The Impaler (38 page)

It was turned on to
high
.

“Please, no!” Edmund screamed, his voice coming back to him in echoes both hollow and deafening.

“WHERE IS SHE?”
the god bellowed inside the lion’s head, and Edmund was suddenly both at Kutha and in the workroom; could feel his hands on the temple doors and on the workbench at the same time as he stared through the lion’s mouth in disbelief.

“Please, no,” he sputtered—his actions not his own, the scene before him terrifying in its inevitability as he saw the temple doors crack open and felt the wind of the grinder’s wheel against his skin. He was hovering above it now, his chest only inches from its spinning steel bristles.

“I’m sorry, please, I—

The temple doors swung open as the grinder bit into his flesh. A bright burst of pain passed before his eyes, and Edmund howled in agony—his cries matched only by the Prince’s incessant
“Where is she?”
and
“C’est mieux d’oublier.
” It was all one now inside the lion’s head, as was the white liquid fire squirting from the abyss beyond the doorway. It splattered him like acid milk and then turned red as the grinder tore open the flesh between his pectoral muscles. The blood spattered everywhere, and Edmund felt a hot wetness run down the backs of his thighs. And as the spinning bristles, like thousands of little teeth, chomped farther and farther down the center of his torso, incredibly, amid his pain Edmund registered somewhere that he’d shit himself.

Thhwummp!—
a rush of darkness and yellowy light, and now there was only the workroom through the lion’s mouth. The grinder continued to whir somewhere behind him, but Edmund was moving again—legs trembling, chest screaming as the blood ran down his stomach and soaked his geni-talia. The cellar began to spin; and in what seemed like a leap forward in time, Edmund found himself on the cellar stairs, sobbing and panting uncontrollably as the shit and blood trailed off behind him. He felt weak, but at the same time as if he was being dragged upstairs by an unseen hand.

He ended up in his grandmother’s parlor, kneeling beneath the mirror that hung above the fireplace. The General had recently tilted it downward so he could sit naked on the floor and admire the doorway.

But now it was Edmund Lambert who gazed up at his reflection. And when he saw himself kneeling there with the lion’s head atop his shoulders; when he saw the 9 and the 3 that Billy Canning had so intricately tattooed on the temple doors split apart by a thick red gash, the young man knew with chilling certainty that the General had severely underestimated the Prince.

“WHERE IS SHE?” Edmund cried in the voice of the Prince himself—but, in the gaping bloody maw that was to be his doorway to Hell, the young man could not find his mother anywhere.

It was almost 2 p.m. when Andy Schaap emerged from the wooded subdivision in Wilson. He drove about a half mile then pulled into a Bojangles’ parking lot, where he crossed another name off his list and rested his head back, wondering what Sam Markham would think had he known what he was up to.

Indeed, all day he’d been expecting his partner to call him. Schaap had decided not to lie to him; would say that he was following up on his lists but wouldn’t go into detail unless Markham asked him. Of course, Schaap had no way of knowing that Markham had fallen asleep in his childhood bedroom early that morning and would sleep a vampire’s sleep until the sun went down. But Schaap would’ve understood; he was tired, too. The last couple of days had been exhausting for both of them.

Names.

Christ, there were so many from the cemetery—
over three thousand
that his computer program had linked to Iraq War veterans living in and around the Raleigh area. The program had already weeded out servicemen who still lived on
base; and thus Schaap focused first on men not only who had served in units with lions or lionlike creatures as their symbols but also who lived in areas remote enough for the Im-paler’s operation.

Schaap gazed down at the list in his hands—just over one hundred names. A much more manageable number, yes, but still daunting for one person. And so far he’d come up empty—had knocked off only nine names that day and met the tenth with a groan when he saw the address was located over an hour away near Fayetteville.

Schaap thumbed through a series of pages and found another list the computer had generated by cross-referencing the cemetery records with a list he’d received that morning from the U.S. Army. The program had also ranked the names by unit symbol and location.

He ran his finger down the page until he found a name in the city of Wilson.

“Here we are,” he said. He leaned over to the passenger seat and checked the address against the satellite imagery on his laptop. “Sergeant Edmund Lambert. 101st Airborne, 187th Infantry. Eagle and a seal-tailed lion. Nice, Wilson boy. That’ll make you number ten and then we’ll call it day.”

Schaap programmed Lambert’s address into his GPS and drove away—decided against a snack of Bojangles’ chicken and biscuits and vowed to treat himself to a Dubliner steak when he got back to Raleigh.

After all, he’d earned it.

The General awoke on the parlor rug. He’d collapsed there on his stomach, unconscious for hours inside the lion’s head. He pulled it off immediately and sat up, the gash on his chest crying out as he tore himself free from the caked blood and shit beneath him. His wound began to bleed again, but the General only sat there, staring up at himself in the mirror amid the mess that Edmund Lambert had created.

Oh yes, the young man had certainly made a mess of things. But how could he have guessed that the Prince would’ve awakened during the day? And how could he have guessed that the Prince would find out about his plan?

No use wondering about it now
, he thought. The Prince was powerful, and he found out. That’s all that mattered. And now it was up to the General to prove his loyalty once again and set things right.

However, as the General sat there thinking, it occurred to him that in all of the Prince’s ranting and raving he never showed him visions of Ereshkigal. Perhaps he was still unaware of how she fit into the equation. Perhaps, because she too was a god, she had the power to cloud—

Again, no use wondering about it. He needed to square things with the Prince. The Prince had shown him mercy and allowed him to live, which meant perhaps he saw Edmund’s communication with his mother as a temporary slip. Yes, the General thought; the Prince still needed him as much as he needed the Prince. He could still hide his thoughts about his mother and Ereshkigal. And as long as he didn’t communicate with them through the doorway again, perhaps there was still hope.

The doorway.

The General looked down at the bloody gash between the numbers 9 and 3. The doorway was cracked open, but something was wrong now; something needed to be fixed. The General could feel this instinctively. He picked up the lion’s head and went back down into the cellar. The grinder was still whirring, and he stepped in the workroom and shut it off before heading into the Throne Room.

The smell of rotting flesh was strong in here today, but it did not bother the General. He stood there, gazing down at the headless corpse on the throne, then back and forth between the carving of the temple doors and the bloody tattoo on his chest. Impulsively, he slipped the lion’s head over his own and waited for the rush of light that told him the door was open.

Nothing happened.

It was as he suspected, the General thought, removing the head. The doorway was broken now. It had lost its power, most likely from a combination of Edmund’s use of it during the day and the Prince coming through it to control Edmund’s actions. But the General couldn’t be sure. There was still so much about the doorways that he didn’t understand. The gash on his chest told him so. It was a message from the Prince as in the old days. A wound that needed to be healed between them; a gap that needed to be closed between the 9 and the 3.

Yes, the General thought. The Prince required a new doorway. That would heal the wound between them and set the equation right again. That would prove to the Prince that the 9 and 3 were together again.

As the General returned the lion’s head to its proper place, he felt a wave of remorse pass through him. He hoped the Prince, wherever he went during the daytime, could feel how sorry he was. He assumed he could; for the Prince and the General were tied together in the stars. Always had been, and both of them were in too deep to turn back now.

What was the line from
Macbeth
that Bradley Cox said so poorly?
“I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

Macbeth. Bradley Cox. Part of the equation? Everything connected?

There was something there.

Flash-flash—A memory? A dream from the night before?—
and suddenly the General understood why the Prince had wanted him to go to the cast party.

Bradley Cox.

The Prince had wanted Bradley Cox—the self-worshipping actor, the vain and promiscuous sinner. That had to be it. But the young man named Edmund had let his recklessness and his obsession with Ereshkigal get in the way. And now it was too late. Now, if he were to take Cox as a soldier, because of their public confrontation, the authorities would focus on Edmund first.

Or would they?

The General knew from his previous consultations with the Prince where he desired the next soldier to be sacrificed. And surely, the authorities would never find him
there.
Plus, the General could make it look as if Cox had disappeared; could make it look as if he committed suicide or perhaps drowned in the Tar River while swimming drunk. Yes, the General thought, as long as the authorities didn’t find Brad-
ley Cox’s body they might never connect his death to Vlad the Impaler. And even if they did, the General and the Prince would be long gone by the time they figured it all out.

It made sense—but the General needed to think about this. It was all coming at him too fast. He couldn’t be sure anymore—he had grown too dependent on the doorways for confirmation of the Prince’s messages, needed time to sort it all out. Perhaps Cox should be the doorway itself. Perhaps—

The gash on his chest cried out, and the General understood. He was wasting his time guessing. First things first: he needed to begin with cleaning up his mess.

The General left the cellar and went up two flights to the upstairs bathroom. He turned on the shower and stepped inside. His wound stung painfully under the hot water, but the General gritted his teeth and took it—washed himself thoroughly, then stood there thinking until the hot water ran out. The cold felt good on his skin, helped numb the pain in his chest and stomach. And when his mind had cleared somewhat, the General toweled off and bandaged himself with some gauze and medical tape he’d originally purchased to help his tattoo heal. How ironic.

Once his wound was properly dressed, the General donned a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and went downstairs to the kitchen and made himself a protein shake. He stood there at the sink, drinking and thinking how pleasant it felt to have the line of coolness running behind the burning gash at the center of his torso. There would be no workout in the horse barn today, he thought; no running across the tobacco fields, either, and no push-ups for a long time if he ever wanted his wound to heal.

“But the wound
will
heal,” the General whispered. “Eventually.”

He rinsed out his glass and headed into the parlor. The room smelled awful, and the General immediately opened all the windows. Then he rolled up the rug and lugged it out
onto the back porch. It was ruined, he decided, and would have to be burned in the yard at some point. The General went back into the kitchen, fetched the mop and bucket from the broom closet, and filled it with hot water and Pine-Sol.

He began in the parlor, following the trail of blood and excrement and mopping carefully as it led him through the front hall and kitchen and back down the cellar stairs to the workroom. The General felt calm and at peace. One step at a time, he thought—the beginning of eventually, of solving the equation. Following the trail told him so. Yes, one could find the Prince’s messages in anything—even in one’s own blood and shit—if one looked closely enough.

“
C’est mieux d’oublier
,” the General whispered as he mopped the workroom floor. He dumped the bloody-shitty water down the drain in the corner and rinsed out the bucket in the slop sink. And when he went back upstairs and looked at the clock on the kitchen wall, he realized he’d cleaned up the entire mess in just over half an hour.

Satisfied, the General took a deep breath and realized that his T-shirt was sticking to his chest. The temple doors were bleeding again. He would have to take another shower and replace the gauze and medical tape.

Before heading upstairs, however, the General returned to the parlor—was about to close the windows, when suddenly he caught sight of a black SUV coming up the driveway.

The General froze as a crippling wave of fear shot through his body. The SUV looked dangerous, and there was no time to change—no time to wash the blood from his chest! He began to tremble—had to fight the urge to flee—when suddenly something unexpected happened.

It came to him in a
flash-flash
inside his head, and all at once the General’s fear disappeared.

Andy Schaap parked his TrailBlazer alongside the white truck at the end of the driveway. He got out and peeked through the driver’s side window. He didn’t know what he expected to find—
Blood spatters on the dashboard?
—and felt foolish when he saw the truck was clean.

Nonetheless, Schaap couldn’t deny the feeling he got when he pulled onto Sergeant Lambert’s property. The old tobacco farm was the most secluded of the homes he’d visited so far. And had he not been taken so off guard by the little spark of hope clicking away deep inside his stomach, perhaps Andy Schaap might have been more careful.