The Scream (3 page)

This time, when Steve yanked, it was with all the strength in his possession. A handful of long dark locks came loose: the price of freedom. He let out a little triumphant yell as he pushed himself backward, away from the wall.

There was a brilliant flash of silver and aqua-green, brilliantly underlit by the pool. Steve watched it disappear under his chin, felt the snick and tug of it. The pain came a split second later, hot on the heels of the cold steel slice that neatly bisected his Adam's apple.

Then he was up to his nose in the water again, the water that met his new aperture and didn't know which way to go with it. Blood and water shot down to his lungs and spritzed back up his nose, intermingled in the sputtering gash. He tried to scream, got bubbling red and green.

Perry was laughing. Steve wished to God that he couldn't hear it. God didn't appear to be listening. It was the sound that he carried with him as he sank, the sound that greeted him as he surfaced.

And sank. And surfaced. And sank.

And sank.

And sank.

Eddie was pissed when he came down the stairs. His halls hurt, his poontang strategies were blown, and now Perry and a bunch of assholes had crashed the party. The only good news was that it gave him an excuse to hit something. Like a Dempsey, for instance.

There was a lot of noise coming from ol' Dr. Wyler's Wreck Room. The Scream's showpiece tune was building toward its climax, with the chanting and the screaming on the record cranking the speakers way past the blowout point. Then he realized that the damage wasn't confined to the airwaves. Things were actually getting trashed in there. He wondered what kind of rowdy shit the kids were up to now.

The Scream played on; it was the only thing going that didn't piss him off. He paused for a moment, listening to the haunting chorus of the last song on the album, "The Critical Mass" . . .

"
When we all come together

in blood and bone

In flashing light,

in crumbling stone . . .
"

"God, this is the shit," he told himself. The music swelled.

"
The Father spits on all their fears

The Mother slits the veil of tears . . .
"

There was screaming on the album, artfully interwoven with the music, accentuating the black Armageddonal mass that the song was designed to evoke. He could almost see Tara, at the front of the stage, her robe slipping away to reveal more exquisite female flesh than mortal teenage man was ever meant to see, her belly swelling in hideously erotic mock-pregnancy, the gleaming dagger in her hands poised to slide into her navel as the taped voices and the audience chanted . . .

"
Magdhim Dios! Satanas Dios!

Asteroth Dios! Ellylldan Dios!
"

The bass and drums pounded relentlessly; the voices joined in ecstatically as Tara slid the knife slowly in . . .

"
Sancti Dios! Omnitus Dios!

Magisterulus Baalberth Dios!
"

It was his concentration on the screams that ripped the vision from his head, brought him back to the living room and the commotion downstairs. He had listened to the album at least a million times.

He was hearing screams . . . real horrorshow screams . . . that weren't on the recording.

Eddie froze; automatically instinct kicked in. Adrenaline chiseled through the drugs and the anger, assumed control. His senses heightened. The dull ache in his nuts oozed up into his vitals. He found himself scoping out every detail of the room, as if it were the most important thing he'd ever seen in his life. Touch assailed. Scent assailed.

Sound assailed.

Somewhere in the house, large expanses of glass exploded: the picture window perhaps, the mirror behind the bar. There was only one way to be sure, and it was entirely out of the question. Thuds and screams and wet tearing sounds came together in terrible, terminal polyrhythms.

People were dying down there. That much was clear. He didn't know who, or how, or why. He wasn't sure that he cared. A curious calm had settled over him, a silencer muffling the report of his fear. The words
YOU CAN STILL GET OUT OF HERE
impressed themselves upon his brain in twenty-four-point banner headlines.

He turned and took a glance down the hallway to the front door. It was open. Curtained oblong windows surrounded it like Roman pillars. He could see split-shots of the Caddy, still idling there. It was his guess that it hadn't been left all alone.

Then he looked at the fireplace.

God only knew what use Dr. Wyler had for a fireplace California: romance, perhaps, or simple
savoir faire
. Whatever the case, it had all the necessary implements in the stand beside it: poker, tongs, dainty shovel in cast iron and bronze. As he looked at them, the six-inch switchblade in his pocket seemed not nearly long enough.

All he had to do was step fully into view of the Wreck Room stairway, snag the little fuckers, and make his merry home. By force.

I can't do it
, his mind said.
Oh, yes, I can
. Shades of gray argumentativeness erupted between his logic's poles. He needed the weapons; he needed to survive. He was amazed by how succinctly each side of his brain argued its points.

Then the point became moot.

Someone came up the stairs.

It took a moment to recognize Deke Eli, even though they'd been friends since kindergarten. But it was understandable; Deke's face wasn't usually drenched in blood and terror, and his lower lip didn't usually dangle by a thread like a rope of mozzarella in thick red sauce. The moment of unrecognition was a blessing for Eddie; it lent an air of detachment to his perception of the seconds preceding Deke's death.

Eddie stood, frozen, as Deke tripped at the fourth step from the top. The third step caught him at mid-shin, toppled him forward. The top step caught him across the chest, between armpit and nipple. His face slammed into the living room carpet.

He lifted his head. It left a skull-sized splotch. "HELP!" he screamed, his eyes searching Eddie's and finding them, holding them.

Then the Screamer came up the stairs behind Deke. He had one of Dr. Wyler's lovely metal-sculpture lamps raised over his head like a bludgeon, upside-down. For one hysterical moment, it looked as if he were wearing the lampshade on his head.

Then the lamp came down, and Deke's head exploded like a ripe tomato full of brain and bone. It sprayed six feet in every direction, polka-dotting Eddie from forehead to toe. Eddie shrieked. The Screamer howled.

The paralysis shattered. Eddie broke for the fireplace. There was a sofa in the way. He jumped over it, his feet neatly skirting the glass and brass coffee table. The Screamer was not nearly so slick. Both feet went through the glass, from the sound of it, immediately followed by both knees. Eddie sensed this in the moment before his hands closed around the poker's handle. Then he whirled.

The Screamer was framed in the brass and jagged glass. He looked confused. Blood was smeared across his cheeks and chin in a clownish, psychotic oval. Blood covered his gloves. The broken glass had etched fresh gouges in his shins, his thighs, and his biceps, but they didn't appear to be bleeding at all.

Another smell, stronger and richer than the reek of Deke's mashed brains, cut into Eddie's nostrils. A high, sweet smell, of sick things crawling under the porch to die.

Eddie gagged, but his grip on the poker was firm. He brought it back in a Pete Rose stance, his gaze trying to cling steadily to the mirrored black expressionless expanse of the Screamer's sunglasses, as if he could see through to read the intention in the eyes.

"EEYAAOW!" the Screamer howled. Its teeth were black.

Its gums were black.

"NO!" Eddie screamed. Even then, he was swinging. The poker made a clean connection with the bridge of the Screamer's nose. The face collapsed inward with alarming ease. The shades, deprived of their center of balance, slid off. Eddie saw what was behind them.

That was when he lost it.

Completely.

"EEYAAOW!" the Screamer persisted, reaching forward.

* * *

Perry found Cyndi under some Anne Klein originals on her mommy's closet floor, after everybody else had been dealt their hands. She was dragged out easily. Noisily.

Beautifully.

Then his friends came in, and they held her down on the thick white shag. The music downstairs was still pounding up through the floorboards. The screaming had long since died off. "Gonna be my baby tonight," he said, and then helped himself to a few of the things she would no longer be needing.

Her T-shirt.

Her panties.

Her eyes.

JACOB HAMER BAND