light, dancing shadows, as there had been the first time. But now she realized that it was candlelight, disturbed by crossdrafts.

She turned her head on the pillow and saw the candles. Ten thick cylinders of wax were arranged on the rocks and on the nearest limestone ledges and formations.

No!

She turned her head the other way, toward the roaring water, but she couldn’t see anything. The candlelight drove the darkness back only a distance of about fifteen feet. The waterfall was much farther away than that, at least eighty or a hundred feet away, but there was no doubt that it was out there, tumbling and frothing in the blackest corner of the cave.

She was in the House of Thunder.

No, no, no, she told herself. No, this must be a dream. Or I’m delirious.

She closed her eyes, shutting out the candlelight. But she couldn’t shut out the musty smell of the cavern or the thunderous noise of the underground waterfall.

She was three thousand miles away from the House of Thunder, dammit. She was in Oregon, not Pennsylvania.

Or Hell.

Someone jerked the blankets off her, and she opened her eyes with a snap, gasping, crying out.

It was Ernest Harch. He put one hand on her leg, and she realized that she was naked. He slid his hand along her bare thigh, across her bristling pubic thatch, across her belly, to her breasts.

She went rigid at his touch.

He smiled. “No, not yet. Not yet, you sweet bitch. Not for a while yet. Tonight. That’s when I want it. Right at the hour I died in prison. Right at the minute that damned nigger stuck a knife in my throat,
that’s
when I’m going to stick a knife in your throat, and I’m going to be up inside you at the same time, screwing you, spurting inside you just as I push the knife deep into your pretty neck. Tonight, not now.”

He took his hand off her breasts. He raised the other hand, and she saw that he was holding a hypodermic syringe.

She tried to sit up.

Jellicoe appeared and pushed her down.

“I want you to rest for a while,” Harch said. “Rest up for the party tonight.”

Again, he was vicious with the needle.

As he finished administering the injection, he said, “Carl, you know what I’m going to like most about killing her?”

“What’s that?” Jellicoe asked.

“It’s not the end. It’s just the beginning. I get to kill her again and again.”

Jellicoe giggled.

Harch said, “That’s your fate, bitch. That’s the way you’re going to spend eternity. We’re going to use, you every night, and every night we’re going to kill you. We’ll do it a different way each time. There are thousands of ways, an infinite number of ways to die. You’re going to experience all of them.”

She sank down into a drugged sleep.

 
 
Underwater. She was underwater and drowning.

She opened her eyes, gasping for breath, and realized that she was only under the
sound
of water. The waterfall.

She was still in bed. She tried to sit up, and the covers slid off her; but she hadn’t the strength to stay sitting up, and she collapsed back against the pillows, heart pounding.

She closed her eyes.

For just a minute.

Oh, maybe for an hour.

No way to tell for sure.

“
Susan
...”

She opened her eyes, and she was filled with dread. Her vision was smeary, but she saw a face in the flickering light.

“
Susan
...”

He drew nearer, and she saw him clearly. It was Jerry. The awful, rotting face. His lips were riper, more swollen than before, bursting with pus.

“
Susan
...”

She screamed. The harder she screamed, the faster the bed seemed to spin. She whirled off into deepest space.

 
 
And woke again.

The effects of the drug had almost worn off. She lay with her eyes closed, afraid to open them.

She wished she had not awakened. She didn’t want to be awake ever again. She wanted to die.

“Susan?”

She lay perfectly still.

Harch thumbed one of her eyelids open, and she twitched in surprise.

He grinned. “Don’t try to fool me, you dumb bitch. I know you’re there.”

She felt numb. Afraid but numb. Maybe, if she was lucky, the numbness would grow and grow until that was the
only
thing she could feel.

“It’s almost time,” Harch said. “Did you know that? In an hour or so, the party starts. In three hours, I’ll cut your throat wide open. See, that gives us two hours for the party. Wouldn’t want to disappoint the other guys, would we? Two hours ought to satisfy them, don’t you think? You’ll wear them out fast, a sexy girl like you.”

None of it seemed real. It was too crazy, too senseless, too fuzzy at the edges to be real. A hospital bed in the middle of a cave? Not real at all. The terror, the violence, the implied violence, the purity of Harch’s evil... all of that had the quality of a dream.

Yet she could feel the two separate pains of the two needles that he had jammed in her arms.
That
felt real enough.

Harch threw the covers aside, exposing her again.

“Bastard,” she said weakly, so weakly that she could barely hear her own voice.