Wakowski looked past Matthew, staring down into the cellar. “It’s down there, isn’t it?”
“Yes, right now,” Matthew said. “Did you feel it at the hospital?”
“I did.”
Wakowski didn’t even care, Matthew could see that in his eyes; more accurately, he cared as much about this as anything else, with no real questions, curiosity, or fear. There was also no remorse for anything he’d done or seen done tonight. The fever couldn’t break him because he’d lived through it before, adapted as he had to, and would live through it again. “You’re lucky,” Matthew told him.
“No,” Wakowski said, even his voice cut from stone. “But I’m alive, and I still will be even after this is over.”
“I’m not so sure about me.”
“Go on. I can’t help you with whatever’s down there. Give me your girl. I’ll keep her safe and try to save as many of them as I can. Do what you have to do.”
Matthew placed Helen in Wakowski’s arms as she slept. He kissed her brow, and Wakowski nestled her and tenderly carried her off, without worry, into the maelstrom.
Matthew’s scars told him to come home, come home, come home.
He would do what he had to do.
Hodges had screamed it at him back in the abandoned train station. You’re going into the ground! Another prophecy fulfilled. Matthew rushed to the cellar and tossed hexes against each of the four walls, his will as much a part of the arcana as his past, as his memories. The north wall burst apart in a cloud of brittle brick and dust, to reveal the mouth of a tunnel leading into the rest of the caves and catacombs.
“Mother!”
Of course he knew the Goat.
This counterpart risen from whatever circle of Hell it had come from was not his mother, but the Goat had raised him into this life as surely as any parent. His mom was more of a beautiful myth than a woman who had changed his diapers and danced with his father. The crackling sheen of fiery sigils wafted from his hands and lit these tunnels. He called out for her again.
The Goat’s mouth whispered to him, marks of the Beast chattering and pulsing in his own flesh.
Matthew ran through the catacombs, following the directions that the scars gave him. He passed by the area he thought should be directly under the grove; stopping and looking above, he saw rivulets of rainwater sluicing down from a muddy hole at the top of the cave wall.
He kept running, feeling lighter as he came closer to his assertions and his acceptance.
Soon the walls vibrated with the thrashing of the ocean, as he stumbled, gasping. Sweat stung his eyes, but he put the miles behind him. He turned through the catacombs the way his scars told him to go.
Leading him back to where it all began.
He needed to see Debbi again so much. Though A.G. had taken her bones in an effort to relock the Beast in the earth, her soul would still be there where her gore had set the evil free.
Soon he came to the altar, these same carved tracks ready to be filled with more blood.
His hands lit the cavern so much more than A.G.’s lantern had done those years before.
He saw.
His mother.
Sitting on the altar before him, within the magik circles of the painted Baphomet. The dress she’d been buried in had been nothing but a rag to begin with, and had become even more tattered after all this time. Matthew was stunned to see that the Goat had bothered to keep it on.
The face he’d loved was long gone, shredded worse than the dress, more mutilated than the first time he’d seen her in the cave, leaning over him to peck his cheek. Only a skull with scraps of dried flesh stuck to it, a parody of her beauty, cheekbones without much by way of cheeks. Some scraggly clumps of her hair remained attached in ugly weavings, cut to prepare knotted cords in order to perform greater rituals of maleficia. He couldn’t tell if she had eyes, but a piercing stare emptied out from the depths of her head. Her mouth was black and grisly.
The rock on the ground where Debbi had died remained an icon to torment and betrayal.
A.G. had never made it inside to Bosco Bob’s party.
She cradled him in her arms. A.G. slumped, covered with dirt and blood from where he’d fought her as she’d sucked him down through the muddy hole in the grove. He lay across her lap like some godforsaken version of La Pietà, Mother Mary cradling the dead body of Christ.
“There’s no need to kill him,” Matthew said. “I’m here now, Mother.”
She dumped A.G. off her lap, and he struck the cave floor with a thud.
Matthew pointed, and she did her best to smile animatedly, so alive, and even lovely, in its own way. Her mouth didn’t work so well anymore. “You’re the same as anyone else,” Matthew said. “You got greedy. The more you had the more you wanted, isn’t that the way of it? Just another simple human trait.”
The Goat nodded happily. His scars chanted, yes, yes yes.
“My mother and father weren’t good enough for you. Debbi wasn’t enough. The bits and pieces you nibbled from town only whetted your hunger for more. Janey and those kids couldn’t satisfy you, no, you had to have everybody, and failing that, you still want more.”
Her eyeless glare glistened.
“She was special, my mother. Even down here in this darkness you felt her above, like a love that could threaten your possessions. Maybe whatever it was that made her so special is what woke you from your stupor.”
Yes, yes, yes.
“You started to feed on her, little by little, saturating her with your cancer. Killing wasn’t good enough, you even had to take her body from the nameless grave. The humiliation made you stronger, but believe me, it didn’t hurt her. This doesn’t hurt my mother.”
Skin like parchment fell from its face.
“My father knew it in his fashion, knew that my mother walked, that the insanity you plagued her with wasn’t a natural one, or else he would have cured her. Debbi’s blood made you stronger, too.”
Now, the ultimate truth. Could he face it?
Within him, this tumor of reality, shifting as he dug for it, not wanting it to be real. He could fantasize forever, live out a dozen more false lives if need be, or come back to where his love resided, surrounded by seashells on the beach.
“I pushed her for you.”
The echoes of the ocean rumbled through the cavern like laughter.
“That night when I found my father drunk, I discovered my mother’s grave and went to it, dug it up with my own hands to see if I was right, if what I remembered was true—that you’d taken her, too.” He glanced down at his palms, covered with the black flame of hexes.
“You waited for me to return, shaping events to bring me home again, and when the last point of the inverted pentagram is filled, my soul will seep out and you’ll take over this witch’s shell, and be a thousand times more powerful on earth.”
The body of his mother held its hands out to him, clacking its teeth together.
Matthew approached the altar, and his mother opened her arms to embrace him. He bent from her and grabbed A.G.’s wrists, dragging him from the circle. “Wake up,” he said. “C’mon, man, you’ve got to get the hell out of here.” The Goat talked to him through his chest. “Shut up! Let him go, it doesn’t matter now, nothing matters now that we’re back together again.”
Yes yes yes.
A.G’s eyes fluttered open and focused.
“You’ve got to get out of here now,” Matthew said. His scars made kissing noises, loving A.G. nearly as much as they did him.
A.G. swallowed and said, “You’re coming with me.”
“Later.”
“No.” He wavered and held on to Matthew. He wiped mud off his face, cleared his mouth. “I know that tone of your voice. You never made it out of here with me the first time. You’re going to give the Beast what it wants?”
I’ve been dead all these years anyway, ever since that first blast of arcana threw me back against the cave wall. The stone is cracked, I couldn’t ha
ve lived through that, every bone would have been broken. It’s the cancer inside, that’s what’s been keeping me alive.
“We can beat it,” A.G. said.
Yes, I can, I can destroy the Goat, but only if you leave me alone with my mother.
A.G. began to weep now, all of these missed emotions welling at such a wrong time and place, but also the only time it’s ever completely mattered. I love you, man. Tell Helen how much I—
“I know. I will.”
They hugged each other, and A.G. spun and spat at the Goat, then turned and ran up the stone stairs that had brought them down to this level in the first place, going back up into the lighthouse, the only survivor.
Matthew took off his sweater. “Let’s get this over with.”
His mother reached out and tapped the unscarred portion of his chest.
The fifth point.
A triangle.
Three lines to fill out the pentagram.
She drew her shard of a fingernail through his flesh, as he groaned beneath her touch again, stealing the fever and fatigue from him now, the juice that he’d been living on. She carved in the second line, and his blood pumped from the wounds congealing and drying into powder.
The last stroke proved the easiest, his skin as thin as communion wafer by then. When the Goat finished this new baptism his mother’s body pitched forward onto him, released at last.
“Rest,” he told her.
He stared at the stalagmite and whispered God’s name.
Matthew positioned himself as best he could. He felt the hot wind brush against him just before the final segment of his soul was ripped from him, and he was thrown back up against the cave wall the same as before.
As his consciousness heaved, he felt himself splitting again, becoming, at long last, the other Matthew Galen, on the beach with Debbi and staring at the lighthouse, as he took her hand and led him from that place and said, “Come on, Deb, let’s go swim,” and she assented with a grin.
He was alive.
The deafening sound of stone cracking, these moments sometimes planned, sometimes not, but he had hoped.
The Goat stood inside its son’s body.
The inverted pentagram flamed on its chest, blue and red fire swimming in skin.
Its eyes had turned crimson, and it smiled, waving blazing configurations of doom before its face now, rearing back and howling laughter that was a second reborn but screamed the agony of millennia.
“I …” the Goat said.
The cave wall cracked open where Matthew’s body had struck it twice in the course of his life and death, and a billion gallons of ocean roared in.
The tremendous waves lifted the Goat up, and for all it had sown, it hadn’t reaped enough understanding to know that it stood where Matthew had trapped it, directly in front of the stalagmite that had murdered his love.
The surging curl of the first massive swell swung Matthew Galen’s body down with immense power, plunging it onto the point of the rock where he’d killed Debbi, tearing away the lungs and scarred chest before the Beast that was only itself could complete its first selfish breath.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The end came mercifully quick.
Nearly everyone who lived through the night stayed in town despite the horror. Wakowski had done an impressive job of saving these people. Out of almost a thousand neighbors, more than six hundred lived through Bosco Bob’s party as the paincraft came to a close in the tempest. Maimed and blind and shattered and alone, they still managed to live.
Roger had personally broken forty-three jaws, yanked a bucketful of nails from seventeen of the crucified, placed tourniquets on the amputated, cauterized slit arteries. Of the six hundred less than a third were immediately placed in Panecraft. Dr. Patterford was promoted to the status of head director of the mental facility, but soon after was replaced by Doctor Moser when Patterford barricaded himself in the girls’ lavatory of the Gallows elementary school, holding a shotgun and three children hostage, and it took three hours for the SWAT team to shoot him in the head.
Anyone who hadn’t attended the party realized their good fortune and decided not to push their luck. They moved, all of them, even if only to the next county. Bosco Bob’s mansion took no worse a beating than did Bosco Bob, who had played piano throughout the night while the town died around him and the sea ran under him. He had only nicks and bruises, but all of his fingers were broken from playing so long and so hard. He would never play again.
The next-to-worst part of it all—so it seemed to him—was that he was a good man who would never understand how these atrocities had decided to use him as benefactor; the seventeen private detectives he hired to discover the reason returned without answers.
The worst part was that his daughter had disappeared.
One detective had phoned to say he was close to Jane and would call back later with more information.
He’d been found with his kidneys compacted into his nostrils, no other part of him touched.
Neither Joe nor Jodi Carmichael could think about the events of the party much, even when they were married and moved to Hawaii, without nightmare or delirium of fevers, never tormented—they were a happy couple, proving the resilience of well-placed ardor.
On the beach at night, after the storm, Helen and A.G. and Wakowski stood on the shore and watched the lighthouse being swallowed by the ocean as the cliffs rumbled all night long and crashed into the waves. Like the Leaning Tower of Pisa it tilted only slightly at first, then gradually more and more and the ocean rushed through the tunnels under Summerfell. Before dawn the catwalks had fallen, and a little after sunrise the entire structure crumbled. A.G. threw stones into the water. Helen sat in the sand, crying, watching the seagulls. Wakowski sat beside her, holding a bullet in his left hand, a periwinkle in his right.
After a few minutes he threw them both high in the air. A seagull dipped, searching for food, and dove. It caught something in its beak. Wakowski wasn’t sure if it had been the bullet or the shell. He didn’t care enough to let it bother him.
Helen and A.G. often came back in the following months after Summerfell was a ghost town populated by ghosts. They sometimes drove through the mostly deserted streets and regarded the empty houses and those where no one entered the light anymore. The asylum didn’t fold—it did more than continue, it thrived.
They would sit in Potter’s Field and stare at the rows of cube windows, wondering which of their friends were where, what the sheriff might be thinking about in his cell. Helen would take off her jacket and ball it up into a pillow behind her head, or else lie against A.G., both of them on a nameless grave, watching the windows.
Wherever Mr. Carmichael had moved to it was still close by, and on warmer days Disgusto would be there waiting for them when they arrived. The three of them would lie beside each other, ears to the ground, listening to the ocean roiling in the catacombs, the last vestiges of Summerfell.
As Helen fell asleep in his arms, the back of her neck would begin to quiver, as though silvery hands caressed her. She dreamed of Matthew.
So did Panecraft.
Other books by authors in this collection
AL SARRANTONIO
Al Sarrantonio's Book of Holidays
Campbell Wood
Halloween and Other Seasons
Halloweenland
Hallows Eve
Hornets & Others
Horrorland
Horrorween
House Haunted
Moonbane
October
Skeletons
The Boy With Penny Eyes
The Worms
Totentanz
Toybox
Underground
B.W. BATTIN
Into the Pit
It's Loose
Mary, Mary
Night Sounds
Satan's Servant
CHET WILLIAMSON
Ash Wednesday
Defenders of the Faith
Drea
mthorp
Hunters
Lowland Rider
McKain's Dilemma
Reign
Second Chance
Soulstorm
DAVID J. SCHOW
Black Leather Required
Black Orchids
Bullets of Rain
Eye
Havoc Swims Jaded
The Kill Riff
Lost Angels
Rock Breaks, Scissors Cut
Seeing Red
Wild Hairs
Zombie Jam
ELIZABETH MASSIE
Abed
Afraid
Homegrown
Naked, on the Edge
Sineater
Wire Mesh Mothers
GERARD HOUARNER
A Blood of Killers
I Love You and There's Nothing You Can Do About It
In the Country of Dreaming Caravans
Road to Hell
Road from Hell
The Beast That Was Max
Waiting for Mister Cool
HUGH B. CAVE
Disciples of Dread
Lucifer's Eye
Murgunstrumm and Others
Shades of Evil
The Dawning
The Evil
The Evil Returns
The Lower Deep
The Nebulon Horror
The Restless Dead
JEFFREY SACKETT
Blood of the Impaler
Candlemas Eve
Grogo the Goblin
Lycanthropos
Stolen Souls
JOHN FARRIS
All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By
Before the Night Ends
Catacombs
Dragonfly
Fiends
King Windom
Minotaur
Phantom Nights
Sacrifice
Sharp Practice
Shatter
Solar Eclipse
Son of the Endless Night
Soon She Will Be Gone
A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult Page 612
