Mathias shrieked and dropped to his knees, then his side, as Jake continued to biblically scourge him, the way Mel Gibson did to Jesus: literally shredding him, laying open his back until glistening ribs showed through the red.
And just as Mathias began to black out from the pain, he heard Jake howling, too.
Howling a woman’s name…
Emmy stopped singing at the sound of the screams.
“Oh my God,” she moaned, covering her ears and melting into the floor. “Mathias…”
In the jagged bathroom blackness, Christian couldn’t even cover his ears to block it out. Moving drove him insane with pain.
So he just lay there, and helplessly listened…
Eddie dragged the unbroken door across the pool of blood in the foyer, gritting his teeth against the sound. Gray stepped around it, but Eddie almost slipped.
“Fuck, what a mess,” Gray muttered. “You’ll have to mop that up, when you’re done with this.”
Eddie turned to him, eyes probing for some trace of humanity.
Gray shrugged. “Don’t look at me, spic. Up to me, I’d be in Jamaica by now.”
His gun said the rest, motioning toward the broken door. Eddie bent to pick up one end, leaving red footprints in the flickering light.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The screaming stopped, but the wind kept howling. And so did the women, turned to face each other now.
“We’ve got to help him!” Emmy shrieked.
“Oh, bullshit!” Evangeline bellowed back. “We can’t even help ourselves! Don’t you get it?”
“Listen,” Esther growled, as if her voice had gravity. “If we’re going to get out of here, you will have to trust me. I know my way—”
“You know your way what?” Evangeline clenched like a fist. “Cuz I don’t see you doing shit!”
“I know my way around here—”
“I know my way around here, too.”
Esther jerked as if backhanded. “You—”
“Oh, come on! I’ve been locked in this goddamned room a hundred times. And unless you’re an idiot, you gotta know there’s no way out but through him.”
Esther said nothing, but her pale flesh went even whiter.
“Please don’t tell me that he never did this to you.”
Esther stared at the empty flask, said nothing.
Emmy spoke quietly. “I never…”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ve been to the house. Once. But never back there, in the studio. And, I swear to God, never out here…”
“Okay. So maybe you’re a virgin, after all.” Evangeline turned to Esther. “But you and I aren’t. Not with Jake, that’s for sure. And not all over this house.”
Esther looked up, stifled fury boiling in her eyes.
“That’s right. Which is to say, Mrs. Connaway: I have fucked him in your bed, when you weren’t home. I fucked him in your kitchen. I fucked him in your pool.”
“Stop it.” Reaching the turning point now.
“I fucked Jake right in front of that fireplace, with the pictures of you and him hangin’ there, just as nice as can be.”
“You stop it right now!”
“And if you’d watched any of my confessions, you’d know I got fucked in that studio, too.”
“SHUT UP!”
“Just the same as you—”
Esther went, tooth and claw, for Evangeline: a full-body assault, at full speed, plowing into her in a flurry of hair-tugging, bitch-slapping animal hate.
“STOP IT!” Emmy bellowed, suddenly the voice of reason. She pushed between them, desperately trying to break it up.
Instead, she found herself pickle in the middle.
Being battered by both sides at once…
Eddie and the broken door were twenty feet from the garage, sprinkling the last shards of twinkling glass into Gray’s path behind them.
But when Esther shrieked in pain, Eddie forgot himself and everything else: dropping the door and rushing forward.
“Fuck!” Gray yelled, and took off after him.
Once Emmy hit the floor, in predictable tears, Esther was free to dig in with both hands. Enough slapping around. It was time to do some damage.
Esther seized the moment, surging forward.
Right into Evangeline’s fist.
It was a vicious right hook to the eye; and the next thing Esther knew, she was down on her ass.
Evangeline towered above her, bloody-knuckled fists on her ample hips. “So what were you saying about who needs who?”
Suddenly, Eddie was calling her name, so close to the window she could almost feel his breath against the door.
“Eddie?” she cried back: for a moment, actually hopeful.
Then something thudded against the door, hard enough to rattle the wall, and Eddie groaned.
As the women screamed.
“Yeah!” Gray hollered, over the wind. “He came to rescue you! And NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON!”
Gray had caught up to Eddie, shoved him off balance, kicked him hard in the ass, and sent him stumbling into the door.
Gray kicked him again, so long as he was still bent over, then resumed his aim at the back of Eddie’s head.
“Now pick up the door, Zorro. Let’s do this.”
Eddie turned to stare at him, and there was no ignoring the hate in those eyes. Searing hate, at that moment. Only barely contained.
It was a welcome reminder that, behind the blank stares and meek demeanor, there was a man who would love to tear his fucking throat out.
Esther pressed herself against the door, the better to hear what was going on outside. But no one was talking anymore.
Only the wind.
And what ever mad God propelled it.
Esther sagged to the floor, muttering to herself, “Thank God. He’s still alive…”
And the moment she said it, the other women cringed.
She looked at Evangeline, saw Jasper’s ghost in her eyes. Saw Jasper impaled and writhing.
Evangeline cast her gaze at the house, and Esther knew she was thinking of Christian: locked up alone in there, with their dead friend’s body.
And then there was Emmy, so pure in her terror and ravaged faith.
So very much like a child.
For the first time, Esther felt their loss and terror as her own.
And found herself praying.
Not just for herself.
But for them all…
Chapter Twenty-eight
Gray’s buzz was fading fast. This party was a bust, and he was sick of babysitting.
Eddie dragged the broken door back into the black mouth of the garage. Chest hitching in momentary panic, Gray stepped into the doorway…
…and glimpsed something in the back of the shed, as the light ripped the veil of shadows away.
A girl crouched in the corner, grinning. A sloe-eyed nymph, naked and ready to play.
In that instant, he thought he recognized her.
And then, just as quickly, she was gone.
“WHAT THE FUCK?” Gray aimed his gun at the spot where he’d seen her, and Eddie jumped, too.
But when the light swung back, Gray saw the same thing Eddie did.
Nothing.
“What is it?” Eddie nervously searched the shadows, looking as scared as Gray felt.
The giggling started again, high-pitched and chilling, going all the way under Gray’s skin.
He stared at Eddie, incredulous. “Are you saying you don’t hear that?”
“I don’t—” The words know what you’re talking about went politely unspoken.
Gray swallowed hard, felt his mind start to come untethered. The giggling got worse.
“Just grab your shit, and let’s go.”
Eddie moved to the workbench, threw some stuff in the toolbox. He picked up a big crowbar, held it just long enough for Gray to hear the little gears turning in the wetback’s head.
“You just put that down right now.” Gray m
ight be going insane, but he wasn’t going stupid.
Eddie dropped it with a shrug. “Okay?”
“LET’S JUST GO, GOD DAMN IT!”
Eddie headed back toward him.
While the horrible sound that only he could hear went on and on.
It wasn’t until Eddie and Gray left the garage that the women in the holding cell heard it, too.
“Who is that?” Emmy was first to speak, but she could see the creeping fear in their eyes.
All of them could hear it, coming through the wall.
Esther shook her head, as if to clear it. Evangeline tensed, as if to fight. Emmy knocked on the wall, as if a friend might be there.
“Hello?” she called. “Can you hear me?”
Silence.
A long moment passed. Almost long enough to believe they’d heard nothing at all.
Then—from inside the holding cell—the giggling started again.
Emmy, Esther, and Evangeline all shrieked as one, racing toward each other.
This time, as they converged, they did not fight. Just held on tight in helpless desperation, like barely teenage girls at a slumber party séance gone monstrously wrong.
“Oh, shit. Oh, shit,” Evangeline hissed. Emmy hugged her right side. Esther wrapped around her left.
“Who is it?” Esther whispered.
Emmy held them close, and prayed that it was an angel.
She could not have been more wrong.
Chapter Twenty-nine
A woman’s mocking laughter filled the studio. Jake stood back from Mathias, let the wet belt slide into a loose coil on the floor.
“Shut up,” he said.
He was not winded, not sweating, but his arm felt like it might just fall off, and embalming fluid oozed like tree sap out of the sutures in his scalp.
Jake rolled the life-size wooden cross into the center of Camera One’s frame, dead centered before the green screen. Mathias writhed on the floor at the foot of it, bathed in blood, a welter of bruises and open, grinning wounds. Even now, the camera didn’t like him too much. Sad, that not everybody had Jake’s kind of charisma.
Then came that laughter again. Sultry. Psychotic. Unreal.
“Oh, Jake. Is this supposed to be impressive? Cuz it ain’t.”
“Put a lid on it, Lorna.”
He felt her behind him, could almost smell her stale sex and cigarette breath. His hair prickled at the memories buried in his brain, but running wild in his body.
Fear is unbecoming in a dead man.
And so he turned to face her.
A demon-whore grinned at him out of the shallow pane of shadow in the back of the studio. At the first lick of his gaze, she took root in the room, and glided into the light, bringing the darkness in a swirling wake behind her, until she hovered over him.
Long dark hair cascaded around her exaggerated features, the smile frighteningly wide. She had not rotted in the grave, but kept on partying, harder and heavier than ever.
Nothing living could be so used up, yet her eyes sparkled with immortal carnality. A longing to have him again, if only he could mea sure up—
“Look how ugly you are. You never were any goddamn good.”
“Just shut up and watch, you fucking cow. I am stronger than you now.”
Mathias looked around with his good eye, but saw and heard only Jake, coming toward him again. No one else in the room.
Jake scooped him up by the armpits. “Alley oop!” he grunted, then slammed Mathias into the trunk of the cross, holding him up by his shirt.
He strapped one arm to the arm of the cross at the bicep and wrist, then the other, until they bore his weight. Mathias kicked and arched his feet, trying to find a perch on the cross, but his legs hung free, dangling in space.
Jake stepped back to admire it like one of those maddening “magic eye” stereogram pictures, frowning until it occurred to him what was missing.
Up to now, Mathias had only gotten a deluxe package version of the initiation into the inner circle of the Church of Eternal Life. But to night was kind of special, and Mathias seemed like just the guy to test-drive the ultimate version.
Jake had to compromise on historical authenticity, but he figured the Romans would’ve gladly used a Black & Decker nail gun if they’d had one lying around. It made nailing the kid’s hands to the cross as simple as one-two-three.
And finally, a lacquered wreath of thorns, gouging the last inch of skin off Mathias’s forehead as Jake crowned him with it.
Now it was art.
Jake threw the lever on a hydraulic lift built into the base, and the cross rose up another two feet in the air. Mathias screamed with the weight of his body suspended from his scrawny arms. His hands swelled up like surgical gloves, ripening from deep red to eggplant purple.
“This is where it starts to get real, isn’t it? When you’re up on that cross?”
Mathias mewled. Hot tears streamed down his face, cutting streams in the crusted blood. Jake slapped him across the face to get his full attention.
“So you’ll wanna answer me now, when I speak.”
“Yes! Yes! I’m sorry! I—AAAUGH!” A hollow, muffled pop came from Mathias’s left shoulder as it dislocated from its socket. His shoes scrambled to prop him up, and when he slipped, the knobby end of his upper arm jutted out against his bloody shirt like a cock.
“You’ve probably never felt closer to your Lord and Savior than you do right now. Am I right? Do you feel his suffering?”
Nodding frantically, Mathias was almost beyond hearing, beyond anything but wanting it to end.
“AUGH! Yes, I…”
“Good. Then pray to him.” Eyes blazing, Jake stepped in behind the blinking red light atop Camera One. “Pray for him to save you. Cuz believe me, he’s the only one who could.”
Mathias began sniveling, on automatic prayer pilot. But he could barely get a spoonful of air into his lungs with each stabbing breath.
“Oh Lord!” he screeched. “Christ Jesus, please help me! AUGH! Oh, my God…!”
Jake slapped him again.
“Come on! You can do better than that!”
Mathias lurched out of automatic, looked down at Jake, saw his burning demon eyes.
And in that moment, he knew.
Knew that he was dying.
And that his moment of truth had come.
He had been raised to love the Lord, and never strayed from his faith. Not even with Emmy, who was responsible for all this. Who had led him away from his flock and down the darkened path, and dragged him to his death.
He had done nothing wrong, except loving her. He saw that now, with horrible clarity. Mom was right. Uncle Douglas was right. And he had been wrong. Oh, so sorrowfully wrong.
“I’m sorry,” he whimpered; and in that moment, something broke free inside him.
In that moment of confession, he remembered that he was already saved…
…and there was Jesus, when he closed his eyes: up on the cross atop Golgotha, framed by a blue sky rife with swarms of almost-invisible angels. It was a strong and clear-eyed Jesus—white, long-haired, and radiant—looking courageously skyward while the blood from his wounds flowed down, becoming red mist on the wind, splashing Mathias’s face.
Mathias lifted his head as well, eyes squeezed shut, as if to see what Jesus saw.
“Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus, please! PLEASE look down upon me, and see that I suffer as you have suffered…” Sobbing uncontrollably now, fighting to breathe, hardly reacting as his other shoulder dislocated. “…and know that my heart belongs to you! Only you, my blessed Savior! Know that my faith is true, and reach down with your blessed hands to save me from this nightmare!”
Mathias opened his eyes. Jake was looking at him with wonder, all the loneliness of hell etched into his expression.
“Please, Lord God! Let no demon torment me! I am your servant, and I know that with you all things are possible, Lord! Yea, as you can move mountains, you can move me from this
hell! I believe with all that I am, Lord! Deliver me, now!”
Jake watched Mathias, head cocked as if the echoes of the crucified boy’s prayer still rang in his ears. Like he was waiting for God to smite him.
Mathias looked around, hopeful for a moment.
The moment passed.
And nothing happened.
“So…” Jake purred, “how’d that work out for ya?”
A fresh terror blossomed inside Mathias.
“Cuz the fact is, that Jesus never saved anyone. Sure as hell not a little pissant like you.”
It was the blackest terror imaginable.
Total abandonment by God.
Jake came closer, until Mathias’s blood and tears spattered his face. Something dark bloomed like a cloud of ink just behind him, sucked at the marrow of his misery, and laughed.
Mathias could see and hear her, now, too.
“PLEASE!” he screamed, one final time…
…but when he closed his eyes, there was no Jesus to be found. Just a dead man rotting on a lonely cross, withered skin sloughing off of greasy bone…
Mathias tried to scream, but his vocal cords were scoured raw. A cracked, broken kazoo sound came from his flapping mouth, even before Jake put his hands on him, and steered his face toward the monitor.
Mathias’s feet could not touch the floor, but his soul had reached the bottom.
On the screen, a rolling black cloudscape filled the space behind the cross. But it was not just an effect. He could not look behind him, but he could feel it at his back: a hunger of infinite emptiness, a hole in eternity being torn with the weapon of his pain, with the blood of his sacrifice.
The whole back of the studio had opened up on another dimension, ravenous and unspeakably vast.
And whirling in the void were motes and leaves that he knew were the souls of the dead.
The studio seemed to tilt, the cross to quiver, as if teetering on the threshold, awaiting only the slightest push from Jake to send him—and perhaps the whole world after it—into this nightmare black sky.
“Take a good look at yourself,” Jake crooned. “That’s you on the cross. Just like your hero. And every bit as useless to me.”
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