The demon at his side laughed huskily. “I love to watch a man piss himself.”
Jake shook Mathias out of his fugue, wrenched his face around to stare into Jake’s eyes.
“The good news is, you get to see him real soon. Unless, of course, I squeeze your eyes out.”
Jake and Lorna laughed.
Mathias screamed louder.
“Yeah, fuck it. Let’s do that.”
From across the yard, the ladies could hear Mathias’s screams ratchet up higher…and the laughter of not just Jake, but a chorus of women, as well.
Christian heard it, too. Pushing with his feet and bracing his broken ribs with his good arm, he dragged himself across the floor, toward Jasper’s body. The screaming had steeped him in despair, but the toxic laughter only made him push harder.
Eddie and Gray heard it all, too, as Eddie repaired a hinge that was torn off the wall.
Eddie froze, as the sound got even worse.
“Did I say you could stop?” Gray hissed.
Jake’s thumbs slid into Mathias’s sockets up to the second knuckle before they met bone. Blood and orb jelly squelched out and oozed down his hands, into his sleeves.
Mathias’s breathless screeching built in pitch and volume until Jake punched through the bony orbits to spear the brain, then twisted his neck with an audible crack.
Emmy broke down and sobbed when the screams cut out, and the wind resumed singing outside. Esther and Evangeline retreated into their own solitary despair. Even the giggling stopped.
Christian reached Jasper, laid his head across the dead chest in exhaustion and sorrow. Blood seeped up through Jasper’s shirt, sticking to his face.
He reached into Jasper’s front trousers pocket. Pulled out a lighter and flicked it.
In the darkness, at least he had light.
More, he had fire.
Jake pulled his red thumbs out of Mathias’s eyeholes, shook the blood off, admired his handiwork.
What a good boy am I, he thought.
The swirling blackness behind Mathias swirled like water down a drain, turned back into green paint on a wall. Jake’s afterglow faded as well.
“Well, you better hope you can do better than that,” jeered Lorna, right behind him. Always at his back, whispering, twisting knives…
“Oh, fercrissakes…”
“You can’t even keep the Door open…”
“MOM, GOD DAMN IT…!”
And just like that, he was taken back…
Chapter Thirty
Suddenly, Jake was back at Lorna’s place: a ramshackle white-trash redneck pigsty, circa 1973. Lorna’s eyes were all too human then, but pickled in whiskey and malice.
She sneered down at the whimpering twelve-year-old Jake, slapping him repeatedly. She was only half dressed in her filthy lingerie. Behind her, an ugly man was putting on his shirt.
“You make me sick, you piece of shit! Spyin’ on me, when I’m doin’ my business?”
“I wasn’t, Momma! Augh!”
She slapped him some more. Looked contemptuously down.
“Yeah, that’s why you got your pants down, in my closet, with your thing stickin’ out. I guess you couldn’t find your homework.”
“Momma, no!”
“My God, y’all are disgusting,” the ugly man said.
“And you just paid to fuck me. So get outta my house. My boy’s got a cock twice as big as yours, and he’s only twelve years old.”
The ugly man went out the door, muttering, slammed it shut behind him. Lorna looked down at Jake with a horrible knowingness.
“Oh, honey. You just wanna know what it’s like to be a man. I understand that. My own daddy popped my cherry when I was eight. I was way too small. But you, you’re nice and large.”
Her face moved closer, more intimate and frightening.
“Momma, no…”
“Time you figured out that men are scum, and women aren’t no better. It’s just the way of the world, Jake. Ugly and dumb. But my God, you feel nice.”
“Momma…”
“Time to show you how it’s done.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Jake opened his eyes; and if he could spare the fluid, he might have shed a tear.
It was painful to think about his past, his hellish fucking childhood. Painful to be faced with the forces that molded him: his perspective on the world, and on women in particular. To be thrown back there was to remember how horribly twisted he was, right from the root.
And to remember how hard he’d had to fight.
To become the man he was today.
Resurrecting had been weird enough; but strangely, that was hardly a surprise. Not nearly as surprising as dying: something he’d always known was bound to happen, but never accepted as his fate.
But why, in his moment of triumph, did he have to be hounded by her, of all people? By Lorna, who had mercifully drunk herself dead by the time he turned twenty? Who had existed only in his nightmares and deeply closeted memories for the past twenty years?
But maybe that was the problem.
When he came back, he brought them all back with him.
It was an enormous responsibility, being the Resurrected One. The one upon whom the entire bleak fate of future history depended, and around whom it all revolved.
But in his dreams, and his heart, he had always been that man. The power-giver. The power-taker. The alpha and the omega.
He could only guess that she was here to serve, and to obey, just like the rest. That as his powers bloomed, her own would recede to an acceptable background noise.
But try as he might, he could not deny that he was flustered: first by the fag and his yapping mouth, and now by this bitch, and her yapping mouth. It undercut his intensity, his assuredness, his dominion.
And that was not acceptable.
When the black door had opened, he had felt it inside him. Felt its power. Felt its power as his own. Known that he was the key, and that sacrifice was the twisting motion by which it was unlocked.
What he needed was more sacrifices, now. How convenient that the house was crawling with ’em.
And when he needed more, the whole world awaited.
Jake took a moment to look around the studio, reground himself in the here and now. After his broad-daylight vision of Lorna’s house, the harsh play of spotlight and shadow was almost like nascent, incipient blindness.
He took in the solid walls, ceiling, floor, and its forest of TV gear. He took in the crucified boy, with the three screaming mouths in his head.
He took in Lorna, who would not stop laughing.
“Time to show you how it’s done,” he said.
From the back of the house, Gray and Eddie could hear Jake’s booming footsteps as he stomped out of the studio and thundered down the hall.
“NEXT!” he bellowed, so loud that it seemed to shake the portraits above the fireplace. Or maybe it was just the storm. At this point, it seemed impossible to tell whether there was any difference between the two.
Gray continued to supervise—middle management with a gun—while Eddie packed quick-drying putty into the door frame, where the upper hinge had torn out.
Eddie trembled and averted his eyes as Jake strode into the living room.
Jake laughed. “Not you, Don Quixote. You got a job to do.” To Gray, he added, “Bring me that little Bible girl, quick. I’ll hold the fort.”
Gray dropped his cig on the carpet and ground it out as he crossed the living room and slouched out the back, leaving Jake and Eddie alone beside the open front door. The wind, gusty and curious, flowed into the room and swiped at the fire, driving it back into the embers.
Eddie focused on the job at hand, the stubby putty knife that might as well have been a Q-tip, for all the good it might do him. The words putty in your hands flittered through his brain, and he was stung by how hideously apropos they suddenly were.
“Hallelujah, and praise Jesus!” Jake brayed in his ear. “Your work here i
s almost done.”
Eddie said nothing, but he visibly flinched. It made Jake smile, and step closer.
“That really bugs you, doesn’t it? My whole ‘Praise Jesus’ thing. I watch you, and I can see it just stick in your craw.”
Eddie set down the putty knife, his back to Jake, said nothing.
“You’re thinkin’, ‘Isn’t it enough that this rotten bastard is ruining the life of the woman I love? Why does he have to drag poor old Jesus through the mud, while he’s at it?’”
Eddie looked up at Jake, his face as carefully blank as if he were getting lectured about the chlorine levels in the pool.
But staring into those eyes, he saw something he did not expect. Beyond the bloodlust, beyond the horror, beyond the formaldehyde stench and looming danger, there was a deep well of sadness in the monster’s expression that Eddie found truly satanic. Eddie always thought the Devil must be very lonely.
It was the look at a man in desperate need of confession.
Eddie found that he could not look away.
“Now I could tell you,” Jake resumed, “that my daddy was a traveling preacher. A Holy Roller. And that he fucked my momma for twenty bucks, a blessing, and a jug of corn liquor, and never came back. Never even knew I existed.”
Eddie listened, giving up nothing.
“And I could tell you that I ran away from home when I was sixteen, to find that son of a bitch. And when I finally tracked him down, he was this nasty old drunk, in a trailer at a farm show outside Wheeling, West Virginia.
“But God damn if he still didn’t have his congregation, just waitin’ to hear what batshit craziness he’d spout off next. And damned if he still couldn’t make the women wet.”
Jake looked away for a second, shook his head and whistled: a weird mixture of heartbreak and grudging admiration.
But when he looked back, the admiration was gone, replaced by a smoldering, wounded rage.
“And I could tell you that I when I told him my story, he called me a liar, and took off his belt, and whipped me with it until I wound up having to beat that motherfucker half to death…”
Eddie tried to maintain his emotional neutrality; but the fact was, it really was a horrible tale. And it made perfect sense, in the context of Jake.
Perhaps weirdest of all, Eddie could tell that for once Jake was actually telling the truth.
Suddenly, all the years of wondering how this guy had become such an absolute piece of shit clicked into place. And while it did nothing to excuse his crimes, it went a long way toward explaining them.
Jake caught Eddie thinking, and nodded his head as if to say yep, that’s how it happened.
Eddie found himself nodding along.
“But that’s not the point of my story,” Jake said.
He leaned in, confiding, as if they were almost friends: the boss sharing a hot stock tip with the help. And for a moment, Eddie was almost sucked in.
Then he eyed Jake’s thumbs, hitched casually in his big black leather belt.
Which was caked in blood and bits of skin.
“The point is,” Jake continued, “I learned a lot that day. But the biggest thing was…well, let me put it this way…
“The thing about Jesus is that you can get away with just about anything, as long as you invoke his name. You can start a war. You can burn a witch. You can hang a heathen. You can bang anybody you fucking want. You can milk the poor for everything they’ve got, and give the rich a cheap way to look like saints.
“All you have to do is say the magic J-word, and you give them hope they can’t get anywhere else.”
Eddie just listened, not even nodding. Every word out of Jake’s mouth might as well have been a cockroach.
“Faith doesn’t move mountains of anything but bullshit. Will is what makes it all happen, Eddie. If you have the will, you can control your own reality. I’m living proof of that, right?”
Scraping the eyeball crust out from under one thumbnail with the other, Jake let his face cloud over, genuinely troubled by these hard truths.
“I’m not trying to say this is how the world should be. It’s just the way it is.”
Jake’s thumbnail popped wetly out of its rotten bed and dangled from his thumb by a streamer of pus.
“And you can tell yourself all you want that the good guys always win, and the meek will inherit the earth. But that’s not the way it fucking works. You know it. And I know it. Right?”
Eddie closed his eyes and sighed: not with contempt, but with utter despair.
“Am I wrong,” Jake pressed, “or am I right, on this particular point?”
Eddie did not want to answer, did not want to open his eyes. But Jake stepped closer, close enough to touch; and he would sooner cut his own hand off than suffer Jake’s hands upon him.
So he opened his eyes; and the sight made him shrink back, shrivel into himself, as if Jake’s gaze alone was giving him cancer.
Jake’s unblinking eyes were dry as hard candy, but they pulsated red, as if swollen with thick neon blood that blazed bright as the fireplace.
And inside them was a glistening, eternal damnation.
Eddie seemed to see himself falling, sucked out of the windows of his own eyes and plummeting into the bottomless, ravenous fires of hell that waited inside Jake. You would burn forever there. You would never stop burning and falling.
I am the gate, he heard Jake’s voice echo inside his head, though the undead lips were not moving. On the right hand is the fire. On the left hand lies the dark.
And I am in the center.
Where the darkness burns.
For a moment, the room behind Jake seemed to vanish completely, and in its place, a black billowing void full of screaming vapors, full of nothing at all…
None shall come unto resurrection, except through me…
…and that was when Eddie broke his gaze from Jake’s, and turned his back.
The second the spell broke, Eddie collapsed against the door frame, panting. Every sweat gland opened up and doused him like a fever, but he shivered all the way down to the veins in his bones.
Nothing short of getting sprayed with Esther’s blood could have pulled such a reaction out of him. Or so he would have thought.
But seeing the fate that might await his soul was too much. Too much for any mortal man to bear.
And just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse, Jake laid a brotherly, crushing hand on his shoulder.
“So that should tell you something about how your bread is actually buttered,” Jake nearly whispered in his ear. “You think about that. And you let me know when you make up your mind. Cuz Judgment Day has finally come. And you might even come in handy. But believe me, you will be judged.”
Chapter Thirty-two
It had been quiet for a long time now.
No screaming, no crying. Maybe it’s over, Emmy thought. Maybe Jake saw the light, and repented. Or the Devil in him had been driven out.
Emmy stared out the barred window, seeing nothing but pale walls and dark curtains. She might as well have been staring at the floor, for all the information it gave her.
But given what she’d witnessed, was there any other explanation?
Jake was dead for three days. Then he got up. It was not a miracle, but a mockery of the resurrection, and a desecration of the body that had been so powerful a messenger for God’s word, in life.
Hell would try to undo all the church’s good works like that, because that’s what hell did: it turned truths to lies, and weakness to evil.
The others in the cell with her were proof of that. Whatever truth there was in their accusations, they hadn’t seemed surprised by Jake—oh, by his return, certainly.
But the vulgar, violent beast that murdered that poor man, blasphemer or not, had only seemed like the one they knew all along.
The one who fooled only her.
No, there could be no other answer. Jake had a demon inside him. But the question now was, how long befo
re he died had it hidden inside his heart?
Maybe…all along?
She jumped at the sound of keys, jumped again when the holding cell door flew open. And there was Gray, grimacing at them all.
Growing up, she never watched that many movies, but she always found herself identifying every new face she saw with a movie star.
This one—this sullen, rage-drunk, hag-ridden man—looked like a young Lee Marvin, who would never grow into an old one.
Gray stepped inside and smiled tightly at the terrified women. He pointed at each of them with his gun. Emmy found it easier to watch the nickel-plated eye of the weapon than the face of the man holding it. The obvious pleasure he took in their fear made her feel dirty, as if some part of her were getting raped every time he looked at her.
“Eeny, meenie, miney…” he recited, as if bored. “Ah, fuck it. He wants you.”
The gun pointed at Emmy.
She stepped forward, dizzy, feeling like she was falling out the door as Evangeline and Esther stepped back like the runners-up in a beauty contest, both terrified and ashamed at their relief.
The door slammed shut behind her.
Gray had to push her, to remind her to walk.
Above, the moon was bloodred, peeping down through the leafy cathedral dome of the old oak tree in the Connaway backyard. The wind howling across the desert took on a throaty, panpipe tone as it blew through the eaves of the big house, inescapably spreading out before her.
So quiet. Where had everyone gone? The screaming was so loud, and the laughter…had it only just ended, or was it longer?
Emmy’s mother always said she had a wandering mind. Senile from birth, was one of the nicer ways she put it. A little Devil in her head, was what she meant.
Emmy’s mother saw demons hiding behind every human flaw. She believed fallen angels blew on the wind like germs, looking for homes in uncovered, yawning mouths, unbaptized babies, and all men, everywhere.
When she saw that she couldn’t beat the demon out of Emmy, or the right attitude in, she’d taken shelter in her own illness.
But Emmy had found her own cure.
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