The 13th

by John Everson

  “You know, Barry,” she called across the room. “This is going to get difficult to do in a couple more days when these beds start filling up.”

  He stepped away from the now-quiet mother, and came to the sink near her to wash his hands.

  “I know,” he agreed. “But it won’t be for long. Most of the kids are too young to induce until the day we need them. I think we can probably get Janie and Sarah in three and four to go this weekend. They’re both near term. Then we’ve got Chelsea. But she’s just seven months. I’m worried about taking any of the others until the end of next week after her.”

  “That’s a lot to do all at once,” Amelia said, shifting an arm to follow the head of an infant. “Maybe we should wait a few more weeks.”

  The doctor shook his head. “No way. You said so yourself—the birth of the first starts the thing moving. It’s our own fault that we took so long to get things moved out here and set up. We should have found a dozen women at the same time as we grabbed Angela so that they’d all be due at the same time. But it doesn’t matter. Babies are babies, no matter how old. We’ll cut them out when we need them.” He shrugged. “Or we’ll just use them right where they are.”

  Amelia nodded. “I suppose.”

  She held up a half-empty formula bottle, and then slipped it back in the mouth of the newborn baby. “And I sure as hell don’t want to be doing this a moment more than I have to. There’s not a mothering bone in my body.”

  “Maybe not,” Rockford said, sliding a hand up her leg to cup her ass. “But I could put a bone in your body.”

  She slapped his hand away and laughed, a wicked, knowing sound. “You’re a greedy bastard,” she said. “Aren’t a dozen women enough for you?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  If he had been timing his ride, David would have been elated to know that after weeks of cycling the crossback on 190, he had finally just broken his all-time speed record for the five-mile sprint. And a good chunk of that was spent pumping uphill.

  But the image of Dr. Rockford’s bloody hands kept appearing before his eyes, and he imagined the doctor and his twisted nurse would suddenly appear behind him on the road in their black sedan at any second.

  “C’mere, son,” they’d call from behind the tinted windows. “We just want to talk to you a minute about the grass.” But if they got their hands on him and pulled him inside that sedan he knew that he would never see the lawn mower or the grass or his bike again.

  “We know you were downstairs,” Nurse Spellman would say, pointing at him with the spine of her black book.

  “And we don’t like what you saw,” the doctor would follow up, pulling out the silver birthing instrument and running it slowly up David’s thigh. “We need to make sure you don’t remember it anymore.”

  “I promise I’ll never say a word to anyone,” David would say, as the car’s rear tires shifted across the gravel and evened out again, pointing steadily back toward the tall ivy-covered walls of the asylum.

  “I promise you won’t too,” Dr. Rockford said, moving the silver instrument up David’s chest to rest at his mouth. He could feel something sharp, like a tiny forked blade pressing against his closed lips.

  “I will make sure of it.”

  David shook the image from his head but pedaled even harder, desperate to get as far from the asylum as possible before the night fully fell. Already the horizon betrayed the deep hues of purple, and the stars were out overhead.

  He rounded the curve and sped through the center of town in a blur of sweat and panic, and in moments he was back at Aunt Elsie’s, ditching his bike in the garage without any thought for protecting it from scratching. He hastily kicked out the kickstand and let it settle on its own…but the bike instead overbalanced and fell to the ground. He didn’t look back.

  “Hey, sweetie, how was your day?” his aunt called, as he practically ran through the kitchen and up the stairs to his room.

  “Okay,” he mumbled. “Gotta take a shower.”

  He didn’t really, since he’d taken one at the asylum, but he ran the water anyway, deciding that he might as well wash off the sweat of the ride. And truth be told, he wanted to enjoy the comforting hot rain on his face. Maybe that would make him feel clean…because after what he’d witnessed, he didn’t feel very clean. Not at all.

  As he soaped up, he replayed the basement scene again in his mind. Obviously the doc and his nurse were not there just to help poor psycho pregger girls. But what the hell did they want with the babies? Something bad, judging by the weird candles and strange language in which Nurse Spellman had spoken. They were into ritual, and a ritual carried out in a basement—with blood and candles—was not the white kind, he surmised.

  They’d repeated the same names over and over as the woman gave birth. Ba’al. And Astarte. He could still hear the two repeating those names over and over. David ran his fingers through his hair quickly, pushing out the last of the soap, and then turned off the water. He toweled off quickly and then walked to his bedroom, turning on the computer before he searched for clothes.

  As the machine booted, he got dressed, and then sat down and hit the AOL icon. He cringed as he logged on and then listened to the digital pong sounds as the computer accessed the phone line and dialed in. His aunt didn’t own a computer, so he was stuck here with dial-up for the summer. He didn’t know how people had ever lived this way. You could leave the room and have dinner by the time the damn machine actually got online and accessed anything.

  Still, it was all he had, and he tried to be patient as he waited for the image blocks to load. Finally he typed in his query, and it returned a long list of references for Ba’al and Astarte. He’d typed in “demon, Bail, and Astart,” but saw the listing for “goddess” next to Astarte, and clicked there first.

  When he skimmed down the page and found the reference to “cultic” worship, he whistled. The page suggested that Astarte was worshipped through ritual sex, and was the mistress and mother—as well as lover—of Ba’al. He flipped over to Wikipedia and found Astarte was connected with fertility, sexuality and war. The listing connected her to symbols of the lion and the sphinx, as well as the planet Venus. It also noted that she was frequently portrayed as naked. He laughed silently. Pornography of the ancients.

  He read further and found a photo of a statue of Astarte sitting on a throne. The listing noted that the statue’s breasts were pierced, so that “a hollow in the statue would have been filled with milk through the head and gentle heating would have melted wax plugging the holes in her breasts, producing an apparent miracle when the milk emerged.”

  “Damn.” David shook his head. “People have always been fucked up, haven’t they?”

  He read further and found a reference to Ba’al, son of Dagon, whom Astarte kept from attacking other deities.

  He followed more links and learned that both Ba’al and Astarte were worshipped throughout the Old World in various ways, but always with the idea that they were fertility symbols. Men and women staged ceremonies on crop fields that culminated in ritual intercourse to encourage the god and goddess to spread their mystical seed in similar fashion across a couple’s crops, blessing their harvest for the year.

  There were dozens of entries that discussed the licentious worship of Ba’al and his mother, as well as his sister and lover, Anat.

  But what did these have to do with Dr. Rockford and Amelia and the nut farm? David wondered. He read entry after entry of innocuous worship and then found one page that chilled his heart.

  “The cult of Astarte and Ba’al on the island of Cieran believed that only through the sacrifice of their firstborn children could the land of heaven be opened to those on earth. Every year the Cieranites staged a magnificent feast in the center of the town, and after an evening of eating the best harvest of the year’s crops, drinking the last year’s vintage wine and dancing with all of the women in the town, the women of age would pair off with a man of their choice and lie with him in the
street, asking for the child of Ba’al to be seeded in their loins.

  “After the orgy was completed, all of the town would gather again, and the firstborn children would be brought to a sacrificial altar in the center of the square. Mothers were said to surrender their babies readily, knowing that the offering pleased the god Ba’al, and they would thus be guaranteed good crops in the coming year, and more babies that they could keep.”

  David rolled his eyes up at the ceiling as he leaned back from the screen. “What the fuck is wrong with people?” he said. “People are idiots now, and they were idiots then. We haven’t evolved at all.”

  He skimmed down the page a bit further, finding notice of another ritual that apparently had not remained in vogue long.

  “There was a period where it was believed that the ritual copulation on the night of Ba’al could result in the incarnation of Ba’al to a woman who had been properly prepared as the vessel of Astarte. The ceremony of the Thirteenth was only documented in the writings of Monsieur Getty in the 1600s, and has widely been debated for its veracity.”

  The words “the Thirteenth” were a hyperlink, but when David tried to follow them, the hourglass came up on his computer.

  “God damn this thing,” he said, slamming a palm on the desk. He hit reload on the browser, and this time the page came up quickly. But it was mostly white, because at the top it simply read PAGE NOT FOUND.

  “Oh, that figures,” he said.

  He tried running a search for “The ritual of the Thirteenth” but most of what came up seemed to revolve around dark metal rock bands.

  He tried a couple more variations on the phrase, as well as for “Monsieur Getty,” but at last gave up, not finding anything applicable. On a whim, he plugged “Dr. Barry Rockford” into Google, and his eyebrows raised when the return list came back.

  There were dozens of links and entries about the Castle House Asylum founder, but none of them mentioned psychiatry as his expertise. Instead, he saw lots of references to stem cells and genetic mutation and some kind of President’s Award for Research.

  David sat back and scratched his head absently. The guy wasn’t a psychiatrist, but he was running an asylum. He was famous for genetic research on fetuses, but today he’d been arm deep in a new baby delivery, and calling out the names of ancient gods and demons as he did it.

  Exactly what kind of medicine was going on down at the asylum?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The night seemed to go on forever. David’s mind would not shut down after the events of the day, and after lying in his bed for an hour or two tossing and turning, he did what he usually did when insomnia struck. He got up and paced the house. He slipped downstairs to the kitchen and blinked at the brightness of the fridge bulb when he opened it. A tear wet his cheek from the intensity of the glare—his eyes were adjusted to the dark, and the light was almost painful.

  He pulled the milk from the fridge and poured a glass before putting the carton back. A good glass of milk always seemed to weigh down his body and encourage sleep. He drank it down and then wandered the downstairs for a while, idly staring at the knickknacks his aunt had accumulated through the years. Statuettes of giraffes, and coffee mugs with a variety of sayings and logos on them like “I (heart) My Attitude Problem.” He grinned at that one; Elsie had never had much attitude that he knew of. She was always helping someone out.

  Presently, David returned to his bed. He pressed his face into the pillow and willed away the images of bloody hands and babies from his mind. But in their place, he saw the photo of the statue of Astarte with holes where her nipples should be. While the holes were intended to be used in a fertility rite—cow’s milk would be piped through the cavities in the statue’s chest so that the local farmers could drink of the goddess’s goodness and enjoy productive harvests for the season—David imagined a more sinister use. In his waking dreams, the statue changed to a human woman. But where her nipples should have been were instead ragged red holes, blood leaking down her torso. It was an abomination of the archetypal fertile woman whose breasts leaked life-giving milk. Instead, this woman leaked her life, and a throng of people lined up before her, each of them eager to swallow the ragged flesh that gave up her very life’s blood. One by one they suckled her ruined breasts, and walked away with faces painted crimson, each of them stealing a small bit of her life.

  David rolled to his back; but the shadows of the trees moving outside his window reached for him from the ceiling, as if they were demons ready to rip the soul from his heart. The milk sloshed in his stomach as he rolled from side to side, and finally he curled into the fetal position and tried to instead fill his head with images of something good. Something happy. His summer hadn’t really been filled with good things; the frustration of training wasn’t really something he wanted to think about. There was the night at the Clam Shack with Brenda…though that too hadn’t ended well. There was one good part though, and he worked to remember the warm touch of her hands on his back, and the intoxicating taste of her tongue in his mouth as they clutched each other on the trail behind the bar.

  That image did push some of the horror from his mind, but it brought with it a whole new set of worries. He felt that somehow her disappearance had been his fault, and yet he had let his own investigation of the cause dissipate. He’d gone to the bar, and talked to a couple of old lushes there, but he’d not pursued any of the rest of the people on the list he’d gotten from Joe the bartender.

  Instead he’d started the job at the asylum and let the work and his training take over the needs of his conscience.

  He thought of his aunt and the bric-a-brac downstairs that served as the mementos of her life—all of them gifts from people she’d touched. She wouldn’t have given up trying to help someone as easily as David had abandoned trying to track down Brenda. He vowed that in the morning, he’d try to pick up the trail again.

  It was after two A.M. when David finally drifted into a troubled sleep. In his dreams, he heard Brenda calling for him, and every time she did, her plea for help was punctuated by a scream of pain.

  The morning came far too quickly after the long night, but David woke oddly refreshed. He showered and ate a couple pieces of toast with his orange juice.

  “Are you working at the old hotel again today?” Elsie asked.

  His heart jumped at the question, but he nodded. “Yeah, but I want to do some solid riding first. So I’m heading out early.”

  Truth be told, he wasn’t sure that he was going to the asylum to work. He couldn’t imagine showing up there again after what he’d seen. Yet…they did still owe him money, and despite his dreams, he knew that they didn’t know that he knew about the activities in the basement. He didn’t want to be drawn into whatever hellish shit they were involved in…but he was curious to learn more about what was going on.

  Those thoughts were still in mind as he climbed on his aunt’s old Huffy and kicked the bike down the drive and across town. There were very few cars on the road and the morning air was sweet, and he marveled at the clots of fog that still hugged the edges of the low spots in town.

  He made his first stop the supermarket, where Joe had mentioned a handful of people worked who had been at the bar the night of Brenda’s disappearance. But just like the old lushes he’d spoken to at the bar, the store was a dead end. He did get a glimpse of the town’s transvestite though, which gave him a good chuckle. He/she was walking down an aisle in a short skirt and panty hose, but David guessed you were not supposed to notice the stubble on his/her face.

  “Hard to be a woman with that kind of beard,” he mumbled to himself, and ducked out of the grocery.

  His next stop was somewhere along the 190. The bartender had mentioned two other guys who had been at the bar that night—the “Terror Twins.” From the vague directions, it seemed like the two were on one of the gravel roads that cut off 190 near the asylum. He wasn’t crazy about the idea of visiting two guys that far out of town who had earned the
nickname “Terror Twins,” but, on the other hand, they were also his last lead. His conscience wouldn’t rest until he at least gave it a shot…and hell, they were near his work. When they slammed the door in his face, his conscience could feel vindicated that he’d tried, and he could go try to collect his money from the psychos at the insane asylum. And actually, maybe he could walk the patients’ floor and find the girl who’d appeared the other day in the upstairs window who’d reminded him of Brenda. He didn’t believe that Brenda had ended up in the asylum, but he supposed he could rule out that last idea too while he was on a fool’s errand.

  Sounded like the setup for a perfect day.

  Christy chewed on the inside of her cheek as she guided the police cruiser around the curves of the 190. She’d been enjoying the scenery around here a lot lately. Except, she couldn’t really say she’d been enjoying it. The academy hadn’t really prepared her for this one, and she could tell the chief didn’t quite know what to do about it after forty years as a small-town cop. She’d asked him to apply for a warrant to search the asylum, but he’d only shaken his head.

  “On what grounds?”

  “On the grounds that they’re holding people there against their will.”

  “And your proof?” he prodded, settling his weight back in the leather chair. It groaned under the attention.

  “I know, I know—my proof implicates the department in a breaking-and-entering charge. But there has to be another way to get one.”

  “You tell me what it is,” he grumbled. “Probable cause. How do you think the courts look on the idea of an insane asylum holding people against their will? That’s really kind of the point of an asylum, isn’t it? To hold people whose mental faculties are suspect. In other words, to keep people in a safe place, most likely against their will?”

  “But Chief…”

  “Look, I don’t know why the girls you saw are there, but until we’ve got something more to go on, we’re watching and waiting.”